(June 1831) _Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; with Notices of his
Life. By THOMAS MOORE, Esq. 2 vols. 4to. London: 1830._
|WE have read this book with the greatest pleasure. Considered merely
as a composition, it deserves to be classed among the best specimens of
English prose which our age has produced. It contains, indeed, no single
passage equal to two or three which we could select from the Life of
Sheridan. But, as a whole, it is immeasurably superior to that work. The
style is agreeable, clear, and manly, and when it rises into eloquence,
rises without effort or ostentation. Nor is the matter inferior to
the manner. It would be difficult to name a book which exhibits more
kindness, fairness, and modesty. It has evidently been written, not
for the purpose of showing, what, however, it often shows, how well its
author can write, but for the purpose of vindicating, as far as truth
will permit, the memory of a celebrated man who can no longer vindicate
himself. Mr. Moore never thrusts himself between Lord Byron and the
public. With the strongest temptations to egotism, he has said no more
about himself than the subject absolutely required.
A great part, indeed the greater part, of these volumes, consists
of extracts from the letters and journals of Lord Byron; and it is
difficult to speak too highly of the skill which has been shown in the
selection and arrangement. We will not say that we have not occasionally
remarked in these two large quartos an anecdote which should have been
omitted, a letter which should have been suppressed, a name which should
have been concealed by asterisks, or asterisks which do not answer
the purpose of concealing the name. But it is impossible, on a general
survey, to deny that the task has been executed with great judgment and
great humanity. When we consider the life which Lord Byron had led, his
petulance, his irritability, and his communicativeness, we cannot but
admire the dexterity with which Mr. Moore has contrived to exhibit so
much of the character and opinions of his friend, with so little pain to
the feelings of the living.
The extracts from the journals and correspondence of Lord Byron are in
the highest degree valuable, not merely on account of the information
which they contain respecting the distinguished man by whom they were
written, but on account also of their rare merit as compositions. The
letters, at least those which were sent from Italy, are among the best
in our language. They are less affected than those of Pope and Walpole;
they have more matter in them than those of Cowper. Knowing that many of
them were not written merely for the person to whom they were directed,
but were general epistles, meant to be read by a large circle, we
expected to find them clever and spirited, but deficient in ease. We
looked with vigilance for instances of stiffness in the language and
awkwardness in the transitions. We have been agreeably disappointed;
and we must confess that, if the epistolary style of Lord Byron was
artificial, it was a rare and admirable instance of that highest art
which cannot be distinguished from nature.
Of the deep and painful interest which this book excites no abstract can
give a just notion. So sad and dark a story is scarcely to be found in
any work of fiction; and we are little disposed to envy the moralist who
can read it without being softened.
The pretty fable by which the Duchess of Orleans illustrated the
character of her son the Regent might, with little change, be applied to
Byron. All the fairies, save one, had been bidden to his cradle. All
the gossips had been profuse of their gifts. One had bestowed nobility,
another genius, a third beauty. The malignant elf who had been uninvited
came last, and, unable to reverse what her sisters had done for their
favourite, had mixed up a curse with every blessing. In the rank of Lord
Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very person, there
was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men
covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he
possessed over others was mingled something of misery and debasement.
He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and
impoverished by a series of crimes and follies which had attained a
scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and,
but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young
peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his
mind. He had naturally a generous and feeling heart: but his temper was
wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy,
and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.
Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his
intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a handsome
cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and the most
judicious training. But, capriciously as nature had dealt with him, the
parent to whom the office of forming his character was intrusted was
more capricious still. She passed from paroxysms of rage to paroxysms
of tenderness. At one time she stifled him with her caresses; at another
time she insulted his deformity. He came into the world; and the world
treated him as his mother had treated him, sometimes with fondness,
sometimes with cruelty, never with justice. It indulged him without
discrimination, and punished him without discrimination. He was truly
a spoiled child, not merely the spoiled child of his parent, but the
spoiled child of nature, the spoiled child of fortune, the spoiled child
of fame, the spoiled child of society. His first poems were received
with a contempt which, feeble as they were, they did not absolutely
deserve. The poem which he published on his return from his travels was,
on the other hand, extolled far above its merit. At twenty-four, he
found himself on the highest pinnacle of literary fame, with Scott,
Wordsworth, Southey, and a crowd of other distinguished writers beneath
his feet. There is scarcely an instance in history of so sudden a rise
to so dizzy an eminence.
Everything that could stimulate, and everything that could gratify
the strongest propensities of our nature, the gaze of a hundred
drawing-rooms, the acclamations of the whole nation, the applause of
applauded men, the love of lovely women, all this world and all the
glory of it were at once offered to a youth to whom nature had given
violent passions, and whom education had never taught to control them.
