"No man is the lord of any thing,
Till he communicate his parts to others:
Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
Till he behold them formed in the applause,
Where they're extended! which like an arch reverberates
The voice again, or like a gate of steel,
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
Its figure and its heat."
Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice.
"Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane
Be shook to air."
Shakspeare's language and versification are like the rest of him. He has
a magic power over words: they come winged at his bidding; and seem to
know their places. They are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the
occasion, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an
actual impression of the objects. His epithets and single phrases are
like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling
rapidity of its own motion. His language is hieroglypnical. It
translates thoughts into visible images. It abounds in sudden
transitions and elliptical expressions. This is the source of his mixed
metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of speech. These, however,
give no pain from long custom. They have, in fact, become idioms in the
language. They are the building, and not the scaffolding to thought. We
take the meaning and effect of a well-known passage entire, and no more
stop to scan and spell out the particular words and phrases, than the
syllables of which they are composed. In trying to recollect any other
author, one sometimes stumbles, in case of failure, on a word as good.
In Shakspeare, any other word but the true one, is sure to be wrong. If
any body, for instance, could not recollect the words of the following
description,
"------Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,"
he would be greatly at a loss to substitute others for them equally
expressive of the feeling. These remarks, however, are strictly
applicable only to the impassioned parts of Shakspeare's language, which
flowed from the warmth and originality of his imagination, and were his
own. The language used for prose conversation and ordinary business is
sometimes technical, and involved in the affectation of the time.
Compare, for example, Othello's apology to the senate, relating "his
whole course of love," with some of the preceding parts relating to his
appointment, and the official dispatches from Cyprus. In this respect,
"the business of the state does him offence."--His versification is no
less powerful, sweet, and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of
sullen intricacy, crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and
loftiest expansion--from the ease and familiarity of measured
conversation to the lyrical sounds
"------Of ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower,
With ravishing division to her lute."
It is the only blank verse in the language, except Milton's, that for
itself is readable. It is not stately and uniformly swelling like his,
but varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass
over in its uncertain course,
"And so by many winding nooks it strays,
With willing sport to the wild ocean."
It remains to speak of the faults of Shakspeare. They are not so many
or so great as they have been represented; what there are, are chiefly
owing to the following causes:--The universality of his genius was,
perhaps, a disadvantage to his single works; the variety of his
resources, sometimes diverting him from applying them to the most
effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of AEschylus
and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been
only half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The
natural ease and indifference of his temper made him sometimes less
scrupulous than he might have been. He is relaxed and careless in
critical places; he is in earnest throughout only in Timon, Macbeth, and
Lear. Again, he had no models of acknowledged excellence constantly in
view to stimulate his efforts, and by all that appears, no love of fame.
He wrote for the "great vulgar and the small," in his time, not for
posterity. If Queen Elizabeth and the maids of honour laughed heartily
at his worst jokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were silent at his
best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next night well. He
did not trouble himself about Voltaire's criticisms. He was willing to
take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things; and if his
plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very
facility of production would make him set less value on his own
excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well
or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above
half a dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography,
not against poetry. As to the unities, he was right in setting them at
defiance. He was fonder of puns than became so great a man. His
barbarisms were those of his age. His genius was his own. He had no
objection to float down with the stream of common taste and opinion: he
rose above it by his own buoyancy, and an impulse which he could not
keep under, in spite of himself or others, and "his delights did shew
most dolphin-like."
He had an equal genius for comedy and tragedy; and his tragedies are
better than his comedies, because tragedy is better than comedy. His
female characters, which have been found fault with as insipid, are the
finest in the world. Lastly, Shakspeare was the least of a coxcomb of
any one that ever lived, and much of a gentleman.
Shakspeare discovers in his writings little religious enthusiasm, and
an indifference to personal reputation; he had none of the bigotry of
his age, and his political prejudices were not very strong. In these
respects, as well as in every other, he formed a direct contrast to
Milton. Milton's works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn
to Fame. He had his thoughts constantly fixed on the contemplation of
the Hebrew theocracy, and of a perfect commonwealth; and he seized the
pen with a hand just warm from the touch of the ark of faith. His
religious zeal infused its character into his imagination; so that he
devotes himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation of his
genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the good of his country.
