(April 1830)
_1. The Omnipresence of the Deity: a Poem By ROBERT MONTGOMERY. Eleventh
Edition. London. 1830._
_2. Satan: a Poem By ROBERT MONTGOMERY. Second Edition. London: 1830._
|THE wise men of antiquity loved to convey instruction under the
covering of apologue; and though this practice is generally thought
childish, we shall make no apology for adopting it on the present
occasion. A generation which has bought eleven editions of a poem by Mr.
Robert Montgomery may well condescend to listen to a fable of Pilpay.
A pious Brahmin, it is written, made a vow that on a certain day he
would sacrifice a sheep, and on the appointed morning he went forth to
buy one. There lived in his neighbourhood three rogues who knew of his
vow, and laid a scheme for profiting by it. The first met him and said,
“Oh Brahmin, wilt thou buy a sheep? I have one fit for sacrifice.” “It
is for that very purpose,” said the holy man, “that I came forth this
day.” Then the impostor opened a bag, and brought out of it an unclean
beast, an ugly dog, lame and blind. Thereon the Brahmin cried out,
“Wretch, who touchest things impure, and utterest things untrue; callest
thou that cur a sheep?” “Truly,” answered the other, “it is a sheep of
the finest fleece, and of the sweetest flesh. Oh Brahmin, it will be
an offering most acceptable to the gods.” “Friend,” said the Brahmin,
“either thou or I must be blind.”
Just then one of the accomplices came up. “Praised be the gods,” said
the second rogue, “that I have been saved the trouble of going to the
market for a sheep! This is such a sheep as I wanted. For how much wilt
thou sell it?” When the Brahmin heard this, his mind waved to and fro,
like one swinging in the air at a holy festival. “Sir,” said he to the
new comer, “take heed what thou dost; this is no sheep, but an unclean
cur.” “Oh Brahmin,” said the new corner, “thou art drunk or mad!”
At this time the third confederate drew near. “Let us ask this man,”
said the Brahmin, “what the creature is, and I will stand by what he
shall say.” To this the others agreed; and the Brahmin called out, “Oh
stranger, what dost thou call this beast?” “Surely, oh Brahmin,” said
the knave, “it is a fine sheep.” Then the Brahmin said, “Surely the gods
have taken away my senses”; and he asked pardon of him who carried the
dog, and bought it for a measure of rice and a pot of ghee, and offered
it up to the gods, who, being wroth at this unclean sacrifice, smote him
with a sore disease in all his joints.
Thus, or nearly thus, if we remember rightly, runs the story of the
Sanscrit Aesop. The moral, like the moral of every fable that is worth
the telling, lies on the surface. The writer evidently means to caution
us against the practices of puffers, a class of people who have more
than once talked the public into the most absurd errors, but who surely
never played a more curious or a more difficult trick than when they
passed Mr. Robert Montgomery off upon the world as a great poet.
In an age in which there are so few readers that a writer cannot subsist
on the sum arising from the sale of his works, no man who has not an
independent fortune can devote himself to literary pursuits, unless he
is assisted by patronage. In such an age, accordingly, men of letters
too often pass their lives in dangling at the heels of the wealthy and
powerful; and all the faults which dependence tends to produce, pass
into their character. They become the parasites and slaves of the great.
It is melancholy to think how many of the highest and most exquisitely
formed of human intellects have been condemned to the ignominious labour
of disposing the commonplaces of adulation in new forms and brightening
them into new splendour. Horace invoking Augustus in the most
enthusiastic language of religious veneration; Statius flattering a
tyrant, and the minion of a tyrant, for a morsel of bread; Ariosto
versifying the whole genealogy of a niggardly patron; Tasso extolling
the heroic virtues of the wretched creature who locked him up in a
madhouse: these are but a few of the instances which might easily be
given of the degradation to which those must submit who, not possessing
a competent fortune, are resolved to write when there are scarcely any
who read.