He lived as many men live who have no similar excuse to plead for their
faults. But his countrymen and his countrywomen would love him and
admire him. They were resolved to see in his excesses only the flash and
outbreak of that same fiery mind which glowed in his poetry. He attacked
religion; yet in religious circles his name was mentioned with fondness,
and in many religious publications his works were censured with singular
tenderness. He lampooned the Prince Regent; yet he could not alienate
the Tories. Everything, it seemed, was to be forgiven to youth, rank,
and genius.
Then came the reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it had
been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and
petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry.
He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about
those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life.
Yet nothing is, nothing ever was, positively known to the public, but
this, that he quarrelled with his lady, and that she refused to live
with him. There have been hints in abundance, and shrugs and shakings of
the head, and “Well, well, we know,” and “We could an if we would,” and
“If we list to speak,” and “There be that might an they list.” But we
are not aware that there is before the world substantiated by credible,
or even by tangible evidence, a single fact indicating that Lord Byron
was more to blame than any other man who is on bad terms with his wife.
The professional men whom Lady Byron consulted were undoubtedly of
opinion that she ought not to live with her husband. But it is to be
remembered that they formed that opinion without hearing both sides.
We do not say, we do not mean to insinuate, that Lady Byron was in any
respect to blame. We think that those who condemn her on the evidence
which is now before the public are as rash as those who condemn her
husband. We will not pronounce any judgment, we cannot, even in our own
minds, form any judgment, on a transaction which is so imperfectly known
to us. It would have been well if, at the time of the separation, all
those who knew as little about the matter then as we know about it
now, had shown that forbearance which, under such circumstances, is but
common justice.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of
its periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and
family quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk
about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years our
virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and
decency to be violated. We must make a stand against vice. We must teach
libertines that the English people appreciate the importance of domestic
ties. Accordingly some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than
hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out
as an expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from
him. If he has a profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by
the higher orders, and hissed by the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of
whipping-boy, by whose vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of
the same class are, it is supposed, sufficiently chastised. We reflect
very complacently on our own severity, and compare with great pride the
high standard of morals established in England with the Parisian laxity.
At length our anger is satiated. Our victim is ruined and heart-broken.
And our virtue goes quietly to sleep for seven years more.
It is clear that those vices which destroy domestic happiness ought to
be as much as possible repressed. It is equally clear that they cannot
be repressed by penal legislation. It is therefore right and desirable
that public opinion should be directed against them. But it should
be directed against them uniformly, steadily, and temperately, not by
sudden fits and starts. There should be one weight and one measure.
Decimation is always an objectionable mode of punishment. It is the
resource of judges too indolent and hasty to investigate facts and
to discriminate nicely between shades of guilt. It is an irrational
practice, even when adopted by military tribunals. When adopted by the
tribunal of public opinion, it is infinitely more irrational. It is good
that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly attend on certain
bad actions. But it is not good that the offenders should merely have
to stand the risks of a lottery of infamy, that ninety-nine out of every
hundred should escape, and that the hundredth, perhaps the most innocent
of the hundred, should pay for all. We remember to have seen a mob
assembled in Lincoln’s Inn to hoot a gentleman against whom the most
oppressive proceeding known to the English law was then in progress. He
was hooted because he had been an unfaithful husband, as if some of
the most popular men of the age, Lord Nelson for example, had not been
unfaithful husbands. We remember a still stronger case. Will posterity
believe that, in an age in which men whose gallantries were universally
known, and had been legally proved, filled some of the highest offices
in the State and in the army, presided at the meetings of religions
and benevolent institutions, were the delight of every society, and the
favourites of the multitude, a crowd of moralists went to the theatre,
in order to pelt a poor actor for disturbing the conjugal felicity of an
alderman? What there was in the circumstances either of the offender or
of the sufferer to vindicate the zeal of the audience, we could never
conceive. It has never been supposed that the situation of an actor is
peculiarly favourable to the rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys
any special immunity from injuries such as that which on this occasion
roused the anger of the public. But such is the justice of mankind.
