Lectures on the English Poets; Delivered at the Surrey Institution
by William Hazlitt · English · Gutenberg #16209 · 444,915 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Lectures on the English Poets; Delivered at the Surrey Institution
Author: William Hazlitt
Editor: Ernest Rhys
A. R. Waller
Release date: July 5, 2005 [eBook #16209]
Most recently updated: December 11, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16209
Credits: E-text prepared by R. W. Jones
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS; DELIVERED AT THE SURREY INSTITUTION ***
E-text prepared by R. W. Jones <rwj@freeshell.org>
Transcriber's note: This file was proofed, using a text-to-speech reader,
against the hard copy 2nd. edition published in 1819.
No attempt has been made to change the text of any of
the quoted verse to reflect later editors' amendments.
_Italics_ are indicated thus. The footnotes are
serially numbered from the first to the last Lecture,
unlike in the original.
LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS
Delivered at the Surrey Institution
by
WILLIAM HAZLITT
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
INTRODUCTORY.--ON POETRY IN GENERAL.
LECTURE II.
ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER.
LECTURE III.
ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON.
LECTURE IV.
ON DRYDEN AND POPE.
LECTURE V.
ON THOMSON AND COWPER.
LECTURE VI.
ON SWIFT, YOUNG, GRAY, COLLINS &c.
LECTURE VII.
ON BURNS, AND THE OLD ENGLISH BALLADS.
LECTURE VIII.
ON THE LIVING POETS.
LECTURE I.--INTRODUCTORY
ON POETRY IN GENERAL.
The best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the
natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an
involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by
sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.
In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of the subject-matter of
it, next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and
afterwards of its connection with harmony of sound.
Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It
relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind.
It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what
so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be
a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart
holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot
have much respect for himself, or for any thing else. It is not a mere
frivolous accomplishment, (as some persons have been led to imagine) the
trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours--it has been
the study and delight of mankind in all ages. Many people suppose that
poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten
syllables, with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty,
or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the
growth of a flower that "spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and
dedicates its beauty to the sun,"--_there_ is poetry, in its birth. If
history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its
materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the most
part, of the cumbrous and unwieldly masses of things, the empty cases in
which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue
or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is
no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man, which
he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen
to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a
branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of which our life is made." The
rest is "mere oblivion," a dead letter: for all that is worth
remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is
poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse,
admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is
that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises
our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as beast's." Man is a
poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of
poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's _Bourgeois
Gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without knowing it. The child
is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the
story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he
first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman,
when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice, when he gazes
after the Lord-Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the
courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his
idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who
fancies himself a god;--the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the
choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich
and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own
making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others
think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness
at second hand. "There is warrant for it." Poets alone have not "such
seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler
reason" can.
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
The madman. While the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination."
If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is
a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they
are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality.
Ariosto has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro: but was not
Medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as
much enamoured of her charms as he? Homer has celebrated the anger of
Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the
poets from his Commonwealth, lest their descriptions of the natural man
should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and
affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger,
to be cast down nor elated by any thing. This was a chimera, however,
which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and Homer's
poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic.
Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the
passions are a part of man's nature. We shape things according to our
wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical
language that can be found for those creations of the mind "which
ecstacy is very cunning in." Neither a mere description of natural
objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or
forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the
heightenings of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only a
direct but also a reflected light, that while it shews us the object,
throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions,
communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of
lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole
being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms;
feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit
of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the
fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the
distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the
imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or
feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite
sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is
impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link
itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine
itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the
aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner, and by
the most striking examples of the same quality in other instances.
Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason, "has something divine
in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by
conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of
subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do." It is
strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that
faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as
they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite
variety of shapes and combinations of power. This language is not the
less true to nature, because it is false in point of fact; but so much
the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object
under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for
instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear--
and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it
into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "Our
eyes are made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the universal
law of the imagination,
"That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy:
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy is each bush suppos'd a bear!"
When Iachimo says of Imogen,
"------The flame o' th' taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see the enclosed lights"--
this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord with
the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally with the
poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of shining
gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from novelty
and a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the
imagination than the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic stature
to a tower: not that he is any thing like so large, but because the
excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual
size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a greater feeling
of magnitude and ponderous strength than another object of ten times the
same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for the
disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination, which
have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror,
admiration, delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge
his cause, "for they are old like him," there is nothing extravagant or
impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there
is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his
wrongs and his despair!
Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the
forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by
blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses
the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it;
exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples
with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us
back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our
being or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the
rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest
contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, "Nothing but his
unkind daughters could have brought him to this;" what a bewildered
amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to
conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down,
and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood,
supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the
mad scene, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see,
they bark at me!" it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make
every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and
insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching
every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining
image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to
torture and kill it! In like manner, the "So I am" of Cordelia gushes
from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love
and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years. What a
fine return of the passion upon itself is that in Othello--with what a
mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the last traces of
departed happiness--when he exclaims,
------"Oh now, for ever
Farewel the tranquil mind. Farewel content;
Farewel the plumed troops and the big war,
That make ambition virtue! Oh farewel!
Farewel the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war:
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th' immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewel! Othello's occupation's gone!"
How his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in
its sounding course, when in answer to the doubts expressed of his
returning love, he says,
"Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont:
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up."--
The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that
line [sic],
"But there where I had garner'd up my heart,
To be discarded thence!"--
One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our
sympathy without raising our disgust is, that in proportion as it
sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the
desire of good. It enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by making
us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion lays bare
and shews us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our
existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we
desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the
action and re-action are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only
gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate
participation with the antagonist world of good; makes us drink deeper
of the cup of human life; tugs at the heart-strings; loosens the
pressure about them; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into
play with tenfold force.
Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part
of our nature, as well as of the sensitive--of the desire to know, the
will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these
different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The
domestic or prose tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is
in this sense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one
of these faculties, our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo,
for this reason, however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a
dead weight upon the mind, a load of misery which it is unable to throw
off: the tragedy of Shakspeare, which is true poetry, stirs our inmost
affections; abstracts evil from itself by combining it with all the
forms of imagination, and with the deepest workings of the heart, and
rouses the whole man within us.
The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry, is not any thing
peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing. It is not
an anomaly of the imagination. It has its source and ground-work in the
common love of strong excitement. As Mr. Burke observes, people flock to
see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the next street,
the theatre would very soon be empty. It is not then the difference
between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are
satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose: nor do
the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and
executions about the streets, find it necessary to have them turned into
penny ballads, before they can dispose of these interesting and
authentic documents. The grave politician drives a thriving trade of
abuse and calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies
for no other end than that he may live by them. The popular preacher
makes less frequent mention of heaven than of hell. Oaths and nicknames
are only a more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric. We are as fond of
indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of
others. We are as prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate
in our hopes of good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will
be, Because we cannot help it. The sense of power is as strong a
principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and
pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or
beauty. It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to
express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration.
"Masterless passion sways us to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes."
Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred
and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every
refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a
bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of
deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to
grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm
our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to
contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of
passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our
conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or
dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of
the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot
get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the
thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and
tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord Mayor's
shew,--
"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more!"
--when Collins makes Danger, "with limbs of giant mould,"
------"Throw him on the steep
Of some loose hanging rock asleep:"
when Lear calls out in extreme anguish,
"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
How much more hideous shew'st in a child
Than the sea-monster!"
--the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and
of indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thing
ourselves, and shew it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in
spite of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. The imagination, by
thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the
indistinct and importunate cravings of the will.--We do not wish the
thing to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledge is
conscious power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe,
though it may be the victim of vice or folly.
Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the
passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than
the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic
critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common
sense and reason: for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first and
now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature," seen through the
medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means
of literal truth or abstract reason. The painter of history might as
well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod
upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait, as
the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which
things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of common
conversation. Let who will strip nature of the colours and the shapes of
fancy, the poet is not bound to do so; the impressions of common sense
and strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference, cannot be
the same, and they must have a separate language to do justice to
either. Objects must strike differently upon the mind, independently of
what they are in themselves, as long as we have a different interest in
them, as we see them in a different point of view, nearer or at a
greater distance (morally or physically speaking) from novelty, from old
acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their
consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We can no more
take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects
without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their
preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our
curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these
various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their
stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the
glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning
nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry
visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent
moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. This is also one
part of nature, one appearance which the glow-worm presents, and that
not the least interesting; so poetry is one part of the history of the
human mind, though it is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot be
concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a
tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the
wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally
visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things
to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful
pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is
much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from the progress
of experimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon that gives
birth and scope to the imagination; we can only fancy what we do not
know. As in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill them with
what shapes we please, with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, and
drear enchantments, so in our ignorance of the world about us, we make
gods or devils of the first object we see, and set no bounds to the
wilful suggestions of our hopes and fears.
"And visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf and cling to every bough."
There can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time, the heavens
have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become averse
to the imagination, nor will they return to us on the squares of the
distances, or on Doctor Chalmers's Discourses. Rembrandt's picture
brings the matter nearer to us.--It is not only the progress of
mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that
are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe
of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look
with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of
the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we
are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions
of wild beasts or "bandit fierce," or to the unmitigated fury of the
elements. The time has been that "our fell of hair would at a dismal
treatise rouse and stir as life were in it." But the police spoils all;
and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only
tolerated in this country for the sake of the music; and in the United
States of America, where the philosophical principles of government are
carried still farther in theory and practice, we find that the Beggar's
Opera is hooted from the stage. Society, by degrees, is constructed into
a machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to
the other, in a very comfortable prose style.
"Obscurity her curtain round them drew,
And siren Sloth a dull quietus sung."
The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead to a
solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting and
poetry. I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem that
the argument which has been sometimes set up, that painting must affect
the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more
distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much temerity,
that poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or connoisseurs
talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they shew that they know
little about poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives
the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a
thing contains in itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any
manner connected with it. But this last is the proper province of the
imagination. Again, as it relates to passion, painting gives the event,
poetry the progress of events: but it is during the progress, in the
interval of expectation and suspense, while our hopes and fears are
strained to the highest pitch of breathless agony, that the pinch of the
interest lies.
"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The mortal instruments are then in council;
And the state of man, like to a little kingdom,
Suffers then the nature of an insurrection."
But by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. Faces are
the best part of a picture; but even faces are not what we chiefly
remember in what interests us most.--But it may be asked then, Is there
anything better than Claude Lorraine's landscapes, than Titian's
portraits, than Raphael's cartoons, or the Greek statues? Of the two
first I shall say nothing, as they are evidently picturesque, rather
than imaginative. Raphael's cartoons are certainly the finest comments
that ever were made on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same if
we were not acquainted with the text? But the New Testament existed
before the cartoons. There is one subject of which there is no cartoon,
Christ washing the feet of the disciples the night before his death. But
that chapter does not need a commentary! It is for want of some such
resting place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else
than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart. They
have not an informing principle within them. In their faultless
excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they
are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty
they are deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and
their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no
sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration.
Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined
with passion and fancy. In its mode of conveyance, it combines the
ordinary use of language with musical expression. There is a question of
long standing, in what the essence of poetry consists; or what it is
that determines why one set of ideas should be expressed in prose,
another in verse. Milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single
line--
"Thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers."
As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the
song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts
that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change
"the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo." There is a striking
instance of this adaptation of the movement of sound and rhythm to the
subject, in Spenser's description of the Satyrs accompanying Una to the
cave of Sylvanus.
"So from the ground she fearless doth arise
And walketh forth without suspect of crime.
They, all as glad as birds of joyous prime,
Thence lead her forth, about her dancing round,
Shouting and singing all a shepherd's rhyme;
And with green branches strewing all the ground,
Do worship her as queen with olive garland crown'd.
And all the way their merry pipes they sound,
That all the woods and doubled echoes ring;
And with their horned feet do wear the ground,
Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring;
So towards old Sylvanus they her bring,
Who with the noise awaked, cometh out."
_Faery Queen_, b. i. c. vi.
On the contrary, there is nothing either musical or natural in the
ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary
and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the
voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements
in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or
correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with
which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the
inequalities, and harshnesses of prose, are fatal to the flow of a
poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs
the reverie of an absent man. But poetry makes these odds all even. It
is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as
it were "the secret soul of harmony." Wherever any object takes such a
hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting
the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;--
wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind,
by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other
objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony,
sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion,
to the sounds that express it--this is poetry. The musical in sound is
the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained
and continuous also. There is a near connection between music and
deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing. As often as articulation passes
naturally into intonation, there poetry begins. Where one idea gives a
tone and colour to others, where one feeling melts others into it, there
can be no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the
sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends
syllables and lines into each other. It is to supply the inherent defect
of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an
echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to
mingle the tide of verse, "the golden cadences of poetry," with the tide
of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows--in short, to take the
language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread
its wings where it may indulge its own impulses--
"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air--"
without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and
petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that poetry
was invented. It is to common language, what springs are to a carriage,
or wings to feet. In ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by
the modulations of the voice: in poetry the same thing is done
systematically by a regular collocation of syllables. It has been well
observed, that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a
subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose. The
merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way "sounding always the
increase of his winning." Every prose-writer has more or less of
rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who, when deprived of the regular
mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation left in
their writings.
An excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner. It is but fair
that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail
itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of
syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of
images. It is allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit
and shrewdness has been heard to say, that the only four good lines of
poetry are the well known ones which tell the number of days in the
months of the year.
"Thirty days hath September," &c.
But if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken
the fancy? and there are other things worth having at our fingers' ends,
besides the contents of the almanac.--Pope's versification is tiresome,
from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. Shakspeare's blank verse is
the perfection of dramatic dialogue.
All is not poetry that passes for such: nor does verse make the whole
difference between poetry and prose. The Iliad does not cease to be
poetry in a literal translation; and Addison's Campaign has been very
properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from
poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar,
and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary impulse to the
imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the
understanding, as do not admit of the wayward or violent movements
either of the imagination or the passions.
I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible
without absolutely being so, namely, the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson
Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated
some of the last into English rhyme, but the essence and the power of
poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth,
which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is
poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being
"married to immortal verse." If it is of the essence of poetry to strike
and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of
childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of
afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be
permitted to pass for poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and
reality in the Pilgrim's Progress was never equalled in any allegory.
His pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what
beauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feeling in the description of
Christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the
Shining Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on
their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes! The writer's
genius, though not "dipped in dews of Castalie," was baptised with the
Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in this book are no small part of
it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos was a
subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies, what shall we
say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on
leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the
reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of
confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever
cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls
its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his
heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he
says,
"As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the
country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me
on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the
woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner,
locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an
uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest
composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and
make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take
me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh,
and look upon the ground for an hour or two together, and this was still
worse to me, for if I could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it
would go off, and the grief having exhausted itself would abate." P.
50.
The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey,
it is true; but the relator had the true genius of a poet. It has been
made a question whether Richardson's romances are poetry; and the answer
perhaps is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance. The
interest is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an
infinite number of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the
attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The
sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is
unforced and spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The
story does not "give an echo to the seat where love is throned." The
heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does
not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged
along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which
the Lilliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.--Sir
Charles Grandison is a coxcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut,
translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the
divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her
ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles--she is
interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely
they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination.
