verence before the throne of Antonine, he may bow with equal awe before Epictetus among his fellow-slaves "and rejoice In the plain presence of his dignity." Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet Wordsworth himself exclaims, "Oh! many are the Poets that are sown By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, By circumstance to take unto the height Strongest minds Are often those of whom the noisy world Hears least." 17 To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one's heart good; though I, for my part, have not the fullest faith in the truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances to be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans on a lake, in a fancy landscape. When I think how many, and how much better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar, or Eschylus, could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and how restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and yet find even in situations the most favorable, according to Mr. Wordsworth, for the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which ensure familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one Burns, among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life among those of English lakes and 17 [The Excursion, Book i., P. W., vi., p. 10. After "accomplishment of verse" there is a parenthesis of five lines omitted in the extract; the liste quotation that occurs just before is from the same place. S. C.] mountains; I conclude, that Poetic Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant. But be this as it may, the feelings with which, "I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, " 18 are widely different from those with which I should read a poem, where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage, and education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing, but biography, can justify this. If it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of Fielding's in THE LIFE OF MOLL FLANDERS, or COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM JONES, or even a JOSEPH ANDREWS. Much less, then, can it be legitimately introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest individualization, must still remain representative. The precepts of Horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the human mind." They are not more peremptory than wise and prudent. 18 [" Of him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plough, along the mountain side :” P. W., ii. S. C.] 19 [There are many precepts in Horace De Arte Poetica that bear on this subject, as those on congruity, at the beginning, and those on giving suitable attributes to every character, and duly regarding the exemplar of life and manners, v. 309-18; but none, I think, that forbids the choice of too peculiar a subject, except so far as this is implied in the condemnation of what appears improbable. Ficta voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris: Ne, quodcunque volet, poscat sibi fabula credi. v. 338. Mr Coleridge's observation on laborious fidelity in representations, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect, are supported, in a general way, by those lines of Horace: For, in the first place, a deviation from them perplexes the reader's feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear, and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only knows, that the sentiments and lan-、 guage are the poet's own, and his own, too, in his artificial character, as poet; but, by the fruitless endeavors to make hin think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in THE MESSIAH OF KLOPSTOCK, or in CUMBERLAND'S CALVARY; and not Semper ad eventum festinat, et in medias res, 20 v. 248. S. C. 20 [This Epic is written in blank verse, and is a studied imitation of Milton. In its best passages, as the Assembling of the Devils, in the first book, it is but a mocking-bird strain, with scarce a note in it of native music; and, generally, where the poem is not tame, it borders on the burlesque. The dispute in B. vii, between Satan and Death, who, rather unnaturally, refuses to harbor his old father, and is informed, as it appears, in reward of this conduct, that he may live till the end of the world, seems to have been written in order to serve as a foil to Milton's grand episode of Satan's encounter with his " fair Son" at the gates of Hell :-it brings our moral and metaphysical ideas into such an odd sort of conflict and confusion. By comparing the two, we see clearly how little this allegorical subject supports itself; how soon it sinks into the ridiculous in unequal hands; how completely its sublimity in those of Milton is the result of consummate skill and high poetic genius. Perhaps, too, it may be questioned whether the author has not too much interfered with the Scriptural representations of Death, by making him turn out mild and amiable, and oppose himself to the great Enemy. Revelation, as Lessing observes in his Essay on this subject, has made him the "king of terrors," the awful offspring of Sin, and the dread way to its punishment; though to the imagination of the ancient Heathen world, Greek or Etrurian, he was a youthful Genius-the twin brother of Sleep-or a lusty boy, with a torch held downward. But the accomplished author of The Choleric Man has dramatized him as freely as if he were but a Jack Nightshade; although he avers that there i" very little of the audacity of fancy in the composition of Calvary The peer hows want of judgment, if not audacity, in another way also. merely suggested by it, as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their immediate neighborhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is, in a less degree, brought about in the instances to which I have been objecting, by the baffled attempts of the author to make him believe. Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE Of all subjects in the wide range of thought, the Death of Christ is that which Fiction should approach most warily. Milton left it untouched. The "narrow basis" of the Paradise Regained seems to me one of the numberless proofs of the mighty master's judgment; the whole poem is comprised within the limits of that passage of our Lord's history which is least defined in Holy Writ,-the sojourn in the wilderness, and could best bear to have an invention grafted into it. To bring angels and devils, not mentioned in the Scripture narrative of the Death and Passion, around the cross, or into any sort of connexion with it, either in foreground or background, that narrative being so full as it is of actual facts and particulars, is to jar, if not absolutely to shock, the feelings of most readers. When fanciful fiction is brought so near to sacred history of the most definite character, we recoil, and feel as if the former clashed with the latter, and was broken against it, like the china vase against the vessel of iron. This collision the plan of Cumberland's poem involved, and poets of greater genius than he, in an enterprise of like nature, have but failed, I think, more splendidly. The author of Calvary thought himself well off because he had so much fine subject ready to his hand. It was just that which ruined him. He had not capital enough to invest in such an undertaking; for the more is given, in this way, to the poet, the more is required out of his own brain, for the oinois, which must be made with materials furnished by himself, whatever he adopts for the foundation matter. A man may even take from various places a certain amount of material ready wrought, as Milton did, and yet add that, in the using of it, which makes the result entirely his own. S. C.] EXCURSION characteristic of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When, on the contrary, this information renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments, and information, a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? Finally, when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased" in some obscure town) as "From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak, To his Step-father's School,"-&c.21 21 [Book i., P. W., vi., are now alone retained. narrative proceeds thus: p. 7. The first three lines of the first passage The story of the Step-father is left out, and the "His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt: In the next paragraph the fifth line now is Equipped with satchel, to a school, that stood," &c. S. C.] |
