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There are other rules of the same kind without end. "Shakespeare," says Rymer,
"ought not to have made Othello black; for the hero of a tragedy ought always to
be white." "Milton," says another critic, "ought not to have taken Adam for his
hero; for the hero of an epic poem ought always to be victorious." "Milton,"
says another, "ought not to have put so many similes into his first book; for
the first book of an epic poem ought always to be the most unadorned. There are
no similes in the first book of the Iliad." "Milton," says another, "ought not
to have placed in an epic poem such lines as these:
'While thus I called, and strayed I knew not whither.'"
And why not? The critic is ready with a reason, a lady's reason. "Such lines,"
says he, "are not, it must be allowed, unpleasing to the ear; but the redundant
syllable ought to be confined to the drama, and not admitted into epic poetry."
As to the redundant syllable in heroic rhyme on serious subjects, it has been,
from the time of Pope downward, proscribed by the general consent of all the
correct school. No magazine would have admitted so incorrect a couplet as that
of Drayton.
"As when we lived untouch'd with these disgraces, When as our kingdom was our
dear embraces."
Another law of heroic rhyme, which, fifty years ago, was considered as
fundamental, was, that there should be a pause, a comma at least, at the end of
every couplet. It was also provided that there should never be a full stop
except at the end of a line. Well do we remember to have heard a most correct
judge of poetry revile Mr. Rogers for the incorrectness of that most sweet and
graceful passage,
"Such grief was ours,--it seems but yesterday,--When in thy prime, wishing so
much to stay, 'Twas thine, Maria, thine without a sigh At midnight in a sister's
arms to die. Oh thou wert lovely; lovely was thy frame, And pure thy spirit as
from heaven it came: And when recall'd to join the blest above Thou diedst a
victim to exceeding love, Nursing the young to health. In happier hours, When
idle Fancy wove luxuriant flowers, Once in thy mirth thou badst me write on thee
And now I write what thou shalt never see."
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
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 canvas that
glorious paradise, seen by the interior eye of him whose outward sight had
failed with long watching and laboring 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
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 Boulogne 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 colors on
colors, 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, everything that is
changeable in this world has been changed. Civilization has been gained, lost,
gained again. Religions, and languages, and forms of government, and usages of
private life, and modes of thinking, all have undergone a succession of
revolutions. Everything 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
school-boys. 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 color; the actor, until the poet supplies him with words, only
form, color, and motion. Poetry holds the outer world in common with the other
arts. The 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 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 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 Shakespeare 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 anything 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. Anything
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 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 favorite 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 vigor 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 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 seguono," says he, "tutte sono per essa, e ben sue, e di lei
solamente; poiche mai d'altra donna per certo con cantero."
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, The substitute for genius, taste, and
wit."
He praised Pope; yet he regretted that Pope had
"Made poetry a mere mechanic art, And every warbler had his tune by heart."
Alfieri speaks with similar scorn of the tragedies of his predecessors. "Mi
cadevano dalle mani per la languidezza, trivialita e prolissita dei modi e dei
verso, senza parlare poi della snervatezza dei pensieri. Or perche mai questa
nostra divina lingua, si maschia anco, ed energica, e feroce, in bocca di Dante,
dovra ella farsi casi sbiadata ed eunuca nel dialogo tragico?"
To men thus sick of the languid manner of their contemporaries ruggedness seemed
a venial fault, or rather a positive merit. In their hatred of meretricious
ornament, and of what Cowper calls "creamy smoothness," they erred on the
opposite side. Their style was too austere, their versification too harsh. It is
not easy, however, to overrate the service which they rendered to literature.
The intrinsic value of their poems is considerable. But the example which they
set of mutiny against an absurd system was invaluable. The part which they
performed was rather that of Moses than that of Joshua. They opened the house of
bondage; but they did not enter the promised land.
During the twenty years which followed the death of Cowper, the revolution in
English poetry was fully consummated. None of the writers of this period, not
even Sir Walter Scott, contributed so much to the consummation as Lord Byron.