The spirit of the poet, the patriot, and the prophet, vied with each
other in his breast. His mind appears to have held equal communion with
the inspired writers, and with the bards and sages of ancient Greece and
Rome;--
"Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old."
He had a high standard, with which he was always comparing himself,
nothing short of which could satisfy his jealous ambition. He thought of
nobler forms and nobler things than those he found about him. He lived
apart, in the solitude of his own thoughts, carefully excluding from his
mind whatever might distract its purposes or alloy its purity, or damp
its zeal. "With darkness and with dangers compassed round," he had the
mighty models of antiquity always present to his thoughts, and
determined to raise a monument of equal height and glory, "piling up
every stone of lustre from the brook," for the delight and wonder of
posterity. He had girded himself up, and as it were, sanctified his
genius to this service from his youth. "For after," he says, "I had from
my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, been
exercised to the tongues, and some sciences as my age could suffer, by
sundry masters and teachers, it was found that whether aught was imposed
upon me by them, or betaken to of my own choice, the style by certain
vital signs it had, was likely to live; but much latelier, in the
private academies of Italy, perceiving that some trifles which I had in
memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout, met with acceptance
above what was looked for; I began thus far to assent both to them and
divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting
which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study (which I
take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity
of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times as
they should not willingly let it die. The accomplishment of these
intentions, which have lived within me ever since I could conceive
myself anything worth to my country, lies not but in a power above man's
to promise; but that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and
with more unwearied spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of
myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend. Neither do I think
it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years
yet, I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now
indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the
vapours of wine; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some
vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be
obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but
by devout prayer to that eternal spirit who can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed
fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases: to
this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation,
and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs. Although it
nothing content me to have disclosed thus much beforehand; but that I
trust hereby to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to
interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and
pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to
embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, from beholding
the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful
studies."
So that of Spenser:
"The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought,
And is with child of glorious great intent,
Can never rest until it forth have brought
The eternal brood of glory excellent."
Milton, therefore, did not write from casual impulse, but after a
severe examination of his own strength, and with a resolution to leave
nothing undone which it was in his power to do. He always labours, and
almost always succeeds. He strives hard to say the finest things in the
world, and he does say them. He adorns and dignifies his subject to the
utmost: he surrounds it with every possible association of beauty or
grandeur, whether moral, intellectual, or physical. He refines on his
descriptions of beauty; loading sweets on sweets, till the sense aches
at them; and raises his images of terror to a gigantic elevation, that
"makes Ossa like a wart." In Milton, there is always an appearance of
effort: in Shakespeare, scarcely any.
Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every
source of imitation, sacred or profane; yet he is perfectly distinct
from every other writer. He is a writer of centos, and yet in
originality scarcely inferior to Homer. The power of his mind is stamped
on every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders
malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. In reading
his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect,
that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from
them. The quantity of art in him shews the strength of his genius: the
weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other
writer. Milton's learning has the effect of intuition. He describes
objects, of which he could only have read in books, with the vividness
of actual observation. His imagination has the force of nature. He makes
words tell as pictures.
"Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat
Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks
Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams."
The word _lucid_ here gives to the idea all the sparkling effect of the
most perfect landscape.
And again:
"As when a vulture on Imaus bred,
Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a region scarce of prey,
To gorge the flesh of lambs and yeanling kids
On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
But in his way lights on the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses [sic] drive
With sails and wind their cany waggons light."
If Milton had taken a journey for the express purpose, he could not have
described this scenery and mode of life better. Such passages are like
demonstrations of natural history. Instances might be multiplied without
end.
