and prodigality of blessings! The herbs, elastic with health, seem to
partake of sensitive and animated life, and to feel under my hand the
benediction I would bestow on them. What a hum of satisfaction in
God's creatures! How is it, Sidney, the smallest do seem the happiest?
_Sidney._ Compensation for their weaknesses and their fears;
compensation for the shortness of their existence. Their spirits mount
upon the sunbeam above the eagle; and they have more enjoyment in
their one summer than the elephant in his century.
_Brooke._ Are not also the little and lowly in our species the most
happy?
_Sidney._ I would not willingly try nor over-curiously examine it. We,
Greville, are happy in these parks and forests: we were happy in my
close winter-walk of box and laurustine. In our earlier days did we
not emboss our bosoms with the daffodils, and shake them almost unto
shedding with our transport? Ay, my friend, there is a greater
difference, both in the stages of life and in the seasons of the year,
than in the conditions of men: yet the healthy pass through the
seasons, from the clement to the inclement, not only unreluctantly
but rejoicingly, knowing that the worst will soon finish, and the best
begin anew; and we are desirous of pushing forward into every stage of
life, excepting that alone which ought reasonably to allure us most,
as opening to us the _Via Sacra_, along which we move in triumph to
our eternal country. We may in some measure frame our minds for the
reception of happiness, for more or for less; we should, however, well
consider to what port we are steering in search of it, and that even
in the richest its quantity is but too exhaustible. There is a
sickliness in the firmest of us, which induceth us to change our side,
though reposing ever so softly: yet, wittingly or unwittingly, we turn
again soon into our old position.
God hath granted unto both of us hearts easily contented, hearts
fitted for every station, because fitted for every duty. What appears
the dullest may contribute most to our genius; what is most gloomy may
soften the seeds and relax the fibres of gaiety. We enjoy the
solemnity of the spreading oak above us: perhaps we owe to it in part
the mood of our minds at this instant; perhaps an inanimate thing
supplies me, while I am speaking, with whatever I possess of
animation. Do you imagine that any contest of shepherds can afford
them the same pleasure as I receive from the description of it; or
that even in their loves, however innocent and faithful, they are so
free from anxiety as I am while I celebrate them? The exertion of
intellectual power, of fancy and imagination, keeps from us greatly
more than their wretchedness, and affords us greatly more than their
enjoyment. We are motes in the midst of generations: we have our
sunbeams to circuit and climb. Look at the summits of the trees around
us, how they move, and the loftiest the most: nothing is at rest
within the compass of our view, except the grey moss on the
park-pales. Let it eat away the dead oak, but let it not be compared
with the living one.
Poets are in general prone to melancholy; yet the most plaintive ditty
hath imparted a fuller joy, and of longer duration, to its composer,
than the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian. A bottle of wine
bringeth as much pleasure as the acquisition of a kingdom, and not
unlike it in kind: the senses in both cases are confused and
perverted.
_Brooke._ Merciful Heaven! and for the fruition of an hour's
drunkenness, from which they must awaken with heaviness, pain, and
terror, men consume a whole crop of their kind at one harvest home.
Shame upon those light ones who carol at the feast of blood! and worse
upon those graver ones who nail upon their escutcheon the name of
great! Ambition is but Avarice on stilts and masked. God sometimes
sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the
chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration. Only
some cause like unto that which is now scattering the mental fog of
the Netherlands, and is preparing them for the fruits of freedom, can
justify us in drawing the sword abroad.
_Sidney._ And only the accomplishment of our purpose can permit us
again to sheathe it; for the aggrandizement of our neighbour is nought
of detriment to us: on the contrary, if we are honest and industrious,
his wealth is ours. We have nothing to dread while our laws are
equitable and our impositions light: but children fly from mothers who
strip and scourge them.
_Brooke._ We are come to an age when we ought to read and speak
plainly what our discretion tells us is fit: we are not to be set in a
corner for mockery and derision, with our hands hanging down
motionless and our pockets turned inside out.
* * * * *
But away, away with politics: let not this city-stench infect our
fresh country air!
