The beings who luxuriate in the everlasting beauties of nature have a deeper charm for us than creatures whose chief delight is in the little artifices of a woman's toilet. The skill is exquisite by which the ephemeral nothings of gay fashion are coloured with the hues of poetic fancy, but in spite of the brilliancy they remain nothings still, and cannot compete with strains which are struck from the profoundest chords in the heart and mind of man. Lord Byron, to save the supremacy of Pope, asserted that "the poet is always ranked according to his execution."[339] Bowles maintained that the test of poetical excellence was the subject and execution combined.[340] He admitted that the loftiest theme in feeble hands would be eclipsed by insignificant topics when treated by a master, but he said that no genius could render subordinate topics equal in poetry to the highest where the execution, as in Shakespeare and Milton, was worthy of the subject. Lord Byron stultified himself. He had no sooner completed his proof that execution was the sole criterion of poetry, than he went on to argue that "the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth."[341] His paradox did not deserve a reply, even if he had not contradicted it the moment it was uttered. Hume wisely recommended that words should not be wasted upon theories which it is inconceivable that any human being could believe.
In his Observations on the Poetry of Pope, Bowles put the modes and incidents of artificial life, the secondary passions, and descriptions of outward objects in a lower grade than the development of the impressive passions.[342] What he said of manners and passions was suppressed by Campbell, who based his reply upon his own misstatements, and proceeded to protest against "trying Pope exclusively by his powers of describing inanimate phenomena."[343] No one could be more emphatic than Bowles in placing souls before things. Of "inanimate phenomena," he had said that "all images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature, are more beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art." Again, his antagonists misrepresented him, and arguing as though he had asserted that all images drawn from nature were beautiful, and that there was no beauty in any image drawn from art, they imagined they refuted him by adducing natural objects which were unsightly, and artificial objects which were the reverse. The canal at Venice, without the buildings and gondolas "would be nothing," said Lord Byron, "but a clay-coloured ditch."[344] The illustration did not touch the position of Bowles, who had never pretended that the ugly in nature eclipsed the beautiful in art. His principle was that, beauty for beauty, Solomon in the richest products of the loom was not arrayed like the flowers of the field. Campbell did not reason better than Byron. He selected the launching of a ship of the line for an instance of the sublime. Admitting, what nobody could deny, that his ship was poetical, it did not follow that the wooden structure had the grandeur of the ocean. His language was a virtual confession that it was inferior. He endowed his "vast bulwark" with attributes borrowed from nature, human and inanimate. He thought "of the stormy element on which the vessel was soon to ride, of the days of battle and nights of danger she had to encounter, of the ends of the earth which she had to visit, of all that she had to do and suffer for her country." He found the sublimity, not in the ship, but in the associations,—in the stormy waves of the mighty deep which was to be her home; in the terrors of darkness when she was tempest-driven; in the vast distances she had to traverse; in the perils and patriotism of the crew; in the fierce heroic contention of the battle. Campbell was self-refuted. He fell into the same error with respect to some fragments he quoted from the poets. Images derived from nature and art were mixed together, and he did not perceive that the passages owed their principal beauty to the nature. The fallacies of disputants who wrote without thinking were easily exposed, and Bowles got a signal victory over the whole of his numerous opponents.
Many a work of man, like the ship, impresses us less by its intrinsic qualities than by the train of ideas it suggests. Until the errors of controversialists called for fuller explanations Bowles did not draw the distinction, and Lord Byron was misled by overlooking it. "The Parthenon," he said, "is more poetical than the rock on which it stands."[345] "Not," replied Hazlitt, "because it is a work of art, but because it is a work of art o'erthrown."[346] Prostrate and broken columns, rent walls, and mouldering stone, exercise a more potent sway over the feelings than temples in the freshness of their artistic beauty. Hazlitt tells the obvious cause. Relics of departed glory, dilapidated monuments of intellectual splendour, are mementos of the fate which awaits the proudest works of man. With the thoughts of mighty reverses mingle the reflections which are always engendered by antiquity. The imagination reverts to shadowy, remote generations, to a people and power long ago laid in dust, and the ruins have a pathos which is the result of the centuries that have swept over them,—of the mysteries, vicissitudes, and havoc of time. When Lord Byron asked if there was an image in Gray's Elegy more striking than his "shapeless sculptures," his own question might have revealed the truth to him.[347] Whatever poetry may be embodied in the matchless art of Greece, there can be none in the "shapeless sculptures" of country tomb-stones; but they are memorials set up by poor cottagers to protect the bones of kindred from insult, and the whole force of the phrase in the Elegy arises from the prominence given to the tenderness and affection of which "the shapeless sculptures" are the symbols. The emotion is extrinsic to the rude, prosaic, and often ludicrous art. The same image becomes poetical or unpoetical according to the associations with which it is linked. The rusting, disused needles of Cowper's Mary, stricken by paralysis, are associated, Byron says, "with the darning of stockings, the hemming of shirts, and the mending of breeches."[348] This is the ordinary, mechanic association, and had it been the association called up by Cowper's lines they would not have been, what Byron pronounced them, "eminently poetical and pathetic." The associations are of another kind. The thousands who have shed tears over the lines to Mary did not pay a tribute to the needles, or the uses to which the needles were applied. They were melted by the representation—true and strong as the living facts—of love, of decay, of desolation, and of anguish. The different aspect of the same incident through the influence of association is exemplified in the description of the tea in the Rape of the Lock, and in the Task. The passage of Pope is not united to any sentiment, and only pleases from the elegance of the verse and language. Cowper sets the heart in a glow with the delicious picture he presents of "fire-side enjoyments, and home-born happiness."