We might be tempted to suppose that the vividness with which he
describes visible objects, was owing to their having acquired an unusual
degree of strength in his mind, after the privation of his sight; but we
find the same palpableness and truth in the descriptions which occur in
his early poems. In Lycidas he speaks of "the great vision of the
guarded mount," with that preternatural weight of impression with which
it would present itself suddenly to "the pilot of some small
night-foundered skiff": and the lines in the Penseroso, describing "the
wandering moon,"
"Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven's wide pathless way,"
are as if he had gazed himself blind in looking at her. There is also
the same depth of impression in his descriptions of the objects of all
the different senses, whether colours, or sounds, or smells--the same
absorption of his mind in whatever engaged his attention at the time. It
has been indeed objected to Milton, by a common perversity of criticism,
that his ideas were musical rather than picturesque, as if because they
were in the highest degree musical, they must be (to keep the sage
critical balance even, and to allow no one man to possess two qualities
at the same time) proportionably deficient in other respects. But
Milton's poetry is not cast in any such narrow, common-place mould; it
is not so barren of resources. His worship of the Muse was not so simple
or confined. A sound arises "like a steam of rich distilled perfumes";
we hear the pealing organ, but the incense on the altars is also there,
and the statues of the gods are ranged around! The ear indeed
predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately affected, and
because the language of music blends more immediately with, and forms a
more natural accompaniment to, the variable and indefinite associations
of ideas conveyed by words. But where the associations of the
imagination are not the principal thing, the individual object is given
by Milton with equal force and beauty. The strongest and best proof of
this, as a characteristic power of his mind, is, that the persons of
Adam and Eve, of Satan, &c. are always accompanied, in our imagination,
with the grandeur of the naked figure; they convey to us the ideas of
sculpture. As an instance, take the following:
"------He soon
Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand,
The same whom John saw also in the sun:
His back was turned, but not his brightness hid;
Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar
Circled his head, nor less his locks behind
Illustrious on his shoulders fledge with wings
Lay waving round; on some great charge employ'd
He seem'd, or fix'd in cogitation deep.
Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hope
To find who might direct his wand'ring flight
To Paradise, the happy seat of man,
His journey's end, and our beginning woe.
But first he casts to change his proper shape,
Which else might work him danger or delay:
And now a stripling cherub he appears,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb
Suitable grace diffus'd, so well he feign'd:
Under a coronet his flowing hair
In curls on either cheek play'd; wings he wore
Of many a colour'd plume sprinkled with gold,
His habit fit for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a silver wand."
The figures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a
Greek statue; glossy and impurpled, tinged with golden light, and
musical as the strings of Memnon's harp!
Again, nothing can be more magnificent than the portrait of
Beelzebub:
"With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies:"
Or the comparison of Satan, as he "lay floating many a rood," to "that
sea beast,"
"Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream!"
What a force of imagination is there in this last expression! What an
idea it conveys of the size of that hugest of created beings, as if it
shrunk up the ocean to a stream, and took up the sea in its nostrils as
a very little thing? Force of style is one of Milton's greatest
excellences. Hence, perhaps, he stimulates us more in the reading, and
less afterwards. The way to defend Milton against all impugners, is to
take down the book and read it.
Milton's blank verse is the only blank verse in the language (except
Shakspeare's) that deserves the name of verse. Dr. Johnson, who had
modelled his ideas of versification on the regular sing-song of Pope,
condemns the Paradise Lost as harsh and unequal. I shall not pretend to
say that this is not sometimes the case; for where a degree of
excellence beyond the mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poet
must sometimes fail. But I imagine that there are more perfect examples
in Milton of musical expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and
movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage, than in all our
other writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the
exception already mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our
stanza writers, as Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our
rhymists. But in neither is there any thing like the same ear for music,
the same power of approximating the varieties of poetical to those of
musical rhythm, as there is in our great epic poet. The sound of his
lines is moulded into the expression of the sentiment, almost of the
very image. They rise or fall, pause or hurry rapidly on, with exquisite
art, but without the least trick or affectation, as the occasion seems
to require.
The following are some of the finest instances:
"------His hand was known
In Heaven by many a tower'd structure high;--
Nor was his name unheard or unador'd
In ancient Greece: and in the Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber: and how he fell
From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the chrystal battlements; from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos, the AEgean isle: thus they relate,
Erring."--
"------But chief the spacious hall
Thick swarm'd, both on the ground and in the air,
Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings. As bees
In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides,
Pour forth their populous youth about the hive
In clusters; they among fresh dews and flow'rs
Fly to and fro: or on the smoothed plank,
The suburb of their straw-built citadel,
New rubb'd with balm, expatiate and confer
Their state affairs. So thick the airy crowd
Swarm'd and were straiten'd; till the signal giv'n,
Behold a wonder! They but now who seem'd
In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons,
Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room
Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race
Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course: they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds."
I can only give another instance, though I have some difficulty in
leaving off.
