HAYDON’S ‘CHRIST’S AGONY IN THE GARDEN’
| The London Magazine.] | [May, 1821. |
We have prefixed to the present number an engraved outline of this picture (which we hope will be thought satisfactory), and we subjoin the following description of it in the words of the artist’s catalogue.
‘Christ’s Agony in the Garden.—The manner of treating this subject in the present picture has not been taken from the account of any one Apostle [Evangelist] in particular, but from the united relations of the whole four.
‘The moment selected for the expression of our Saviour is the moment when he acquiesces to (in) the necessity of his approaching sacrifice, after the previous struggle of apprehension.
“Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.”
‘It is wished to give an air of submissive tenderness, while a quiver of agony still trembles on his features. The Apostles are resting a little behind, on a sort of garden-bank; St. John in an unsound doze—St. James in a deep sleep—St. Peter has fallen into a disturbed slumber against a tree, while keeping guard with his sword, and is on the point of waking at the approach of light. Behind St. Peter, and stealing round the edge of the bank, comes the mean traitor, Judas, with a centurion, soldiers, and a crowd; the centurion has stepped forward from his soldiers (who are marching up) to look with his torch, where Christ is retired and praying; while Judas, alarmed lest he might be surprised too suddenly, presses back his hand to enforce caution and silence, and crouching down his malignant and imbecile face beneath his shoulders, he crawls forward like a reptile to his prey, his features shining with the anticipated rapture of successful treachery.
‘It is an inherent feeling in human beings, to rejoice at the instant of a successful exercise of their own power, however despicably directed.
‘The Apostles are supposed to be lit by the glory which emanates from Christ’s head, and the crowd by the torches and lights about them.’
The printed catalogue contains also elaborate and able descriptions of Macbeth, the murder of Dentatus, and the judgment of Solomon, which have been already before the public.
We do not think Christ’s Agony in the Garden the best picture in this collection, nor the most striking effort of Mr. Haydon’s pencil. On the contrary, we must take leave to say, that we consider it as a comparative failure, both in execution and probable effect. We doubt whether, in point of policy, the celebrated artist would not have consulted his reputation and his ultimate interest more, by waiting till he had produced another work on the same grand and magnificent scale as his last, instead of trusting to the ebb of popularity, resulting from the exhibition of Christ’s Entrance into Jerusalem, to float him through the present season. It is well, it may be argued, to keep much before the public, since they are apt to forget their greatest favourites: but they are also fastidious; and it is safest not to appear always before them in the same, or a less imposing, attitude. It is better to rise upon them at every step, if possible (and there is yet room for improvement in our artist’s productions), to take them by surprise, and compel admiration by new and extraordinary exertions—than to trust to their generosity or gratitude, to the lingering remains of their affection for old works, or their candid construction of some less arduous undertaking. A liberal and friendly critic has, indeed, declared on this occasion, that if the spirits of great men and lofty geniuses take delight in the other world, in contemplating what delighted them in this, then the shades of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Correggio, can find no better employment than to descend again upon the earth, once more teeming with the birth of high art, and stand with hands crossed, and eyes uplifted in mute wonder, before Mr. Haydon’s picture of Christ’s Agony in the Garden. If we believed that the public in general sympathised seriously in this sentiment, we would not let a murmur escape us to disturb it;—the opinion of the world, however erroneous, is not easily altered; and if they are happy in their ignorance, let them remain so;—but if the artist himself, to whom this august compliment has been paid, should find the hollowness of such hyperbolical commendation, a hint to him, as to its cause in the present instance, may not be thrown away. The public may, and must, be managed to a certain point; that is, a little noise, and bustle, and officious enthusiasm, is necessary to catch their notice and fix their attention; but then they should be left to see for themselves; and after that, an artist should fling himself boldly and fairly into the huge stream of popularity (as Lord Byron swam across the Hellespont), stemming the tide with manly heart and hands, instead of buoying himself up with borrowed bloated bladders, and flimsy newspaper paragraphs. When a man feels his own strength, and the public confidence, he has nothing to do but to use the one, and not abuse the other. As his suspicions of the lukewarmness or backwardness of the public taste are removed, his jealousy of himself should increase. The town and the country have shown themselves willing, eager patrons of Mr. Haydon’s AT HOME:—he ought to feel particular obligations not to invite them by sound of trumpet and beat of drum to an inferior entertainment; but, like our advertising friend, Matthews, compass ‘sea, earth, and air,’ to keep up the eclat of his first and overwhelming accueil! So much for advice; now to criticism.