Out-door nature, and the imposing or beautiful passions, were not "the haunt and main region of Pope's song," and Bowles, after saying that the representation of nature demanded a susceptible heart, and an observing eye, goes on to state that "the weak eyes and tottering strength" of Pope were the reason that he seldom excelled in depicting natural appearances. His legs would not serve him to walk nor his eyes to see, and he was limited to the particulars which "could be gained by books, or suggested by imagination." "From his infirmities," Bowles continues, "he must have been chiefly conversant with artificial life, but if he had been gifted with the same powers of observing outward nature, I have no doubt he would have evinced as much accuracy in describing the appropriate and peculiar beauties such as nature exhibits in the Forest where he lived, as he was able to describe in a manner so novel, and with colours so vivid, a game of cards."[349] The premises are erroneous. Pope's vision was not bad; his eyes, says Warburton, were "fine, sharp, and piercing;"[350] and though he was too feeble for long walks, he could, and did, ramble through woods and meadows, and along the banks of streams. Nine-tenths of the finest descriptions from nature in the poets are of sights and sounds which were within the range of his common experience. The decision of Bowles must be reversed, and we must ascribe the little nature in Pope's works to his want of mental "susceptibility," and not to physical infirmity. His love of the country was the cursory admiration which is seldom wanting. He had none of the exceptional enthusiasm which could lead him to revel in nature, to scrutinise it, and enrich his mind with its memories. His strongest sympathies and antipathies were directed to the society of his day,—to the men who praised or abused, caressed or defied him.
The object of Bowles in setting forth his critical principles, was not to condemn descriptions of artificial life or images taken from art, but to single out the circumstances which render one class of poetry more exalted than another. The bulk of Pope's works were satirical and didactic: and the affinity to the highest species of poetry in the Rape of the Lock, and the Epistle of Eloisa, was not so complete as to place him on a level with the mightiest masters. Warton and Bowles united in ranking him before Dryden and next to Milton.[351] Johnson doubtfully, and Cowper unhesitatingly, put Dryden before him.[352] Cowper states that he had "known persons of taste and discernment who would not allow that Pope was a poet at all," and the language of some writers implies that his claim to be called a poet was a serious moot-point with critics. Johnson gravely replied to the question "whether Pope was a poet," and Hazlitt said in 1818, that it was "a question which had hardly yet been settled."[353] Who the sceptics were does not appear, and it is probable that the opinion was never maintained by a single person of reputation. Pope was placed higher by Warton and Bowles, who were accused of depreciating, than by Johnson who defended him. Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge had "an antipathy to him," according to Byron;[354] but this was a false charge, originating in his own antipathy to Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. They all admitted that Pope had a brilliant poetical genius, and that many of his poems were of extraordinary excellence. Wordsworth, the one perhaps of the three who held him the cheapest, said he was "a man most highly gifted, who unluckily took to the plain when the heights were within his reach." Yet, while thinking that his poetry was not of the most poetical kind "he committed much of him to memory," acknowledged that "he succeeded as far as he went," and in mentioning the persons, dramatists omitted, who were the representatives of the "poetic genius of England," he specially named "Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope."[355] The real Pope controversy was with the zealots who maintained that he was of the same flight with Shakespeare and Milton. Their lofty estimate of his comparative excellence, did not arise from their keener appreciation of his merits; they were simply men of cold, unimaginative minds, who were insensible to merits which were greater still.
