writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphyric, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti; which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. If Marino and Cowley be greater poets than Ariosto and Milton, let young poets imitate the former with might and main, and avoid spoiling their style by any perusal of the too-intelligible common sense of the latter. If Byron’s moral (which used to be thought execrable) be really his great excellence, his style (which used to be thought almost perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us have his moral without his style, his matter without his form; or–that we may be sure of never falling for a moment into his besetting sin of terseness, grace, and completeness–without any form at all. If poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, Virgil or Horace, Shakespeare or Spenser, Dante or Tasso, let those too idolised names be rased henceforth from the calendar; let the _Ars Poetica_, be consigned to flames by Mr. Calcraft, and Bartinus Scriblerus’s _Art of Sinking_ placed forthwith on the list of the Committee of the Council for Education, that not a working man in England may be ignorant that, whatsoever superstitions about art may have haunted the benighted heathens who built the Parthenon, _nous avons changes tout cela_. In one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style in which almost everyone has been trying to write it since Pope and plain sense went out, and Shelley and the seventh heaven came in; let it be so written: and let him who most perfectly so “sets the age to music,” be presented by the assembled guild of critics, not with the obsolete and too classical laurel, but with an electro-plated brass medal, bearing the due inscription, _Ars est nescire artem_. And when, in twelve months’ time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps descried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.
In Pope’s writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded; naturalness produced by studious art; daring sublimity by strict self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue among poetasters, by honest faith in God….
Yes, Pope knew, as well as Wordsworth and our “Naturalisti,” that no physical fact was so mean or coarse as to be below the dignity of poetry–when in its right place. He could draw a pathos and sublimity out of the dirty inn-chamber, such as Wordsworth never elicited from tubs and daffodils–because he could use them according to the rules of art, which are the rules of sound reason and of true taste….
The real cause of the modern vagueness is rather to be found in shallow and unsound culture, and in that inability, or carelessness about seeing any object clearly, which besets our poets just now; as the cause of antique clearness lies in the nobler and healthier manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of thought, the sounder philosophic and critical training which enabled Spenser and Milton to draw up a state paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics, with the same manful possession of their subject which gives grace and completeness to the _Penseroso_ or the _Epithalmion_. And if our poets have their doubts, they should remember, that those to whom doubt and enquiry are real and stern, are not inclined to sing about them till they can sing poems of triumph over them. There has no temptation taken our modern poets save that which is common to man–the temptation of wishing to make the laws of the universe and of art fit them, as they do not feel inclined to make themselves fit the laws, or care to find them out….
The “poetry of doubt,” however pretty, would stand us in little stead if we were threatened with a second Armada. It will conduce little to the valour, “virtues,” manhood of any Englishman to be informed by any poet, even in the most melodious verse, illustrated by the most startling and pan-cosmic metaphors, “See what a highly organised and peculiar stomach-ache I have had! Does it not prove indisputably that I am not as other men are?” What gospel there can be in such a message to any honest man who has either to till the earth, plan a railroad, colonise Australia, or fight the despots, is hard to discover. Hard indeed to discover how this most practical, and therefore most epical of ages, is to be “set to music,” when all those who talk about so doing persist obstinately in poring, with introverted eyes, over the state of their own digestion, or creed.
What man wants, what art wants, perhaps what the maker of the both wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other men are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language which all men can understand. This is the only road to that gift of prophecy which most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to arrogate to themselves….
There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the commonsense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge. Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether fragmentary– _disjecta membra poetarum_; they need some uniting idea. And what idea?
Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. Nevertheless we answer simply. What our poets want is faith. There is little or no faith nowadays. And without faith there can be no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm, coherent belief….
In the meanwhile, poets write about poets, and poetry, and guiding the age, and curbing the world, and waking it, and thrilling it, and making it start, and weep, and tremble, and self-conceit only knows what else; and yet the age is not guided, or the world curbed, or thrilled, or waked, or anything else, by them. Why should it be? Curb and thrill the world? The world is just now a most practical world; and these men are utterly unpractical. The age is given up to physical science: these men disregard and outrage it in every page by their false analogies….
