Hear me! If this most specious mass of flesh,
Which thou hast made my daughter; this my blood,
This particle of my divided being;
Or rather, this my bane and my disease,
Whose sight infects and poisons me; this devil
Which sprung from me as from a hell, was meant
To aught good use; if her bright loveliness
Was kindled to illumine this dark world;
If nursed by thy selectest dew of love
Such virtues blossom in her as should make
The peace of life, I pray thee for my sake
As thou the common God and Father art
Of her, and me, and all; reverse that doom!
Earth, in the name of God, let her food be
Poison, until she be encrusted round
With leprous stains! Heaven, rain upon her head
The blistering drops of the Maremma's dew,
Till she be speckled like a toad; parch up
Those love-enkindled lips, warp those fine limbs
To loathed lameness! All beholding sun,
Strike in thine envy those life darting eyes
With thine own blinding beams!
_Lucr._ Peace! Peace!
For thine own sake unsay those dreadful words.
When high God grants he punishes such prayers.
_Cen._ (_Leaping up, and throwing his right hand toward Heaven_)
He does his will, I mine! This in addition,
That if she have a child--
_Lucr._ Horrible thought!
_Cen._ That if she ever have a child; and thou,
Quick Nature! I adjure thee by thy God,
That thou be fruitful in her, and encrease
And multiply, fulfilling his command,
And my deep imprecation! May it be
A hideous likeness of herself, that as
From a distorting mirror, she may see
Her image mixed with what she most abhors,
Smiling upon her from her nursing breast.
And that the child may from its infancy
Grow, day by day, more wicked and deformed,
Turning her mother's love to misery:
And that both she and it may live until
It shall repay her care and pain with hate,
Or what may else be more unnatural.
So he may hunt her thro' the clamorous scoffs
Of the loud world to a dishonoured grave.
Shall I revoke this curse? Go, bid her come,
Before my words are chronicled in Heaven.
(_Exit_ LUCRETIA.)
I do not feel as if I were a man,
But like a fiend appointed to chastise
The offences of some unremembered world.
My blood is running up and down my veins;
A fearful pleasure makes it prick and tingle:
I feel a giddy sickness of strange awe;
My heart is beating with an expectation
Of horrid joy."
_Ohe! jam satis est!!_--The _minutiae_ of this _affectionate_ parent's
curses forcibly remind us of the equally minute excommunication so
admirably recorded in Tristram Shandy. But Sterne has the start of him;
for though Percy Bysshe Shell[e]y, Esquire, has contrived to include in
the imprecations of Cenci, the eyes, head, lips, and limbs of his
daughter, the other has anticipated his measures, in formally and
specifically anathematizing the lights, lungs, liver, and _all odd
joints_, without excepting even the great toe of his victim.--To proceed
in our review; the dying expostulations of poor Beatrice, are beautiful
and affecting, though occasionally tinged with the Cockney style of
burlesque; for instance, Bernado asks, when they tear him from the
embraces of his sister,
"Would ye divide body from soul?"
On which the judge sturdily replies--"That is the headsman's business."
The idea of approaching execution paralyses the soul of Beatrice, and
she thus frantically expresses her horror.
"_Beatr._ (_Wildly_) Oh,
My God! Can it be possible I have
To die so suddenly? So young to go
Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground!
To be nailed down into a narrow place;
To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again
Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost.
How fearful! to be nothing! Or to be--
What? O, where am I? Let me not go mad!
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!
If all things then should be--my father's spirit
His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!
If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,
Even the form which tortured me on earth,
Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles, he should come
And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix
His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!"
The author, in his preface, observes that he has committed only one
plagiarism in his play. But with all the triumph of vanity, we here
stoutly convict him of having wilfully, maliciously and despitefully
stolen, the pleasing idea of the repetition of "down, down, down," from
the equally pathetic and instructive ditty of "up, up, up," in Tom
Thumb; the exordium or prolegomena to which floweth _sweetly_ and
_poetically_ thus:--
"Here we go up, up, up,
And here we go _down, down, down_!"
