WILLIAM HAZL1TT LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETS & THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE INTRODUCTION BY CATHERINE MACDONALD MACLEAN, M.A., D.LITT., F.R.S.L. U No. 459 EVEWMAN'S O Contents of this Volume LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS I. Introductory — On Poetry in General II. On Chaucer and Spenser III. On Shakespeare and Milton IV. On Dryden and Pope V. On Thomson and Cowper VI. On Swift, Young, Gray, Collins, etc. VII. On Burns, and the Old English Ballads VIII. On the Living Poets. THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE Jeremy Bentham; William Godwin; Mr Coleridge; the Rev. Mr Irving; the late Mr Home Tookc; Sir Walter Scott; Lord Byron; Mr Southey; Mr Wordsworth; Sir James Macintosh; Mr Malthus; Mr Gifford; Mr Jeffrey; Mr Brougham-Sir F. Burdett; Lord Eldon-Mr Wilberforce; Mr Canning; Mr Campbell-Mr Crabbe; Mr T. Moore-Mr Leigh Hunt; Elia- Geoffrey Crayon. See back flap for details of the Everyman editions of the poets discussed in these lectures Wrapper drawing by R. T. 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LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETS t THE SPIRIT OF 5.00 MM LL The Newark Public Library Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations The Branch Libraries MID-MANHATTAN LIBRARY Literature & Language Dept. 455 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016 MM LL BOOKS MAY BE RETURNED TO ANY BRANCH OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY ALL RECORDINGS MUST BE RETURNED TO BRANCH FROM WHICH BORROWED NO RENEWALS ARE ALLOWED FINES FOR OVERDUE MATERIAL PER CALENDAR DAY: Adult books lOtf Juvenile books 5^ Recordings 104 Form *0692 E VER YMAN, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side, WILLIAM HAZLITT 177^ Born in i7#S-tmd educated for the Unitarian ministry. Studied painting, wrote dramatic criticisms. Continental tour, 1824-5. Died in 1830. WILLIAM HAZLITT Lectures on the English Poets The Spirit of the Age: OR CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS INTRODUCTION BY CATHERINE MACDONALD MACLEAN, M.A., D.LITT., F.R.S.L. DENT: LONDON EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY DUTTON: NEW YORK All rights reserved Made in Great Britain at the Aldine Press • Letchworth • Herts fir J. M. DENT & SONS LTD Aldine House • Bedford Street • London First included in Everyman's Library Last reprinted 1967 G-l NO. 45$ _MMLL // "&-I INTRODUCTION IT is part of the secret of the vitality of Hazlitt's writing that he never remained long enough at one type of work to become stale. His mind had rich resources. From the end of 1813, when his article on The Beggar's Opera brought him into sudden favour, to 1817, he had earned most of his livelihood as a journalist. Early in 1818 he gave up most of this work for lecturing on English literature. Between January 1818 and Christmas 1819 he delivered at the Surrey Institution, near Blackfriars Bridge, three courses of lectures, for which it has been claimed that 'there had been no such body of vital comment since the prefaces of Dryden.' When Hazlitt began to lecture on English literature he was just rising into fame. He was known as a literary critic of singular penetration, as a dramatic critic whose word could make or mar the fortunes of an actor, as a redoubtable critic of art, as a formidable political commentator and as an Essayist of great originality. It is therefore not surprising that those who were drawn to his lectures should be as varied as the themes on which he had touched. On the evening of Tuesday, i3th January 1818, he faced an audience composed partly of Dissenters, who approved of his advocacy of religious freedom but had no sympathy with his love of the theatre; of pious Quakers, who supported his pleas for social justice but had no sympathy with his passionate concern for the arts; of 'well- dressed' and 'respectable' citizens bent on improving their minds ; of some of the painters, poets and writers of the day ; of a few enemies who came to jeer; a few half- friends who came to carp; and a few genuine friends who thought his conversation matchless, and who looked forward to hearing it range over English poetry. John Keats, arriving so late for the second lecture that he met the lecturer coming out, was 'pounced upon' — he said — by a group of the friends surrounding Hazlitt, including John Hunt and his son Henry, John Land- seer and his sons Thomas and Edwin, young William Bewick, who thought Hazlitt ' the Shakespeare prose writer ' of the age, Charles Wells, 'aye and more.' v vi INTRODUCTION The most experienced lecturer in the world might have found some difficulty in welding such a mixed audience into a unity, but Hazlitt succeeded in commanding its attention as if it were one man. Here the experience of his journalistic years helped him. He had learned that the uninterrupted move- ment of thought wearied the reader, and so he punctuated it with lighter matter, 'like the blue and red flowers in corn, pleasing to those who care only for amusement.' He had learned also the art of attracting by repelling, or of stimulating attention by flicking at the prejudices of his readers. He made such use of this stimulus in his first course of lectures that he sometimes provoked angry scenes. He had a regular battle of wills with the pious among his audience when he read aloud almost thirty of Gay's ribald lines on Blackmore. When he dismissed Hannah More with the remark: 'She has written a great deal that I have never read,' one of her admirers called out indignantly: 'More pity for you! ' Even Crabb Robinson, much to his own astonishment, was betrayed into hissing when Wordsworth came under the lecturer's fire. All these things are witnesses to Hazlitt's power of holding his audience. Crabb Robinson, when he had attended Coleridge's lectures, had sometimes found himself inclined to doze. No one dozed at Hazlitt's. And even the pious whom at times he antagon- ized had their turn of being delighted. When he read from Cowper's Truth the lines comparing Voltaire to his disad- vantage with the poor cottager who Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true — they burst into what Talfourd calls 'a joyous shout' of approval. Hazlitt's lectures were above all stimulating. When read, they have no less power to stimulate than when they filled the hall of the Surrey Institution — as one hostile critic complained — with 'the uproar of a one-shilling gallery.' Their great merit was what has been finely called their 'catholic enjoying spirit.' Literature had been a lifelong passion with Hazlitt. His aim in lecturing was to share with others what he had enjoyed himself. Although at his first lecture he was 'pallid as death' — as William Bewick has recorded — and suffering from extreme nervousness, once he launched into his subject it was a delight to him to give expression to 'that uneasy, ex- quisite sense of beauty or power ' which certain poets awakened in him. It was his consciousness of this delight which made INTRODUCTION vii him claim : ' If I did not write these Lectures to please myself, I ... am sure 1 should please nobody else.' He knew exactly what he wanted to do. 'I conceive,' he wrote, 'that what I have undertaken to do ... is merely to read over a se*t of works with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to point out a favourite passage, to explain an objection; or if a remark or a theory occurs, to state it in illustration of the subject, but neither to tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantic rules and pragmatical formulas of criticism that can do no good to any body.' His lectures fulfil to the letter this conception of his task. He not only read long extracts from the Poets to his audience, but two entire narrative poems, Tarn o' Shanter and Hartleap Well ; in pointing out his favourite passages he brought to light excellences that had been obscured, like the intensity of certain passages in Chaucer and their 'deep pathos'; he brushed aside impatiently the trivialities of critical discussion that obscured rather than illumined the quality of the poetry, and 'the mechanical and instrumental part' of criticism; where he advanced a theory in illustration of his subject he gave examples of its operation some of which show extra- ordinary delicacy of insight and sensibility, as when he supported his claim that poetry shows up the mirror to Nature, 'seen through the fine medium of passion,' by reference to certain lines of the soliloquy of lachimo watching the sleeping Imogen : The flame o' th' taper Bows towards her, and would under-peep her lids To see the enclosed lights. His audience kept steadily increasing throughout his lectures. In the last, delivered on the first Tuesday of March, the hall was 'crowded to the very ceiling.' In this, 'On the Living Poets,' as in his first great opening lecture, 'On Poetry in General,' he fairly swept his listeners 'within the estuary of the passions.' Crabb Robinson censured the descant on Coleridge with which it concluded as 'outrageous eulogy.' But by this time Coleridge was amongst those whom Hazlitt himself saw only 'through the fine medium of passion.' Early in 1824 Hazlitt began to contribute to The New Monthly Magazine studies of his famed contemporaries, under the general title The Spirit of the Age. In January his 'Jeremy Bentham' appeared; in February his very amusing, grim-grotesque 'Edward Irving'; in March his 'Home Tooke,' viii INTRODUCTION which Charles Lamb pronounced 'a matchless portrait'; in April his 'Sir Walter Scott'; in July his 'Lord Eldon.' By this time, as the impulse underlying his work gradually became clear to h'im, his original plan of contributing a number of separate sketches to The New Monthly Magazine became some- what modified. He conceived the idea of supplementing these articles with a series of studies of his contemporaries, linked together by the point of view from which each was considered, the extent of their response to or reaction against what he considered to be the Spirit of the Age, the hope for the better- ment of the lot of mankind which had come in with ' the grand whirling movements of the French Revolution.' In this way, what had begun as occasional writing took on the character of work that was organic, and the book developed from this occasional writing, The Spirit of the Age, became a piece of history written not from the closet but by one who had shared to the full in the repercussions of the movements of feeling and the reactions against them which were recorded. The book is amazing in the immediacy of its impact. It takes the reader right into the heart of these stormy times. To read it is to realize, despite the impression Hazlitt sometimes gives that he had dreamed or loitered his life away, how deeply he had shared in the hopes, and the despairs too, of the times, and how full and varied his life had been. 'Much had he seen and known 1 ' Shortly after its publication Hazlitt wrote to Landor: 'You can hardly suppose the depression of body and mind under which I wrote some of these articles.' No one, enjoying the wit and sparkle of the book, could guess at this depression. The Spirit of the Age is the most brilliant and colourful of all Hazlitt's books. It is the effect of the fusion of all his gifts, in their maturity. The Metaphysician, the Critic, the political Commentator and the Essayist — all had their share in it. All Hazlitt had succeeded in doing as a writer had enriched it. Perhaps I should add that all he had failed to do as a painter enriched it even more. In his youth Hazlitt had tried to earn his living as a portrait-painter, and had given up the attempt because he had lost hope of ever becoming a great painter. Surely, in The Spirit of the Age the portrait-painter manque" did something which might have consoled him for his failure to express himself on canvas, and which might have assured him that he too had his place among the true historical painters. Using words instead of colours, he succeeded through their INTRODUCTION ix medium in doing what he had failed to do in oils. Bentham's lack-lustre eye, the quivering lip of Charles Fox, Moore's mignon figure, the falcon glance of Southey, the ' comfortable double-chin' of Benjamin Franklin, Lamb's 'fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence' — all these have been pictured. Even the language in which the ideas are released is a series of word- pictures. For none of his writings could Hazlitt claim more justly that they were 'the thoughts of a metaphysician expressed by a painter.' Brilliant though the portraiture is in this book, it is never metallic. The Spirit of the Age is the work of one who had experienced much, but it is also the work of one in whom experience had brought about some softening of feeling towards his fellow mortals, as compared with the inveteracy or reckless- ness of earlier years. This is specially noticeable in his study of Southey, in the exquisite criticism of Campbell's poetry, and in the tone of what Hazlitt wrote of Wordsworth. He went out of his way to apologize for the attack on Wordsworth's limita- tions, in his lecture ' On the Living Poets,' confessing that the substance of it had been ' mere epigrams and jeux-d' esprit.' At the same time he claimed that these, if 'far from truth/ were also 'free from malice.' This claim, that they were 'free from malice,' may be made even for the harsher portraits, of Malthus, Eldon and Gifford, because all that Hazlitt said was referable to principle. The harshest study of all, that of Gifford, was the effect not of malice, but of the contempt felt by one who always took ' high ground ' in his literary criticism for the sub- serviency which lent itself to the degradation of literary criticism into a political tool. Measureless contempt is not malice. What has done more than any of these biting character- sketches to expose Hazlitt to the charge of writing with malice, even with wanton malice, is the attack appended to his delight- ful estimate of Sir Walter Scott as a writer. Various critics have professed themselves unable to understand the tone of this attack or to point to any provocation which could justify it. To Hazlitt's contemporaries the provocation was all too clear. The political weapon he was known to despise above all others was slander, which he judged most contemptible when it took the form of anonymous calumny. Like many another, he had received a great shock when it had become known, in the autumn of 1821, that Scott was among those who financed a disreputable sheet called The Beacon, which directed 'an *459 x INTRODUCTION organized system of blackguardism' against the opponents of Toryism. Scott was at the time challenged by one whose reputation 'had been struck at' by 'a secret and envenomed blow,' but friends had bestirred themselves to safeguard him from the chances of a duel. The Beacon had been discontinued, but had been succeeded by a similar sheet called The Sentinel, said to be the work of the same 'junto of secret libellers.' James Stuart of Dunearn, the leader of the Opposition in Fife, on discovering that Sir Alexander Boswell had been his most persistent calumniator in its pages, had challenged Boswell, and killed him in a duel, in March 1822. When Hazlitt had been in Edinburgh in June 1822, the trial for murder of Stuart — whose acquittal owed much to Jeffrey's eloquence — had been the all- engrossing subject of conversation. Until the exposure of Scott's association with The Beacon Hazlitt's criticism of him had been unflawed in its admiration. After this exposure he was careful to dissociate his admiration of the author of the novels from his scorn of the politician who had any connection with The Beacon or The Sentinel. From this time henceforth his attacks on Scott's political character were constant. It is only just to add that his praise of the beloved writer was equally constant; and his compliments were 'divine.' In the year following the publication of The Spirit of the Age he described the author of Waverley as one who had ' five hundred hearts beating in his bosom.' This is perhaps the finest tribute ever paid to the genius of Scott. Indeed, the noblest praise in that age of bitter political faction was given to Scott, as to Burke, by the man who was implacable in his political hostility to both. CATHERINE MACDONALD MACLEAN. 1959. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY SEPARATE WORKS. Essay on the Principles of Human Action . . . with Remarks on the System of Hartley and Helvetius, 1805; Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, 1806; Abridgment of Abraham Tucker's 'Light of Nature', 1807; Eloquence of the British Senate (Parliamentary Speeches and Notes), 1807; Reply to Malthus, 1807; A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue, etc., 1810; Memoir of Thomas Holcroft, written by himself, etc., continued by Hazlitt, 1816; The Round Table (from The Examiner], 1817; Characters of Shakespear's Plays, 1817, 1818; A Review of the English Stage; or, a Series of Dramatic Criticisms, 1818, 1821; Lectures on the English Poets, 1818, 1819; Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 1819; Letter to William Gifford, 1819; Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters, 1819, 1822; Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1820; Table Talk; or, Original Essays on Men and Manners, 1821-2, 1824; Liber Amoris; or, The New Pyg- malion, 1823; Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims, 1823, 1837; Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England, with a criticism on Marriage d la Mode (in part from London Magazine], 1824; The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits, 1825; The Plain Speaker; or, Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, 1826; Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (from Morning Chronicle], 1826; Boswell Redivivus, 1827; The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, vols. i and ii, 1828; iii and iv, 1830; Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A., 1830. COLLECTED WORKS. Edited by P. P. Howe, after the edition of Waller and Glover, in 21 vols., 1930-4, and including much hitherto unpublished material. BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM. Augustine Birrell, William Hazlitt (English Men of Letters series), 1902; P. P. Howe, The Life of William Hazlitt, 1922; E. Schneider, The Aesthetics of William Hazlitt, Philadelphia, 1933; Hesketh Pearson, The Fool of Love, 1934; Catherine MacClean, Born Under Saturn, 1943; S. C. Wilcox, Hazlitt in the Workship : the Manuscript of ' The Fight ', Baltimore, 1943 ; C. W. and L. H. Houtchens, The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A review of Research and Criticism, New York, 1957; H. Baker, William Hazlitt, 1962. XI BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS PUBLISHED in 1818 in one 8vo volume with the following title-page: ' Lectures on the English Poets. Delivered at the Surrey Institution. By William Hazlitt. London: Printed for Taylor and Hessey, 93, Fleet Street. 1818.' The volume was printed by T. Miller, Noble Street, Cheapside. A second edition, partly reset, correcting the 'Errata,' and effecting other slight changes, was published in 1819. Of this the present issue is a reprint. On the verso of the half-title of both editions appears the following advertisement: 'This day is published, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, By William Hazlitt. Second edition, Svo, price IDS. €>d. boards.' THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE Published (anonymously) early in 1825 in one Svo volume with the following title-page: 'The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits. "To know another well were to know one's self." London: Printed for Henry Colburn, New Burlington Street. 1825.' The volume was printed by S. & R. Bentley, Dorset Street. Shortly after its publication Hazlitt, who was in Paris, prepared for A. & W. Galignani two small Svo volumes with the same title and motto and with his name on the title-page. In this edition the order of the essays was drastically rearranged, an addition was made to the essay on Coleridge, and the 'Character of Cobbett' (omitted from the Paris edition of Table Talk, which he prepared at the same time) was included, together with the 'Character of Mr Canning' from The Examiner of nth July 1824, which was otherwise not republished during his lifetime. Later in the same year the second English edition appeared, the title-page now reading : ' The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits. "To know a man well, were to know himself." HAMLET. Second Edition. London: Henry Colburn, New Burlington Street. 1825.' The printers were again S. & R. Bentley. In this edition, which was reset throughout in I2mo, the order of the essays followed, with a few changes, that of the first English edition (the ' Errata' list of which was corrected), the essay on Coleridge was revised in accordance with the Paris text, and the essay on Cobbett was included. The present text repro- duces that of the second English edition with the substitution of the essay on Canning for that on Cobbett. Xlli CONTENTS PAGE Introduction by Catherine Macdonald Maclean . . v LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS LECTURE PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY — ON POETRY IN GENERAL . . i II. ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER .... 19 III. ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON .... 