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE:
[6] Censurable as that practice may appear, it belonged to the age of
Sidney. Amusements were permitted the English on the seventh day, nor
were they restricted until the Puritans gained the ascendancy.
SOUTHEY AND PORSON
_Porson._ I suspect, Mr. Southey, you are angry with me for the
freedom with which I have spoken of your poetry and Wordsworth's.
_Southey._ What could have induced you to imagine it, Mr. Professor?
You have indeed bent your eyes upon me, since we have been together,
with somewhat of fierceness and defiance: I presume you fancied me to
be a commentator. You wrong me in your belief that any opinion on my
poetical works hath molested me; but you afford me more than
compensation in supposing me acutely sensible of injustice done to
Wordsworth. If we must converse on these topics, we will converse on
him. What man ever existed who spent a more inoffensive life, or
adorned it with nobler studies?
_Porson._ I believe so; and they who attack him with virulence are men
of as little morality as reflection. I have demonstrated that one of
them, he who wrote the _Pursuits of Literature_, could not construe a
Greek sentence or scan a verse; and I have fallen on the very _Index_
from which he drew out his forlorn hope on the parade. This is
incomparably the most impudent fellow I have met with in the course of
my reading, which has lain, you know, in a province where impudence is
no rarity.
* * * * *
I had visited a friend in _King's Road_ when he entered.
'Have you seen the _Review_?' cried he. 'Worse than ever! I am
resolved to insert a paragraph in the papers, declaring that I had no
concern in the last number.'
'Is it so very bad?' said I, quietly.
'Infamous! detestable!' exclaimed he.
'Sit down, then: nobody will believe you,' was my answer.
Since that morning he has discovered that I drink harder than usual,
that my faculties are wearing fast away, that once, indeed, I had some
Greek in my head, but--he then claps the forefinger to the side of his
nose, turns his eye slowly upward, and looks compassionately and
calmly.
_Southey._ Come, Mr. Porson, grant him his merits: no critic is better
contrived to make any work a monthly one, no writer more dexterous in
giving a finishing touch.
_Porson._ The plagiary has a greater latitude of choice than we; and
if he brings home a parsnip or turnip-top, when he could as easily
have pocketed a nectarine or a pineapple, he must be a blockhead. I
never heard the name of the _Pursuer of Literature_, who has little
more merit in having stolen than he would have had if he had never
stolen at all; and I have forgotten that other man's, who evinced his
fitness to be the censor of our age, by a translation of the most
naked and impure satires of antiquity--those of Juvenal, which owe
their preservation to the partiality of the friars. I shall entertain
an unfavourable opinion of him if he has translated them well: pray,
has he?
_Southey._ Indeed, I do not know. I read poets for their poetry, and
to extract that nutriment of the intellect and of the heart which
poetry should contain. I never listen to the swans of the cesspool,
and must declare that nothing is heavier to me than rottenness and
corruption.
_Porson._ You are right, sir, perfectly right. A translator of Juvenal
would open a public drain to look for a needle, and may miss it. My
nose is not easily offended; but I must have something to fill my
belly. Come, we will lay aside the scrip of the transpositor and the
pouch of the pursuer, in reserve for the days of unleavened bread;
and again, if you please, to the lakes and mountains. Now we are both
in better humour, I must bring you to a confession that in your friend
Wordsworth there is occasionally a little trash.
_Southey._ A haunch of venison would be trash to a Brahmin, a bottle
of Burgundy to the xerif of Mecca. We are guided by precept, by habit,
by taste, by constitution. Hitherto our sentiments on poetry have been
delivered down to us from authority; and if it can be demonstrated, as
I think it may be, that the authority is inadequate, and that the
dictates are often inapplicable and often misinterpreted, you will
allow me to remove the cause out of court. Every man can see what is
very bad in a poem; almost every one can see what is very good: but
you, Mr. Porson, who have turned over all the volumes of all the
commentators, will inform me whether I am right or wrong in asserting
that no critic hath yet appeared who hath been able to fix or to
discern the exact degrees of excellence above a certain point.
_Porson._ None.
