Sir Roger Newdigate is fairly entitled, we think, to be ranked among
the great critics of this school. He made a law that none of the poems
written for the prize which he established at Oxford should exceed
fifty lines. This law seems to us to have at least as much foundation in
reason as any of those which we {343}have mentioned; nay, much more,
for the world, we believe, is pretty well agreed in thinking that the
shorter a prize-poem is, the better.
We do not see why we should not make a few more rules of the same kind;
why we should not enact that the number of scenes in every act shall be
three or some multiple of three, that the number of lines in every scene
shall be an exact square, that the _dramatis personae_ shall never
be more or fewer than sixteen, and that, in heroic rhymes, every
thirty-sixth line shall have twelve syllables. If we were to lay down
these canons, and to call Pope, Goldsmith, and Addison incorrect writers
for not having complied with our whims, we should act precisely as those
critics act who find incorrectness in the magnificent imagery and the
varied music of Coleridge and Shelley.
The correctness which the last century prized so much resembles the
correctness of those pictures of the garden of Eden which we see in old
Bibles. We have an exact square, enclosed by the rivers Pison, Gihon,
Hiddekel, and Euphrates, each with a convenient bridge in the centre,
rectangular beds of flowers, a long canal, neatly bricked and railed
in, the tree of knowledge, clipped like one of the limes behind the
Tuilleries, standing in the centre of the grand alley, the snake twined
round it, the man on the right hand, the woman on the left, and the
beasts drawn up in an exact circle round them. In one sense the picture
is correct enough. That is to say, the squares are correct; the circles
are correct; the man and the woman are in a most correct line with the
tree; and the snake forms a most correct spiral.
But if there were a painter so gifted that he could place on the canvass
that glorious paradise, seen by the {344}interior eye of him whose
outward sight had failed with long watching and labouring for liberty
and truth, if there were a painter who could set before us the mazes
of the sapphire brook, the lake with its fringe of myrtles, the flowery
meadows, the grottoes overhung by vines, the forests shining with
Hesperian fruit and with the plumage of gorgeous birds, the massy shade
of that nuptial bower which showered down roses on the sleeping lovers,
what should we think of a connoisseur who should tell us that this
painting, though finer than the absurd picture in the old Bible, was not
so correct? Surely we should answer, It is both finer and more correct;
and it is finer because it is more correct. It is not made up of
correctly drawn diagrams; but it is a correct painting, a worthy
representation of that which it is intended to represent.
It is not in the fine arts alone that this false correctness is prized
by narrow-minded men, by men who cannot distinguish means from ends,
or what is accidental from what is essential. M. Jourdain admired
correctness in fencing. “You had no business to hit me then. You must
never thrust in quart till you have thrust in tierce.” M. Tomes liked
correctness in medical practice. “I stand up for Artemius. That he
killed his patient is plain enough. But still he acted quite according
to rule. A man dead is a man dead; and there is an end of the matter.
But if rules are to be broken, there is no saying what consequences may
follow.” We have heard of an old German officer, who was a great admirer
of correctness in military operations. He used to revile Bonaparte for
spoiling the science of war, which had been carried to such exquisite
perfection by Marshal {345}Daun. “In my youth we used to march and
countermarch all the summer without gaining or losing a square league,
and then we went into winter quarters. And now comes an ignorant,
hot-headed young man, who flies about from Bologne to Ulm, and from
Ulm to the middle of Moravia, and fights battles in December. The
whole system of his tactics is monstrously incorrect.” The world is of
opinion, in spite of critics like these, that the end of fencing is
to hit, that the end of medicine is to cure, that the end of war is to
conquer, and that those means are the most correct which best accomplish
the ends.
And has poetry no end, no eternal and immutable principles? Is poetry,
like heraldry, mere matter of arbitrary regulation? The heralds tell us
that certain scutcheons and bearings denote certain conditions, and that
to put colours on colours, or metals on metals, is false blazonry.