44 IV. ON DRYDEN AND POPE ..... 68 V. ON THOMSON AND COWPER . . . .85 VI. ON SWIFT, YOUNG, GRAY, COLLINS, ETC. . .104 VII. ON BURNS, AND THE OLD ENGLISH BALLADS . 123 VIII. ON THE LIVING POETS ..... 143 THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE JEREMY BENTHAM ....... 171 WILLIAM GODWIN . . . . . . .182 MR. COLERIDGE . . . . . . .194 REV. MR. IRVING ....... 204 THE LATE MR. HORNE TOOKE . . . .213 SIR WALTER SCOTT . . . . . .223 LORD BYRON . . . . . . .235 MR. SOUTHEY ....... 244 MR. WORDSWORTH . . . . . . .252 SIR JAMES MACINTOSH . . . . . .261 MR. MALTHUS ....... 269 MR. GIFFORD ....... 280 MR. JEFFREY ........ 292 MR. BROUGHAM — SIR F. BURDETT .... 300 LORD ELDON — MR. WILBERFORCE .... 307 MR. CANNING . . . . . . .316 MR. CAMPBELL — MR. CRABBE . . . . .325 MR. T. MOORE — MR. LEIGH HUNT . . • 335 ELIA — GEOFFREY CRAYON . . . . . .344 xv LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS LECTURE I.— INTRODUCTORY ON POETRY IN GENERAL THE best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, ex- pressing it. In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of the subject-matter of it, next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and afterwards of its connection with harmony of sound. Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It re- lates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men ; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a con- tempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for any thing else. It is not a mere frivolous accomplishment, (as some persons have been led to imagine) the trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours — it has been the study and delight of mankind in all ages. Many people suppose that poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables, with like endings : but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that * spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun/ — there is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver : its materials lie deeper, and LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the cumbrous and unwicldly masses of things, the empty cases in which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or war, in different states, and from century to century : but there is no thought or feel- ing that can have entered into the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a branch of authorship: it is 'the stuff of which our life is made.' The rest is ' mere oblivion/ a dead letter : for all that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry ; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being : without it * man's life is poor as beast's.' Man is a poetical animal : and those of us who do not study the principles of poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who had always spoken prose without knowing it. The child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer ; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers ; the countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow ; the city-apprentice, when he gazes after the Lord-Mayor's show ; the miser, when he hugs his gold ; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile ; the savage, who paints his idol with blood ; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god ; — the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own making ; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second hand. * There is warrant for it.' Poets alone have not * such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler reason' can. 1 The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold ; The madman. While the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n ; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination.' 2 ON POETRY IN GENERAL If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality. Ariosto has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro : but was not Medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as much enamoured of her charms as he ? Homer has celebrated the anger of Achilles : but was not the hero as mad as the poet ? Plato banished the poets from his Common- wealth, lest their descriptions of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by any thing. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the brain of the inventor ; and Homer's poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic. Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man's nature. We shape things according to our wishes and fancies, without poetry ; but poetry is the most emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the mind * which ecstacy is very cunning in.' Neither a mere description of natural objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the heightenings of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that while it shews us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it : the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms ; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur ; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner, and by the most striking examples of the same quality in other instances. Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason, * has something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, 3 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS as reason and history do.' It is strictly the language of the imagina- tion ; and the imagination is that faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety of shapes and combina- tions of power. This language is not the less true to nature, because it is false in point of fact ; but so much the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be pre- sented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear — and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. * Our eyes are made the fools ' of our other faculties. This is the universal law of the imagination, 4 That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy: Or in the night imagining some fear, How easy is each bush suppos'd a bear ! * When lachimo says of Imogen, * The flame o* th' taper Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids To see the enclosed lights ' — this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord with the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally with the poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of shining gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from novelty and a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the imagination than the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower : not that he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous strength than another object of ten times the same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, * for they are old like him,' there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identifica- tion of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and his despair! Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with 4 ON POETRY IN GENERAL the forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most im- passioned species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or con- trast ; loses the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it ; exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it ; grapples with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint ; throws us back upon the past, forward into the future ; brings every moment of our being or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, * Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this ; ' what a bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own ! His sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the mad scene, * The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me ! ' it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to torture and kill it ! In like manner, the * So I am ' of Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years. What a fine return of the passion upon itself is that in Othello — with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the last traces of departed happiness — when he exclaims, ' Oh now, for ever Farewel the tranquil mind. Farewel content j Farewel the plumed troops and the big war, That make ambition virtue ! Oh farewel ! Farewel the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war : And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats Th' immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit, Farewel ! Othello's occupation's gone !' How his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in its 5 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS sounding course, when in answer to the doubts expressed of his returning love, he says, ' Never, lago. Like to the Pontic sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont : Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love, Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up.' — The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that line, ' But there where I had garner'd up my heart, To be discarded thence ! ' — One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our sympathy without raising our disgust is, that in proportion as it sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the desire of good. It enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by making us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion lays bare and shews us the rich depths of the human soul : the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast ; the action and re-action are equal ; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate participation with the antagonist world of good ; makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life ; tugs at the heart- strings ; loosens the pressure about them ; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force. Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive — of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel ; and ought to appeal to these different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The domestic or prose tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is in this sense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one of these faculties, our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo, for this reason, however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a dead weight upon the mind, a load oi misery which it is unable to throw off: the tragedy of Shakspearej which is true poetry, stirs our inmost affections ; abstracts evil from itself by combining it with all the forms of imagination, and with the deepest workings of the heart, and rouses the whole man within us. 6 ON POETRY IN GENERAL The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry, is not any thing peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing. It is not an anomaly of the imagination. It has its source and ground- work in the common love of strong- excitement. As Mr. Burke observes, people flock to see a tragedy ; but if there were a public execution in the next street, the theatre would very soon be empty. It is not then the difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose : nor do the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and executions about the streets, find it necessary to have them turned into penny ballads, before they can dispose of these interesting and authentic documents. The grave politician drives a thriving trade of abuse and calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies for no other end than that he may live by them. The popular preacher makes less frequent mention of heaven than of hell. Oaths and nicknames are only a more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric. We are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of others. We are as prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of good. If it be asked, Why we do so ? the best answer will be, Because we cannot help it. The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration. * Masterless passion sways us to the mood Of what it likes or loathes.' Not that we like what we loathe ; but we like to iudulge our hatred and scorn of it ; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration ; to make it a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant ' satisfaction to the thought.' This is equally the origin of wit and LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord Mayor's show, — ' Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er, But lives in Settle's numbers one day more! * — when Collins makes Danger, * with limbs of giant mould,* 'Throw him on the steep Of some loose hanging rock asleep : * when Lear calls out in extreme anguish, 4 Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, How much more hideous shew'st in a child Than the sea-monster!' — the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and of indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thing ourselves, and shew it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in spite of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. The imagination, by thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the indistinct and importunate cravings of the will. — We do not wish the thing to be so ; but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledge is conscious power ; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe, though it may be the victim of vice or folly. Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason : for fhe end and use of poetry, * both at the first and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature,' seen through the medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means of literal truth or abstract reason. The painter of history might as well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait, as the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of common conversation. Let who will strip nature of the colours and the shapes of fancy, the poet is not bound to do so ; the im- pressions of common sense and strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference, cannot be the same, and they must have a separate language to do justice to either. Objects must strike differently upon the mind, independently of what they are in themselves, as long as we have a different interest in them, as we see them in a different point of view, nearer or at a greater distance (morally or physically 8 ON POETRY IN GENERAL speaking) from novelty, from old acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We can no more take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their preternatural light ; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab- coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm ; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. This is also one part of nature, one appearance which the glow-worm presents, and that not the least interesting ; so poetry is one part of the history of the human mind, though it is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot be concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary, the unknown and undefined : the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is much the same ; and both have received a sensible shock from the progress of ex- perimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon that gives birth and scope to the imagination ; we can only fancy what we do not know. As in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill them with what shapes we please, with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, and drear enchantments, so -in our ignorance of the world about us, we make gods or devils of the first object we see, and set no bounds to the wilful suggestions of our hopes and fears. ' And visions, as poetic eyes avow, Hang on each leaf and cling to every bough.* There can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time, the heavens have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become averse to the imagination, nor will they return to us on the squares of the distances, or on Doctor Chalmers's Discourses. Rembrandt's picture brings the matter nearer to us. — It is not only the progress of mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters 9 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS and giants. At present we are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of wild beasts or ' bandit fierce,' or to the unmitigated fury of the elements. The time has been that * our fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir as life were in it.' But the police spoils all ; and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only tolerated in this country for the sake of the music ; and in the United States of America, where the philosophical principles of government are carried still farther in theory and practice, we find that the Beggar's Opera is hooted from the stage. Society, by degrees, is constructed into a machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to the other, in a very comfortable prose style. ' Obscurity her curtain round them drew, And siren Sloth a dull quietus sung.'' The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead to a solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting and poetry. I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem that the argument which has been sometimes set up, that paint- ing must affect the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much temerity, that poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or connoisseurs talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they shew that they know little about poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it. But this last is the proper province of the imagination. Again, as it relates to passion, painting gives the event, poetry the progress of events : but it is during the progress, in the interval of expectation and suspense, while our hopes and fears are strained to the highest pitch of breathless agony, that the pinch of the interest lies. * Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The mortal instruments are then in council ; And the state of man, like to a little kingdom, Suffers then the nature of an insurrection.' But by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. Faces are the best part of a picture ; but even faces are not what we chiefly remember in what interests us most. — But it may be asked then, Is 10 ON POETRY IN GENERAL there anything better than Claude Lorraine's landscapes, than Titian's portraits, than Raphael's cartoons, or the Greek statues ? Of the two first I shall say nothing, as they are evidently picturesque, rather than imaginative. Raphael's cartoons are certainly the finest com- ments that ever were made on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same, if we were not acquainted with the text ? But the New Testament existed before the cartoons. There is one subject of which there is no cartoon, Christ washing the feet of the disciples the night before his death. But that chapter does not need a commentary ! It is for want of some such resting place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart. They have not an informing principle within them. In their faultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By cheir beauty they are deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration. Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined with passion and fancy. In its mode of conveyance, it combines che ordinary use of language with musical expression. There is a question of long standing, in what the essence of poetry consists ; or what it is that determines why one set of ideas should be expressed in prose, another in verse. Milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single line — * Thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers.' As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change 'the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo.' There is a striking instance of this adaptation of the movement of sound and rhythm to the subject, in Spenser's description of the Satyrs accompanying Una to the cave of Sylvanus. ' So from the ground she fearless doth arise And vvalketh forth without suspect of crime. They, all as glad as birds of joyous prime, Thence lead her forth, about her dancing iound, Shouting and singing all a shepherd's rhyme; And with green branches strewing all the ground, Do worship her as queen with olive garland crown'd. 1 1 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS Ami all the way their merry pipes they sound, That all the woods and doubled echoes ring; And with their horned feet do wear the ground, Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring; So towards old Sylvanus they her bring, Who with the noise awaked, coineth out.' Faery £>ueen, b. i. c. vi. On the contrary, there is nothing either musical or natural in the ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrange- ments in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the inequalities, and harshnesses of prose, are fatal to the flow of a poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs the reverie of an absent man. But poetry makes these odds all even. It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as it were * the secret soul of harmony.' Wherever any object takes such a hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm ; — wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony, sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion, to the sounds that express it — this is poetry. The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous ; the musical in thought is the sustained and continuous also. There is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing. As often as articulation passes naturally into intonation, there poetry begins. Where one idea gives a tone and colour to others, where one feeling melts others into it, there can be no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends syllables and lines into each other. It is to supply the in- herent defect of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself — to mingle the tide of verse, * the golden cadences of poetry,' with the tide of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows — in short, to take the language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses— - * Sailing with supreme dominion Through the azure deep of air — * 12 ON POETRY IN GENERAL without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that poetry was invented. It is to common language, what springs are to a carriage, or wings to feet. In ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by the modulations of the voice : in poetry the same thing is done systematically by a regular collocation of syllables. It has been well observed, that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose. The merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way * sounding always the increase of his winning.' Every prose-writer has more or less of rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who, when deprived of the regular mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation left in their writings. An excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner. It is but fair that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence 6f syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of images. It is allowed that rhyme assists the memory ; and a man of wit and shrewdness has been heard to say, that the only four good lines of poetry are the well-known ones which tell the number of days in the months of the year. ' Thirty days hath September/ &c. But if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken the fancy ? and there are other things worth having at our fingers' ends, besides the contents of the almanac. — Pope's versification is tiresome, from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. Shakspeare's blank verse is the perfection of dramatic dialogue. All is not poetry that passes for such : nor does verse make the whole difference between poetry and prose. The Iliad does not cease to be poetry in a literal translation ; and Addison's Campaign has been very properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar, and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extra- ordinary impulse to the imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the understanding, as do not admit of the way- ward or violent movements either of the imagination or the passions. I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible without absolutely being so, namely, the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated some of the last into English rhyme, but the essence and the power of poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth, which draws the soul out of itself with LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS indescribable longings, is poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being * married to immortal verse.' If it is of the essence of poetry to strike and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be permitted to pass for poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and reality in the Pilgrim's Progress was never equalled in any allegory. His pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what beauty, what truth of fiction ! What deep feeling in the description of Christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the Shining Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes ! The writer's genius, though not * dipped in dews of Castalie,' was baptised with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in this book are no small part of it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos was a subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies, what shall we say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of confine- ment. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he says, * As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in ; and how I was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, with- out redemption. In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two together, and this was still worse to me, for if I could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it would go oiF, and the grief having exhausted itself would abate.' P. 50. The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey, it is true ; but the relator had the true genius of a poet. It has been made a question whether Richardson's romances are poetry ; and the answer perhaps is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance. The interest is worked up to an incon- ceivable height ; but it is by an infinite number of little things, by ON POETRY IN GENERAL incessant labour and calls upon the attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is unforced and spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The story does not * give an echo to the seat where love is throned.' The heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the Lilliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace. — Sir Charles Grandison is a coxcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles ? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles — she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination. There is intinite truth and feeling in Richardson ; but it is extracted from a caput mortuum of circum- stances : it does not evaporate of itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out. Shakspeare says — ' Our poesy is as a gum Which issues whence 'tis nourished, our gentle flame Provokes itself, and like the current flies Each bound it chafes.' l I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of the principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of history — Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. In Homer, the principle of action or life is predominant ; in the Bible, the principle of faith and the idea of Providence ; Dante is a personification of blind will ; and in Ossian we see the decay of life, and the lag end of the world. Homer's poetry is the heroic : it is full of life and action : it is bright as the day, strong as a river. In the vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of nature, 1 Burke's writings are not poetry, notwithstanding the vividness of the fancy, because the subject matter is abstruse and dry, not natural, but artificial. The difference between poetry and eloquence is, that the one is the eloquence of the imagination, and the other of the understanding. Eloquence tries to persuade the will, and convince the reason : poetry produces its effect by instantaneous sympathy. Nothing is a subject for poetry that admits of a dispute. Poets are in general bad prose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not to the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetry wants the forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic. And some of our own poetry which has been most admired, is only poetry in the rhyme, and in the studied use of poetic diction. B 469 ! 5 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS and enters into all the relations of social life. He saw many countries, and the manners of many men ; and he has brought them all together in his poem. He describes his heroes going to battle with a prodigality of life, arising from an exuberance of animal spirits : we see them before us, their number, and their order of battle, poured out upon the plain * all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and gorgeous as the sun at midsummer/ covered with glittering armour, with dust and blood ; while the Gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or mingle in the fray ; and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy rise up with reverence as Helen passes by them. The multitude of things in Homer is wonderful ; their splendour, their truth, their force, and variety. His poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and form : he describes the bodies as well as the souls of men. The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith : it is abstract and disembodied : it is not the poetry of form, but of power ; not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude : each man seems alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing : * If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also ; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from it.' Man is thus aggrandised in the image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is of this kind ; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the inheritors of the earth ; they exist in the generations which are to come after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite ; a vision is upon it — an invisible hand is suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed ; but in the Hebrew dispensation, Providence took an immediate share in the affairs of this life. Jacob's dream arose out of this intimate communion between heaven and earth : it was this that let down, in the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon the lonely place, which can never pass away. The story of Ruth, again, is as if all the depth of natural affection in the human race was involved in her breast. There are descriptions in 16 ON POETRY IN GENERAL the book of Job more prodigal of imagery, more intense in passion, than any thing in Homer, as that of the state of his prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night. The metaphors in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative. Things were collected more into masses, and gave a greater momentum to the imagination. Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic darkness and barbarism ; and the struggle of thought in it to burst the thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every page. He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world ; and saw the glories of antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its passage to the other world. He was lost in wonder at what had been done before him, and he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been indebted to the Bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry ; but he is utterly unlike Homer. His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the sullen heat of a furnace. He is power, passion, self-will personified. In all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after him ; but there is a gloomy abstrac- tion in his conceptions, which lies like a dead weight upon the mind ; a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe, from the intensity of the impression ; a terrible obscurity, like that which oppresses us in dreams ; an identity of interest, which moulds every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the passions and imaginations of the human soul, — that make amends for all other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to the mind are not much in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, and order ; but they become every thing by the force of the character he impresses upon them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering ; who relies most on his own power, and the sense of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest ; and he interests by exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed. He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been created ; but he seizes on the attention, by shewing us the effect they produce on his feelings ; and his poetry accordingly gives the same thrilling and overwhelming sensation, 17 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS which is caught by gazing on the face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are excessive : but the interest never Hags, from the continued earnestness of the author's mind. Dante's great power is in combining internal feelings with external objects. Thus the gate of hell, on which that withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely local and individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up with the inscription, * I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth ' : and half the personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own acquaintance. All this, perhaps, tends to heighten the effect by the bold intermixture of realities, and by an appeal, as it were, to the individual knowledge and experience of the reader. He affords few subjects for picture. There is, indeed, one gigantic one, that of Count Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds ought not to have painted. Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihead, Ossian is the decay and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of the past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than all other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things, of friends, of good name, of country — he is even without God in the world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed ; with the motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre on his head ; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower ; the thistle waves its beard to the wandering gale ; and the strings of his harp seem, as the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind ! The feeling of cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all things as in a mock- embrace, is here perfect. In this way, the lamentation of Selma for the loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would only be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so often complain, * Roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian ! ' 18 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER LECTURE II ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER HAVING, in the former Lecture, given some account of the nature of poetry in general, I shall proceed, in the next place, to a more particular consideration of the genius and history of English poetry. I shall take, as the subject of the present lecture, Chaucer and Spenser, two out of four of the greatest names in poetry, which this country has to boast. Both of them, however, were much indebted to the early poets of Italy, and may be considered as belonging, in a certain degree, to the same school. The freedom and copiousness with which our most original writers, in former periods, availed themselves of the productions of their predecessors, frequently transcribing whole passages, without scruple or acknowledgment, may appear contrary to the etiquette of modern literature, when the whole stock of poetical common-places has become public property, and no one is compelled to trade upon any particular author. But it is not so much a subject of wonder, at a time when to read and write was of itself an honorary distinction, when learning was almost as great a rarity as genius, and when in fact those who first transplanted the beauties of other languages into their own, might be considered as public benefactors, and the founders of a national literature. — There are poets older than Chaucer, and in the interval between him and Spenser ; but their genius was not such as to place them in any point of comparison with either of these celebrated men ; and an inquiry into their particular merits or defects might seem rather to belong to the province of the antiquary, than be thought generally interesting to the lovers of poetry in the present day. Chaucer (who has been very properly considered as the father of English poetry) preceded Spenser by two centuries. He is supposed to have been born in London, in the year 1328, during the reign of Edward in. and to have died in 1400, at the age of seventy-two. He received a learned education at one, or at both of the universities, and travelled early into Italy, where he became thoroughly imbued with the spirit and excellences of the great Italian poets and prose- writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccace ; and is said to have had a personal interview with one of these, Petrarch. He was connected, by marriage, with the famous John of Gaunt, through whose interest he was introduced into several public employments. Chaucer was an active partisan, a religious reformer, and from the share he took in some disturbances, on one occasion, he was obliged to fly the country. 19 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS On his return, he was imprisoned, and made his peace with govern- ment, as it is said, by a discovery of his associates. Fortitude does not appear, at any time, to have been the distinguishing virtue of poets — There is, however, an obvious similarity between the practical turn of Chaucer's mind and restless impatience of his character, and the tone of his writings. Yet it would be too much to attribute the one to the other as cause and effect : for Spenser, whose poetical tempera- ment was as effeminate as Chaucer's was stern and masculine, was equally engaged in public affairs, and had mixed equally in the great world. So much does native disposition predominate orer accidental circumstances, moulding them to its previous bent and purposes ! For while Chaucer's intercourse with the busy world, and collision with the actual passions and conflicting interests of others, seemed to brace the sinews of his understanding, and gave to his writings the air of a man who describes persons and things that he had known and been intimately concerned in ; the same opportunities, operating on a differently constituted frame, only served to alienate Spenser's mind the more from the * close-pent up ' scenes of ordinary life, and to make him * rive their concealing continents,' to give himself up to the unrestrained indulgence of * flowery tenderness.' It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite in this respect. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment ; Chaucer, in severe activity of mind. As Spenser was the most romantic and visionary, Chaucer was the most practical of all the great poets, the most a man of business and the world. His poetry reads like history. Every thing has a downright reality ; at least in the relator's mind. A simile, or a sentiment, is as if it were given in upon evidence. Thus he describes Cressid's first avowal of her love. ' And as the new abashed nightingale, That stinteth first when she beginneth sing, When that she heareth any herde's tale, Or in the hedges any wight stirring, And after, sicker, doth her voice outring; Right so Cresseide, when that her dread stent, Open'd her heart, and told him her intent.' This is so true and natural, and beautifully simple, that the two things seem identified with each other. Again, it is said in the Knight's Tale— 'T'nus passeth yere by yere, and day by day, Till it felle ones in a morwe of May, That Emelie that fayrer was to sent Than is the lilie upon his stalke grenej 20 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER And fresher than the May with floures newe, For with the rose-colour strof hire hewe : I n'ot which was the finer of hem two/ This scrupulousness about the literal preference, as if some question or matter of fact was at issue, is remarkable. I might mention that other, where he compares the meeting between Palamon and Arcite to a hunter waiting for a lion in a gap; — * That stondeth at a gap with a spere, Whan hunted is the lion or the here, And hereth him come rushing in the greves, And brelcing both the boughes and the leves : * — or that still finer one of Constance, when she is condemned to death : — * Have ye not seen somtime a pale face (Among a prees) of him that hath been lad Toward his deth, wheras he geteth no grace, And swiche a colour in his face hath had, Men mighten know him that was so bestad, Amonges all the faces in that route ; So stant Custance, and loketh hire aboute.