"Round he surveys (and well might, where he stood
So high above the circling canopy
Of night's extended shade) from th' eastern point
Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears
Andromeda far off Atlantic seas
Beyond the horizon: then from pole to pole
He views in breadth, and without longer pause
Down right into the world's first region throws
His flight precipitant, and winds with ease
Through the pure marble air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable stars that shone
Stars distant, but nigh hand seem'd other worlds;
Or other worlds they seem'd or happy isles," &c.
The verse, in this exquisitely modulated passage, floats up and down as
if it had itself wings. Milton has himself given us the theory of his
versification--
"Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out."
Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a
rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton's,--Thomson's,
Young's, Cowper's, Wordsworth's,--and it will be found, from the want
of the same insight into "the hidden soul of harmony," to be mere
lumbering prose.
To proceed to a consideration of the merits of Paradise Lost, in the
most essential point of view, I mean as to the poetry of character and
passion. I shall say nothing of the fable, or of other technical
objections or excellences; but I shall try to explain at once the
foundation of the interest belonging to the poem. I am ready to give up
the dialogues in Heaven, where, as Pope justly observes, "God the Father
turns a school-divine"; nor do I consider the battle of the angels as
the climax of sublimity, or the most successful effort of Milton's pen.
In a word, the interest of the poem arises from the daring ambition and
fierce passions of Satan, and from the account of the paradisaical
happiness, and the loss of it by our first parents. Three-fourths of the
work are taken up with these characters, and nearly all that relates to
them is unmixed sublimity and beauty. The two first books alone are like
two massy pillars of solid gold.
Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem; and
the execution is as perfect as the design is lofty. He was the first of
created beings, who, for endeavouring to be equal with the highest, and
to divide the empire of heaven with the Almighty, was hurled down to
hell. His aim was no less than the throne of the universe; his means,
myriads of angelic armies bright, the third part of the heavens, whom he
lured after him with his countenance, and who durst defy the Omnipotent
in arms. His ambition was the greatest, and his punishment was the
greatest; but not so his despair, for his fortitude was as great as his
sufferings. His strength of mind was matchless as his strength of body;
the vastness of his designs did not surpass the firm, inflexible
determination with which he submitted to his irreversible doom, and
final loss of all good. His power of action and of suffering was equal.
He was the greatest power that was ever overthrown, with the strongest
will left to resist or to endure. He was baffled, not confounded. He
stood like a tower; or
"------As when Heaven's fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines."
He was still surrounded with hosts of rebel angels, armed warriors, who
own him as their sovereign leader, and with whose fate he sympathises as
he views them round, far as the eye can reach; though he keeps aloof
from them in his own mind, and holds supreme counsel only with his own
breast. An outcast from Heaven, Hell trembles beneath his feet, Sin and
Death are at his heels, and mankind are his easy prey.
"All is not lost; th' unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what else is not to be overcome,"
are still his. The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude
of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames is qualified and made
innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite
happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of
inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of
malignity, or of the abstract love of evil--but of the abstract love
of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle
all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. From this
principle he never once flinches. His love of power and contempt for
suffering are never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity.
His thoughts burn like a hell within him; but the power of thought holds
dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness
of a determined purpose, of "that intellectual being, those thoughts
that wander through eternity," though accompanied with endless pain, he
prefers to nonentity, to "being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb
of uncreated night." He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition
in one line. "Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or
suffering!" After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat
in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he
does more than this--he founds a new empire in hell, and from it
conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted flight, forcing
his way through nether and surrounding fires. The poet has not in all
this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the
magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct;
the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a
more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of
Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, "rising aloft incumbent
on the dusky air," it is illustrated with the most striking and
appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic,
irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed--but dazzling in its
faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god. The deformity of Satan is
only in the depravity of his will; he has no bodily deformity to excite
our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there, poor emblems
of the unbending, unconquered spirit, of the writhing agonies within.
Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his
argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot; to bring into the
fair field of controversy the good old catholic prejudices of which
Tasso and Dante have availed themselves, and which the mystic German
critics would restore. He relied on the justice of his cause, and did
not scruple to give the devil his due. Some persons may think that he
has carried his liberality too far, and injured the cause he professed
to espouse by making him the chief person in his poem. Considering the
nature of his subject, he would be equally in danger of running into
this fault, from his faith in religion, and his love of rebellion; and
perhaps each of these motives had its full share in determining the
choice of his subject.