In these cases the punishment was excessive; but the offence was known
and proved. The case of Lord Byron was harder. True Jedwood justice was
dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and
last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without
knowing anything whatever about the transactions in his family, flew
into a violent passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories
which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the
separation, inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with
common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be
for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them neither
knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but
the effects of the public indignation. They resembled those loathsome
slanders which Lewis Goldsmith, and other abject libellers of the same
class, were in the habit of publishing about Bonaparte; such as that he
poisoned a girl with arsenic when he was at the military school, that he
hired a grenadier to shoot Dessaix at Marengo, that he filled St. Cloud
with all the pollutions of Capreae. There was a time when anecdotes like
these obtained some credence from persons who, hating the French emperor
without knowing why, were eager to believe anything which might justify
their hatred. Lord Byron fared in the same way. His countrymen were in
a bad humour with him. His writings and his character had lost the charm
of novelty. He had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences,
is punished most severely; he had been over-praised; he had excited too
warm an interest; and the public, with its usual justice, chastised
him for its own folly. The attachments of the multitude bear no small
resemblance to those of the wanton enchantress in the Arabian Tales,
who, when the forty days of her fondness were over, was not content
with dismissing her lovers, but condemned them to expiate, in loathsome
shapes, and under cruel penances, the crime of having once pleased her
too well.
The obloquy which Byron had to endure was such as might well have shaken
a more constant mind. The newspapers were filled with lampoons. The
theatres shook with execrations. He was excluded from circles where he
had lately been the observed of all observers. All those creeping things
that riot in the decay of nobler natures hastened to their repast; and
they were right; they did after their kind. It is not every day that
the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies of such a
spirit, and the degradation of such a name.
The unhappy man left his country for ever. The howl of contumely
followed him across the sea, up the Rhine, over the Alps; it gradually
waxed fainter; it died away; those who had raised it began to ask each
other, what, after all, was the matter about which they had been so
clamorous, and wished to invite back the criminal whom they had just
chased from them. His poetry became more popular than it had ever
been; and his complaints were read with tears by thousands and tens of
thousands who had never seen his face.
He had fixed his home on the shores of the Adriatic, in the most
picturesque and interesting of cities, beneath the brightest of skies,
and by the brightest of seas. Censoriousness was not the vice of the
neighbours whom he had chosen. They were a race corrupted by a bad
government and a bad religion, long renowned for skill in the arts of
voluptuousness, and tolerant of all the caprices of sensuality. From the
public opinion of the country of his adoption, he had nothing to dread.
With the public opinion of the country of his birth, he was at open war.
He plunged into wild and desperate excesses, ennobled by no generous or
tender sentiment. From his Venetian haram, he sent forth volume after
volume, full of eloquence, of wit, of pathos, of ribaldry, and of bitter
disdain. His health sank under the effects of his intemperance. His hair
turned grey. His food ceased to nourish him. A hectic fever withered him
up. It seemed that his body and mind were about to perish together.
From this wretched degradation he was in some measure rescued by a
connection, culpable indeed, yet such as, if it were judged by the
standard of morality established in the country where he lived, might
be called virtuous. But an imagination polluted by vice, a temper
embittered by misfortune, and a frame habituated to the fatal excitement
of intoxication, prevented him from fully enjoying the happiness which
he might have derived from the purest and most tranquil of his many
attachments. Midnight draughts of ardent spirits and Rhenish wines had
begun to work the ruin of his fine intellect. His verse lost much of
the energy and condensation which had distinguished it. But he would not
resign, without a struggle, the empire which he had exercised over the
men of his generation. A new dream of ambition arose before him; to be
the chief of a literary party; to be the great mover of an intellectual
revolution; to guide the public mind of England from his Italian
retreat, as Voltaire had guided the public mind of France from the
villa of Ferney. With this hope, as it should seem, he established The
Liberal. But, powerfully as he had affected the imaginations of his
contemporaries, he mistook his own powers if he hoped to direct their
opinions; and he still more grossly mistook his own disposition, if he
thought that he could long act in concert with other men of letters. The
plan failed, and failed ignominiously. Angry with himself, angry with
his coadjutors, he relinquished it, and turned to another project, the
last and noblest of his life.
A nation, once the first among the nations, pre-eminent in knowledge,
pre-eminent in military glory, the cradle of philosophy, of eloquence,
and of the fine arts, had been for ages bowed down under a cruel yoke.
All the vices which oppression generates, the abject vices which it
generates in those who submit to it, the ferocious vices which it
generates in those who struggle against it, had deformed the character
of that miserable race. The valour which had won the great battle of
human civilisation, which had saved Europe, which had subjugated
Asia, lingered only among pirates and robbers. The ingenuity, once
so conspicuously displayed in every department of physical and moral
science, had been depraved into a timid and servile cunning. On a sudden
this degraded people had risen on their oppressors. Discountenanced or
betrayed by the surrounding potentates, they had found in themselves
something of that which might well supply the place of all foreign
assistance, something of the energy of their fathers.