Let the poets of the new school consider carefully Wolfe’s “Sir John Moore,” Campbell’s “Hohenlinden,” “Mariners of England,” and “Rule Britannia,” Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and “Bridge of Sighs,” and then ask themselves, as men who would be poets, were it not better to have written any one of these glorious lyrics than all which John Keats has left behind him; and let them be sure that, howsoever they may answer the question to themselves, the sound heart of the English people has already made its choice, and that when that beautiful “Hero and Leander,” in which Hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers at their own weapons, by virtue of that very terseness, clearness, and manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the Crashawes and Marines, his “Song of the Shirt” and his “Bridge of Sighs,” will be esteemed by great new English nations far beyond the seas, for what they are–two of the most noble lyric poems ever written by an English pen. If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new time, they will find them there. If they want the truly sublime and awful, they will find them there also. But they will find none of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a metaphor; no taint of this new poetic diction into which we have now fallen, after all our abuse of the far more manly and sincere “poetic diction” of the eighteenth century; they will find no loitering by the way to argue and moralise, and grumble at Providence, and show off the author’s own genius and sensibility; they will find, in short, two real works of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what they want to say, saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the calmest, the most finished words. Saying it–rather taught to say it. For if that “divine inspiration of poets,” of which the poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have, indeed, as all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from an unrighteous man to a righteous God, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems to be that mere passionate sensibility, which our modern Draco once described when speaking of poor John Keats, as “an infinite hunger after all manner of pleasant things, crying to the universe, ‘oh, that thou wert one great lump of sugar, that I might suck thee!'”
ANONYMOUS
NOVELS FOR CHRISTMAS, 1837
[From _Fraser’s Magazine_, January, 1838]
If[1] against the inroads of the evangelical party the orthodox church has need of a defender, it hardly would wish, we should think, to be assisted _tali auxilio_. Mrs. Trollope has not exactly the genius which is best calculated to support the Church of England, or to argue upon so grave a subject as that on which she has thought proper to write.
[1] _The Vicar of Wrexhill_. By Mrs. Trollope. London, 1837.
With a keen eye, a very sharp tongue, a firm belief, doubtless, in the high church doctrines, and a decent reputation from the authorship of half-a-dozen novels, or other light works, Mrs. Trollope determined on no less an undertaking than to be the champion of oppressed Orthodoxy. These are feeble arms for one who would engage in such a contest, but our fair Mrs. Trollope trusted entirely in her own skill, and the weapon with which she proposed to combat a strong party is no more nor less than this novel of _The Vicar of Wrexhill_. It is a great pity that the heroine ever set forth on such a foolish errand; she has only harmed herself and her cause (as a bad advocate always will), and had much better have remained home, pudding-making or stocking-mending, than have meddled with matters which she understands so ill.
In the first place (we speak it with due respect for the sex), she is guilty of a fault which is somewhat too common among them; and having very little, except prejudice, on which to found an opinion, she makes up for want of argument by a wonderful fluency of abuse. A woman’s religion is chiefly that of the heart, and not of the head. She goes through, for the most part, no tedious process of reasoning, no dreadful stages of doubt, no changes of faith: she loves God as she loves her husband–by a kind of instinctive devotion. Faith is a passion with her, not a calculation; so that, in the faculty of believing, though they far exceed the other sex, in the power of convincing they fall far short of them.
