instead of
| When we had come ashore, and climb’d the cliff. |
The hipallage he calls the changeling, when changing the place of words changes the sense; as in the phrase “come dine with me, and stay not,” turned into “come stay with me, and dine not.” This change of sense into nonsense he called “the changeling,” in allusion to the nursery legend when fairies steal the fairest child, and substitute an ill-favoured one. This at least is a most fanciful account of nonsense! I will give the technical terms of satire; they display a refinement of conception which we hardly expected from the native effusions of the wits of that day. Ironia, he calls the dry-mock; sarcasmus, the bitter taunt; the Greek term asteismus he calls the merry scoff—it is the jest which offends not the hearer. When we mock scornfully comes the micterismus, the fleering frumpe, as he who said to one to whom he gave no credit, “No doubt, sir, of that!” The antiphrasis, or the broad flout, when we deride by flat contradiction, antithetically calling a dwarf a giant; or addressing a black woman, “In sooth ye are a fair one!” The charientismus is the privy nippe, when you mock a man in a sotto voce; and the hyperbole, as the Greeks term the figure, and the Latins dementiens, our vernacular critic, for its immoderate excess, describes as “the over-reacher, or the loud liar.” The rhetorical figures of our critic exceed a hundred in number, if Octavius Gilchrist has counted rightly, all which are ingeniously illustrated by fragments of our own literature, and often by poetical and historical anecdotes by no means common and stale. We must appreciate this treasure of our own antiquity, though we may smile when we learn that while we speak or write, however naturally, we are in fact violating, or illustrating, this heap of rhetorical figures, without whose aid unconsciously our fleering frumpes, our merry scoffs, and our privy nippes, have been intelligible all our days.
In the more elevated spirit of this work, the writer opens by defining the poet, after the Greek, to be “a maker” or creator, drawing the verse and the matter from his native invention,—unlike the translator, who therefore may be said to be a versifier, and not a poet. This canon of criticism might have been secure from the malignity of hypercriticism. It happened, however, that in the year following that in which “The Art of Poetry” was published, Sir John Harrington put forth his translation of Ariosto, and, presuming that none but a poet could translate a poet, he caught fire at the solemn exclusion. The vindictive “versifier” invented a merciless annihilation both of the critic and his “Art,” by very unfair means; for he proved that the critic himself was a most detestable poet, and consequently the very existence of “The Art” itself was a nullity! “All the receipts of poetry prescribed,” proceeds the enraged translator of Ariosto, “I learn out of this very book, never breed excellent poets. For though the poor gentleman laboureth to make poetry an art, he proveth nothing more plainly than that it is a gift and not an art, because making himself and many others so cunning in the art, yet he sheweth himself so slender a gift in it.”
Was this critic qualified by nature and art to arbitrate on the destinies of the Muses? Were his taste and sensibility commensurate with that learning which dictated with authority, and that ingenuity which reared into a system the diversified materials of his critical fabric? We hesitate to allow the claims of a critic whose trivial taste values “the courtly trifles,” which he calls “pretty devices,” among the inventions of poesy; we are startled by his elaborate exhibition of “geometrical figures in verse,” his delight in egg or oval poems, tapering at the ends and round in the middle, and his columnar verse, whose pillars, shaft, and capital, can be equally read upwards and downwards. This critic, too, has betrayed his utter penury of invention in “parcels of his own poetry,” obscure conceits in barbarous rhymes; by his intolerable “triumphals,” poetical speeches for recitation; and a series of what he calls “partheniades, or new year’s gifts,”—bloated eruptions of those hyperbolical adulations which the maiden queen could endure, but which bear the traces of the poetaster holding some appointment at court.
When the verse flowed beyond the mechanism of his rule of scanning, and the true touch of nature beyond the sympathy of his own emotions, the rhetorician showed the ear of Midas. He condemns the following lines as “going like a minstrel’s music in a metre of eleven, very harshly in my ear, whether it be for lack of good rime or of good reason, or of both, I wot not.” And he exemplifies this lack of “good rime and good reason, or both,” by this exquisitely tender apostrophe of a mother to her infant:
| Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother’s own joy, Her only sweet comfort to drown all annoy; For beauty, surpassing the azured sky, I love thee, my darling, as ball of mine eye. |
Such a stanza indeed may disappoint the reader when he finds that we are left without any more.
In the history of this ambiguous book, and its anonymous author, I discover so many discrepancies and singularities, such elaborate poetical erudition, combined with such ineptitude of poetic taste, that I am inclined to think that the more excellent parts could never have been composed by the courtly trifler. It is remarkable that this curious Art of English Poetry was ascribed to Sidney; and Wanley, in his catalogue of the Harley Library, assigns this volume to Spenser.[4] I lay no stress on the singular expression of Sir John Harrington, applied to the present writer, as “the unknown godfather,” which seems to indicate that the presumed writer had named an offspring without being the parent. Nor will I venture to suggest that this work may at all have been connected with that treatise of “the English poets,” which Spenser, we know, had lost and never recovered. The poet lived ten years after the present publication, and it does not appear that he ever claimed this work. Manuscripts, however, we may observe, strangely wandered about the world in that day, and such literary foundlings often fell into the hands of the charitable. In that day of modest publication, some were not always solicitous to claim their own; and there are even instances of the original author, residing at a distance from the metropolis, who did not always discover that his own work had long passed through the press; so narrow then was the sphere of publication, and so partial was all literary communication.
One more mystery is involved in the authorship of this remarkable work: first printed in 1589, we gather from the book itself that it was in hand at least as early as in 1553. This glorious retention of a work during nearly forty years, would be a literary virtue with which we cannot honour the trifler who complacently alludes to so many of his own writings which no one else has noticed, and unluckily for himself has furnished for us so many “parcels of his poetry,” to exemplify “the art.”