Yet Lord Byron contributed to it unwillingly, and with constant self-reproach
and shame. All his tastes and inclinations led him to take part with the school
of poetry which was going out against the school which was coming in. Of Pope
himself he spoke with extravagant admiration. He did not venture directly to say
that the little man of Twickenham was a greater poet than Shakespeare or Milton;
but he hinted pretty clearly that he thought so. Of his contemporaries, scarcely
any had so much of his admiration as Mr. Gifford, who, considered as a poet, was
merely Pope, without Pope's wit and fancy, and whose satires are decidedly
inferior in vigor and poignancy to the very imperfect juvenile performance of
Lord Byron himself. He now and then praised Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge,
but ungraciously and without cordiality. When he attacked them, he brought his
whole soul to the work. Of the most elaborate of Mr. Wordsworth's poems he could
find nothing to say, but that it was "clumsy, and frowsy, and his aversion."
Peter Bell excited his spleen to such a degree that he evoked the shades of Pope
and Dryden, and demanded of them whether it were possible that such trash could
evade contempt? In his heart he thought his own Pilgrimage of Harold inferior to
his Imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry, a feeble echo of Pope and Johnson. This
insipid performance he repeatedly designed to publish, and was withheld only by
the solicitations of his friends. He has distinctly declared his approbation of
the unities, the most absurd laws by which genius was ever held in servitude. In
one of his works, we think in his letter to Mr. Bowles, he compares the poetry
of the eighteenth century to the Parthenon, and that of the nineteenth to a
Turkish mosque, and boasts that, though he had assisted his contemporaries in
building their grotesque and barbarous edifice, he had never joined them in
defacing the remains of a chaster and more graceful architecture. In another
letter he compares the change which had recently passed on English poetry to the
decay of Latin poetry after the Augustan age. In the time of Pope, he tells his
friend, it was all Horace with us. It is all Claudian now.
For the great old masters of the art he had no very enthusiastic veneration. In
his letter to Mr. Bowles he uses expressions which clearly indicate that he
preferred Pope's Iliad to the original. Mr. Moore confesses that his friend was
no very fervent admirer of Shakespeare. Of all the poets of the first class Lord
Byron seems to have admired Dante and Milton most. Yet in the fourth canto of
Childe Harold, he places Tasso, a writer not merely inferior to them, but of
quite a different order of mind, on at least a footing of equality with them.
Mr. Hunt is, we suspect, quite correct in saying that Lord Byron could see
little or no merit in Spenser.
But Byron the critic and Byron the poet were two very different men. The effects
of the noble writer's theory may indeed often be traced in his practice. But his
disposition led him to accommodate himself to the literary taste of the age in
which he lived; and his talents would have enabled him to accommodate himself to
the taste of any age. Though he said much of his contempt for mankind, and
though he boasted that amidst the inconstancy of fortune and of fame he was
all-sufficient to himself, his literary career indicated nothing of that lonely
and unsocial pride which he affected. We cannot conceive him, like Milton or
Wordsworth, defying the criticism of his contemporaries, retorting their scorn,
and laboring on a poem in the full assurance that it would be unpopular, and in
the full assurance that it would be immortal. He has said, by the mouth of one
of his heroes, in speaking of political greatness, that "he must serve who fain
would sway"; and this he assigns as a reason for not entering into political
life. He did not consider that the sway which he had exercised in literature had
been purchased by servitude, by the sacrifice of his own taste to the taste of
the public.
He was the creature of his age; and whenever he had lived he would have been the
creature of his age. Under Charles the First Byron would have been more quaint
than Donne. Under Charles the Second the rants of Byron's rhyming plays would
have pitted it, boxed it, and galleried it, with those of any Bayes or Bilboa.
Under George the First, the monotonous smoothness of Byron's versification and
the terseness of his expression would have made Pope himself envious.
