Chapter 98

‘——The poor man’s only music,’[63]

excites as lively an interest in the mind, as the warbling of a thrush: the sight of a village spire presents nothing discordant with the surrounding scenery.

2. Natural objects are more akin to poetry and the imagination, partly because they are not our own handy-work, but start up spontaneously, like a visionary creation, of their own accord, without our knowledge or connivance.—

‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water hath,And these are of them;—’

‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water hath,

And these are of them;—’

and farther, they have this advantage over the works of art, that the latter either fall short of their preconceived intention, and excite our disgust and disappointment by their defects; or, if they completely answer their end, they then leave nothing to the imagination, and so excite little or no romantic interest that way. A Count Rumford stove, or a Dutch oven, are useful for the purposes of warmth or culinary dispatch. Gray’s purring favourite would find great comfort in warming its nose before the one, or dipping its whiskers in the other; and so does the artificial animal, man: but the poetry of Rumford grates or Dutch ovens, it would puzzle even Lord Byron to explain. Cowper has made something of the ‘loud-hissing urn,’ though Mr. Southey, as being one of the more refined ‘naturals,’ still prefers ‘the song of the kettle.’ The more our senses, our self-love, our eyes and ears, are surrounded, and, as it were, saturated with artificial enjoyments and costly decorations, the more the avenues to the imagination and the heart are unavoidably blocked up. We do not say, that this may not be an advantage to the individual; we say it is a disadvantage to the poet. Even ‘Mine Host of Human Life’ has felt its palsying, enervating influence. Let any one (after ten years old) take shelter from a shower of rain in Exeter Change, and see how he will amuse the time with looking over the trinkets, the chains, the seals, the curious works of art. Compare this with the description of Una and the Red Cross Knight in Spenser:

‘Enforc’d to seek some covert nigh at hand,A shady grove not far away they spied,That promis’d aid the tempest to withstand:Whose lofty trees, yclad with summer’s pride,Did spread so broad, that heaven’s light did hide,Not pierceable with power of any star;And all within were paths and alleys wide,With footing worn, and leading inward far;Far harbour that them seems: so in they enter’d are.‘And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led,Joying to hear the birds’ sweet harmony,Which therein shrowded from the tempest’s dread,Seem’d in their song to scorn the cruel sky.Much can they praise the trees so straight and high,The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry,The builder oak, sole king of forests all,The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral.’[64]

‘Enforc’d to seek some covert nigh at hand,

A shady grove not far away they spied,

That promis’d aid the tempest to withstand:

Whose lofty trees, yclad with summer’s pride,

Did spread so broad, that heaven’s light did hide,

Not pierceable with power of any star;

And all within were paths and alleys wide,

With footing worn, and leading inward far;

Far harbour that them seems: so in they enter’d are.

‘And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led,Joying to hear the birds’ sweet harmony,Which therein shrowded from the tempest’s dread,Seem’d in their song to scorn the cruel sky.Much can they praise the trees so straight and high,The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry,The builder oak, sole king of forests all,The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral.’[64]

‘And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led,

Joying to hear the birds’ sweet harmony,

Which therein shrowded from the tempest’s dread,

Seem’d in their song to scorn the cruel sky.

Much can they praise the trees so straight and high,

The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,

The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry,

The builder oak, sole king of forests all,

The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral.’[64]

Artificial flowers look pretty in a lady’s head-dress; but they will not do to stick into lofty verse. On the contrary, a crocus bursting out of the ground seems to blush with its own golden light—‘a thing of life.’ So a greater authority than Lord Byron has given his testimony on this subject: ‘Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Shakspeare speaks of—

——‘Daffodils,That come before the swallow dares and takeThe winds of March with beauty.’

——‘Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares and take

The winds of March with beauty.’

All this play of fancy and dramatic interest could not be transferred to a description of hot-house plants, regulated by a thermometer. Lord Byron unfairly enlists into the service of his argument those artificial objects, which are direct imitations of nature, such as statuary, etc. This is an oversight. At this rate, all poetry would be artificial poetry. Dr. Darwin is among those, who have endeavoured to confound the distinctions of natural and artificial poetry, and indeed, he is, perhaps, the only one who has gone the whole length of Lord Byron’s hypercritical and super-artificial theory. Here are some of his lines, which have been greatly admired.

Apostrophe to Steel.‘Hail, adamantine steel! magnetic lord,King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword!True to the pole, by thee the pilot guidesHis steady course amid the struggling tides,Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee!’

Apostrophe to Steel.

‘Hail, adamantine steel! magnetic lord,King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword!True to the pole, by thee the pilot guidesHis steady course amid the struggling tides,Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee!’

‘Hail, adamantine steel! magnetic lord,

King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword!

True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides

His steady course amid the struggling tides,

Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,

Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee!’