In taking leave of Mr. Shelley, we have a few observations to whisper in
his ear. That he has the seedlings of poetry in his composition no one
can deny, after the perusal of many of our extracts; that he employs
them worthily, is more than can be advanced. His style, though disgraced
by occasional puerilities, and simpering affectations, is in general
bold, vigorous, and manly; but the disgraceful fault to which we object
in his writings, is the scorn he every where evinces for all that is
moral or religious. If he must be skeptical--if he must be lax in his
human codes of excellence, let him be so; but in God's name let him not
publish his principles, and cram them down the throats of others.
Existence in its present state is heavy enough; and if we take away the
idea of eternal happiness, however visionary it may appear to some, who
or what is to recompence us for the loss we have sustained? Will
scepticism lighten the bed of death?--Will vice soothe the pillow of
declining age? If so! let us all be sceptics, let us all be vicious; but
until their admirable efficacy is proved, let us jog on the beaten
course of life, neither influenced by the scoff of infidelity, nor
fascinated by the dazzling but flimsy garb of licentiousness and
immorality.--_The London Magazine_.
ADONAIS. _An Elegy, on the Death of Mr. John Keats_. By P.B. Shelley.
We have already given some of our columns to this writer's merits, and
we will not now repeat our convictions of his incurable absurdity. On
the last occasion of our alluding to him, we were compelled to notice
his horrid licentiousness and profaneness, his fearful offences to all
the maxims that honorable minds are in the habit of respecting, and his
plain defiance of Christianity. On the present occasion we are not met
by so continued and regular a determination of insult, though there are
atrocities to be found in the poem quite enough to make us caution our
readers against its pages. Adonais is an elegy after _the manner of
Moschus_, on a foolish young man, who, after writing some volumes of
very weak, and, in the greater part, of very indecent poetry, died some
time since of a consumption: the breaking down of an infirm constitution
having, in all probability, been accelerated by the discarding his neck
cloth, a practice of the cockney poets, who look upon it as essential to
genius, inasmuch as neither Michael Angelo, Raphael or Tasso are
supposed to have worn those antispiritual incumbrances. In short, as the
vigour of Sampson lay in his hair, the secret of talent with these
persons lies in the neck; and what aspirations can be expected from a
mind enveloped in muslin. Keats caught cold in training for a genius,
and, after a lingering illness, died, to the great loss of the
Independents of South America, whom he had intended to visit with an
English epic poem, for the purpose of exciting them to liberty. But
death, even the death of the radically presumptuous profligate, is a
serious thing; and as we believe that Keats was made presumptuous
chiefly by the treacherous puffing of his cockney fellow gossips, and
profligate in his poems merely to make them saleable, we regret that he
did not live long enough to acquire common sense, and abjure the
pestilent and perfidious gang who betrayed his weakness to the grave,
and are now panegyrising his memory into contempt. For what is the
praise of cockneys but disgrace, or what honourable inscription can be
placed over the dead by the hands of notorious libellers, exiled
adulterers, and avowed atheists.
Adonais, an Elegy, is the form in which Mr. Shelley puts forth his woes.
We give a verse at random, premising that there is no story in the
elegy, and that it consists of fifty-five stanzas, which are, to our
seeming, altogether unconnected, interjectional, and nonsensical. We
give one that we think among the more comprehensible. An address to
Urania:--
"Most musical of mourners, weep anew!
Not all to that bright station dared to climb;
And _happier they their happiness who knew_,
Whose _tapers yet burn thro' that night of time
In which suns perish'd_; Others more sublime,
Struck by the _envious_ wroth of man or GOD!!
_Have sunk extinct in their refulgent prime_;
And some yet live," &c.----
Now what is the meaning of this, or of any sentence of it, except indeed
that horrid blasphemy which attributes crime to the Great Author of all
virtue! The rest is mere empty absurdity. If it were worth our while to
dilate on the folly of the production, we might find examples of every
species of the ridiculous within those few pages.