Not only the figure of Satan, but his speeches in council, his
soliloquies, his address to Eve, his share in the war in heaven, or in
the fall of man, shew the same decided superiority of character. To give
only one instance, almost the first speech he makes:
"Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then the lost archangel, this the seat
That we must change for Heaven; this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is sov'rain can dispose and bid
What shall be right: farthest from him is best,
Whom reason hath equal'd, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewel happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells: Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."
The whole of the speeches and debates in Pandemonium are well worthy
of the place and the occasion--with Gods for speakers, and angels and
archangels for hearers. There is a decided manly tone in the arguments
and sentiments, an eloquent dogmatism, as if each person spoke from
thorough conviction; an excellence which Milton probably borrowed from
his spirit of partisanship, or else his spirit of partisanship from the
natural firmness and vigour of his mind. In this respect Milton
resembles Dante, (the only modern writer with whom he has any thing in
common) and it is remarkable that Dante, as well as Milton, was a
political partisan. That approximation to the severity of impassioned
prose which has been made an objection to Milton's poetry, and which is
chiefly to be met with in these bitter invectives, is one of its great
excellences. The author might here turn his philippics against Salmasius
to good account. The rout in Heaven is like the fall of some mighty
structure, nodding to its base, "with hideous ruin and combustion down."
But, perhaps, of all the passages in Paradise Lost, the description of
the employments of the angels during the absence of Satan, some of whom
"retreated in a silent valley, sing with notes angelical to many a harp
their own heroic deeds and hapless fall by doom of battle," is the most
perfect example of mingled pathos and sublimity.--What proves the truth
of this noble picture in every part, and that the frequent complaint of
want of interest in it is the fault of the reader, not of the poet, is
that when any interest of a practical kind take a shape that can be at
all turned into this, (and there is little doubt that Milton had some
such in his eye in writing it,) each party converts it to its own
purposes, feels the absolute identity of these abstracted and high
speculations; and that, in fact, a noted political writer of the present
day has exhausted nearly the whole account of Satan in the Paradise
Lost, by applying it to a character whom he considered as after the
devil, (though I do not know whether he would make even that exception)
the greatest enemy of the human race. This may serve to shew that
Milton's Satan is not a very insipid personage.
Of Adam and Eve it has been said, that the ordinary reader can feel
little interest in them, because they have none of the passions,
pursuits, or even relations of human life, except that of man and wife,
the least interesting of all others, if not to the parties concerned, at
least to the by-standers. The preference has on this account been given
to Homer, who, it is said, has left very vivid and infinitely
diversified pictures of all the passions and affections, public and
private, incident to human nature--the relations of son, of brother,
parent, friend, citizen, and many others. Longinus preferred the Iliad
to the Odyssey, on account of the greater number of battles it contains;
but I can neither agree to his criticism, nor assent to the present
objection. It is true, there is little action in this part of Milton's
poem; but there is much repose, and more enjoyment. There are none of
the every-day occurrences, contentions, disputes, wars, fightings,
feuds, jealousies, trades, professions, liveries, and common handicrafts
of life; "no kind of traffic; letters are not known; no use of service,
of riches, poverty, contract, succession, bourne, bound of land, tilth,
vineyard none; no occupation, no treason, felony, sword, pike, knife,
gun, nor need of any engine." So much the better; thank Heaven, all
these were yet to come. But still the die was cast, and in them our doom
was sealed. In them
"The generations were prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs, were ready, the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will,
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."