We have said, that we regard the present performance as a comparative failure; and our reasons are briefly and plainly these following:—First, this picture is inferior in size to those that Mr. Haydon has of late years painted, and is so far a falling off. It does not fill a given stipulated space in the world’s eye. It does not occupy one side of a great room. It is the Iliad in a nutshell. It is only twelve feet by nine, instead of nineteen by sixteen; and that circumstance tells against it with the unenlightened many, and with the judicious few. One great merit of Mr. Haydon’s pictures is their size. Reduce him within narrow limits, and you cut off half his resources. His genius is gigantic. He is of the race of Brobdingnag, and not of Lilliput. He can manage a groupe better than a single figure: he can manage ten groupes better than one. He bestrides his art like a Colossus. The more you give him to do, the better he does it. Ardour, energy, boundless ambition, are the categories of his mind, the springs of his enterprises. He only asks ‘ample room and verge enough.’ Vastness does not confound him, difficulty rouses him, impossibility is the element in which he glories. He does not concentrate his powers in a single point, but expands them to the utmost circumference of his subject, with increasing impetus and rapidity. He must move great masses, he must combine extreme points, he must have striking contrasts and situations, he must have all sorts of characters and expressions; these he hurries over, and dashes in with a decided, undistracted hand;—set him to finish any one of these to an exact perfection, to make ‘a hand, an ear, an eye,’ that, in the words of an old poet, shall be ‘worth an history,’ and his power is gone. His forte is in motion, not in rest; in complication and sudden effects, not in simplicity, subtlety, and endless refinement. As it was said in the Edinburgh Review, Mr. Haydon’s compositions are masterly sketches;—they are not, as it was said in Blackwood’s Magazine, finished miniature pictures. We ourselves thought the Christ in the triumphant Entry into Jerusalem, the least successful part of that much admired picture: but there it was lost, or borne along in a crowd of bold and busy figures, in varied or violent actions. Here it is, not only the principal, but a solitary, and almost the only important figure: it is thrown in one corner of the picture like a lay-figure in a painter’s room; the attitude is much like still-life: and the expression is (in our deliberate judgment) listless, feeble, laboured, neither expressing the agony of grief, nor the triumph of faith and resignation over it. It may be, we are wrong: but if so, we cannot help it. It is evident, however, that this head is painted on a different principle from that of the Christ last year. It is wrought with care, and even with precision, in the more detailed outlines: but it is timid, without relief, and without effect. The colour of the whole figure is, as if it had been smeared over, and neutralized, with some chalky tint. It does not stand out from the canvas, either in the general masses, or in the nicer inflections of the muscles and surface of the skin. It has a veil over it, not a glory round it. We ought, in justice, to add, that a black and white copy (we understand by a young lady) of the head of Christ has a more decided and finer apparent character. To what can this anomaly be owing? Is it that Mr. Haydon’s conception and drawing of character is good, but that his mastery in this respect leaves him, when he resigns the port-crayon; and that, instead of giving additional force and beauty to the variations of form and expression, by the aid of colour and real light and shade, he only smudges them over with the pencil, and leaves the indications of truth and feeling more imperfect than he found them? We believe that Mr. Haydon generally copies from nature only with his port-crayon; and paints from conjecture or fancy. If so, it would account for what we have here considered as a difficulty. We have reason to believe that the old painters copied form, colour,—every thing, to the last syllable,—from nature. Indeed, we have seen two of the heads in the celebrated Madonna of the Garland, the Mother, and the fine head of Joseph, as original, finished studies of heads (the very same as they are in the large composition) in the collection at Burleigh-house. By the contrary practice, Mr. Haydon, as it appears to us, has habituated his hand and eye to giving only the contour of the features or the grosser masses:—when he comes to the details of those masses, he fails. Some one, we suspect from the style of this picture, has been advising our adventurous and spirited artist to try to finish, and he has been taking the advice: we would advise him to turn back, and consult the natural bent of his own genius. A man may avoid great faults or absurdities by the suggestion of friends: he can only attain positive excellence, or overcome great difficulties, by the unbiassed force of his own mind.
The crowd coming, with Judas at their head, to surprise our Saviour, is not to our taste. We dislike mobs in a picture. There is, however, a good deal of bustle and movement in the advancing group, and it contrasts almost too abruptly with the unimpassioned stillness and retirement of the figure of Christ. Judas makes a bad figure both in Mr. Haydon’s catalogue, and on his canvas. We think the original must have been a more profound and plausible-looking character than he is here represented. He should not grin and show his teeth. He was by all accounts, a grave, plodding, calculating personage, usurious, and with a cast of melancholy, and soon after went and hanged himself. Had Mr. Haydon been in Scotland when he made this sketch? Judas was not a laughing, careless wag; he was one of the ‘Melancholy Andrews.’—The best part of this picture is decidedly (in our opinion) the middle ground, containing the figures of the three Apostles. There is a dignity, a grace, a shadowy repose about them which approaches close indeed upon the great style in painting. We have only to regret that a person, who does so well at times, does not do well always. We are inclined to attribute such inequalities, and an appearance of haste and unconcoctedness in some of Mr. Haydon’s plans, to distraction and hurry of mind, arising from a struggle with the difficulties both of art and of fortune; and as the last of these is now removed, we trust this circumstance will leave him at leisure to prosecute the grand design he has begun (the Raising of Lazarus) with a mind free and unembarrassed; and enable him to conclude it in a manner worthy of his own reputation, and that of his country!
POPE, LORD BYRON, AND MR. BOWLES[[60]]
| The London Magazine.] | [June 1821. |
This is a very proper letter for a lord to write to his bookseller, and for Mr. Murray to show about among his friends, as it contains some dry rubs at Mr. Bowles, and some good hits at Mr. Southey and his ‘invariable principles.’ There is some good hating, and some good writing in it, some coarse jests, and some dogmatical assertions; but that it is by any means a settler of the question, is what we are in all due form inclined to doubt. His Lordship, as a poet, is a little headstrong and self-willed, a spoiled child of nature and fortune: his philosophy and criticism have a tincture of the same spirit: he doles out his opinions with a great deal of frankness and spleen, saying, ‘this I like, that I loathe;’ but he does not trouble himself, or the reader, with his reasons, any more than he accounts to his servants for the directions he gives them. This might seem too great a compliment in his Lordship to the public.