As it was, he was the man of the last thirteen years of the eighteenth century,
and of the first twenty-three years of the nineteenth century. He belonged half
to the old, and half to the new school of poetry. His personal taste led him to
the former; his thirst of praise to the latter; his talents were equally suited
to both. His fame was a common ground on which the zealots on both sides,
Gifford for example, and Shelley, might meet. He was the representative, not of
either literary party, but of both at once, and of their conflict, and of the
victory by which that conflict was terminated. His poetry fills and measures the
whole of the vast interval through which our literature has moved since the time
of Johnson. It touches the Essay on Man at the one extremity, and the Excursion
at the other.
There are several parallel instances in literary history. Voltaire, for example,
was the connecting link between the France of Lewis the Fourteenth and the
France of Lewis the Sixteenth, between Racine and Boileau on the one side, and
Condorcet and Beaumarchais on the other. He, like Lord Byron, put himself at the
head of an intellectual revolution, dreading it all the time, murmuring at it,
sneering at it, yet choosing rather to move before his age in any direction than
to be left behind and forgotten. Dryden was the connecting link between the
literature of the age of James the First, and the literature of the age of Anne.
Oromasdes and Arimanes fought for him. Arimanes carried him off. But his heart
was to the last with Oromasdes. Lord Byron was, in the same manner, the mediator
between two generations, between two hostile poetical sects. Though always
sneering at Mr. Wordsworth, he was yet, though perhaps unconsciously, the
interpreter between Mr. Wordsworth and the multitude. In the Lyrical Ballads and
the Excursion Mr. Wordsworth appeared as the high priest of a worship, of which
nature was the idol. No poems have ever indicated a more exquisite perception of
the beauty of the outer world or a more passionate love and reverence for that
beauty. Yet they were not popular; and it is not likely that they ever will be
popular as the poetry of Sir Walter Scott is popular. The feeling which pervaded
them was too deep for general sympathy. Their style was often too mysterious for
general comprehension. They made a few esoteric disciples, and many scoffers.
Lord Byron founded what may be called an exoteric Lake school; and all the
readers of verse in England, we might say in Europe, hastened to sit at his
feet. What Mr. Wordsworth had said like a recluse, Lord Byron said like a man of
the world, with less profound feeling, but with more perspicuity, energy, and
conciseness. We would refer our readers to the last two cantos of Childe Harold
and to Manfred, in proof of these observations.
Lord Byron, like Mr. Wordsworth, had nothing dramatic in his genius. He was
indeed the reverse of a great dramatist, the very antithesis to a great
dramatist. All his characters, Harold looking on the sky, from which his country
and the sun are disappearing together, the Giaour standing apart in the gloom of
the side aisle, and casting a haggard scowl from under his long hood at the
crucifix and the censer, Conrad leaning on his sword by the watch-tower, Lara
smiling on the dancers, Alp gazing steadily on the fatal cloud as it passes
before the moon, Manfred wandering among the precipices of Berne, Azzo on the
judgment-seat, Ugo at the bar, Lambro frowning on the siesta of his daughter and
Juan, Cain presenting his unacceptable offering, are essentially the same. The
varieties are varieties merely of age, situation, and outward show. If ever Lord
Byron attempted to exhibit men of a different kind, he always made them either
insipid or unnatural. Selim is nothing. Bonnivart is nothing. Don Juan, in the
first and best cantos, is a feeble copy of the Page in the Marriage of Figaro.
Johnson, the man whom Juan meets in the slave-market, is a most striking
failure. How differently would Sir Walter Scott have drawn a bluff, fearless
Englishman, in such a situation! The portrait would have seemed to walk out of
the canvas.
Sardanapalus is more closely drawn than any dramatic personage that we can
remember. His heroism and his effeminacy, his contempt of death and his dread of
a weighty helmet, his kingly resolution to be seen in the foremost ranks, and
the anxiety with which he calls for a looking-glass that he may be seen to
advantage, are contrasted, it is true, with all the point of Juvenal. Indeed the
hint of the character seems to have been taken from what Juvenal says of Otho:
"Speculum civilis sarcina belli. Nimirum summi ducis est occidere Galbam, Et
curare cutem summi constantia civis, Bedriaci in campo spolium affectare Palati
Et pressum in faciem digitis extendere panem."
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