Oh! we repeat once more, that ladies would make puddings and mend stockings! that they would not meddle with religion (what is styled religion, we mean), except to pray to God, to live quietly among their families, and move lovingly among their neighbours! Mrs. Trollope, for instance, who sees so keenly the follies of the other party–how much vanity there is in Bible Meetings–how much sin even at Missionary Societies–how much cant and hypocrisy there is among those who desecrate the awful name of God, by mixing it with their mean interests and petty projects–Mrs. Trollope cannot see that there is any hypocrisy or bigotry on her part. She, who designates the rival party as false, and wicked, and vain–tracing all their actions to the basest motives, declaring their worship of God to be only one general hypocrisy, their conduct at home one fearful scene of crime, is blind to the faults on her own side. Always bitter against the Pharisees, she does as the Pharisees do. It is vanity, very likely, which leads these people to use God’s name so often, and to devote all to perdition who do not coincide in their peculiar notions. Is Mrs. Trollope less vain than they when she declares, and merely _declares_, her own to be the real creed, and stigmatises its rival so fiercely? Is Mrs. Trollope serving God, in making abusive licencious pictures of those who serve Him in a different way? Once, as Mrs. Trollope has read–it was a long time ago!–there was a woman taken in sin; the people brought her before a great Teacher of Truth, who lived in those days. Shall we not kill her? said they; the laws command that all adulteresses be killed. We can fancy a Mrs. Trollope in the crowd, shouting, “oh, the wretch! oh, the abominable harlot! kill her, by all means–stoning is really too good for her!” But what did the Divine Teacher say? He was quite as anxious to prevent the crime as any Mrs. Trollope of them all; but he did not even make an allusion to it–he did not describe the manner in which the poor creature was caught–He made no speech to detail the indecencies which she committed, or to raise the fury of the mob against her–He said “let the man who is without sin himself throw the first stone!” Whereupon the Pharisees and Mrs. Trollope slunk away, for they knew they were no better than she. There was as great a sin in His eyes as that of the poor erring woman–it was the sin of pride.
Mrs. Trollope may make a licentious book, of which the heroes and heroines are all of the evangelical party; and it may be true, that there are scoundrels belonging to that party as to every other; but her shameful error has been in fixing upon the evangelical _class_ as an object of satire, making them necessarily licentious and hypocritical, and charging everyone of them with the vices which belong to only a very few of all sects….
There are some books, we are told, in the libraries of Roman Catholic theologians, which, though written for the most devout purposes, are so ingeniously obscene as to render them quite dangerous for common eyes. The groom, in the old story, had never learned the art of greasing horses’ teeth, to prevent their eating oats, until the confessor, in interrogating him as to his sins, asked him the question. The next time the groom came to confess, he _had_ greased the horses’ teeth. It was the holy father who taught him, by the very fact of warning him against it. By which we mean, that there are some scenes of which it is better not to speak at all.
Our fair moralist, however, has no such squeamishness. She will show up these odious evangelicals; she will expose them and chastise them, wherever they be. So have we seen, in that beautiful market in Thames Street, whither the mariners of England bring the glittering produce of their nets–so have we seen, we say, in Billingsgate, a nymph attacking another of her sisterhood. How keenly she detects and proclaims the number and enormity of her rival’s faults! How eloquently she enlarges upon the gin she has drunk, the children she has confided to the parish, the watchmen whose noses she has broken, and the bridewells which she has visited in succession! No one can but admire the lady’s eloquence and talent in conducting the case for the prosecution; no one will, perhaps, doubt the guilt of the hapless object on whom her wrath is vented. But, with all her rage for morality, had not that fair accused have better left the matter alone? That torrent of slang and oath, O nymph! falls ill from thy lips, which should never open but for a soft word or a smile; that accurate description of vice, sweet orator [-tress or-trix]! only shows that thou thyself art but too well acquainted with scenes which thy pure eyes should never have beheld. And when we come to the matter in dispute–a simple question of mackerel–O, Mrs. Trollope! Why, why should you abuse other people’s fish, and not content yourself with selling your _own_….
There can be little doubt as to the cleverness of this novel, but, coming from a women’s pen, it is most odiously and disgustingly indecent. As a party attack, it is an entire failure; and as a representation of a very large portion of English Christians, a shameful and wicked slander.
