Tacitus, in one of his epistles, that the diffuse style was better than
the concise. ‘Such a one,’ says he, ‘aims at the throat of his
adversary: now I like to strike him wherever I can.’ I may be thought
guilty of a like piece of officiousness in the remarks here offered on
several of the most prominent of our parliamentary speakers. In general,
to suggest advice, or hazard criticism, is to recommend it to others to
do something, which we know they either will not or cannot do: or it is
to desire them either to please us, or do nothing. The present article
may be considered as a marginal note or explanatory addition to a former
one, on nearly the same subject—like one of Lord Castlereagh’s long
parentheses: but I hope there will be more in it. It is a subject of
which I wish to make clear work as I go; for it is one to which, if I
can once get rid of it, I am not likely to recur.
The haughty tone of invective which I have already ascribed to Lord
Chatham, was very different from that didactic style of parliamentary
oratory which has since been imported from northern colleges and
lecture-rooms. Of this school Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Brougham may
be reckoned at the head.
This method consists, not so much in taking a side, as in stating a
question. The speaker takes upon him to be the judge rather than the
advocate; and if he had the authority of a judge, or could direct the
decision, as well as sum up the evidence, it would be all very well. An
orator of this stamp does not seat himself on the Opposition side of the
House to urge or to reply to particular points, but in a Professor’s
chair of Humanity, to read a lecture to the tyros of the Treasury-Bench,
on the elementary principles and all the possible bearings, the
objections and answers, the difficulties and the solutions of every
question in philosophy, jurisprudence, politics, and political
economy,—on war, peace, ‘domestic treason, foreign levy,’ colonial
produce, copy-right of authors, prison discipline, the hulks, the
corn-bill, the penitentiary, prostitutes, and pick-pockets. Nothing
comes amiss to him that can puzzle himself or _pose_ his hearers; and he
lets out all his knowledge indiscriminately, whether it makes for or
against him, with deliberate impartiality and scrupulous exactness. Such
persons might be called _Orators of the Human Mind_. They are a little
out of their place, it must be owned, in the House of Commons. The
object there is—not to put the majority in possession of the common
grounds of judging, as in a class of students—(these are taken for
granted as already known)—but to carry a point, to gain a verdict for
yourself or for truth, by throwing the weight of eloquence and argument
into the scale against interest, prejudice, or sophistry. There are
retainers enough on the other side to manage for the crown, who are
ready to take all advantages without your volunteering to place yourself
in their power, or to put excuses in their mouths, to help them out at a
dead-lift. If they were candid, if they were disinterested, if they were
not hostilely disposed, it might be a feasible scheme to consider a
debate as an amicable communication of doubts and lights, as a
comparison of strength or a confession of weakness: but why hint a
doubt, or start a difficulty needlessly in your own path, which will be
eagerly caught at, and made use of in the most insulting manner to
defeat a host of real proofs, and overturn the most legitimate
conclusions? Why tamper with your own cause? Why play at fast and loose
with your object? Why restore the weapons into your enemies’ hands,
which you have just wrested from them? Why ‘make a wanton’ of the First
Minister of State? It is either vanity, weakness, or indifference to do
so. You might as well in confidence tell an adversary where you meant to
strike him, point out to him your own weak sides, or wait in courtesy
for the blow. Gamesters do not show one another their hands: neither
should politicians, who understand what they are about—that is, knaves
_will_ not, and honest men _ought_ not. Others will find out the rotten
parts of a question: do you stick to the sound—knowledge is said to be
power: but knowledge, applied as we have seen it, neutralises itself.
Mere knowledge, to be effectual, must act _in vacuo_: but the House of
Commons is by no means a vacuum, and empty receiver for abstract truth
and airy speculation. There is the resistance, the refrangibility of
dense prejudice and crooked policy: you must concentrate, you must
enforce, you must urge to glowing sympathy: and enthusiasm, zeal,
perfect conviction on your part, is the only principle that can be
brought into play against the cool calculations or gross incentives of
selfishness and servility on the opposite side. A middle line of conduct
does not excite respect, but contempt. They do not think you sincere,
but lukewarm. They give you credit for affectation or timidity, but none
for heartiness in a cause, or fidelity to a party. They have more hopes
of you than fears. By everlasting subtle distinctions, and hesitating,
qualified, retracting dissent from measures you would be thought most to
reprobate, you do more harm than good. In theory there are infinite
shades of difference, but in practice the question must be decided one
way or other: either the Ayes or the Noes must have it. In all such
cases, those who are not for us are against us. In political
controversy, as in a battle, there are but two sides to chuse between;
and those who create a diversion in favour of established abuses by
setting up a third, fanciful, impracticable standard of perfection of
their own, in the most critical circumstances, betray the cause they
pretend to espouse with such overweening delicacy. For my own part, I
hate a fellow who picks a hole in his own coat, who finds a flaw in his
own argument, who treats his enemies as if they might become friends, or
his friends as if they might become enemies. I hate your shuffling,
_shilly-shally_ proceedings, and diagonal sidelong movements between
right and wrong. Fling yourself into the gap at once—either into the
arms, or at the heads of Ministers!
I remember hearing, with some pain and uneasiness, Sir James
Mackintosh’s maiden speech on the Genoa business. It was a great, but
ineffectual effort. The mass of information, of ingenuity, and
reasoning, was very prodigious; but the whole was misdirected, no
impression whatever was made. It was like an inaugural dissertation on
the general principles of ethics, on the laws of nature and nations, on
ancient and modern history—a laboured treatise _de omnibus rebus et
quibusdam aliis_. There were all the rules of moral arithmetic, all the
items in a profligate political account; but the bill was not properly
cast up, the case was not distinctly made out, the counsel got no
damages for his client. Nothing was gained by this motion, nor could
there be. When he had brought his heaviest artillery to bear with
probable success upon a certain point, he stopped short like a
scientific demonstrator (not like a skilful engineer) to show how it
might be turned against himself. When he had wound up the charge of
treachery or oppression to a climax, he gratuitously suggested a
possible plea of necessity, accident, or some other topic, to break the
force of his inference; or he anticipated the answers that might be made
to it, as if he was afraid he should not be thought to know all that
could be said on both sides of the question. This enlarged knowledge of
good and evil may be very necessary to a philosopher, but it is very
prejudicial to an orator. No man can play the whole game in this manner,
blow hot and cold in a breath, or take an entire debate into his own
hands, and wield it in which way he pleases. He will find his own load
enough for his own shoulders to bear. The exceptions if you chuse to go
into them, multiply faster than the rules: the various complications of
the subject distract, instead of convincing: you do your adversary’s
work for him; the battle is lost without a blow being struck; and a
speech of this sceptical kind requires and receives no answer. It falls
by its own weight, and buries any body but the Minister under its
ruins—or it is left, not a triumphal arch, but a splendid mausoleum of
the learning, genius, and eloquence of the speaker.—The Cock-pit of St.
Stephen’s does not relish this scholastic refinement, this method of
holding an argument with a man’s self: a little bear-garden,
cut-and-thrust work would be much better understood. Sir James has of
late improved his tact and knowledge of the House. He has taken up Sir
Samuel Romilly’s department of questions relating to the amelioration of
the penal code and general humanity, and I have no doubt Government will
leave him in quiet possession of it. They concede these sort of
questions as an amiable diversion, or friendly _bonus_, to the
indefatigable spirit of Opposition.
Mr. Brougham is, I conceive, another instance of this analytical style
of debating, which ‘plays round the head, but does not reach the heart.’
There is a want of warmth, of _momentum_, of impulse in his speeches. He
loses himself in an infinity of details, as his learned and honourable
friend does in a wide sea of speculation. He goes picking up a number of
curious pebbles on the shore, and at the outlets of a question—but he
does not ‘roll all his strength and all his sharpness up into one ball,’
to throw at and crush his enemies beneath his feet. He enters into
statistics, he calls for documents, he examines accounts. This method is
slow, perplexing, circuitous, and not sure. While the evidence is
collecting, the question is lost. While one thing is substantiating,
another goes out of your mind. These little detached multifarious
particulars, which require such industry and sagacity in the speaker to
bring them forward, have no clue in the minds of the hearers to connect
them together. There is no substratum of prejudice, no cement of
interest. They do not grow out of the soil of common feeling and
experience, but are set in it; nor do they bear the fruits of
conviction. Mr. Brougham can follow the ramifications of an intricate
subject, but he is not so well acquainted with the springs of the human
mind. He finds himself at the end of his speech,—in the last sentence of
it,—just where he was at the beginning, or in any other given part of
it. He has not acquired any additional _impetus_, is not projected
forward with any new degree of warmth or vigour. He was cold, correct,
smart, pointed at first, and he continues so still. A repetition of
blows, however, is of no use, unless they are struck in the same place:
a change of position is not progression. As Sir James Mackintosh’s
speeches are a decomposition of the moral principles of society, so Mr.
Brougham’s are an ingenious taking in pieces of its physical mechanism.
While they are at work with their experiments, their antagonists are
putting in motion the passions, the fears, and antipathies of mankind,
and blowing their schemes of reform above the moon.
Talent alone, then, is not sufficient to support a successful
Opposition. There is talent on the other side too, of some sort or
other; and, in addition, there is another weight, that of influence,
which requires a counterpoise. This can be nothing else but fixed
principle, but naked honesty, but undisguised enthusiasm. That is the
expansive force that must shatter the strongholds of corruption if ever
they are shattered, that must make them totter, if ever they are made to
totter, about the heads of their possessors. Desire to expose a
ministry, and you will do it—if it be, like ours, vulnerable all over.
Desire to make a display of yourself, and you will do it, if you have a
decent stock of acquirements. Mr. Brougham has a great quantity of
combustible materials constantly passing through his hands, but he has
not the warmth in his own heart to ‘kindle them into a flame of sacred
vehemence.’ He is not a good hater. He is not an impassioned lover of
the popular cause. He is not a Radical orator: he is not a Back-bone
debater. He wants nerve, he wants impetuosity. He may divide on a
question, but he will never carry it. His circumspection, which he
thinks his strength, is in reality his weakness. He makes paltry
excuses, unmanly concessions. His political warfare is not a _bellum
internecinum_. He commits no mortal offences. He has not yet cut off his
retreat. In a word, he trims too much between all parties. A person who
does this too long, loses the confidence, loses the cordiality of all
parties; loses his character; and when he has once lost that, there is
nothing to stand in his way to office and the first honours of the
State!
He who is not indifferent himself will find out, from his own feelings,
what it is that interests others in a cause. An honest man is an orator
by nature. The late Mr. Whitbread was an honest man, and a true
parliamentary speaker. He had no artifices, no tricks, no reserve about
him. He spoke point-blank what he thought, and his heart was in his
broad, honest, English face. He had as much activity of mind as Mr.
Brougham, and paid the same attention to business as that gentleman
does; but it was with him a matter of feeling, and had nothing of a
professional look. His objects were open and direct; and he had a
sufficient stock of natural good sense and practical information, not to
be made the dupe of sophistry and chicane. He was always in his place,
and ready to do his duty. If a falsehood was stated, he contradicted it
instantly in a few plain words: if an act of injustice was palliated, it
excited his contempt; if it was justified, it roused his indignation: he
retorted a mean insinuation with manly spirit, and never shrunk from a
frank avowal of his sentiments. He presented a petition or complaint
against some particular grievance better than any one else I ever saw.
His manner seemed neither to implicate him in the truth of the charge,
nor to signify a wish to disclaim it beforehand. He was merely the organ
through which any alleged abuse of power might meet the public ear, and
he either answered or redressed, according to the merits of the case
upon inquiry. In short, he was the representative of the spontaneous,
unsophisticated sense of the English people on public men and public
measures. Any plain, well-meaning man, on hearing him speak, would say,
‘That is just what I think’; or from observing his manner, would say,
‘That is just what I feel.’ He was not otherwise a powerful debater or
an accomplished speaker. He could not master a general view of any
subject, or get up a set speech with effect. One or two that I heard him
make (particularly one on the Princess of Wales and the situation of her
affairs in 1813, in which he grew pathetic) were complete failures. He
could pull down better than he could build up. The irritation of
constant contradiction was necessary to his full possession of
himself:—give him ‘ample scope and verge enough,’ and he lost his way.