In their first false step we trace all our future woe, with loss of
Eden. But there was a short and precious interval between, like the
first blush of morning before the day is overcast with tempest, the dawn
of the world, the birth of nature from "the unapparent deep," with its
first dews and freshness on its cheek, breathing odours. Theirs was the
first delicious taste of life, and on them depended all that was to come
of it. In them hung trembling all our hopes and fears. They were as yet
alone in the world, in the eye of nature, wondering at their new being,
full of enjoyment and enraptured with one another, with the voice of
their Maker walking in the garden, and ministering angels attendant on
their steps, winged messengers from heaven like rosy clouds descending
in their sight. Nature played around them her virgin fancies wild; and
spread for them a repast where no crude surfeit reigned. Was there
nothing in this scene, which God and nature alone witnessed, to interest
a modern critic? What need was there of action, where the heart was full
of bliss and innocence without it! They had nothing to do but feel their
own happiness, and "know to know no more." "They toiled not, neither
did they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of
these." All things seem to acquire fresh sweetness, and to be clothed
with fresh beauty in their sight. They tasted as it were for themselves
and us, of all that there ever was pure in human bliss. "In them the
burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this
unintelligible world, is lightened." They stood awhile perfect, but they
afterwards fell, and were driven out of Paradise, tasting the first
fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss. But their pangs were
such as a pure spirit might feel at the sight--their tears "such as
angels weep." The pathos is of that mild contemplative kind which arises
from regret for the loss of unspeakable happiness, and resignation to
inevitable fate. There is none of the fierceness of intemperate passion,
none of the agony of mind and turbulence of action, which is the result
of the habitual struggles of the will with circumstances, irritated by
repeated disappointment, and constantly setting its desires most eagerly
on that which there is an impossibility of attaining. This would have
destroyed the beauty of the whole picture. They had received their
unlooked-for happiness as a free gift from their Creator's hands, and
they submitted to its loss, not without sorrow, but without impious and
stubborn repining.
"In either hand the hast'ning angel caught
Our ling'ring parents, and to th' eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappear'd.
They looking back, all th' eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces throng'd, and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropt, but wip'd them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide."
LECTURE IV.
ON DRYDEN AND POPE.
Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificial style of
poetry in our language, as the poets of whom I have already treated,
Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, were of the natural; and
though this artificial style is generally and very justly acknowledged
to be inferior to the other, yet those who stand at the head of that
class, ought, perhaps, to rank higher than those who occupy an inferior
place in a superior class. They have a clear and independent claim upon
our gratitude, as having produced a kind and degree of excellence which
existed equally nowhere else. What has been done well by some later
writers of the highest style of poetry, is included in, and obscured by
a greater degree of power and genius in those before them: what has been
done best by poets of an entirely distinct turn of mind, stands by
itself, and tells for its whole amount. Young, for instance, Gray, or
Akenside, only follow in the train of Milton and Shakspeare: Pope and
Dryden walk by their side, though of an unequal stature, and are
entitled to a first place in the lists of fame. This seems to be not
only the reason of the thing, but the common sense of mankind, who,
without any regular process of reflection, judge of the merit of a work,
not more by its inherent and absolute worth, than by its originality and
capacity of gratifying a different faculty of the mind, or a different
class of readers; for it should be recollected, that there may be
readers (as well as poets) not of the highest class, though very good
sort of people, and not altogether to be despised.
The question, whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled,
and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must
have been a great prose-writer, that is, he was a great writer of some
sort. He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined
taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as
the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet,
and a good one. If, indeed, by a great poet, we mean one who gives the
utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the
passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the
bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the clean contrary way;
namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent
observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his Critical Essays;
or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point
of view, as in his Satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity,
as in his poems of Fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and
familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression, and
all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his
Epistles. He was not then distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm,
of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of
nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a
wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation, and the world, with a
keen relish for the elegances of art, or of nature when embellished by
art, a quick tact for propriety of thought and manners as established by
the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the sentiments
and habitudes of human life, as he felt them within the little circle of
his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet, not of nature, but
of art; and the distinction between the two, as well as I can make it
out, is this--The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of
beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with
whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its
simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts
and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and
depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the
very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record
the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable to
the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his
readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for
he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for
he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common
nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakspeare, whose works will last as
long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and
everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a
perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker.
The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all
nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of
the universe.
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 every thing, 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. It is time
to refer to particular instances in his works.--The Rape of the Lock is
the best or most ingenious of these. It is the most exquisite specimen
of _fillagree_ work ever invented. It is admirable in proportion as it
is made of nothing.
"More subtle web Arachne cannot spin,
Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew, do not in th' air more lightly flee."
It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance
is given to every thing, to paste, pomatum, billet-doux, and patches.
