This reasonable enthusiasm is the perfection of their art. It is this which formerly occasioned the belief that poets were inspired by the gods, a notion which was never applied to other artists.
How is reasoning to control enthusiasm? A poet should, in the first instance, make a sketch of his design. Reason then holds the crayon. But when he is desirous of animating his characters, to communicate to them the different and just expressions of the passions, then his imagination kindles, enthusiasm is in full operation and urges him on like a fiery courser in his career. But his course has been previously traced with coolness and judgment.
Enthusiasm is admissible into every species of poetry which admits of sentiment; we occasionally find it even in the eclogue; witness the following lines of Virgil (Eclogue x. v. 58):
Jam mihi per rupes videor lucosque sonantes
Ire; libet Partho torquere cydonia cornu
Spicula; tanquam haec sint nostri medicina furoris,
Aut deus ille malis hominum mitescere discat!
Nor cold shall hinder me, with horns and hounds
To thrid the thickets, or to leap the mounds.
And now, methinks, through steepy rocks I go,
And rush through sounding woods and bend the Parthian
bow:
As if with sports my sufferings I could ease,
Or by my pains the god of Love appease.
The style of epistles and satires represses enthusiasm, we accordingly see little or nothing of it in the works of Boileau and Pope.
Our odes, it is said by some, are genuine lyrical enthusiasm, but as they are not sung with us, they are, in fact, rather collections of verses, adorned with ingenious reflections, than odes.
Of all modern odes that which abounds with the noblest enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that never abates, that never falls into the bombastic or the ridiculous, is "Timotheus, or Alexander's Feast," by Dryden. It is still considered in England as an inimitable masterpiece, which Pope, when attempting the same style and the same subject, could not even approach. This ode was sung, set to music, and if the musician had been worthy of the poet it would have been the masterpiece of lyric poesy.
The most dangerous tendency of enthusiasm in this occurs in an ode on the birth of a prince of the bast, rant, and burlesque. A striking example of this occurs in an ode on the birth of a prince of the blood royal:
Où suis-je? quel nouveau miracle
Tient encore mes sens enchantés
Quel vaste, quel pompeux spectacle
Frappe mes yeux épouvantés?
Un nouveau monde vient d'éclore
L'univers se reforme encore
Dans les abîmes du chaos;
Et, pour réparer ses ruines
Je vois des demeures divines
Descendre un peuple de héros.
—J.B. ROUSSEAU.
"Ode on the Birth of the Duke of Brittany."
Here we find the poet's senses enchanted and alarmed at the appearance of a prodigy—a vast and magnificent spectacle—a new birth which is to reform the universe and redeem it from a state of chaos, all which means simply that a male child is born to the house of Bourbon. This is as bad as "Je chante les vainqueurs, des vainqueurs de la terre."