BULWER’S “ERNEST MALTRAVERS”
To talk of _Ernest Maltravers_ now, is to rake up a dead man’s ashes. The poor creature came into the world almost still-born, and, though he has hardly been before the public for a month, is forgotten as much as _Rienzi_ or the _Disowned_. What a pity that Mr. Bulwer will not learn wisdom with age, and confine his attention to subjects at once more grateful to the public and more suitable to his own powers! He excels in the _genre_ of Paul de Kock, and is always striving after the style of Plato; he has a keen perception of the ridiculous and, like Liston or Cruikshank, and other comic artists, persists that his real vein is the sublime. What a number of sparkling magazine-papers, what an outpouring of fun and satire, might we have had from Neddy Bulwer, had he not thought fit to turn moralist, metaphysician, politician, poet, and be Edward Lytton, Heaven–knows–what Bulwer, Esquire and M.P., a dandy, a philosopher, a spouter at Radical meetings. We speak feelingly, for we knew the youth at Trinity Hall, and have a tenderness even for his tomfooleries. He has thrown away the better part of himself–his great inclination for the LOW, namely; if he would but leave off scents for his handkerchief, and oil for his hair; if he would but confine himself to three clean shirts a week, a couple of coats in a year, a beefsteak and onions for dinner, his beaker a pewter-pot, his carpet a sanded floor, how much might be made of him even yet! An occasional pot of porter too much–a black eye, in a tap-room fight with a carman–a night in the watch-house–or a surfeit produced by Welsh-rabbit and gin and beer, might, perhaps, redden his fair face and swell his slim waist; but the _mental_ improvement which he would acquire under such treatment– the intellectual pluck and vigour which he would attain by the stout diet–the manly sports and conversation in which he would join at the Coal-Hole, or the Widow’s, are far better for him than the feeble fribble of the Reform Club (not inaptly called “The Hole in the Wall”); the windy French dinners, which, as we take it, are his usual fare; and, above all, the unwholesome Radical garbage which form the political food of himself and his clique in the House of Commons.
For here is the evil of his present artificial courses–the humbug required to keep up his position as dandy, politician, and philosopher (in neither of which latter characters the man is in earnest), must get into _his heart_ at last; and then his trade is ruined. A little more politics and Plato, and the natural disappears altogether from Mr. Bulwer’s writings: the individual man becomes as undistinguishable amidst the farrago of philosophy in which he has chosen to envelope himself, as a cutlet in the sauces of a French cook. The idiosyncracy of the mutton perishes under the effects of the adjuncts: even so the moralising, which may be compared to the mushrooms, of Mr. Bulwer’s style; the poetising, which may be likened unto the flatulent turnips and carrots; and the politics, which are as the gravy, reeking of filthy garlic, greasy with rancid oil;–even so, we say, pursuing this savoury simile to its fullest extent, the natural qualities of young Pelham–the wholesome and juicy _mutton of the mind_, is shrunk and stewed away.
Or, to continue in this charming vein of parable, the author of _Pelham_ may be likened to Beau Tibbs. Tibbs, as we all remember, would pass for a pink of fashion, and had a wife whom he presented to the world as a paragon of virtue and _ton_, and who was but the cast-off mistress of a lord. Mr. Bulwer’s philosophy is his Mrs. Tibbs; he thrusts her forward into the company of her betters, as if her rank and reputation never admitted of a question. To all his literary undertakings this goddess of his accompanies him; what a cracked, battered truly she is! with a person and morals that would suit Vinegar yard, and a chastity that would be hooted in Drury Lane.
The morality which Mr. Bulwer has acquired in his researches, political and metaphysical, is of the most extraordinary nature. For one who is always preaching of Truth of Beauty, the dulness of his moral sense is perfectly ludicrous. He cannot see that the hero into whose mouth he places his favourite metaphysical gabble–his dissertations about the stars, the passions, the Greek plays, and what not–his eternal whine about what he calls the good and the beautiful–is a fellow as mean and paltry as can be well imagined; a man of rant, and not of action; foolishly infirm of purpose, and strong only in desire; whose beautiful is a tawdry strumpet, and whose good would be crime in the eyes of an honest man. So much for the portrait of Ernest Maltravers: as for the artist, we cannot conceive a man to have failed more completely. He wishes to paint an amiable man, and he succeeds in drawing a scoundrel: he says he will give us the likeness of a genius, and it is only the picture of a _humbug_.