Airs, languid airs, breathe around;--the atmosphere is perfumed with
affectation. A toilette is described with the solemnity of an altar
raised to the Goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is
given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion
of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest
things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity,
is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is
made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or
weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and
folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic! I will give only the two
following passages in illustration of these remarks. Can any thing be
more elegant and graceful than the description of Belinda, in the
beginning of the second canto?
"Not with more glories, in the ethereal plain,
The sun first rises o'er the purpled main,
Than, issuing forth, the rival of his beams
Launch'd on the bosom of the silver Thames.
Fair nymphs, and well-drest youths around her shone,
But ev'ry eye was fix'd on her alone.
On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.
Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes, and as unfix'd as those:
Favours to none, to all she smiles extends;
Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike;
And like the sun, they shine on all alike.
Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,
Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:
If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.
This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,
Nourish'd two locks, which graceful hung behind
In equal curls, and well conspir'd to deck
With shining ringlets the smooth iv'ry neck."
The following is the introduction to the account of Belinda's assault
upon the baron bold, who had dissevered one of these locks "from her
fair head for ever and for ever."
"Now meet thy fate, incens'd Belinda cry'd,
And drew a deadly bodkin from her side.
(The same his ancient personage to deck,
Her great, great grandsire wore about his neck,
In three seal-rings; which after, melted down,
Form'd a vast buckle for his widow's gown:
Her infant grandame's whistle next it grew,
The bells she jingled, and the whistle blew;
Then in a bodkin grac'd her mother's hairs,
Which long she wore, and now Belinda wears)."
I do not know how far Pope was indebted for the original idea, or the
delightful execution of this poem, to the Lutrin of Boileau.
The Rape of the Lock is a double-refined essence of wit and fancy, as
the Essay on Criticism is of wit and sense. The quantity of thought and
observation in this work, for so young a man as Pope was when he wrote
it, is wonderful: unless we adopt the supposition, that most men of
genius spend the rest of their lives in teaching others what they
themselves have learned under twenty. The conciseness and felicity of
the expression are equally remarkable. Thus in reasoning on the variety
of men's opinion, he says--
" 'Tis with our judgments, as our watches; none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own."
Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and
illustrations in the Essay; the critical rules laid down are too much
those of a school, and of a confined one. There is one passage in the
Essay on Criticism in which the author speaks with that eloquent
enthusiasm of the fame of ancient writers, which those will always feel
who have themselves any hope or chance of immortality. I have quoted the
passage elsewhere, but I will repeat it here.
"Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage,
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
Hail, bards triumphant, born in happier days,
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honours with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow."
These lines come with double force and beauty on the reader, as they
were dictated by the writer's despair of ever attaining that lasting
glory which he celebrates with such disinterested enthusiasm in others,
from the lateness of the age in which he lived, and from his writing in
a tongue, not understood by other nations, and that grows obsolete and
unintelligible to ourselves at the end of every second century. But he
needed not have thus antedated his own poetical doom--the loss and
entire oblivion of that which can never die. If he had known, he might
have boasted that "his little bark" wafted down the stream of time,
"------With _theirs_ should sail,
Pursue the triumph and partake the gale"--
if those who know how to set a due value on the blessing, were not the
last to decide confidently on their own pretensions to it.
There is a cant in the present day about genius, as every thing in
poetry: there was a cant in the time of Pope about sense, as performing
all sorts of wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the shibboleth of a
critical party of the day. As a proof of the exclusive attention which
it occupied in their minds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on
Criticism (not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score
successive couplets rhyming to the word _sense_. This appears almost
incredible without giving the instances, and no less so when they are
given.
"But of the two, less dangerous is the offence,
To tire our patience than mislead our sense."--_lines_ 3, 4.
"In search of wit these lose their common sense,
And then turn critics in their own defence."--_l._ 28, 29.
"Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense."--_l._ 209, 10.
"Some by old words to fame have made pretence,
Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense."--_l._ 324, 5.
" 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense."--_l._ 364, 5.
"At every trifle scorn to take offence;
That always shews great pride, or little sense."--_l._ 386, 7.
"Be silent always, when you doubt your sense,
And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence."--_l._ 366, 7.
"Be niggards of advice on no pretence,
For the worst avarice is that of sense."--_l._ 578, 9.
"Strain out the last dull dropping of their sense,
And rhyme with all the rage of impotence."--_l._ 608, 9.
"Horace still charms with graceful negligence,
And without method talks us into sense."--_l._ 653, 4.