"Pope," said Hazlitt, "had none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion."[356] This was a creed he sometimes avowed. "Poetry and criticism," he said in the preface to his works, "are only the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there."[357] He talked later of his "idle songs," but in the same breath, with characteristic inconsistency, he set up to be the moral reformer of his age, and had undertaken a little before "to vindicate" in verse "the ways of God to man."[358] His views of his art are contradictory and irreconcileable. His disparagement of it was an affectation founded upon a common definition of poetry, that its end was to please. The premise, false from its incompleteness, led to degrading conclusions. Hurd, who studied poetry for the purpose of analysing its ingredients, and who should have known its true properties, adopted the usual pleasure theory, and at thirty-seven he was naturally ashamed of his frivolous pursuit. "He must not," he said, "pass more of his life in these flowery regions; the light food was not the proper nourishment of age." Verse was the amusement of youth, and unless very sparingly used, was unbecoming the gravity of mature minds.[359] Milton had another conception of the office of poetry, and he avowed that his purpose was "to inbreed and cherish in a great people whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave." Wordsworth was of Milton's school. His aim was, "to make men wiser, better, and happier." "Every great poet," he said, "is a teacher; I wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing."[360] The right doctrine was enforced by a critic whom Pope despised. "Poetry," wrote Dennis, "has two ends,—a subordinate and a final one: the subordinate one is pleasure, and the final one is instruction."[361] He had the sanction of Lord Bacon, who declared that "poesy" had three uses, of which two were to inculcate morality and heroism; the third alone was for "delectation."[362] Aristotle long before had contended that poetry was a more effective school of virtue than philosophy, and Horace avowed his conviction that right and wrong were taught better by Homer than by the sages. The least reflection upon the range of the noblest poetry must satisfy anybody that entertainment is its smallest function. The poet has the world of external things from which to cull his pictures. He gives definiteness to what was vague, fixes what was transitory, detects delightful resemblances, and brings to view unnoticed beauties. He invests the realities with the thoughts of his impassioned mind, creating in us sentiments, and supplying us with associations which we should not have derived from the actual objects. Nature, in itself enchanting, has meanings for us which were never dreamt of till we saw it through the medium of the poet's representations. He has the world of mankind for his province. He can take us the circuit of the passions; he can summon them from the inner recesses of the soul, and set them in open array; he can assign to each its rightful force, stripping corruption of its disguises, and displaying what is lovely in its unadulterated lustre. He can soar at pleasure into loftier regions, and when his main theme lies in a lower sphere can link it, openly or by implication, to the world of spirits,—to the divinity and the divine. Verse abounds in the strains which lift the soul to heaven, or bring down heaven to glorify earth, and sustain its weakness and woes. In a word, the poet treats of nature, man, the superhuman, and treats of them in a way which dilates our faculties and feelings, till through the contemplation of the ideal we attain to a grander real. "Poesy," says Lord Bacon, "was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."[363] The domain of high poetry is the sublime, the solemn, the terrible, the pathetic, the tender, the sweet, and the tranquil; the office of poetry is to purify, to ennoble, to humanise, to soften, to soothe, and to delight. Poetry is great, and participates of divineness in proportion as it employs these means, and attains these ends. The dry unprofitable seeds which lurk in the heart, are by poetry quickened into a resplendent growth. Through poetry, obscure vestiges of truth start into distinctness, and flash upon the inward eye. Through poetry, the ethereal elements of the mind, incessantly dissipated and deadened by common concerns, are renewed in their sanctity. In the reach and importance of the lessons no hard prosaic facts can go beyond exalted poetry. The lesser kinds have their lesser uses, and chiefly in this that they are often more attractive in youth than healthier inspirations, and prepare the way for them. Wordsworth, in his boyhood, was entranced by the false glitter of famous poems which in his manhood seemed to him "dead as a theatre fresh emptied of spectators."[364] Thrown aside when they had served their purpose, they were the initial sparks which kindled a spirit that took precedence even of Milton in the depth and compass of thoughts and feelings almost deserving the name of revelations.
TO MRS.[365] ARABELLA FERMOR.
Madam,
It will be in vain to deny that I have some regard for this piece, since I dedicate it to you. Yet you may bear me witness, it was intended only to divert a few young ladies, who have good sense and good humour enough to laugh not only at their sex's little unguarded follies, but at their own. But as it was communicated with the air of a secret, it soon found its way into the world. An imperfect copy having been offered to a bookseller, you had the good-nature, for my sake, to consent to the publication of one more correct. This I was forced to, before I had executed half my design, for the machinery was entirely wanting to complete it.
The machinery, Madam, is a term invented by the critics, to signify that part which the deities, angels, or demons, are made to act in a poem. For the ancient poets are in one respect like many modern ladies, let an action be never so trivial in itself, they always make it appear of the utmost importance. These machines I determined to raise on a very new and odd foundation, the Rosicrucian doctrine of spirits.