The weight of mightiest monarchies.’
Often and often have these verses been quoted without a suspicion how strongly the corporeal is substituted for the moral. However Atlantean his shoulders might be, the might of monarchies could no more be supported by them than by the shoulders of a grasshopper.”
Here, Mr Landor takes part with plain matter-of-fact against that play of poetic imagination, which often succeeds in making one deep and harmonious impression out of incongruous materials, merely by the dexterous rapidity with which these are passed before the mind. We confess to have admired the bold, vague, instantaneous, transitory combination of physical with moral properties, which we have in these celebrated lines. The monarchies do not rest directly on the “shoulders,” but on the sage man with these broad shoulders, and the epithet “Atlantean,” by suggesting immediately a mythological person, has already half allegorised the figure. The shoulders which are for an instant brought before the mind’s eye, have never supported any less honourable weight than that of a whole world. Mr Landor, however, may be right; we are not disputing the correctness of his criticism; we are only pointing out the inherent difficulties of the subject. Mr Landor may be right; but what answer would he give to the man of plain understanding who did not comprehend how a hill could climb, and who should insist upon it, that a mound of earth could no more be “instinct with life and activity” than broad shoulders could help a man to govern well?
Turning over the pages of a work of Meinherr Feuchtersleben on Medical Psychology, we met with the remark, that the effort to enjoy or attend to some of our finer sensations was not always followed by an increase in those pleasurable sensations. Thus, he says, we distend our nostrils and inspire vigorously when we would take our fill of some agreeable odour, and yet certain of the more refined scents escape us by this very effort to seize and appropriate them. Passing by a bed of violets, the flowers themselves perhaps unseen, how charming a fragrance has hit upon the unwarned sense! Turn back, and strenuously inhale for the very purpose of enjoying it more fully, the fairy favour has escaped you. It floated on the air, playing with the sense of him who sought not for it; but quite refusing to be fed upon voraciously by the prying and dilated nostril. Something like this may be observed in the case of poetical enjoyment. The susceptible reader feels it, though he sought it not, and the more varied the culture of his mind, the more likely is he to be visited by this pleasure; but it will not be captured by any effort of hard, vigorous attention, or the merely scrutinising intellect. The poetry of the verse, like the fragrance of the violet, will not be rudely seized; and he who knits his brow and strains his faculty of thought over the light and musical page may wonder how it happens that the charm grows less as his desire to fix and to appropriate it has increased.
When, therefore, we discuss the merits of a poetical style, we enter upon a subject on which we must not expect to reason with strict certainty, or arrive at very dogmatic conclusions. To the last some minds will find a glorious imagination, where others will perceive only a logical absurdity. We can only come, as we have said, to some compromise between reason and emotion. They meet together in the arena of imagination, and must settle their rival claims as they best can.
That Gray was a true poet surely no one will deny. Who has bequeathed, in proportion to the extent or volume of his writings, a greater number of those individual lines and passages which live in the memory of all men, and are recognised as the most perfect expression of a given thought or sentiment that our British world has produced? But such lines and passages rarely bear the stamp of the poet’s mannerism. They would not have gained their universal acceptation if they had. Highest excellence is all of one style. That manner which constitutes the peculiarity of Gray, and which distinguishes him from other poets, we certainly do not admire, and we will give the best reasons for our dislike to it that we are able.
Poetry we have somewhere heard defined as “passionate rhythmical expression;” and, if our memory fail us, and we do not quote correctly, we nevertheless venture to promulgate this as a very sufficient definition. It is passionate rhythmical expression; and it becomes imaginative because it is passionate. Every one knows that strong feeling runs to metaphor and imagery to express itself; or, in other words, that a predominant sentiment will gather round itself a host of kindred ideas held often together by almost imperceptible associations. In proportion as the mind is full of ideas or remembered objects, will be the complex structure which will grow out of this operation. It is not, therefore, because a strain is complex, ornate, or full of learning, that it ceases to be spontaneous or natural. If Milton rolls out thought after thought, gathered from the literature of Rome or Greece, the verse may be quite as natural, quite as genuine an expression of sentiment as any ballad in the Percy Reliques. But what is desired is, that, learned or not, the strain have this character of spontaneity, that it be the language in which some mortal has verily and spontaneously thought. We do not mean, of course, that the style should not be corrected by afterthought, but the corrections should be made in the same spirit, the language moving from the thought and passion of the man. Now, there is much of Gray’s writing of which it cannot be said that the language or imagery flows by any such spontaneous process; in which we are perpetually reminded of effort and artifice, which, as it never came from, so it can never go home straightway to any human soul.
We might venture even to take for an instance the popular line—
“E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires.”
This quotation has obtained a general currency: “ashes” and their “fires” bear each other out so well, that the careless reader has no doubt the meaning is all right. Yet we suspect that very many quote the line without any distinct meaning whatever attached to it. And for this reason,—no Englishman would ever naturally have expressed the sentiment in this language. Men, at least some men, are careful where they shall lay their bones; they would sleep amongst their fathers, their countrymen, their children; some seek a retired spot; some where friends will congregate; some choose the sun, and some the shadow. They endue the dead clay that will be lying under the turf with some vague sentiment of feeling—with some residue of the old affections. Would any Englishman, impressed with such a feeling, go back in imagination to classic times, when the body was burnt, and speak of “ashes” which never will exist, rather than of the slumbering corpse which his eye must be following, as he speaks, into the earth? Here is the whole stanza:—