There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted
from a _caput mortuum_ of circumstances: it does not evaporate of
itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and
requires an artificial process to let it out. Shakspeare says--
"Our poesy is as a gum
Which issues whence 'tis nourished, our gentle flame
Provokes itself, and like the current flies
Each bound it chafes." [1]
I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of
the principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of
history--Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. In Homer,
the principle of action or life is predominant; in the Bible, the
principle of faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a
personification of blind will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life,
and the lag end of the world. Homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full
of life and action: it is bright as the day, strong as a river. In the
vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of nature, and
enters into all the relations of social life.
___
[1] Burke's writings are not poetry, notwithstanding the vividness of
the fancy, because the subject matter is abstruse and dry, not natural,
but artificial. The difference between poetry and eloquence is, that the
one is the eloquence of the imagination, and the other of the
understanding. Eloquence tries to persuade the will, and convince the
reason: poetry produces its effect by instantaneous sympathy. Nothing is
a subject for poetry that admits of a dispute. Poets are in general bad
prose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not
to the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetry
wants the forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic.
And some of our own poetry which has been most admired, is only poetry
in the rhyme, and in the studied use of poetic diction.
___
He saw many countries, and the manners of many men; and he has brought
them all together in his poem. He describes his heroes going to battle
with a prodigality of life, arising from an exuberance of animal
spirits: we see them before us, their number, and their order of battle,
poured out upon the plain "all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly
bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and
gorgeous as the sun at midsummer," covered with glittering armour, with
dust and blood; while the Gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or
mingle in the fray; and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy rise
up with reverence as Helen passes by them. The multitude of things in
Homer is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force, and
variety. His poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and
form: he describes the bodies as well as the souls of men.
The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is
abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power;
not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but
aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It
is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone
in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth,
and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of
faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs
the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and
a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it
became more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing: "If
we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we
turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from it." Man is thus
aggrandised in the image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is
of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the
inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come
after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed,
obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it--an invisible hand is
suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian religion consists in the
glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation,
Providence took an immediate share in the affairs of this life. Jacob's
dream arose out of this intimate communion between heaven and earth: it
was this that let down, in the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden
ladder from the sky to the earth, with angels ascending and descending
upon it, and shed a light upon the lonely place, which can never pass
away. The story of Ruth, again, is as if all the depth of natural
affection in the human race was involved in her breast. There are
descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal of imagery, more intense
in passion, than any thing in Homer, as that of the state of his
prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night. The metaphors
in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative. Things were collected
more into masses, and gave a greater _momentum_ to the imagination.
Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a
place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic
darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it to burst the
thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every
page. He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which
separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of
antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its
passage to the other world. He was lost in wonder at what had been done
before him, and he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been
indebted to the Bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for
the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is
utterly unlike Homer. His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the
sullen heat of a furnace. He is power, passion, self-will personified.
In all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he
bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after
him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies
like a dead weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe,
from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity, like that
which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest, which moulds
every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the
passions and imaginations of the human soul,--that make amends for all
other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to the mind are
not much in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they
become every thing by the force of the character he impresses upon them.
His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates,
instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the
nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the
shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest of
all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the
flowery and glittering; who relies most on his own power, and the sense
of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his
readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by
exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed.
He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been
created; but he seizes on the attention, by shewing us the effect they
produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same
thrilling and overwhelming sensation, which is caught by gazing on the
face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability
of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are
excessive: but the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness
of the author's mind. Dante's great power is in combining internal
feelings with external objects. Thus the gate of hell, on which that
withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and
consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of
mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely local and
individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the
obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up
with the inscription, "I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth": and
half the personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own
acquaintance. All this, perhaps, tends to heighten the effect by the
bold intermixture of realities, and by an appeal, as it were, to the
individual knowledge and experience of the reader. He affords few
subjects for picture. There is, indeed, one gigantic one, that of Count
Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua
Reynolds ought not to have painted.
Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade
myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a
feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his
readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihed, Ossian is the decay
and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of
the past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than
all other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things,
of friends, of good name, of country--he is even without God in the
world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the
motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre
on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves
its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as
the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh
and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of
cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of
the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all
things as in a mock-embrace, is here perfect. In this way, the
lamentation of Selma for the loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it
were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would only
be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left
in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so
often complain, "Roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your
wing to Ossian!"
LECTURE II.
ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER.
Having, in the former Lecture, given some account of the nature of
poetry in general, I shall proceed, in the next place, to a more
particular consideration of the genius and history of English poetry. I
shall take, as the subject of the present lecture, Chaucer and Spenser,
two out of four of the greatest names in poetry, which this country has
to boast. Both of them, however, were much indebted to the early poets
of Italy, and may be considered as belonging, in a certain degree, to
the same school. The freedom and copiousness with which our most
original writers, in former periods, availed themselves of the
productions of their predecessors, frequently transcribing whole
passages, without scruple or acknowledgment, may appear contrary to the
etiquette of modern literature, when the whole stock of poetical
common-places has become public property, and no one is compelled to
trade upon any particular author. But it is not so much a subject of
wonder, at a time when to read and write was of itself an honorary
distinction, when learning was almost as great a rarity as genius, and
when in fact those who first transplanted the beauties of other
languages into their own, might be considered as public benefactors, and
the founders of a national literature.--There are poets older than
Chaucer, and in the interval between him and Spenser; but their genius
was not such as to place them in any point of comparison with either of
these celebrated men; and an inquiry into their particular merits or
defects might seem rather to belong to the province of the antiquary,
than be thought generally interesting to the lovers of poetry in the
present day.
Chaucer (who has been very properly considered as the father of
English poetry) preceded Spenser by two centuries. He is supposed to
have been born in London, in the year 1328, during the reign of Edward
III. and to have died in 1400, at the age of seventy-two. He received a
learned education at one, or at both of the universities, and travelled
early into Italy, where he became thoroughly imbued with the spirit and
excellences of the great Italian poets and prose-writers, Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccace; and is said to have had a personal interview with
one of these, Petrarch. He was connected, by marriage, with the famous
John of Gaunt, through whose interest he was introduced into several
public employments. Chaucer was an active partisan, a religious
reformer, and from the share he took in some disturbances, on one
occasion, he was obliged to fly the country. On his return, he was
imprisoned, and made his peace with government, as it is said, by a
discovery of his associates. Fortitude does not appear, at any time, to
have been the distinguishing virtue of poets.--There is, however, an
obvious similarity between the practical turn of Chaucer's mind and
restless impatience of his character, and the tone of his writings. Yet
it would be too much to attribute the one to the other as cause and
effect: for Spenser, whose poetical temperament was an effeminate as
Chaucer's was stern and masculine, was equally engaged in public
affairs, and had mixed equally in the great world. So much does native
disposition predominate over accidental circumstances, moulding them to
its previous bent and purposes! For while Chaucer's intercourse with the
busy world, and collision with the actual passions and conflicting
interests of others, seemed to brace the sinews of his understanding,
and gave to his writings the air of a man who describes persons and
things that he had known and been intimately concerned in; the same
opportunities, operating on a differently constituted frame, only served
to alienate Spenser's mind the more from the "close-pent up" scenes of
ordinary life, and to make him "rive their concealing continents," to
give himself up to the unrestrained indulgence of "flowery tenderness."
It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite in this
respect. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment; Chaucer, in severe
activity of mind. As Spenser was the most romantic and visionary,
Chaucer was the most practical of all the great poets, the most a man of
business and the world. His poetry reads like history. Every thing has a
downright reality; at least in the relator's mind. A simile, or a
sentiment, is as if it were given in upon evidence. Thus he describes
Cressid's first avowal of her love.
"And as the new abashed nightingale,
That stinteth first when she beginneth sing,
When that she heareth any herde's tale,
Or in the hedges any wight stirring,
And after, sicker, doth her voice outring;
Right so Cresseide, when that her dread stent,
Open'd her heart, and told him her intent."
This is so true and natural, and beautifully simple, that the two things
seem identified with each other. Again, it is said in the Knight's
Tale--
"Thus passeth yere by yere, and day by day,
Till it felle ones in a morwe of May,
That Emelie that fayrer was to sene
Than is the lilie upon his stalke grene;
And fresher than the May with floures newe,
For with the rose-colour strof hire hewe:
I n'ot which was the finer of hem two."
This scrupulousness about the literal preference, as if some question of
matter of fact was at issue, is remarkable. I might mention that other,
where he compares the meeting between Palamon and Arcite to a hunter
waiting for a lion in a gap;--
"That stondeth at a gap with a spere,
Whan hunted is the lion or the bere,
And hereth him come rushing in the greves,
And breking both the boughes and the leves:"--
or that still finer one of Constance, when she is condemned to death:--
"Have ye not seen somtime a pale face
(Among a prees) of him that hath been lad
Toward his deth, wheras he geteth no grace,
And swiche a colour in his face hath had,
Men mighten know him that was so bestad,
Amonges all the faces in that route;
So stant Custance, and loketh hire aboute."
The beauty, the pathos here does not seem to be of the poet's seeking,
but a part of the necessary texture of the fable. He speaks of what he
wishes to describe with the accuracy, the discrimination of one who
relates what has happened to himself, or has had the best information
from those who have been eye-witnesses of it. The strokes of his pencil
always tell. He dwells only on the essential, on that which would be
interesting to the persons really concerned: yet as he never omits any
material circumstance, he is prolix from the number of points on which
he touches, without being diffuse on any one; and is sometimes tedious
from the fidelity with which he adheres to his subject, as other writers
are from the frequency of their digressions from it. The chain of his
story is composed of a number of fine links, closely connected together,
and rivetted by a single blow. There is an instance of the minuteness
which he introduces into his most serious descriptions in his account of
Palamon when left alone in his cell:
"Swiche sorrow he maketh that the grete tour
Resouned of his yelling and clamour:
The pure fetters on his shinnes grete
Were of his bitter salte teres wete."
The mention of this last circumstance looks like a part of the
instructions he had to follow, which he had no discretionary power to
leave out or introduce at pleasure. He is contented to find grace and
beauty in truth. He exhibits for the most part the naked object, with
little drapery thrown over it. His metaphors, which are few, are not for
ornament, but use, and as like as possible to the things themselves. He
does not affect to shew his power over the reader's mind, but the power
which his subject has over his own. The readers of Chaucer's poetry feel
more nearly what the persons he describes must have felt, than perhaps
those of any other poet. His sentiments are not voluntary effusions of
the poet's fancy, but founded on the natural impulses and habitual
prejudices of the characters he has to represent. There is an inveteracy
of purpose, a sincerity of feeling, which never relaxes or grows vapid,
in whatever they do or say. There is no artificial, pompous display, but
a strict parsimony of the poet's materials, like the rude simplicity of
the age in which he lived. His poetry resembles the root just springing
from the ground, rather than the full-blown flower. His muse is no
"babbling gossip of the air," fluent and redundant; but, like a
stammerer, or a dumb person, that has just found the use of speech,
crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and
fond repetitions to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the
objects, like the eye or finger. There were none of the common-places of
poetic diction in our author's time, no reflected lights of fancy, no
borrowed roseate tints; he was obliged to inspect things for himself, to
look narrowly, and almost to handle the object, as in the obscurity of
morning we partly see and partly grope our way; so that his descriptions
have a sort of tangible character belonging to them, and produce the
effect of sculpture on the mind. Chaucer had an equal eye for truth of
nature and discrimination of character; and his interest in what he saw
gave new distinctness and force to his power of observation. The
picturesque and the dramatic are in him closely blended together, and
hardly distinguishable; for he principally describes external
appearances as indicating character, as symbols of internal sentiment.
There is a meaning in what he sees; and it is this which catches his eye
by sympathy. Thus the costume and dress of the Canterbury Pilgrims--of
the Knight--the Squire--the Oxford Scholar--the Gap-toothed Wife
of Bath, and the rest, speak for themselves. To take one or two of these
at random:
"There was also a nonne, a Prioresse,
That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy;
Hire gretest othe n'as but by seint Eloy:
And she was cleped Madame Eglentine.
Ful wel she sange the service divine
Entuned in hire nose ful swetely;
And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly,
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe.
At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle;
She lette no morsel from hire lippes falle,
Ne wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe.
* * * * * *
And sikerly she was of great disport,
And ful plesant, and amiable of port,
And peined hire to contrefeten chere
Of court, and ben estatelich of manere,
And to ben holden digne of reverence.
But for to speken of hire conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous,
She wolde wepe if that she saw a mous
Caughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde
With rosted flesh, and milk, and wastel brede.
But sore wept she if on of hem were dede,
Or if men smote it with a yerde smert:
And all was conscience and tendre herte.
Ful semely hire wimple ypinched was;
Hire nose tretis; hire eyen grey as glas;
Hire mouth ful smale; and therto soft and red;
But sickerly she hadde a fayre forehed.
It was almost a spanne brode, I trowe."
"A Monk there was, a fayre for the maistrie,
An out-rider, that loved venerie:
A manly man, to ben an abbot able.
Ful many a deinte hors hadde he in stable:
And whan he rode, men mighte his bridel here,
Gingeling in a whistling wind as clere,
And eke as loude, as doth the chapell belle,
Ther as this lord was keper of the celle.
The reule of Seint Maure and of Seint Beneit,
Because that it was olde and somdele streit,
This ilke monk lette olde thinges pace,
And held after the newe world the trace. [*]
He yave not of the text a pulled hen,
That saith, that hunters ben not holy men;--
Therfore he was a prickasoure a right:
Greihoundes he hadde as swift as foul of flight:
Of pricking and of hunting for the hare
Was all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare.
I saw his sleves purfiled at the hond
With gris, and that the finest of the lond.
And for to fasten his hood under his chinne,
He had of gold ywrought a curious pinne:
A love-knotte in the greter end ther was.
His hed was balled, and shone as any glas,
And eke his face, as it hadde ben anoint.
He was a lord ful fat and in good point.
His eyen stepe, and rolling in his hed,
That stemed as a forneis of a led.
His botes souple, his hors in gret estat,
Now certainly he was a fayre prelat.
He was not pale as a forpined gost.
A fat swan loved he best of any rost.
His palfrey was as broune as is a bery."
___
[*] PG transcriber's note:
"space" instead of "trace" in some editions.
___
The Serjeant at Law is the same identical individual as Lawyer
Dowling in Tom Jones, who wished to divide himself into a hundred
pieces, to be in a hundred places at once.
"No wher so besy a man as he ther n'as,
And yet he semed besier than he was."
