ON POETRY IN GENERAL
This is the first of the “Lectures on the English Poets.”
[P. 251.] spreads its sweet leaves. “Romeo and Juliet,” i, 1, 158.
[P. 252.] the stuff. “Tempest,” iv, 1, 156.
mere oblivion. “As You Like It,” ii, 7, 166.
man’s life “King Lear,” ii, 4, 270.
[P. 253.] There is warrant. “Richard III,” i, 4, 112.
such seething brains. “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” v, 1, 4.
Angelica and Medoro. Characters in “Orlando Furioso.”
[P. 254.] which ecstacy is very cunning in. “Hamlet,” iii, 4, 138.
Poetry, according to Lord Bacon. Cf. Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning,” Book II: “Because true Historie representeth Actions and Euents more ordinarie and lesse interchanged, therefore Poesie endueth them with more Rarenesse and more vnexpected and alternatiue Variations: So as it appeareth that Poesie serueth and conferreth to Magnanimitie, Moralitie, and to delectation. And therefore it was euer thought to haue some participation of diuinesse, because it doth raise and erect the Minde, by submitting the shewes of things to the desires of the Mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bowe the Mind unto the Nature of things.”
[P. 255.] Our eyes are made the fools. “Macbeth,” ii, 1, 44.
That if it would. “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” v, 1, 19.
The flame o’ th’ taper. “Cymbeline,” ii, 2, 19.
[P. 256.] for they are old. Cf. “Lear,” ii, 4, 194.
Nothing but his unkind daughters. Cf. “King Lear,” iii, 4, 72:
“Nothing could have subdued nature
To such a lowness but his unkind daughters.”
[P. 257.] The little dogs. Ibid., iii, 6, 65.
O now, for ever. “Othello,” iii, 3, 347.
Never, Iago. Ibid., iii, 3, 453.
[P. 258.] But there. Ibid., iv, 2, 57.
To be discarded thence! The first edition at this point adds: “This is like that fine stroke of pathos in ‘Paradise Lost,’ where Milton makes Adam say to Eve,
‘Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart!’”
Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature. Cf. “On People of Sense” in “Plain Speaker”: “Poetry acts by sympathy with nature, that is, with the natural impulses, customs, and imaginations of men, and is, on that account, always popular, delightful, and at the same time instructive. It is nature moralizing and idealizing for us; inasmuch as, by shewing us things as they are, it implicitly teaches us what they ought to be; and the grosser feelings, by passing through the strainers of this imaginary, wide-extended experience, acquire an involuntary tendency to higher objects. Shakspeare was, in this sense, not only one of the greatest poets, but one of the greatest moralists that we have. Those who read him are the happier, better, and wiser for it.”
Moore, Edward (1712-1757), author of “The Gamester” (1753).
[P. 259.] As Mr. Burke observes, in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” Part I, Section 15: “Choose a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy.”
Masterless passion. Cf. “Merchant of Venice,” iv, 1, 51: “For affection, Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood,” etc.
[P. 260.] satisfaction to the thought. “Othello,” iii, 3, 97.
Now night descending. See p. [128].
Throw him. Collins’s “Ode to Fear.”
Ingratitude. Cf. “King Lear,” i, 4, 281: “More hideous, when thou show’st thee in a child.”
[P. 261.] both at the first. “Hamlet,” iii, 2, 23.
[P. 262.] And visions. Hazlitt uses this quotation in his paper on “Wordsworth’s Excursion” in the “Round Table” with the change of poetic to prophetic. “This couplet occurs in a letter from Gray to Walpole (‘Letters,’ ed. Tovey I, 7-8). The lines are apparently a translation by Gray of Virgil, ‘Æneid,’ VI, 282-84.” Waller-Glover, XII, 504.
[P. 263.] Doctor Chalmers’s Discourses. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), a celebrated divine and preacher of Scotland, published in 1817 “A Series of Discourses on the Christian Revelation, Viewed in Connection with Modern Astronomy.”
bandit fierce. Milton’s “Comus,” 426.
our fell of hair. “Macbeth,” v, 5, 11.
Macbeth ... for the sake of the music. Some copies of the first edition misprint Macheath, the name of the leading character in Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera.” In writing “On Commonplace Critics,” in the “Round Table,” Hazlitt represents the commonplace critic as questioning whether any one of Shakespeare’s plays, “if brought out now for the first time, would succeed. He thinks that ‘Macbeth’ would be the most likely, from the music which has been introduced into it.” The reference is to the music written for D’Avenant’s version of the play, produced in 1672. According to Waller-Glover (I, 436), “this music, traditionally assigned to Matthew Locke, is now attributed to Purcell”; but Furness, in the Variorum edition of “Macbeth,” accepts the conclusion of Chappell in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music,” “that Purcell could not have been the composer of a work which appeared when he was in his fourteenth year,” especially as “the only reason that can be assigned why modern musicians should have doubted Locke’s authorship is that a manuscript of it exists in the handwriting of Henry Purcell.”
[P. 264.] Between the acting. “Julius Cæsar,” ii, 1, 63.
[P. 265.] Thoughts that voluntary move. “Paradise Lost,” III, 37.
the words of Mercury. Cf. “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” v, 2, 940: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.”
So from the ground. “Faërie Queene,” I, vi, 13.