Ernest Maltravers is an eccentric and enthusiastic young man, to whom we are introduced upon his return from a German university. Fond of wild adventure and solitary rambles, we find him upon a heath, wandering alone, tired, and benighted. The two first chapters of the book are in Mr. Bulwer’s very best manner; the description of the lone hut to which the lad comes–the ruffian who inhabits it–the designs which he has upon the life of his new guest, and the manner in which his daughter defeats them, are told with admirable liveliness and effect. The young man escapes, and with him the girl who had prevented his murder. Both are young, interesting, and tender hearted; she loves but him, and would die of starvation without him. Ernest Maltravers cannot resist the claim of so unprotected a creature; he hires a cottage for her, and a writing-master. He is a young man of genius, and generous dispositions; he is a Christian, and instructs the ignorant Alice in the awful truth of his religion; moreover he is deep in poetry, philosophy, and the German metaphysics. How should such a Christian instruct an innocent and beautiful child, his pupil? What should such a philosopher do? Why seduce her, to be sure! After a deal of namby-pamby Platonism, the girl, as Mr. Bulwer says, “goes to the deuce.” The expression is as charming as the morality, and appears amidst a quantity of the very finest writing about the good and the beautiful, youth, love, passion, nature and so forth. It is curious how rapidly one turns from good to bad in this book. How clever the descriptions are! how neatly some of the minor events and personalities are hit off! and yet, how astonishingly vile and contemptible the chief part of it is!–that part, we mean, which contains the adventures of the hero, and, of course, the choice reflections of the author.
The declamations about virtue are endless, as soon as Maltravers appears upon the scene; and yet we find him committing the agreeable little _faux pas_ of which we have just spoken. In one place, we have him making violent love to another man’s wife; in another place, raging for blood like a tiger and swearing for revenge….
It is curious and painful to read Mr. Bulwer’s [philosophy], and to mark the easy vanity with which virtue is assumed here, self-knowledge arrogated, and a number of windy sentences, which really possess no meaning, are gravely delivered with all the emphasis of truth and the air of profound conviction.
“I have learned,” cries our precious philosopher, “to lean on my own soul, and not look eleswhere [Transcriber’s note: sic] for the reeds that a wind can break!” And what has he learned by leaning on his own soul? Is it to be happier than others? or to be better? Not he!–he is as wretched and wicked a dog as any unhung. He “leans on his own soul,” and makes love to the Countess and seduces Alice Darvell. A ploughboy is a better philosopher and moralist than this mouthing Maltravers, with his boasted love of mankind (which reduces itself to a very coarse love of _woman_kind), and his scorn of “the false gods and miserable creeds” of the world, and his soul “lifting its crest to heaven!” A Catholic whipping himself before a stone-image, a Brahmin dangling on a hook, or standing on one leg for a year, has a higher notion of God than this ranting fool, who is always prating about his own perfections and his divine nature; the one is humble, at least, though blind; the other is proud of his very imperfections and glories in his folly. What does this creature know of virtue, who finds it _by leaning on his own soul_, forsooth? What does he know of God, who, in looking for him, can see but himself, steeped in sin, bloated and swollen with monstrous pride, and strutting before the world and the creator as a maker of systems, a layer down of morals, and a preacher of beauty and truth?…
[Some of the] characters are excellently drawn; how much better than “_their lips spake of sentiment, and their eyes applied it_!” How soon these philosophers begin ogling! how charmingly their unceasing gabble about beauty and virtue is exemplified in their actions! Mr. Bulwer’s philosophy is like a French palace–it is tawdry, shady, splendid; but, _gare aux nez sensibles_! one is always reminded of the sewer. “Their lips spoke sentiment, and their eyes applied it.” O you naughty, naughty Mr. Bulwer!
WILLIAM JOHN FOX
The dedicatory inscription in the volume of _The Monthly Repository_, in which the following review appears, will indicate–in a few words–the motives inspiring the editor, W. J. Fox, in his journalistic career:– “To the Working People of Great Britain and Ireland; who, whether they produce the means of physical support and enjoyment, or aid the progress of moral, political, and social reform and improvement, are fellow-labourers for the well-being of the entire community.”
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_Pauline_ was published, when Browning was 21, at his aunt’s expense. It secured only _one_ favourable notice, here printed; while the author and his sister deliberately destroyed the unsold copies.
W. J. FOX ON BROWNING
[From _The Monthly Repository_, 1833]
_Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession_. London, Saunders & Otley. 1833
The most deeply interesting adventures, the wildest vicissitudes, the most daring explorations, the mightiest magic, the fiercest conflicts, the brightest triumphs, and the most affecting catastrophes, are those of the spiritual world….