All this pribble prabble about Pope, and Milton, and Shakspeare, and what foreigners say of us, and the Venus, and Antinous, and the Acropolis, and the Grand Canal at Venice, and the Turkish fleet, and Falconer’s Shipwreck, and ethics, and ethical poetry (with the single exception of some bold picturesque sketches in the poet’s best prose-style) is what might be talked by any Bond-street lounger of them all, after a last night’s debauch, in the intervals between the splashings of the soda-water and the acid taste of the port wine rising in the mouth. It is no better than that. If his Lordship had sent it in from Long’s, or the Albany, to be handed about in Albemarle-street, in slips as he wrote it, it would have been very well. But all the way from Ravenna, cannot he contrive to send us something better than his own ill-humour and our own common-places—than the discovery that Pope was a poet, and that Cowper was none; and the old story that Canova, in forming a statue, takes a hand from one, a foot from another, and a nose from a third, and so makes out the idea of perfect beauty! (We would advise his Lordship to say less about this subject of virtù, for he knows little about it: and besides, his perceptions are at variance with his theories.) In truth, his Lordship has the worst of this controversy, though he throws out a number of pert, smart, flashy things, with the air of a man who sees company on subjects of taste, while his reverend antagonist, who is the better critic and logician of the two, goes prosing on in a tone of obsequious pertinacity and sore pleasantry, as if he were sitting (an unwelcome guest) at his Lordship’s table, and were awed, yet galled, by the cavalier assumption of patrician manners. We cannot understand these startling voluntaries, played off before the public on the ground of personal rank, nor the controversial under-song, like the drone of a bagpipe that forms a tedious accompaniment to them. As Jem Belcher, when asked if he did not feel a little awkward at facing Gamble the tall Irishman, made answer, ‘An please ye, sir, when I am stript to my shirt, I am afraid of no man;’—so we would advise Mr. Bowles, in a question of naked argument, to fear no man, and to let no man bite his thumb at him. If his Lordship were to invite his brother-poet to his house, and to eke out a sour jest by the flavour of Monte-Pulciano or Frontiniac,—if in the dearth of argument he were to ply his friend’s weak side with rich sauces and well seasoned hospitality, ‘Ah! ça est bon, ah! goutez ça!‘—if he were to point, in illustration of Pope’s style, to the marble pillars, the virandas, the pier glasses, the classic busts, the flowering dessert, and were to exclaim, ‘You see, my dear Bowles, the superiority of art over nature, the triumph of polished life over Gothic barbarism: we have here neither the ghosts nor fairies of Shakspeare, nor Milton’s Heaven, nor his Hell, yet we contrive to do without them;’—it might require Parson Supple’s command of countenance to smile off this uncourteous address; but the divine would not have to digest such awkward raillery on an empty stomach—he would have his quid pro quo: his Lordship would have paid for the liberty of using his privilege of peerage. But why any man should carry the rôle of his Lordship’s chaplain out of his Lordship’s house, is what we see no reason for.—Lord Byron, in the Preface to his Tragedy, complains that Horace Walpole has had hard measure dealt him by the critics, ‘firstly, because he was a lord, and secondly, because he was a gentleman.’ We do not know how the case may stand between the public and a dead nobleman: but a living lord has every reasonable allowance made him, and can do what no one else can. If Lord Byron chooses to make a bad joke, by means of an ill-spelt pun, it is a condescension in his Lordship:—if he puts off a set of smart assertions and school-boy instances for pithy proofs, it is not because he is not able, but because he cannot be at the pains of going deeper into the question:—if he is rude to an antagonist, it is construed into agreeable familiarity; any notice from so great a man appears like a favour:—if he tells or recommends ‘a tale of bawdry,’ he is not to be tied down by the petty rules which restrict common men:—if he publishes a work, which is thought of too equivocal a description for the delicate air of Albemarle-street, his Lordship’s own name in the title-page is sufficient to back it without the formality of a bookseller’s; if a wire-drawn tragedy of his is acted, in spite of his protestations against such an appeal to the taste of a vulgar audience, the storm of pitiless damnation is not let loose upon it, because it is felt that it would fall harmless on so high and proud a head; the gilded coronet serves as a conductor to carry off the lightning of popular criticism, which might blast the merely laurelled bard; the blame, the disappointment, the flat effect, is thrown upon the manager, upon the actors—upon any body but the Noble Poet! This sounding title swells the mouth of Fame, and lends her voice a thousand circling echoes: the rank of the Author, and the public charity extended to him, as he does not want it, cover a multitude of sins. What does his Lordship mean, then by this whining over the neglect of Horace Walpole,—this uncalled-for sympathy with the faded lustre of patrician and gentlemanly pretensions? Has he had only half his fame! Or, does he already feel, with morbid anticipation, the retiring ebb of that overwhelming tide of popularity, which having been raised too high by adventitious circumstances, is lost in flats and shallows, as soon as their influence is withdrawn? Lord Byron has been twice as much talked of as he would have been, had he not been Lord Byron. His rank and genius have been happily placed ‘each other’s beams to share,’ and both together, by their mutually reflected splendour, may be said to have melted the public coldness into the very wantonness of praise: the faults of the man (real or supposed) have only given a dramatic interest to his works. Whence, then, this repining, this ungracious cavilling, this got up ill-humour? We load his Lordship with ecstatic admiration, with unqualified ostentatious eulogies; and he throws them stifling back in our face: he thanks us with cool, cutting contempt: he asks us for our voices, ‘our sweet voices,’ like Coriolanus; and, like Coriolanus, disdains us for the unwholesome gift. Why, then does he ask for it? If, as a lord, he holds in contempt and abhorrence the willing, delighted homage, which the public pay to the poet, let him retire and feed the pride of birth in stately solitude, or take his place among his equals: but if he does not find this enough, and wants our wondering tribute of applause to satisfy his craving vanity, and make him something more than a mere vulgar lord among hundreds of other lords, why dash the cup of delicious poison, which, at his uneasy request, we tender him, to the ground, with indignant reckless hands, and tell us he scorns equally our censure or our praise? If he looks upon both as equal impertinence, he can easily escape out of the reach of both by ceasing to write; we shall in that case soon cease to think of his Lordship: but if he cannot do without our good opinion, why affect all this coyness, coldness, and contempt? If he says he writes not to please us, but to live by us, that only alters the nature of the obligation, and he might still be civil to Mr. Murray’s customers. Whether he is independent of public opinion, or dependent on it, he need not be always sending his readers to Coventry. When we come to offer him our demonstrations of good will, he should not kick us down stairs. If he persists in this humour, the distaste may in time ‘become mutual.’