If all this were reversed, if every coat of arms in Europe were new
fashioned, if it were decreed that or should never be placed but on
argent, or argent but on or, that illegitimacy should be denoted by a
lozenge, and widowhood by a bend, the new science would be just as good
as the old science, because both the new and the old would be good for
nothing. The mummery of Portcullis and Rouge Dragon, as it has no other
value than that which caprice has assigned to it, may well submit to any
laws which caprice may impose on it. But it is not so with that great
imitative art, to the power of which all ages, the rudest and the most
enlightened, bear witness. Since its first great masterpieces were
produced, every thing that is changeable in this world has been changed.
Civilisation has been gained, lost, gained again. Religions, and
languages, and forms of government, and usages of private {346}life, and
modes of thinking, all have undergone a succession of revolutions. Every
thing has passed away but the great features of nature, and the heart of
man, and the miracles of that art of which it is the office to reflect
back the heart of man and the features of nature. Those two strange
old poems, the wonder of ninety generations, still retain all their
freshness. They still command the veneration of minds enriched by the
literature of many nations and ages. They are still, even in wretched
translations, the delight of schoolboys. Having survived ten thousand
capricious fashions, having seen successive codes of criticism become
obsolete, they still remain to us, immortal with the immortality of
truth, the same when perused in the study of an English scholar, as when
they were first chanted at the banquets of the Ionian princes.
Poetry is, as was said more than two thousand years ago, imitation. It
is an art analogous in many respects to the art of painting, sculpture,
and acting. The imitations of the painter, the sculptor, and the actor,
are indeed, within certain limits, more perfect than those of the poet.
The machinery which the poet employs consists merely of words; and words
cannot, even when employed by such an artist as Homer or Dante, present
to the mind images of visible objects quite so lively and exact as
those which we carry away from looking on the works of the brush and the
chisel. But, on the other hand, the range of poetry is infinitely wider
than that of any other imitative art, or than that of all the other
imitative arts together. The sculptor can imitate only form; the painter
only form and colour; the actor, until the poet supplies him with words,
only form, colour, and motion. Poetry holds the outer world in common
with the other arts. The {347}heart of man is the province, of poetry,
and of poetry alone. The painter, the sculptor, and the actor can
exhibit no more of human passion and character than that small portion
which overflows into the gesture and the face, always an imperfect,
often a deceitful, sign of that which is within. The deeper and more
complex parts of human nature can be exhibited by means of words alone.
Thus the objects of the imitation of poetry are the whole external and
the whole internal universe, the face of nature, the vicissitudes of
fortune, man as he is in himself, man as he appears in society, all
things which really exist, all things of which we can form an image in
our minds by combining together parts of things which really exist.
The domain of this Imperial art is commensurate with the imaginative
faculty.
An art essentially imitative ought not surely to be subjected to rules
which tend to make its imitations less perfect than they otherwise would
be; and those who obey such rules ought to be called, not correct, but
incorrect artists. The true way to judge of the rules by which English
poetry was governed during the last century is to look at the effects
which they produced.
It was in 1780 that Johnson completed his Lives of the Poets. He tells
us in that work that, since the time of Dryden, English poetry had shown
no tendency to relapse into its original savageness, that its language
had been refined, its numbers tuned, and its sentiments improved. It may
perhaps be doubted whether the nation had any great reason to exult in
the refinements and improvements which gave it Douglas for Othello, and
the Triumphs of Temper for the Fairy Queen.
It was during the thirty years which preceded the {348}appearance of
Johnson’s Lives that the diction and versification of English poetry
were, in the sense in which the word is commonly used, most correct.
Those thirty years are, as respects poetry, the most deplorable part
of our literary history. They have indeed bequeathed to us scarcely any
poetry which deserves to be remembered. Two or three hundred lines of
Gray, twice as many of Goldsmith, a few stanzas of Beattie and Collins,
a few strophes of Mason, and a few clever prologues and satires, were
the masterpieces of this age of consummate excellence. They may all be
printed in one volume, and that volume would be by no means a volume
of extraordinary merit. It would contain no poetry of the very highest
class, and little which could be placed very high in the second class.
The Paradise Regained or Comus would outweigh it all.
At last, when poetry had fallen into such utter decay that Mr. Hayley
was thought a great poet, it began to appear that the excess of the evil
was about to work the cure. Men became tired of an insipid conformity to
a standard which derived no authority from nature or reason. A shallow
criticism had taught them to ascribe a superstitious value to the
spurious correctness of poetasters. A deeper criticism brought them back
to the true correctness of the first great masters. The eternal laws
of poetry regained their power, and the temporary fashions which had
superseded those laws went after the wig of Lovelace and the hoop of
Clarissa.