* The beauty, the pathos here does not seem to be of the poet's seeking, but a part of the necessary texture of the fable. He speaks of what he wishes to describe with the accuracy, the discrimination of one who relates what has happened to himself, or has had the best information from those who have been eye-witnesses of it. The strokes of his pencil always tell. He dwells only on the essential, on that which would be interesting to the persons really concerned : yet as he never omits any material circumstance, he is prolix from the number of points on which he touches, without being diffuse on any one ; and is sometimes tedious from the fidelity with which he adheres to his subject, as other writers are from the frequency of their digressions from it. The chain of his story is composed of a number of fine links, closely connected together, and rivetted by a single blow. There is an instance of the minuteness which he introduces into his most serious descriptions in his account of Palamon when left alone in his cell : * Swiche sorrow he maketh that the grete tour Resouned of his yelling and clamour: The pure fetters on his shinnes grete Were of his bitter sake teres wete.' 21 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS The mention of this last circumstance looks like a part of the instruc- tions he had to follow, which he had no discretionary power to leave out or introduce at pleasure. He is contented to find grace and beauty in truth. He exhibits for the most part the naked object, with little drapery thrown over it. His metaphors, which are few, are not for ornament, but use, and as like as possible to the things themselves. He does not affect to shew his power over the reader's mind, but the power which his subject has over his own. The readers of Chaucer's poetry feel more nearly what the persons he describes must have felt, than perhaps those of any other poet. His sentiments are not voluntary effusions of the poet's fancy, but founded on the natural impulses and habitual prejudices of the characters he has to represent. There is an inveteracy of purpose, a sincerity of feeling, which never relaxes or grows vapid, in whatever they do or say. There is no artificial, pompous display, but a strict parsimony of the poet's materials, like the rude simplicity of the age in which he lived. His poetry resembles the root just springing from the ground, rather than the full-blown flower. His muse is no * babbling gossip of the air,' fluent and redundant ; but, like a stammerer, or a dumb person, that has just found the use of speech, crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and fond repetitions to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the objects, like the eye or finger. There were none of the common-places of poetic diction in our author's time, no reflected lights of fancy, no borrowed roseate tints ; he was obliged to inspect things for himself, to look narrowly, and almost to handle the object, as in the obscurity of morning we partly see and partly grope our way ; so that his descrip- tions have a sort of tangible character belonging to them, and produce the effect of sculpture on the mind. Chaucer had an equal eye for truth of nature and discrimination of character ; and his interest in what he saw gave new distinctness and force to his power of observa- tion. The picturesque and the dramatic are in him closely blended together, and hardly distinguishable ; for he principally describes external appearances as indicating character, as symbols of internal sentiment. There is a meaning in what he sees ; and it is this which catches his eye by sympathy. Thus the costume and dress of the Canterbury Pilgrims — of the Knight — the Squire — the Oxford Scholar — the Gap-toothed Wife of Bath, and the rest, speak for themselves. To take one or two of these at random : * There was also a nonne, a Prioresse, That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy j Hire gretest othe n'as but by seint Eloy: 22 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER And she was cleped Madame Eglentine. Ful wel she sange the service divine Entuned in hire nose ful swetely ; And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenche of Paris was to hire unlcnowe. At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle j She lette no morsel from hire lippes falle, Ne wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe. * * * * * * * And sikerly she was of great disport, And ful plesant, and amiable of port, And peined hire to contrefeten chere Of court, and ben estatelich of manere, And to ben holden digne of reverence. But for to speken of hire conscience, She was so charitable and so pitous, She wolde wepe if that she saw a mous Caughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde. Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde With rested flesh, and milk, and wastel brede, But sore wept she if on of hem were dede, Or if men smote it with a yerde smert : And all was conscience and tendre herte. Ful semely hire wimple ypinched wasj Hire nose tretis; hire eyen grey as glas; Hire mouth ful smale; and therto soft and red; But sickerly she hadde a fayre forehed. It was almost a spanne brode, I trowe.' A Monk there was, a fayre for the maistrie, An out-rider, that loved venerie : A manly man, to ben an abbot able. Ful many a deinte hors hadde he in stable : And whan he rode, men mighte his bridel here, Gingeling in a whistling wind as clere, And eke as loude, as doth the chapell belle, Ther as this lord was keper of the celle. The reule of Seint Maure and of Seint Beneit, Because that it was olde and somdele streit, This ilke monk lette olde thinges pace, And held after the newe world the trace. He yave not of the text a pulled hen, That saith, that hunters ben not holy men ; — Therfore he was a prickasoure a right : Greihoundes he hadde as swift as foul of flight x Of pricking and of hunting for the hare Was all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare. 23 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS I saw his sieves purfiled at the hond With gris, and that the finest of the lond. And tor to fasten his hood under his chinne, He had of gold ywrought a curious pinne : A love-lcnotte in the greter end ther was. His hed was balled, and shone as any glas, And eke his face, as it hadde ben anoint. He was a lord ful fat and in good point. His eyen stepe, and rolling in his hed, That stemed as a forneis of a led. His botes souple, his hors in gret estat, Now certainly he was a fayre prelat. He was not pale as a forpined gost. A fat swan loved he best of any rost. His palfrey was as broune as is a bery.' The Serjeant at Law is the same identical individual as Lawyei Dowling in Tom Jones, who wished to divide himself into a hundred pieces, to be in a hundred places at once. * No wher so besy a man as he ther n'as, And yet he semed besier than he was.' The Frankelein, in * whose hous it snewed of mete and drinke ' ; the Shipman, * who rode upon a rouncie, as he couthe ' ; the Doctour of Phisike, « whose studie was but litel of the Bible ' ; the Wif of Bath, in 1 All whose parish ther was non, That to the offring before hire shulde gon, And if ther did, certain so wroth was she, That she was out of alle charitee 5 ' — the poure Persone of a toun, * whose parish was wide, and houses fer asonder ' ; the Miller, and the Reve, * a slendre colerike man,' are all of the same stamp. They are every one samples of a kind ; abstract definitions of a species. Chaucer, it has been said, numbered the classes of men, as Linnaeus numbered the plants. Most of them remain to this day : others that are obsolete, and may well be dis- pensed with, still live in his descriptions of them. Such is the Sompnoure : ' A Sompnoure was ther with us in that place, That hadde a fire-red cherubinnes face, For sausefleme he was, with eyen narwe, As hote he was, and likerous as a sparwe, With scalled browes blake, and pilied herd : Of his visage children were sore afcrd. 24 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER Ther n'as quicksilver, litarge, ne brimston, Boras, ceruse, ne oile of tartre non, Ne oinement that wolde dense or bite, That him might helpen of his whelkes white, Ne of the knobbes sitting on his chekes. Wei loved he garlike, onions, and lekes, And for to drinke strong win as rede as blood. Than wolde he speke, and crie as he were wood. And whan that he wel dronken had the win, Than wold he speken no word but Latin. A fewe termes coude he, two or three, That he had lerned out of som decree j No wonder is, he heard it all the day. — In danger hadde he at his owen gise The yonge girles of the diocise, And knew hir conseil, and was of hir rede. A gerlond hadde he sette upon his hede As gret as it were for an alestake : A bokeler hadde he made him of a cake. With him ther rode a gentil Pardonere — That hadde a vois as smale as hath a gote.* It would be a curious speculation (at least for those who think that the characters of men never change, though manners, opinions, and institutions may) to know what has become of this character of the Sompnoure in the present day ; whether or not it has any technical representative in existing professions ; into what channels and conduits it has withdrawn itself, where it lurks unseen in cunning obscurity, or else shews its face boldly, pampered into all the insolence of office, in some other shape, as it is deterred or encouraged by circumstances. Chaucer's characters modernised, upon this principle of historic deriva- tion, would be an useful addition to our knowledge of human nature. But who is there to undertake it ? The descriptions of the equipage, and accoutrements of the two kings of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight's Tale, are as striking and grand, as the others are lively and natural : 'Ther maist thou se coming with Palamon Licurge himself, the grete king of Trace : Blake was his berd, and manly was his face The cercles of his eyen in his hed They gloweden betwixen yelwe and red, And like a griffon loked he about, With kemped heres on his browes stout ; His limmes gret, his braunes hard and stronge, His shouldres brode, his armes round and longe. 25 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS And as the guise was in his contree, Ful highe upon a char of gold stood he, With foure white holies in the trais. Instede of cote-arrrune on his harnais, With nayles yelwe, and bright as any gold, He hadde a beres skin, cole-blake for old. His longe here was kempt behind his bak, As any ravenes fether it shone for blake. A wreth of gold arm-gret, of huge weight, Upon his hed sate full of stones bright, Or fine rubins and of diamants. About his char ther wenten white alauns, Twenty and mo, as gret as any stere, To hunten at the Icon or the dere, And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound. — With Arcita, in stories as men find, The grete Emetrius, the king of Inde, Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele, Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele, Came riding like the god of armes Mars. His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars, Couched with perles, white, and round and grete. His sadel was of brent gold new ybete ,• A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling. His crispe here like ringes was yronne, And that was yelwe, and glitered as the Sonne. His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin, His lippes round, his colour was sanguin, A fewe fraknes in his face yspreint, Betwixen yelwe and blake somdel ymeint, And as a Icon he his loking caste. Of five and twenty yere his age I caste. His berd was wel begonnen for to spring; His vois was as a trompe thondering. Upon his hed he wered of laurer grene A gerlond freshe and lusty for to sene. Upon his hond he bare for his deduit An egle tame, as any lily whit. — About this king ther ran on every part Ful many a tame Icon and leopart.' What a deal of terrible beauty there is contained in this description! The imagination of a poet brings such objects before us, as when we look at wild beasts in a menagerie ; their claws are pared, their eyes glitter like harmless lightning ; but we gaze at them with a pleasing awe, clothed in beauty, formidable in the sense of abstract power. Chaucer's descriptions of natural scenery possess the same sort of 26 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER characteristic excellence, or what might be termed gusto. They have a local truth and freshness, which gives the very feeling of the air, the coolness or moisture of the ground. Inanimate objects are thus made to have a fellow-feeling in the interest of the story ; and render back the sentiment of the speaker's mind. One of the finest parts of Chaucer is of this mixed kind. It is the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf, where he describes the delight of that young beauty, shrouded in her bower, and listening, in the morning of the year, to the singing of the nightingale ; while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of pleasure, and still increases and repeats, and prolongs itself, and knows no ebb. The coolness of the arbour, its retirement, the early time of the day, the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouring bushes, the eager delight with which they devour and rend the opening buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth and feeling, which make the whole appear like the recollection of an actual scene : 4 Which as me thought was right a pleasing sight, And eke the briddes song for to here, Would haue rejoyced any earthly wight, And I that couth not yet in no manere Heare the nightingale of all the yeare, Ful busily herkened with herte and with eare, If I her voice perceiue coud any where. And I that all this pleasaunt sight sie, Thought sodainly I felt so sweet an aire Of the eglentere, that certainely There is no herte I deme in such dispaire, Ne with thoughts fro ward and contra! re, So ouerlaid, but it should soone haue bote, If it had ones felt this savour sote. And as I stood and cast aside mine eie, I was ware of the fairest medler tree That ever yet in all my life I sie As full of blossomes as it might be, Therein a goldfinch leaping pretile Fro bough to bousfh, and as him list he eet O C7 * Here and there of buds and floures sweet. And to the herber side was joyning This faire tree, of which I haue you told, And at the last the brid began to sing, Whan he had eaten what he eat wold, So passing sweetly, that by manifold It was more pleasaunt than I coud deuise. And whan his song was ended in this wise, 27 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS The nightingale with so merry a note Answered him, that all the wood rong So sodainly, that as it were a sote, I stood astonied, so was I with the song Thorow raHished, that till late and long, I ne wist in what place I was, ne where, And ayen me thought she song euen by mine ere. Wherefore I waited about busily On euery side, if I her might see, And at the last I gan full well aspic Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree, On the further side euen right by me, That gaue so passing a delicious smell, According to the eglentere full well. Whereof I had so inly great pleasure, That as me thought I surely rauished was Into Paradice, where my desire Was for to be, and no ferther passe As for that day, and on the sote grasse, I sat me downe, for as for mine entent, The birds song was more conuenient, And more pleasaunt to me by manifold, Than meat or drinke, or any other thing, Thereto the herber was so fresh and cold, The wholesome sauours eke so comforting, That as I demed, sith the beginning Of the world was neur scene or than So pleasaunt a ground of none earthly man. And as I sat the birds barkening thus, Me thought that I heard voices sodainly, The most sweetest and most delicious That euer any wight I trow truly Heard in their life, for the armony And sweet accord was in so good musike, That the uoice to angels was most like/ There is here no affected rapture, no flowery sentiment : the whole is an ebullition of natural delight 'welling out of the heart,' like water from a crystal spring. Nature is the soul of art : there is a strength as well as a simplicity in the imagination that reposes entirely on nature, that nothing else can supply. It was the same trust in nature, and reliance on his subject, which enabled Chaucer to describe the grief and patience of Griselda ; the faith of Constance ; and the 28 ON CHAUCER AiND SPEiNSER heroic perseverance of the little child, who, going to school through the streets of Jewry, * Oh Alma Redemptoris matert loudly sung,' and who after his death still triumphed in his song. Chaucer has more of this deep, internal, sustained sentiment, than any other writer, except Boccaccio. In depth of simple pathos, and intensity of con- ception, never swerving from his subject, I think no other writer comes near him, not even the Greek tragedians. I wish to be allowed to give one or two instances of what I mean. I will take the following from the Knight's Tale. The distress of Arcite, in conse- quence of his banishment from his love, is thus described : ' Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was, Ful oft a day he swelt and said Alas, For sene his lady shall be never mo. And shortly to concluden all his wo, So mochel sorwe hadde never creature, That is or shall be, while the world may dure. His slepe, his mete, his drinke is him byraft. That lene he wex, and drie as is a shaft. His eyen holwe, and grisly to behold, His hewe salwe, and pale as ashen cold, And solitary he was, and ever alone, And wailing all the night, making his mone. And if he herde song or instrument, Than wold he wepe, he mighte not be stent. So feble were his spirites, and so low, And changed so, that no man coude know His speche ne his vois, though men it herd.* This picture of the sinking of the heart, of the wasting away of the body and rnind, of the gradual failure of all the faculties under the contagion of a rankling sorrow, cannot be surpassed. Of the same kind is his farewell to his mistress, after he has gained her hand and lost his life in the combat : * Alas the wo ! alas the peines stronge, That I for you have suffered, and so longe ! Alas the deth ! alas min Emilie ! Alas departing of our compagnie : Alas min hertes quene ! alas my wif ! Min hertes ladie, ender of my lif ! What is this world ? what axen men to have ? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Alone withouten any compagnie.' 29 LECTURES ON TIIK ENGLISH POETS The death of Arcite is the more affecting, as it comes after triumph and victory, after the pomp of sacrifice, the solemnities of prayer, the celebration of the gorgeous rites of chivalry. The descriptions of the three temples of Mars, of Venus, and Diana, of the ornaments and ceremonies used in each, with the reception given to the offerings of the lovers, have a beauty and grandeur, much of which is lost in Dryden's version. For instance, such lines as the following are not rendered with their true feeling. * Why shukle I not as well elce tell you all The purtrciture that was upon the wall Within the temple of mighty Mars the rede — That highte the gret temple of Mars in Trace In thilke colde and frosty region, Ther as Mars hath his sovereine mansion. First on the wall was peinted a forest, In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best, With knotty knarry barrein trees old Of stubbes sharpe and hideous to behold ; In which ther ran a romble and a swough, As though a storme shuld bresten eveiy bough.* And again, among innumerable terrific images of death and slaughter painted on the wall, is this one : * The statue of Mars upon a carte stood Armed, and looked grim as he were wood. A wolf ther stood beforne him at his fete With eyen red, and of a man he etc.' The story of Griselda is in Boccaccio; but the Clerk of Oxen- forde, who tells it, professes to have learned it from Petrarch. This story has gone all over Europe, and has passed into a proverb. In spite of the barbarity of the circumstances, which are abominable, the sentiment remains unimpaired and unalterable. It is of that kind, 1 that heaves no sigh, that sheds no tear ' ; but it hangs upon the beatings of the heart ; it is a part of the very being ; it is as inseparable from it as the breath we draw. It is still and calm as the face of death. Nothing can touch it in its ethereal purity: tender as the yielding flower, it is fixed as the marble firmament. The only remonstrance she makes, the only complaint she utters against all the ill-treatment she receives, is that single line where, when turned back naked to her father's house, she says, ' Let me not like a worm go by the way. 5° ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER The first outline given of the character is inimitable : 'Nought fer fro thilke paleis honourable, Wher as this markis shope his manage, Ther stood a thorpe, of sighte delitable, In which that poure folk of that village Hadden hir bestes and her herbergage, And of hir labour toke hir sustenance, After that the earthe yave hem habundance. Among this poure folk ther dwelt a man, Which that was holden pourest of hem all : But highe God sometime senden can His grace unto a litel oxes stall : Janicola men of that thorpe him call. A doughter had he, faire ynough to sight, And Grisildis this yonge maiden hight. But for to speke of vertuous beautee, Than was she on the fairest under Sonne : Ful pourely yfostred up was she : No likerous lust was in hire herte yronne ; Ful ofter of the well than of the tonne She dranke, and for she wolde vertue plese, She knew wel labour, but non idel ese. But though this mayden tendre were of age, Yet in the brest of hire virginitee Ther was enclosed sad and ripe corage : And in gret reverence and charitee Hire olde poure fader fostred she : A few sheep spinning on the feld she kept, She wolde not ben idel til she slept. And whan she homward came she wolde bring Wortes and other herbes times oft, The which she shred and sethe for hire living, And made hire bed ful hard, and nothing soft: And ay she kept hire fadres lif on loft With every obeisance and diligence, That child may don to fadres reverence, Upon Grisilde, this poure creature, Ful often sithe this markis sette his sye, As he on hunting rode paraventure : And whan it fell that he might hire espie, He not with wanton Joking of folie His eyen cast on hire, but in sad wise Upon hire chere he wold him oft avise, 3» LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS Commending in his hertc hire womanhede. And eke hire vertue, passing any wight Or so yong age, as wel in chere as dede. For though the people have no gret insight In vertue, he considered ful right Hire bountee, and disposed that he wold Wedde hire only, if ever he wedden shold. Grisilde of this (God wot) ful innocent, That for hire shapen was all this array, To fetchen water at a welle is went, And cometh home as sone as ever she may. For wel she had herd say, that thilke day The marlcis shulde wedde, and, if she might, She wolde fayn han seen som of that sight. She thought, " I wol with other maidens stond, That ben my felawes, in our dore, and see The markisesse, and therto wol I fond To don at home, as sone as it may be, The labour which longeth unto me, And than I may at leiser hire behold, If she this way unto the castel hold." And she wolde over the threswold gon, The markis came and gan hire for to call, And she set doun her water-pot anon Beside the threswold in an oxes stall, And doun upon hire knees she gan to fall. And with sad countenance kneleth still, Till she had herd what was the lordes will.'