He stuck close to the skirts of Ministry, but he was not qualified to
originate or bring to a triumphant conclusion any great political
movement. His enthusiasm ran away with his judgment, and was not
_backed_ by equal powers of reasoning or imagination. He was a sanguine,
high-spirited man, but not a man of genius, or a deep thinker; and his
fortitude failed him, when the last fatal blow was given to himself and
his party. He could not have drawn up so able a political statement as
Mr. Brougham; but he would have more personal adherents in the House of
Commons, for he was himself the adherent of a cause.
Mr. Tierney is certainly a better speaker and a cleverer man. But he can
never make a leader for want of earnestness. He has no Quixotic
enthusiasm in himself; much less any to spare for his followers. He
cares nothing (or seems to care nothing) about a question; but he is
impatient of absurdity, and has a thorough contempt for the
understandings of his opponents. Sharpened by his spleen, nothing
escapes his acuteness. He makes fine sport for the spectators. He takes
up Lord Castlereagh’s blunders, and Mr. Vansittart’s no-meanings; and
retorts them on their heads in the finest style of execution imaginable.
It is like being present on a Shrove-Tuesday, and seeing a set of
mischievous unfeeling boys throwing at a brace of cocks, and breaking
their shins. Mr. Tierney always brings down his man: but beyond this you
feel no confidence in him; you take no interest in his movements but as
he is instrumental in annoying other people. He (to all appearance) has
no great point to carry himself, and no wish to be thought to have any
important principle at stake. He is by much too sincere for a hypocrite,
but is not enough in earnest for a parliamentary leader. For others to
sympathise with you, you must first sympathise with them. When Mr.
Whitbread got up to speak, you felt an interest in what he was going to
say, in the success of his arguments: when you hear that Mr. Tierney is
on his legs, you feel that you shall be amused with an admirable display
of dexterity and talent, but are nearly indifferent as to the result.
You look on as at an exhibition of extraordinary skill in fencing or
prize-fighting.
Of all those who have for some years past aspired by turns to be leaders
of the Opposition, Mr. Ponsonby was the person who had the fewest
pretensions. He was a literal arguer. He affected great sagacity and
judgment, and referred every thing, in a summary way, to the principles
of common sense, and the reason of the case. He abounded in truisms,
which seldom go far in deciding disputable points. He generally reduced
the whole range of the debate into the narrow compass of a self-evident
proposition:—to make sure of his object, he began by taking the question
for granted, and necessarily failed when he came to the particular
application. He was not aware of the maxim, that he who proves too much,
proves nothing. His turn of observation was legal, not acute: his manner
was dry, but his blows were not hard: his features were flat on his
face, and his arguments did not stand out from the question. He might
have been a tolerable special-pleader, but he was a bad orator, and, I
think, a worse politician. Any one who argues on strict logical grounds
must be prepared to go all lengths, or he will be sure to be defeated at
every step he takes: but the gentleman’s principles were of a very
cautious and temporising cast. I have seen him, more than once, give
himself great airs over those who took more general views of the
subject; and he was very fastidious in the choice of associates, with
whom he would condescend to act.
Mr. Ponsonby’s style of speaking was neither instructive nor
entertaining. In this respect, it was the reverse of Mr. Grattan’s,
which was both. To see the latter make one of his promised motions on
Catholic Emancipation, was one of the most extraordinary exhibitions,
both bodily and mental, which could possibly be witnessed. You saw a
little oddly-compacted figure of a man, with a large head and
features,—such as they give to pasteboard masks, or stick upon the
shoulders of Punch in the puppet-show,—rolling about like a
Mandarin—sawing the air with his whole body from head to foot, sweeping
the floor with a roll of parchment, which he held in one hand, and
throwing his legs and arms about like the branches of trees tossed by
the wind:—every now and then striking the table with impatient
vehemence, and, in a sharp, slow, nasal, gutteral tone, drawling out,
with due emphasis and discretion, a set of little smart antithetical
sentences,—all ready-cut and dry, polished and pointed;—that seemed as
if they ‘would lengthen out in succession to the crack of doom.’
Alliterations were tacked to alliterations,—inference was dove-tailed
into inference,—and the whole derived new brilliance and piquancy from
the contrast it presented to the uncouthness of the speaker, and the
monotony of his delivery. His were compositions that would have done
equally well to be said or sung. The rhyme was placed at the beginning
instead of the end of each line; he sharpened the sense on the sound,
and clenched an argument by corresponding letters of the alphabet. It
must be confessed, that there was something meretricious, as well as
alluring, in this style. After the first surprise and startling effect
is over, and the devoted champion of his country’s cause goes on ringing
the changes on ‘the Irish People and the Irish Parliament’—on ‘the
Guinea and the Gallows,’ as the ultimate resources of the English
government,—on ‘ministerial mismanagement, and privileged
profligacy,’—we begin to feel that there is nothing in these quaint and
affected verbal coincidences more nearly allied to truth than
falsehood:—there is a want of directness and simplicity in this warped
and garbled style; and our attention is drawn off from the importance of
the subject by a shower of epigrammatic conceits, and fanciful
phraseology, in which the orator chuses to veil it. It is hardly enough
to say, in defence of this jingle of words, (as well as of the
overstrained hyperbolical tone of declamation which accompanies it) that
‘it is a custom of Ireland.’[55] The same objection may be made to it in
point of taste that has been made to the old-fashioned, obsolete
practice of cutting trees into the shape of arm-chairs and peacocks, or
to that style of landscape-gardening, where
‘Grove nods to grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other—’
and I am afraid that this objection cannot be got over, at least, on
this side the water.[56]
The best Irish speaker I ever heard (indeed the best speaker without any
exception whatever) is Mr. Plunkett; who followed Mr. Grattan in one of
the debates on the Catholic question above alluded to. The contrast was
not a little striking; and it was certainly in favour of Mr. Plunkett.
His style of workmanship was more manly and more masterly. There were no
little Gothic ornaments or fantastic excrescences to catch and break the
attention: no quaintness, witticism, or conceit. Roubilliac, after being
abroad, said, that ‘what he had seen there made his own work in
Westminster Abbey look like tobacco-pipes.’ You had something of the
same sort of feeling with respect to Mr. Grattan’s artificial and
frittered style, after hearing Mr. Plunkett’s defence of the same side
of the question. He went strait forward to his end with a force equal to
his rapidity. He removed all obstacles, as he advanced. He overturned
Mr. Banks with his right hand, and Mr. Charles Yorke with his left—the
one on a chronological question of the Concordat, and the other as to
the origin of the Corporation and Test Acts. One wonders how they ever
got up again, or trusted themselves on a ground of matter-of-fact ever
after. Mr. Secretary Peele did not offer to put himself in his way. No
part of the subject could come amiss to him—history, law, constitutional
principle, common feeling, local prejudices, general theory,—all was
alike within his reach and his controul. Having settled one point, he
passed on to another, carrying his hearers with him:—it was as if he
knew all that could be said on the question, and was anxious to impart
his knowledge without any desire of shining. There was no affectation,
no effort, but equal ease and earnestness. Every thing was brought to
bear that could answer his purpose, and there was nothing superfluous.
His eloquence swept along like a river,
‘Without o’erflowing, full.’
Every step told: every sentence went to account. I cannot say that there
was any thing very profound or original in argument, imposing in
imagination, or impassioned in sentiment, in any part of this
address—but it was throughout impregnated with as much thought,
imagination and passion as the House would be likely to understand or
sympathise with. It acted like a loadstone to the feelings of the House;
and the speaker raised their enthusiasm, and carried their convictions
as far as he wished, or as it was practicable. The effect was
extraordinary: the impression grew stronger from first to last. No one
stirred the whole time, and, at the end, the lobbies were crowded with
members going up stairs and saying, ‘Well, this is a speech worth going
without one’s dinner to hear,’ (Oh, unequivocal testimony of applause!)
‘there has been nothing like this since the time of Fox,’ etc. For
myself, I never heard any other speech that I would have given three
farthings to have made. It did not make the same figure in the
newspapers the next day; for it was but indifferently reported, owing to
the extreme fluency with which it was delivered. There was no boggling,
no straggling, irrelevant matter;—you could not wait for him at the end
of a long parenthesis, and go on with your report as if nothing had
happened in the interval, as is sometimes the case,[57]—and besides, for
the reason above given, it was a speech better calculated to strike in
the hearing than the perusal; for though it was fully up to the tone of
the House, the public mind can bear stronger meats. Another such speech
would have decided the question, and made the difference of four votes
by which it was lost. While the impression was fresh in the mind, it was
not easy for any one, pretending to honesty, to look his neighbour in
the face and vote against the motion. But Mr. Plunkett, in the mean
time, sailed for Ireland. Any one who can speak as he can, and is a
friend to his own, or any other country, ought not to let the present
men retain their seats six months longer. Nothing but the will is
wanting.—The ability, I will venture to say, is there.
And what shall I say of Lord Castlereagh—that spouter without beginning,
middle, or end—who has not an idea in his head, nor a word to say for
himself—who carries the House of Commons by his manner alone—who bows
and smiles assent and dissent—who makes a dangling proposition of his
person, and is himself a drooping figure of speech—what shall I say of
this inanimate automaton? Nothing! For what can be said of him?
‘Come then, expressive silence, muse his praise.’[58]
Neither have I any thing to say of the style of eloquence of Mr.
Alderman Wood, or Mr. Waithman, or Sir. W. Curtis—except that the latter
always appears to me a very fit and lively representative of the good
living, drinking, and eating of the city. This is but reasonable. The
bodies of the city, not their minds, should be represented. A large
turtle in the House (with a proxy to the minister) would answer the
purpose just as well.
Mr. Wilberforce is a speaker whom it is difficult to class either with
ministers or opposition. His character and his pretensions are
altogether equivocal. He is a man of some ability, and, at one time, had
considerable influence. He is what might be called ‘a sweet speaker’:
his silver voice floats and glides up and down in the air, as if it was
avoiding every occasion of offence, and dodging the question through its
various avenues of reason and interest.
——‘In many a winding bout
Of melting softness long drawn out.’
There is a finical flexibility of purpose, and a cautious curiosity of
research, that would put you in pain for him, if the want of proper
self-respect did not take away all common fellow-feeling. His stratagems
are so over-wrought that you wish them to fail: his evasions are so
slippery and yet so palpable that you laugh in his face. Mr. Wilberforce
is a man that has always two strings to his bow: as an orator, he is a
kind of lay-preacher in parliament. He is at continual _hawk and
buzzard_ between character and conscience, between popularity and court
favour, between his loyalty and his religion, between this world and the
next. Is not this something like trying to serve God and Mammon? He is
anxious to stand fair with the reflecting part of the community, without
giving umbrage to power. He is shocked at vice in low stations:
‘But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore;
Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.’
He would go with the popular cause as long as it was popular, and gave
him more weight than he lost by it; but would desert it the instant it
became obnoxious, and that an obstinate adherence to it was likely to
deprive him of future opportunities of doing good. He had rather be on
the right side than the wrong, if he loses nothing by it. His reputation
costs him nothing; though he always takes care to save appearances. His
virtues compound for his vices in a very amicable manner. His humanity
is at the horizon, three thousand miles off,—his servility stays at
home, at the beck of the minister. He unbinds the chains of Africa, and
helps (we trust without meaning it) to rivet those of his own country,
and of Europe. As a general truth,—(not meaning any undue application in
the present instance,) it may be affirmed, that there is not a more
insignificant as well as a dangerous character crawling between heaven
and earth, than that of the pretended patriot, and philanthropist, who
has not courage to take the plain reward of vice or virtue—who crouches
to authority, and yet dreads the censure of the world, who gives a
sneaking casting vote on the side of conscience only when he can do it
with impunity,—or else throws the weight of his reputation into the
scale of his interest and the profligacy of others—who makes an
affectation of principle a stalking-horse to his pitiful desire of
distinction, and betrays a cause, sooner than commit himself.