It was in a cold and barren season that the seeds of that rich harvest
which we have reaped were first sown. While poetry was every year
becoming more feeble and more mechanical, while the monotonous
versification {349}which Pope had introduced, no longer redeemed by his
brilliant wit and his compactness of expression, palled on the ear of
the public, the great works of the old masters were every day attracting
more and more of the admiration which they deserved. The plays of
Shakspeare were better acted, better edited, and better known than they
had ever been. Our fine ancient ballads were again read with pleasure,
and it became a fashion to imitate them. Many of the imitations were
altogether contemptible. But they showed that men had at least begun to
admire the excellence which they could not rival. A literary revolution
was evidently at hand. There was a ferment in the minds of men, a vague
craving for something new, a disposition to hail with delight any
thing which might at first sight wear the appearance of originality. A
reforming age is always fertile of impostors. The same excited state of
public feeling which produced the great separation from the see of Rome
produced also the excesses of the Anabaptists. The same stir in the
public mind of Europe which overthrew the abuses of the old French
government, produced the Jacobins and Theophilanthropists.
Macpherson and Della Crusca were to the true reformers of English poetry
what Knipperdoling was to Luther, or Clootz to Turgot. The success of
Chatterton’s forgeries and of the far more contemptible forgeries of
Ireland showed that people had begun to love the old poetry well,
though not wisely. The public was never more disposed to believe stories
without evidence, and to admire books without merit. Any thing which
could break the dull monotony of the correct school was acceptable.
The forerunner of the great restoration of our literature was Cowper.
His literary career began and {350}ended at nearly the same time with
that of Alfieri. A comparison between Alfieri and Cowper may, at first
sight, appear as strange as that which a loyal Presbyterian minister is
said to have made in 1745 between George the Second and Enoch. It may
seem that the gentle, shy, melancholy Calvinist, whose spirit had been
broken by fagging at school, who had not courage to earn a livelihood by
reading the titles of bills in the House of Lords, and whose favourite
associates were a blind old lady and an evangelical divine, could have
nothing in common with the haughty, ardent, and voluptuous nobleman, the
horse-jockey, the libertine, who fought Lord Ligonier in Hyde Park, and
robbed the Pretender of his queen. But though the private lives of
these remarkable men present scarcely any points of resemblance, their
literary lives bear a close analogy to each other. They both found
poetry in its lowest state of degradation, feeble, artificial, and
altogether nerveless. They both possessed precisely the talents which
fitted them for the task of raising it from that deep abasement. They
cannot, in strictness, be called great poets. They had not in any very
high degree the creative power,
“The vision and the faculty divine;"
but they had great vigour of thought, great warmth of feeling, and what,
in their circumstances, was above all things important, a manliness of
taste which approached to roughness. They did not deal in mechanical
versification and conventional phrases. They wrote concerning things the
thought of which set their hearts on fire; and thus what they wrote,
even when it wanted every other grace, had that inimitable grace which
sincerity and strong passion impart to the rudest and most homely
compositions. Each of them sought {351}for inspiration in a noble and
affecting subject, fertile of images which had not yet been hackneyed.
Liberty was the muse of Alfieri, Religion was the muse of Cowper. The
same truth is found in their lighter pieces. They were not among those
who deprecated the severity, or deplored the absence, of an unreal
mistress in melodious commonplaces. Instead of raving about imaginary
Chloes and Sylvias, Cowper wrote of Mrs. Unwin’s knitting-needles. The
only love-verses of Alfieri were addressed to one whom he truly and
passionately loved. “Tutte le rime amorose che se-guono,” says he,
“tutte sono per essa, e ben sue, e di lei solamente; poiche mai d” altra
donna per certo non canterô.”
These great men were not free from affectation. But their affectation
was directly opposed to the affectation which generally prevailed. Each
of them expressed, in strong and bitter language, the contempt which he
felt for the effeminate poetasters who were in fashion both in England
and in Italy. Cowper complains that
“Manner is all in all, whate’er is writ,