Before we proceed, there is one thing in which we must say we heartily agree with Lord Byron; and that is the ridicule with which he treats Mr. Bowles’s editorial inquisition into the moral character of Pope. It is a pure piece of clerical priggism. If Pope was not free from vice, we should like to know who is. He was one of the most faultless of poets, both in his life and in his writings. We should not care to throw the first stone at him. We do not wonder at Lord Byron’s laughing outright at Mr. Bowles’s hysterical horrors at poor Pope’s platonic peccadillos, nor at his being a little impatient of the other’s attempt to make himself a make-believe character of perfection out of the ‘most small faults’ he could rake up against the reputation of an author, whom he was bound either not to edite or not to injure. But we think his Lordship turns the tables upon the divine, and gets up into the reading desk himself, without the proper canonical credentials, when he makes such a fuss as he does about didactic or moral poetry as the highest of all others, because moral truth and moral conduct are of such vast and paramount concernment in human life. But because they are such good things in themselves, does it follow that they are the better for being put into rhyme? We see no connection between ‘ends of verse, and sayings of philosophers.’ This reasoning reminds us of the critic who said, that the only poetry he knew of, good for any thing, was the four lines, beginning ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,’ for that these were really of some use in finding out the number of days in the different months of the year. The rules of arithmetic are important in many respects, but we do not know that they are the fittest subjects of poetry. Besides, Pope was not the only moral poet, nor are we sure that we understand his moral system, or that Lord Byron understands it, or that he understood it himself. Addison paraphrased the Psalms, and Blackmore sung the Creation: yet Pope has written a lampoon upon the one, and put the other in his Dunciad. Mr. Bowles has numbers of manuscript sermons by him, the morality of which, we will venture to say, is quite as pure, as orthodox, as that of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan; yet we doubt whether Mr. Murray, the Mecænas of poetry and orthodoxy, would give as much for the one as for the other. We do not look for the flowers of fancy in moral treatises, nor for a homily in his Lordship’s irregular stanzas. The Decalogue, as a practical prose composition, or as a body of moral laws and precepts, is of sufficient weight and authority; but we should not regard the putting this into heroic verse, as an effort of the highest poetry. That ‘Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms’ is no imputation on the pious raptures of the Hebrew bard: and we suspect his Lordship himself would object to the allegory in Spenser, as a drawback on the poetry, if it is in other respects to his Lordship’s taste, which is more than we can pretend to determine. The Noble Letter-writer thus moralizes on this subject and transposes the ordinary critical canons somewhat arbitrarily and sophistically.
‘The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenuous boast,
“That not in Fancy’s maze he wander’d long,
But stoop’d to Truth, and moraliz’d his song.”
‘He should have written “rose to truth.” In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human hands except Milton’s and Dante’s, and even Dante’s powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances. What made Socrates the greatest of men? His moral truth—his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the very first order of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the “forests” that ever were “walked” for their “description,” and all the epics that ever were founded upon fields of battle. The Georgics are indisputably, and, I believe, undisputedly, even a finer poem than the Æneid. Virgil knew this: he did not order them to be burnt.
“The proper study of mankind is man.”
‘It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call “imagination” and “invention,”—the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect: his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious.’ P. 42.
Really this is very inconsequential, incongruous reasoning. An Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, would not fall upon more blunders, contradictions, and defective conclusions. Lord Byron talks of the ethical systems of Socrates and Jesus Christ. What made the former the great man he supposes?—The invention of his system—the discovery of sublime moral truths. Does Lord Byron mean to say, that the mere repetition of the same precepts in prose, or the turning them into verse, will make others as great, or will make a great man at all? The two things compared are wholly disparates. The finding out the 48th proposition in Euclid made Pythagoras a great man. Shall we say that the putting this into a grave, didactic distich would make either a great mathematician or a great poet? It would do neither one nor the other; though, according to Lord Byron, this distich would belong to the highest class of poetry, ‘because it would do that in verse, which one of the greatest of men had wished to accomplish in prose.’ Such is the way in which his Lordship transposes the common sense of the question,—because it is his humour! The value of any moral truth depends on the philosophic invention implied in it. But this rests with the first author, and the general idea, which forms the basis of didactic poetry, remains the same, through all its mechanical transmissions afterwards. The merit of the ethical poet must therefore consist in his manner of adorning and illustrating a number of these general truths which are not his own, that is, in the poetical invention and imagination he brings to the subject, as Mr. Bowles has well shown, with respect to the episodes in the Essay on Man, the description of the poor Indian and the lamb doomed to death, which are all the unsophisticated reader ever remembers of that much-talked-of production. Lord Byron clownishly chooses to consider all poetry but what relates to this ethical or didactic truth as ‘a lie.’ Is Lear a lie? Or does his Lordship prefer the story, or the moral, in Æsop’s Fables? He asks ‘why must the poet mean the liar, the feigner, the tale-teller? A man may make and create better things than these.’—He may make and create better things than a common-place, and he who does not, makes and creates nothing. The ethical or didactic poet necessarily repeats after others, because general truths and maxims are limited. The individual instances and illustrations, which his Lordship qualifies as ‘lies,’ ‘feigning,’ and ‘tale-telling,’ are infinite, and give endless scope to the genius of the true poet. The rank of poetry is to be judged of by the truth and purity of the moral—so we find it ‘in the bond,’—and yet Cowper, we are told, was no poet. Is there any keeping in this, or is it merely an air? Again, we are given to understand that didactic poetry ‘requires more mind, more power than all the descriptive or epic poetry that ever was written:’ and as a proof of this, his Lordship lays it down, that the Georgics are a finer poem than the Æneid. We do not perceive the inference here. ‘Virgil knew this: he did not order them to be burnt.
“The proper study of mankind is man.”’