‘Out upon such half-faced fellowship.’ We have another example of
trumpery ambition in the person of Mr. C. Wynne; who, officious,
indefatigable in his petty warfare with the abuses of power, is chiefly
anxious to stand well with those who sanction them. He interprets the
text literally, _not to do evil that good may come_. He is so fearful of
the imputation of the least wrong, that he will never do or let any one
else do the greatest right. _Summum jus summa injuria_, has never
entered his head. He is the dog in the political manger: a technical
marplot. He takes a systematic delight in giving a lift to his enemies,
and in hampering his friends. He is a regular whipper-in on the side of
opposition, to all those who go but a hairs-breadth beyond his
pragmatical notions of discretion and propriety. He sets up for a
balance-master of the constitution and, by insisting on its never
deviating from its erect, perpendicular position, is sure to have it
overturned. He professes to be greatly scandalized at the abuses and
corruptions in our ancient institutions, which are ‘as notorious as the
sun at noon-day,’ and would have them removed—but he is much more
scandalized at those indiscreet persons who bring to light any of these
notorious abuses, in order to have them remedied. He is more angry at
those with whom he differs in the smallest iota than at those who differ
from him _toto cælo_: and is at mortal enmity with every antiministerial
measure that is not so clogged with imbecility and objections as to be
impracticable or absolutely unavailing. He is therefore a bad partisan,
and does little mischief, only because he is little attended to. Indeed,
his voice is against him.
I did not much like Sir Samuel Romilly’s significant, oracular way of
laying down the law in the House:—his self-important assumption of
second-hand truths, and his impatience of contradiction, as if he gave
his time there to humanity for _nothing_. He was too solemn a speaker:
as Garrow was too flippant and fluent. The latter appeared to have
nothing to do but to talk nonsense _by the yard_, for the pleasure of
exposing himself or being exposed by others. He might be said to hold in
his hand a general retainer for absurdity, and to hold his head up in
the pillory of his own folly with a very unabashed and unblushing gaiety
of demeanour. Lawyers, as a general rule, are the very worst speakers in
the House: if there are a few nominal exceptions, it is because they are
not lawyers.
I do not recollect any other speaker of importance but Mr. Canning; and
he requires a chapter by himself. Thus then I would try to estimate
him.—The orator and the writer do not always belong to the same class of
intellectual character; nor is it, I think, in general, fair to judge of
the merit of popular harangues by reducing them to the standard of
literary compositions. Something,—a great deal,—is to be given to the
suddenness of the emergency, the want of preparation, the instantaneous
and effectual, but passing appeal to individual characters, feelings,
and events. The speaker has less time allowed him to enforce his
purpose, and to procure the impression he aims at than the writer; and
he is therefore entitled to produce it by less scrupulous, by more
obvious and fugitive means. He must strike the iron while it is hot. The
blow must be prompt and decisive. He must mould the convictions and
purposes of his hearers while they are under the influence of passion
and circumstances,—as the glass-blower moulds the vitreous fluid with
his breath. If he can take the popular mind by surprise, and stamp on
it, while warm, the impression desired, it is not to be demanded whether
the same means would have been equally successful on cool reflection or
after the most mature deliberation. That is not the question at issue.
At a moment’s notice the expert debater is able to start some topic,
some view of a subject, which answers the purpose of the moment. He can
suggest a dextrous evasion of his adversaries’ objections, he knows when
to seize and take advantage of the impulse of popular feeling, he is
master of the dazzling fence of argument, ‘the punto, the stoccado, the
reverso,’ the shifts, and quirks, and palpable topics of debate; he can
wield these at pleasure, and employ them to advantage on the spur of the
occasion—this is all that can be required of him; for it is all that is
necessary, and all that he undertakes to do. That another could bring
forward more weighty reasons, offer more wholesome advice, convey more
sound and extensive information in an indefinite period, is nothing to
the purpose; for all this wisdom and knowledge would be of no avail in
the supposed circumstances; the critical opportunity for action would be
lost, before any use could be made of it. The one thing needful in
public speaking is not to say what is best, but the best that can be
said in a given time, place, and circumstance. The great qualification
therefore of a leader in debate (as of a leader in fight) is presence of
mind: he who has not this, wants every thing, and he who has it, may be
forgiven almost all other deficiencies. The current coin of his
discourses may be light and worthless in itself; but if it is always
kept bright and ready for immediate use, it will pass unquestioned; and
the public voice will affix to his name the praise of a sharp-witted,
able, fluent, and eloquent speaker. We ‘no further seek his merits to
disclose, or scan his frailties in their brief abode,’—the popular ear
and echo of popular applause. What he says may be trite, pert, shallow,
contradictory, false, unfounded, and sophistical; but it was what was
wanted for the occasion, and it told with those who heard it. Let it
stop there, and all is well. The rest is forgotten; nor is it worth
remembering.
But Mr. Canning has an ill habit of printing his speeches: and I doubt
where the same oratorical privileges can be extended to _printed_
speeches; or to this gentleman’s speeches in general, even though they
should not be printed. Whether afterwards committed to the press or not,
they have evidently, I think, been first committed, with great care, to
paper or to memory. They have all the marks, and are chargeable with all
the _malice prepense_ of written compositions. They are not occasional
effusions, but set harangues. They are elaborate _impromptus_; deeply
concerted and highly polished pieces of extempore ingenuity. The
repartee has been conceived many months before the luckless observation
which gives ostensible birth to it; and an argument woven into a debate
is sure to be the counterpart or fag-end of some worn-out sophism of
several years’ standing. Mr. Canning is not so properly an orator as an
author reciting his own compositions. He foresees (without much of the
spirit of prophecy) what will, may, or can be said on some well-conned
subject, and gets up, by anticipation, a tissue of excellent good
conceits, indifferent bad arguments, classical quotations, and showy
similes, which he contrives, by a sort of rhetorical join-hand, to tack
on to some straggling observation dropped by some Honourable Member,—and
so goes on, with folded arms and sonorous voice, neither quickened nor
retarded, neither elevated nor depressed by the _hear him’s_ that now
rise on the one side, or are now echoed from the other;—never diverted
into laughing gaiety, never hurried into incontrolable passion—till he
is regularly delivered in the course of the same number of hours of the
labour of weeks and months. To those who are in the secret of the arts
of debating, who are versed in the complicated tactics of parliamentary
common-place, there is nothing very mysterious in the process, though it
startles the uninitiated. The fluency, the monotony, the unimpressible,
imposing style of his elocution,—‘swinging slow with sullen roar,’ like
the alternate oscillation of a pendulum—afraid of being thrown off his
balance—never trusting himself with the smallest inflection of tone or
manner from the impulse of the moment,—all shew that the speaker relies
on the tenaciousness of his memory, not on the quickness and fertility
of his invention. Mr. Canning, I apprehend, never answered a speech: he
answers, or affects to answer some observation in a speech, and then
manufactures a long _tirade_ out of his own ‘mother-wit and arts
_well-known_ before.’ He _caps_ an oration, as school-boys cap verses;
and gets up his oracular responses, as Sidrophel and Whackum did theirs,
by having met with his customers of old. From that time he has the
debate entirely in his own hands, and exercises over it ‘sole sovereign
sway and masterdom.’ One of these spontaneous mechanical sallies of his
resembles a _voluntary_ played on a barrel-organ: it is a kind of
Pan-harmonic display of wit and wisdom—such as Mr. Canning possesses!
The amplest stores of his mind are unfolded to their inmost source—the
classic lore, the historic page, the philosophic doubt, the sage reply,
the sprightly allusion, the delicate irony, the happy turning of a
period or insinuation of a paragraph with senatorial dignity and Ovidian
grace—are all here concocted, studied, revised, varnished over, till the
sense aches at their glossy beauty and sickens at hopeless perfection.
Our modern orator’s thoughts have been declared by some to have all the
elegance of the antique; I should say, they have only the fragility and
smoothness of plaster-cast copies!
If I were compelled to characterize Mr. Canning’s style by a single
trait, I should say that he is a mere _parodist_ in verse or prose, in
reasoning or in wit. He transposes arguments as he does images, and
makes sophistry of the one, and burlesque of the other. ‘What’s serious,
he turns to farce.’ This is perhaps, not art in him, so much as nature.
The specific levity of his mind causes it to subsist best in the
rarified atmosphere of indifference and scorn: it attaches most interest
and importance to the slight and worthless. There is a striking want of
solidity and keeping in this person’s character. The frivolous, the
equivocal, is his delight—the element in which he speaks, and writes,
and has his being, as an orator and poet. By applying to low and
contemptible objects the language or ideas which have been appropriated
to high and swelling contemplations, he reduces the latter to the same
paltry level, or renders the former doubly ridiculous. On the same
principle, or from not feeling the due force and weight of different
things, as they affect either the imagination or the understanding, he
brings the slenderest and most evanescent analogies to bear out the most
important conclusions; establishes some fact in history by giving it the
form of an idle interrogation, like a school-boy declaiming on he knows
not what; and thinks to overturn the fixed sentiment of a whole people
by an interjection of surprise at what he knows to be unavoidable and
unanswerable. There is none of the gravity of the statesman, of the
enthusiasm of the patriot, the impatient zeal of the partizan, in Mr.
Canning. We distinguish through the disguise of pompous declamation, or
the affectation of personal consequence, only the elegant trifler, the
thoughtless epigrammatist, spreading ‘a windy fan of painted plumes,’ to
catch the breath of popular applause, or to flutter in the tainted
breeze of court-favour. ‘As those same plumes, so seems he vain and
light,’—never applying his hand to useful action, or his mind to sober
truth. A thing’s being evident, is to him a reason for attempting to
falsify it: its being right is a reason for straining every nerve to
evade or defeat it at all events. It might appear, that with him
inversion is the order of nature. ‘Trifles light as air, are’ to his
understanding, ‘confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ:’ and he
winks and shuts his apprehension up to the most solemn and momentous
truths as gross and vulgar errors. His political creed is of an entirely
fanciful and fictitious texture—a kind of moral, religious, political,
and sentimental _filligre-work_: or it is made up of monstrous pretexts,
and idle shadows, and spurious theories, and mock-alarms. Hence his
gravest reasonings have very much an air of concealed irony; and it
might sometimes almost be suspected that, by his partial, loose, and
unguarded sophisms, he meant to abandon the very cause he professes to
magnify and extol.[59] It is indeed, his boast, his pride, his pleasure,
‘to make the worse appear the better reason,’ which he does with the
pertness of a school-boy and the effrontery of a prostitute: he assumes
indecent postures in the debate, confounds the sense of right and wrong
by his licentious disregard of both, puts honesty out of countenance by
the familiarity of his proposals, makes a jest of principle,—‘takes the
rose from the fair forehead of a virtuous cause, and plants a blister
there.’
The House of Lords does not at present display much of the aristocracy
of talent. The scene is by no means so amusing or dramatic here as in
the House of Commons. Every speaker seems to claim his privilege of
peerage in the awful attention of his auditors, which is granted while
there is any reasonable hope of a return: but it is not easy to hear
Lord Grenville repeat the same thing regularly four times over, in
different words—to listen to the Marquis of Wellesley who never lowers
his voice for four hours from the time he begins, nor utters the
commonest syllable in a tone below that in which Pierre curses the
Senate—Lord Holland might have other pretensions to alacrity of mind
than an impediment of speech, and Lord Liverpool might introduce less of
the _vis inertiæ_ of office into his official harangues, than he does.