The Frankelein, in "whose hous it snewed of mete and drinke"; the
Shipman, "who rode upon a rouncie, as he couthe"; the Doctour of
Phisike, "whose studie was but litel of the Bible"; the Wif of Bath, in
"All whose parish ther was non,
That to the offring before hire shulde gon,
And if ther did, certain so wroth was she,
That she was out of alle charitee;"
--the poure Persone of a toun, "whose parish was wide, and houses fer
asonder"; the Miller, and the Reve, "a slendre colerike man," are all of
the same stamp. They are every one samples of a kind; abstract
definitions of a species. Chaucer, it has been said, numbered the
classes of men, as Linnaeus numbered the plants. Most of them remain to
this day: others that are obsolete, and may well be dispensed with,
still live in his descriptions of them. Such is the Sompnoure:
"A Sompnoure was ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fire-red cherubinnes face,
For sausefleme he was, with eyen narwe,
As hote he was, and likerous as a sparwe,
With scalled browes blake, and pilled berd:
Of his visage children were sore aferd.
Ther n'as quicksilver, litarge, ne brimston,
Boras, ceruse, ne oile of tartre non,
Ne oinement that wolde clense or bite,
That him might helpen of his whelkes white,
Ne of the knobbes sitting on his chekes.
Wel loved he garlike, onions, and lekes,
And for to drinke strong win as rede as blood.
Than wolde he speke, and crie as he were wood.
And whan that he wel dronken had the win,
Than wold he speken no word but Latin.
A fewe termes coude he, two or three,
That he had lerned out of som decree;
No wonder is, he heard it all the day.--
In danger hadde he at his owen gise
The yonge girles of the diocise,
And knew hir conseil, and was of hir rede.
A gerlond hadde he sette upon his hede
As gret as it were for an alestake:
A bokeler hadde he made him of a cake.
With him ther rode a gentil Pardonere--
That hadde a vois as smale as hath a gote."
It would be a curious speculation (at least for those who think that
the characters of men never change, though manners, opinions, and
institutions may) to know what has become of this character of the
Sompnoure in the present day; whether or not it has any technical
representative in existing professions; into what channels and conduits
it has withdrawn itself, where it lurks unseen in cunning obscurity, or
else shews its face boldly, pampered into all the insolence of office,
in some other shape, as it is deterred or encouraged by circumstances.
_Chaucer's characters modernised_, upon this principle of historic
derivation, would be an useful addition to our knowledge of human
nature. But who is there to undertake it?
The descriptions of the equipage, and accoutrements of the two kings
of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight's Tale, are as striking and grand, as
the others are lively and natural:
"Ther maist thou se coming with Palamon
Licurge himself, the grete king of Trace:
Blake was his berd, and manly was his face,
The cercles of his eyen in his hed
They gloweden betwixen yelwe and red,
And like a griffon loked he about,
With kemped heres on his browes stout;
His limmes gret, his braunes hard and stronge,
His shouldres brode, his armes round and longe
And as the guise was in his contree,
Ful highe upon a char of gold stood he,
With foure white bolles in the trais.
Instede of cote-armure on his harnais,
With nayles yelwe, and bright as any gold,
He hadde a beres skin, cole-blake for old.
His longe here was kempt behind his bak,
As any ravenes fether it shone for blake.
A wreth of gold arm-gret, of huge weight,
Upon his hed sate full of stones bright,
Of fine rubins [sic] and of diamants.
About his char ther wenten white alauns,
Twenty and mo, as gret as any stere,
To hunten at the leon or the dere,
And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound.--
With Arcita, in stories as men find,
The grete Emetrius, the king of Inde,
Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele,
Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,
Came riding like the god of armes Mars.
His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars,
Couched with perles, white, and round and grete.
His sadel was of brent gold new ybete;
A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging
Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling.
His crispe here like ringes was yronne,
And that was yelwe, and glitered as the Sonne.
His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin,
His lippes round, his colour was sanguin,
A fewe fraknes in his face yspreint,
Betwixen yelwe and blake somdel ymeint,
And as a leon he his loking caste.
Of five and twenty yere his age I caste.
His berd was wel begonnen for to spring;
His vois was as a trompe thondering.
Upon his hed he wered of laurer grene
A gerlond freshe and lusty for to sene.
Upon his hond he bare for his deduit
An egle tame, as any lily whit.--
About this king ther ran on every part
Ful many a tame leon and leopart."
What a deal of terrible beauty there is contained in this
description! The imagination of a poet brings such objects before us, as
when we look at wild beasts in a menagerie; their claws are pared, their
eyes glitter like harmless lightning; but we gaze at them with a
pleasing awe, clothed in beauty, formidable in the sense of abstract
power.
Chaucer's descriptions of natural scenery possess the same sort of
characteristic excellence, or what might be termed _gusto_. They have a
local truth and freshness, which gives the very feeling of the air, the
coolness or moisture of the ground. Inanimate objects are thus made to
have a fellow-feeling in the interest of the story; and render back the
sentiment of the speaker's mind. One of the finest parts of Chaucer is
of this mixed kind. It is the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf,
where he describes the delight of that young beauty, shrowded in her
bower, and listening, in the morning of the year, to the singing of the
nightingale; while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out
afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of
pleasure, and still increases, and repeats, and prolongs itself, and
knows no ebb. The coolness of the arbour, its retirement, the early time
of the day, the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouring
bushes, the eager delight with which they devour and rend the opening
buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth and feeling, which make the
whole appear like the recollection of an actual scene:
"Which as me thought was right a pleasing sight,
And eke the briddes song for to here,
Would haue rejoyced any earthly wight,
And I that couth not yet in no manere
Heare the nightingale of all the yeare,
Ful busily herkened with herte and with eare,
If I her voice perceiue coud any where.
And I that all this pleasaunt sight sie,
Thought sodainly I felt so sweet an aire
Of the eglentere, that certainely
There is no herte I deme in such dispaire,
Ne with thoughts froward and contraire,
So ouerlaid, but it should soone haue bote,
If it had ones felt this savour sote.
And as I stood and cast aside mine eie,
I was ware of the fairest medler tree
That ever yet in all my life I sie
As full of blossomes as it might be,
Therein a goldfinch leaping pretile
Fro bough to bough, and as him list he eet
Here and there of buds and floures sweet.
And to the herber side was joyning
This faire tree, of which I haue you told,
And at the last the brid began to sing,
Whan he had eaten what he eat wold,
So passing sweetly, that by manifold
It was more pleasaunt than I coud deuise,
And whan his song was ended in this wise,
The nightingale with so merry a note
Answered him, that all the wood rong
So sodainly, that as it were a sote,
I stood astonied, so was I with the song
Thorow rauished, that till late and long,
I ne wist in what place I was, ne where,
And ayen me thought she song euen by mine ere.
Wherefore I waited about busily
On euery side, if I her might see,
And at the last I gan full well aspie
Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree,
On the further side euen right by me,
That gaue so passing a delicious smell,
According to the eglentere full well.
Whereof I had so inly great pleasure,
That as me thought I surely rauished was
Into Paradice, where my desire
Was for to be, and no ferther passe
As for that day, and on the sote grasse,
I sat me downe, for as for mine entent,
The birds song was more conuenient,
And more pleasaunt to me by manifold,
Than meat or drinke, or any other thing,
Thereto the herber was so fresh and cold,
The wholesome sauours eke so comforting,
That as I demed, sith the beginning
Of the world was neur seene or than
So pleasaunt a ground of none earthly man.
And as I sat the birds harkening thus,
Me thought that I heard voices sodainly,
The most sweetest and most delicious
That euer any wight I trow truly
Heard in their life, for the armony
And sweet accord was in so good musike,
That the uoice to angels was most like."
There is here no affected rapture, no flowery sentiment: the whole is
an ebullition of natural delight "welling out of the heart," like water
from a crystal spring. Nature is the soul of art: there is a strength as
well as a simplicity in the imagination that reposes entirely on nature,
that nothing else can supply. It was the same trust in nature, and
reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucer to describe the grief and
patience of Griselda; the faith of Constance; and the heroic
perseverance of the little child, who, going to school through the
streets of Jewry,
"Oh _Alma Redemptoris mater_, loudly sung,"
and who after his death still triumphed in his song. Chaucer has more of
this deep, internal, sustained sentiment, than any other writer, except
Boccaccio. In depth of simple pathos, and intensity of conception, never
swerving from his subject, I think no other writer comes near him, not
even the Greek tragedians. I wish to be allowed to give one or two
instances of what I mean. I will take the following from the Knight's
Tale. The distress of Arcite, in consequence of his banishment from his
love, is thus described:
"Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was,
Ful oft a day he swelt and said Alas,
For sene his lady shall he never mo.
And shortly to concluden all his wo,
So mochel sorwe hadde never creature,
That is or shall be, while the world may dure.
His slepe, his mete, his drinke is him byraft.
That lene he wex, and drie as is a shaft.
His eyen holwe, and grisly to behold,
His hewe salwe, and pale as ashen cold,
And solitary he was, and ever alone,
And wailing all the night, making his mone.
And if he herde song or instrument,
Than wold he wepe, he mighte not be stent.
So feble were his spirites, and so low,
And changed so, that no man coude know
His speche ne his vois, though men it herd."
This picture of the sinking of the heart, of the wasting away of the
body and mind, of the gradual failure of all the faculties under the
contagion of a rankling sorrow, cannot be surpassed. Of the same kind is
his farewel to his mistress, after he has gained her hand and lost his
life in the combat:
"Alas the wo! alas the peines stronge,
That I for you have suffered, and so longe!
Alas the deth! alas min Emilie!
Alas departing of our compagnie;
Alas min hertes quene! alas my wif!
Min hertes ladie, ender of my lif!
What is this world? what axen men to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave
Alone withouten any compagnie."
The death of Arcite is the more affecting, as it comes after triumph
and victory, after the pomp of sacrifice, the solemnities of prayer, the
celebration of the gorgeous rites of chivalry. The descriptions of the
three temples of Mars, of Venus, and Diana, of the ornaments and
ceremonies used in each, with the reception given to the offerings of
the lovers, have a beauty and grandeur, much of which is lost in
Dryden's version. For instance, such lines as the following are not
rendered with their true feeling.
"Why shulde I not as well eke tell you all
The purtreiture that was upon the wall
Within the temple of mighty Mars the rede--
That highte the gret temple of Mars in Trace
In thilke colde and frosty region,
Ther as Mars hath his sovereine mansion.
First on the wall was peinted a forest,
In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best,
With knotty knarry barrein trees old
Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to behold;
In which ther ran a romble and a swough,
As though a storme shuld bresten every bough."
And again, among innumerable terrific images of death and slaughter
painted on the wall, is this one:
"The statue of Mars upon a carte stood
Armed, and looked grim as he were wood.
A wolf ther stood beforne him at his fete
With eyen red, and of a man he ete."
The story of Griselda is in Boccaccio; but the Clerk of Oxenforde,
who tells it, professes to have learned it from Petrarch. This story has
gone all over Europe, and has passed into a proverb. In spite of the
barbarity of the circumstances, which are abominable, the sentiment
remains unimpaired and unalterable. It is of that kind, "that heaves no
sigh, that sheds no tear"; but it hangs upon the beatings of the heart;
it is a part of the very being; it is as inseparable from it as the
breath we draw. It is still and calm as the face of death. Nothing can
touch it in its ethereal purity: tender as the yielding flower, it is
fixed as the marble firmament. The only remonstrance she makes, the only
complaint she utters against all the ill-treatment she receives, is that
single line where, when turned back naked to her father's house, she
says,
"Let me not like a worm go by the way."
The first outline given of the character is inimitable:
"Nought fer fro thilke paleis honourable,
Wher as this markis shope his marriage,
Ther stood a thorpe, of sighte delitable,
In which that poure folk of that village
Hadden hir bestes and her herbergage,
And of hir labour toke hir sustenance,
After that the erthe yave hem habundance.
Among this poure folk ther dwelt a man,
Which that was holden pourest of hem all:
But highe God sometime senden can
His grace unto a litel oxes stall:
Janicola men of that thorpe him call.
A doughter had he, faire ynough to sight,
And Grisildis this yonge maiden hight.
But for to speke of vertuous beautee,
Than was she on the fairest under Sonne:
Ful pourely yfostred up was she:
No likerous lust was in hire herte yronne;
Ful ofter of the well than of the tonne
She dranke, and for she wolde vertue plese,
She knew wel labour, but non idel ese.
But though this mayden tendre were of age,
Yet in the brest of hire virginitee
Ther was enclosed sad and ripe corage:
And in gret reverence and charitee
Hire olde poure fader fostred she:
A few sheep spinning on the feld she kept,
She wolde not ben idel til she slept.
And whan she homward came she wolde bring
Wortes and other herbes times oft,
The which she shred and sethe for hire living,
And made hire bed ful hard, and nothing soft:
And ay she kept hire fadres lif on loft
With every obeisance and diligence,
That child may don to fadres reverence,
Upon Grisilde, this poure creature,
Ful often sithe this markis sette his sye, [sic]
As he on hunting rode paraventure:
And whan it fell that he might hire espie,
He not with wanton loking of folie
His eyen cast on hire, but in sad wise
Upon hire chere he wold him oft avise,
Commending in his herte hire womanhede,
And eke hire vertue, passing any wight
Of so yong age, as wel in chere as dede.
For though the people have no gret insight
In vertue, he considered ful right
Hire bountee, and disposed that he wold
Wedde hire only, if ever he wedden shold.
Grisilde of this (God wot) ful innocent,
That for hire shapen was all this array,
To fetchen water at a welle is went,
And cometh home as sone as ever she may.
For wel she had herd say, that thilke day
The markis shulde wedde, and, if she might,
She wolde fayn han seen som of that sight.
She thought, "I wol with other maidens stond,
That ben my felawes, in our dore, and see
The markisesse, and therto wol I fond
To don at home, as sone as it may be,
The labour which longeth unto me,
And than I may at leiser hire behold,
If she this way unto the castel hold."
And she wolde over the threswold gon,
The markis came and gan hire for to call,
And she set doun her water-pot anon
Beside the threswold in an oxes stall,
And doun upon hire knees she gan to fall.
And with sad countenance kneleth still,
Till she had herd what was the lordes will."
The story of the little child slain in Jewry, (which is told by the
Prioress, and worthy to be told by her who was "all conscience and
tender heart,") is not less touching than that of Griselda. It is simple
and heroic to the last degree. The poetry of Chaucer has a religious
sanctity about it, connected with the manners and superstitions of the
age. It has all the spirit of martyrdom.
It has also all the extravagance and the utmost licentiousness of
comic humour, equally arising out of the manners of the time. In this
too Chaucer resembled Boccaccio that he excelled in both styles, and
could pass at will "from grave to gay, from lively to severe"; but he
never confounded the two styles together (except from that involuntary
and unconscious mixture of the pathetic and humorous, which is almost
always to be found in nature,) and was exclusively taken up with what he
set about, whether it was jest or earnest. The Wife of Bath's Prologue
(which Pope has very admirably modernised) is, perhaps, unequalled as a
comic story. The Cock and the Fox is also excellent for lively strokes
of character and satire. January and May is not so good as some of the
others. Chaucer's versification, considering the time at which he wrote,
and that versification is a thing in a great degree mechanical, is not
one of his least merits. It has considerable strength and harmony, and
its apparent deficiency in the latter respect arises chiefly from the
alterations which have since taken place in the pronunciation or mode of
accenting the words of the language. The best general rule for reading
him is to pronounce the final _e_, as in reading Italian.