Does our author mean that this was Virgil’s reason for liking his pastoral poetry better than his description of Dido and Æneas? But farther, there is a Latin poem (that of Lucretius) superior even to the Georgics; nay, it would have been so to any poem now in existence, but for one unlucky circumstance. And what is that? ‘Its ethics!’ So that ethics have spoiled the finest poem in the world. This is the rub that makes didactic poetry come in such a questionable shape. If original, like Lucretius, there will be a difference of opinion about it. If trite and acknowledged, like Pope, however pure, there will be little valuable in it. It is the glory and the privilege of poetry to be conversant about those truths of nature and the heart that are at once original and self-evident. His Lordship ought to have known this. In the same passage, he speaks of imagination and invention as ‘the two commonest of qualities.’ We will tell his Lordship what is commoner, the want of them. ‘An Irish peasant,’ he adds, ‘with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more than’—(What? Homer, Spenser, and Ariosto? No: but than)—‘would furnish forth a modern poem.’ That we will not dispute. But at any rate, when sober next morning, he would be as ‘full of wise saws and modern instances’ as his Lordship; and in either case, equally positive, tetchy, and absurd!
His Lordship, throughout his pamphlet, makes a point of contradicting Mr. Bowles, and, it would seem, of contradicting himself. He cannot be said to have any opinions of his own, but whatever any one else advances, he denies out of mere spleen and rashness. ‘He hates the word invariable,’ and not without reason. ‘What is there of human, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, life, or death, which is invariable?’ There is one of the particulars in this enumeration, which seems pretty invariable, which is death. One would think that the principles of poetry are so too, notwithstanding his peevish disclaimer: for towards the conclusion of this letter he sets up Pope as a classic model, and considers all modern deviations from it as grotesque and barbarous.
‘They have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from whose practice I have borrowed the figure, they are not contented with their own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which preceded,[[61]] and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever.’
Lord Byron has here substituted his own invariable principles for Mr. Bowles’s, which he hates as bad as Mr. Southey’s variable politics. Will nothing please his Lordship—neither dull fixtures nor shining weather-cocks?—We might multiply instances of a want of continuous reasoning, if we were fond of this sort of petty cavilling. Yet we do not know that there is any better quarry in the book. Why does his Lordship tell us that ‘ethical poetry is the highest of all poetry,’ and yet that ‘Petrarch the sonnetteer’ is esteemed by good judges the very highest poet of Italy? Mr. Bowles is a sonnetteer, and a very good one. Why does he assert that ‘the poet who executes the best is the highest, whatever his department,’ and then affirm in the next page that didactic poetry ‘requires more mind, more wisdom, more power than all the forests that ever were walked for their description;’ and then again, two pages after, that ‘a good poet can make a silk purse of a sow’s ear;’ that is, as he interprets it, ‘can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America?’ That’s a Non Sequitur, as Partridge has it. Why, contending that all subjects are alike indifferent to the genuine poet, does he turn round upon himself, and assume that ‘the sun shining upon a warming-pan cannot be made sublime or poetical?’ Why does he say that ‘there is nothing in nature like the bust of the Antinous, except the Venus,’ which is not in nature?[[62]] Why does he call the first ‘that wonderful creation of perfect beauty,’ when it is a mere portrait, and on that account so superior to his favourite coxcomb, the Apollo? Why does he state that ‘more poetry cannot be gathered into existence’ than we here see, and yet that this poetry arises neither from nature nor moral exaltedness; Mr. Bowles and he being at issue on this very point, viz. the one affirming that the essence of poetry is derived from nature, and his Lordship, that it consists in moral truth? Why does he consider a shipwreck as an artificial incident? Why does he make the excellence of Falconer’s Shipwreck consist in its technicalities, and not in its faithful description of common feelings and inevitable calamity? Why does he say all this, and much more, which he should not? Why does he write prose at all? Yet, in spite of all this trash, there is one passage for which we forgive him, and here it is.
‘The truth is, that in these days the grand primum mobile of England is cant: cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. It is the fashion, and while it lasts, will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the times. I say cant, because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer, and more divided among themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum.’ These words should be written in letters of gold, as the testimony of a lofty poet to a great moral truth, and we can hardly have a quarrel with the writer of them.