Lord Ellenborough was great ‘in the extremity of an oath.’ Lord Eldon,
‘his face ’twixt tears and smiles contending,’ never loses his place or
his temper. It is a pity to see Lord Erskine sit silent, who was once a
popular and powerful speaker; and when he does get up to speak, you wish
he had said nothing. This nobleman, the other day, on his return to
Scotland after an absence of fifty years, made a striking speech on the
instinctive and indissoluble attachment of all persons to the country
where they are born,—which he considered as an innate and unerring
principle of the human mind; and, in expatiating on the advantages of
patriotism, argued by way of illustration, that if it were not for this
original dispensation of Providence, attaching, and, as it were,
_rooting_ every one to the spot where he was bred and born,—civil
society should never have existed, nor mankind have been reclaimed from
the barbarous and wandering way of life, to which they were in the first
instance addicted! How these persons should become attached by habit to
places where it appears, from their vagabond dispositions, they never
stayed at all, is an oversight of the speaker which remains unexplained.
On the same occasion, the learned Lord, in order to produce an effect,
observed that when, advancing farther north, he should come to the old
playground near his father’s mansion, where he used to play at ball when
a child, his sensations would be of a most affecting description. This
is possible; but his Lordship returned homewards the next day, thinking,
no doubt, he had anticipated all the sentiment of the situation. This
puts one in mind of the story one has heard of Tom Sheridan, who told
his father he had been down to the bottom of a coal-pit. ‘Then, you are
a fool, Tom,’ said the father. ‘Why so, Sir?’ ‘Because,’ said the other,
‘it would have answered all the same purpose _to have said you had been
down_!’
HAYDON’S ‘CHRIST’S AGONY IN THE GARDEN’
_The London Magazine._] [_May, 1821._
We have prefixed to the present number an engraved outline of this
picture (which we hope will be thought satisfactory), and we subjoin the
following description of it in the words of the artist’s catalogue.
‘_Christ’s Agony in the Garden._—The manner of treating this subject in
the present picture has not been taken from the account of any one
Apostle [Evangelist] in particular, but from the united relations of the
whole four.
‘The moment selected for the expression of our Saviour is the moment
when he acquiesces to (in) the necessity of his approaching sacrifice,
after the previous struggle of apprehension.
“_Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done._”
‘It is wished to give an air of submissive tenderness, while a quiver of
agony still trembles on his features. The Apostles are resting a little
behind, on a sort of garden-bank; St. John in an unsound doze—St. James
in a deep sleep—St. Peter has fallen into a disturbed slumber against a
tree, while keeping guard with his sword, and is on the point of waking
at the approach of light. Behind St. Peter, and stealing round the edge
of the bank, comes the mean traitor, Judas, with a centurion, soldiers,
and a crowd; the centurion has stepped forward from his soldiers (who
are marching up) to look with his torch, where Christ is retired and
praying; while Judas, alarmed lest he might be surprised too suddenly,
presses back his hand to enforce caution and silence, and crouching down
his malignant and imbecile face beneath his shoulders, he crawls forward
like a reptile to his prey, his features shining with the anticipated
rapture of successful treachery.
‘It is an inherent feeling in human beings, to rejoice at the instant of
a successful exercise of their own power, however despicably directed.
‘The Apostles are supposed to be lit by the glory which emanates from
Christ’s head, and the crowd by the torches and lights about them.’
The printed catalogue contains also elaborate and able descriptions of
Macbeth, the murder of Dentatus, and the judgment of Solomon, which have
been already before the public.
We do not think _Christ’s Agony in the Garden_ the best picture in this
collection, nor the most striking effort of Mr. Haydon’s pencil. On the
contrary, we must take leave to say, that we consider it as a
comparative failure, both in execution and probable effect. We doubt
whether, in point of policy, the celebrated artist would not have
consulted his reputation and his ultimate interest more, by waiting till
he had produced another work on the same grand and magnificent scale as
his last, instead of trusting to the ebb of popularity, resulting from
the exhibition of Christ’s Entrance into Jerusalem, to float him through
the present season. It is well, it may be argued, to keep much before
the public, since they are apt to forget their greatest favourites: but
they are also fastidious; and it is safest not to appear always before
them in the same, or a less imposing, attitude. It is better to rise
upon them at every step, if possible (and there is yet room for
improvement in our artist’s productions), to take them by surprise, and
compel admiration by new and extraordinary exertions—than to trust to
their generosity or gratitude, to the lingering remains of their
affection for old works, or their candid construction of some less
arduous undertaking. A liberal and friendly critic has, indeed, declared
on this occasion, that if the spirits of great men and lofty geniuses
take delight in the other world, in contemplating what delighted them in
this, then the shades of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Correggio, can
find no better employment than to descend again upon the earth, once
more teeming with the birth of high art, and stand with hands crossed,
and eyes uplifted in mute wonder, before Mr. Haydon’s picture of
Christ’s Agony in the Garden. If we believed that the public in general
sympathised seriously in this sentiment, we would not let a murmur
escape us to disturb it;—the opinion of the world, however erroneous, is
not easily altered; and if they are happy in their ignorance, let them
remain so;—but if the artist himself, to whom this august compliment has
been paid, should find the hollowness of such hyperbolical commendation,
a hint to him, as to its cause in the present instance, may not be
thrown away. The public may, and must, be managed to a certain point;
that is, a little noise, and bustle, and officious enthusiasm, is
necessary to catch their notice and fix their attention; but then they
should be left to see for themselves; and after that, an artist should
fling himself boldly and fairly into the huge stream of popularity (as
Lord Byron swam across the Hellespont), stemming the tide with manly
heart and hands, instead of buoying himself up with borrowed bloated
bladders, and flimsy newspaper paragraphs. When a man feels his own
strength, and the public confidence, he has nothing to do but to use the
one, and not abuse the other. As his suspicions of the lukewarmness or
backwardness of the public taste are removed, his jealousy of himself
should increase. The town and the country have shown themselves willing,
eager patrons of Mr. Haydon’s AT HOME:—he ought to feel particular
obligations not to invite them by sound of trumpet and beat of drum to
an inferior entertainment; but, like our advertising friend, Matthews,
compass ‘sea, earth, and air,’ to keep up the eclat of his first and
overwhelming _accueil_! So much for advice; now to criticism.
We have said, that we regard the present performance as a comparative
failure; and our reasons are briefly and plainly these following:—First,
this picture is inferior in size to those that Mr. Haydon has of late
years painted, and is so far a falling off. It does not fill a given
_stipulated_ space in the world’s eye. It does not occupy one side of a
great room. It is the Iliad in a nutshell. It is only twelve feet by
nine, instead of nineteen by sixteen; and that circumstance tells
against it with the unenlightened many, and with the judicious few. One
great merit of Mr. Haydon’s pictures is their size. Reduce him within
narrow limits, and you cut off half his resources. His genius is
gigantic. He is of the race of Brobdingnag, and not of Lilliput. He can
manage a groupe better than a single figure: he can manage ten groupes
better than one. He bestrides his art like a Colossus. The more you give
him to do, the better he does it. Ardour, energy, boundless ambition,
are the categories of his mind, the springs of his enterprises. He only
asks ‘ample room and verge enough.’ Vastness does not confound him,
difficulty rouses him, impossibility is the element in which he glories.
He does not concentrate his powers in a single point, but expands them
to the utmost circumference of his subject, with increasing impetus and
rapidity. He must move great masses, he must combine extreme points, he
must have striking contrasts and situations, he must have all sorts of
characters and expressions; these he hurries over, and dashes in with a
decided, undistracted hand;—set him to finish any one of these to an
exact perfection, to make ‘a hand, an ear, an eye,’ that, in the words
of an old poet, shall be ‘worth an history,’ and his power is gone. His
_forte_ is in motion, not in rest; in complication and sudden effects,
not in simplicity, subtlety, and endless refinement. As it was said in
the Edinburgh Review, Mr. Haydon’s compositions are masterly
sketches;—they are not, as it was said in Blackwood’s Magazine, finished
miniature pictures. We ourselves thought the Christ in the triumphant
Entry into Jerusalem, the least successful part of that much admired
picture: but there it was lost, or borne along in a crowd of bold and
busy figures, in varied or violent actions. Here it is, not only the
principal, but a solitary, and almost the only important figure: it is
thrown in one corner of the picture like a lay-figure in a painter’s
room; the attitude is much like still-life: and the expression is (in
our deliberate judgment) listless, feeble, laboured, neither expressing
the agony of grief, nor the triumph of faith and resignation over it. It
may be, we are wrong: but if so, we cannot help it. It is evident,
however, that this head is painted on a different principle from that of
the Christ last year. It is wrought with care, and even with precision,
in the more detailed outlines: but it is timid, without relief, and
without effect. The colour of the whole figure is, as if it had been
smeared over, and neutralized, with some chalky tint. It does not stand
out from the canvas, either in the general masses, or in the nicer
inflections of the muscles and surface of the skin. It has a veil over
it, not a glory round it. We ought, in justice, to add, that a black and
white copy (we understand by a young lady) of the head of Christ has a
more decided and finer apparent character. To what can this anomaly be
owing? Is it that Mr. Haydon’s conception and drawing of character is
good, but that his mastery in this respect leaves him, when he resigns
the port-crayon; and that, instead of giving additional force and beauty
to the variations of form and expression, by the aid of colour and real
light and shade, he only _smudges_ them over with the pencil, and leaves
the indications of truth and feeling more imperfect than he found them?
We believe that Mr. Haydon generally copies from nature only with his
port-crayon; and paints from conjecture or fancy. If so, it would
account for what we have here considered as a difficulty. We have reason
to believe that the old painters copied form, colour,—every thing, to
the last syllable,—from nature. Indeed, we have seen two of the heads in
the celebrated Madonna of the Garland, the Mother, and the fine head of
Joseph, as original, finished studies of heads (the very same as they
are in the large composition) in the collection at Burleigh-house. By
the contrary practice, Mr. Haydon, as it appears to us, has habituated
his hand and eye to giving only the contour of the features or the
grosser masses:—when he comes to the details of those masses, he fails.
Some one, we suspect from the style of this picture, has been advising
our adventurous and spirited artist to try to finish, and he has been
taking the advice: we would advise him to turn back, and consult the
natural bent of his own genius. A man may avoid great faults or
absurdities by the suggestion of friends: he can only attain positive
excellence, or overcome great difficulties, by the unbiassed force of
his own mind.
The crowd coming, with Judas at their head, to surprise our Saviour, is
not to our taste. We dislike mobs in a picture. There is, however, a
good deal of bustle and movement in the advancing group, and it
contrasts almost too abruptly with the unimpassioned stillness and
retirement of the figure of Christ. Judas makes a bad figure both in Mr.
Haydon’s catalogue, and on his canvas. We think the original must have
been a more profound and plausible-looking character than he is here
represented. He should not grin and show his teeth. He was by all
accounts, a grave, plodding, calculating personage, usurious, and with a
cast of melancholy, and soon after went and hanged himself. Had Mr.
Haydon been in Scotland when he made this sketch? Judas was not a
laughing, careless wag; he was one of the ‘Melancholy Andrews.’—The best
part of this picture is decidedly (in our opinion) the middle ground,
containing the figures of the three Apostles. There is a dignity, a
grace, a shadowy repose about them which approaches close indeed upon
the great style in painting. We have only to regret that a person, who
does so well at times, does not do well always. We are inclined to
attribute such inequalities, and an appearance of haste and
unconcoctedness in some of Mr. Haydon’s plans, to distraction and hurry
of mind, arising from a struggle with the difficulties both of art and
of fortune; and as the last of these is now removed, we trust this
circumstance will leave him at leisure to prosecute the grand design he
has begun (the Raising of Lazarus) with a mind free and unembarrassed;
and enable him to conclude it in a manner worthy of his own reputation,
and that of his country!