_Southey._ The reason is, because the eyes of no one have been upon a
level with it. Supposing, for the sake of argument, the contest of
Hesiod and Homer to have taken place: the judges who decided in favour
of the worse, and he, indeed, in poetry has little merit, may have
been elegant, wise, and conscientious men. Their decision was in
favour of that to the species of which they had been the most
accustomed. Corinna was preferred to Pindar no fewer than five times,
and the best judges in Greece gave her the preference; yet whatever
were her powers, and beyond a question they were extraordinary, we may
assure ourselves that she stood many degrees below Pindar. Nothing is
more absurd than the report that the judges were prepossessed by her
beauty. Plutarch tells us that she was much older than her competitor,
who consulted her judgment in his earlier odes. Now, granting their
first competition to have been when Pindar was twenty years old, and
that the others were in the years succeeding, her beauty must have
been somewhat on the decline; for in Greece there are few women who
retain the graces, none who retain the bloom of youth, beyond the
twenty-third year. Her countenance, I doubt not, was expressive: but
expression, although it gives beauty to men, makes women pay dearly
for its stamp, and pay soon. Nature seems, in protection to their
loveliness, to have ordered that they who are our superiors in
quickness and sensibility should be little disposed to laborious
thought, or to long excursions in the labyrinths of fancy. We may be
convinced that the verdict of the judges was biased by nothing else
than the habitudes of thinking; we may be convinced, too, that living
in an age when poetry was cultivated highly, and selected from the
most acute and the most dispassionate, they were subject to no greater
errors of opinion than are the learned messmates of our English
colleges.
_Porson._ You are more liberal in your largesses to the fair Greeks
than a friend of mine was, who resided in Athens to acquire the
language. He assured me that beauty there was in bud at thirteen, in
full blossom at fifteen, losing a leaf or two every day at seventeen,
trembling on the thorn at nineteen, and under the tree at twenty.
_Southey._ Mr. Porson, it does not appear to me that anything more is
necessary, in the first instance, than to interrogate our hearts in
what manner they have been affected. If the ear is satisfied; if at
one moment a tumult is aroused in the breast, and tranquillized at
another, with a perfect consciousness of equal power exerted in both
cases; if we rise up from the perusal of the work with a strong
excitement to thought, to imagination, to sensibility; above all, if
we sat down with some propensities toward evil, and walk away with
much stronger toward good, in the midst of a world which we never had
entered and of which we never had dreamed before--shall we perversely
put on again the _old man_ of criticism, and dissemble that we have
been conducted by a most beneficent and most potent genius? Nothing
proves to me so manifestly in what a pestiferous condition are its
lazarettos, as when I observe how little hath been objected against
those who have substituted words for things, and how much against
those who have reinstated things for words.
Let Wordsworth prove to the world that there may be animation without
blood and broken bones, and tenderness remote from the stews. Some
will doubt it; for even things the most evident are often but little
perceived and strangely estimated. Swift ridiculed the music of Handel
and the generalship of Marlborough; Pope the perspicacity and the
scholarship of Bentley; Gray the abilities of Shaftesbury and the
eloquence of Rousseau. Shakespeare hardly found those who would
collect his tragedies; Milton was read from godliness; Virgil was
antiquated and rustic; Cicero, Asiatic. What a rabble has persecuted
my friend! An elephant is born to be consumed by ants in the midst of
his unapproachable solitudes: Wordsworth is the prey of Jeffrey. Why
repine? Let us rather amuse ourselves with allegories, and recollect
that God in the creation left His noblest creature at the mercy of a
serpent.
* * * * *
_Porson._ Wordsworth goes out of his way to be attacked; he picks up a
piece of dirt, throws it on the carpet in the midst of the company,
and cries, _This is a better man than any of you!_ He does indeed
mould the base material into what form he chooses; but why not rather
invite us to contemplate it than challenge us to condemn it? Here
surely is false taste.
_Southey._ The principal and the most general accusation against him
is, that the vehicle of his thoughts is unequal to them. Now did ever
the judges at the Olympic games say: 'We would have awarded to you the
meed of victory, if your chariot had been equal to your horses: it is
true they have won; but the people are displeased at a car neither new
nor richly gilt, and without a gryphon or sphinx engraved on the
axle'? You admire simplicity in Euripides; you censure it in
Wordsworth: believe me, sir, it arises in neither from penury of
thought--which seldom has produced it--but from the strength of
temperance, and at the suggestion of principle.