There are three questions which form the subject of the present pamphlet; viz. What is poetical? What is natural? What is artificial? And we get an answer to none of them. The controversy, as it is carried on between the chief combatants, is much like a dispute between two artists, one of whom should maintain that blue is the only colour fit to paint with, and the other that yellow alone ought ever to be used. Much might be said on both sides, but little to the purpose. Mr. Campbell leads off the dance, and launches a ship as a beautiful and poetical artificial object. But he so loads it with patriotic, natural, and foreign associations, and the sails are ‘so perfumed that the winds are love-sick,’ that Mr. Bowles darts upon and seizes it as contraband to art, swearing that it is no longer the work of the shipwright, but of Mr. Campbell’s lofty poetic imagination; and dedicates its stolen beauty to the right owners, the sun, the winds, and the waves. Mr. Campbell, in his eagerness to make all sure, having overstepped the literal mark, presses no farther into the controversy; but Lord Byron, who is ‘like an Irishman in a row, any body’s customer,’ carries it on with good polemical hardihood, and runs a very edifying parallel between the ship without the sun, the winds, and waves,—and the sun, the winds, and waves without the ship. ‘The sun,’ says Mr. Bowles, ‘is poetical, by your Lordship’s admission.’ We think it would have been so without it. But his Lordship contends that ‘the sun would no longer be poetical, if it did not shine on ships, or pyramids, or fortresses, and other works of art,’ (he expressly excludes ‘footmen’s liveries’ and ‘brass warming-pans’ from among those artificial objects that reflect new splendour on the eye of Heaven)—to which Mr. Bowles replies, that let the sun but shine, and ‘it is poetical per se,’ in which we think him right. His Lordship decompounds the wind into a caput mortuum of poetry, by making it howl through a pig-stye, instead of
‘Roaming the illimitable ocean wide;’
and turns a water-fall, or a clear spring, into a slop-basin, to prove that nature owes its elegance to art. His Lordship is ‘ill at these numbers.’ Again, he affirms that the ruined temple of the Parthenon is poetical, and the coast of Attica with Cape Colonna, and the recollection of Falconer’s Shipwreck, classical. Who ever doubted it? What then? Does this prove that the Rape of the Lock is not a mock-heroic poem? He assures us that a storm with cockboats scudding before it is interesting, particularly if this happens to take place in the Hellespont, over which the noble critic swam; and makes it a question, whether the dark cypress groves, or the white towers and minarets of Constantinople are more impressive to the imagination? What has this to do with Pope’s grotto at Twickenham, or the boat in which he paddled across the Thames to Kew? Lord Byron tells us (and he should know) that the Grand Canal at Venice is a muddy ditch, without the stately palaces by its side; but then it is a natural, not an artificial canal; and finally, he asks, what would the desert of Tadmor be without the ruins of Palmyra, or Salisbury Plain without Stone-Henge? Mr. Bowles who, though tedious and teasing, has ‘damnable iteration in him,’ and has read the Fathers, answers very properly, by saying that a desert alone ‘conveys ideas of immeasurable distance, of profound silence, of solitude;’ and that Salisbury Plain has the advantage of Hounslow Heath, chiefly in getting rid of the ideas of artificial life, ‘carts, caravans, raree-show-men, butchers’ boys, coaches with coronets, and livery servants behind them,’ even though Stone-Henge did not lift its pale head above its barren bosom. Indeed, Lord Byron’s notions of art and poetry are sufficiently wild, romantic, far-fetched, obsolete: his taste is Oriental, Gothic; his Muse is not domesticated; there is nothing mimminee-pimminee, modern, polished, light, fluttering, in his standard of the sublime and beautiful: if his thoughts are proud, pampered, gorgeous, and disdain to mingle with the objects of humble, unadorned nature, his lordly eye at least ‘keeps distance due’ from the vulgar vanities of fashionable life; from drawing-rooms, from card-parties, and from courts. He is not a carpet poet. He does not sing the sofa, like poor Cowper. He is qualified neither for poet-laureate nor court-newsman. He is at issue with the Morning Post and Fashionable World, on what constitutes the true pathos and sublime of human life. He hardly thinks Lady Charlemont so good as the Venus, or as an Albanian girl, that he saw mending the road in the mountains. If he does not like flowers and forests, he cares as little for stars, garters, and prince’s feathers, for diamond necklaces and paste buckles. If his Lordship cannot make up his mind to the quiet, the innocence, the simple, unalterable grandeur of nature, we are sure that he hates the frippery, the foppery, and pert grimace of art, quite as much. His Lordship likes the poetry, the imaginative part of art, and so do we; and so we believe did the late Mr. John Scott. He likes the sombre part of it, the thoughtful, the decayed, the ideal, the spectral shadow of human greatness, the departed spirit of human power. He sympathizes not with art as a display of ingenuity, as the triumph of vanity or luxury, as it is connected with the idiot, superficial, petty self-complacency of the individual and the moment, (these are to him not ‘luscious as locusts, but bitter as coloquintida’); but he sympathizes with the triumphs of Time and Fate over the proudest works of man—with the crumbling monuments of human glory—with the dim vestiges of countless generations of men—with that which claims alliance with the grave, or kindred with the elements of nature. This is what he calls art and artificial poetry. But this is not what any body else understands by the terms, commonly or critically speaking. There is as little connexion between the two things as between the grand-daughters of Mr. Coutts, who appeared at court the other day, and Lady Godiva—as there is between a reigning toast and an Egyptian mummy. Lord Byron, through the whole of the argument, pelts his reverend opponent with instances, like throwing a stone at a dog, which the incensed animal runs after, picks up, mumbles between his teeth, and tries to see what it is made of. The question is, however, too tough for Mr. Bowles’s powers of mastication, and though the fray is amusing, nothing comes of it. Between the Editor of Pope, and the Editor of the New Monthly Magazine, his Lordship sits
‘——high arbiter,
And by decision more embroils the fray.’
What is the use of taking a work of art, from which ‘all the art of art is flown’ a mouldering statue, or a fallen column in Tadmor’s marble waste, that staggers and over-awes the mind, and gives birth to a thousand dim reflections, by seeing the power and pride of man prostrate, and laid low in the dust; what is there in this to prove the self-sufficiency of the upstart pride and power of man? A Ruin is poetical. Because it is a work of art, says Lord Byron. No, but because it is a work of art o’erthrown. In it we see, as in a mirror, the life, the hopes, the labour of man defeated, and crumbling away under the slow hand of time; and all that he has done reduced to nothing, or to a useless mockery. Or as one of the bread-and-butter poets has described the same thing a little differently, in his tale of Peter Bell the potter,—
‘——The stones and tower
Seem’d fading fast away
From human thoughts and purposes,
To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees.’