It was observed in the last Lecture that painting describes what the
object is in itself, poetry what it implies or suggests. Chaucer's
poetry is not, in general, the best confirmation of the truth of this
distinction, for his poetry is more picturesque and historical than
almost any other. But there is one instance in point which I cannot help
giving in this place. It is the story of the three thieves who go in
search of Death to kill him, and who meeting with him, are entangled in
their fate by his words, without knowing him. In the printed catalogue
to Mr. West's (in some respects very admirable) picture of Death on the
Pale Horse, it is observed, that "In poetry the same effect is produced
by a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching, as it were
with fire, the features and edges of a general mass of awful obscurity;
but in painting, such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply that
the artist wanted the power to pourtray the conceptions of his fancy.
Mr. West was of opinion that to delineate a physical form, which in its
moral impression would approximate to that of the visionary Death of
Milton, it was necessary to endow it, if possible, with the appearance
of super-human strength and energy. He has therefore exerted the utmost
force and perspicuity of his pencil on the central figure."--One might
suppose from this, that the way to represent a shadow was to make it as
substantial as possible. Oh, no! Painting has its prerogatives, (and
high ones they are) but they lie in representing the visible, not the
invisible. The moral attributes of Death are powers and effects of an
infinitely wide and general description, which no individual or physical
form can possibly represent, but by a courtesy of speech, or by a
distant analogy. The moral impression of Death is essentially visionary;
its reality is in the mind's eye. Words are here the only _things_; and
things, physical forms, the mere mockeries of the understanding. The
less definite, the less bodily the conception, the more vast, unformed,
and unsubstantial, the nearer does it approach to some resemblance of
that omnipresent, lasting, universal, irresistible principle, which
every where, and at some time or other, exerts its power over all
things. Death is a mighty abstraction, like Night, or Space, or Time. He
is an ugly customer, who will not be invited to supper, or to sit for
his picture. He is with us and about us, but we do not see him. He
stalks on before us, and we do not mind him: he follows us close behind,
and we do not turn to look back at him. We do not see him making faces
at us in our life-time, nor perceive him afterwards sitting in
mock-majesty, a twin-skeleton, beside us, tickling our bare ribs, and
staring into our hollow eye-balls! Chaucer knew this. He makes three
riotous companions go in search of Death to kill him, they meet with an
old man whom they reproach with his age, and ask why he does not die, to
which he answers thus:
"Ne Deth, alas! ne will not han my lif.
Thus walke I like a restless caitiff,
And on the ground, which is my modres gate,
I knocke with my staf, erlich and late,
And say to hire, "Leve mother, let me in.
Lo, how I vanish, flesh and blood and skin,
Alas! when shall my bones ben at reste?
Mother, with you wolde I changen my cheste,
That in my chambre longe time hath be,
Ye, for an heren cloute to wrap in me."
But yet to me she will not don that grace,
For which ful pale and welked is my face."
They then ask the old man where they shall find out Death to kill
him, and he sends them on an errand which ends in the death of all
three. We hear no more of him, but it is Death that they have
encountered!
The interval between Chaucer and Spenser is long and dreary. There is
nothing to fill up the chasm but the names of Occleve, "ancient Gower,"
Lydgate, Wyatt, Surry, and Sackville. Spenser flourished in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, and was sent with Sir John Davies into Ireland, of
which he has left behind him some tender recollections in his
description of the bog of Allan, and a record in an ably written paper,
containing observations on the state of that country and the means of
improving it, which remain in full force to the present day. Spenser
died at an obscure inn in London, it is supposed in distressed
circumstances. The treatment he received from Burleigh is well known.
Spenser, as well as Chaucer, was engaged in active life; but the genius
of his poetry was not active: it is inspired by the love of ease, and
relaxation from all the cares and business of life. Of all the poets, he
is the most poetical. Though much later than Chaucer, his obligations to
preceding writers were less. He has in some measure borrowed the plan of
his poem (as a number of distinct narratives) from Ariosto; but he has
engrafted upon it an exuberance of fancy, and an endless voluptuousness
of sentiment, which are not to be found in the Italian writer. Farther,
Spenser is even more of an inventor in the subject-matter. There is an
originality, richness, and variety in his allegorical personages and
fictions, which almost vies with the splendor of the ancient mythology.
If Ariosto transports us into the regions of romance, Spenser's poetry
is all fairy-land. In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground, in a company,
gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough. In Spenser, we wander in another
world, among ideal beings. The poet takes and lays us in the lap of a
lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and
fairer valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected
to find it; and fulfils the delightful promise of our youth. He waves
his wand of enchantment--and at once embodies airy beings, and throws
a delicious veil over all actual objects. The two worlds of reality and
of fiction are poised on the wings of his imagination. His ideas,
indeed, seem more distinct than his perceptions. He is the painter of
abstractions, and describes them with dazzling minuteness. In the Mask
of Cupid he makes the God of Love "clap on high his coloured winges
_twain_": and it is said of Gluttony, in the Procession of the Passions,
"In green vine leaves he was right fitly clad."
At times he becomes picturesque from his intense love of beauty; as
where he compares Prince Arthur's crest to the appearance of the almond
tree:
"Upon the top of all his lofty crest,
A bunch of hairs discolour'd diversely
With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest
Did shake and seem'd to daunce for jollity;
Like to an almond tree ymounted high
On top of green Selenis all alone,
With blossoms brave bedecked daintily;
Her tender locks do tremble every one
At every little breath that under heav'n is blown."
The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the moving principle
of his mind; and he is guided in his fantastic delineations by no rule
but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriates equally
in scenes of Eastern magnificence; or the still solitude of a hermit's
cell--in the extremes of sensuality or refinement.
In reading the Faery Queen, you see a little withered old man by a
wood-side opening a wicket, a giant, and a dwarf lagging far behind, a
damsel in a boat upon an enchanted lake, wood-nymphs, and satyrs, and
all of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace, with tapers
burning, amidst knights and ladies, with dance and revelry, and song,
"and mask, and antique pageantry." What can be more solitary, more shut
up in itself, than his description of the house of Sleep, to which
Archimago sends for a dream:
"And more to lull him in his slumber soft
A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft,
Mix'd with a murmuring wind, much like the sound
Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swound.
No other noise, nor people's troublous cries.
That still are wont t' annoy the walled town
Might there be heard; but careless Quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies."
It is as if "the honey-heavy dew of slumber" had settled on his pen in
writing these lines. How different in the subject (and yet how like in
beauty) is the following description of the Bower of Bliss:
"Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound
Of all that mote delight a dainty ear;
Such as at once might not on living ground,
Save in this Paradise, be heard elsewhere:
Right hard it was for wight which did it hear,
To tell what manner musicke that mote be;
For all that pleasing is to living eare
Was there consorted in one harmonee:
Birds, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree.
The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade
Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet:
The angelical soft trembling voices made
To th' instruments divine respondence meet.
The silver sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur of the water's fall;
The water's fall with difference discreet,
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."
The remainder of the passage has all that voluptuous pathos, and languid
brilliancy of fancy, in which this writer excelled:
"The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay;
Ah! see, whoso fayre thing dost thou fain to see,
In springing flower the image of thy day!
Ah! see the virgin rose, how sweetly she
Doth first peep forth with bashful modesty,
That fairer seems the less ye see her may!
Lo! see soon after, how more bold and free
Her bared bosom she doth broad display;
Lo! see soon after, how she fades and falls away!
So passeth in the passing of a day
Of mortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower;
Ne more doth flourish after first decay,
That erst was sought to deck both bed and bower
Of many a lady and many a paramour!
Gather therefore the rose whilst yet is prime,
For soon comes age that will her pride deflower;
Gather the rose of love whilst yet is time,
Whilst loving thou mayst loved be with equal crime. [2]
He ceased; and then gan all the quire of birds
Their divers notes to attune unto his lay,
As in approvance of his pleasing wordes.
The constant pair heard all that he did say,
Yet swerved not, but kept their forward way
Through many covert groves and thickets close,
In which they creeping did at last display [3]
That wanton lady with her lover loose,
Whose sleepy head she in her lap did soft dispose.
Upon a bed of roses she was laid
As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin;
And was arrayed or rather disarrayed,
All in a veil of silk and silver thin,
That hid no whit her alabaster skin,
But rather shewed more white, if more might be:
More subtle web Arachne cannot spin;
Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew, do not in the air more lightly flee.
Her snowy breast was bare to greedy spoil
Of hungry eyes which n' ote therewith be fill'd,
And yet through languor of her late sweet toil
Few drops more clear than nectar forth distill'd,
That like pure Orient perles adown it trill'd;
And her fair eyes sweet smiling in delight
Moisten'd their fiery beams, with which she thrill'd
Frail hearts, yet quenched not; like starry light,
Which sparkling on the silent waves does seem more bright."
___
[2] Taken from Tasso.
[3] This word is an instance of those unwarrantable freedoms which
Spenser sometimes took with language.
___
The finest things in Spenser are, the character of Una, in the first
book; the House of Pride; the Cave of Mammon, and the Cave of Despair;
the account of Memory, of whom it is said, among other things,
"The wars he well remember'd of King Nine,
Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine";
the description of Belphoebe; the story of Florimel and the Witch's son;
the Gardens of Adonis, and the Bower of Bliss; the Mask of Cupid; and
Colin Clout's vision, in the last book. But some people will say that
all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account
of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it
would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon,
and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle.
If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle
with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a
pike-staff. It might as well be pretended that we cannot see Poussin's
pictures for the allegory, as that the allegory prevents us from
understanding Spenser. For instance, when Britomart, seated amidst the
young warriors, lets fall her hair and discovers her sex, is it
necessary to know the part she plays in the allegory, to understand the
beauty of the following stanza?
"And eke that stranger knight amongst the rest
Was for like need enforc'd to disarray.
Tho when as vailed was her lofty crest,
Her golden locks that were in trammels gay
Upbounden, did themselves adown display,
And raught unto her heels like sunny beams
That in a cloud their light did long time stay;
Their vapour faded, shew their golden gleams,
And through the persant air shoot forth their azure streams."
Or is there any mystery in what is said of Belphoebe, that her hair was
sprinkled with flowers and blossoms which had been entangled in it as
she fled through the woods? Or is it necessary to have a more distinct
idea of Proteus, than that which is given of him in his boat, with the
frighted Florimel at his feet, while
"------the cold icicles from his rough beard
Dropped adown upon her snowy breast!"
Or is it not a sufficient account of one of the sea-gods that pass by
them, to say--
"That was Arion crowned:--
So went he playing on the watery plain."
Or to take the Procession of the Passions that draw the coach of Pride,
in which the figures of Idleness, of Gluttony, of Lechery, of Avarice,
of Envy, and of Wrath speak, one should think, plain enough for
themselves; such as this of Gluttony:
"And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony,
Deformed creature, on a filthy swine;
His belly was up blown with luxury;
And eke with fatness swollen were his eyne;
And like a crane his neck was long and fine,
With which he swallowed up excessive feast,
For want whereof poor people oft did pine.
In green vine leaves he was right fitly clad;
For other clothes he could not wear for heat:
And on his head an ivy garland had,
From under which fast trickled down the sweat:
Still as he rode, he somewhat still did eat.
And in his hand did bear a bouzing can,
Of which he supt so oft, that on his seat
His drunken corse he scarce upholden can;
In shape and size more like a monster than a man."
Or this of Lechery:
"And next to him rode lustfull Lechery
Upon a bearded goat, whose rugged hair
And whaly eyes (the sign of jealousy)
Was like the person's self whom he did bear:
Who rough and black, and filthy did appear.
Unseemly man to please fair lady's eye:
Yet he of ladies oft was loved dear,
When fairer faces were bid standen by:
O! who does know the bent of woman's fantasy?
In a green gown he clothed was full fair,
Which underneath did hide his filthiness;
And in his hand a burning heart he bare,
Full of vain follies and new fangleness;
For he was false and fraught with fickleness;
And learned had to love with secret looks;
And well could dance; and sing with ruefulness;
And fortunes tell; and read in loving books;
And thousand other ways to bait his fleshly hooks.
Inconstant man that loved all he saw,
And lusted after all that he did love;
Ne would his looser life be tied to law;
But joyed weak women's hearts to tempt and prove,
If from their loyal loves he might them move."
This is pretty plain-spoken. Mr. Southey says of Spenser:
"------Yet not more sweet
Than pure was he, and not more pure than wise;
High priest of all the Muses' mysteries!"
On the contrary, no one was more apt to pry into mysteries which do not
strictly belong to the Muses.
Of the same kind with the Procession of the Passions, as little
obscure, and still more beautiful, is the Mask of Cupid, with his train
of votaries:
"The first was Fancy, like a lovely boy
Of rare aspect, and beauty without peer;
His garment neither was of silk nor say,
But painted plumes in goodly order dight,
Like as the sun-burnt Indians do array
Their tawny bodies in their proudest plight:
As those same plumes so seem'd he vain and light,
That by his gait might easily appear;
For still he far'd as dancing in delight,
And in his hand a windy fan did bear
That in the idle air he mov'd still here and there.
And him beside march'd amorous Desire,
Who seem'd of riper years than the other swain,
Yet was that other swain this elder's sire,
And gave him being, common to them twain:
His garment was disguised very vain,
And his embroidered bonnet sat awry;
Twixt both his hands few sparks he close did strain,
Which still he blew, and kindled busily,
That soon they life conceiv'd and forth in flames did fly.
Next after him went Doubt, who was yclad
In a discolour'd coat of strange disguise,
That at his back a broad capuccio had,
And sleeves dependant _Albanese-wise_;
He lookt askew with his mistrustful eyes,
And nicely trod, as thorns lay in his way,
Or that the floor to shrink he did avise;
And on a broken reed he still did stay
His feeble steps, which shrunk when hard thereon he lay.
With him went Daunger, cloth'd in ragged weed,
Made of bear's skin, that him more dreadful made;
Yet his own face was dreadfull, ne did need
Strange horror to deform his grisly shade;
A net in th' one hand, and a rusty blade
In th' other was; this Mischiefe, that Mishap;
With th' one his foes he threat'ned to invade,
With th' other he his friends meant to enwrap;
For whom he could not kill he practiz'd to entrap.
Next him was Fear, all arm'd from top to toe,
Yet thought himselfe not safe enough thereby,
But fear'd each shadow moving to and fro;
And his own arms when glittering he did spy
Or clashing heard, he fast away did fly,
As ashes pale of hue, and winged-heel'd;
And evermore on Daunger fixt his eye,
'Gainst whom he always bent a brazen shield,
Which his right hand unarmed fearfully did wield.
With him went Hope in rank, a handsome maid,
Of chearfull look and lovely to behold;
In silken samite she was light array'd,
And her fair locks were woven up in gold;
She always smil'd, and in her hand did hold
An holy-water sprinkle dipt in dew,
With which she sprinkled favours manifold
On whom she list, and did great liking shew,
Great liking unto many, but true love to few.
Next after them, the winged God himself
Came riding on a lion ravenous,
Taught to obey the menage of that elfe
That man and beast with power imperious
Subdueth to his kingdom tyrannous:
His blindfold eyes he bade awhile unbind,
That his proud spoil of that same dolorous
Fair dame he might behold in perfect kind;
Which seen, he much rejoiced in his cruel mind.