The knowledge of mind is the first of sciences; the records of its formation and workings are the most important of histories; and it is eminently a subject for poetical exhibition. The annals of a poet’s mind are poetry. Nor has there ever been a genuine bard, who was not himself more poetical than any of his productions. They are emanations of his essence. He himself is, or has been, all that he truly and touchingly, _i.e._, poetically, describes. Wordsworth, indeed, never carried a pedlar’s pack, nor did Byron ever command a pirate ship, or Coleridge shoot an albatross; but there were times and moods in which their thoughts intently realised, and identified themselves with the reflective wanderer, the impetuous Corsair, and the ancient mariner. They felt _their_ feelings, thought _their_ thoughts, burned with _their_ passions, dreamed _their_ dreams, and lived their lives, or died their deaths. In relation to his creations, the poet is the omnific spirit in whom they have their being. All their vitality must exist in his life. He only, in them, displays to us fragments of himself. The poem, in which a great poet should reveal the whole of himself to mankind would be a study, a delight, and a power, for which there is yet no parallel; and around which the noblest creations of the noblest writers would range themselves as subsidiary luminaries.
These thoughts have been suggested by the work before us, which, though evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius. Whoever the anonymous author may be, he is a poet. A pretender to science cannot always be safely judged of by a brief publication, for the knowledge of some facts does not imply the knowledge of other facts; but the claimant of poetic honours may generally be appreciated by a few pages, often by a few lines, for if they be poetry, he is a poet. We cannot judge of the house by the brick, but we can judge of the statue of Hercules by its foot. We felt certain of Tennyson, before we saw the book, by a few verses which had straggled into a newspaper; we are not less certain of the author of Pauline.
Pauline is the recipient of the confessions: the hero is as anonymous as the author, and this is no matter, for _poet_ is the title both of the one and the other. The confessions have nothing in them which needs names: the external world is only reflected in them in its faintest shades; its influences are only described after they have penetrated into the intellect. We have never read anything more purely confessional. The whole composition is of the spirit, spiritual. The scenery is in the chambers of thought: the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another. And yet the composition is not dreamy; there is on it a deep stamp of reality. Still less is it characterised by coldness. It has visions that we love to look upon, and tones that touch the inmost heart till it responds.
The poet’s confessions are introduced with an analysis of his spiritual constitution, in which he is described as having an intense consciousness of individuality, combined with a sense of power, a self-supremacy, and a “principle of restlessness which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all”; of this essential self, imagination is described as the characteristic quality; an imagination, steady and unfailing in its power. A “yearning after God,” or supreme and universal good, unconsciously cherished through the earlier stages of the history, keeps this mind from utterly dissipating itself; and, which seems to us the only point in which the coherence fails, there is added an unaptness for love, a mere perception of the beautiful, the perception being felt more precious than its object….
And now when he has run the whole toilsome yet giddy round and arrived at the goal, there arises, even though that goal be religion, or because it is religion, a yearning after human sympathies and affections, which would not have assorted with any state or moment of the previous experience; he could not have loved before; at one time it would have been only a fancy, a cold, and yet perhaps extravagant imagining; at another, a low and selfish passion. Some souls are purified _by_ love, others are purified _for_ love. Othello needed not Desdemona to listen to his tale of disastrous chances; they were only external perils, rapid by elevated station; but the mind that has gone through more than his vicissitudes, been in deeper dangers, and deadlier struggles, even when it rests at last in a far higher repose and dignity, yearns for some one who will “seriously incline” to listen to the “strange eventful history,” one who will sympathise and soothe, who will receive the confession, and give the absolution of heaven its best earthly ratification, that of a pure and loving heart. The poem is addressed to Pauline; with her it begins, and ends; and her presence is felt throughout, as that of a second conscience, wounded by evil, but never stern, and incorporate in a form of beauty, which blends and softens the strong contrasts of different portions of the poem, so that all might be murmured by the breath of affection.