This evil the progress of the human mind tends to remove. As a taste for
books becomes more and more common, the patronage of individuals becomes
less and less necessary. In the middle of the last century a marked
change took place. The tone of literary men, both in this country and in
France, became higher and more independent. Pope boasted that he was
the “one poet” who had “pleased by manly ways”; he derided the
soft dedications with which Halifax had been fed, asserted his own
superiority over the pensioned Boileau, and gloried in being not the
follower, but the friend, of nobles and princes. The explanation of all
this is very simple. Pope was the first Englishman who, by the mere sale
of his writings, realised a sum which enabled him to live in comfort and
in perfect independence. Johnson extols him for the magnanimity which
he showed in inscribing his Iliad, not to a minister or a peer, but
to Congreve. In our time this would scarcely be a subject for praise.
Nobody is astonished when Mr. Moore pays a compliment of this kind to
Sir Walter Scott, or Sir Walter Scott to Mr. Moore. The idea of either
of those gentlemen looking out for some lord who would be likely to give
him a few guineas in return for a fulsome dedication seems laughably
incongruous. Yet this is exactly what Dryden or Otway would have done;
and it would be hard to blame them for it. Otway is said to have been
choked with a piece of bread which he devoured in the rage of hunger;
and, whether this story be true or false, he was beyond all question
miserably poor. Dryden, at near seventy, when at the head of the
literary men of England, without equal or second, received three hundred
pounds for his Fables, a collection of ten thousand verses, and of such
verses as no man then living, except himself, could have produced, Pope,
at thirty, had laid up between six and seven thousand pounds, the fruits
of his poetry. It was not, we suspect, because he had a higher spirit or
a more scrupulous conscience than his predecessors, but because he had a
larger income, that he kept up the dignity of the literary character so
much better than they had done.
From the time of Pope to the present day the readers have been
constantly becoming more and more numerous, and the writers,
consequently, more and more independent. It is assuredly a great evil
that men, fitted by their talents and acquirements to enlighten and
charm the world, should be reduced to the necessity of flattering wicked
and foolish patrons in return for the sustenance of life. But, though
we heartily rejoice that this evil is removed, we cannot but see with
concern that another evil has succeeded to it. The public is now the
patron, and a most liberal patron. All that the rich and powerful
bestowed on authors from the time of Maecenas to that of Harley would
not, we apprehend, make up a sum equal to that which has been paid
by English booksellers to authors during the last fifty years. Men of
letters have accordingly ceased to court individuals, and have begun to
court the public. They formerly used flattery. They now use puffing.
Whether the old or the new vice be the worse, whether those who formerly
lavished insincere praise on others, or those who now contrive by
every art of beggary and bribery to stun the public with praises of
themselves, disgrace their vocation the more deeply, we shall not
attempt to decide. But of this we are sure, that it is high time to
make a stand against the new trickery. The puffing of books is now so
shamefully and so successfully carried on that it is the duty of all who
are anxious for the purity of the national taste, or for the honour of
the literary character, to join in discountenancing the practice. All
the pens that ever were employed in magnifying Bish’s lucky office,
Romanis’s fleecy hosiery, Packwood’s razor strops, and Rowland’s
Kalydor, all the placard-bearers of Dr. Eady, all the wall-chalkers of
Day and Martin, seem to have taken service with the poets and novelists
of this generation. Devices which in the lowest trades are considered
as disreputable are adopted without scruple, and improved upon with a
despicable ingenuity, by people engaged in a pursuit which never was
and never will be considered as a mere trade by any man of honour and
virtue. A butcher of the higher class disdains to ticket his meat. A
mercer of the higher class would be ashamed to hang up papers in his
window inviting the passers-by to look at the stock of a bankrupt,
all of the first quality, and going for half the value. We expect some
reserve, some decent pride, in our hatter and our bootmaker. But no
artifice by which notoriety can be obtained is thought too abject for a
man of letters.
It is amusing to think over the history of most of the publications
which have had a run during the last few years. The publisher is often
the publisher of some periodical work. In this periodical work the first
flourish of trumpets is sounded. The peal is then echoed and re-echoed
by all the other periodical works over which the publisher, or the
author, or the author’s coterie, may have any influence. The newspapers
are for a fortnight filled with puffs of all the various kinds which
Sheridan enumerated, direct, oblique, and collusive. Sometimes the
praise is laid on thick for simple-minded people. “Pathetic,” “sublime,”
“splendid,” “graceful,” “brilliant wit,” “exquisite humour,” and other
phrases equally flattering, fall in a shower as thick and as sweet as
the sugarplums at a Roman carnival. Sometimes greater art is used. A
sinecure has been offered to the writer if he would suppress his work,
or if he would even soften down a few of his incomparable portraits.