Mr. Shelley summons all kinds of visions round the grave of this young
man, who, if he has now any feeling of the earth, must shrink with
shame and disgust from the touch of the hand that could have written
that impious sentence. These he classifies under names, the greater
number as new we believe to poetry as strange to common sense. Those
are--
----"Desires and _Adorations_
Winged _Persuasions_ and veiled Destinies,
_Splendours_, and _Glooms_, and glimmering _Incarnations_
Of hopes and fears and twilight Phantasies,
And Sorrow with her family of _Sighs_,
And Pleasure, _blind with tears_! led by the _gleam_
Of her own _dying_ SMILE instead of eyes!!"
Let our readers try to imagine these weepers, and close with "_blind_
Pleasure led," by what? "by the _light_ of _her own dying
smile_--instead of _eyes_!!!"
We give some specimens of Mr. S.'s
_Nonsense--pastoral._
"_Lost Echo_ sits amid the _voiceless mountains_,[M]
And feeds her grief with his remember'd lay,
_And will no more reply_ to winds and fountains."
_Nonsense--physical._
--"for whose disdain she (Echo) pin'd away
Into a _shadow_ of all _sounds_!"
_Nonsense--vermicular._
"Flowers springing from the corpse
----------------------illumine death
And _mock_ the _merry_ worm that wakes beneath."
_Nonsense--pathetic._
"Alas! that all we lov'd of him should be
But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And _grief itself be mortal_! WOE IS ME!"
_Nonsense--nondescript._
"In the death chamber for a moment Death,
_Blush'd to annihilation_!"
_Nonsense--personal._
"A pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift--
A love in _desolation mask'd_;--a Power
Girt _round with weakness_;--it can scarce _uplift_
The _weight_ of the _superincumbent hour_!"
We have some idea that this fragment of character is intended for Mr.
Shelley himself. It closes with a passage of memorable and ferocious
blasphemy:--
---------------"He with a sudden hand
Made bare his branded and ensanguin'd brow,
Which was like Cain's or CHRIST'S!!!"
What can be said to the wretched person capable of this daring
profanation. The name of the first murderer--the accurst of God--brought
into the same aspect image with that of the Saviour of the World! We are
scarcely satisfied that even to quote such passages may not be criminal.
The subject is too repulsive for us to proceed even in expressing our
disgust for the general folly that makes the Poem as miserable in point
of authorship, as in point of principle. We know that among a certain
class this outrage and this inanity meet with some attempt at
palliation, under the idea that frenzy holds the pen. That any man who
insults the common order of society, and denies the being of God, is
essentially mad we never doubted. But for the madness, that retains
enough of rationality to be wilfully mischievous, we can have no more
lenity than for the appetites of a wild beast. The poetry of the work is
_contemptible_--a mere collection of bloated words heaped on each other
without order, harmony, or meaning; the refuse of a schoolboy's
common-place book, full of the vulgarisms of pastoral poetry, yellow
gems and blue stars, bright Phoebus and rosy-fingered Aurora; and of
this stuff is Keats's wretched Elegy compiled.
We might add instances of like incomprehensible folly from every stanza.
A heart _keeping_, a mute _sleep_, and death _feeding_ on a mute
_voice_, occur in one verse (page 8); Spring in despair "throws down her
_kindling_ buds as if she Autumn were," a thing we never knew Autumn do
with buds of any sort, the kindling kind being unknown to our botany; a
_green lizard_ is like an _unimprisoned flame_, _waking_ out of its
_trance_ (page 13). In the same page the _leprous corpse_ touched by the
tender spirit of Spring, so as to exhale itself in flowers, is compared
to "_incarnations of the stars, when splendour is changed to
fragrance_!!!" Urania (page 15) _wounds_ the "invisible palms" of her
tender feet by treading on human hearts as she journeys to see the
corpse. Page 22, somebody is asked to "clasp with panting soul the
pendulous earth," an image which, we take it, exceeds that of
Shakespeare, to "put a girdle about it in forty minutes."
