The house of Sir John Belfield was become a pleasant kind of home to me.
He and his lady seldom went out in an evening. Happy in each other and
in their children, though they lived much with the rational, they
associated as little as they thought possible with the racketing world.
Yet being known to be generally at home, they were exposed to the
inroads of certain invaders, called fine ladies, who, always afraid of
being too early for their parties, are constantly on the watch how to
disburden themselves for the intermediate hour, of the heavy commodity
_time_; a raw material, which as they seldom work up at home, they are
always willing to truck against the time of their more domestic
acquaintance. Now as these last _have_ always something to do, it is an
unfair traffic; "all the reciprocity is on one side," to borrow the
expression of an illustrious statesman; and the barter is as
disadvantageous to the sober home-trader, as that of the honest negroes,
who exchange their gold-dust and ivory for the beads and bits of glass
of the wily English.
These nightly irruptions, though sometimes inconvenient to my friends,
were of use to me, as they enabled me to see and judge more of the gay
world than I could have done without going in search of it; a risk which
I thought bore no proportion to the gain. It was like learning the
language of the enemy's country at home.
One evening, when we were sitting happily alone in the library, Lady
Belfield, working at her embroidery, cheerfully joining in our little
discussions, and comparing our peaceful pleasures with those pursued by
the occupiers of the countless carriages which were tearing up the
"wheel-worn streets," or jostling each other at the door of the next
house, where a grand assembly was collecting its myriads--Sir John asked
what should be the evening book. Then rising, he took down from the
shelf Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination.
"Is it," said he, as soon as he sat down, "the rage for novelty, or a
real degeneracy of taste, that we now so seldom hear of a poet, who,
when I was a boy, was the admiration of every man who had a relish for
true genius? I can not defend his principles, since in a work, of which
_Man_ is professedly the object, he has overlooked his _immortality_: a
subject which one wonders did not force itself upon him, as so congenial
to the sublimity of his genius, whatever his religious views might have
been. But to speak of him only as a poet; a work which abounds in a
richer profusion of images, and a more variegated luxuriance of
expression than the Pleasures of Imagination, can not easily be found.
The flimsy metre of our day seems to add fresh value to his sinewy
verse. We have no happier master of poetic numbers; none who better knew
To build the lofty rhyme.
The condensed vigor, so indispensable to blank verse, the skillful
variation of the pause, the masterly structure of the period, and all
the occult mysteries of the art, can, perhaps, be best learned from
Akenside. If he could have conveyed to Thomson his melody and rhyme, and
Thomson would have paid him back in perspicuity and transparency of
meaning, how might they have enriched each other!"
"I confess," said I, "in reading Akenside, I have now and then found the
same passage at once enchanting and unintelligible. As it happens to
many frequenters of the opera, the music always transports, but the
words are not always understood." I then desired my friend to gratify us
with the first book of the Pleasures of Imagination.
Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a fine taste.
He read it with much spirit and feeling, especially these truly
classical lines,
_Mind, Mind_ alone, bear witness earth and heaven,
The living fountains in itself contains
Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand
Sit paramount the graces; here enthroned
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs
Invites the soul to never-fading joy.
"The reputation of this exquisite passage," said he, laying down the
book, "is established by the consenting suffrage of all men of taste,
though by the critical countenance you are beginning to put on, you look
as if you had a mind to attack it."
"So far from it," said I, "that I know nothing more splendid in the
whole mass of our poetry. And I feel almost guilty of high treason
against the majesty of the sublimer Muses, in the remark I am going to
hazard, on the celebrated lines which follow. The poet's object, through
this and the two following pages, is to establish the infinite
superiority of mind over unconscious matter, even in its fairest forms.
The idea is as just as the execution is beautiful; so also is his
supreme elevation of intellect, over
Greatness of bulk, or symmetry of parts.
Nothing again can be finer, than his subsequent preference of
The powers of genius and design,
over even the stupendous range
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres.
He proceeds to ransack the stores of the mental and the moral world, as
he had done the world of matter, and with a pen dipped in Hippocrene,
opposes to the latter,
The charms of virtuous friendship, etc.
* * * * *
The candid blush
Of him who strives with fortune to be just.
* * * * *
All the mild majesty of private life.
The graceful tear that streams from others' woes.
"Why, Charles," said Sir John, "I am glad to find you the enthusiastic
eulogist of the passage of which I suspected you were about to be the
saucy censurer."
"Censure," replied I, "is perhaps too strong a term for any part
especially the most admired part of this fine poem. I need not repeat
the lines on which I was going to risk a slight observation; they live
in the mind and memory of every lover of the Muses."
"I will read the next passage, however," said Sir John, "that I may be
better able to controvert your criticism:
Look then abroad through nature to the range
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense,
And speak, oh man! does the capacious scene
With half that kindling majesty dilate
Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Caesar's fate
Amid the crowd of patriots, and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove
When guilt brings down the thunder, call'd aloud
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,
And bade the father of his country hail;
For lo! the tyrant prostrate in the dust,
And Rome again is free?
"What a grand and powerful passage!" said Sir John.
"I acknowledge it," said I, "but is it as just as it is grand? _Le vrai
est le seul beau._ Is it a fair and direct opposition between mind and
matter? The poet could not have expressed the image more nobly, but
might he not, out of the abundant treasures of his opulent mind have
chosen it with more felicity? Is an act of murder, even of an usurper,
as happily contrasted with the organization of matter, as the other
beautiful instances I named, and which he goes on to select? The
superiority of mental beauty is the point he is establishing, and his
elaborate preparation leads you to expect all his other instances to be
drawn from pure mental excellence. His other exemplifications are
general, this is particular. They are a class, this is only a variety. I
question if Milton, who was at least as ardent a champion for liberty,
and as much of a party-man as Akenside, would have used this
illustration. Milton, though he often insinuates a political stroke in
his great poem, always, I think, generalizes. Whatever had been his
principles, or at whatever period he had written, I question, when he
wanted to describe the overthrow of authority by the rebel angels, if he
would have illustrated it by Cromwell's seizing the mace, or the
decapitation of Charles. Much less, if he would have selected those two
instances as the triumph of mind over matter."
"But," said Sir John, "you forget that Akenside professedly adopts the
language of Cicero in his second Philippic." He then read the note
beginning with, Caesare interfecto, etc.
"True," said I; "I am not arguing the matter as a point of fact, but as
a point of just application. I pass over the comparison of Brutus with
Jove, which by the way would have become Tully better than Akenside, but
which Tully would have perhaps thought too bold. Cicero adorns his
oration with this magnificent description. He relates it as an event,
the other uses it as an illustration of that to which I humbly conceive
it does not exactly apply. The orator paints the violent death of a
hero; the poet adopts the description of the violent death, or rather of
the stroke which caused it, to illustrate the perfection of intellectual
grandeur. After all, it is as much a party question as a poetical one. A
question on which the critic will be apt to be guided in his decision by
his politics rather than by his taste. The splendor of the passage,
however, will inevitably dazzle the feeling reader, till it produce the
common effect of excessive brightness, that of somewhat blinding the
beholder."