Chapter XXV: Introduction: To an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (12)

It is well for the author of this tragedy that it has been praised in the _Quarterly Review_,—or we should not wonder to see Mr. Coleridge, as well from these lines as from its being acted with universal applause at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, set about proving it to be a very ultra-Jacobinical performance.—But ‘to leave this keen encounter of the wits, and fall to something of a slower method.’ The reason—(for Mr. Coleridge knows, that if we have not ‘reason as plenty as blackberries,’ yet what we have, we are ready ‘to give to any man without compulsion’)—the reason why Mr. Coleridge is not what he might be, is, that he would be thought what he is not. His motto is, to be nothing or every thing. His levity or his vanity is not satisfied with being admired for what he is, but for all that he is capable of becoming, wise or foolish, knave or not. He is not contented to be ‘the inconstant moon,’ unless he can be the halo round it. He would glitter in the sunshine of public favour, and yet he would cast no shadow. Please all and please none is his rule, he has succeeded. He thinks it a great disparagement of his parts, a proof of a narrow and contracted mind, to be thought to hold only the sentiments which he professes. His capacious mind has room for all opinions, both those which he believes and those which he does not. He thinks he shews the greatest magnanimity when he shews the greatest contempt for his own principles, past, present, and to come. He would be esteemed greatly superior, not only to the rest of the world, but to himself. Would any one catch him in the trammels of a sect? Would any one make him swear to the dogmas of a party? Would any one suppose that he has any prejudices in favour of his own notions? That he is blindly wedded to one single view of a subject, as a man is wedded to one wife? He is shocked at any such imputation of intellectual uxoriousness. Would the Presbyterians try to hook him in?—he knows better than Socinus or old John Knox. Would the Established Church receive him at her wide portals?—he carries too great a weight of the Fathers and school divinity at his back. Would the Whigs patronise him?—he is too straitened in antiquated notions and traditional prejudices. Would the Tories take him in?—he is too liberal, enlightened, and transcendental for them. Would principle bind him?—he shuffles out of it, as a clog upon his freedom of thought, ‘his large discourse of reason, looking before and after.’ Would interest lay dirty hands upon him?—he jockies her too by some fetch or conundrum, borrowed from the great clerks of the so-called Dark Ages. You can no more know where to have him than an otter. You might as well hedge the cuckoo. You see him now squat like a toad at the ear of the _Courier_; and oh! that we could rouse him up once more into an archangel’s shape. But what is it to him what so poor a thing as he himself is, who is sublimely indifferent to all other things, and who may be looked upon as a terrible petrification of religion, genius, and the love of liberty. Yet it is too much to think that he who began his career with two Sonnets to Lord Stanhope and Mary Wolstonecraft, in the _Morning Chronicle_, should end with slimy, drivelling abuse of Jacobinism and the French Revolution, in the _Courier_;—that, like some devoted fanatic, he should seek the praise of martyrdom by mangling his own soul with a prostituted, unpaid-for pen, and let out his last breath as a pander to that which would be a falsehood, but that it means nothing.

CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE (CANTO IV.)

_The Yellow Dwarf._] [_May 2, 1818._

‘I do perceive a fury in your words, but nothing wherefore.’

The fourth and last canto of _Childe Harold_ has disappointed us. It is a falling off from the three former ones. We have read it carefully through, but it has left only the same impression on our minds that a troubled dream does,—as disturbed, as confused, as disjointed, as harassing, and as unprofitable. It is an indigestion of the mind. It is the lassitude or feverish tossing and tumbling of the imagination, after having taken a surfeit of pleasure, and fed upon the fumes of pride. Childe Harold is a spoiled child of the Muses—and of Fortune. He looks down upon human life, not more with the superiority of intellect than with the arrogance of birth. The poet translates the lord into high sounding and supercilious verse. It is Agamemnon and Thersites in one person. The common events and calamities of the world afford matter for the effusions of his spleen, while they seem resented as affronts to his personal dignity.

‘And as the soldiers’ bare dead bodies lay,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.’

So when ‘the very age and body of the time’ comes between his Lordship’s speculative notions and hereditary prejudices, he stops the nose at it, and plays some very fantastic tricks before the public, who are lookers-on. In general, the idle wants, the naughty airs, the ill humours and _ennui_, the contempt for others, and disgust at themselves, common to exalted birth and station, are suffered to corrupt and stagnate in the blood that inherits them;—they are a disease in the flesh, an obstinate tumour in the mind, a cloud upon the brow, a venom that vents itself in hateful looks and peevish words to those about them; but in this poem and this author they have acquired ‘an understanding and a tongue,’—are sublimed by imagination, systematised by sophistry—mount the steps of the Capitol, fulmine over Greece, and are poured in torrents of abuse on the world. It is well if the world like it—we are tired of the monotony of his Lordship’s griefs, of which we can perceive neither beginning nor end. ‘They are begot of nothing, born of nothing.’ He volunteers his own Pilgrimage,—appoints his own penance,—makes his own confession,—and all—for nothing. He is in despair, because he has nothing to complain of—miserable, because he is in want of nothing. ‘He has tasted of all earth’s bliss, both living and loving,’ and therefore he describes himself as suffering the tortures of the damned. He is in love with misery, because he has possessed every enjoyment; and because he has had his will in every thing, is inconsolable because he cannot have impossibilities. His Lordship, in fact, makes out his own hard case to be, that he has attained all those objects that the rest of the world admire; that he has met with none of those disasters which embitter their lives; and he calls upon us to sympathise with his griefs and his despair.

This will never do. It is more intolerable than even Mr. Wordsworth’s arbitrary egotism and pampered self-sufficiency. _He_ creates a factitious interest out of nothing: Lord Byron would destroy our interest in all that is. Mr. Wordsworth, to salve his own self-love, makes the merest toy of his own mind,—the most insignificant object he can meet with,—of as much importance as the universe: Lord Byron would persuade us that the universe itself is not worth his or our notice; and yet he would expect us to be occupied with him.