A distinguished military and political character has challenged the
inimitable satirist of the vices of the great; and the puffer is glad to
learn that the parties have been bound over to keep the peace. Sometimes
it is thought expedient that the puffer should put on a grave face, and
utter his panegyric in the form of admonition. “Such attacks on private
character cannot be too much condemned. Even the exuberant wit of our
author, and the irresistible power of his withering sarcasm, are no
excuses for that utter disregard which he manifests for the feelings of
others. We cannot but wonder that a writer of such transcendent talents,
a writer who is evidently no stranger to the kindly charities and
sensibilities of our nature, should show so little tenderness to the
foibles of noble and distinguished individuals, with whom it is clear,
from every page of his work, that he must have been constantly mingling
in society.” These are but tame and feeble imitations of the paragraphs
with which the daily papers are filled whenever an attorney’s clerk or
an apothecary’s assistant undertakes to tell the public in bad English
and worse French, how people tie their neckcloths and eat their dinners
in Grosvenor Square. The editors of the higher and more respectable
newspapers usually prefix the words “Advertisement,” or “From a
Correspondent,” to such paragraphs. But this makes little difference.
The panegyric is extracted, and the significant heading omitted. The
fulsome eulogy makes its appearance on the covers of all the Reviews and
Magazines, with Times or Globe affixed, though the editors of the Times
and the Globe have no more to do with it than with Mr. Goss’s way of
making old rakes young again.
That people who live by personal slander should practise these arts is
not surprising. Those who stoop to write calumnious books may well stoop
to puff them; and that the basest of all trades should be carried on in
the basest of all manners is quite proper and as it should be. But how
any man who has the least self-respect, the least regard for his own
personal dignity, can condescend to persecute the public with this
Ragfair importunity, we do not understand. Extreme poverty may, indeed,
in some degree, be an excuse for employing these shifts, as it may be an
excuse for stealing a leg of mutton. But we really think that a man of
spirit and delicacy would quite as soon satisfy his wants in the one way
as in the other.
It is no excuse for an author that the praises of journalists are
procured by the money or influence of his publishers, and not by his
own. It is his business to take such precautions as may prevent others
from doing what must degrade him. It is for his honour as a gentleman,
and, if he is really a man of talents, it will eventually be for his
honour and interest as a writer, that his works should come before the
public recommended by their own merits alone, and should be discussed
with perfect freedom. If his objects be really such as he may own
without shame, he will find that they will, in the long-run, be better
attained by suffering the voice of criticism to be fairly heard. At
present, we too often see a writer attempting to obtain literary fame as
Shakspeare’s usurper obtains sovereignty. The publisher plays Buckingham
to the author’s Richard. Some few creatures of the conspiracy are
dexterously disposed here and there in the crowd. It is the business of
these hirelings to throw up their caps, and clap their hands, and utter
their vivas. The rabble at first stare and wonder, and at last join in
shouting for shouting’s sake; and thus a crown is placed on a head which
has no right to it, by the huzzas of a few servile dependants.
The opinion of the great body of the reading public is very materially
influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume
a right to criticise. Nor is the public altogether to blame on this
account. Most even of those who have really a great enjoyment in reading
are in the same state, with respect to a book, in which a man who has
never given particular attention to the art of painting is with respect
to a picture. Every man who has the least sensibility or imagination
derives a certain pleasure from pictures. Yet a man of the highest and
finest intellect might, unless he had formed his taste by contemplating
the best pictures, be easily persuaded by a knot of connoisseurs that
the worst daub in Somerset House was a miracle of art. If he deserves
to be laughed at, it is not for his ignorance of pictures, but for his
ignorance of men. He knows that there is a delicacy of taste in
painting which he does not possess, that he cannot distinguish hands,
as practised judges distinguish them, that he is not familiar with the
finest models, that he has never looked at them with close attention,
and that, when the general effect of a piece has pleased him or
displeased him, he has never troubled himself to ascertain why. When,
therefore, people, whom he thinks more competent to judge than himself,
and of whose sincerity he entertains no doubt, assure him that a
particular work is exquisitely beautiful, he takes it for granted that
they must be in the right. He returns to the examination, resolved to
find or imagine beauties; and, if he can work himself up into something
like admiration, he exults in his own proficiency.