It is so far a fortunate thing that this piece of impious and utter
absurdity can have little circulation in Britain. The copy in our hands
is one of some score sent to the Author's intimates from Pisa, where it
has been printed in a quarto form "with the types of Didot," and two
learned Epigraphs from Plato and Moschus. Solemn as the subject is, (for
in truth we must grieve for the early death of any youth of literary
ambition,) it is hardly possible to help laughing at the mock solemnity
with which Shelley charges the Quarterly Review for having murdered his
friend with--a critique![N] If criticism killed the disciples of that
school, Shelley would not have been alive to write an Elegy on
another:--but the whole is most farcical from a pen which on other
occasions, has treated of the soul, the body, life and death agreeably
to the opinions, the principles, and the practice of Percy Bysshe
Shelley.--_The Literary Gazette_.
[Footnote M: Though there is _no Echo_ and the mountains are
_voiceless_, the woodmen, nevertheless, in the last line of this verse
hear "a drear murmur between their Songs!!"]
[Footnote N: This would have done excellently for a coroner's inquest
like that on _Honey_, which lasted _thirty_ days, and was facetiously
called the "Honey-moon."]
JOHN KEATS
_Endymion: A Poetic Romance_. By John Keats. London. 1818. pp. 207.
Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which
they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate
the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his
work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty--far from it--indeed, we
have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to
be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance,
we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond
the first of the four books of which this Poetic Romance consists. We
should extremely lament this want of energy, or whatever it may be, on
our parts, were it not for one consolation--namely, that we are no
better acquainted with the meaning of the book through which we have so
painfully toiled, than we are with that of the three which we have not
looked into.
It is not that Mr. Keats, (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt
that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody,)
it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of
fancy, and gleams of genius--he has all these; but he is unhappily a
disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called Cockney
poetry; which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in
the most uncouth language.
Of this school, Mr. Leigh Hunt, as we observed in a former Number,
aspires to be the hierophant. Our readers will recollect the pleasant
recipes for harmonious and sublime poetry which he gave us in his
preface to 'Rimini,' and the still more facetious instances of his
harmony and sublimity in the verses themselves; and they will recollect
above all the contempt of Pope, Johnson, and such like poetasters and
pseudo-critics, which so forcibly contrasted itself with Mr. Leigh
Hunt's self-complacent approbation of
--'all the things itself had wrote,
Of special merit though of little note.'
This author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt; but he is more unintelligible,
almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and
absurd than his prototype, who, though he impudently presumed to seat
himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his
own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats has advanced no
dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense therefore
is quite gratuitous; he writes it for its own sake, and, being bitten by
Mr. Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his
poetry.
Mr. Keats's preface hints that his poem was produced under peculiar
circumstances.
'Knowing within myself (he says) the manner in which this Poem has
been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it
public.--What manner I mean, will be _quite clear_ to the reader,
who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every
error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed
accomplished.'--_Preface_, p. vii.
We humbly beg his pardon, but this does not appear to us to be _quite so
clear_--we really do not know what he means--but the next passage is
more intelligible.
'The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible are
not of such completion as to warrant their passing the
press.'--_Preface_, p. vii.
Thus 'the two first books' are, even in his own judgment, unfit to
appear, and 'the two last' are, it seems, in the same condition--and as
two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have
a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work.
Mr. Keats, however, deprecates criticism on this 'immature and feverish
work' in terms which are themselves sufficiently feverish; and we
confess that we should have abstained from inflicting upon him any of
the tortures of the '_fierce hell_' of criticism, which terrify his
imagination, if he had not begged to be spared in order that he might
write more; if we had not observed in him a certain degree of talent
which deserves to be put in the right way, or which, at least, ought to
be warned of the wrong; and if, finally, he had not told us that he is
of an age and temper which imperiously require mental discipline.
Of the story we have been able to make out but little; it seems to be
mythological, and probably relates to the loves of Diana and Endymion;
but of this, as the scope of the work has altogether escaped us, we
cannot speak with any degree of certainty; and must therefore content
ourselves with giving some instances of its diction and
versification:--and here again we are perplexed and puzzled.--At first
it appeared to us, that Mr. Keats had been amusing himself and wearying
his readers with an immeasurable game at _bouts-rimes_; but, if we
recollect rightly, it is an indispensable condition at this play, that
the rhymes when filled up shall have a meaning; and our author, as we
have already hinted, has no meaning. He seems to us to write a line at
random, and then he follows not the thought excited by this line, but
that suggested by the _rhyme_ with which it concludes. There is hardly
a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book. He
wanders from one subject to another, from the association, not of the
ideas but of sounds, and the work is composed of hemistichs which, it is
quite evident, have forced themselves upon the author by the mere force
of the catchwords on which they turn.