The author cannot expect such a poem as this to be popular, to make a “hit,” to produce a “sensation.” The public are but slow in recognising the claims of Tennyson whom in some respects he resembles; and the common eye scarcely yet discerns among the laurel-crowned, the form of Shelley, who seems (how justly, we stop not now to discuss), to have been the god of his early idolatory. Whatever inspiration may have been upon him from that deity, the mysticism of the original oracles has been happily avoided. And whatever resemblance he may bear to Tennyson (a fellow worshipper probably at the same shrine) he owes nothing of the perhaps inferior melody of his verse to an employment of archaisms which it is difficult to defend from the charge of affectation. But he has not given himself the chance for popularity which Tennyson did, and which it is evident that he easily might have done. His poem stands alone, with none of those light but taking accompaniments, songs that sing themselves, sketches that everybody knows, light little lyrics, floating about like humming birds, around the trunk and foliage of the poem itself; and which would attract so many eyes, and delight so many ears, that will be slow to perceive the higher beauty of that composition, and to whom a sycamore is no sycamore, unless it be “musical with bees.”
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
(1785-1859)
De Quincey has been said to have “taken his place in our literature as the author of about 150 magazine articles,” and, though chiefly remembered by his _Confessions of an Opium Eater_ and by his wonderful experiments in “impassioned prose,” there can be no question that his critical work occupied much of his attention, and was nearly always original. In many respects his point of view was perverse, and towards his contemporaries occasionally spiteful; while his tendency to dwell upon disputed points was apt to obscure the general impression.
* * * * *
It is interesting to compare his unmeasured condemnation of Pope with Kingsley’s eulogy: since both were, more or less, directly inspired by the contrast of eighteenth century correctness to the poetical gospel of the Lake Poets. From the two articles we can obtain a fair and emphatic statement of “both sides of the case.”
DE QUINCEY ON POPE
[From _Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine_, May, 1851]
Whom shall we pronounce a fit writer to be laid before an auditory of working-men, as a model of what is just in composition–fit either for conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for sustaining it? The qualifications for such a writer are apparently these two; first, that he should deal chiefly with the elder and elementary affections of man, and under those relations which concern man’s grandest capacities; secondly, that he should treat his subject with solemnity, and not with sneer–with earnestness, as one under a prophet’s burden of impassioned truth, and not with the levity of a girl hunting a chance-started caprice. I admire Pope in the very highest degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic artist for producing brilliant and evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment’s life within them. There is a flash and a startling explosion, then there is a dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the suddenness of a display that, springing like a burning arrow out of darkness, rushes back into the darkness with arrowy speed, and in a moment is all over. Like festal shows, or the hurrying music of such shows–
It _was_, and it is not.
Untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of Pope, that he belonged by his classification to the family of the Drydens. Dryden had within him a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them, and oftentimes pursuing them through their unlinkings with the _sequaciousness_ (pardon a Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature, such as the unfolding of a flower. But Pope was all jets and tongues of flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. Dryden followed, genially, an impulse of his healthy nature. Pope obeyed, spasmodically, an overmastering febrile paroxysm. Even in these constitutional differences between the two are written and are legible the corresponding necessities of “utter falsehood in Pope, and of loyalty to truth in Dryden.” Strange it is to recall this one striking fact, that if once in his life Dryden might reasonably have been suspected of falsehood, it was in the capital matter of religion. He _ratted_ from his Protestant faith; and according to the literal origin of that figure he _ratted_; for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which their instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and at the very moment when Popery wore the promise of a triumph that might, at any rate, have lasted his time. Dryden was a papist by apostacy; and perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some bias from self-interest. Pope, on the other hand, was a Papist by birth, and by a tie of honour; and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted faith, which temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively, and in persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating. How base a time-server does Dryden appear on the one side! on the other, how much of a martyr should we be disposed to pronounce Pope! And yet, for all that, such is the overruling force of a nature originally sincere, the apostate Dryden wore upon his brow the grace of sincerity, whilst the pseudo-martyr Pope, in the midst of actual fidelity to his church, was at his heart a traitor–in the very oath of his allegiance to his spiritual mistress had a lie upon his lips, scoffed at her while kneeling in homage to her pretensions, and secretly forswore her doctrines while suffering insults in her service.