Just such is the manner in which nine readers out of ten judge of a
book. They are ashamed to dislike what men who speak as having authority
declare to be good. At present, however contemptible a poem or a novel
may be, there is not the least difficulty in procuring favourable
notices of it from all sorts of publications, daily, weekly, and
monthly. In the meantime, little or nothing is said on the other side.
The author and the publisher are interested in crying up the book.
Nobody has any very strong interest in crying it down. Those who are
best fitted to guide the public opinion think it beneath them to expose
mere nonsense, and comfort themselves by reflecting that such popularity
cannot last. This contemptuous lenity has been carried too far. It is
perfectly true that reputations which have been forced into an unnatural
bloom fade almost as soon as they have expanded; nor have we any
apprehensions that puffing will ever raise any scribbler to the rank
of a classic. It is indeed amusing to turn over some late volumes of
periodical works, and to see how many immortal productions have, within
a few months, been gathered to the poems of Blackmore and the novels
of Mrs. Behn; how many “profound views of human nature,” and “exquisite
delineations of fashionable manners,” and “vernal, and sunny, and
refreshing thoughts,” and “high imaginings,” and “young breathings,”
and “embodyings,” and “pinings,” and “minglings with the beauty of the
universe,” and “harmonies which dissolve the soul in a passionate sense
of loveliness and divinity,” the world has contrived to forget. The
names of the books and of the writers are buried in as deep an oblivion
as the name of the builder of Stonehenge. Some of the well-puffed
fashionable novels of eighteen hundred and twenty-nine hold the pastry
of eighteen hundred and thirty; and others, which are now extolled in
language almost too high-flown for the merits of Don Quixote, will, we
have no doubt, line the trunks of eighteen hundred and thirty-one. But,
though we have no apprehensions that puffing will ever confer permanent
reputation on the undeserving, we still think its influence most
pernicious. Men of real merit will, if they persevere, at last reach the
station to which they are entitled, and intruders will be ejected with
contempt and derision. But it is no small evil that the avenues to fame
should be blocked up by a swarm of noisy, pushing, elbowing pretenders,
who, though they will not ultimately be able to make good their own
entrance, hinder, in the mean time, those who have a right to enter. All
who will not disgrace themselves by joining in the unseemly scuffle must
expect to be at first hustled and shouldered back. Some men of talents,
accordingly, turn away in dejection from pursuits in which success
appears to bear no proportion to desert. Others employ in self-defence
the means by which competitors, far inferior to themselves, appear for
a time to obtain a decided advantage. There are few who have sufficient
confidence in their own powers and sufficient elevation of mind, to wait
with secure and contemptuous patience, while dunce after dunce presses
before them. Those who will not stoop to the baseness of the modern
fashion are too often discouraged. Those who do stoop to it are always
degraded.
We have of late observed with great pleasure some symptoms which lead us
to hope that respectable literary men of all parties are beginning to be
impatient of this insufferable nuisance. And we purpose to do what in
us lies for the abating of it. We do not think that we can more usefully
assist in this good work than by showing our honest countrymen what that
sort of poetry is which puffing can drive through eleven editions, and
how easily any bellman might, if a bellman would stoop to the necessary
degree of meanness, become a “master-spirit of the age.” We have no
enmity to Mr. Robert Montgomery. We know nothing whatever about him,
except what we have learned from his books, and from the portrait
prefixed to one of them, in which he appears to be doing his very best
to look like a man of genius and sensibility, though with less success
than his strenuous exertions deserve. We select him, because his works
have received more enthusiastic praise, and have deserved more unmixed
contempt, than any which, as far as our knowledge extends, have appeared
within the last three or four years. His writing bears the same relation
to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are colours in
the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words
In Mr. Montgomery’s writing which, when disposed in certain orders and
combinations, have made, and will again make, good poetry. But, as they
now stand, they seem to be put together on principle in such a manner
as to give no image of anything “in the heavens above, or in the earth
beneath, or in the waters under the earth.”