We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least
liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem.
----'Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead; &c. &c.'--pp. 3, 4.
Here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, _moon_ produces the
simple sheep and their shady _boon_, and that 'the _dooms_ of the mighty
dead' would never have intruded themselves but for the '_fair musk-rose
blooms_.'
Again.
'For 'twas the morn: Apollo's upward fire
Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre
Of brightness so unsullied, that therein
A melancholy spirit well might win
Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine
Into the winds: rain-scented eglantine
Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun;
The lark was lost in him; cold springs had run
To warm their chilliest bubbles in the grass;
Man's voice was on the mountains; and the mass
Of nature's lives and wonders puls'd tenfold,
To feel this sun-rise and its glories old.'--p. 8.
Here Apollo's _fire_ produces a _pyre_, a silvery pyre of clouds,
_wherein_ a spirit may _win_ oblivion and melt his essence _fine_, and
scented _eglantine_ gives sweets to the _sun_, and cold springs had
_run_ into the _grass_, and then the pulse of the _mass_ pulsed
_tenfold_ to feel the glories _old_ of the new-born day, &c.
One example more.
'Be still the unimaginable lodge
For solitary thinkings; such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven,
Then leave the naked brain: be still the leaven,
That spreading in this dull and clodded earth
Gives it a touch ethereal--a new birth.'--p. 17.
_Lodge, dodge_--_heaven, leaven_--_earth, birth_; such, in six words, is
the sum and substance of six lines.
We come now to the author's taste in versification. He cannot indeed
write a sentence, but perhaps he may be able to spin a line. Let us see.
The following are specimens of his prosodial notions of our English
heroic metre.
'Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite.'--p. 4.
'So plenteously all weed-hidden roots.'--p. 6.
'Of some strange history, potent to send.'--p. 18.
'Before the deep intoxication.'--p. 27.
'Her scarf into a fluttering pavilion.'--p. 33.
'The stubborn canvass for my voyage prepared--.'--p. 39.
'"Endymion! the cave is secreter
Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir
No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise
Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys
And trembles through my labyrinthine hair."'--p. 48.
By this time our readers must be pretty well satisfied as to the meaning
of his sentences and the structure of his lines: we now present them
with some of the new words with which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh Hunt,
he adorns our language.
We are told that 'turtles _passion_ their voices,' (p. 15); that 'an
arbour was _nested_,' (p. 23); and a lady's locks '_gordian'd_ up,' (p.
32); and to supply the place of the nouns thus verbalized Mr. Keats,
with great fecundity, spawns new ones; such as 'men-slugs and human
_serpentry_,' (p. 41); the '_honey-feel_ of bliss,' (p. 45); 'wives
prepare _needments_,' (p. 13)--and so forth.
Then he has formed new verbs by the process of cutting off their natural
tails, the adverbs, and affixing them to their foreheads; thus, 'the
wine out-sparkled,' (p. 10); the 'multitude up-followed,' (p. 11); and
'night up-took,' (p. 29). 'The wind up-blows,' (p. 32); and the 'hours
are down-sunken,' (p. 36.)
But if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he compensates the language
with adverbs and adjectives which he separates from the parent stock.
Thus, a lady 'whispers _pantingly_ and close,' makes '_hushing_ signs,'
and steers her skiff into a '_ripply_ cove,' (p. 23); a shower falls
'_refreshfully_,' (45); and a vulture has a '_spreaded_ tail,' (p. 44.)
But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte.--If any one should
be bold enough to purchase this 'Poetic Romance,' and so much more
patient, than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much
more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us
acquainted with his success; we shall then return to the task which we
now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to Mr.
Keats and to our readers.--_The Quarterly Review_.
COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY.
No[.] IV.
------------------------------OF KEATS,
THE MUSES' SON OF PROMISE, AND WHAT FEATS
HE YET MAY DO, &C.
CORNELIUS WEBB.