Of which full proud, himself uprearing high,
He looked round about with stern disdain,
And did survey his goodly company:
And marshalling the evil-ordered train,
With that the darts which his right hand did strain,
Full dreadfully he shook, that all did quake,
And clapt on high his colour'd winges twain,
That all his many it afraid did make:
Tho, blinding him again, his way he forth did take."
The description of Hope, in this series of historical portraits, is one
of the most beautiful in Spenser: and the triumph of Cupid at the
mischief he has made, is worthy of the malicious urchin deity. In
reading these descriptions, one can hardly avoid being reminded of
Rubens's allegorical pictures; but the account of Satyrane taming the
lion's whelps and lugging the bear's cubs along in his arms while yet an
infant, whom his mother so naturally advises to "go seek some other
play-fellows," has even more of this high picturesque character. Nobody
but Rubens could have painted the fancy of Spenser; and he could not
have given the sentiment, the airy dream that hovers over it! With all
this, Spenser neither makes us laugh nor weep. The only jest in his poem
is an allegorical play upon words, where he describes Malbecco as
escaping in the herd of goats, "by the help of his fayre hornes on
hight." But he has been unjustly charged with a want of passion and of
strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the pathos
of immediate action or suffering, which is more properly the dramatic;
but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance--all that belongs
to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His
strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and
muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable--but it assumes a character of
vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and
blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need
only turn, in proof of this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of
Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into Jealousy. The
following stanzas, in the description of the Cave of Mammon, the grisly
house of Plutus, are unrivalled for the portentous massiness of the
forms, the splendid chiaro-scuro, and shadowy horror.
"That house's form within was rude and strong,
Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift,
From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung,
Embossed with massy gold of glorious gift,
And with rich metal loaded every rift,
That heavy ruin they did seem to threat:
And over them Arachne high did lift
Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net,
Enwrapped in foul smoke, and clouds more black than jet.
Both roof and floor, and walls were all of gold,
But overgrown with dust and old decay, [4]
And hid in darkness that none could behold
The hue thereof: for view of cheerful day
Did never in that house itself display,
But a faint shadow of uncertain light;
Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away;
Or as the moon clothed with cloudy night
Does shew to him that walks in fear and sad affright.
* * * * * * *
And over all sad Horror with grim hue
Did always soar, beating his iron wings;
And after him owls and night-ravens flew,
The hateful messengers of heavy things,
Of death and dolour telling sad tidings;
Whiles sad Celleno, sitting on a clift,
A song of bitter bale and sorrow sings,
That heart of flint asunder could have rift;
Which having ended, after him she flieth swift."
___
[4] "That all with one consent praise new-born gauds,
Tho' they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to Dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than gold o'er-dusted."
_Troilus and Cressida_.
___
The Cave of Despair is described with equal gloominess and power of
fancy; and the fine moral declamation of the owner of it, on the evils
of life, almost makes one in love with death. In the story of Malbecco,
who is haunted by jealousy, and in vain strives to run away from his own
thoughts--
"High over hill and over dale he flies"--
the truth of human passion and the preternatural ending are equally
striking.--It is not fair to compare Spenser with Shakspeare, in point
of interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus; and the result
would not be unfavourable to Spenser. There is only one work of the same
allegorical kind, which has more interest than Spenser (with scarcely
less imagination): and that is the Pilgrim's Progress. The three first
books of the Faery Queen are very superior to the three last. One would
think that Pope, who used to ask if any one had ever read the Faery
Queen through, had only dipped into these last. The only things in them
equal to the former, are the account of Talus, the Iron Man, and the
delightful episode of Pastorella.
The language of Spenser is full, and copious, to overflowing; it is
less pure and idiomatic than Chaucer's, and is enriched and adorned with
phrases borrowed from the different languages of Europe, both ancient
and modern. He was, probably, seduced into a certain license of
expression by the difficulty of filling up the moulds of his complicated
rhymed stanza from the limited resources of his native language. This
stanza, with alternate and repeatedly recurring rhymes, is borrowed from
the Italians. It was peculiarly fitted to their language, which abounds
in similar vowel terminations, and is as little adapted to ours, from
the stubborn, unaccommodating resistance which the consonant endings of
the northern languages make to this sort of endless sing-song.--Not
that I would, on that account, part with the stanza of Spenser. We are,
perhaps, indebted to this very necessity of finding out new forms of
expression, and to the occasional faults to which it led, for a poetical
language rich and varied and magnificent beyond all former, and almost
all later example. His versification is, at once, the most smooth and
the most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinth of sweet sounds,
"in many a winding bout of linked sweetness long drawn out"--that
would cloy by their very sweetness, but that the ear is constantly
relieved and enchanted by their continued variety of modulation--
dwelling on the pauses of the action, or flowing on in a fuller tide of
harmony with the movement of the sentiment. It has not the bold dramatic
transitions of Shakspeare's blank verse, nor the high-raised tone of
Milton's; but it is the perfection of melting harmony, dissolving the
soul in pleasure, or holding it captive in the chains of suspense.
Spenser was the poet of our waking dreams; and he has invented not only
a language, but a music of his own for them. The undulations are
infinite, like those of the waves of the sea: but the effect is still
the same, lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noises
of the world, from which we have no wish to be ever recalled.
LECTURE III.
ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON.
In looking back to the great works of genius in former times, we are
sometimes disposed to wonder at the little progress which has since been
made in poetry, and in the arts of imitation in general. But this is
perhaps a foolish wonder. Nothing can be more contrary to the fact, than
the supposition that in what we understand by the _fine arts_, as
painting, and poetry, relative perfection is only the result of repeated
efforts in successive periods, and that what has been once well done,
constantly leads to something better. What is mechanical, reducible to
rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual
improvement: what is not mechanical, or definite, but depends on
feeling, taste, and genius, very soon becomes stationary, or retrograde,
and loses more than it gains by transfusion. The contrary opinion is a
vulgar error, which has grown up, like many others, from transferring an
analogy of one kind to something quite distinct, without taking into the
account the difference in the nature of the things, or attending to the
difference of the results. For most persons, finding what wonderful
advances have been made in biblical criticism, in chemistry, in
mechanics, in geometry, astronomy, &c. _i.e._ in things depending on
mere inquiry and experiment, or on absolute demonstration, have been led
hastily to conclude, that there was a general tendency in the efforts of
the human intellect to improve by repetition, and, in all other arts and
institutions, to grow perfect and mature by time. We look back upon the
theological creed of our ancestors, and their discoveries in natural
philosophy, with a smile of pity: science, and the arts connected with
it, have all had their infancy, their youth, and manhood, and seem to
contain in them no principle of limitation or decay: and, inquiring no
farther about the matter, we infer, in the intoxication of our pride,
and the height of our self-congratulation, that the same progress has
been made, and will continue to be made, in all other things which are
the work of man. The fact, however, stares us so plainly in the face,
that one would think the smallest reflection must suggest the truth, and
overturn our sanguine theories. The greatest poets, the ablest orators,
the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw,
appeared soon after the birth of these arts, and lived in a state of
society which was, in other respects, comparatively barbarous. Those
arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have
always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn
of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in
general declined ever after. This is the peculiar distinction and
privilege of each, of science and of art:--of the one, never to attain
its utmost limit of perfection; and of the other, to arrive at it almost
at once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Dante, and Ariosto,
(Milton alone was of a later age, and not the worse for it)--Raphael,
Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio, the Greek
sculptors and tragedians,--all lived near the beginning of their arts
--perfected, and all but created them. These giant-sons of genius stand
indeed upon the earth, but they tower above their fellows; and the long
line of their successors, in different ages, does not interpose any
object to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength
and stature they are unrivalled; in grace and beauty they have not been
surpassed. In after-ages, and more refined periods, (as they are called)
great men have arisen, one by one, as it were by throes and at
intervals; though in general the best of these cultivated and artificial
minds were of an inferior order; as Tasso and Pope, among poets; Guido
and Vandyke, among painters. But in the earlier stages of the arts, as
soon as the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the
language was sufficiently acquired, they rose by clusters, and in
constellations, never so to rise again!
The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of
thought within us, and with the world of sense around us--with what we
know, and see, and feel intimately. They flow from the sacred shrine of
our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature. But the
pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings
of the human heart were as well understood three thousand, or three
hundred years ago, as they are at present: the face of nature, and "the
human face divine" shone as bright then as they have ever done. But it
is _their_ light, reflected by true genius on art, that marks out its
path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses' feet, like that which
"Circled Una's angel face,
And made a sunshine in the shady place."
The four greatest names in English poetry, are almost the four first
we come to--Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton. There are no
others that can really be put in competition with these. The two last
have had justice done them by the voice of common fame. Their names are
blazoned in the very firmament of reputation; while the two first
(though "the fault has been more in their stars than in themselves that
they are underlings") either never emerged far above the horizon, or
were too soon involved in the obscurity of time. The three first of
these are excluded from Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (Shakspeare
indeed is so from the dramatic form of his compositions): and the
fourth, Milton, is admitted with a reluctant and churlish welcome.
In comparing these four writers together, it might be said that
Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life; Spenser, as the
poet of romance; Shakspeare as the poet of nature (in the largest use of
the term); and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently
describes things as they are; Spenser, as we wish them to be;
Shakspeare, as they would be; and Milton as they ought to be. As poets,
and as great poets, imagination, that is, the power of feigning things
according to nature, was common to them all: but the principle or moving
power, to which this faculty was most subservient in Chaucer, was habit,
or inveterate prejudice; in Spenser, novelty, and the love of the
marvellous; in Shakspeare, it was the force of passion, combined with
every variety of possible circumstances; and in Milton, only with the
highest. The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spenser,
remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakspeare, every thing.--It has
been said by some critic, that Shakspeare was distinguished from the
other dramatic writers of his day only by his wit; that they had all his
other qualities but that; that one writer had as much sense, another as
much fancy, another as much knowledge of character, another the same
depth of passion, and another as great a power of language. This
statement is not true; nor is the inference from it well-founded, even
if it were. This person does not seem to have been aware that, upon his
own shewing, the great distinction of Shakspeare's genius was its
virtually including the genius of all the great men of his age, and not
his differing from them in one accidental particular. But to have done
with such minute and literal trifling.
The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare's mind was its generic
quality, its power of communication with all other minds--so that it
contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no
one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was
just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the
least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in
himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He
not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he
could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their
conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict
of passion, or turn of thought. He had "a mind reflecting ages past,"
and present:--all the people that ever lived are there. There was no
respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on
the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: "All
corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay,
the secrets of the grave," are hardly hid from his searching glance. He
was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at
pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the
globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and
the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions,
follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives--as well those that they
knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves.
The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his
fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless
fairies "nodded to him, and did him curtesies": and the night-hag
bestrode the blast at the command of "his so potent art." The world of
spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there
is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if
the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist,
they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them. He had only to
think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the
circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether
real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and
feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring,
to be surrounded with all the same objects, "subject to the same skyey
influences," the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which
would occur in reality. Thus the character of Caliban not only stands
before us with a language and manners of its own, but the scenery and
situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the
place, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, "his frequent haunts and
ancient neighbourhood," are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and
with all the familiarity of an old recollection. The whole "coheres
semblably together" in time, place, and circumstance. In reading this
author, you do not merely learn what his characters say,--you see their
persons. By something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to
decypher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the
grouping, the bye-play, as we might see it on the stage. A word, an
epithet paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole years in the
history of the person represented. So (as it has been ingeniously
remarked) when Prospero describes himself as left alone in the boat with
his daughter, the epithet which he applies to her, "Me and thy _crying_
self," flings the imagination instantly back from the grown woman to the
helpless condition of infancy, and places the first and most trying
scene of his misfortunes before us, with all that he must have suffered
in the interval. How well the silent anguish of Macduff is conveyed to
the reader, by the friendly expostulation of Malcolm--"What! man,
ne'er pull your hat upon your brows!" Again, Hamlet, in the scene with
Rosencrans and Guildenstern, somewhat abruptly concludes his fine
soliloquy on life by saying, "Man delights not me, nor woman neither,
though by your smiling you seem to say so." Which is explained by their
answer--"My lord, we had no such stuff in our thoughts. But we smiled
to think, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment the
players shall receive from you, whom we met on the way":--as if while
Hamlet was making this speech, his two old schoolfellows from Wittenberg
had been really standing by, and he had seen them smiling by stealth, at
the idea of the players crossing their minds. It is not "a combination
and a form" of words, a set speech or two, a preconcerted theory of a
character, that will do this: but all the persons concerned must have
been present in the poet's imagination, as at a kind of rehearsal; and
whatever would have passed through their minds on the occasion, and have
been observed by others, passed through his, and is made known to the
reader.--I may add in passing, that Shakspeare always gives the best
directions for the costume and carriage of his heroes. Thus to take one
example, Ophelia gives the following account of Hamlet; and as Ophelia
had seen Hamlet, I should think her word ought to be taken against that
of any modern authority.
"_Ophelia_. My lord, as I was reading in my closet,
Prince Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd,
No hat upon his head, his stockings loose,
Ungartred, and down-gyved to his ancle,
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous,
As if he had been sent from hell
To speak of horrors, thus he comes before me.
_Polonius_. Mad for thy love!
_Oph_. My lord, I do not know,
But truly I do fear it.
_Pol_. What said he?
_Oph_. He took me by the wrist, and held me hard,
Then goes he to the length of all his arm;
And with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face,
As he would draw it: long staid he so;
At last, a little shaking of my arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound,
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being. That done, he lets me go,
And with his head over his shoulder turn'd,
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes;
For out of doors he went without their help,
And to the last bended their light on me."
_Act. II. Scene 1_.
How after this airy, fantastic idea of irregular grace and bewildered
melancholy any one can play Hamlet, as we have seen it played, with
strut, and stare, and antic right-angled sharp-pointed gestures, it is
difficult to say, unless it be that Hamlet is not bound, by the
prompter's cue, to study the part of Ophelia. The account of Ophelia's
death begins thus:
"There is a willow hanging o'er a brook,
That shows its hoary leaves in the glassy stream."--
Now this is an instance of the same unconscious power of mind which is
as true to nature as itself. The leaves of the willow are, in fact,
white underneath, and it is this part of them which would appear "hoary"
in the reflection in the brook. The same sort of intuitive power, the
same faculty of bringing every object in nature, whether present or
absent, before the mind's eye, is observable in the speech of Cleopatra,
when conjecturing what were the employments of Antony in his absence:--
"He's speaking now, or murmuring, where's my serpent of old Nile?" How
fine to make Cleopatra have this consciousness of her own character, and
to make her feel that it is this for which Antony is in love with her!
She says, after the battle of Actium, when Antony has resolved to risk
another fight, "It is my birth-day; I had thought to have held it poor:
but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra." What other poet
would have thought of such a casual resource of the imagination, or
would have dared to avail himself of it? The thing happens in the play
as it might have happened in fact.--That which, perhaps, more than any
thing else distinguishes the dramatic productions of Shakspeare from all
others, is this wonderful truth and individuality of conception. Each of
his characters is as much itself, and as absolutely independent of the
rest, as well as of the author, as if they were living persons, not
fictions of the mind. The poet may be said, for the time, to identify
himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one
to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies.