The poem on the Omnipresence of the Deity commences with a description
of the creation, in which we can find only one thought which has the
least pretension to ingenuity, and that one thought is stolen from
Dryden, and marred in the stealing:=
```“Last, softly beautiful, as music’s close,
```Angelic woman into being rose.”=
The all-pervading influence of the Supreme Being is then described in
a few tolerable lines borrowed from Pope, and a great many intolerable
lines of Mr. Robert Montgomery’s own. The following may stand as a
specimen:=
```“But who could trace Thine unrestricted course,
```Though Fancy followed with immortal force?
```There’s not a blossom fondled by the breeze,
```There’s not a fruit that beautifies the trees,
```There’s not a particle in sea or air,
```But nature owns thy plastic influence there!
```With fearful gaze, still be it mine to see
```How all is fill’d and vivified by Thee;
```Upon thy mirror, earth’s majestic view,
```To paint Thy Presence, and to feel it too.”=
The last two lines contain an excellent specimen of Mr. Robert
Montgomery’s Turkey carpet style of writing. The majestic view of
earth is the mirror of God’s presence; and on this mirror Mr. Robert
Montgomery paints God’s presence. The use of a mirror, we submit, is not
to be painted upon.
A few more lines, as bad as those which we have quoted, bring us to one
of the most amusing instances of literary pilfering which we remember.
It might be of use to plagiarists to know, as a general rule, that what
they steal is, to employ a phrase common in advertisements, of no use to
any but the right owner. We never fell in, however, with any plunderer
who so little understood how to turn his booty to good account as Mr.
Montgomery. Lord Byron, in a passage which everybody knows by heart, has
said, addressing the sea,=
```“Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow.”=
Mr. Robert Montgomery very coolly appropriates the image and reproduces
the stolen goods in the following form:=
```“And thou vast Ocean, on whose awful face
```Time’s iron feet can print no ruin-trace.”=
So may such ill-got gains ever prosper!
The effect which the Ocean produces on Atheists is then described in the
following lofty lines:=
```“Oh! never did the dark-soul’d ATHEIST stand,
```And watch the breakers boiling on the strand,
```And, while Creation stagger’d at his nod,
```Mock the dread presence of the mighty God!
```We hear Him in the wind-heaved ocean’s roar,
```Hurling her billowy crags upon the shore
```We hear Him in the riot of the blast,
```And shake, while rush the raving whirlwinds past!”=
If Mr. Robert Montgomery’s genius were not far too free and aspiring to
be shackled by the rules of syntax, we should suppose that it is at the
nod of the Atheist that creation staggers. But Mr. Robert Montgomery’s
readers must take such grammar as they can get, and be thankful.
A few more lines bring us to another instance of unprofitable theft. Sir
Walter Scott has these lines in the Lord of the Isles:=
```“The dew that on the violet lies,
```Mocks the dark lustre of thine eyes.”=
This is pretty taken separately, and, as is always the case with the
good things of good writers, much prettier in its place than can even
be conceived by those who see it only detached from the context. Now for
Mr. Montgomery:=
```“And the bright dew-bead on the bramble lies,
```Like liquid rapture upon beauty’s eyes.”=
The comparison of a violet, bright with the dew, to a woman’s eyes, is
as perfect as a comparison can be. Sir Walter’s lines are part of a song
addressed to a woman at daybreak, when the violets are bathed in dew;
and the comparison is therefore peculiarly natural and graceful. Dew on
a bramble is no more like a woman’s eyes than dew anywhere else. There
is a very pretty Eastern tale of which the fate of plagiarists often
reminds us. The slave of a magician saw his master wave his wand, and
heard him give orders to the spirits who arose at the summons. The slave
stole the wand, and waved it himself in the air; but he had not observed
that his master used the left hand for that purpose. The spirits thus
irregularly summoned tore the thief to pieces instead of obeying his
orders. There are very few who can safely venture to conjure with the
rod of Sir Walter; and Mr. Robert Montgomery is not one of them.