Take up a poem of Wordsworth's and read it--I would rather say, read
them all; and, knowing that a mind like yours must grasp closely what
comes within it, I will then appeal to you whether any poet of our
country, since Milton, hath exerted greater powers with less of strain
and less of ostentation. I would, however, by his permission, lay
before you for this purpose a poem which is yet unpublished and
incomplete.
_Porson._ Pity, with such abilities, he does not imitate the ancients
somewhat more.
_Southey._ Whom did they imitate? If his genius is equal to theirs he
has no need of a guide. He also will be an ancient; and the very
counterparts of those who now decry him will extol him a thousand
years hence in malignity to the moderns.
THE ABBÉ DELILLE AND WALTER LANDOR
The Abbé Delille was the happiest of creatures, when he could weep
over the charms of innocence and the country in some crowded and
fashionable circle at Paris. We embraced most pathetically on our
first meeting there, as if the one were condemned to quit the earth,
the other to live upon it.
_Delille._ You are reported to have said that descriptive poetry has
all the merits of a handkerchief that smells of roses?
_Landor._ This, if I said it, is among the things which are neither
false enough nor true enough to be displeasing. But the Abbé Delille
has merits of his own. To translate Milton well is more laudable than
originality in trifling matters; just as to transport an obelisk from
Egypt, and to erect it in one of the squares, must be considered a
greater labour than to build a new chandler's shop.
_Delille._ Milton is indeed extremely difficult to translate; for,
however noble and majestic, he is sometimes heavy, and often rough and
unequal.
_Landor._ Dear Abbé, porphyry is heavy, gold is heavier; Ossa and
Olympus are rough and unequal; the steppes of Tartary, though high,
are of uniform elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a
cytisus, nor an arbutus upon them great enough to shelter a
new-dropped lamb. Level the Alps one with another, and where is their
sublimity? Raise up the vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where
are those sylvan creeks and harbours in which the imagination watches
while the soul reposes; those recesses in which the gods partook the
weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments of the gods?
You have treated our poet with courtesy and distinction; in your
trimmed and measured dress, he might be taken for a Frenchman. Do not
think me flattering. You have conducted Eve from Paradise to Paris,
and she really looks prettier and smarter than before she tripped.
With what elegance she rises from a most awful dream! You represent
her (I repeat your expression) as springing up _en sursaut_, as if
you had caught her asleep and tickled the young creature on that sofa.
Homer and Virgil have been excelled in sublimity by Shakespeare and
Milton, as the Caucasus and Atlas of the old world by the Andes and
Teneriffe of the new; but you would embellish them all.
_Delille._ I owe to Voltaire my first sentiment of admiration for
Milton and Shakespeare.
_Landor._ He stuck to them as a woodpecker to an old forest-tree, only
for the purpose of picking out what was rotten: he has made the holes
deeper than he found them, and, after all his cries and chatter, has
brought home but scanty sustenance to his starveling nest.
_Delille._ You must acknowledge that there are fine verses in his
tragedies.
_Landor._ Whenever such is the first observation, be assured, M.
l'Abbé, that the poem, if heroic or dramatic, is bad. Should a work of
this kind be excellent, we say, 'How admirably the characters are
sustained! What delicacy of discrimination! There is nothing to be
taken away or altered without an injury to the part or to the whole.'
We may afterward descend on the versification. In poetry, there is a
greater difference between the good and the excellent than there is
between the bad and the good. Poetry has no golden mean; mediocrity
here is of another metal, which Voltaire, however, had skill enough to
encrust and polish. In the least wretched of his tragedies, whatever
is tolerable is Shakespeare's; but, gracious Heaven! how deteriorated!