By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out
of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the
person in whose name it is given. His plays alone are properly
expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters
are real beings of flesh and blood; they speak like men, not like
authors. One might suppose that he had stood by at the time, and
overheard what passed. As in our dreams we hold conversations with
ourselves, make remarks, or communicate intelligence, and have no idea
of the answer which we shall receive, and which we ourselves make, till
we hear it: so the dialogues in Shakspeare are carried on without any
consciousness of what is to follow, without any appearance of
preparation or premeditation. The gusts of passion come and go like
sounds of music borne on the wind. Nothing is made out by formal
inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis: all comes, or seems to
come, immediately from nature. Each object and circumstance exists in
his mind, as it would have existed in reality: each several train of
thought and feeling goes on of itself, without confusion or effort. In
the world of his imagination, every thing has a life, a place, and being
of its own!
Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but
they are too little varied in themselves, too much like identical
propositions. They are consistent, but uniform; we get no new idea of
them from first to last; they are not placed in different lights, nor
are their subordinate _traits_ brought out in new situations; they are
like portraits or physiognomical studies, with the distinguishing
features marked with inconceivable truth and precision, but that
preserve the same unaltered air and attitude. Shakspeare's are
historical figures, equally true and correct, but put into action, where
every nerve and muscle is displayed in the struggle with others, with
all the effect of collision and contrast, with every variety of light
and shade. Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakspeare's dramatic,
Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he
pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his
characters himself. In Shakspeare they are introduced upon the stage,
are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer
for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In
Shakspeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its
elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its
alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in
contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the
result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances.
Milton took only a few simple principles of character, and raised them
to the utmost conceivable grandeur, and refined them from every base
alloy. His imagination, "nigh sphered in Heaven," claimed kindred only
with what he saw from that height, and could raise to the same elevation
with itself. He sat retired and kept his state alone, "playing with
wisdom"; while Shakspeare mingled with the crowd, and played the host,
"to make society the sweeter welcome."
The passion in Shakspeare is of the same nature as his delineation of
character. It is not some one habitual feeling or sentiment preying upon
itself, growing out of itself, and moulding every thing to itself; it is
passion modified by passion, by all the other feelings to which the
individual is liable, and to which others are liable with him; subject
to all the fluctuations of caprice and accident; calling into play all
the resources of the understanding and all the energies of the will;
irritated by obstacles or yielding to them; rising from small beginnings
to its utmost height; now drunk with hope, now stung to madness, now
sunk in despair, now blown to air with a breath, now raging like a
torrent. The human soul is made the sport of fortune, the prey of
adversity: it is stretched on the wheel of destiny, in restless ecstacy.
The passions are in a state of projection. Years are melted down to
moments, and every instant teems with fate. We know the results, we see
the process. Thus after Iago has been boasting to himself of the effect
of his poisonous suggestions on the mind of Othello, "which, with a
little act upon the blood, will work like mines of sulphur," he adds--
"Look where he comes! not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the East,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow'dst yesterday."--
And he enters at this moment, like the crested serpent, crowned with his
wrongs and raging for revenge! The whole depends upon the turn of a
thought. A word, a look, blows the spark of jealousy into a flame; and
the explosion is immediate and terrible as a volcano. The dialogues in
Lear, in Macbeth, that between Brutus and Cassius, and nearly all those
in Shakspeare, where the interest is wrought up to its highest pitch,
afford examples of this dramatic fluctuation of passion. The interest in
Chaucer is quite different; it is like the course of a river, strong,
and full, and increasing. In Shakspeare, on the contrary, it is like the
sea, agitated this way and that, and loud-lashed by furious storms;
while in the still pauses of the blast, we distinguish only the cries of
despair, or the silence of death! Milton, on the other hand, takes the
imaginative part of passion--that which remains after the event, which
the mind reposes on when all is over, which looks upon circumstances
from the remotest elevation of thought and fancy, and abstracts them
from the world of action to that of contemplation. The objects of
dramatic poetry affect us by sympathy, by their nearness to ourselves,
as they take us by surprise, or force us upon action, "while rage with
rage doth sympathise"; the objects of epic poetry affect us through the
medium of the imagination, by magnitude and distance, by their
permanence and universality. The one fill us with terror and pity, the
other with admiration and delight. There are certain objects that strike
the imagination, and inspire awe in the very idea of them, independently
of any dramatic interest, that is, of any connection with the
vicissitudes of human life. For instance, we cannot think of the
pyramids of Egypt, of a Gothic ruin, or an old Roman encampment, without
a certain emotion, a sense of power and sublimity coming over the mind.
The heavenly bodies that hang over our heads wherever we go, and "in
their untroubled element shall shine when we are laid in dust, and all
our cares forgotten," affect us in the same way. Thus Satan's address to
the Sun has an epic, not a dramatic interest; for though the second
person in the dialogue makes no answer and feels no concern, yet the eye
of that vast luminary is upon him, like the eye of heaven, and seems
conscious of what he says, like an universal presence. Dramatic poetry
and epic, in their perfection, indeed, approximate to and strengthen one
another. Dramatic poetry borrows aid from the dignity of persons and
things, as the heroic does from human passion, but in theory they are
distinct.--When Richard II. calls for the looking-glass to contemplate
his faded majesty in it, and bursts into that affecting exclamation:
"Oh, that I were a mockery-king of snow, to melt away before the sun of
Bolingbroke," we have here the utmost force of human passion, combined
with the ideas of regal splendour and fallen power. When Milton says of
Satan:
"------His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appear'd
Less than archangel ruin'd, and th' excess
Of glory obscur'd;"--
the mixture of beauty, of grandeur, and pathos, from the sense of
irreparable loss, of never-ending, unavailing regret, is perfect.
The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an
experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility;
or what is worse, to divest it both of imaginary splendour and human
passion, to surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelings and
devouring egotism of the writers' own minds. Milton and Shakspeare did
not so understand poetry. They gave a more liberal interpretation both
to nature and art. They did not do all they could to get rid of the one
and the other, to fill up the dreary void with the Moods of their own
Minds. They owe their power over the human mind to their having had a
deeper sense than others of what was grand in the objects of nature, or
affecting in the events of human life. But to the men I speak of there
is nothing interesting, nothing heroical, but themselves. To them the
fall of gods or of great men is the same. They do not enter into the
feeling. They cannot understand the terms. They are even debarred from
the last poor, paltry consolation of an unmanly triumph over fallen
greatness; for their minds reject, with a convulsive effort and
intolerable loathing, the very idea that there ever was, or was thought
to be, any thing superior to themselves. All that has ever excited the
attention or admiration of the world, they look upon with the most
perfect indifference; and they are surprised to find that the world
repays their indifference with scorn. "With what measure they mete, it
has been meted to them again."--
Shakespeare's imagination is of the same plastic kind as his
conception of character or passion. "It glances from heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven." Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the
most opposite extremes; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats,
"puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes." He seems always
hurrying from his subject, even while describing it; but the stroke,
like the lightning's, is sure as it is sudden. He takes the widest
possible range, but from that very range he has his choice of the
greatest variety and aptitude of materials. He brings together images
the most alike, but placed at the greatest distance from each other;
that is, found in circumstances of the greatest dissimilitude. From the
remoteness of his combinations, and the celerity with which they are
effected, they coalesce the more indissolubly together. The more the
thoughts are strangers to each other, and the longer they have been kept
asunder, the more intimate does their union seem to become. Their
felicity is equal to their force. Their likeness is made more dazzling
by their novelty. They startle, and take the fancy prisoner in the same
instant. I will mention one or two which are very striking, and not much
known, out of Troilus and Cressida. AEneas says to Agamemnon,
"I ask that I may waken reverence,
And on the cheek be ready with a blush
Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes
The youthful Phoebus."
Ulysses urging Achilles to shew himself in the field, says--
"No man is the lord of any thing,
Till he communicate his parts to others:
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
Till he behold them formed in the applause,
Where they're extended! which like an arch reverberates
The voice again, or like a gate of steel,
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
Its figure and its heat."
Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice.
"Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane
Be shook to air."
Shakspeare's language and versification are like the rest of him. He has
a magic power over words: they come winged at his bidding; and seem to
know their places. They are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the
occasion, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an
actual impression of the objects. His epithets and single phrases are
like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling
rapidity of its own motion. His language is hieroglypnical. It
translates thoughts into visible images. It abounds in sudden
transitions and elliptical expressions. This is the source of his mixed
metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of speech. These, however,
give no pain from long custom. They have, in fact, become idioms in the
language. They are the building, and not the scaffolding to thought. We
take the meaning and effect of a well-known passage entire, and no more
stop to scan and spell out the particular words and phrases, than the
syllables of which they are composed. In trying to recollect any other
author, one sometimes stumbles, in case of failure, on a word as good.
In Shakspeare, any other word but the true one, is sure to be wrong. If
any body, for instance, could not recollect the words of the following
description,
"------Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,"
he would be greatly at a loss to substitute others for them equally
expressive of the feeling. These remarks, however, are strictly
applicable only to the impassioned parts of Shakspeare's language, which
flowed from the warmth and originality of his imagination, and were his
own. The language used for prose conversation and ordinary business is
sometimes technical, and involved in the affectation of the time.
Compare, for example, Othello's apology to the senate, relating "his
whole course of love," with some of the preceding parts relating to his
appointment, and the official dispatches from Cyprus. In this respect,
"the business of the state does him offence."--His versification is no
less powerful, sweet, and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of
sullen intricacy, crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and
loftiest expansion--from the ease and familiarity of measured
conversation to the lyrical sounds
"------Of ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower,
With ravishing division to her lute."
It is the only blank verse in the language, except Milton's, that for
itself is readable. It is not stately and uniformly swelling like his,
but varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass
over in its uncertain course,
"And so by many winding nooks it strays,
With willing sport to the wild ocean."
It remains to speak of the faults of Shakspeare. They are not so many
or so great as they have been represented; what there are, are chiefly
owing to the following causes:--The universality of his genius was,
perhaps, a disadvantage to his single works; the variety of his
resources, sometimes diverting him from applying them to the most
effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of AEschylus
and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been
only half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The
natural ease and indifference of his temper made him sometimes less
scrupulous than he might have been. He is relaxed and careless in
critical places; he is in earnest throughout only in Timon, Macbeth, and
Lear. Again, he had no models of acknowledged excellence constantly in
view to stimulate his efforts, and by all that appears, no love of fame.
He wrote for the "great vulgar and the small," in his time, not for
posterity. If Queen Elizabeth and the maids of honour laughed heartily
at his worst jokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were silent at his
best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next night well. He
did not trouble himself about Voltaire's criticisms. He was willing to
take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things; and if his
plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very
facility of production would make him set less value on his own
excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well
or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above
half a dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography,
not against poetry. As to the unities, he was right in setting them at
defiance. He was fonder of puns than became so great a man. His
barbarisms were those of his age. His genius was his own. He had no
objection to float down with the stream of common taste and opinion: he
rose above it by his own buoyancy, and an impulse which he could not
keep under, in spite of himself or others, and "his delights did shew
most dolphin-like."
He had an equal genius for comedy and tragedy; and his tragedies are
better than his comedies, because tragedy is better than comedy. His
female characters, which have been found fault with as insipid, are the
finest in the world. Lastly, Shakspeare was the least of a coxcomb of
any one that ever lived, and much of a gentleman.
Shakspeare discovers in his writings little religious enthusiasm, and
an indifference to personal reputation; he had none of the bigotry of
his age, and his political prejudices were not very strong. In these
respects, as well as in every other, he formed a direct contrast to
Milton. Milton's works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn
to Fame. He had his thoughts constantly fixed on the contemplation of
the Hebrew theocracy, and of a perfect commonwealth; and he seized the
pen with a hand just warm from the touch of the ark of faith. His
religious zeal infused its character into his imagination; so that he
devotes himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation of his
genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the good of his country.
The spirit of the poet, the patriot, and the prophet, vied with each
other in his breast. His mind appears to have held equal communion with
the inspired writers, and with the bards and sages of ancient Greece and
Rome;--
"Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old."
He had a high standard, with which he was always comparing himself,
nothing short of which could satisfy his jealous ambition. He thought of
nobler forms and nobler things than those he found about him. He lived
apart, in the solitude of his own thoughts, carefully excluding from his
mind whatever might distract its purposes or alloy its purity, or damp
its zeal. "With darkness and with dangers compassed round," he had the
mighty models of antiquity always present to his thoughts, and
determined to raise a monument of equal height and glory, "piling up
every stone of lustre from the brook," for the delight and wonder of
posterity. He had girded himself up, and as it were, sanctified his
genius to this service from his youth. "For after," he says, "I had from
my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, been
exercised to the tongues, and some sciences as my age could suffer, by
sundry masters and teachers, it was found that whether aught was imposed
upon me by them, or betaken to of my own choice, the style by certain
vital signs it had, was likely to live; but much latelier, in the
private academies of Italy, perceiving that some trifles which I had in
memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout, met with acceptance
above what was looked for; I began thus far to assent both to them and
divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting
which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study (which I
take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity
of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times as
they should not willingly let it die. The accomplishment of these
intentions, which have lived within me ever since I could conceive
myself anything worth to my country, lies not but in a power above man's
to promise; but that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and
with more unwearied spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of
myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend. Neither do I think
it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years
yet, I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now
indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the
vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some
vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be
obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but
by devout prayer to that eternal spirit who can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed
fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases: to
this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation,
and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs. Although it
nothing content me to have disclosed thus much beforehand; but that I
trust hereby to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to
interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and
pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to
embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, from beholding
the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful
studies."
So that of Spenser:
"The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought,
And is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest until it forth have brought
The eternal brood of glory excellent."
Milton, therefore, did not write from casual impulse, but after a
severe examination of his own strength, and with a resolution to leave
nothing undone which it was in his power to do. He always labours, and
almost always succeeds. He strives hard to say the finest things in the
world, and he does say them. He adorns and dignifies his subject to the
utmost: he surrounds it with every possible association of beauty or
grandeur, whether moral, intellectual, or physical. He refines on his
descriptions of beauty; loading sweets on sweets, till the sense aches
at them; and raises his images of terror to a gigantic elevation, that
"makes Ossa like a wart." In Milton, there is always an appearance of
effort: in Shakespeare, scarcely any.
Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every
source of imitation, sacred or profane; yet he is perfectly distinct
from every other writer. He is a writer of centos, and yet in
originality scarcely inferior to Homer. The power of his mind is stamped
on every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders
malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. In reading
his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect,
that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from
them. The quantity of art in him shews the strength of his genius: the
weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other
writer. Milton's learning has the effect of intuition. He describes
objects, of which he could only have read in books, with the vividness
of actual observation. His imagination has the force of nature. He makes
words tell as pictures.
"Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat
Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks
Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams."
The word _lucid_ here gives to the idea all the sparkling effect of the
most perfect landscape.
And again:
"As when a vulture on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a region scarce of prey,
To gorge the flesh of lambs and yeanling kids
On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
But in his way lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses [sic] drive
With sails and wind their cany waggons light."
If Milton had taken a journey for the express purpose, he could not have
described this scenery and mode of life better. Such passages are like
demonstrations of natural history. Instances might be multiplied without
end.