POPE, LORD BYRON, AND MR. BOWLES[60]
_The London Magazine._] [_June 1821._
This is a very proper letter for a lord to write to his bookseller, and
for Mr. Murray to show about among his friends, as it contains some dry
rubs at Mr. Bowles, and some good hits at Mr. Southey and his
‘invariable principles.’ There is some good _hating_, and some good
writing in it, some coarse jests, and some dogmatical assertions; but
that it is by any means a _settler_ of the question, is what we are in
all due form inclined to doubt. His Lordship, as a poet, is a little
headstrong and self-willed, a spoiled child of nature and fortune: his
philosophy and criticism have a tincture of the same spirit: he doles
out his opinions with a great deal of frankness and spleen, saying,
‘this I like, that I loathe;’ but he does not trouble himself, or the
reader, with his reasons, any more than he accounts to his servants for
the directions he gives them. This might seem too great a compliment in
his Lordship to the public.
All this _pribble prabble_ about Pope, and Milton, and Shakspeare, and
what foreigners say of us, and the Venus, and Antinous, and the
Acropolis, and the Grand Canal at Venice, and the Turkish fleet, and
Falconer’s Shipwreck, and ethics, and ethical poetry (with the single
exception of some bold picturesque sketches in the poet’s best
prose-style) is what might be talked by any Bond-street lounger of them
all, after a last night’s debauch, in the intervals between the
splashings of the soda-water and the acid taste of the port wine rising
in the mouth. It is no better than that. If his Lordship had sent it in
from Long’s, or the Albany, to be handed about in Albemarle-street, in
slips as he wrote it, it would have been very well. But all the way from
Ravenna, cannot he contrive to send us something better than his own
ill-humour and our own common-places—than the discovery that Pope was a
poet, and that Cowper was none; and the old story that Canova, in
forming a statue, takes a hand from one, a foot from another, and a nose
from a third, and so makes out the idea of perfect beauty! (We would
advise his Lordship to say less about this subject of _virtù_, for he
knows little about it: and besides, his perceptions are at variance with
his theories.) In truth, his Lordship has the worst of this controversy,
though he throws out a number of pert, smart, flashy things, with the
air of a man who sees company on subjects of taste, while his reverend
antagonist, who is the better critic and logician of the two, goes
prosing on in a tone of obsequious pertinacity and sore pleasantry, as
if he were sitting (an unwelcome guest) at his Lordship’s table, and
were awed, yet galled, by the cavalier assumption of patrician manners.
We cannot understand these startling _voluntaries_, played off before
the public on the ground of personal rank, nor the controversial
under-song, like the drone of a bagpipe that forms a tedious
accompaniment to them. As Jem Belcher, when asked if he did not feel a
little awkward at facing Gamble the tall Irishman, made answer, ‘An
please ye, sir, when I am stript to my shirt, I am afraid of no man;’—so
we would advise Mr. Bowles, in a question of naked argument, to fear no
man, and to let no man bite his thumb at him. If his Lordship were to
invite his brother-poet to his house, and to eke out a sour jest by the
flavour of Monte-Pulciano or Frontiniac,—if in the dearth of argument he
were to ply his friend’s weak side with rich sauces and well seasoned
hospitality, ‘_Ah! ça est bon, ah! goutez ça!_‘—if he were to point, in
illustration of Pope’s style, to the marble pillars, the virandas, the
pier glasses, the classic busts, the flowering dessert, and were to
exclaim, ‘You see, my dear Bowles, the superiority of art over nature,
the triumph of polished life over Gothic barbarism: we have here neither
the ghosts nor fairies of Shakspeare, nor Milton’s Heaven, nor _his_
Hell, yet we contrive to do without them;’—it might require Parson
Supple’s command of countenance to smile off this uncourteous address;
but the divine would not have to digest such awkward raillery on an
empty stomach—he would have his _quid pro quo_: his Lordship would have
paid for the liberty of using his privilege of peerage. But why any man
should carry the _rôle_ of his Lordship’s chaplain out of his Lordship’s
house, is what we see no reason for.—Lord Byron, in the Preface to his
Tragedy, complains that Horace Walpole has had hard measure dealt him by
the critics, ‘firstly, because he was a lord, and secondly, because he
was a gentleman.’ We do not know how the case may stand between the
public and a dead nobleman: but a living lord has every reasonable
allowance made him, and can do what no one else can. If Lord Byron
chooses to make a bad joke, by means of an ill-spelt pun, it is a
condescension in his Lordship:—if he puts off a set of smart assertions
and school-boy instances for pithy proofs, it is not because he is not
able, but because he cannot be at the pains of going deeper into the
question:—if he is rude to an antagonist, it is construed into agreeable
familiarity; any notice from so great a man appears like a favour:—if he
tells or recommends ‘a tale of bawdry,’ he is not to be tied down by the
petty rules which restrict common men:—if he publishes a work, which is
thought of too equivocal a description for the delicate air of
Albemarle-street, his Lordship’s own name in the title-page is
sufficient to back it without the formality of a bookseller’s; if a
wire-drawn tragedy of his is acted, in spite of his protestations
against such an appeal to the taste of a vulgar audience, the storm of
pitiless damnation is not let loose upon it, because it is felt that it
would fall harmless on so high and proud a head; the gilded coronet
serves as a conductor to carry off the lightning of popular criticism,
which might blast the merely laurelled bard; the blame, the
disappointment, the flat effect, is thrown upon the manager, upon the
actors—upon any body but the Noble Poet! This sounding title swells the
mouth of Fame, and lends her voice a thousand circling echoes: the rank
of the Author, and the public charity extended to him, as he does not
want it, cover a multitude of sins. What does his Lordship mean, then by
this whining over the neglect of Horace Walpole,—this uncalled-for
sympathy with the faded lustre of patrician and gentlemanly pretensions?
Has _he_ had only half his fame! Or, does he already feel, with morbid
anticipation, the retiring ebb of that overwhelming tide of popularity,
which having been raised too high by adventitious circumstances, is lost
in flats and shallows, as soon as their influence is withdrawn? Lord
Byron has been twice as much talked of as he would have been, had he not
been Lord Byron. His rank and genius have been happily placed ‘each
other’s beams to share,’ and both together, by their mutually reflected
splendour, may be said to have melted the public coldness into the very
wantonness of praise: the faults of the man (real or supposed) have only
given a dramatic interest to his works. Whence, then, this repining,
this ungracious cavilling, this _got up_ ill-humour? We load his
Lordship with ecstatic admiration, with unqualified ostentatious
eulogies; and he throws them stifling back in our face: he thanks us
with cool, cutting contempt: he asks us for our voices, ‘our sweet
voices,’ like Coriolanus; and, like Coriolanus, disdains us for the
unwholesome gift. Why, then does he ask for it? If, as a lord, he holds
in contempt and abhorrence the willing, delighted homage, which the
public pay to the poet, let him retire and feed the pride of birth in
stately solitude, or take his place among his equals: but if he does not
find this enough, and wants our wondering tribute of applause to satisfy
his craving vanity, and make him something more than a mere vulgar lord
among hundreds of other lords, why dash the cup of delicious poison,
which, at his uneasy request, we tender him, to the ground, with
indignant reckless hands, and tell us he scorns equally our censure or
our praise? If he looks upon both as equal impertinence, he can easily
escape out of the reach of both by ceasing to write; we shall in that
case soon cease to think of his Lordship: but if he cannot do without
our good opinion, why affect all this coyness, coldness, and contempt?
If he says he writes not to please us, but to live by us, that only
alters the nature of the obligation, and he might still be civil to Mr.
Murray’s customers. Whether he is independent of public opinion, or
dependent on it, he need not be always sending his readers to Coventry.
When we come to offer him our demonstrations of good will, he should not
kick us down stairs. If he persists in this humour, the distaste may in
time ‘become mutual.’
Before we proceed, there is one thing in which we must say we heartily
agree with Lord Byron; and that is the ridicule with which he treats Mr.
Bowles’s editorial inquisition into the moral character of Pope. It is a
pure piece of clerical priggism. If Pope was not free from vice, we
should like to know who is. He was one of the most faultless of poets,
both in his life and in his writings. We should not care to throw the
first stone at him. We do not wonder at Lord Byron’s laughing outright
at Mr. Bowles’s hysterical horrors at poor Pope’s platonic peccadillos,
nor at his being a little impatient of the other’s attempt to make
himself a _make-believe_ character of perfection out of the ‘most small
faults’ he could rake up against the reputation of an author, whom he
was bound either not to edite or not to injure. But we think his
Lordship turns the tables upon the divine, and gets up into the reading
desk himself, without the proper canonical credentials, when he makes
such a fuss as he does about didactic or moral poetry as the highest of
all others, because moral truth and moral conduct are of such vast and
paramount concernment in human life. But because they are such good
things in themselves, does it follow that they are the better for being
put into rhyme? We see no connection between ‘ends of verse, and sayings
of philosophers.’ This reasoning reminds us of the critic who said, that
the only poetry he knew of, good for any thing, was the four lines,
beginning ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,’ for
that these were really of some use in finding out the number of days in
the different months of the year. The rules of arithmetic are important
in many respects, but we do not know that they are the fittest subjects
of poetry. Besides, Pope was not the only moral poet, nor are we sure
that we understand his moral system, or that Lord Byron understands it,
or that he understood it himself. Addison paraphrased the Psalms, and
Blackmore sung the Creation: yet Pope has written a lampoon upon the
one, and put the other in his Dunciad. Mr. Bowles has numbers of
manuscript sermons by him, the morality of which, we will venture to
say, is quite as pure, as orthodox, as that of the unpublished cantos of
Don Juan; yet we doubt whether Mr. Murray, the Mecænas of poetry and
orthodoxy, would give as much for the one as for the other. We do not
look for the flowers of fancy in moral treatises, nor for a homily in
his Lordship’s irregular stanzas. The Decalogue, as a practical prose
composition, or as a body of moral laws and precepts, is of sufficient
weight and authority; but we should not regard the putting this into
heroic verse, as an effort of the highest poetry. That ‘Sternhold and
Hopkins had great qualms’ is no imputation on the pious raptures of the
Hebrew bard: and we suspect his Lordship himself would object to the
allegory in Spenser, as a drawback on the poetry, if it is in other
respects to his Lordship’s taste, which is more than we can pretend to
determine. The Noble Letter-writer thus moralizes on this subject and
transposes the ordinary critical canons somewhat arbitrarily and
sophistically.
‘The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the
dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by
the ingenuous boast,
“That not in Fancy’s maze he wander’d long,
But _stoop’d_ to Truth, and moraliz’d his song.”
‘He should have written “rose to truth.” In my mind the highest of all
poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be
moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is
something beyond human hands except Milton’s and Dante’s, and even
Dante’s powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though
in supernatural circumstances. What made Socrates the greatest of men?
His moral truth—his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God
hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have
made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an
adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that
ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it,
whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the _very first
order_ of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the
priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the
“forests” that ever were “walked” for their “description,” and all the
epics that ever were founded upon fields of battle. The Georgics are
indisputably, and, I believe, _undisputedly_, even a finer poem than the
Æneid. Virgil knew this: he did not order _them_ to be burnt.
“The proper study of mankind is man.”
‘It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call
“imagination” and “invention,”—the two commonest of qualities: an Irish
peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more
than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been
spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem
to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems.
What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect: his moral
is as pure as his poetry is glorious.’ P. 42.
