‘Roaming the illimitable ocean wide;’
and turns a water-fall, or a clear spring, into a slop-basin, to prove that nature owes its elegance to art. His Lordship is ‘ill at these numbers.’ Again, he affirms that the ruined temple of the Parthenon is poetical, and the coast of Attica with Cape Colonna, and the recollection of Falconer’s Shipwreck, classical. Who ever doubted it? What then? Does this prove that the Rape of the Lock is not a mock-heroic poem? He assures us that a storm with cockboats scudding before it is interesting, particularly if this happens to take place in the Hellespont, over which the noble critic swam; and makes it a question, whether the dark cypress groves, or the white towers and minarets of Constantinople are more impressive to the imagination? What has this to do with Pope’s grotto at Twickenham, or the boat in which he paddled across the Thames to Kew? Lord Byron tells us (and he should know) that the Grand Canal at Venice is a muddy ditch, without the stately palaces by its side; but then it is a natural, not an artificial canal; and finally, he asks, what would the desert of Tadmor be without the ruins of Palmyra, or Salisbury Plain without Stone-Henge? Mr. Bowles who, though tedious and teasing, has ‘damnable iteration in him,’ and has read the Fathers, answers very properly, by saying that a desert alone ‘conveys ideas of immeasurable distance, of profound silence, of solitude;’ and that Salisbury Plain has the advantage of Hounslow Heath, chiefly in getting rid of the ideas of artificial life, ‘carts, caravans, raree-show-men, butchers’ boys, coaches with coronets, and livery servants behind them,’ even though Stone-Henge did not lift its pale head above its barren bosom. Indeed, Lord Byron’s notions of art and poetry are sufficiently wild, romantic, far-fetched, obsolete: his taste is Oriental, Gothic; his Muse is not domesticated; there is nothing mimminee-pimminee, modern, polished, light, fluttering, in his standard of the sublime and beautiful: if his thoughts are proud, pampered, gorgeous, and disdain to mingle with the objects of humble, unadorned nature, his lordly eye at least ‘keeps distance due’ from the vulgar vanities of fashionable life; from drawing-rooms, from card-parties, and from courts. He is not a carpet poet. He does not sing the sofa, like poor Cowper. He is qualified neither for poet-laureate nor court-newsman. He is at issue with the Morning Post and Fashionable World, on what constitutes the true pathos and sublime of human life. He hardly thinks Lady Charlemont so good as the Venus, or as an Albanian girl, that he saw mending the road in the mountains. If he does not like flowers and forests, he cares as little for stars, garters, and prince’s feathers, for diamond necklaces and paste buckles. If his Lordship cannot make up his mind to the quiet, the innocence, the simple, unalterable grandeur of nature, we are sure that he hates the frippery, the foppery, and pert grimace of art, quite as much. His Lordship likes the poetry, the imaginative part of art, and so do we; and so we believe did the late Mr. John Scott. He likes the sombre part of it, the thoughtful, the decayed, the ideal, the spectral shadow of human greatness, the departed spirit of human power. He sympathizes not with art as a display of ingenuity, as the triumph of vanity or luxury, as it is connected with the idiot, superficial, petty self-complacency of the individual and the moment, (these are to him not ‘luscious as locusts, but bitter as coloquintida’); but he sympathizes with the triumphs of Time and Fate over the proudest works of man—with the crumbling monuments of human glory—with the dim vestiges of countless generations of men—with that which claims alliance with the grave, or kindred with the elements of nature. This is what he calls art and artificial poetry. But this is not what any body else understands by the terms, commonly or critically speaking. There is as little connexion between the two things as between the grand-daughters of Mr. Coutts, who appeared at court the other day, and Lady Godiva—as there is between a reigning toast and an Egyptian mummy. Lord Byron, through the whole of the argument, pelts his reverend opponent with instances, like throwing a stone at a dog, which the incensed animal runs after, picks up, mumbles between his teeth, and tries to see what it is made of. The question is, however, too tough for Mr. Bowles’s powers of mastication, and though the fray is amusing, nothing comes of it. Between the Editor of Pope, and the Editor of the New Monthly Magazine, his Lordship sits
‘——high arbiter,
And by decision more embroils the fray.’
What is the use of taking a work of art, from which ‘all the art of art is flown’ a mouldering statue, or a fallen column in Tadmor’s marble waste, that staggers and over-awes the mind, and gives birth to a thousand dim reflections, by seeing the power and pride of man prostrate, and laid low in the dust; what is there in this to prove the self-sufficiency of the upstart pride and power of man? A Ruin is poetical. Because it is a work of art, says Lord Byron. No, but because it is a work of art o’erthrown. In it we see, as in a mirror, the life, the hopes, the labour of man defeated, and crumbling away under the slow hand of time; and all that he has done reduced to nothing, or to a useless mockery. Or as one of the bread-and-butter poets has described the same thing a little differently, in his tale of Peter Bell the potter,—
‘——The stones and tower
Seem’d fading fast away
From human thoughts and purposes,
To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees.’