As a man of letters, Lord Byron could not but be interested in the event
of this contest. His political opinions, though, like all his opinions,
unsettled, leaned strongly towards the side of liberty. He had assisted
the Italian insurgents with his purse, and, if their struggle against
the Austrian Government had been prolonged, would probably have assisted
them with his sword. But to Greece he was attached by peculiar ties. He
had when young resided in that country. Much of his most splendid and
popular poetry had been inspired by its scenery and by its history. Sick
of inaction, degraded in his own eyes by his private vices and by
his literary failures, pining for untried excitement and honourable
distinction, he carried his exhausted body and his wounded spirit to the
Grecian camp.
His conduct in his new situation showed so much vigour and good sense
as to justify us in believing that, if his life had been prolonged,
he might have distinguished himself as a soldier and a politician. But
pleasure and sorrow had done the work of seventy years upon his delicate
frame. The hand of death was upon him: he knew it; and the only wish
which he uttered was that he might die sword in hand.
This was denied to him. Anxiety, exertion, exposure, and those fatal
stimulants which had become indispensable to him, soon stretched him on
a sick-bed, in a strange land, amidst strange faces, without one human
being that he loved near him. There, at thirty-six, the most celebrated
Englishman of the nineteenth century closed his brilliant and miserable
career.
We cannot even now retrace those events without feeling something of
what was felt by the nation, when it was first known that the grave had
closed over so much sorrow and so much glory; something of what was felt
by those who saw the hearse, with its long train of coaches, turn slowly
northward, leaving behind it that cemetery which had been consecrated
by the dust of so many great poets, but of which the doors were closed
against all that remained of Byron. We well remember that on that day,
rigid moralists could not refrain from weeping for one so young, so
illustrious, so unhappy, gifted with such rare gifts, and tried by
such strong temptations. It is unnecessary to make any reflections. The
history carries its moral with it. Our age has indeed been fruitful of
warnings to the eminent and of consolations to the obscure. Two men have
died within our recollection, who, at the time of life at which many
people have hardly completed their education, had raised themselves,
each in his own department, to the height of glory. One of them died at
Longwood; the other at Missolonghi.
It is always difficult to separate the literary character of a man who
lives in our own time from his personal character. It is peculiarly
difficult to make this separation in the case of Lord Byron. For it
is scarcely too much to say, that Lord Byron never wrote without some
reference, direct or indirect, to himself The interest excited by the
events of his life mingles itself in our minds, and probably in the
minds of almost all our readers, with the interest which properly
belongs to his works. A generation must pass away before it will be
possible to form a fair judgment of his books, considered merely as
books. At present they are not only books but relics. We will however
venture, though with unfeigned diffidence, to offer some desultory
remarks on his poetry.
His lot was cast in the time of a great literary revolution. That
poetical dynasty which had dethroned the successors of Shakspeare and
Spenser was, in its turn, dethroned by a race who represented themselves
as heirs of the ancient line, so long dispossessed by usurpers. The real
nature of this revolution has not, we think, been comprehended by the
great majority of those who concurred in it.
Wherein especially does the poetry of our times differ from that of the
last century? Ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would answer that
the poetry of the last century was correct, but cold and mechanical, and
that the poetry of our time, though wild and irregular, presented far
more vivid images, and excited the passions far more strongly than that
of Parnell, of Addison, or of Pope. In the same manner we constantly
hear it said, that the poets of the age of Elizabeth had far more
genius, but far less correctness, than those of the age of Anne. It
seems to be taken for granted, that there is some incompatibility, some
antithesis between correctness and creative power. We rather suspect
that this notion arises merely from an abuse of words, and that it has
been the parent of many of the fallacies which perplex the science of
criticism.
What is meant by correctness in poetry? If by correctness he meant the
conforming to rules which have their foundation in truth and in the
principles of human nature, then correctness is only another name for
excellence. If by correctness be meant the conforming to rules purely
arbitrary, correctness may be another name for dulness and absurdity.
A writer who describes visible objects falsely and violates the
propriety of character, a writer who makes the mountains “nod their
drowsy heads” at night, or a dying man take leave of the world with a
rant like that of Maximin, may be said, in the high and just sense of
the phrase, to write incorrectly. He violates the first great law of
his art. His imitation is altogether unlike the thing imitated. The four
poets who are most eminently free from incorrectness of this description
are Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. They are, therefore, in one
sense, and that the best sense, the most correct of poets.
When it is said that Virgil, though he had less genius than Homer, was a
more correct writer, what sense is attached to the word correctness? Is
it meant that the story of the Aeneid is developed more skilfully than
that of the Odyssey? that the Roman describes the face of the external
world, or the emotions of the mind, more accurately than the Greek? that
the characters of Achates and Mnestheus are more nicely discriminated,
and more consistently supported, than those of Achilles, of Nestor, and
of Ulysses? The fact incontestably is that, for every violation of the
fundamental laws of poetry which can be found in Homer, it would be easy
to find twenty in Virgil.
Troilus and Cressida is perhaps of all the plays of Shakspeare that
which is commonly considered as the most incorrect. Yet it seems to us
infinitely more correct, in the sound sense of the term, than what are
called the most correct plays of the most correct dramatists. Compare
it, for example, with the Iphigenie of Racine. We are sure that the
Greeks of Shakspeare bear a far greater resemblance than the Greeks of
Racine to the real Greeks who besieged Troy; and for this reason, that
the Greeks of Shakspeare are human beings, and the Greeks of Racine
mere names, mere words printed in capitals at the head of paragraphs of
declamation. Racine, it is true, would have shuddered at the thought of
making a warrior at the siege of Troy quote Aristotle. But of what
use is it to avoid a single anachronism, when the whole play is one
anachronism, the sentiments and phrases of Versailles in the camp of
Aulis?
In the sense in which we are now using the word correctness, we think
that Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge, are far more
correct poets than those who are commonly extolled as the models of
correctness, Pope, for example, and Addison. The single description of
a moonlight night in Pope’s Iliad contains more inaccuracies than can
be found in all the Excursion. There is not a single scene in Cato,
in which all that conduces to poetical illusion, all the propriety of
character, of language, of situation, is not more grossly violated than
in any part of the Lay of the Last Minstrel. No man can possibly think
that the Romans of Addison resemble the real Romans so closely as the
moss-troopers of Scott resemble the real moss-troopers. Wat Tinlinn and
William of Deloraine are not, it is true, persons of so much dignity
as Cato. But the dignity of the persons represented has as little to do
with the correctness of poetry as with the correctness of painting. We
prefer a gipsy by Reynolds to his Majesty’s head on a signpost, and a
Borderer by Scott to a Senator by Addison.
In what sense, then, is the word correctness used by those who say, with
the author of the Pursuits of Literature, that Pope was the most correct
of English Poets, and that next to Pope came the late Mr. Gifford? What
is the nature and value of that correctness, the praise of which
is denied to Macbeth, to Lear, and to Othello, and given to Hoole’s
translations and to all the Seatonian prize-poems? We can discover no
eternal rule, no rule founded in reason and in the nature of things,
which Shakspeare does not observe much more strictly than Pope. But if
by correctness be meant the conforming to a narrow legislation which,
while lenient to the mala in se, multiplies, without a shadow of
a reason, the mala prohibita, if by correctness be meant a strict
attention to certain ceremonious observances, which are no more
essential to poetry than etiquette to good government, or than the
washings of a Pharisee to devotion, then, assuredly, Pope may be a more
correct poet than Shakspeare; and, if the code were a little altered,
Colley Cibber might be a more correct poet than Pope. But it may well be
doubted whether this kind of correctness be a merit, nay, whether it be
not an absolute fault.
It would be amusing to make a digest of the irrational laws which bad
critics have framed for the government of poets. First in celebrity
and in absurdity stand the dramatic unities of place and time. No human
being has ever been able to find anything that could, even by courtesy,
be called an argument for these unities, except that they have been
deduced from the general practice of the Greeks. It requires no very
profound examination to discover that the Greek dramas, often admirable
as compositions, are, as exhibitions of human character and human life,
far inferior to the English plays of the age of Elizabeth. Every scholar
knows that the dramatic part of the Athenian tragedies was at first
subordinate to the lyrical part. It would, therefore, have been little
less than a miracle if the laws of the Athenian stage had been found to
suit plays in which there was no chorus. All the greatest masterpieces
of the dramatic art have been composed in direct violation of the
unities, and could never have been composed if the unities had not been
violated. It is clear, for example, that such a character as that
of Hamlet could never have been developed within the limits to which
Alfieri confined himself. Yet such was the reverence of literary men
during the last century for these unities that Johnson who, much to his
honour, took the opposite side, was, as he says, “frightened at his own
temerity,” and “afraid to stand against the authorities which might be
produced against him.”
There are other rules of the same kind without end. “Shakspeare,” says
Rymer, “ought not to have made Othello black; for the hero of a tragedy
ought always to be white.” “Milton,” says another critic, “ought not to
have taken Adam for his hero; for the hero of an epic poem ought always
to be victorious.” “Milton,” says another, “ought not to have put so
many similes into his first book; for the first book of an epic poem
ought always to be the most unadorned. There are no similes in the first
book of the Iliad.” “Milton,” says another, “ought not to have placed in
an epic poem such lines as these:=
```“‘While thus I called, and strayed I knew not whither.’”=
And why not? The critic is ready with a reason, a lady’s reason. “Such
lines,” says he, “are not, it must be allowed, unpleasing to the ear;
but the redundant syllable ought to be confined to the drama, and not
admitted into epic poetry.” As to the redundant syllable in heroic
rhyme on serious subjects, it has been, from the time of Pope downward,
proscribed by the general consent of all the correct school. No magazine
would have admitted so incorrect a couplet as that of Drayton.