This is the true false gallop of the sublime. Yet steel is a very useful metal, and doubtless performs all these wonders. But it has not, among so many others, the virtue of amalgamating with the imagination. We might quote also his description of the spinning-jenny, which is pronounced by Dr. Aikin to be as ingenious a piece of mechanism as the object it describes; and, according to Lord Byron, this last is as well suited to the manufacture of verses as of cotton-twist without end.

3. Natural interests are those which are real and inevitable, and are so far contradistinguished from the artificial, which are factitious and affected. If Lord Byron cannot understand the difference, he may find it explained by contrasting some of Chaucer’s characters and incidents with those in the Rape of the Lock, for instance. Custance floating in her boat on the wide sea, is different from Pope’s heroine,

‘Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames.’

Griselda’s loss of her children, one by one, of herall, does not belong to the same class of incidents, nor of subjects for poetry, as Belinda’s loss of her favourite curl. A sentiment that has rooted itself in the heart, and can only be torn from it with life, is not like the caprice of the moment—the putting on of paint and patches, or the pulling off a glove. The inbred character is not like a masquerade dress. There is a difference between the theatrical, and natural, which is important to the determination of the present question, and which has been overlooked by his Lordship. Mr. Bowles, however, formally insists (and with the best right in the world) on the distinction between passion and manners. But he agrees with Lord Byron, that the Epistle to Abelard is the height of the pathetic.

‘Strange that such difference should beTwixt tweedledum and tweedledee.’

‘Strange that such difference should be

Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee.’

That it is in a great degree pathetic, we should be amongst the last to dispute; but its character is more properly rhetorical and voluptuous. That its interest is of the highest or deepest order, is what we should wonder to hear any one affirm, who is intimate with Shakspeare, Chaucer, Boccacio, our own early dramatists, or the Greek tragedians.There is more true, unfeigned, unspeakable, heart-felt distress in one line of Chaucer’s tale just mentioned,

‘Let me not like a worm go by the way,’

than in all Pope’s writings put together; and we say it without any disrespect to him too. Didactic poetry has to do with manners, as they are regulated, not by fashion or caprice, but by abstract reason and grave opinion, and is equally remote from the dramatic, which describes the involuntary and unpremeditated impulses of nature. As Lord Byron refers to the Bible, we would just ask him here, which he thinks the most poetical parts of it, the Law of the Twelve Tables, the Book of Leviticus, etc.; or the Book of Job, Jacob’s dream, the story of Ruth etc?

4. Supernatural poetry is, in the sense here insisted on, allied to nature, not to art, because it relates to the impressions made upon the mind by unknown objects and powers, out of the reach both of the cognizance and will of man, and still more able to startle and confound his imagination, while he supposes them to exist, than either those of nature or art. The Witches in Macbeth, the Furies in Æschylus, are so far artificial objects, that they are creatures of the poet’s brain; but their impression on the mind depends on their possessing attributes, which baffle and set at nought all human pretence, and laugh at all human efforts to tamper with them. Satan in Milton is an artificial or ideal character: but would any one call this artificial poetry? It is, in Lord Byron’s phrase, super-artificial, as well as super-human poetry. But it is serious business. Fate, if not Nature, is its ruling genius. The Pandemonium is not a baby-house of the fancy, and it is ranked (ordinarily,) with natural,i.e.with the highest and most important order of poetry, and above the Rape of the Lock. We intended a definition, and have run again into examples. Lord Byron’sconcretionshave spoiled us for philosophy. We will therefore leave off here, and conclude with a character of Pope, which seems to have been written with an eye to this question, and which (for what we know) is as near a solution of it as the Noble Letter-writer’s emphatical division of Pope’s writings into ethical, mock-heroic, and fanciful poetry.

‘Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of it. He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakspeare had an intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart of man in all possible circumstances: Pope had an exact knowledge of all that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his daring flight from heaven to earth, through Chaos and old Night. Pope’s Muse never wandered withsafety, 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 brightnessThe herd hath more annoyance by the brizeThan by the tyger: but when the splitting windMakes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,And flies fled under shade, why thenThe 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.”

“——In Fortune’s ray and brightness

The herd hath more annoyance by the brize

Than by the tyger: but when the splitting wind

Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,

And flies fled under shade, why then

The thing of courage,

As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathise;

And with an accent tuned in the self-same key,

Replies to chiding Fortune.”

There is none of this rough work in Pope. His Muse was on a peace-establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered flatteries; its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for—“the gnarled oak,” he gives us “the soft myrtle:” for rocks, and seas, and mountains, artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a china jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of the passions, we have

“Calm contemplation and poetic ease.”

Yet within this retired and narrow circle how much, and that how exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy, what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the magnifier is, to be sure, held to everything, but still the exhibition is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or surprised. Such, at least, is the best account I am able to give of this extraordinary man, without doing injustice to him or others.’

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