Really this is very inconsequential, incongruous reasoning. An Irish
peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, would not fall upon more
blunders, contradictions, and defective conclusions. Lord Byron talks of
the ethical systems of Socrates and Jesus Christ. What made the former
the great man he supposes?—The invention of his system—the discovery of
sublime moral truths. Does Lord Byron mean to say, that the mere
repetition of the same precepts in prose, or the turning them into
verse, will make others as great, or will make a great man at all? The
two things compared are wholly disparates. The finding out the 48th
proposition in Euclid made Pythagoras a great man. Shall we say that the
putting this into a grave, didactic distich would make either a great
mathematician or a great poet? It would do neither one nor the other;
though, according to Lord Byron, this distich would belong to the
highest class of poetry, ‘because it would do that in verse, which one
of the greatest of men had wished to accomplish in prose.’ Such is the
way in which his Lordship transposes the common sense of the
question,—because it is his humour! The value of any moral truth depends
on the philosophic invention implied in it. But this rests with the
first author, and the general idea, which forms the basis of didactic
poetry, remains the same, through all its mechanical transmissions
afterwards. The merit of the ethical poet must therefore consist in his
manner of adorning and illustrating a number of these general truths
which are not his own, that is, in the poetical invention and
imagination he brings to the subject, as Mr. Bowles has well shown, with
respect to the episodes in the Essay on Man, the description of the poor
Indian and the lamb doomed to death, which are all the unsophisticated
reader ever remembers of that much-talked-of production. Lord Byron
clownishly chooses to consider all poetry but what relates to this
ethical or didactic truth as ‘a lie.’ Is Lear a lie? Or does his
Lordship prefer the story, or the moral, in Æsop’s Fables? He asks ‘why
must the _poet_ mean the _liar_, the _feigner_, the _tale-teller_? A man
may make and create better things than these.’—He may make and create
better things than a common-place, and he who does not, makes and
creates nothing. The ethical or didactic poet necessarily repeats after
others, because general truths and maxims are limited. The individual
instances and illustrations, which his Lordship qualifies as ‘lies,’
‘feigning,’ and ‘tale-telling,’ are infinite, and give endless scope to
the genius of the true poet. The rank of poetry is to be judged of by
the truth and purity of the moral—so we find it ‘in the bond,’—and yet
Cowper, we are told, was no poet. Is there any keeping in this, or is it
merely an air? Again, we are given to understand that didactic poetry
‘requires more mind, more power than all the descriptive or epic poetry
that ever was written:’ and as a proof of this, his Lordship lays it
down, that the Georgics are a finer poem than the Æneid. We do not
perceive the inference here. ‘Virgil knew this: he did not order _them_
to be burnt.
“The proper study of mankind is man.”’
Does our author mean that this was Virgil’s reason for liking his
pastoral poetry better than his description of Dido and Æneas? But
farther, there is a Latin poem (that of Lucretius) superior even to the
Georgics; nay, it would have been so to any poem now in existence, but
for one unlucky circumstance. And what is that? ‘Its ethics!’ So that
ethics have spoiled the finest poem in the world. This is the rub that
makes didactic poetry come in such a questionable shape. If original,
like Lucretius, there will be a difference of opinion about it. If trite
and acknowledged, like Pope, however pure, there will be little valuable
in it. It is the glory and the privilege of poetry to be conversant
about those truths of nature and the heart that are at once original and
self-evident. His Lordship ought to _have known this_. In the same
passage, he speaks of imagination and invention as ‘the two commonest of
qualities.’ We will tell his Lordship what is commoner, the want of
them. ‘An Irish peasant,’ he adds, ‘with a little whiskey in his head,
will imagine and invent more than’—(What? Homer, Spenser, and Ariosto?
No: but than)—‘would furnish forth a modern poem.’ That we will not
dispute. But at any rate, when sober next morning, he would be as ‘full
of wise saws and modern instances’ as his Lordship; and in either case,
equally positive, tetchy, and absurd!
His Lordship, throughout his pamphlet, makes a point of contradicting
Mr. Bowles, and, it would seem, of contradicting himself. He cannot be
said to have any opinions of his own, but whatever any one else
advances, he denies out of mere spleen and rashness. ‘He hates the word
_invariable_,’ and not without reason. ‘What is there of human, be it
poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter,
life, or death, which is invariable?’ There is one of the particulars in
this enumeration, which seems pretty invariable, which is death. One
would think that the principles of poetry are so too, notwithstanding
his peevish disclaimer: for towards the conclusion of this letter he
sets up Pope as a classic model, and considers all modern deviations
from it as grotesque and barbarous.
‘They have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest
architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from whose
practice I have borrowed the figure, they are not contented with their
own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy _the prior and purely
beautiful fabric which preceded_,[61] and which shames them and theirs
for ever and ever.’
Lord Byron has here substituted his own invariable principles for Mr.
Bowles’s, which he hates as bad as Mr. Southey’s variable politics. Will
nothing please his Lordship—neither dull fixtures nor shining
weather-cocks?—We might multiply instances of a want of continuous
reasoning, if we were fond of this sort of petty cavilling. Yet we do
not know that there is any better quarry in the book. Why does his
Lordship tell us that ‘ethical poetry is the highest of all poetry,’ and
yet that ‘Petrarch the sonnetteer’ is esteemed by good judges the very
highest poet of Italy? Mr. Bowles is a sonnetteer, and a very good one.
Why does he assert that ‘the poet who executes the best is the highest,
whatever his department,’ and then affirm in the next page that didactic
poetry ‘requires more mind, more wisdom, more power than all the forests
that ever were walked for their description;’ and then again, two pages
after, that ‘a good poet can make a silk purse of a sow’s ear;’ that is,
as he interprets it, ‘can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than
inhabits the forests of America?’ That’s a _Non Sequitur_, as Partridge
has it. Why, contending that all subjects are alike indifferent to the
genuine poet, does he turn round upon himself, and assume that ‘the sun
shining upon a warming-pan cannot be made sublime or poetical?’ Why does
he say that ‘there is nothing in nature like the bust of the Antinous,
except the Venus,’ which is not in nature?[62] Why does he call the
first ‘that wonderful _creation_ of perfect beauty,’ when it is a mere
portrait, and on that account so superior to his favourite coxcomb, the
Apollo? Why does he state that ‘more poetry cannot be gathered into
existence’ than we here see, and yet that this poetry arises neither
from nature nor moral exaltedness; Mr. Bowles and he being at issue on
this very point, viz. the one affirming that the essence of poetry is
derived from nature, and his Lordship, that it consists in moral truth?
Why does he consider a shipwreck as an artificial incident? Why does he
make the excellence of Falconer’s Shipwreck consist in its
technicalities, and not in its faithful description of common feelings
and inevitable calamity? Why does he say all this, and much more, which
he should not? Why does he write prose at all? Yet, in spite of all this
trash, there is one passage for which we forgive him, and here it is.
‘The truth is, that in these days the grand _primum mobile_ of England
is _cant_: cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral;
but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. It is the
fashion, and while it lasts, will be too powerful for those who can only
exist by taking the tone of the times. I say _cant_, because it is a
thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the
English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer, and more divided
among themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the
prevalence of this verbal decorum.’ These words should be written in
letters of gold, as the testimony of a lofty poet to a great moral
truth, and we can hardly have a quarrel with the writer of them.
There are three questions which form the subject of the present
pamphlet; viz. What is poetical? What is natural? What is artificial?
And we get an answer to none of them. The controversy, as it is carried
on between the chief combatants, is much like a dispute between two
artists, one of whom should maintain that blue is the only colour fit to
paint with, and the other that yellow alone ought ever to be used. Much
might be said on both sides, but little to the purpose. Mr. Campbell
leads off the dance, and launches a ship as a beautiful and poetical
artificial object. But he so loads it with patriotic, natural, and
foreign associations, and the sails are ‘so perfumed that the winds are
love-sick,’ that Mr. Bowles darts upon and seizes it as contraband to
art, swearing that it is no longer the work of the shipwright, but of
Mr. Campbell’s lofty poetic imagination; and dedicates its stolen beauty
to the right owners, the sun, the winds, and the waves. Mr. Campbell, in
his eagerness to make all sure, having overstepped the literal mark,
presses no farther into the controversy; but Lord Byron, who is ‘like an
Irishman in a row, _any body’s customer_,’ carries it on with good
polemical hardihood, and runs a very edifying parallel between the ship
without the sun, the winds, and waves,—and the sun, the winds, and waves
without the ship. ‘The sun,’ says Mr. Bowles, ‘is poetical, by your
Lordship’s admission.’ We think it would have been so without it. But
his Lordship contends that ‘the sun would no longer be poetical, if it
did not shine on ships, or pyramids, or fortresses, and other works of
art,’ (he expressly excludes ‘footmen’s liveries’ and ‘brass
warming-pans’ from among those artificial objects that reflect new
splendour on the eye of Heaven)—to which Mr. Bowles replies, that let
the sun but shine, and ‘it is poetical _per se_,’ in which we think him
right. His Lordship decompounds the wind into a _caput mortuum_ of
poetry, by making it howl through a pig-stye, instead of
‘Roaming the illimitable ocean wide;’
and turns a water-fall, or a clear spring, into a slop-basin, to prove
that nature owes its elegance to art. His Lordship is ‘ill at these
numbers.’ Again, he affirms that the ruined temple of the Parthenon is
poetical, and the coast of Attica with Cape Colonna, and the
recollection of Falconer’s Shipwreck, classical. Who ever doubted it?
What then? Does this prove that the Rape of the Lock is not a
mock-heroic poem? He assures us that a storm with cockboats scudding
before it is interesting, particularly if this happens to take place in
the Hellespont, over which the noble critic swam; and makes it a
question, whether the dark cypress groves, or the white towers and
minarets of Constantinople are more impressive to the imagination? What
has this to do with Pope’s grotto at Twickenham, or the boat in which he
paddled across the Thames to Kew? Lord Byron tells us (and he should
know) that the Grand Canal at Venice is a muddy ditch, without the
stately palaces by its side; but then it is a natural, not an artificial
canal; and finally, he asks, what would the desert of Tadmor be without
the ruins of Palmyra, or Salisbury Plain without Stone-Henge? Mr. Bowles
who, though tedious and teasing, has ‘damnable iteration in him,’ and
has read the Fathers, answers very properly, by saying that a desert
alone ‘conveys ideas of immeasurable distance, of profound silence, of
solitude;’ and that Salisbury Plain has the advantage of Hounslow Heath,
chiefly in getting rid of the ideas of artificial life, ‘carts,
caravans, raree-show-men, butchers’ boys, coaches with coronets, and
livery servants behind them,’ even though Stone-Henge did not lift its
pale head above its barren bosom. Indeed, Lord Byron’s notions of art
and poetry are sufficiently wild, romantic, far-fetched, obsolete: his
taste is Oriental, Gothic; his Muse is not domesticated; there is
nothing _mimminee-pimminee_, modern, polished, light, fluttering, in his
standard of the sublime and beautiful: if his thoughts are proud,
pampered, gorgeous, and disdain to mingle with the objects of humble,
unadorned nature, his lordly eye at least ‘keeps distance due’ from the
vulgar vanities of fashionable life; from drawing-rooms, from
card-parties, and from courts. He is not a carpet poet. He does not sing
the sofa, like poor Cowper. He is qualified neither for poet-laureate
nor court-newsman. He is at issue with the Morning Post and Fashionable
World, on what constitutes the true pathos and sublime of human life. He
hardly thinks Lady Charlemont so good as the Venus, or as an Albanian
girl, that he saw mending the road in the mountains. If he does not like
flowers and forests, he cares as little for stars, garters, and prince’s
feathers, for diamond necklaces and paste buckles. If his Lordship
cannot make up his mind to the quiet, the innocence, the simple,
unalterable grandeur of nature, we are sure that he hates the frippery,
the foppery, and pert grimace of art, quite as much. His Lordship likes
the poetry, the imaginative part of art, and so do we; and so we believe
did the late Mr. John Scott. He likes the _sombre_ part of it, the
thoughtful, the decayed, the ideal, the spectral shadow of human
greatness, the departed spirit of human power. He sympathizes not with
art as a display of ingenuity, as the triumph of vanity or luxury, as it
is connected with the idiot, superficial, petty self-complacency of the
individual and the moment, (these are to him not ‘luscious as locusts,
but bitter as coloquintida’); but he sympathizes with the triumphs of
Time and Fate over the proudest works of man—with the crumbling
monuments of human glory—with the dim vestiges of countless generations
of men—with that which claims alliance with the grave, or kindred with
the elements of nature. This is what he calls art and artificial poetry.