* The story of the little child slain in Jewry, (which is told by the Prioress, and worthy to be told by her who was * all conscience and tender heart/) is not less touching than that of Griselda. It is simple and heroic to the last degree. The poetry of Chaucer has a religious sanctity about it, connected with the manners and supersti- tions of the age. It has all the spirit of martyrdom. It has also all the extravagance and the utmost licentiousness of comic humour, equally arising out of the manners of the time. In this too Chaucer resembled Boccaccio that he excelled in both styles, and could pass at will * from grave to gay, from lively to severe ' ; but he never confounded the two styles together (except from that involuntary and unconscious mixture of the pathetic and humorous, which is almost always to be found in nature,) and was exclusively taken up with what he set about, whether it was jest or earnest. The Wife of Bath's Prologue (which Pope has very admirably modern- s' ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER ised) is, perhaps, unequalled as a comic story. The Cock and the Fox is also excellent for lively strokes of character and satire. January arid May is not so good as some of the others. Chaucer's versification, considering the time at which he wrote, and that versification is a thing in a great degree mechanical, is not one of his least merits. It has considerable strength and harmony, and its apparent deficiency in the latter respect arises chiefly from the altera- tions which have since taken place in the pronunciation or mode of accenting the words of the language. The best general rule for reading him is to pronounce the final e, as in reading Italian. It was observed in the last Lecture that painting describes what the object is in itself, poetry what it implies or suggests. Chaucer's poetry is not, in general, the best confirmation of the truth of this distinction, for his poetry is more picturesque and historical than almost any other. But there is one instance in point which I cannot help giving in this place. It is the story of the three thieves who go in search of Death to kill him, and who meeting with him, are entangled in their fate by his words, without knowing him. In the printed catalogue to Mr. West's (in some respects very admirable) picture of Death on the Pale Horse, it is observed, that ' In poetry the same effect is produced by a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching, as it were with fire, the features and edges of a general mass of awful obscurity ; but in painting, such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply that the artist wanted the power to pourtray the conceptions of his fancy. Mr. West was of opinion that to delineate a physical form, which in its moral impression would approximate to that of the visionary Death of Milton, it was necessary to endow it, if possible, with the appearance of super-human strength and energy. He has therefore exerted the utmost force and perspicuity of his pencil on the central figure.' — One might suppose from this, that the way to represent a shadow was to make it as substantial as possible. Oh, no ! Painting has its prerogatives, (and high ones they are) but they lie in representing the visible, not the invisible. The moral attributes of Death are powers and effects of an infinitely wide and general description, which no individual or physical form can possibly represent, but by a courtesy of speech, or by a distant analogy. The moral impression of Death is essentially visionary ; its reality is in the mind's eye. Words are here the only things ; and things, physical forms, the mere mockeries of the under- standing. The less definite, the less bodily the conception, the more vast, unformed, and unsubstantial, the nearer does it approach to some resemblance of that omnipresent, lasting, universal, irresistible principle, which every where, and at some time or other, exerts its power over 33 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS all things. Death is a mighty abstraction, like Night, or Space, or Time. He is an ugly customer, who will not be invited to supper, or to sit for his picture. He is with us and about us, but we do not see him. He stalks on before us, and we do not mind him : he follows us close behind, and we do not turn to look back at him. We do not see him making faces at us in our life-time, nor perceive him afterwards sitting in mock-majesty, a twin-skeleton, beside us, tickling our bare ribs, and staring into our hollow eye-balls ! Chaucer knew this. He makes three riotous companions go in search of Death to kill him, they meet with an old man whom they reproach with his age, and ask why he does not die, to which he answers thus : ' Ne Deth, alas ! ne will not han my lit. Thus walke I like a restless caitiff, And on the ground, which is my modres gate, I knocke with my staf, erlich and late, And say to hire, "Leve mother, let me in. Lo, how I vanish, flesh and blood and skin, Alas ! when shall my bones ben at reste ? Mother, with you wolde I changen my cheste, That in my chambre longe time hath be, Ye, for an heren cloute to wrap in me." But yet to me she will not don that grace, For which ful pale and welked is my face.' They then ask the old man where they shall find out Death to kill him, and he sends them on an errand which ends in the death of all three. We hear no more of him, but it is Death that they have encountered ! The interval between Chaucer and Spenser is long and dreary. There is nothing to fill up the chasm but the names of Occleve, 'ancient Gower, Lydgate, Wyatt, Surrey, and Sackville. Spenser flourished in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and was sent with Sir John Davies into Ireland, of which he has left behind him some tender recollections in his description of the bog of Allan, and a record in an ably written paper, containing observations on the state of that country and the means of improving it, which remain in full force to the present day. Spenser died at an obscure inn in London, it is supposed in distressed circumstances. The treatment he received from Burleigh is well known. Spenser, as well as Chaucer, was engaged in active life; but the genius of his poetry was not active: it is inspired by the love of ease, and relaxation from all the cares and business of life. Of all the poets, he is the most poetical. Though much later than Chaucer, his obligations to preceding writers were 34 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER less. He has in some measure borrowed the plan of his poem (as a number of distinct narratives) from Ariosto ; but he has engrafted upon it an exuberance of fancy, and an endless voluptuousness of sentiment, which are not to be found in the Italian writer. Farther, Spenser is even more of an inventor in the subject-matter. There is an originality, richness, and variety in his allegorical personages and fictions, which almost vies with the splendor of the ancient mythology. If Ariosto transports us into the regions of romance, Spenser's poetry is all fairy-land. In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground, in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough. In Spenser, we wander in another world, among ideal beings. The poet takes and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and fairer valleys. He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected to find it ; and fulfils the delightful promise of our youth. He waves his wand of enchantment — and at once embodies airy beings, and throws a delicious veil over all actual objects. The two worlds of reality and of fiction are poised on the wings of his imagination. His ideas, indeed, seem more distinct than his perceptions. He is the painter of abstractions, and describes them with dazzling minuteness. In the Mask of Cupid he makes the God of Love * clap on high his coloured winges twain ' : and it is said of Gluttony, in the Procession of the Passions, ' In green vine leaves he was right fitly clad.' At times he becomes picturesque from his intense love of beauty ; as where he compares Prince Arthur's crest to the appearance of the almond tree : ' Upon the top of all his lofty crest, A bunch of hairs discolour'd diversely With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest Did shake and seem'd to daunce for jollity j Like to an almond tree ymounted high On top of green Selenis all alone, With blossoms brave bedecked dainti'y; Her tender locks do tremble every one At every little breath that under heav'n is blown/ The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the moving principle of his mind ; and he is guided in his fantastic delineations by no rule but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriates equally in scenes of Eastern magnificence ; or the still solitude of a hermit's cell — in the extremes of sensuality or refinement. In reading the Faery Queen, you see a little withered old man by a wood-side opening a wicket, a giant, and a dwarf lagging far behind, 35 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS a damsel in a boat upon an enchanted lake, wood-nymphs, and satyrs ; and all of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace, with tapers burning, amidst knights and ladies, with dance and revelry, and song, * and mask, and antique pageantry.' What can be more solitary, more shut up in itself, than his description of the house of Sleep, to which Archimago sends for a dream : ' And more to lull him in his slumber soft A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down, And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft, Mix'd with a murmuring wind, much like the sound Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swound. No other noise, nor people's troublous cries. That still are wont t' annoy the walled town Might there be heard j but careless Quiet lies Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies.' It is as if * the honey-heavy dew of slumber ' had settled on his pen in writing these lines. How different in the subject (and yet how like in beauty) is the following description of the Bower of Bliss: * Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound Of all that mote delight a dainty ear; Such as at once might not on living ground, Save in this Paradise, be heard elsewhere : Right hard it was for wight which did it hear, To tell what manner musicke that mote be j For all that pleasing is to living eare Was there consorted in one harmonee : Birds, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree. The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet : The angelical soft trembling voices made To th' instruments divine respondence meet. The silver sounding instruments did meet With the base murmur of the water's fall ; The water's fall with difference discreet, Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call ; The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.' The remainder of the passage has all that voluptuous pafhos, and languid brilliancy of fancy, in which this writer excelled : ' The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay ; Ah ! see, whoso fayre thing dost thou fain to see, In springing flower the image of thy day ! Ah ! see the virgin rose, how sweetly she 36 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER Doth first peep forth with bashful modesty, That fairer seems the less ye see her may ! Lo ! see soon after, how more bold and free Her bared bosom she doth broad display j Lo ! see soon after, how she fades and falls away ! So passeth in the passing of a day Of mortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower j Ne more doth flourish after first decay, That erst was sought to deck both bed and bower Of many a lady and many a paramour! Gather therefore the rose whilst yet is prime, For soon comes age that will her pride de.lower j Gather the rose of love whilst yet is time, Whilst loving thou mayst loved be with equal crime. * He ceased ; and then gan all the quire of birds Their divers notes to attune unto his lay, As in approvance of his pleasing wordes. The constant pair heard all that he did say, Yet swerved not, but kept their forward way Through many covert groves and thickets close, In which they creeping did at last display2 That wanton lady with her lover loose, Whose sleepy head she in her lap did soft dispose. Upon a bed of roses she was laid As faint through heat, or dight to pleasant sin j And was arrayed or rather disarrayed, All in a veil of silk and silver thin, That hid no whit her alabaster skin, But rather shewed more white, if more might be : More subtle web Arachne cannot spin ; Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see Of scorched dew, do not in the air more lightly flee. Her snowy breast was bare to greedy spoil Of hungry eyes which n' ote therewith be fill'd, And yet through languor of her late sweet toil Few drops more clear than nectar forth distilled, That like pure Orient perles adown it trilTd ; And her fair eyes sweet smiling in delight Moisten'd their fiery beams, with which she thrilTd Frail hearts, yet quenched not; like starry light, Which sparkling on the silent waves does seem more bright.* 1 Taken from Tasso. 2 This word is an instance of those unwarrantable freedoms which Spenser some- times took with language. 37 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS The finest things in Spenser are, the character of Una, in the first book ; the House of Pride ; the Cave of Mammon, and the Cave of Despair ; the account of Memory, of whom it is said, among other things, 'The wars he well remembered of King Nine, Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine ' j the description of Bclphoebe ; the story of Florimel and the Witch's son ; the Gardens of Adonis, and the Bower of Bliss ; the Mask or Cupid ; and Colin Clout's vision, in the last book. But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them : they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pike-srafT. It might as well be pretended that we cannot see Poussin's pictures for the allegory, as that the allegory prevents us from understanding Spenser. For instance, when Brito- mart, seated amidst the young warriors, lets fall her hair and discovers her sex, is it necessary to know the part she plays in the allegory, to understand the beauty of the following stanza? ' And eke that stranger knight amongst the rest Was for like need enforced to disarray. Tho when as vailed was her lofty crest, Her golden locks that were in trammels gay Upbounden, did themselves adown display, And raught unto her heels like sunny beams That in a cloud their light did long time stay ,• Their vapour faded, shew their golden gleams, And through the persant air shoot forth their azure streams. Or is there any mystery in what is said of Belphcebe, that her hair was sprinkled with flowers and blossoms which had been entangled in it as she fled through the woods ? Or is it necessary to have a more distinct idea of Proteus, than that which is given of him in his boat, with the frighted Florimel at his feet, while * the cold icicles from his rough beard Dropped adown upon her snowy breast ! * Or is it not a sufficient account of one of the sea-gods that pass by them, to say — * That was Arion crowned : — So went he playing on the watery plain.1 38 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER Or to take the Procession of the Passions that draw the coach of Pride, in which the figures of Idleness, of Gluttony, of Lechery, of Avarice, of Envy, and of Wrath speak, one should think, plain enough for themselves ; such as this of Gluttony : ' And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony, Deformed creature, on a filthy swine 5 His belly was up blown with luxury ; And eke with fatness swollen were his eyne; And like a crane his neck was long and fine, With which he swallowed up excessive feast, For want whereof poor people oft did pine. In green vine leaves he was right fitly clad ; For other clothes he could not wear for heat : And on his head an ivy garland had, From under which fast trickled down the sweat: Still as he rode, he somewhat still did eat. And in his hand did bear a bouzing can, Of which he supt so oft, that on his seat His drunken corse he scarce upholden can ; In shape and size more like a monster than a man.'' Or this of Lechery : ' And next to him rode lustfull Lechery Upon a bearded goat, whose rugged hair And whaly eyes (the sign of jealousy) Was like the person's self whom he did bear: Who rough and black, and filthy did appear. Unseemly man to please fair lady's eye : Yet he of ladies oft was loved dear, When fairer faces were bid standen by : O ! who does know the bent of woman's fantasy ? In a green gown he clothed was full fair, Which underneath did hide his filthiness j And in his hand a burning heart he bare, Full of vain follies and new fangleness ; For he was false and fraught with fickleness j And learned had to love with secret looks ; And well could dance j and sing with ruefulness j And fortunes tell ; and read in loving books j And thousand other ways to bait his fleshly hooks. Inconstant man that loved all he saw, And lusted after all that he did love ; Ne would his looser life be tied to law; But joyed weak women's hearts to tempt and prove, If from their loyal loves he might them move.' 39 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS This is pretty plain-spoken. Mr. Southey says of Spenser : < Yet not more sweet Than pure was he, and not more pure than wise } High priest of all the Muses' mysteries ! ' On the contrary, no one was more apt to pry into mysteries which do not strictly belong to the Muses. Of the same kind with the Procession of the Passions, as little obscure, and still more beautiful, is the Mask of Cupid, with his train of votaries : ' The first was Fancy, like a lovely boy Of rare aspect, and beauty without peer } His garment neither was of silk nor say, But painted plumes in goodly order dight, Like as the sun-burnt Indians do array Their tawny bodies in their proudest plight : As those same plumes so seem'd he vain and light, That by his gait might easily appear j For still he far'd as dancing in delight, And in his hand a windy fan did bear That in the idle air he mov'd still here and there. And him beside march'd amorous Desire, Who seem'd of riper years than the other swain, Yet was that other swain this elder's sire, And gave him being, common to them twain : His garment was disguised very vain, And his embroidered bonnet sat awry $ Twixt both his hands few sparks he close did strain, Which still he blew, and kindled busily, That soon they life conceived and forth in flames did fly. Next after him went Doubt, who was yclad In a discoloured coat of strange disguise, That at his back a broad capuccio had, And sleeves dependant Albanese-njoise j He lookt askew with his mistrustful eyes, And nicely trod, as thorns lay in his way, Or that the floor to shrink he did avisej And on a broken reed he still did stay His feeble steps, which shrunk when hard thereon he lay. With him went Daunger, clotrTd in ragged weed, Made of bear's skin, that him more dreadful made ; Yet his own face was dreadfull, ne did need Strange horror to deform his grisly shade ; 40 ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER A net in th' one hand, and a rusty blade In th' other was; this Mischiefe, that Mishap j With th' one his foes he threatened to invade, With th1 other he his friends meant to enwrap j For whom he could not kill he practiz'd to entrap. Next him was Fear, all arm"d from top to toe, Yet thought himselfe not safe enough thereby, But feafd each shadow moving to and fro 5 And his own arms when glittering he did spy Or clashing heard, he fast away did tiy, As ashes pale of hue, and winged-heel'd ; And evermore on Daunger fixt his eye, 'Gainst whom he always bent a brazen shield, Which his right hand unarmed fearfully did wield. With him went Hope in rank, a handsome maid, Of chearfull look and lovely to behold j In silken samite she was light array'd, And her fair locks were woven up in gold } She always smiPd, and in her hand did hold An holy-water sprinkle dipt in dew, With which she sprinkled favours manifold On whom she list, and did great liking shew, Great liking unto many, but true love to few. Next after them, the winged God himself Came riding on a lion ravenous, Taught to obey the menage of that elfe That man and beast with power imperious Subdueth to his kingdom tyrannous : His blindfold eyes he bade awhile unbind, That his proud spoil of that same dolorous Fair dame he might behold in perfect kind ; Which seen, he much rejoiced in his cruel mind. Of which full proud, himself uprearing high, He looked round about with stern disdain, And did survey his goodly company : And marshalling the evil-ordered train, With that the darts which his right hand did strain, Full dreadfully he shook, that all did quake, And clapt on high his coloured winges twain, That all his many it afraid did make : Tho, blinding him again, his way he forth did take/ The description of Hope, in this series of historical portraits, is one of the most beautiful in Spenser : and the triumph of Cupid at the mischief he has made, is worthy of the malicious urchin deity. In 41 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS reading these descriptions, one can hardly avoid being reminded of Rubens's allegorical pictures ; but the account of Satyrane taming the lion's whelps and lugging the bear's cubs along in his arms while yet an infant, whom his mother so naturally advises to * go seek some other play-fellows,' has even more of this high picturesque character. Nobody but Rubens could have painted the fancy of Spenser ; and he could not have given the sentiment, the airy dream that hovers over it! With all this, Spenser neither makes us laugh nor weep. The only jest in his poem is an allegorical play upon words, where he describes Malbecco as escaping in the herd of goats, ' by the help of his fayre homes on hight.' But he has been unjustly charged with a want of passion and of strength. He has both in an immense degree. He has not indeed the pathos of immediate action or suffering, which is more properly the dramatic ; but he has all the pathos of sentiment and romance — all that belongs to distant objects of terror, and uncertain, imaginary distress. His strength, in like manner, is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable — but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium, and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn, in proof ot this, to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into Jealousy. The following stanzas, in the description of the Cave of Mammon, the grisly hout>e of Plutus, are unrivalled for the portentous massiness of the forms, the splendid chiaro-scuro, and shadowy horror ' That house's form within was rude and strong, Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clitt, From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung, Embossed with massy gold ot glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift, That heavy ruin they did seem to threat : And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, Enwrapped in foul smoke, and clouds more black than jet. Both roof and floor, and walls were all of gold, But overgrown with dust and old decay.1 And hid in darkness that none could behold 1 'That all with one consent praise new-born gauds, Tho' they are made and moulded of things past, And give to Dust, that is a little gilt, More laud than gold o'er-dusted.' TroiJus and Cressida. ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER The hue thereof : tor view of cheerful day Did never in that house itself display, But a faint shadow of uncertain light ; Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away ; Or as the moon clothed with cloudy night Does shew to him that walks in fear and sad affright. ******* And over all sad Horror with grim hue Did always soar, beating his iron wings j And after him owls and night-ravens flew, The hateful messengers of heavy things, OF death and dolour telling sad tidings j Whiles sad Celleno, sitting on a clirt, A song of bitter bale and sorrow sings, That heart of flint asunder could have rift ; Which having ended, after him she flieth swift/ The Cave of Despair is described with equal gloominess and power of fancy ; and the fine moral declamation of the owner of it, on the evils of life, almost makes one in love with death. In the story of Malbecco, who is haunted by jealousy, and in vain strives to run away from his own thoughts — 'High over hill and over dale he flies' — the truth of human passion and the preternatural ending are equally striking. — It is not fair to compare Spenser with Shakspeare, in point of interest. A fairer comparison would be with Comus ; and the result would not be unfavourable to Spenser. There is only one work of the same allegorical kind, which has more interest than Spenser (with scarcely less imagination) : and that is the Pilgrim's Progress. The three first books of the Faery Queen are very superior to the three last. One would think that Pope, who used to ask if any one had ever read the Faery Queen through, had only dipped into these last. The only things in them equal to the former, are the account of Talus, the Iron Man, and the delightful episode of Pastorella. The language of Spenser is full, and copious, to overflowing : it is less pure and idiomatic than Chaucer's, and is enriched and adorned with phrases borrowed from the different languages of Europe, both ancient and modern. He was, probably, seduced into a certain license of expression by the difficulty of filling up the moulds of his complicated rhymed stanza from the limited resources of his native language. This stanza, with alternate and repeatedly recurring rhymes, is borrowed from the Italians. It was peculiarly fitted to 43 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS their language, which abounds in similar vowel terminations, and is as little adapted to ours, from the stubborn, unaccommodating resistance which the consonant endings of the northern languages make to this sort of endless sing-song. — Not that I would, on that account, part with the stanza of Spenser. We are, perhaps, indebted to this very necessity of finding out new forms of expression, and to the occasiona) faults to which it led, for a poetical language rich and varied and magnificent beyond all former, and almost all later example. His versification is, at once, the most smooth and the most sounding in the language. It is a labyrinth of sweet sounds, 'in many a winding bout of linked sweetness long drawn out ' — that would cloy by their very sweetness, but that the ear is constantly relieved and enchanted by their continued variety of modulation — dwelling on the pauses of the action, or flowing on in a fuller tide of harmony with the move- ment of the sentiment. It has not the bold dramatic transitions of Shakspeare's blank verse, nor the high-raised tone of Milton's ; but it is the perfection of melting harmony, dissolving the soul in pleasure, or holding it captive in the chains of suspense. Spenser was the poet of our waking dreams ; and he has invented not only a language, but a music of his own for them. The undulations are infinite, like those of the waves of the sea : but the effect is still the same, lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noises of the world, from which we have no wish to be ever recalled. LECTURE III ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON IN looking back to the great works of genius in former times, we are sometimes disposed to wonder at the little progress which has since been made in poetry, and in the arts of imitation in general. But this is perhaps a foolish wonder. Nothing can be more contrary to the fact, than the supposition that in what we understand by the fine arts, as painting, and poetry, relative perfection is only the result of repeated efforts in successive periods, and that what has been once well done, constantly leads to something better. What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement : what is not mechanical, or definite, but depends on feeling, taste, and genius, very soon becomes stationary, or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. The contrary opinion is a vulgar error, which has grown up, like many 44 ON SHAKSPEAUE AND MILTON others, from transferring an analogy of one kind to something quite distinct, without taking into the account the difference in the nature of the things, or attending to the difference of the results. For most persons, finding what wonderful advances have been made in biblical criticism, in chemistry, in mechanics, in geometry, astronomy, &c. i.e. in things depending on mere inquiry and experiment, or on absolute demonstration, have been led hastily to conclude, that there was a general tendency in the efforts of the human intellect to improve by repetition, and, in all other arts and institutions, to grow perfect and mature by time. We look back upon the theological creed of our ancestors, and their discoveries in natural philosophy, with a smile of pity : science, and the arts connected with it, have all had their infancy, their youth, and manhood, and seem to contain in them no principle of limitation or decay : and, inquiring no farther about the matter, we infer, in the intoxication of our pride, and the height of our self-congratulation, that the same progress has been made, and will continue to be made, in all other things which are the work of man. The fact, however, stares us so plainly in the face, that one would think the smallest reflection must suggest the truth, and over- turn our sanguine theories. The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the birth of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was, in other respects, comparatively barbarous. Those arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after. This is the peculiar dis- tinction and privilege of each, of science and of art : — of the one, never to attain its utmost limit of perfection ; and of the other, to arrive at it almost at once. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Dante, and Ariosto, (Milton alone was of a later age, and not the worse for it) — Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio, the Greek sculptors and tragedians, — all lived near the beginning of their arts — perfected, and all but created them. These giant-sons of genius stand indeed upon the earth, but they tower above their fellows ; and the long line of their successors, in different ages, does not interpose any object to obstruct their view, or lessen their brightness. In strength and stature they are unrivalled ; in grace and beauty they have not been surpassed. In after-ages, and more refined periods, (as they are called) great men have arisen, one by one, as it were by throes and at intervals; though in general the best of these cultivated and artificial minds were of an inferior order; as Tasso and Pope, among poets ; Guido and Vandyke, among painters. But 45 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS in the earlier stages of the arts, as soon as the first mechanical difficulties had been got over, and the language was sufficiently acquired, they rose by clusters, and in constellations, never so to rise again ! The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world ot thought within us, and with the world of sense around us — with what we know, and see, and feel intimately. They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature. But the pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood three thousand, or three hundred years ago, as they are at present: the face of nature, and * the human face divine ' shone as bright then as they have ever done. But it is their light, reflected by true genius on art, that marks out its path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses' feet, like that which ' Circled Una's angel face, And made a sunshine in the shady place.* The four greatest names in English poetry, are almost the four first we come to — Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton. There are no others that can really be put in competition with these. The two last have had justice done them by the voice of common fame. Their names are blazoned in the very firmament of reputation ; while the two first (though 'the fault has been more in their stars than in themselves that they are underlings') either never emerged far above the horizon, or were too soon involved in the obscurity of time. The three first of these are excluded from Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (Shakspeare indeed is so from the dramatic form of his com- positions) : and the fourth, Milton, is admitted with a reluctant and churlish welcome. In comparing these four writers together, it might be said that Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life ; Spenser, as the poet of romance ; Shakspeare as the poet of nature (in the largest use of the term) ; and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as they are ; Spenser, as we wish them to be ; Shakspeare, as they would be ; and Milton as they ought to be. As poets, and as great poets, imagination, that is, the power of feigning things according to nature, was common to them all : but the principle or moving power, to which this faculty was most subservient in Chaucer, was habit, or inveterate prejudice ; in Spenser, novelty, and the love of the marvellous ; in Shakspeare, it was the force of passion, combined with every variety of possible circumstances; and in Milton, only with the highest. The charac- teristic of Chaucer is intensity ; of Spenser, remoteness ; of Milton, ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON elevation ; of Shakspeare, every thing. — It has been said by some critic, that Shakspeare was distinguished from the other dramalic writers of his day only by his wit ; that they had all his other qualities but that ; that one writer had as much sense, another as much fancy, another as much knowledge of character, another the same depth of passion, and another as great a power of language. This statement is not true ; nor is the inference from it well-founded, even if it were. This person does not seem to have been aware that, upon his own shewing, the great distinction of Shakspeare's genius was its virtually including the genius of all the great men of his age, and not his differing from them in one accidental particular. But to have done with such minute and literal trifling. The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds — so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had * a mind reflecting ages past,' and present : — all the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar : * All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,' are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives — as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies * nodded to him, and did him curtesies ' : and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of * his so potent art/ The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women : and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other ; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes 47 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, * subject to the same skyey influences,' the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which would occur in reality. Thus the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a language and manners of its own, but the scenery and situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, * his frequent haunts and ancient neighbourhood,' are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and with all the familiarity of an old recollection. The whole * coheres semblably together ' in time, place, and circumstance. In reading this author, you do not merely learn what his characters say, — you see their persons. By something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to decypher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the grouping, the bye-play, as we might see it on the stage. A word, an epithet paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole years in the history of the person represented. So (as it has been ingeniously remarked) when Prospero describes himself as left alone in the boat with his daughter, the epithet which he applies to her, * Me and thy crying self,' flings the imagination instantly back from the grown woman to the helpless condition of infancy, and places the first and most trying scene of his misfortunes before us, with all that he must have suffered in the interval. How well the silent anguish of Macduff is conveyed to the reader, by the friendly expostulation of Malcolm — * What ! man, ne'er pull your hat upon your brows ! ' Again, Hamlet, in the scene with Rosencrans and Guildenstern, somewhat abruptly concludes his fine soliloquy on life by saying, * Man delights not me, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.' Which is explained by their answer — * My lord, we had no such stuff in our thoughts. But we smiled to think, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive from you, whom we met on the way ' : — as if while Hamlet was making this speech, his two old schoolfellows from Wittenberg had been really standing by, and he had seen them smiling by stealth, at the idea of the players crossing their minds. It is not * a combination and a form ' of words, a set speech or two, a preconcerted theory of a character, that will do this : but all the persons concerned must have been present in the poet's imagination, as at a kind of rehearsal ; and whatever would have passed through their minds on the occasion, and have been observed by others, passed through his, and is made known to the 48 ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON reader. — I may add in passing, that Shakspeare always gives the best directions for the costume and carriage of his heroes. Thus to take one example, Ophelia gives the following account of Hamlet ; and as Ophelia had seen Hamlet, I should think her word ought to be taken against that of any modern authority. * Ophelia. My lord, as I was reading in my closet, Prince Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'd, No hat upon his head, his stockings loose, Ungartred, and down-gyved to his ancle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous, As if he had been sent from hell To speak of horrors, thus he conies before me. Polonius. Mad for thy love ! Oph. My lord, I do not know, But truly I do fear it. Pol. What said he ? Oph. He took me by the wrist, and held me hard Then goes he to the length of all his arm ; And with his other hand thus o'er his brow, He falls to such perusal of my face, As he would draw it : long staid he so ; At last, a little shaking of my arm, And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound, As it did seem to shatter all his bulk, And end his being. That done, he lets me go, And with his head over his shoulder turn'd, He seem'd to find his way without his eyes; For out of doors he went without their help, And to the last bended their light on me.' Act. II. Scene i. How after this airy, fantastic idea of irregular grace and bewildered melancholy any one can play Hamlet, as we have seen it played, with strut, and stare, and antic right-angled sharp-pointed gestures, it is difficult to say, unless it be that Hamlet is not bound, by the prompter's cue, to study the part of Ophelia. The account of Ophelia's death begins thus : ' There is a willow hanging o'er a brook, That shows its hoary leaves in the glassy stream.* — Now this is an instance of the same unconscious power of mind which is as true to nature as itself. The leaves of the willow are, in fact, white underneath, and it is this part of them which would appear 49 LKC'IUHKS ON TIIK KNGLISU I'OKTS * hoary ' in the rcllection in the brook. The same sort of intuitive power, the same faculty of bringing every object in nature, whether present or absent, before the mind's eye, is observable in the speech of Cleopatra, when conjecturing what were the employments of Antony in his absence :—' He *8 speaking now, or murmuring, where 's my serpent of old Nile?' How line to make Cleopatra have this con- sciousness of her own character, and to make her feel that it is this for which Antony is in love with her ! She says, after the battle of Actium, when Antony has resolved to risk another fight, * It is my birth-day ; I had thought to have held it poor : but since my lord is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.' What other poet would have thought of such a casual resource of the imagination, or would have dared to avail himself of it ? The thing happens in the play as it might have happened in fact. --That which, perhaps, more than any thing else distinguishes the dramatic productions of Shakspeare from all others, is this wonderful truth and individuality of conception. Each of his characters is as much itself, and as absolutely independent of the rest, as well as of the author, as if they were living persons, not fictions of the mind. The poet may be said, for the time, to identify himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given. His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh and blood ; they speak like men, not like authors. One might suppose that he had stood by at the time, and overheard what passed. As in our dreams we hold conversations with ourselves, make remarks, or communicate intelligence, and have no idea of the answer which we shall receive, and which we ourselves make, till we hear it : so the dialogues in Shakspeare are carried on without any consciousness of what is to follow, without any appearance of preparation or premeditation. The gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. Nothing is made out by formal inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis : all comes, or seems to come, immediately from nature. Each object and circum- stance exists in his mind, as it would have existed in reality: each several train of thought and feeling goes on of itself, without confusion or effort. In the world of his imagination, every thing has a life, a place, and being of its own ! Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like identical pro- positions. They are consistent, but uniform ; we get no new idea of 50 ON SHAKSPEAKE AND MILTON them from first to last ; they are not placed in different lights, nor are their subordinate traits brought out in new situations ; they are like portraits or physiognomical studies, with the distinguishing features marked with inconceivable truth and precision, but that preserve the same unaltered air and attitude. Shakspeare's are historical figures, equally true and correct, but put into action, where every nerve and muscle is displayed in the struggle with others, with all the effect of collision and contrast, with every variety of light and shade. Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakspeare's dramatic, Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shakspeare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. In Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakspeare there is a continual composition and de- composition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances. Milton took only a few simple principles of character, and raised them to the utmost conceivable grandeur, and refined them from every base alloy. His imagination, * nigh sphered in Heaven,' claimed kindred only with what he saw from that height, and could raise to the same elevation with itself. He sat retired and kept his state alone, * playing with wisdom'; while Shakspeare mingled with the crowd, and played the host, ' to make society the sweeter welcome.' The passion in Shakspeare is of the same nature as his delineation of character. It is not some one habitual feeling or sentiment prey- ing upon itself, growing out of itself, and moulding every thing to itself; it is passion modified by passion, by all the other feelings to which the individual is liable, and to which others are liable with him ; subject to all the fluctuations of caprice and accident ; calling into play all the resources of the understanding and all the energies of the will ; irritated by obstacles or yielding to them ; rising from small beginnings to its utmost height ; now drunk with hope, now stung to madness, now sunk in despair, now blown to air with a breath, now raging like a torrent. The human soul is made the sport of fortune, the prey of adversity : it is stretched on the wheel of destiny, in restless ecstacy. The passions are in a state of pro- jection. Years are melted down to moments, and every instant teems with fate. We know the results, we see the process. Thus after lago has been boasting to himself of the effect of his poisonous 51 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS suggestions on the mind of Othello, ' which, with a little act upon the blood, will work like mines of sulphur,' he adds — ' Look where he comes ! not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy synips ot the East, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou ow'dst yesterday.' — And he enters at this moment, like the crested serpent, crowned with his wrongs and raging for revenge ! The whole depends upon the turn of a thought. A word, a look, blows the spark of jealousy into a flame ; and the explosion is immediate and terrible as a volcano. The dialogues in Lear, in Macbeth, that between Brutus and Cassius, and nearly all those in Shakspeare, where the interest is wrought up to its highest pitch, afford examples of this dramatic fluctuation of passion. The interest in Chaucer is quite different ; it is like the course of a river, strong, and full, and increasing. In Shakspeare, on the contrary, it is like the sea, agitated this way and that, and loud- lashed by furious storms ; while in the still pauses of the blast, we distinguish only the cries of despair, or the silence of death ! Milton, on the other hand, takes the imaginative part of passion — that which remains after the event, which the mind reposes on when all is over, which looks upon circumstances from the remotest elevation of thought and fancy, and abstracts them from the world of action to that of contemplation. The objects of dramatic poetry affect us by sympathy, by their nearness to ourselves, as they take us by surprise, or force us upon action, * while rage with rage doth sympathise ' ; the objects of epic poetry affect us through the medium of the imagina- tion, by magnitude and distance, by their permanence and universality. The one fill us with terror and pity, the other with admiration and delight. There are certain objects that strike the imagination, and inspire awe in the very idea of them, independently of any dramatic interest, that is, of any connection with the vicissitudes of human life. For instance, we cannot think of the pyramids of Egypt, of a Gothic ruin, or an old Roman encampment, without a certain emotion, a sense of power and sublimity coming over the mind. The heavenly bodies that hang over our heads wherever we go, and * in their untroubled element shall shine when we are laid in dust, and all our cares forgotten,' affect us in the same way. Thus Satan's address to the Sun has an epic, not a dramatic interest ; for though the second person in the dialogue makes no answer and feels no concern, yet the eye of that vast luminary is upon him, like the eye of heaven, and seems conscious of what he says, like an universal presence. Dramatic poetry and epic, in their perfection, indeed, approximate to and 52 ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON strengthen one another. Dramatic poetry borrows aid from the dignity of persons and things, as the heroic does from human passion, but in theory they are distinct. — When Richard n. calls for the looking-glass to contemplate his faded majesty in it, and bursts into that affecting exclamation : * Oh, that I were a mockery-king of snow, to melt away before the sun of Bolingbroke,' we have here the utmost force of human passion, combined with the ideas of regal splendour and fallen power. When Milton says of Satan : * His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruin'd, and th' excess Of glory obscur'd ; * — the mixture of beauty, of grandeur, and pathos, from the sense of irreparable loss, of never-ending, unavailing regret, is perfect. The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility ; or what is worse, to divest it both of imaginary splendour and human passion, to surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelings and devouring egotism of the writers' own minds. Milton and Shakspeare did not so understand poetry. They gave a more liberal interpretation both to nature and art. They did not do all they could to get rid of the one and the other, to fill up the dreary void with the Moods of their own Minds. They owe their power over the human mind to their having had a deeper sense than others of what was grand in the objects of nature, or affecting in the events of human life. But to the men I speak of there is nothing interesting, nothing heroical, but themselves. To them the fall of gods or of great men is the same. They do not enter into the feeling. They cannot under- stand the terms. They are even debarred from the last poor, paltry consolation of an unmanly triumph over fallen greatness ; for their minds reject, with a convulsive effort and intolerable loathing, the very idea that there ever was, or was thought to be, any thing superior to themselves. All that has ever excited the attention or admiration of the world, they look upon with the most perfect indifference ; and they are surprised to find that the world repays their indifference with scorn. ' With what measure they mete, it has been meted to them again/ — Shakespeare's imagination is of the same plastic kind as his con- ception of character or passion. ' It glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.' Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the most opposite extremes ; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, * puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.' 53 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS He seems always hurrying trom his subject, even while describing it ; but the stroke, like the lightning's, is sure as it is sudden. He takes the widest possible range, but from that very range he has his choice of the greatest variety and aptitude of materials. He brings together images the most alike, but placed at the greatest distance from each other ; that is, found in circumstances of the greatest dissimilitude. From the remoteness of his combinations, and the celerity with which they are effected, they coalesce the more indissolubly together. The more the thoughts are strangers to each other, and the longer they have been kept asunder, the more intimate does their union seem to become. Their felicity is equal to their force. Their likeness is made more dazzling by their novelty. They startle, and take the fancy prisoner in the same instant. I will mention one or two which are very striking, and not much known, out of Troilus and Cressida. ./Eneas says to Agamemnon, ' I ask that I may waken reverence, And on the cheek be ready with a blush Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes The youthful Phoebus." Ulysses urging Achilles to shew himself in the field, says — ' No man is the lord of anything, Till he communicate his parts to others: Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in the applause, Where they 're extended ! which like an arch reverberates The voice again, or like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, receives and renders back Its figure and its heat.' Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice. ' Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane Be shook to air.' Shakspeare's language and versification are like the rest of him. He has a magic power over words : they come winged at his bidding ; and seem to know their places. They are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the occasion, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an actual impression of the objects. His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion. His language is 54 ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON hieroglyphical. It translates thoughts into visible images. It abounds in sudden transitions and elliptical expressions. This is the source of his mixed metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of speech. These, however, give no pain from long custom. They have, in fact, become idioms in the language. They are the building, and not the scaffolding to thought. We take the meaning and effect of a well-known passage entire, and no more stop to scan and spell out the particular words and phrases, than the syllables of which they are composed. In trying to recollect any other author, one sometimes stumbles, in case of failure, on a word as good. In Shakspeare, any other word but the true one, is sure to be wrong. If any body, for instance, could not recollect the words of the following description, Light thickens, And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,' he would be greatly at a loss to substitute others for them equally expressive of the feeling. These remarks, however, are strictly applicable only to the impassioned parts of Shakspeare's language, which flowed from the warmth and originality of his imagination, and were his own. The language used for prose conversation and ordinary business is sometimes technical, and involved in the affecta- tion of the time. Compare, for example, Othello's apology to the senate, relating * his whole course of love,' with some of the preceding parts relating to his appointment, and the official dispatches from Cyprus. In this respect, * the business of the state does him offence/ His versification is no less powerful, sweet, and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of sullen intricacy, crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiest expansion — from the •?ase and familiarity of measured conversation to the lyrical sounds ' Of ditties highly penned, Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower, With ravishing division to her lute.' It is the only blank verse in the language, except Milton's, that for itself is readable. It is not stately and uniformly swelling like his, but varied and broken by the inequalities of the ground it has to pass over in its uncertain course, ' And so by many winding nooks it strays, With willing sport to the wild ocean/ It remains to speak of the faults of Shakspeare. They are not so many or so great as they hare been represented ; what there are, are chiefly owing to the following causes : — The universality of his genius 55 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS was, perhaps, a disadvantage to his single works ; the variety of his resources, sometimes diverting him from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of .Aeschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and indifference of his temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than he might have been. He is relaxed and careless in critical places ; he is in earnest throughout only in Timon, Macbeth, and Lear. Again, he had no models of acknowledged excellence constantly in view to stimulate his efforts, and by all that appears, no love of fame. He wrote for the * great vulgar and the small,' in his time, not for posterity. If Queen Elizabeth and the maids of honour laughed heartily at his worst jokes, and the catcalls in the gallery were silent at his best passages, he went home satisfied, and slept the next night well. He did not trouble himself about Voltaire's criticisms. He was willing to take advantage of the ignorance of the age in many things ; and if his plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself. His very facility of production would make him set less value on his own excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well or ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above half a dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography, not against poetry. As to the unities, he was right in setting them at defiance. He was fonder of puns than became so great a man. His barbarisms were those of his age. His genius was his own. He had no objection to float down with the stream of common taste and opinion : he rose above it by his own buoyancy, and an impulse which he could not keep under, in spite of himself or others, and * his delights did shew most dolphin-like.' He had an equal genius for comedy and tragedy ; and his tragedies are better than his comedies, because tragedy is better than comedy. His female characters, which have been found fault with as insipid, are the finest in the world. Lastly, Shakspeare was the least of a coxcomb of any one that ever lived, and much of a gentleman. Shakspeare discovers in his writings little religious enthusiasm, and an indifference to personal reputation ; he had none of the bigotry of his age, and his political prejudices were not very strong. In these respects, as well as in every other, he formed a direct contrast to Milton. Milton's works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses ; a hymn to Fame. He had his thoughts constantly fixed on the con- templation of the Hebrew theocracy, and of a perfect commonwealth ; and he seized the pen with a hand just warm from the touch of the ark of faith. His religious zeal infused its character into his ira- 56 ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON agination ; so that he devotes himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation of his genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the good of his country. The spirit of the poet, the patriot, and the prophet, vied with each other in his breast. His mind appears to have held equal communion with the inspired writers, and with the bards and sages of ancient Greece and Rome ; — ' Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old.* He had a high standard, with which he was always comparing him- self, nothing short of which could satisfy his jealous ambition. He thought of nobler forms and nobler things than those he found about him. He lived apart, in the solitude of his own thoughts, carefully excluding from his mind whatever might distract its purposes or alloy its purity, or damp its zeal. ' With darkness and with dangers compassed round,' he had the mighty models of antiquity always present to his thoughts, and determined to raise a monument of equal height and glory, * piling up every stone of lustre from the brook/ for the delight and wonder of posterity. He had girded himself up, and as it were, sanctified his genius to this service from his youth. 'For after,' he says, *I had from my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, been exercised to the tongues, and some sciences as my age could suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, it was found that whether aught was imposed upon me by them, or betaken to of my own choice, the style by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live ; but much latelier, in the private academies of Italy, perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout, met with acceptance above what was looked for ; I began thus far to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let it die. The accomplish- ment of these intentions, which have lived within me ever since I could conceive myself anything worth to my country, lies not but in a power above man's to promise ; but that none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit that none shall, that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure will extend. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some few years yet, I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours 57 LECTURES ON THE KNCiLISII POKTS of wine ; like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtaincxi by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, hut by devout prayer to that eternal spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed lire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases : to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs. Although it nothing content me to have disclosed thus much before- hand ; but that I trust hereby to make it manifest with what small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than these, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, from beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.' So that of Spenser : ' The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought, And is with child of glorious great intent, Can never rest until it forth have brought The eternal brood of glory excellent.' Milton, therefore, did not write from casual impulse, but after a severe examination of his own strength, and with a resolution to leave nothing undone which it was in his power to do. He always labours, and almost always succeeds. He strives hard to say the finest things in the world, and he does say them. He adorns and dignifies his subject to the utmost : he surrounds it with every possible association of beauty or grandeur, whether moral, intellectual, or physical. He refines on his descriptions of beauty ; loading sweets on sweets, till the sense aches at them ; and raises his images of terror to a gigantic elevation, that * makes Ossa like a wart.' In Milton, there is always an appearance of effort : in Shakespeare, scarcely any. Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every source of imitation, sacred or profane ; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer. He is a writer of centos, and yet in originality scarcely inferior to Homer. The power of his mind is stamped on every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. In reading his works, we feel ourselves under the influence ot a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them. The quantity of art in him shews the strength of his genius : the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. Milton's learning has the 58 ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON effect of intuition. He describes objects, of which he could only have read in books, with the vividness of actual observation. His imagination has the force of nature. He makes words tell as pictures. ' Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams.' The word lucid here gives to the idea all the sparkling effect of the most perfect landscape. And again : * As when a vulture on Imaus bred, Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds, Dislodging from a region scarce of prey, To gorge the flesh of lambs and yeanling kids On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springs Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams; But in his way lights on the barren plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With sails and wind their cany waggons light.