We might be tempted to suppose that the vividness with which he
describes visible objects, was owing to their having acquired an unusual
degree of strength in his mind, after the privation of his sight; but we
find the same palpableness and truth in the descriptions which occur in
his early poems. In Lycidas he speaks of "the great vision of the
guarded mount," with that preternatural weight of impression with which
it would present itself suddenly to "the pilot of some small
night-foundered skiff": and the lines in the Penseroso, describing "the
wandering moon,"
"Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven's wide pathless way,"
are as if he had gazed himself blind in looking at her. There is also
the same depth of impression in his descriptions of the objects of all
the different senses, whether colours, or sounds, or smells--the same
absorption of his mind in whatever engaged his attention at the time. It
has been indeed objected to Milton, by a common perversity of criticism,
that his ideas were musical rather than picturesque, as if because they
were in the highest degree musical, they must be (to keep the sage
critical balance even, and to allow no one man to possess two qualities
at the same time) proportionably deficient in other respects. But
Milton's poetry is not cast in any such narrow, common-place mould; it
is not so barren of resources. His worship of the Muse was not so simple
or confined. A sound arises "like a steam of rich distilled perfumes";
we hear the pealing organ, but the incense on the altars is also there,
and the statues of the gods are ranged around! The ear indeed
predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately affected, and
because the language of music blends more immediately with, and forms a
more natural accompaniment to, the variable and indefinite associations
of ideas conveyed by words. But where the associations of the
imagination are not the principal thing, the individual object is given
by Milton with equal force and beauty. The strongest and best proof of
this, as a characteristic power of his mind, is, that the persons of
Adam and Eve, of Satan, &c. are always accompanied, in our imagination,
with the grandeur of the naked figure; they convey to us the ideas of
sculpture. As an instance, take the following:
"------He soon
Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand,
The same whom John saw also in the sun:
His back was turned, but not his brightness hid;
Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar
Circled his head, nor less his locks behind
Illustrious on his shoulders fledge with wings
Lay waving round; on some great charge employ'd
He seem'd, or fix'd in cogitation deep.
Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hope
To find who might direct his wand'ring flight
To Paradise, the happy seat of man,
His journey's end, and our beginning woe.
But first he casts to change his proper shape,
Which else might work him danger or delay:
And now a stripling cherub he appears,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb
Suitable grace diffus'd, so well he feign'd:
Under a coronet his flowing hair
In curls on either cheek play'd; wings he wore
Of many a colour'd plume sprinkled with gold,
His habit fit for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a silver wand."
The figures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a
Greek statue; glossy and impurpled, tinged with golden light, and
musical as the strings of Memnon's harp!
Again, nothing can be more magnificent than the portrait of
Beelzebub:
"With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies:"
Or the comparison of Satan, as he "lay floating many a rood," to "that
sea beast,"
"Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream!"
What a force of imagination is there in this last expression! What an
idea it conveys of the size of that hugest of created beings, as if it
shrunk up the ocean to a stream, and took up the sea in its nostrils as
a very little thing? Force of style is one of Milton's greatest
excellences. Hence, perhaps, he stimulates us more in the reading, and
less afterwards. The way to defend Milton against all impugners, is to
take down the book and read it.
Milton's blank verse is the only blank verse in the language (except
Shakspeare's) that deserves the name of verse. Dr. Johnson, who had
modelled his ideas of versification on the regular sing-song of Pope,
condemns the Paradise Lost as harsh and unequal. I shall not pretend to
say that this is not sometimes the case; for where a degree of
excellence beyond the mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poet
must sometimes fail. But I imagine that there are more perfect examples
in Milton of musical expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and
movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage, than in all our
other writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the
exception already mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our
stanza writers, as Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our
rhymists. But in neither is there any thing like the same ear for music,
the same power of approximating the varieties of poetical to those of
musical rhythm, as there is in our great epic poet. The sound of his
lines is moulded into the expression of the sentiment, almost of the
very image. They rise or fall, pause or hurry rapidly on, with exquisite
art, but without the least trick or affectation, as the occasion seems
to require.
The following are some of the finest instances:
"------His hand was known
In Heaven by many a tower'd structure high;--
Nor was his name unheard or unador'd
In ancient Greece: and in the Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber: and how he fell
From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the chrystal battlements; from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos, the AEgean isle: thus they relate,
Erring."--
"------But chief the spacious hall
Thick swarm'd, both on the ground and in the air,
Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings. As bees
In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides,
Pour forth their populous youth about the hive
In clusters; they among fresh dews and flow'rs
Fly to and fro: or on the smoothed plank,
The suburb of their straw-built citadel,
New rubb'd with balm, expatiate and confer
Their state affairs. So thick the airy crowd
Swarm'd and were straiten'd; till the signal giv'n,
Behold a wonder! They but now who seem'd
In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course: they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds."
I can only give another instance, though I have some difficulty in
leaving off.
"Round he surveys (and well might, where he stood
So high above the circling canopy
Of night's extended shade) from th' eastern point
Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears
Andromeda far off Atlantic seas
Beyond the horizon: then from pole to pole
He views in breadth, and without longer pause
Down right into the world's first region throws
His flight precipitant, and winds with ease
Through the pure marble air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable stars that shone
Stars distant, but nigh hand seem'd other worlds;
Or other worlds they seem'd or happy isles," &c.
The verse, in this exquisitely modulated passage, floats up and down as
if it had itself wings. Milton has himself given us the theory of his
versification--
"Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out."
Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a
rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton's,--Thomson's,
Young's, Cowper's, Wordsworth's,--and it will be found, from the want
of the same insight into "the hidden soul of harmony," to be mere
lumbering prose.
To proceed to a consideration of the merits of Paradise Lost, in the
most essential point of view, I mean as to the poetry of character and
passion. I shall say nothing of the fable, or of other technical
objections or excellences; but I shall try to explain at once the
foundation of the interest belonging to the poem. I am ready to give up
the dialogues in Heaven, where, as Pope justly observes, "God the Father
turns a school-divine"; nor do I consider the battle of the angels as
the climax of sublimity, or the most successful effort of Milton's pen.
In a word, the interest of the poem arises from the daring ambition and
fierce passions of Satan, and from the account of the paradisaical
happiness, and the loss of it by our first parents. Three-fourths of the
work are taken up with these characters, and nearly all that relates to
them is unmixed sublimity and beauty. The two first books alone are like
two massy pillars of solid gold.
Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem; and
the execution is as perfect as the design is lofty. He was the first of
created beings, who, for endeavouring to be equal with the highest, and
to divide the empire of heaven with the Almighty, was hurled down to
hell. His aim was no less than the throne of the universe; his means,
myriads of angelic armies bright, the third part of the heavens, whom he
lured after him with his countenance, and who durst defy the Omnipotent
in arms. His ambition was the greatest, and his punishment was the
greatest; but not so his despair, for his fortitude was as great as his
sufferings. His strength of mind was matchless as his strength of body;
the vastness of his designs did not surpass the firm, inflexible
determination with which he submitted to his irreversible doom, and
final loss of all good. His power of action and of suffering was equal.
He was the greatest power that was ever overthrown, with the strongest
will left to resist or to endure. He was baffled, not confounded. He
stood like a tower; or
"------As when Heaven's fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines."
He was still surrounded with hosts of rebel angels, armed warriors, who
own him as their sovereign leader, and with whose fate he sympathises as
he views them round, far as the eye can reach; though he keeps aloof
from them in his own mind, and holds supreme counsel only with his own
breast. An outcast from Heaven, Hell trembles beneath his feet, Sin and
Death are at his heels, and mankind are his easy prey.
"All is not lost; th' unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what else is not to be overcome,"
are still his. The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude
of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames is qualified and made
innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite
happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of
inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of
malignity, or of the abstract love of evil--but of the abstract love
of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle
all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. From this
principle he never once flinches. His love of power and contempt for
suffering are never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity.
His thoughts burn like a hell within him; but the power of thought holds
dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness
of a determined purpose, of "that intellectual being, those thoughts
that wander through eternity," though accompanied with endless pain, he
prefers to nonentity, to "being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb
of uncreated night." He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition
in one line. "Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or
suffering!" After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat
in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he
does more than this--he founds a new empire in hell, and from it
conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted flight, forcing
his way through nether and surrounding fires. The poet has not in all
this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the
magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct;
the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a
more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of
Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, "rising aloft incumbent
on the dusky air," it is illustrated with the most striking and
appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic,
irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed--but dazzling in its
faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god. The deformity of Satan is
only in the depravity of his will; he has no bodily deformity to excite
our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there, poor emblems
of the unbending, unconquered spirit, of the writhing agonies within.
Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his
argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot; to bring into the
fair field of controversy the good old catholic prejudices of which
Tasso and Dante have availed themselves, and which the mystic German
critics would restore. He relied on the justice of his cause, and did
not scruple to give the devil his due. Some persons may think that he
has carried his liberality too far, and injured the cause he professed
to espouse by making him the chief person in his poem. Considering the
nature of his subject, he would be equally in danger of running into
this fault, from his faith in religion, and his love of rebellion; and
perhaps each of these motives had its full share in determining the
choice of his subject.
Not only the figure of Satan, but his speeches in council, his
soliloquies, his address to Eve, his share in the war in heaven, or in
the fall of man, shew the same decided superiority of character. To give
only one instance, almost the first speech he makes:
"Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then the lost archangel, this the seat
That we must change for Heaven; this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is sov'rain can dispose and bid
What shall be right: farthest from him is best,
Whom reason hath equal'd, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewel happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."
The whole of the speeches and debates in Pandemonium are well worthy
of the place and the occasion--with Gods for speakers, and angels and
archangels for hearers. There is a decided manly tone in the arguments
and sentiments, an eloquent dogmatism, as if each person spoke from
thorough conviction; an excellence which Milton probably borrowed from
his spirit of partisanship, or else his spirit of partisanship from the
natural firmness and vigour of his mind. In this respect Milton
resembles Dante, (the only modern writer with whom he has any thing in
common) and it is remarkable that Dante, as well as Milton, was a
political partisan. That approximation to the severity of impassioned
prose which has been made an objection to Milton's poetry, and which is
chiefly to be met with in these bitter invectives, is one of its great
excellences. The author might here turn his philippics against Salmasius
to good account. The rout in Heaven is like the fall of some mighty
structure, nodding to its base, "with hideous ruin and combustion down."
But, perhaps, of all the passages in Paradise Lost, the description of
the employments of the angels during the absence of Satan, some of whom
"retreated in a silent valley, sing with notes angelical to many a harp
their own heroic deeds and hapless fall by doom of battle," is the most
perfect example of mingled pathos and sublimity.--What proves the truth
of this noble picture in every part, and that the frequent complaint of
want of interest in it is the fault of the reader, not of the poet, is
that when any interest of a practical kind take a shape that can be at
all turned into this, (and there is little doubt that Milton had some
such in his eye in writing it,) each party converts it to its own
purposes, feels the absolute identity of these abstracted and high
speculations; and that, in fact, a noted political writer of the present
day has exhausted nearly the whole account of Satan in the Paradise
Lost, by applying it to a character whom he considered as after the
devil, (though I do not know whether he would make even that exception)
the greatest enemy of the human race. This may serve to shew that
Milton's Satan is not a very insipid personage.
Of Adam and Eve it has been said, that the ordinary reader can feel
little interest in them, because they have none of the passions,
pursuits, or even relations of human life, except that of man and wife,
the least interesting of all others, if not to the parties concerned, at
least to the by-standers. The preference has on this account been given
to Homer, who, it is said, has left very vivid and infinitely
diversified pictures of all the passions and affections, public and
private, incident to human nature--the relations of son, of brother,
parent, friend, citizen, and many others. Longinus preferred the Iliad
to the Odyssey, on account of the greater number of battles it contains;
but I can neither agree to his criticism, nor assent to the present
objection. It is true, there is little action in this part of Milton's
poem; but there is much repose, and more enjoyment. There are none of
the every-day occurrences, contentions, disputes, wars, fightings,
feuds, jealousies, trades, professions, liveries, and common handicrafts
of life; "no kind of traffic; letters are not known; no use of service,
of riches, poverty, contract, succession, bourne, bound of land, tilth,
vineyard none; no occupation, no treason, felony, sword, pike, knife,
gun, nor need of any engine." So much the better; thank Heaven, all
these were yet to come. But still the die was cast, and in them our doom
was sealed. In them
"The generations were prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs, were ready, the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will,
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."
In their first false step we trace all our future woe, with loss of
Eden. But there was a short and precious interval between, like the
first blush of morning before the day is overcast with tempest, the dawn
of the world, the birth of nature from "the unapparent deep," with its
first dews and freshness on its cheek, breathing odours. Theirs was the
first delicious taste of life, and on them depended all that was to come
of it. In them hung trembling all our hopes and fears. They were as yet
alone in the world, in the eye of nature, wondering at their new being,
full of enjoyment and enraptured with one another, with the voice of
their Maker walking in the garden, and ministering angels attendant on
their steps, winged messengers from heaven like rosy clouds descending
in their sight. Nature played around them her virgin fancies wild; and
spread for them a repast where no crude surfeit reigned. Was there
nothing in this scene, which God and nature alone witnessed, to interest
a modern critic? What need was there of action, where the heart was full
of bliss and innocence without it! They had nothing to do but feel their
own happiness, and "know to know no more." "They toiled not, neither
did they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these." All things seem to acquire fresh sweetness, and to be clothed
with fresh beauty in their sight. They tasted as it were for themselves
and us, of all that there ever was pure in human bliss. "In them the
burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this
unintelligible world, is lightened." They stood awhile perfect, but they
afterwards fell, and were driven out of Paradise, tasting the first
fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss. But their pangs were
such as a pure spirit might feel at the sight--their tears "such as
angels weep." The pathos is of that mild contemplative kind which arises
from regret for the loss of unspeakable happiness, and resignation to
inevitable fate. There is none of the fierceness of intemperate passion,
none of the agony of mind and turbulence of action, which is the result
of the habitual struggles of the will with circumstances, irritated by
repeated disappointment, and constantly setting its desires most eagerly
on that which there is an impossibility of attaining. This would have
destroyed the beauty of the whole picture. They had received their
unlooked-for happiness as a free gift from their Creator's hands, and
they submitted to its loss, not without sorrow, but without impious and
stubborn repining.
"In either hand the hast'ning angel caught
Our ling'ring parents, and to th' eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappear'd.
They looking back, all th' eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces throng'd, and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropt, but wip'd them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide."
LECTURE IV.
ON DRYDEN AND POPE.
Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificial style of
poetry in our language, as the poets of whom I have already treated,
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, were of the natural; and
though this artificial style is generally and very justly acknowledged
to be inferior to the other, yet those who stand at the head of that
class, ought, perhaps, to rank higher than those who occupy an inferior
place in a superior class. They have a clear and independent claim upon
our gratitude, as having produced a kind and degree of excellence which
existed equally nowhere else. What has been done well by some later
writers of the highest style of poetry, is included in, and obscured by
a greater degree of power and genius in those before them: what has been
done best by poets of an entirely distinct turn of mind, stands by
itself, and tells for its whole amount. Young, for instance, Gray, or
Akenside, only follow in the train of Milton and Shakspeare: Pope and
Dryden walk by their side, though of an unequal stature, and are
entitled to a first place in the lists of fame. This seems to be not
only the reason of the thing, but the common sense of mankind, who,
without any regular process of reflection, judge of the merit of a work,
not more by its inherent and absolute worth, than by its originality and
capacity of gratifying a different faculty of the mind, or a different
class of readers; for it should be recollected, that there may be
readers (as well as poets) not of the highest class, though very good
sort of people, and not altogether to be despised.