I have mentioned this the more for the sake of those critics who are
bigotted idolisers of our author, chiefly on the score of his
correctness. These persons seem to be of opinion that "there is but one
perfect writer, even Pope." This is, however, a mistake: his excellence
is by no means faultlessness. If he had no great faults, he is full of
little errors. His grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect.
In the Abelard and Eloise, he says--
"There died the best of passions, Love and Fame."
This is not a legitimate ellipsis. Fame is not a passion, though love
is: but his ear was evidently confused by the meeting of the sounds
"love and fame," as if they of themselves immediately implied "love, and
love of fame." Pope's rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to
the eye instead of the ear; and this to a greater degree, not only than
in later, but than in preceding writers. The praise of his versification
must be confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony. In the
translation of the Iliad, which has been considered as his masterpiece
in style and execution, he continually changes the tenses in the same
sentence for the purposes of the rhyme, which shews either a want of
technical resources, or great inattention to punctilious exactness. But
to have done with this.
The epistle of Eloise to Abelard is the only exception I can think
of, to the general spirit of the foregoing remarks; and I should be
disingenuous not to acknowledge that it is an exception. The foundation
is in the letters themselves of Abelard and Eloise, which are quite as
impressive, but still in a different way. It is fine as a poem: it is
finer as a piece of high-wrought eloquence. No woman could be supposed
to write a better love-letter in verse. Besides the richness of the
historical materials, the high _gusto_ of the original sentiments which
Pope had to work upon, there were perhaps circumstances in his own
situation which made him enter into the subject with even more than a
poet's feeling. The tears shed are drops gushing from the heart: the
words are burning sighs breathed from the soul of love. Perhaps the poem
to which it bears the greatest similarity in our language, is Dryden's
Tancred and Sigismunda, taken from Boccaccio. Pope's Eloise will bear
this comparison; and after such a test, with Boccaccio for the original
author, and Dryden for the translator, it need shrink from no other.
There is something exceedingly tender and beautiful in the sound of the
concluding lines:
"If ever chance two wandering lovers brings
To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs," &c.
The Essay on Man is not Pope's best work. It is a theory which
Bolingbroke is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into
verse. But "he spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple
of his argument." All that he says, "the very words, and to the
self-same tune," would prove just as well that whatever is, is _wrong_,
as that whatever is, is _right_. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but
in general it is dull, heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already quoted
on Settle, the Lord Mayor's poet, (for at that time there was a city as
well as a court poet)
"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more"--
is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better
than his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant
bards of antiquity!
The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope, is the
prophetical conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires:
"Virtue may chuse the high or low degree,
'Tis just alike to virtue, and to me;
Dwell in a monk, or light upon a king,
She's still the same belov'd, contented thing.
Vice is undone if she forgets her birth,
And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth.
But 'tis the Fall degrades her to a whore:
Let Greatness own her, and she's mean no more.
Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess,
Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless;
In golden chains the willing world she draws,
And hers the gospel is, and hers the laws;
Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,
And sees pale Virtue carted in her stead.
Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,
Old England's Genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragged in the dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted trains along the ground!
Our youth, all livery'd o'er with foreign gold,
Before her dance; behind her, crawl the old!
See thronging millions to the Pagod run,
And offer country, parent, wife, or son!
Hear her black trumpet through the land proclaim,
That _not to be corrupted is the shame_.
In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow'r,
'Tis av'rice all, ambition is no more!
See all our nobles begging to be slaves!
See all our fools aspiring to be knaves!
The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore;
All, all look up with reverential awe,
At crimes that 'scape or triumph o'er the law;
While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry:
Nothing is sacred now but villainy.
Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)
Show there was one who held it in disdain."
His Satires are not in general so good as his Epistles. His enmity is
effeminate and petulant from a sense of weakness, as his friendship was
tender from a sense of gratitude. I do not like, for instance, his
character of Chartres, or his characters of women. His delicacy often
borders upon sickliness; his fastidiousness makes others fastidious. But
his compliments are divine; they are equal in value to a house or an
estate. Take the following. In addressing Lord Mansfield, he speaks of
the grave as a scene,
"Where Murray, long enough his country's pride,
Shall be no more than Tully, or than Hyde."