“As when we lived untouch’d with these disgraces, When as our kingdom
was our dear embraces.”
Another law of heroic rhyme, which, fifty years ago, was considered as
fundamental, was, that there should be a pause, a comma at least, at the
end of every couplet. It was also provided that there should never be a
full stop except at the end of a line. Well do we remember to have heard
a most correct judge of poetry revile Mr. Rogers for the incorrectness
of that most sweet and graceful passage,=
```“Such grief was ours,--it seems but yesterday,--
```When in thy prime, wishing so much to stay,
```‘Twas thine, Maria, thine without a sigh
```At midnight in a sister’s arms to die.
```Oh thou wert lovely; lovely was thy frame,
```And pure thy spirit as from heaven it came:
```And when recall’d to join the blest above
```Thou diedst a victim to exceeding love,
```Nursing the young to health. In happier hours,
```When idle Fancy wove luxuriant flowers,
```Once in thy mirth thou badst me write on thee
```And now I write what thou shalt never see.”=
Sir Roger Newdigate is fairly entitled, we think, to be ranked among
the great critics of this school. He made a law that none of the poems
written for the prize which he established at Oxford should exceed
fifty lines. This law seems to us to have at least as much foundation in
reason as any of those which we have mentioned; nay, much more, for the
world, we believe, is pretty well agreed in thinking that the shorter a
prize-poem is, the better.
We do not see why we should not make a few more rules of the same kind;
why we should not enact that the number of scenes in every act shall be
three or some multiple of three, that the number of lines in every scene
shall be an exact square, that the dramatis personae shall never be more
or fewer than sixteen, and that, in heroic rhymes, every thirty-sixth
line shall have twelve syllables. If we were to lay down these canons,
and to call Pope, Goldsmith, and Addison incorrect writers for not
having complied with our whims, we should act precisely as those critics
act who find incorrectness in the magnificent imagery and the varied
music of Coleridge and Shelley.
The correctness which the last century prized so much resembles the
correctness of those pictures of the garden of Eden which we see in old
Bibles. We have an exact square enclosed by the rivers Pison, Gihon,
Hiddekel, and Euphrates, each with a convenient bridge in the centre,
rectangular beds of flowers, a long canal, neatly bricked and railed
in, the tree of knowledge clipped like one of the limes behind the
Tuilleries, standing in the centre of the grand alley, the snake twined
round it, the man on the right hand, the woman on the left, and the
beasts drawn up in an exact circle round them. In one sense the picture
is correct enough. That is to say, the squares are correct; the circles
are correct; the man and the woman are in a most correct line with the
tree; and the snake forms a most correct spiral.
But if there were a painter so gifted that he could place on the canvas
that glorious paradise, seen by the interior eye of him whose outward
sight had failed with long watching and labouring for liberty and
truth, if there were a painter who could set before us the mazes of
the sapphire brook, the lake with its fringe of myrtles, the flowery
meadows, the grottoes overhung by vines, the forests shining with
Hesperian fruit and with the plumage of gorgeous birds, the massy shade
of that nuptial bower which showered down roses on the sleeping lovers,
what should we think of a connoisseur, who should tell us that this
painting, though finer than the absurd picture in the old Bible, was not
so correct. Surely we should answer, it is both finer and more correct;
and it is finer because it is more correct. It is not made up of
correctly drawn diagrams; but it is a correct painting, a worthy
representation of that which it is intended to represent.
It is not in the fine arts alone that this false correctness is prized
by narrow-minded men, by men who cannot distinguish means from ends,
or what is accidental from what is essential. M. Jourdain admired
correctness in fencing. “You had no business to hit me then. You must
never thrust in quart till you have thrust in tierce.” M. Tomes liked
correctness in medical practice. “I stand up for Artemius. That he
killed his patient is plain enough. But still he acted quite according
to rule. A man dead is a man dead; and there is an end of the matter.