The question, whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled,
and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must
have been a great prose-writer, that is, he was a great writer of some
sort. He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined
taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as
the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet,
and a good one. If, indeed, by a great poet, we mean one who gives the
utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the
passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the
bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the clean contrary way;
namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent
observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his Critical Essays;
or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point
of view, as in his Satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity,
as in his poems of Fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and
familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression, and
all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his
Epistles. He was not then distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm,
of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of
nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a
wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation, and the world, with a
keen relish for the elegances of art, or of nature when embellished by
art, a quick tact for propriety of thought and manners as established by
the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the sentiments
and habitudes of human life, as he felt them within the little circle of
his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet, not of nature, but
of art; and the distinction between the two, as well as I can make it
out, is this--The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of
beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with
whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its
simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts
and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and
depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the
very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record
the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable to
the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his
readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for
he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for
he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common
nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakspeare, whose works will last as
long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and
everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a
perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker.
The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all
nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of
the universe.
Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of
it. He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion;
he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the
feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakspeare had an
intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart
of man in all possible circumstances: Pope had an exact knowledge of all
that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his
daring flight from heaven to earth, through Chaos and old Night. Pope's
Muse never wandered with safety, but from his library to his grotto, or
from his grotto into his library back again. His mind dwelt with greater
pleasure on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could
describe the faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own
person, better than the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the
face of heaven--a piece of cut glass or a pair of paste buckles with
more brilliance and effect, than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the
sun. He would be more delighted with a patent lamp, than with "the pale
reflex of Cynthia's brow," that fills the skies with its soft silent
lustre, that trembles through the cottage window, and cheers the
watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of
personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to him, was the
greatest; the fashion of the day bore sway in his mind over the
immutable laws of nature. He preferred the artificial to the natural in
external objects, because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with the
self-love of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw, than admiration of
that which was interesting to all mankind. He preferred the artificial
to the natural in passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating
impulses of the one hurried him away with a force and vehemence with
which he could not grapple; while he could trifle with the conventional
and superficial modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or
admire, put them on or off like a masquerade-dress, make much or little
of them, indulge them for a longer or a shorter time, as he pleased; and
because while they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they
never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind
was the antithesis of strength and grandeur; its power was the power of
indifference. He had none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetry
what the sceptic is in religion.
It cannot be denied, that his chief excellence lay more in
diminishing, than in aggrandizing objects; in checking, not in
encouraging our enthusiasm; in sneering at the extravagances of fancy or
passion, instead of giving a loose to them; in describing a row of pins
and needles, rather than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans; in
penning a lampoon or a compliment, and in praising Martha Blount.
Shakspeare says,
"------In Fortune's ray and brightness
The herd hath more annoyance by the brize
Than by the tyger: but when the splitting wind
Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,
And flies fled under shade, why then
The thing of courage,
As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathise;
And with an accent tuned in the self-same key,
Replies to chiding Fortune."
There is none of this rough work in Pope. His Muse was on a
peace-establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and
indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour
of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies
of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are
whispered flatteries; its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for "the
gnarled oak," he gives us "the soft myrtle": for rocks, and seas, and
mountains, artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for
earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a
china jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of
the passions, we have
"Calm contemplation and poetic ease."
Yet within this retired and narrow circle how much, and that how
exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy,
what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered
refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a
microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new
consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and
slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the
deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the
magnifier is, to be sure, held to every thing, but still the exhibition
is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or
surprised. Such, at least, is the best account I am able to give of this
extraordinary man, without doing injustice to him or others. It is time
to refer to particular instances in his works.--The Rape of the Lock is
the best or most ingenious of these. It is the most exquisite specimen
of _fillagree_ work ever invented. It is admirable in proportion as it
is made of nothing.
"More subtle web Arachne cannot spin,
Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew, do not in th' air more lightly flee."
It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance
is given to every thing, to paste, pomatum, billet-doux, and patches.
Airs, languid airs, breathe around;--the atmosphere is perfumed with
affectation. A toilette is described with the solemnity of an altar
raised to the Goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is
given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion
of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest
things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity,
is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is
made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or
weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and
folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic! I will give only the two
following passages in illustration of these remarks. Can any thing be
more elegant and graceful than the description of Belinda, in the
beginning of the second canto?
"Not with more glories, in the ethereal plain,
The sun first rises o'er the purpled main,
Than, issuing forth, the rival of his beams
Launch'd on the bosom of the silver Thames.
Fair nymphs, and well-drest youths around her shone,
But ev'ry eye was fix'd on her alone.
On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.
Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes, and as unfix'd as those:
Favours to none, to all she smiles extends;
Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike;
And like the sun, they shine on all alike.
Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,
Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:
If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.
This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourish'd two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspir'd to deck
With shining ringlets the smooth iv'ry neck."
The following is the introduction to the account of Belinda's assault
upon the baron bold, who had dissevered one of these locks "from her
fair head for ever and for ever."
"Now meet thy fate, incens'd Belinda cry'd,
And drew a deadly bodkin from her side.
(The same his ancient personage to deck,
Her great, great grandsire wore about his neck,
In three seal-rings; which after, melted down,
Form'd a vast buckle for his widow's gown:
Her infant grandame's whistle next it grew,
The bells she jingled, and the whistle blew;
Then in a bodkin grac'd her mother's hairs,
Which long she wore, and now Belinda wears)."
I do not know how far Pope was indebted for the original idea, or the
delightful execution of this poem, to the Lutrin of Boileau.
The Rape of the Lock is a double-refined essence of wit and fancy, as
the Essay on Criticism is of wit and sense. The quantity of thought and
observation in this work, for so young a man as Pope was when he wrote
it, is wonderful: unless we adopt the supposition, that most men of
genius spend the rest of their lives in teaching others what they
themselves have learned under twenty. The conciseness and felicity of
the expression are equally remarkable. Thus in reasoning on the variety
of men's opinion, he says--
" 'Tis with our judgments, as our watches; none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own."
Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and
illustrations in the Essay; the critical rules laid down are too much
those of a school, and of a confined one. There is one passage in the
Essay on Criticism in which the author speaks with that eloquent
enthusiasm of the fame of ancient writers, which those will always feel
who have themselves any hope or chance of immortality. I have quoted the
passage elsewhere, but I will repeat it here.
"Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage,
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
Hail, bards triumphant, born in happier days,
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honours with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow."
These lines come with double force and beauty on the reader, as they
were dictated by the writer's despair of ever attaining that lasting
glory which he celebrates with such disinterested enthusiasm in others,
from the lateness of the age in which he lived, and from his writing in
a tongue, not understood by other nations, and that grows obsolete and
unintelligible to ourselves at the end of every second century. But he
needed not have thus antedated his own poetical doom--the loss and
entire oblivion of that which can never die. If he had known, he might
have boasted that "his little bark" wafted down the stream of time,
"------With _theirs_ should sail,
Pursue the triumph and partake the gale"--
if those who know how to set a due value on the blessing, were not the
last to decide confidently on their own pretensions to it.
There is a cant in the present day about genius, as every thing in
poetry: there was a cant in the time of Pope about sense, as performing
all sorts of wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the shibboleth of a
critical party of the day. As a proof of the exclusive attention which
it occupied in their minds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on
Criticism (not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score
successive couplets rhyming to the word _sense_. This appears almost
incredible without giving the instances, and no less so when they are
given.
"But of the two, less dangerous is the offence,
To tire our patience than mislead our sense."--_lines_ 3, 4.
"In search of wit these lose their common sense,
And then turn critics in their own defence."--_l._ 28, 29.
"Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense."--_l._ 209, 10.
"Some by old words to fame have made pretence,
Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense."--_l._ 324, 5.
" 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense."--_l._ 364, 5.
"At every trifle scorn to take offence;
That always shews great pride, or little sense."--_l._ 386, 7.
"Be silent always, when you doubt your sense,
And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence."--_l._ 366, 7.
"Be niggards of advice on no pretence,
For the worst avarice is that of sense."--_l._ 578, 9.
"Strain out the last dull dropping of their sense,
And rhyme with all the rage of impotence."--_l._ 608, 9.
"Horace still charms with graceful negligence,
And without method talks us into sense."--_l._ 653, 4.
I have mentioned this the more for the sake of those critics who are
bigotted idolisers of our author, chiefly on the score of his
correctness. These persons seem to be of opinion that "there is but one
perfect writer, even Pope." This is, however, a mistake: his excellence
is by no means faultlessness. If he had no great faults, he is full of
little errors. His grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect.
In the Abelard and Eloise, he says--
"There died the best of passions, Love and Fame."
This is not a legitimate ellipsis. Fame is not a passion, though love
is: but his ear was evidently confused by the meeting of the sounds
"love and fame," as if they of themselves immediately implied "love, and
love of fame." Pope's rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to
the eye instead of the ear; and this to a greater degree, not only than
in later, but than in preceding writers. The praise of his versification
must be confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony. In the
translation of the Iliad, which has been considered as his masterpiece
in style and execution, he continually changes the tenses in the same
sentence for the purposes of the rhyme, which shews either a want of
technical resources, or great inattention to punctilious exactness. But
to have done with this.
The epistle of Eloise to Abelard is the only exception I can think
of, to the general spirit of the foregoing remarks; and I should be
disingenuous not to acknowledge that it is an exception. The foundation
is in the letters themselves of Abelard and Eloise, which are quite as
impressive, but still in a different way. It is fine as a poem: it is
finer as a piece of high-wrought eloquence. No woman could be supposed
to write a better love-letter in verse. Besides the richness of the
historical materials, the high _gusto_ of the original sentiments which
Pope had to work upon, there were perhaps circumstances in his own
situation which made him enter into the subject with even more than a
poet's feeling. The tears shed are drops gushing from the heart: the
words are burning sighs breathed from the soul of love. Perhaps the poem
to which it bears the greatest similarity in our language, is Dryden's
Tancred and Sigismunda, taken from Boccaccio. Pope's Eloise will bear
this comparison; and after such a test, with Boccaccio for the original
author, and Dryden for the translator, it need shrink from no other.
There is something exceedingly tender and beautiful in the sound of the
concluding lines:
"If ever chance two wandering lovers brings
To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs," &c.
The Essay on Man is not Pope's best work. It is a theory which
Bolingbroke is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into
verse. But "he spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple
of his argument." All that he says, "the very words, and to the
self-same tune," would prove just as well that whatever is, is _wrong_,
as that whatever is, is _right_. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but
in general it is dull, heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already quoted
on Settle, the Lord Mayor's poet, (for at that time there was a city as
well as a court poet)
"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more"--
is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better
than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant
bards of antiquity!
The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope, is the
prophetical conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires:
"Virtue may chuse the high or low degree,
'Tis just alike to virtue, and to me;
Dwell in a monk, or light upon a king,
She's still the same belov'd, contented thing.
Vice is undone if she forgets her birth,
And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth.
But 'tis the Fall degrades her to a whore:
Let Greatness own her, and she's mean no more.
Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess,
Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless;
In golden chains the willing world she draws,
And hers the gospel is, and hers the laws;
Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,
And sees pale Virtue carted in her stead.
Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,
Old England's Genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragged in the dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted trains along the ground!
Our youth, all livery'd o'er with foreign gold,
Before her dance; behind her, crawl the old!
See thronging millions to the Pagod run,
And offer country, parent, wife, or son!
Hear her black trumpet through the land proclaim,
That _not to be corrupted is the shame_.
In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow'r,
'Tis av'rice all, ambition is no more!
See all our nobles begging to be slaves!
See all our fools aspiring to be knaves!
The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore;
All, all look up with reverential awe,
At crimes that 'scape or triumph o'er the law;
While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry:
Nothing is sacred now but villainy.
Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)
Show there was one who held it in disdain."
His Satires are not in general so good as his Epistles. His enmity is
effeminate and petulant from a sense of weakness, as his friendship was
tender from a sense of gratitude. I do not like, for instance, his
character of Chartres, or his characters of women. His delicacy often
borders upon sickliness; his fastidiousness makes others fastidious. But
his compliments are divine; they are equal in value to a house or an
estate. Take the following. In addressing Lord Mansfield, he speaks of
the grave as a scene,
"Where Murray, long enough his country's pride,
Shall be no more than Tully, or than Hyde."
To Bolingbroke he says--
"Why rail they then if but one wreath of mine,
Oh all-accomplish'd St. John, deck thy shrine?"
Again, he has bequeathed this praise to Lord Cornbury--
"Despise low thoughts, low gains:
Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains;
Be virtuous and be happy for your pains."
One would think (though there is no knowing) that a descendant of this
nobleman, if there be such a person living, could hardly be guilty of a
mean or paltry action.
The finest piece of personal satire in Pope (perhaps in the world) is
his character of Addison; and this, it may be observed, is of a mixed
kind, made up of his respect for the man, and a cutting sense of his
failings. The other finest one is that of Buckingham, and the best part
of that is the pleasurable.
"------Alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure and that soul of whim:
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love!"
Among his happiest and most inimitable effusions are the Epistles to
Arbuthnot, and to Jervas the painter; amiable patterns of the delightful
unconcerned life, blending ease with dignity, which poets and painters
then led. Thus he says to Arbuthnot--
"Why did I write? What sin to me unknown
Dipp'd me in ink, my parents' or my own?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.
I left no calling for this idle trade,
No duty broke, no father disobey'd:
The muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife;
To help me through this long disease, my life?
To second, Arbuthnot! thy art and care,
And teach the being you preserv'd to bear.
But why then publish? Granville the polite,
And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write;
Well-natur'd Garth inflam'd with early praise,
And Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my lays;
The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read;
E'en mitred Rochester would nod the head;
And St. John's self (great Dryden's friend before)
With open arms receiv'd one poet more.
Happy my studies, when by these approv'd!
Happier their author, when by these belov'd!
From these the world will judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cooks."
I cannot help giving also the conclusion of the Epistle to Jervas.
"Oh, lasting as those colours may they shine,
Free as thy stroke, yet faultless as thy line;
New graces yearly like thy works display,
Soft without weakness, without glaring gay;
Led by some rule, that guides, but not constrains;
And finish'd more through happiness than pains.
The kindred arts shall in their praise conspire,
One dip the pencil, and one string the lyre.
Yet should the Graces all thy figures place,
And breathe an air divine on ev'ry face;
Yet should the Muses bid my numbers roll
Strong as their charms, and gentle as their soul;
With Zeuxis' Helen thy Bridgewater vie,
And these be sung till Granville's Myra die:
Alas! how little from the grave we claim!
Thou but preserv'st a face, and I a name."
And shall we cut ourselves off from beauties like these with a
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