But this is not what any body else understands by the terms, commonly or
critically speaking. There is as little connexion between the two things
as between the grand-daughters of Mr. Coutts, who appeared at court the
other day, and Lady Godiva—as there is between a reigning toast and an
Egyptian mummy. Lord Byron, through the whole of the argument, pelts his
reverend opponent with instances, like throwing a stone at a dog, which
the incensed animal runs after, picks up, mumbles between his teeth, and
tries to see what it is made of. The question is, however, too tough for
Mr. Bowles’s powers of mastication, and though the fray is amusing,
nothing comes of it. Between the Editor of Pope, and the Editor of the
New Monthly Magazine, his Lordship sits
‘——high arbiter,
And by decision more embroils the fray.’
What is the use of taking a work of art, from which ‘all the art of art
is flown’ a mouldering statue, or a fallen column in Tadmor’s marble
waste, that staggers and over-awes the mind, and gives birth to a
thousand dim reflections, by seeing the power and pride of man
prostrate, and laid low in the dust; what is there in this to prove the
self-sufficiency of the upstart pride and power of man? A Ruin is
poetical. Because it is a work of art, says Lord Byron. No, but because
it is a work of art o’erthrown. In it we see, as in a mirror, the life,
the hopes, the labour of man defeated, and crumbling away under the slow
hand of time; and all that he has done reduced to nothing, or to a
useless mockery. Or as one of the bread-and-butter poets has described
the same thing a little differently, in his tale of Peter Bell the
potter,—
‘——The stones and tower
Seem’d fading fast away
From human thoughts and purposes,
To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees.’
If this is what Lord Byron means by artificial objects and interests,
there is an end of the question, for he will get no critic, no school to
differ with him. But a fairer instance would be a snug citizen’s box by
the road side, newly painted, plastered and furnished, with every thing
in the newest fashion and gloss, not an article the worse for wear, and
a lease of one-and-twenty years to run, and then let us see what Lord
Byron, or his friend and ‘host of human life’ will make of it, compared
with the desolation, and the waste of all these comforts, arts, and
elegances. Or let him take—not the pyramids of Egypt, but the pavilion
at Brighton, and make a poetical description of it in prose or verse. We
defy him. The poetical interest, in his Lordship’s transposed cases,
arises out of the imaginary interest. But the truth is, that where art
flourishes and attains its object, imagination droops, and poetry along
with it. It ceases, or takes a different and ambiguous shape; it may be
elegant, ingenious, pleasing, instructive, but if it aspires to the
semblance of a higher interest, or the ornaments of the highest fancy,
it necessarily becomes burlesque, as for instance, in the Rape of the
Lock. As novels end with marriage, poetry ends with the consummation and
success of art. And the reason (if Lord Byron would attend to it) is
pretty obvious. Where all the wishes and wants are supplied, anticipated
by art, there can be no strong cravings after ideal good, nor dread of
unimaginable evils; the sources of terror and pity must be dried up:
where the hand has done every thing, nothing is left for the imagination
to do or to attempt: where all is regulated by conventional
indifference, the full workings, the involuntary, uncontrollable
emotions of the heart cease: property is not a poetical, but a practical
prosaic idea, to those who possess and clutch it; and cuts off others
from cordial sympathy; but nature is common property, the unenvied idol
of all eyes, the fairy ground where fancy plays her tricks and feats;
and the passions, the workings of the heart (which Mr. Bowles very
properly distinguishes from manners, inasmuch as they are not in the
power of the will to regulate or satisfy) are still left as a subject
for something very different from didactic or mock-heroic poetry. By
_art_ and _artificial_, as these terms are applied to poetry or human
life, we mean those objects and feelings which depend for their
subsistence and perfection on the will and arbitrary conventions of man
and society; and by nature, and natural subjects, we mean those objects
which exist in the universe at large, without, or in spite of, the
interference of human power and contrivance, and those interests and
affections which are not amenable to the human will. That we are to
exclude art, or the operation of the human will, from poetry altogether,
is what we do not affirm; but we mean to say, that where this operation
is the most complete and manifest, as in the creation of given objects,
or regulation of certain feelings, there the spring of poetry, _i.e._ of
passion and imagination, is proportionably and much impaired. We are
masters of Art, Nature is our master; and it is to this greater power
that we find working above, about, and within us, that the genius of
poetry bows and offers up its highest homage. If the infusion of art
were not a natural disqualifier for poetry, the most artificial objects
and manners would be the most poetical: on the contrary, it is only the
rude beginnings, or the ruinous decay of objects of art, or the simplest
modes of life and manners, that admit of, or harmonize kindly with, the
tone and language of poetry. To consider the question otherwise, is not
to consider it too curiously, but not to understand it at all. Lord
Byron talks of Ulysses striking his horse Rhesus with his bow, as an
instance of the heroic in poetry. But does not the poetical dignity of
the instrument arise from its very commonness and simplicity? A bow is
not a supererogation of the works of art. It is almost peculiar to a
state of nature, that is, the first and rudest state of society. Lord
Byron might as well talk of a shepherd’s crook, or the garland of
flowers with which he crowns his mistress, as images borrowed from
artificial life. He cannot make a gentleman-usher’s rod poetical, though
it is the pink of courtly and gentlemanly refinement. Will the bold
stickler for the artificial essence of poetry translate Pope’s
description of Sir Plume,—
‘Of amber-headed snuff-box justly vain,
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane,’—
into the same sort of poetry as Homer’s description of the bow of
Ulysses? It is out of the question. The very mention of the last has a
sound with it like the twang of the bow itself; whereas the others, the
snuff-box and clouded cane, are of the very essence of effeminate
impertinence. Pope says, in Spence’s Anecdotes, that ‘a lady of fashion
would admire a star, because it would remind her of the twinkling of a
lamp on a ball-night.’ This is a much better account of his own poetry
than his noble critic has given. It is a clue to a real solution of the
difficulty. What is the difference between the feeling with which we
contemplate a gas light in one of the squares, and the crescent moon
beside it, but this—that though the brightness, the beauty perhaps, to
the mere sense, is the same or greater; yet we know that when we are out
of the square we shall lose sight of the lamp, but that the moon will
lend us its tributary light wherever we go; it streams over green valley
or blue ocean alike; it is hung up in air, a part of the pageant of the
universe; it steals with gradual, softened state into the soul, and
hovers, a fairy apparition, over our existence! It is this which makes
it a more poetical object than a patent lamp, or a Chinese lanthorn, or
the chandelier at Covent-garden, brilliant as it is, and which, though
it were made ten times more so, would still only dazzle and scorch the
sight so much the more; it would not be attended with a mild train of
reflected glory; it would ‘denote no foregone conclusion,’ would touch
no chord of imagination or the heart; it would have nothing romantic
about it.—A man can make any thing, but he cannot make a sentiment! It
is a thing of inveterate prejudice, of old association, of common
feelings, and so is poetry, as far as it is serious. A ‘pack of cards,’
a silver bodkin, a paste buckle, ‘may be imbued’ with as much mock
poetry as you please, by lending false associations to it; but real
poetry, or poetry of the highest order, can only be produced by
unravelling the real web of associations, which have been wound round
any subject by nature, and the unavoidable conditions of humanity. Not
to admit this distinction at the threshold, is to confound the style of
Tom Thumb with that of the Moor of Venice, or Hurlothrumbo with the Doge
of Venice. It is to mistake jest for earnest, and one thing for another.
‘How far that little candle throws its beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.’
The image here is one of artificial life; but it is connected with
natural circumstances and romantic interests, with darkness, with
silence, with distance, with privation, and uncertain danger: it is
common, obvious, without pretension or boast, and therefore the poetry
founded upon it is natural, because the feelings are so. It is not the
splendour of the candle itself, but the contrast to the gloom
without,—the comfort, the relief it holds out from afar to the benighted
traveller,—the conflict between nature and the first and cheapest
resources of art, that constitutes the romantic and imaginary, that is,
the poetical interest, in that familiar but striking image. There is
more art in the lamp or chandelier; but for that very reason, there is
less poetry. A light in a watch-tower, a beacon at sea, is sublime for
the same cause; because the natural circumstances and associations set
it off; it warns us against danger, it reminds us of common calamity, it
promises safety and hope: it has to do with the broad feelings and
circumstances of human life, and its interest does not assuredly turn
upon the vanity or pretensions of the maker or proprietor of it. This
sort of art is co-ordinate with nature, and comes into the first-class
of poetry, but no one ever dreamt of the contrary. The features of
nature are great leading landmarks, not near and little, or confined to
a spot, or an individual claimant; they are spread out everywhere the
same, and are of universal interest. The true poet has therefore been
described as
‘Creation’s tenant, he is nature’s heir.’
What has been thus said of the man of genius might be said of the man of
no genius. The spirit of poetry, and the spirit of humanity are the
same. The productions of nature are not locked up in the cabinets of the
curious, but spread out on the green lap of earth. The flowers return
with the cuckoo in the spring: the daisy for ever looks bright in the
sun; the rainbow still lifts its head above the storm to the eye of
infancy or age—
‘So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man,
So shall it be till I grow old and die;’
but Lord Byron does not understand this, for he does not understand Mr.
Wordsworth’s poetry, and we cannot make him. His Lordship’s nature, as
well as his poetry, is something arabesque and outlandish.—Again, once
more, what, we would ask, makes the difference between an opera of
Mozart’s, and the singing of a thrush confined in a wooden cage at the
corner of the street in which we live? The one is nature, and the other
is art: the one is paid for, and the other is not. Madame Fodor sings
the air of _Vedrai Carino_ in _Don Giovanni_ so divinely, because she is
hired to sing it; she sings it to please the audience, not herself, and
does not always like to be _encored_ in it; but the thrush that awakes
us at daybreak with its song, does not sing because it is paid to sing,
or to please others, or to be admired or criticised. It sings because it
is happy: it pours the thrilling sounds from its throat, to relieve the
overflowings of its own breast—the liquid notes come from, and go to,
the heart, dropping balm into it, as the gushing spring revives the
traveller’s parched and fainting lips. That stream of joy comes pure and
fresh to the longing sense, free from art and affectation, the same that
rises over vernal groves, mingled with the breath of morning, and the
perfumes of the wild hyacinth; that waits for no audience, that wants no
rehearsing, that exhausts its raptures, and still—
‘Hymns its good God, and carols sweet of love.’
There is this great difference between nature and art, that the one _is_
what the other _seems_, and gives all the pleasure it expresses, because
it feels it itself. Madame Fodor sings, as a musical instrument may be
made to play a tune, and perhaps with no more real delight: but it is
not so with the linnet or the thrush, that sings because God pleases,
and pours out its little soul in pleasure. This is the reason why its
singing is (so far) so much better than melody or harmony, than base or
treble, than the Italian or the German School, than quavers or
crotchets, or half-notes, or canzonets, or quartetts, or any thing in
the world but truth and nature!
To give one more instance or two of what we understand by a natural
interest ingrafted on artificial objects, and of the principle that
still keeps them distinct. Amelia’s ‘hashed mutton’ in Fielding, is one
that I might mention. Hashed mutton is an article in cookery, homely
enough in the scale of art, though far removed from the simple products
of nature; yet we should say that this common delicacy which Amelia
provided for her husband’s supper, and then waited so long in vain for
his return, is the foundation of one of the most natural and affecting
incidents in one of the most natural and affecting books in the world.
No description of the most splendid and luxurious banquet could come up
to it. It will be remembered, when the _Almanach des Gourmands_, and
even the article on it in the last Edinburgh Review, are forgotten. Did
Lord Byron never read Boccacio? We wish he would learn refinement from
him, and get rid of his hard _bravura_ taste, and swashbuckler
conclusions. What makes the charm of the Story of the Falcon? Is it
properly art or nature? The tale is one of artificial life, and elegant
manners, and chivalrous pretensions; but it is the fall from these, the
decline into the vale of low and obscure poverty,—the having but one
last loop left to hang life on, and the sacrifice of that to a feeling
still more precious, and which could only give way with life
itself,—that elevates the sentiment, and has made it find its way into
all hearts. Had Frederigo Alberigi had an aviary of Hawks, and preserves
of pheasants without end, he and his poor bird would never have been
heard of. It is not the expence and ostentation of the entertainment he
set before his mistress, but the prodigality of affection, squandering
away the last remains of his once proud fortunes, that stamps this
beautiful incident on the remembrance of all who have ever read it. We
wish Lord Byron would look it over again, and see whether it does not
most touch the chords of pathos and sentiment in those places where we
feel the absence of all the pomp and vanities of art. Mr. Campbell talks
of a ship as a sublime and beautiful object in art. We will confess we
always stop to look at the mail-coaches with no slight emotion, and,
perhaps, extend our hands after some of them, in sign of gratulation.
