Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death.’
Nescio. “You have quoted Byron, rather unfortunately for your argument, I think, Tristo. For he is an instance of the existence of high poetic power, in a mind depraved by the baseness of his moral sentiments.”
Tristo. “You mistake my meaning, if you infer from it that I think the existence of poetic power incompatible with moral degradation, for there are many, too many instances of this kind. My position was that a pure and unsophisticated character was essential to the enjoyment of this faculty in one’s self, or as displayed by others. And of this Byron is as strong a case as I could wish. Every spark of genius, but assisted in lighting the flame, which scathed and consumed his heart. ’Twas so with Shelly, and in the later years of his life, with Burns. Moore is the only similar author who approaches to an exception to this rule. But how widely different with the opposite class of poets. Can you read a page of Cowper, or Wordsworth, without feeling that they derive pure and exquisite pleasure from their inspiration. Indeed to the former it was almost his only source of enjoyment—without it he would have been wretched, in truth, for his nature was too sensitive for a rough and jostling world.”
Nescio. “I cannot deny it. You have, however, a higher idea of the value and interest and influence of poetry than is current now-a-days. I myself have been disposed to regard the high pretensions of this ‘divina gens’ with something of distrust. I have dipped into our poetic literature as extensively, probably, as most of my age; I have been pleased and profited, but never have I been blessed with an admission into the penetralia. My most diligent search (as Pausanias records of the petitioner at Pion’s tomb) has been rewarded by smoke.”
Tristo. “I know that to the unreflecting crowd the life and labors of the poet seem poor and paltry. He is one by himself—a flower-gathering, shade-loving idler in a garden, where others are busily plying the mattock and the spade. To them he appears engaged neither in lessening the evils, nor in adding to the blessings of life. His musings they deem like the dreams of the sleeper, where fancy, and vanity, and passion, draw scenes of glory and of pleasure with the bold tracery of an unfettered hand; but to the waking eye in the light of reason, those pictures are changed to the ungraceful lines, and uncolored objects of ordinary life.”
Nescio. “I am by no means satisfied that their view is not a correct one. It seems to me that the allurements of poetry and the splendors of romance are all lymphatic draughts to inebriate the mind, and, as ‘the subtle blood of the grape,’ exalts and quickens the animal spirits, only thereafter to retard and depress, so do these unearthly potations elevate the soul, but leave it dull, drooping and disgusted. Especially pernicious in their influence are the trashy productions of ephemeral minds, which ‘dream false dreams and see lying visions,’ which clothe the children of their fancy in perfections to which man is a stranger, and fill the untaught soul with hopes and aspirations, which earth can never realize. Byron certainly, and, I think, even Shakspeare, exert an evil influence in their portraitures of character. Their actors are so sublime, or so lovely, that they first inspire the mind with false hope, and then fill it with vain despair.”
Tristo. “You speak the language of a half philosopher, who generalizes a few isolated facts into an all-embracing theory. Even Byron’s evil influence results not from the unnatural beauty of his characters and scenery, but rather from the fact that he does not seem to conceive of virtue even in the abstract; he no where shows regard for aught but self, and no where recognizes even by accident a standard of right and wrong. As for Shakspeare, nature is visible in all his writings; virtue and vice are strangely mingled, even as among the scenes and occurrences of life. If he ever deviates from the actual and the known, it is either in the delineation of some creature of professedly ideal existence, such as Ariel and Puck; or else in the combination of circumstances which produces characters, that all will allow to be natural, though such they have never seen in actual life and motion.”
Nescio. “Suffer me for a moment to interrupt you, and ask what is nature? Shakspeare is certainly more natural than most of his successors, and yet, for the life of me I cannot point out the difference, where it is, or in what it consists. For the incidents of that great master are sometimes not merely improbable, but impossible.”