If this is what Lord Byron means by artificial objects and interests, there is an end of the question, for he will get no critic, no school to differ with him. But a fairer instance would be a snug citizen’s box by the road side, newly painted, plastered and furnished, with every thing in the newest fashion and gloss, not an article the worse for wear, and a lease of one-and-twenty years to run, and then let us see what Lord Byron, or his friend and ‘host of human life’ will make of it, compared with the desolation, and the waste of all these comforts, arts, and elegances. Or let him take—not the pyramids of Egypt, but the pavilion at Brighton, and make a poetical description of it in prose or verse. We defy him. The poetical interest, in his Lordship’s transposed cases, arises out of the imaginary interest. But the truth is, that where art flourishes and attains its object, imagination droops, and poetry along with it. It ceases, or takes a different and ambiguous shape; it may be elegant, ingenious, pleasing, instructive, but if it aspires to the semblance of a higher interest, or the ornaments of the highest fancy, it necessarily becomes burlesque, as for instance, in the Rape of the Lock. As novels end with marriage, poetry ends with the consummation and success of art. And the reason (if Lord Byron would attend to it) is pretty obvious. Where all the wishes and wants are supplied, anticipated by art, there can be no strong cravings after ideal good, nor dread of unimaginable evils; the sources of terror and pity must be dried up: where the hand has done every thing, nothing is left for the imagination to do or to attempt: where all is regulated by conventional indifference, the full workings, the involuntary, uncontrollable emotions of the heart cease: property is not a poetical, but a practical prosaic idea, to those who possess and clutch it; and cuts off others from cordial sympathy; but nature is common property, the unenvied idol of all eyes, the fairy ground where fancy plays her tricks and feats; and the passions, the workings of the heart (which Mr. Bowles very properly distinguishes from manners, inasmuch as they are not in the power of the will to regulate or satisfy) are still left as a subject for something very different from didactic or mock-heroic poetry. By art and artificial, as these terms are applied to poetry or human life, we mean those objects and feelings which depend for their subsistence and perfection on the will and arbitrary conventions of man and society; and by nature, and natural subjects, we mean those objects which exist in the universe at large, without, or in spite of, the interference of human power and contrivance, and those interests and affections which are not amenable to the human will. That we are to exclude art, or the operation of the human will, from poetry altogether, is what we do not affirm; but we mean to say, that where this operation is the most complete and manifest, as in the creation of given objects, or regulation of certain feelings, there the spring of poetry, i.e. of passion and imagination, is proportionably and much impaired. We are masters of Art, Nature is our master; and it is to this greater power that we find working above, about, and within us, that the genius of poetry bows and offers up its highest homage. If the infusion of art were not a natural disqualifier for poetry, the most artificial objects and manners would be the most poetical: on the contrary, it is only the rude beginnings, or the ruinous decay of objects of art, or the simplest modes of life and manners, that admit of, or harmonize kindly with, the tone and language of poetry. To consider the question otherwise, is not to consider it too curiously, but not to understand it at all. Lord Byron talks of Ulysses striking his horse Rhesus with his bow, as an instance of the heroic in poetry. But does not the poetical dignity of the instrument arise from its very commonness and simplicity? A bow is not a supererogation of the works of art. It is almost peculiar to a state of nature, that is, the first and rudest state of society. Lord Byron might as well talk of a shepherd’s crook, or the garland of flowers with which he crowns his mistress, as images borrowed from artificial life. He cannot make a gentleman-usher’s rod poetical, though it is the pink of courtly and gentlemanly refinement. Will the bold stickler for the artificial essence of poetry translate Pope’s description of Sir Plume,—
‘Of amber-headed snuff-box justly vain,
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane,’—
into the same sort of poetry as Homer’s description of the bow of Ulysses? It is out of the question. The very mention of the last has a sound with it like the twang of the bow itself; whereas the others, the snuff-box and clouded cane, are of the very essence of effeminate impertinence. Pope says, in Spence’s Anecdotes, that ‘a lady of fashion would admire a star, because it would remind her of the twinkling of a lamp on a ball-night.’ This is a much better account of his own poetry than his noble critic has given. It is a clue to a real solution of the difficulty. What is the difference between the feeling with which we contemplate a gas light in one of the squares, and the crescent moon beside it, but this—that though the brightness, the beauty perhaps, to the mere sense, is the same or greater; yet we know that when we are out of the square we shall lose sight of the lamp, but that the moon will lend us its tributary light wherever we go; it streams over green valley or blue ocean alike; it is hung up in air, a part of the pageant of the universe; it steals with gradual, softened state into the soul, and hovers, a fairy apparition, over our existence! It is this which makes it a more poetical object than a patent lamp, or a Chinese lanthorn, or the chandelier at Covent-garden, brilliant as it is, and which, though it were made ten times more so, would still only dazzle and scorch the sight so much the more; it would not be attended with a mild train of reflected glory; it would ‘denote no foregone conclusion,’ would touch no chord of imagination or the heart; it would have nothing romantic about it.—A man can make any thing, but he cannot make a sentiment! It is a thing of inveterate prejudice, of old association, of common feelings, and so is poetry, as far as it is serious. A ‘pack of cards,’ a silver bodkin, a paste buckle, ‘may be imbued’ with as much mock poetry as you please, by lending false associations to it; but real poetry, or poetry of the highest order, can only be produced by unravelling the real web of associations, which have been wound round any subject by nature, and the unavoidable conditions of humanity. Not to admit this distinction at the threshold, is to confound the style of Tom Thumb with that of the Moor of Venice, or Hurlothrumbo with the Doge of Venice. It is to mistake jest for earnest, and one thing for another.
‘How far that little candle throws its beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.’
The image here is one of artificial life; but it is connected with natural circumstances and romantic interests, with darkness, with silence, with distance, with privation, and uncertain danger: it is common, obvious, without pretension or boast, and therefore the poetry founded upon it is natural, because the feelings are so. It is not the splendour of the candle itself, but the contrast to the gloom without,—the comfort, the relief it holds out from afar to the benighted traveller,—the conflict between nature and the first and cheapest resources of art, that constitutes the romantic and imaginary, that is, the poetical interest, in that familiar but striking image. There is more art in the lamp or chandelier; but for that very reason, there is less poetry. A light in a watch-tower, a beacon at sea, is sublime for the same cause; because the natural circumstances and associations set it off; it warns us against danger, it reminds us of common calamity, it promises safety and hope: it has to do with the broad feelings and circumstances of human life, and its interest does not assuredly turn upon the vanity or pretensions of the maker or proprietor of it. This sort of art is co-ordinate with nature, and comes into the first-class of poetry, but no one ever dreamt of the contrary. The features of nature are great leading landmarks, not near and little, or confined to a spot, or an individual claimant; they are spread out everywhere the same, and are of universal interest. The true poet has therefore been described as
‘Creation’s tenant, he is nature’s heir.’