The differences as to truth and falsehood lay exactly where by all the external symptoms they ought _not_ to have lain. But the reason for this anomaly was that to Dryden sincerity had been a perpetual necessity of his intellectual nature, whilst Pope, distracted by his own activities of mind, living in an irreligious generation, and beset by infidel friends, had early lost his anchorage of traditional belief; and yet, upon honourable scruple of fidelity to the suffering Church of his fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of his own scepticism, which often he thirsted ostentatiously to parade. Through a motive of truthfulness he became false. And in this particular instance he would, at any rate, have become false, whatever had been the native constitution of his mind. It was a mere impossibility to reconcile any real allegiance to his church with his known irreverence to religion. But upon far more subjects than this Pope was habitually false to the quality of his thoughts, always insincere, never by any accident in earnest, and consequently many times caught in ruinous self-contradiction. Is that the sort of writer to furnish an advantageous study for the precious leisure, precious as rubies, of the toil-worn artisan.
The root and pledge of this falseness in Pope lay in a disease of his mind, which he (like the Roman poet Horace) mistook for a feature of praeter-natural strength; and this disease was the incapacity of self-determination towards any paramount or abiding _principles_. Horace, in a well-known passage, had congratulated himself upon this disease as upon a trophy of philosophical emancipation:
Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri, Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes:
which words Pope translates, and applies to himself in his English adaptation of this epistle–
But ask not to what doctors I apply– Sworn to no master, of no sect am I.
As drives the storm, at any door I knock; And house with Montaigne now, and now with Locke.
That is, neither one poet nor the other having, as regarded philosophy, any internal principle of gravitation or determining impulse to draw him in one direction rather than another, was left to the random control of momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this indetermination of pure, unballasted levity both Pope and Horace mistook for a special privilege of philosophic strength. Others, it seems, were chained and coerced by certain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts were over-ruled accordingly in one uniform line of direction. But _they_, the two brilliant poets, fluttered on butterfly wings to the right and the left, obeying no guidance but that of some instant and fugitive sensibility to some momentary phasis of beauty. In this dream of drunken eclecticism, and in the original possibility of such an eclecticism, lay the ground of that enormous falsehood which Pope practised from youth to age. An eclectic philosopher already, in the very title which he assumes, proclaims his self-complacency in the large liberty of error purchased by the renunciation of all controlling principles. Having served the towing-line which connected him with any external force of guiding and compulsory truth, he is free to go astray in any one of ten thousand false radiations from the true centre of rest. By his own choice he is wandering in a forest all but pathless,
–ubi passim
Pallantes error recto de tramite pellit;
and a forest not of sixty days’ journey, like that old Hercynian forest of Caesar’s time, but a forest which sixty generations have not availed to traverse or familiarise in any one direction….
_Here_ would be the most advantageous and _remunerative_ station to take for one who should undertake a formal exposure of Pope’s hollow-heartedness; that is, it would most commensurately reward the pains and difficulties of such an investigation. But it would be too long a task for this situation, and it would be too polemic. It would move through a jungle of controversies…. Instead of this I prefer, as more amusing, as less elaborate, and as briefer, to expose a few of Pope’s _personal_ falsehoods, and falsehoods as to the notorieties of _fact_. Truth speculative often-times, drives its roots into depth, so dark that the falsifications to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always be exposed to the light of day–the result is known, but not therefore seen. Truth personal, on the other hand, may easily be made to confront its falsifier, not with reputation only, but with the visible _shame_ of refutation. Such shame would settle upon _every_ page of Pope’s satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge of the facts, were to prosecute the inquest. And the general impression from such an inquest would be, that Pope never delineated a character, nor uttered a sentiment, nor breathed an aspiration, which he would not willingly have recast, have retracted, have abjured or trampled underfoot with the curses assigned to heresy, if by such an act he could have added a hue of brilliancy to his colouring or a new depth to his shadows. There is nothing he would not have sacrificed, not the most solemn of his opinions, nor the most pathetic memorial from his personal experience, in return for a sufficient consideration, which consideration meant always with _him_ poetic effect. It is not, as too commonly is believed, that he was reckless of other people’s feelings; so far from _that_, he had a morbid _facility_ in his kindness; and in cases where he had no reason to suspect any lurking hostility, he showed even a paralytic benignity. But, simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a sincere thought or a sincere emotion. Nothing that ever he uttered, were it even a prayer to God, but he had a fancy for reading it backwards. And he was evermore false, not as loving or preferring falsehood, but as one who could not in his heart perceive much real difference between what people affected to call falsehood, and what they affected to call truth.
THE END