But if rules are to be broken, there is no saying what consequences may
follow.” We have heard of an old German officer, who was a great admirer
of correctness in military operations. He used to revile Bonaparte for
spoiling the science of war, which had been carried to such exquisite
perfection by Marshal Daun. “In my youth we used to march and
countermarch all the summer without gaining or losing a square league,
and then we went into winter quarters. And now comes an ignorant,
hot-headed young man, who flies about from Boulogne to Ulm, and from
Ulm to the middle of Moravia, and fights battles in December. The whole
system of his tactics is monstrously incorrect.” The world is of opinion
in spite of critics like these, that the end of fencing is to hit, that
the end of medicine is to cure, that the end of war is to conquer, and
that those means are the most correct which best accomplish the ends.
And has poetry no end, no eternal and immutable principles? Is poetry,
like heraldry, mere matter of arbitrary regulation? The heralds tell us
that certain scutcheons and bearings denote certain conditions, and that
to put colours on colours, or metals on metals, is false blazonry.
If all this were reversed, if every coat of arms in Europe were new
fashioned, if it were decreed that or should never be placed but on
argent, or argent but on or, that illegitimacy should be denoted by a
lozenge, and widowhood by a bend, the new science would be just as good
as the old science, because both the new and the old would be good for
nothing. The mummery of Portcullis and Rouge Dragon, as it has no other
value than that which caprice has assigned to it, may well submit to any
laws which caprice may impose on it. But it is not so with that great
imitative art, to the power of which all ages, the rudest and the most
enlightened, bear witness. Since its first great masterpieces were
produced, everything that is changeable in this world has been changed.
Civilisation has been gained, lost, gained again. Religions, and
languages, and forms of government, and usages of private life, and
modes of thinking, all have undergone a succession of revolutions.
Everything has passed away but the great features of nature, and the
heart of man, and the miracles of that art of which it is the office
to reflect back the heart of man and the features of nature. Those two
strange old poems, the wonder of ninety generations, still retain all
their freshness. They still command the veneration of minds enriched
by the literature of many nations and ages. They are still, even in
wretched translations, the delight of school-boys. Having survived ten
thousand capricious fashions, having seen successive codes of criticism
become obsolete, they still remain to us, immortal with the immortality
of truth, the same when perused in the study of an English scholar, as
when they were first chanted at the banquets of the Ionian princes.
Poetry is, as was said more than two thousand years ago, imitation. It
is an art analogous in many respects to the art of painting, sculpture,
and acting. The imitations of the painter, the sculptor, and the actor,
are indeed, within certain limits, more perfect than those of the poet.
The machinery which the poet employs consists merely of words; and words
cannot, even when employed by such an artist as Homer or Dante, present
to the mind images of visible objects quite so lively and exact as
those which we carry away from looking on the works of the brush and the
chisel. But, on the other hand, the range of poetry is infinitely wider
than that of any other imitative art, or than that of all the other
imitative arts together. The sculptor can imitate only form; the painter
only form and colour; the actor, until the poet supplies him with words,
only form, colour, and motion. Poetry holds the outer world in common
with the other arts. The heart of man is the province of poetry, and of
poetry alone. The painter, the sculptor, and the actor can exhibit
no more of human passion and character than that small portion which
overflows into the gesture and the face, always an imperfect, often a
deceitful, sign of that which is within. The deeper and more complex
parts of human nature can be exhibited by means of words alone. Thus the
objects of the imitation of poetry are the whole external and the whole
internal universe, the face of nature, the vicissitudes of fortune,
man as he is in himself, man as he appears in society, all things which
really exist, all things of which we can form an image in our minds by
combining together parts of things which really exist. The domain of
this imperial art is commensurate with the imaginative faculty.
An art essentially imitative ought not surely to be subjected to rules
which tend to make its imitations less perfect than they otherwise would
be; and those who obey such rules ought to be called, not correct, but
incorrect artists. The true way to judge of the rules by which English
poetry was governed during the last century is to look at the effects
which they produced.
It was in 1780 that Johnson completed his Lives of the Poets. He tells
us in that work that, since the time of Dryden, English poetry had shown
no tendency to relapse into its original savageness, that its language
had been refined, its numbers tuned, and its sentiments improved. It may
perhaps be doubted whether the nation had any great reason to exult in
the refinements and improvements which gave it Douglas for Othello, and
the Triumphs of Temper for the Fairy Queen.
It was during the thirty years which preceded the appearance of
Johnson’s Lives that the diction and versification of English poetry
were, in the sense in which the word is commonly used, most correct.
Those thirty years are, as respects poetry, the most deplorable part
of our literary history. They have indeed bequeathed to us scarcely any
poetry which deserves to be remembered. Two or three hundred lines of
Gray, twice as many of Goldsmith, a few stanzas of Beattie and Collins,
a few strophes of Mason, and a few clever prologues and satires, were
the masterpieces of this age of consummate excellence. They may all be
printed in one volume, and that volume would be by no means a volume
of extraordinary merit. It would contain no poetry of the very highest
class, and little which could be placed very high in the second class.