What has been thus said of the man of genius might be said of the man of no genius. The spirit of poetry, and the spirit of humanity are the same. The productions of nature are not locked up in the cabinets of the curious, but spread out on the green lap of earth. The flowers return with the cuckoo in the spring: the daisy for ever looks bright in the sun; the rainbow still lifts its head above the storm to the eye of infancy or age—
‘So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man,
So shall it be till I grow old and die;’
but Lord Byron does not understand this, for he does not understand Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry, and we cannot make him. His Lordship’s nature, as well as his poetry, is something arabesque and outlandish.—Again, once more, what, we would ask, makes the difference between an opera of Mozart’s, and the singing of a thrush confined in a wooden cage at the corner of the street in which we live? The one is nature, and the other is art: the one is paid for, and the other is not. Madame Fodor sings the air of Vedrai Carino in Don Giovanni so divinely, because she is hired to sing it; she sings it to please the audience, not herself, and does not always like to be encored in it; but the thrush that awakes us at daybreak with its song, does not sing because it is paid to sing, or to please others, or to be admired or criticised. It sings because it is happy: it pours the thrilling sounds from its throat, to relieve the overflowings of its own breast—the liquid notes come from, and go to, the heart, dropping balm into it, as the gushing spring revives the traveller’s parched and fainting lips. That stream of joy comes pure and fresh to the longing sense, free from art and affectation, the same that rises over vernal groves, mingled with the breath of morning, and the perfumes of the wild hyacinth; that waits for no audience, that wants no rehearsing, that exhausts its raptures, and still—
‘Hymns its good God, and carols sweet of love.’
There is this great difference between nature and art, that the one is what the other seems, and gives all the pleasure it expresses, because it feels it itself. Madame Fodor sings, as a musical instrument may be made to play a tune, and perhaps with no more real delight: but it is not so with the linnet or the thrush, that sings because God pleases, and pours out its little soul in pleasure. This is the reason why its singing is (so far) so much better than melody or harmony, than base or treble, than the Italian or the German School, than quavers or crotchets, or half-notes, or canzonets, or quartetts, or any thing in the world but truth and nature!
To give one more instance or two of what we understand by a natural interest ingrafted on artificial objects, and of the principle that still keeps them distinct. Amelia’s ‘hashed mutton’ in Fielding, is one that I might mention. Hashed mutton is an article in cookery, homely enough in the scale of art, though far removed from the simple products of nature; yet we should say that this common delicacy which Amelia provided for her husband’s supper, and then waited so long in vain for his return, is the foundation of one of the most natural and affecting incidents in one of the most natural and affecting books in the world. No description of the most splendid and luxurious banquet could come up to it. It will be remembered, when the Almanach des Gourmands, and even the article on it in the last Edinburgh Review, are forgotten. Did Lord Byron never read Boccacio? We wish he would learn refinement from him, and get rid of his hard bravura taste, and swashbuckler conclusions. What makes the charm of the Story of the Falcon? Is it properly art or nature? The tale is one of artificial life, and elegant manners, and chivalrous pretensions; but it is the fall from these, the decline into the vale of low and obscure poverty,—the having but one last loop left to hang life on, and the sacrifice of that to a feeling still more precious, and which could only give way with life itself,—that elevates the sentiment, and has made it find its way into all hearts. Had Frederigo Alberigi had an aviary of Hawks, and preserves of pheasants without end, he and his poor bird would never have been heard of. It is not the expence and ostentation of the entertainment he set before his mistress, but the prodigality of affection, squandering away the last remains of his once proud fortunes, that stamps this beautiful incident on the remembrance of all who have ever read it. We wish Lord Byron would look it over again, and see whether it does not most touch the chords of pathos and sentiment in those places where we feel the absence of all the pomp and vanities of art. Mr. Campbell talks of a ship as a sublime and beautiful object in art. We will confess we always stop to look at the mail-coaches with no slight emotion, and, perhaps, extend our hands after some of them, in sign of gratulation. They carry the letters of friends, of relations; they keep up the communication between the heart of a country. We do not admire them for their workmanship, for their speed, for their livery—there is something more in it than this. Perhaps we can explain it by saying, that we once heard a person observe—‘I always look at the Shrewsbury mail, and sometimes with tears in my eyes: that is the coach that will bring me the news of the death of my father and mother.’ His Lordship will say, the mail-coach is an artificial object. Yet we think the interest here was not founded upon that circumstance. There was a finer and deeper link of affection that did not depend on the red painted pannels, or the dyed garments of the coachman and guard. At least it strikes us so.
This is not an easy subject to illustrate, and it is still more difficult to define. Yet we shall attempt something of the sort.
1. Natural objects are common and obvious, and are imbued with an habitual and universal interest, without being vulgar. Familiarity in them does not breed contempt, as it does in the works of man. They form an ideal class; their repeated impression on the mind, in so many different circumstances, grows up into a sentiment. The reason is, that we refer them generally and collectively to ourselves, as links and mementos of our various being; whereas, we refer the works of art respectively to those by whom they are made or to whom they belong. This distracts the mind in looking at them, and gives a petty and unpoetical character to what we feel relating to them. When the works of art become poetical, it is when they are emancipated from this state of ‘circumscription and confine,’ by some circumstance that sets aside the idea of property and individual distinction. The sound of village bells,—
‘——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;—’
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]]
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 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 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 her all, 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 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’s concretions have 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 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 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.’