They carry the letters of friends, of relations; they keep up the
communication between the heart of a country. We do not admire them for
their workmanship, for their speed, for their livery—there is something
more in it than this. Perhaps we can explain it by saying, that we once
heard a person observe—‘I always look at the Shrewsbury mail, and
sometimes with tears in my eyes: that is the coach that will bring me
the news of the death of my father and mother.’ His Lordship will say,
the mail-coach is an artificial object. Yet we think the interest here
was not founded upon that circumstance. There was a finer and deeper
link of affection that did not depend on the red painted pannels, or the
_dyed garments_ of the coachman and guard. At least it strikes us so.
This is not an easy subject to illustrate, and it is still more
difficult to define. Yet we shall attempt something of the sort.
1. Natural objects are common and obvious, and are imbued with an
habitual and universal interest, without being vulgar. Familiarity in
them does not breed contempt, as it does in the works of man. They form
an ideal class; their repeated impression on the mind, in so many
different circumstances, grows up into a sentiment. The reason is, that
we refer them generally and collectively to ourselves, as links and
mementos of our various being; whereas, we refer the works of art
respectively to those by whom they are made or to whom they belong. This
distracts the mind in looking at them, and gives a petty and unpoetical
character to what we feel relating to them. When the works of art become
poetical, it is when they are emancipated from this state of
‘circumscription and confine,’ by some circumstance that sets aside the
idea of property and individual distinction. The sound of village
bells,—
‘——The poor man’s only music,’[63]
excites as lively an interest in the mind, as the warbling of a thrush:
the sight of a village spire presents nothing discordant with the
surrounding scenery.
2. Natural objects are more akin to poetry and the imagination, partly
because they are not our own handy-work, but start up spontaneously,
like a visionary creation, of their own accord, without our knowledge or
connivance.—
‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water hath,
And these are of them;—’
and farther, they have this advantage over the works of art, that the
latter either fall short of their preconceived intention, and excite our
disgust and disappointment by their defects; or, if they completely
answer their end, they then leave nothing to the imagination, and so
excite little or no romantic interest that way. A Count Rumford stove,
or a Dutch oven, are useful for the purposes of warmth or culinary
dispatch. Gray’s purring favourite would find great comfort in warming
its nose before the one, or dipping its whiskers in the other; and so
does the artificial animal, man: but the poetry of Rumford grates or
Dutch ovens, it would puzzle even Lord Byron to explain. Cowper has made
something of the ‘loud-hissing urn,’ though Mr. Southey, as being one of
the more refined ‘naturals,’ still prefers ‘the song of the kettle.’ The
more our senses, our self-love, our eyes and ears, are surrounded, and,
as it were, saturated with artificial enjoyments and costly decorations,
the more the avenues to the imagination and the heart are unavoidably
blocked up. We do not say, that this may not be an advantage to the
individual; we say it is a disadvantage to the poet. Even ‘Mine Host of
Human Life’ has felt its palsying, enervating influence. Let any one
(after ten years old) take shelter from a shower of rain in Exeter
Change, and see how he will amuse the time with looking over the
trinkets, the chains, the seals, the curious works of art. Compare this
with the description of Una and the Red Cross Knight in Spenser:
‘Enforc’d to seek some covert nigh at hand,
A shady grove not far away they spied,
That promis’d aid the tempest to withstand:
Whose lofty trees, yclad with summer’s pride,
Did spread so broad, that heaven’s light did hide,
Not pierceable with power of any star;
And all within were paths and alleys wide,
With footing worn, and leading inward far;
Far harbour that them seems: so in they enter’d are.
‘And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led,
Joying to hear the birds’ sweet harmony,
Which therein shrowded from the tempest’s dread,
Seem’d in their song to scorn the cruel sky.
Much can they praise the trees so straight and high,
The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,
The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry,
The builder oak, sole king of forests all,
The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral.’[64]
Artificial flowers look pretty in a lady’s head-dress; but they will not
do to stick into lofty verse. On the contrary, a crocus bursting out of
the ground seems to blush with its own golden light—‘a thing of life.’
So a greater authority than Lord Byron has given his testimony on this
subject: ‘Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they
spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these.’ Shakspeare speaks of—
——‘Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares and take
The winds of March with beauty.’
All this play of fancy and dramatic interest could not be transferred to
a description of hot-house plants, regulated by a thermometer. Lord
Byron unfairly enlists into the service of his argument those artificial
objects, which are direct imitations of nature, such as statuary, etc.
This is an oversight. At this rate, all poetry would be artificial
poetry. Dr. Darwin is among those, who have endeavoured to confound the
distinctions of natural and artificial poetry, and indeed, he is,
perhaps, the only one who has gone the whole length of Lord Byron’s
hypercritical and super-artificial theory. Here are some of his lines,
which have been greatly admired.
_Apostrophe to Steel._
‘Hail, adamantine steel! magnetic lord,
King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword!
True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides
His steady course amid the struggling tides,
Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,
Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee!’
This is the true false gallop of the sublime. Yet steel is a very useful
metal, and doubtless performs all these wonders. But it has not, among
so many others, the virtue of amalgamating with the imagination. We
might quote also his description of the spinning-jenny, which is
pronounced by Dr. Aikin to be as ingenious a piece of mechanism as the
object it describes; and, according to Lord Byron, this last is as well
suited to the manufacture of verses as of cotton-twist without end.
3. Natural interests are those which are real and inevitable, and are so
far contradistinguished from the artificial, which are factitious and
affected. If Lord Byron cannot understand the difference, he may find it
explained by contrasting some of Chaucer’s characters and incidents with
those in the Rape of the Lock, for instance. Custance floating in her
boat on the wide sea, is different from Pope’s heroine,
‘Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames.’
Griselda’s loss of her children, one by one, of her _all_, does not
belong to the same class of incidents, nor of subjects for poetry, as
Belinda’s loss of her favourite curl. A sentiment that has rooted itself
in the heart, and can only be torn from it with life, is not like the
caprice of the moment—the putting on of paint and patches, or the
pulling off a glove. The inbred character is not like a masquerade
dress. There is a difference between the theatrical, and natural, which
is important to the determination of the present question, and which has
been overlooked by his Lordship. Mr. Bowles, however, formally insists
(and with the best right in the world) on the distinction between
passion and manners. But he agrees with Lord Byron, that the Epistle to
Abelard is the height of the pathetic.
‘Strange that such difference should be
Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee.’
That it is in a great degree pathetic, we should be amongst the last to
dispute; but its character is more properly rhetorical and voluptuous.
That its interest is of the highest or deepest order, is what we should
wonder to hear any one affirm, who is intimate with Shakspeare, Chaucer,
Boccacio, our own early dramatists, or the Greek tragedians. There is
more true, unfeigned, unspeakable, heart-felt distress in one line of
Chaucer’s tale just mentioned,
‘Let me not like a worm go by the way,’
than in all Pope’s writings put together; and we say it without any
disrespect to him too. Didactic poetry has to do with manners, as they
are regulated, not by fashion or caprice, but by abstract reason and
grave opinion, and is equally remote from the dramatic, which describes
the involuntary and unpremeditated impulses of nature. As Lord Byron
refers to the Bible, we would just ask him here, which he thinks the
most poetical parts of it, the Law of the Twelve Tables, the Book of
Leviticus, etc.; or the Book of Job, Jacob’s dream, the story of Ruth
etc?
4. Supernatural poetry is, in the sense here insisted on, allied to
nature, not to art, because it relates to the impressions made upon the
mind by unknown objects and powers, out of the reach both of the
cognizance and will of man, and still more able to startle and confound
his imagination, while he supposes them to exist, than either those of
nature or art. The Witches in Macbeth, the Furies in Æschylus, are so
far artificial objects, that they are creatures of the poet’s brain; but
their impression on the mind depends on their possessing attributes,
which baffle and set at nought all human pretence, and laugh at all
human efforts to tamper with them. Satan in Milton is an artificial or
ideal character: but would any one call this artificial poetry? It is,
in Lord Byron’s phrase, super-artificial, as well as super-human poetry.
But it is serious business. Fate, if not Nature, is its ruling genius.
The Pandemonium is not a baby-house of the fancy, and it is ranked
(ordinarily,) with natural, _i.e._ with the highest and most important
order of poetry, and above the Rape of the Lock. We intended a
definition, and have run again into examples. Lord Byron’s _concretions_
have spoiled us for philosophy. We will therefore leave off here, and
conclude with a character of Pope, which seems to have been written with
an eye to this question, and which (for what we know) is as near a
solution of it as the Noble Letter-writer’s emphatical division of
Pope’s writings into ethical, mock-heroic, and fanciful poetry.
‘Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of
it. He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion;
he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the
feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakspeare had an
intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart
of man in all possible circumstances: Pope had an exact knowledge of all
that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his
daring flight from heaven to earth, through Chaos and old Night. Pope’s
Muse never wandered with safety, but from his library to his grotto, or
from his grotto into his library back again. His mind dwelt with greater
pleasure on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could
describe the faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own
person, better than the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the
face of heaven—a piece of cut glass or a pair of paste buckles with more
brilliance and effect, than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun.
He would be more delighted with a patent lamp, than with “the pale
reflex of Cynthia’s brow,” that fills the skies with its soft silent
lustre, that trembles through the cottage window, and cheers the
watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of
personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to him, was the
greatest; the fashion of the day bore sway in his mind over the
immutable laws of nature. He preferred the artificial to the natural in
external objects, because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with the
self-love of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw, than admiration of
that which was interesting to all mankind. He preferred the artificial
to the natural in passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating
impulses of the one hurried him away with a force and vehemence with
which he could not grapple; while he could trifle with the conventional
and superficial modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or
admire, put them on or off like a masquerade dress, make much or little
of them, indulge them for a longer or a shorter time, as he pleased; and
because while they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they
never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind
was the antithesis of strength and grandeur; its power was the power of
indifference. He had none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetry
what the sceptic is in religion.
‘It cannot be denied, that his chief excellence lay more in diminishing,
than in aggrandizing objects; in checking, not in encouraging our
enthusiasm; in sneering at the extravagances of fancy or passion,
instead of giving a loose to them; in describing a row of pins and
needles, rather than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans; in
penning a lampoon or a compliment, and in praising Martha Blount.
‘Shakspeare says,
“——In Fortune’s ray and brightness
The herd hath more annoyance by the brize
Than by the tyger: but when the splitting wind
Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,
And flies fled under shade, why then
The thing of courage,
As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathise;
And with an accent tuned in the self-same key,
Replies to chiding Fortune.”
There is none of this rough work in Pope. His Muse was on a
peace-establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and
indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour
of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies
of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are
whispered flatteries; its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for—“the
gnarled oak,” he gives us “the soft myrtle:” for rocks, and seas, and
mountains, artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for
earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a
china jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of
the passions, we have
“Calm contemplation and poetic ease.”
Yet within this retired and narrow circle how much, and that how
exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy,
what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered
refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a
microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new
consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and
slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the
deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the
magnifier is, to be sure, held to everything, but still the exhibition
is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or
surprised. Such, at least, is the best account I am able to give of this
extraordinary man, without doing injustice to him or others.’
ON CONSISTENCY OF OPINION
_The London Magazine._] [_November 1821._
‘——Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab inceptu processerit, et sibi constet.’