or why does he not leave a lampoon, instead of an elegy, on Laura’s tomb? The reason is, he dare not. The cant of morality is not here strong enough to stem the opposing current of the cant of sentiment, to which he by turns commits the success of his votive rhymes.
Not content with stripping off the false colours from the frail fair (one of whose crimes it is not to have been young) the poet makes a ‘swan-like end,’ and falls foul of men of genius, fancy, and sentiment in general, as impostors and mountebanks, who feel the least themselves of what they describe and make others feel. I beg leave to enter my flat and peremptory protest against this view of the matter, as an impossibility. I am not absolutely blind to the weak sides of authors, poets, and philosophers (for ‘’tis my vice to spy into abuses’) but that they are not generally in earnest in what they write, that they are not the dupes of their own imaginations and feelings, before they turn the heads of the world at large, is what I must utterly deny. So far from the likelihood of any such antipathy between their sentiments and their professions, from their being recreants to truth and nature, quite callous and insensible to what they make such a rout about, it is pretty certain that whatever they make others feel in any marked degree, they must themselves feel first; and further, they must have this feeling all their lives. It is not a fashion got up and put on for the occasion; it is the very condition and ground-work of their being. What the reader is and feels at the instant, that the author is and feels at all other times. It is stamped upon him at his birth; it only quits him when he dies. His existence is intellectual, ideal: it is hard to say he takes no interest in what he is. His passion is beauty; his pursuit is truth. On whomsoever else these may sit light, to whomever else they may appear indifferent, whoever else may play at fast-and-loose with them, may laugh at or despise them, may take them up or lay them down as it suits their convenience or pleasure, it is not so with him. He cannot shake them off, or play the hypocrite or renegado, if he would. ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ They are become a habit, a second nature to him. He is totus in illis: he has no other alternative or resource, and cannot do without them. The man of fashion may resolve to study as a condescension, the man of business as a relaxation, the idler to employ his time. But the poet is ‘married to immortal verse,’ the philosopher to lasting truth. Whatever the reader thinks fine in books (and Mr. Moore acknowledges that fine and rare things are to be found there) assuredly existed before in the living volume of the author’s brain: that which is a passing and casual impression in the one case, a floating image, an empty sound, is in the other an heirloom of the mind, the very form into which it is warped and moulded, a deep and inward harmony that flows on for ever, as the springs of memory and imagination unlock their secret stores. ‘Thoughts that glow, and words that burn,’ are his daily sustenance. He leads a spiritual life, and walks with God. The personal is, as much as may be, lost in the universal. He is Nature’s high-priest, and his mind is a temple where she treasures up her fairest and loftiest forms. These he broods over, till he becomes enamoured of them, inspired by them, and communicates some portion of his ethereal fires to others. For these he has given up every thing, wealth, pleasure, ease, health; and yet we are to be told he takes no interest in them, does not enter into the meaning of the words he uses, or feel the force of the ideas he imprints upon the brain of others. Let us give the Devil his due. An author, I grant, may be deficient in dress or address, may neglect his person and his fortune—
‘But his soul is fair,
Bright as the children of yon azure sheen;’
he may be full of inconsistencies elsewhere, but he is himself in his books: he may be ignorant of the world we live in, but that he is not at home and enchanted with that fairy-world which hangs upon his pen, that he does not reign and revel in the creations of his own fancy, or tread with awe and delight the stately domes and empyrean palaces of eternal truth, the portals of which he opens to us, is what I cannot take Mr. Moore’s word for. He does not ‘give us reason with his rhyme.’ An author’s appearance or his actions may not square with his theories or his descriptions, but his mind is seen in his writings, as his face is in the glass. All the faults of the literary character, in short, arise out of the predominance of the professional mania of such persons, and their absorption in those ideal studies and pursuits, their affected regard to which the poet tells us is a mere mockery, and a bare-faced insult to people of plain, strait-forward, practical sense and unadorned pretensions, like himself. Once more, I cannot believe it. I think that Milton did not dictate ‘Paradise Lost’ by rote (as a mouthing player repeats his part) that Shakespear worked himself up with a certain warmth to express the passion in Othello, that Sterne had some affection for My Uncle Toby, Rousseau a hankering after his dear Charmettes, that Sir Isaac Newton really forgot his dinner in his fondness for fluxions, and that Mr. Locke prosed in sober sadness about the malleability of gold. Farther, I have no doubt that Mr. Moore himself is not an exception to this theory—that he has infinite satisfaction in those tinkling rhymes and those glittering conceits with which the world are so taken, and that he had very much the same sense of mawkish sentiment and flimsy reasoning in inditing the stanzas in question that many of his admirers must have experienced in reading them!—In turning to the ‘Castle of Indolence’ for the lines quoted a little way back, I chanced to light upon another passage which I cannot help transcribing:
‘I care not, Fortune, what you me deny:
You cannot rob me of free Nature’s grace;
You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shews her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace