There was much expenditure of wit and of talent, but in an ill cause;—for the feeling was, au fond, bad and false;—"et il n'est guere plaisant d'être empoisonné, même par l'esprit de rose."
In the present time a better spirit prevails. We are not indeed sublimated into goddesses; but neither is it the fashion to degrade us into the playthings of fopling poets. We seem to have found, at length, our proper level in poetry, as in society; and take the place assigned to us as women—
As creatures not too bright or good,
For human nature's daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles![155]
We are represented as ruling by our feminine attractions, moral or exterior, the passions and imaginations of men; as claiming, by our weakness, our delicacy, our devotion,—their protection, their tenderness, and their gratitude: and, since the minds of women have been more generally and highly cultivated; since a Madame de Stael, a Joanna Baillie, a Maria Edgeworth, and a hundred other names, now shining aloft like stars, have shed a reflected glory on the whole sex they belong to, we possess through them, a claim to admiration and respect for our mental capabilities. We assume the right of passing judgment on the poetical homage addressed to us, and our smiles alone can consecrate what our smiles first inspired.[156]
If we look over the mass of poetry produced during the last twenty-five years, whether Italian, French, German, or English, we shall find that the predominant feeling is honourable to women, and if not gallantry, is something better.[157] It is too true, that the incense has not been always perfectly pure. "Many light lays,—ah, woe is me there-fore!"[158] have sounded from one gifted lyre, which has since been strung to songs of patriotism and tenderness. Moore, whom I am proud, for a thousand reasons, to claim as my countryman, began his literary and amatory career, fresh from the study of the classics, and the poets of Charles the Second's time; and too often through the thin undress of superficial refinement, we trace the grossness of his models. It is said, I know not how truly, that he has since made the amende honorable. He has possibly discovered, that women of sense and sentiment, who have a true feeling of what is due to them as women, are not fitly addressed in the style of Anacreon and Catullus; have no sympathies with his equivocal Rosas, Fanny, and Julias, and are not flattered by being associated with tavern orgies and bumpers of wine, and such "tipsey revelry." Into themes like these he has, it is true, infused a buoyant spirit of gaiety, a tone of sentiment, and touches of tender and moral feeling, which would reconcile us to them, if any thing could; as in the beautiful songs, "When time, who steals our years away,"—"O think not my spirits are always as light,"—"Farewell! but whenever you think on the hour,"—"The Legacy," and a hundred others. But how many more are there, in which the purity and earnestness of the feeling vie with the grace and delicacy of the expression! and in the difficult art (only to be appreciated by a singer) of marrying verse to sound, Moore was never excelled—never equalled—but by Burns. He seems to be gifted, as poet and musician, with a double instinct of harmony, peculiar to himself.
Barry Cornwall is another living poet who has drunk deep from the classics and from our older writers; but with a finer taste and a better feeling, he has borrowed only what was decorative, graceful and accessory: the pure stream of his sentiment flows unmingled and untainted,—
Yet musical as when the waters run,
Lapsing through sylvan haunts deliciously.[159]
It is not without reason that Barry Cornwall has been styled the "Poet of woman," par excellence. It enhances the value, it adds to the charm of every tender and beautiful passage addressed to us, that we know them to be sincere and heartfelt,
Not fable bred,
But such as truest poets love to write.