When he pretends to extol a poet he chooses some defective part, and
renders it more so whenever he translates it. I will repeat a few
verses from Metastasio in support of my assertion. Metastasio was both
a better critic and a better poet, although of the second order in
each quality; his tyrants are less philosophical, and his chambermaids
less dogmatic. Voltaire was, however, a man of abilities, and author
of many passable epigrams, beside those which are contained in his
tragedies and heroics; yet it must be confessed that, like your
Parisian lackeys, they are usually the smartest when out of place.
_Delille._ What you call epigram gives life and spirit to grave works,
and seems principally wanted to relieve a long poem. I do not see why
what pleases us in a star should not please us in a constellation.
DIOGENES AND PLATO
_Diogenes._ Stop! stop! come hither! Why lookest thou so scornfully
and askance upon me?
_Plato._ Let me go! loose me! I am resolved to pass.
_Diogenes._ Nay, then, by Jupiter and this tub! thou leavest three
good ells of Milesian cloth behind thee. Whither wouldst thou amble?
_Plato._ I am not obliged in courtesy to tell you.
_Diogenes._ Upon whose errand? Answer me directly.
_Plato._ Upon my own.
_Diogenes._ Oh, then, I will hold thee yet awhile. If it were upon
another's, it might be a hardship to a good citizen, though not to a
good philosopher.
_Plato._ That can be no impediment to my release: you do not think me
one.
_Diogenes._ No, by my Father Jove!
_Plato._ Your father!
_Diogenes._ Why not? Thou shouldst be the last man to doubt it. Hast
not thou declared it irrational to refuse our belief to those who
assert that they are begotten by the gods, though the assertion (these
are thy words) be unfounded on reason or probability? In me there is a
chance of it: whereas in the generation of such people as thou art
fondest of frequenting, who claim it loudly, there are always too many
competitors to leave it probable.
_Plato._ Those who speak against the great do not usually speak from
morality, but from envy.
_Diogenes._ Thou hast a glimpse of the truth in this place, but as
thou hast already shown thy ignorance in attempting to prove to me
what a _man_ is, ill can I expect to learn from thee what is a _great
man_.
_Plato._ No doubt your experience and intercourse will afford me the
information.
_Diogenes._ Attend, and take it. The great man is he who hath nothing
to fear and nothing to hope from another. It is he who, while he
demonstrates the iniquity of the laws, and is able to correct them,
obeys them peaceably. It is he who looks on the ambitious both as weak
and fraudulent. It is he who hath no disposition or occasion for any
kind of deceit, no reason for being or for appearing different from
what he is. It is he who can call together the most select company
when it pleases him.
_Plato._ Excuse my interruption. In the beginning of your definition I
fancied that you were designating your own person, as most people do
in describing what is admirable; now I find that you have some other
in contemplation.
_Diogenes._ I thank thee for allowing me what perhaps I _do_ possess,
but what I was not then thinking of; as is often the case with rich
possessors: in fact, the latter part of the description suits me as
well as any portion of the former.
_Plato._ You may call together the best company, by using your hands
in the call, as you did with me; otherwise I am not sure that you
would succeed in it.
_Diogenes._ My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together,
select them, detain them, dismiss them. Imbecile and vicious men
cannot do any of these things. Their thoughts are scattered, vague,
uncertain, cumbersome: and the worst stick to them the longest; many
indeed by choice, the greater part by necessity, and accompanied, some
by weak wishes, others by vain remorse.
_Plato._ Is there nothing of greatness, O Diogenes! in exhibiting how
cities and communities may be governed best, how morals may be kept
the purest, and power become the most stable?
_Diogenes._ _Something_ of greatness does not constitute the great
man. Let me, however, see him who hath done what thou sayest: he must
be the most universal and the most indefatigable traveller, he must
also be the oldest creature, upon earth.
_Plato._ How so?
_Diogenes._ Because he must know perfectly the climate, the soil, the
situation, the peculiarities, of the races, of their allies, of their
enemies; he must have sounded their harbours, he must have measured
the quantity of their arable land and pasture, of their woods and
mountains; he must have ascertained whether there are fisheries on
their coasts, and even what winds are prevalent. On these causes, with
some others, depend the bodily strength, the numbers, the wealth, the
wants, the capacities of the people.
_Plato._ Such are low thoughts.