[P. 266.] the secret [hidden] soul. Milton’s “L’Allegro.”
[P. 267.] the golden cadences. “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” iv, 2, 126.
Sailing with supreme dominion. Gray’s “Progress of Poesy.”
sounding always. See p. [207] and n.
except poets. Cf. “On the Prose Style of Poets” in the “Plain Speaker”: “What is a little extraordinary, there is a want of rhythmus and cadence in what they write without the help of metrical rules. Like persons who have been accustomed to sing to music, they are at a loss in the absence of the habitual accompaniment and guide to their judgment. Their style halts, totters, is loose, disjointed, and without expressive pauses or rapid movements. The measured cadence and regular sing-song of rhyme or blank verse have destroyed, as it were, their natural ear for the mere characteristic harmony which ought to subsist between the sound and the sense. I should almost guess the Author of Waverley to be a writer of ambling verses from the desultory vacillation and want of firmness in the march of his style. There is neither momentum nor elasticity in it; I mean as to the score, or effect upon the ear. He has improved since in his other works: to be sure, he has had practice enough. Poets either get into this incoherent, undetermined, shuffling style, made up of ‘unpleasing flats and sharps,’ of unaccountable starts and pauses, of doubtful odds and ends, flirted about like straws in a gust of wind; or, to avoid it and steady themselves, mount into a sustained and measured prose (like the translation of Ossian’s Poems, or some parts of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics) which is more odious still, and as bad as being at sea in a calm.” Hazlitt’s views on this question are peculiar, though his examples are well chosen. The more common opinion is that voiced by Coleridge in his remarks “On Style”: “It is, indeed, worthy of remark that all our great poets have been good prose writers, as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton; and this probably arose from their just sense of metre. For a true poet will never confound verse and prose; whereas it is almost characteristic of indifferent prose writers that they should be constantly slipping into scraps of metre.” Works, IV, 342.
[P. 268.] Addison’s Campaign (1705), written in honor of Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim, was described as “that gazette in rhyme” by Joseph Warton (1722-1800) in his “Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope,” I, 29.
Chaucer. Cf. A. W. Pollard’s “Chaucer,” p. 35: “To Boccaccio’s ‘Teseide’ and ‘Filostrato,’ he was indebted for something more than the groundwork of two of his most important poems; and he was also acquainted with three of his works in Latin prose. If, as is somewhat hardily maintained, he also knew the Decamerone, and took from it, in however improved a fashion, the idea of his Canterbury Pilgrimage and the plots of any or all of the four tales (besides that of Grisilde) to which resemblances have been traced in his own work, his obligations to Boccaccio become immense. Yet he never mentions his name, and it has been contended that he was himself unaware of the authorship of the poems and treatises to which he was so greatly indebted.”
Dryden. His translations from Boccaccio are “Sigismonda and Guiscardo,” “Theodore and Honoria,” “Cymon and Iphigenia.”
[P. 269.] married to immortal verse. “L’Allegro.”
John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of “Pilgrim’s Progress” (1678).
Daniel Defoe (c. 1659-1731), journalist and novelist. His masterpiece, “Robinson Crusoe,” appeared in 1719.
dipped in dews. Cf. T. Heywood’s “Ben Jonson, though his learned pen Was dipt in Castaly, is still but Ben.”
Philoctetes. The story of the Greek hero who, on the voyage to the siege of Troy, was abandoned on an uninhabited island, is the subject of a play by Sophocles.
As I walked about. “Robinson Crusoe,” Part I, p. 125 (ed. G. A. Aitken).
[P. 270.] give an echo. “Twelfth Night,” ii, 4, 21.
[P. 271.] Our poesy. “Timon of Athens,” i, 1, 21.
[P. 272.] all plumed. Cf. 1 “Henry IV,” iv, 1, 98:
“All plumed like estridges that with the wind
Baited like eagles having lately bathed;
Glittering in golden coats, like images;
As full of spirits as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.”
If we fly. Psalms, cxxxix, 9.
[P. 275.] Pope Anastatius. “Inferno,” xi, 8.
Count Ugolino. Ibid., xxxiii.
Ossian. James Macpherson (1736-1796) published between 1760 and 1765 what he alleged to be a translation of the ancient Gaelic hero-bard, Oisin or Ossian. The poems fed the romantic appetite of the generation and were translated into practically every European language. In Germany especially the influence of “Ossian” wrought powerfully through the enthusiasm it aroused in the young Goethe and in Schiller. In England, the poems, immediately upon their appearance, gave rise to a long controversy as to their authenticity, Dr. Johnson being among the first to attack the belief in their antiquity. The truth seems to be that, though there really is a legendary hero answering to Ossian, no such poems as Macpherson attributed to him were ever transmitted. The whole work is to all intents the original creation of Macpherson himself. The supposed Gaelic originals, which were published by the Highland Society of London in 1807, have been proved by philologists to be spurious, to be nothing in fact but translations into bad Gaelic from Macpherson’s good English. This conclusion is further supported by the mass of borrowings from the Bible and the classics which have been found in “Ossian.” See J. C. Smart: “James Macpherson, An Episode in Literature” (1905).
[P. 276.] lamentation of Selma. Lament of Colma in “Songs of Selma,” Ossian, ed. William Sharp, p. 410.
Roll on. Cf. ibid., p. 417: “ye bring no joy on your course!”