The Paradise Regained or Comus would outweigh it all.
At last, when poetry had fallen into such utter decay that Mr. Hayley
was thought a great poet, it began to appear that the excess of the evil
was about to work the cure. Men became tired of an insipid conformity to
a standard which derived no authority from nature or reason. A shallow
criticism had taught them to ascribe a superstitious value to the
spurious correctness of poetasters. A deeper criticism brought them back
to the true correctness of the first great masters. The eternal laws
of poetry regained their power, and the temporary fashions which had
superseded those laws went after the wig of Lovelace and the hoop of
Clarissa.
It was in a cold and barren season that the seeds of that rich harvest
which we have reaped were first sown. While poetry was every year
becoming more feeble and more mechanical, while the monotonous
versification which Pope had introduced, no longer redeemed by his
brilliant wit and his compactness of expression, palled on the ear of
the public, the great works of the old masters were every day attracting
more and more of the admiration which they deserved. The plays of
Shakspeare were better acted, better edited, and better known than they
had ever been. Our fine ancient ballads were again read with pleasure,
and it became a fashion to imitate them. Many of the imitations were
altogether contemptible. But they showed that men had at least begun to
admire the excellence which they could not rival. A literary revolution
was evidently at hand. There was a ferment in the minds of men, a vague
craving for something new, a disposition to hail with delight anything
which might at first sight wear the appearance of originality. A
reforming age is always fertile of impostors. The same excited state of
public feeling which produced the great separation from the see of Rome
produced also the excesses of the Anabaptists. The same stir in the
public mind of Europe which overthrew the abuses of the old French
Government, produced the Jacobins and Theophilanthropists. Macpherson
and Della Crusca were to the true reformers of English poetry what
Knipperdoling was to Luther, or Clootz to Turgot. The success of
Chatterton’s forgeries and of the far more contemptible forgeries of
Ireland showed that people had begun to love the old poetry well,
though not wisely. The public was never more disposed to believe stories
without evidence, and to admire books without merit. Anything which
could break the dull monotony of the correct school was acceptable.
The forerunner of the great restoration of our literature was Cowper.
His literary career began and ended at nearly the same time with that
of Alfieri. A comparison between Alfieri and Cowper may, at first sight,
appear as strange as that which a loyal Presbyterian minister is said to
have made in 1745 between George the Second and Enoch. It may seem that
the gentle, shy, melancholy Calvinist, whose spirit had been broken by
fagging at school, who had not courage to earn a livelihood by
reading the titles of bills in the House of Lords, and whose favourite
associates were a blind old lady and an evangelical divine, could have
nothing in common with the haughty, ardent, and voluptuous nobleman, the
horse-jockey, the libertine, who fought Lord Ligonier in Hyde Park, and
robbed the Pretender of his queen. But though the private lives of
these remarkable men present scarcely any points of resemblance, their
literary lives bear a close analogy to each other. They both found
poetry in its lowest state of degradation, feeble, artificial, and
altogether nerveless. They both possessed precisely the talents which
fitted them for the task of raising it from that deep abasement. They
cannot, in strictness, be called great poets. They had not in any very
high degree the creative power,=
````“The vision and the faculty divine”:=
but they had great vigour of thought, great warmth of feeling, and what,
in their circumstances, was above all things important, a manliness of
taste which approached to roughness. They did not deal in mechanical
versification and conventional phrases. They wrote concerning things
the thought of which set their hearts on fire; and thus what they wrote,
even when it wanted every other grace, had that inimitable grace which
sincerity and strong passion impart to the rudest and most homely
compositions. Each of them sought for inspiration in a noble and
affecting subject, fertile of images which had not yet been hackneyed.
Liberty was the muse of Alfieri, Religion was the muse of Cowper. The
same truth is found in their lighter pieces. They were not among those
who deprecated the severity, or deplored the absence, of an unreal
mistress in melodious commonplaces. Instead of raving about imaginary
Chloes and Sylvias, Cowper wrote of Mrs. Unwin’s knitting-needles. The
only love-verses of Alfieri were addressed to one whom he truly and
passionately loved. “Tutte le rime amorose che seguono,” says he, “tutte
sono per essa, e ben sue, e di lei solamente; poiche mai d’altra donna
per certo con cantero.”
These great men were not free from affectation. But their affectation
was directly opposed to the affectation which generally prevailed. Each
of them expressed, in strong and bitter language, the contempt which he
felt for the effeminate poetasters who were in fashion both in England
and in Italy. Cowper complains that=
```“Manner is all in all, whate’er is writ,
```The substitute for genius, taste, and wit.”=