* If Milton had taken a journey for the express purpose, he could not have described this scenery and mode of life better. Such passages are like demonstrations of natural history. Instances might be multiplied without end. We might be tempted to suppose that the vividness with which h<= describes visible objects, was owing to their having acquired an unusual degree of strength in his mind, after the privation of his sight ; but we find the same palpableness and truth in the descriptions which occur in his early poems. In Lycidas he speaks of * the great vision of the guarded mount/ with that preternatural weight of impression with which it would present itself suddenly to 'the pilot of some small night-foundered skiff' : and the lines in the Penseroso, describing 'the wandering moon,' ' Riding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray Through the heaven's wide pathless way,* are as if he had gazed himself blind in looking at her. There is also the same depth of impression in his descriptions of the objects of all the different senses, whether colours, or sounds, or smells — the same absorption of his mind in whatever engaged his attention at the time. It has been indeed objected to Milton, by a common perversity of criticism, that his ideas were musical rather than picturesque, as if because they were in the highest degree musical, they must be (to 59 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS keep the sage critical balance even, and to allow no one man to possess two qualities at the same time) proportionally deficient in other respects. But Milton's poetry is not cast in any such narrow, common-place mould ; it is not so barren of resources. His worship of the Muse was not so simple or confined. A sound arises Mike a steam of rich distilled perfumes ' ; we hear the pealing organ, but the incense on the altars is also there, and the statues of the gods are ranged around ! The ear indeed predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately affected, and because the language of music blends more immediately with, and forms a more natural accompani- ment to, the variable and indefinite associations of ideas conveyed by words. But where the associations of the imagination are not the principal thing, the individual object is given by Milton with equal force and beauty. The strongest and best proof of this, as a characteristic power of his mind, is, that the persons of Adam and Eve, of Satan, &c. are always accompanied, in our imagination, with the grandeur of the naked figure ; they convey to us the ideas of sculpture. As an instance, take the following : * He soon Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand, The same whom John saw also in the sun : His back was turned, but not his brightness hid j Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar Circled his head, nor less his locks behind Illustrious on his shoulders fledge with wings Lay waving round ; on some great charge employ'd He seem'd, or fix'd in cogitation deep. Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hope To find who might direct his wand'ring flight To Paradise, the happy seat of man, His journey's end, and our beginning woe. But first he casts to change his proper shape, Which else might work him danger or delay And now a stripling cherub he appears, Not of the prime, yet such as in his face Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb Suitable grace diffused, so well he feign'd : Under a coronet his flowing hair In curls on either cheek playM ; wings he wore Of many a colour'd plume sprinkled with gold, His habit fit for speed succinct, and held Before his decent steps a silver wand.' The figures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a Greek statue ; glossy and impurpled, tinged with golden light, and musical as the strings of Memnon's harp ! 60 ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON Again, nothing can be more magnificent than the portrait of Beelzebub : * With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear The weight of mightiest monarchies : * Or the comparison of Satan, as he * lay floating many a rood,' to * that sea beast,' ' Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream ! What a force of imagination is there in this last expression ! What an idea it conveys of the size of that hugest of created beings, as if it shrunk up the ocean to a stream, and took up the sea in its nostrils as a very little thing ? Force of style is one of Milton's greatest excellences. Hence, perhaps, he stimulates us more in the reading, and less afterwards. The way to defend Milton against all impugners, is to take down the book and read it. Milton's blank verse is the only blank verse in the language (except Shakspeare's) that deserves the name of verse. Dr. Johnson, who had modelled his ideas of versification on the regular sing-song of Pope, condemns the Paradise Lost as harsh and unequal. I shall not pretend to say that this is not sometimes the case ; for where a degree of excellence beyond the mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poet must sometimes fail. But I imagine that there are more perfect examples in Milton of musical expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage, than in all our other writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the exception already mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our stanza writers, as Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our rhymists. But in neither is there any thing like the same ear for music, the same power of approximating the varieties of poetical to those of musical rhythm, as there is in our great epic poet. The sound of his lines is moulded into the expression of the sentiment, almost of the very image. They rise or fall, pause or hurry rapidly on, with exquisite art, but without the least trick or affectation, as the occasion seems to require. The following are some of the finest instances : ' His hand was known In Heaven by many a tower'd structure high ; — Nor was his name unheard or unador'd In ancient Greece : and in the Ausonian land Men called him Mulciber : and how he fell From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove 61 I.KCTtJKKS ON TIIK KMiLISII 1'OKTS Shrrr o'er tlu- chi-ystal batt li-nu-nts • from morn To noon lu- fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer's il.iv ; and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith like a tailing star On I.emnos, the ./Iv.;ran isle : thus they relate, Erring/ — lint chief the spacious hall Thick Bwarm'd, both on the ground and in the air, Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings. As bees In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides, Pour forth their populous youth about the hive In clusters ; they among fresh dews and How'rs Fly to and fro : or on the smoothed plank, The suburb ot their straw-built citadel, New rubb'd with balm, expatiate and confer Their state affairs. So thick the airy crowd Swanrfd and were straiten'd ; till the signal giv'n, Behold a wonder ! They but now who seem'd In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves, Whose midnight revels by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course : they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear j At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds/ I can only give another instance, though I have some difficulty in leaving off. ' Round he surveys (and wel; might, where he stood So high above the circling canopy Of night's extended shade) from th' eastern point Of Libra to the fleecy star that bears Andromeda far off Atlantic seas Beyond the horizon : then from pole to pole He views in breadth, and without longer pause Down right into the world's first region throws His flight precipitant, and winds with ease Through the pure marble air his oblique way Amongst innumerable stars that shone Stars distant, but nigh hand seem'd other worlds; Or other worlds they seem'd or happy isles,' &c. The verse, in this exquisitely modulated passage, floats up and down 62 ON SIIAKSPEAUE AND MILTON as if it had itself wings. Milton has himself given us the theory of his versification — 4 Such as the meeting soul may pierce In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.' Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton's, — Thomson's, Young's, Cowper's, Wordsworth's, — and it will be found, from the want of the same insight into * the hidden soul of harmony,' to be mere lumbering prose. To proceed to a consideration of the merits of Paradise Lost, in the most essential point of view, I mean as to the poetry of character and passion. I shall say nothing of the fable, or of other technical objections or excellences ; but I shall try to explain at once the foundation of the interest belonging to the poem. I am ready to give up the dialogues in Heaven, where, as Pope justly observes, * God the Father turns a school-divine'; nor do I consider the battle of the angels as the climax of sublimity, or the most successful effort of Milton's pen. In a word, the interest of the poem arises from the daring ambition and fierce passions of Satan, and from the account of the paradisaical happiness, and the loss of it by our first parents. Three-fourths of the work are taken up with these characters, and nearly all that relates to them is unmixed sublimity and beauty. The two first books alone are like two massy pillars of solid gold. Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem ; and the execution is as perfect as the design is lofty. He was the first of created beings, who, for endeavouring to be equal with the highest, and to divide the empire of heaven with the Almighty, was hurled down to hell. His aim was no less than the throne of the universe ; his means, myriads of angelic armies bright, the third part of the heavens, whom he lured after him with his countenance, and who durst defy the Omnipotent in arms. His ambition was the greatest, and his punishment was the greatest ; but not so his despair, for his fortitude was as great as his sufferings. His strength of mind was matchless as his strength of body ; the vastness of his designs did not surpass the firm, inflexible determination with which he submitted to his irreversible doom, and final loss of all good. His power of action and of suffering was equal. He was the greatest power that was ever overthrown, with the strongest will left to resist or to endure. He was baffled, not confounded. He stood like a tower ; or * As when Heaven's fire Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines ' LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS He was still surrounded with hosts of rebel angels, armed warriors, who own him as their sovereign leader, and with whose fate he sympathises as he views them round, far as the eye can reach; though he keeps aloof from them in his own mind, and holds supreme counsel only with his own breast. An outcast from Heaven, Hell trembles beneath his feet, Sin and Death are at his heels, and man- kind are his easy prey. ' All is not lost ; th' unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, And what else is not to be overcome,' are still his. The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude of it ; the fierceness of tormenting flames is qualified and made innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride ; the loss of infinite happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power or. inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil — but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. From this principle he never once flinches. His love of power and contempt for suffering are never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity. His thoughts burn like a hell within him ; but the power of thought holds dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness of a determined purpose, of * that intellectual being, those thoughts that wander through eternity/ though accompanied with endless pain, he prefers to nonentity, to * being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb of uncreated night.' He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition in one line. ' Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or suffering ! ' After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something ; but he does more than this — he founds a new empire in hell, and from it conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted flight, forcing his way through nether and surrounding fires. The poet has not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline ; the strength is equal to the magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct ; the Titans were not more vast ; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, * rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air,' it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriate images : so that we see it always before us, gigantic, irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed — but dazzling in its faded 64 ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON splendour, the clouded ruins of a god. The deformity of Satan is only in the depravity of his will ; he has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there, poor emblems of the unbending, unconquered spirit, of the writhing agonies within. Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven toot ; to bring into the fair field of controversy the good old catholic prejudices of which Tasso and Dante have availed themselves, and which the mystic German critics would restore. He relied on the justice of his cause, and did not scruple to give the devil his due. Some persons may think that he has carried his liberality too far, and injured the cause he professed to espouse by making him the chief person in his poem. Considering the nature of his subject, he would be equally in danger of running into this fault, from his faith in religion, and his love of rebellion ; and perhaps each of these motives had its full share in determining the choice of his subject. Not only the figure of Satan, but his speeches in council, his soliloquies, his address to Eve, his share in the war in heaven, or in the fall of man, shew the same decided superiority of character. To give only one instance, almost the first speech he makes : ' Is this the region, this the soil, the clime, Said then the lost archangel, this the seat That we must change for Heaven j this mournful gloom For that celestial light ? Be it so, since he Who now is sov'rain can dispose and bid What shall be right : farthest from him is best, Whom reason hath equaled, force hath made supreme Above his equals. Farewel happy fields, Where joy for ever dwells : Hail horrors, hail Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor : one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater ? Here at least We shall be free ; th" Almighty hath n< •• built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence : Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell : Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.* The whole of the speeches and debates in Pandemonium are well worthy of the place and the occasion — with Gods for speakers, and 65 LKCTUlir.S ON TIIK KNGLISII POETS angels and archan;;ils lor hearers. Tlieie is a decided manly tone in the arguments and sentiments, an eloquent dogmatism, as if each person spoke from thorough conviction ; an excellence which Milton probably borrowed from his spirit of partisanship, or else his spirit of partisanship from the natural firmness and vigour of his mind. In this respect Milton resembles Dante, (the only modern writer with whom he has any thing in common) and it is remarkable that Dante, as well as Milton, was a political partisan. That approximation to the severity of impassioned prose which has been made an objection to Milton's poetry, and which is chiefly to be met with in these bitter invectives, is one of its great excellences. The author might here turn his philippics against Salmasius to good account. The rout in Heaven is like the fall of some mighty structure, nodding to its base, * with hideous ruin and combustion down.' But, perhaps, of all the passages in Paradise Lost, the description of the employments of the angels during the absence of Satan, some of whom * retreated in a silent valley, sing with notes angelical to many a harp their own heroic deeds and hapless fall by doom of battle,' is the most perfect example of mingled pathos and sublimity. — What proves the truth of this noble picture in every part, and that the frequent complaint of want of interest in it is the fault of the reader, not of the poet, is that when any interest of a practical kind takes a shape that can be at all turned into this, (and there is little doubt that Milton had some such in his eye in writing it,) each party converts it to its own purpose?, feels the absolute identity of these abstracted and high speculations ; and that, in fact, a noted political writer of the present day has exhausted nearly the whole account of Satan in the Paradise Lost, by applying it to a character whom he considered as after the devil, (though I do not know whether he would make even that exception) the greatest enemy of the human race. This may serve to shew that Milton's Satan is not a very insipid personage. Of Adam and Eve it has been said, that the ordinary reader can feel little interest in them, because they have none of the passions, pursuits, or even relations of human life, except that of man and wife, the least interesting of all others, if not to the parties concerned, at least to the by-standers. The preference has on this account been given to Homer, who, it is said, has left very vivid and infinitely diversified pictures of all the passions and affections, public and private, incident to human nature — the relations of son, of brother, parent, friend, citizen, and many others. Longinus preferred the Iliad to the Odyssey, on account of the greater number of battles it contains ; but I can neither agree to his criticism, nor assent to the present objection. It is true, there is little action in this part of 66 ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON Milton's poem ; but there is much repose, and more enjoyment. There are none of the every-day occurrences, contentions, disputes, wars, fightings, feuds, jealousies, trades, professions, liveries, and common handicrafts of life ; * no kind of traffic ; letters are not known ; no use of service, of riches, poverty, contract, succession, bourne, bound of land, tilth, vineyard none ; no occupation, no treason, felony, sword, pike, knife, gun, nor need of any engine.' 80 much the better ; thank Heaven, all these were yet to come. But still the die was cast, and in them our doom was sealed. In them ' The generations were prepared j the pangs, The internal pangs, were ready, the dread strife Of poor humanity's afflicted will, Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.' In their first false step we trace all our future woe, with loss of Eden. But there was a short and precious interval between, like the first blush of morning before the day is overcast with tempest, the dawn of the world, the birth of nature from * the unapparent deep,' with its first dews and freshness on its cheek, breathing odours. Theirs was the first delicious taste of life, and on them depended all that was to come of it. In them hung trembling all our hopes and fears. They were as yet alone in the world, in the eye of nature, wondering at their new being, full of enjoyment and enraptured with one another, with the voice of their Maker walking in the garden, and ministering angels attendant on their steps, winged messengers from heaven like rosy clouds descending in their sight. Nature played around them her virgin fancies wild ; and spread for them a repast where no crude surfeit reigned. Was there nothing in this scene, which God and nature alone witnessed, to interest a modern critic ? What need was there of action, where the heart was full of bliss and innocence without it ! They had nothing to do but feel their own happiness, and * know to know no more.' * They toiled not, neither did they spin ; yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' All things seem to acquire fresh sweet- ness, and to be clothed with fresh beauty in their sight. They tasted as it were for themselves and us, of all that there ever was pure in human bliss. * In them the burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened.' They stood awhile perfect, but they afterwards fell, and were driven out of Paradise, tasting the first fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss. But their pangs were such as a pure spirit might feel at the sight — their tears * such as angels weep.' The pathos is of that mild LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS contemplative kind which arises from regret for the loss of unspeakable happiness, and resignation to inevitable fate. There is none of the fierceness of intemperate passion, none of the agony of mind anJ turbulence of action, which is the result of the habitual struggles of the will with circumstances, irritated by repeated disappointment, and constantly setting its desires most eagerly on that which there is an impossibility of attaining. This would have destroyed the beauty of the whole picture. They had received their unlooked-for happiness as a free gift from their Creator's hands, and they submitted to its loss, not without sorrow, but without impious and stubborn repining. •In either hand the hastening angel caught Our ling'ring parents, and to trT eastern gate Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast To the subjected plain ; then disappear'd. They looking back, all th' eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Wav'd over by that flaming brand, the gate With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms: Some natural tears they dropt, but wip'd them