——‘The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature’s works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful ever.’

These lines, written by one of these two poets, might be addressed to both of them with equal propriety.

Lord Byron, in this the fourth and last Canto of _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_, seems to have worn out the glowing fervour of his genius to a _calx_, and to have exhausted the intense enthusiasm of his favourite topics of invective. There is little about himself, historically speaking—there is no plot, no story, no interest excited, no catastrophe. The general reflections are connected together merely by the accidental occurrence of different objects—the Venus of Medici, or the statue of Pompey,—the Capitol at Rome, or the Bridge of Sighs at Venice,—Shakespear, and Mrs. Radcliffe,—Bonaparte, and his Lordship in person,—are brought together as in a phantasmagoria, and with as little attention to keeping or perspective, as in Hogarth’s famous print for reversing the laws of vision. The judgements pronounced are often more dogmatical than profound, and with all their extravagance of expression, common-place. His Lordship does not understand the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus de Medicis, any more than Bonaparte. He cants about the one and against the other, and in doing the last, cuts his own throat. We are not without hopes that his friend Mr. Hobhouse will set this matter right in his ‘Historical Illustrations’; and shew that, however it may suit his Noble Friend’s poetical cross-purposes, politically and practically speaking, a house divided against itself cannot stand. He first, in his disdain of modern times, finds nothing to compare with the grandeur of antiquity but Bonaparte; and then ‘as ’twere in spite of scorn,’ goes on to disdain this idol, which he had himself gratuitously set up, in a strain of effeminate and rancorous abuse worthy of Mr. Wordsworth’s pastoral, place-hunting Muse. Suppose what is here said of ‘the child and champion of Jacobinism’ to be true, are there not venal tongues and venal pens enough to echo it, without his Lordship’s joining in the cry? Will ‘the High Legitimates, the Holy Band’ be displeased with these captious efforts to level the object of their hate to the groveling standard of royalty? Is there not a division of labour even on Mount Parnassus? The other writers of prose and verse, who enter the Temple of Fame by Mr. Murray’s door in Albemarle-street, have their cues. Mr. Southey, for instance, never sings or says, or dreams of singing or saying, that the Prince Regent is not so great a man as Julius Cæsar. Why then should Lord Byron force the comparison between the modern and the ancient hero? It is because the slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is _only_ the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion. The league between tyrants and slaves is a chain of adamant; the bond between poets and the people is a rope of sand. Is this a truth, or is it not? If it is not, let Lord Byron write no more on this subject, which is beyond his height and his depth. Let him not trample on the mighty or the fallen! Bonaparte is not Beppo.

The versification and style of this poem are as perverse and capricious as the method or the sentiments. One stanza perpetually runs on into the next, making the exception the rule, merely because it properly ends in itself; and there is a strange mixture of stately phraseology and far-fetched metaphor, with the most affected and bald simplicity of expression and uncouthness in the rhymes. It is well his Lordship is born so high, or all Grub street would set him down as a plebeian for such lines as the following:—

[‘I lov’d her[46] from my boyhood,’ &c. (stanza 18 and part of 19)].

What will the Critics of the Cockney School of Poetry say to this?—Lie on, and swear that it is high patrician poetry, and of very noble birth.

The introductory stanzas are on the same subject, Venice; and are better.

[‘I stood in Venice, on the bridge of sighs,’ &c. (stanzas 1, 2, and
3)].

The thought expressed in the last stanza, ‘but nature doth not die,’ is particularly fine, and consolatory to the mind. We prefer the stanza relating to the tomb of Petrarch, to any others in the poem:—

[‘There is a tomb in Arqua;—rear’d in air,’ &c. (stanzas 30–33)].

The apostrophe to Tasso and to his patron is written with great force, but in a different spirit:—

[‘Ferrara! in thy wide and grass-grown streets,’ &c. (stanzas 35–38)].

In the same strain, and with an alternate mixture of enthusiasm and spleen, the author pays the tribute of acknowledgement to the artist of ‘the statue that enchants the world,’ to the shades of Michael Angelo, Alfieri, ‘the starry Galileo,’ Machiavel, and to the Bard of Prose, ‘him of the Hundred Tales of Love’—Boccacio.

From these recollections the poet proceeds to describe the fall of the Velino, ‘a hell of waters.’ We cannot say but that we think his powers better suited to express the human passions than to reflect the forms of nature. In the present instance, however, the poet has not invoked the genius of the place in vain: it represents, in some measure, the workings of his own spirit,—disturbed, restless, labouring, foaming, sparkling, and now hid in labyrinths and plunging into the gloom of night. The following description is obscure, tortuous, perplexed, and abortive; yet who can say that it is not beautiful, striking, and impassioned?—

[‘How profound
The gulf! and how the giant element,’ &c. (stanzas 70–72)].

We’ll look no more: such kind of writing is enough to turn the brain of the reader or the author. The repetitions in the last stanza are like interlineations in an imperfect manuscript, left for afterselection; such as, ‘Hope upon a death-bed’—‘Love watching madness,’—‘Unworn its steady dies’—‘Serene its brilliant hues,’—‘the distracted waters’—‘the torture of the scene,’ &c. There is here in every line an effort at brilliancy, and a successful effort; and yet, in the next, as if nothing had been done, the same thing is attempted to be expressed again with the same labour as before, the same success, and with as little appearance of repose or satisfaction of mind.

It is in vain to attempt a regular account of the remainder of this poem, which is a mass of discordant things, incoherent, not gross, seen ‘now in glimmer and now in gloom,’ and ‘moving wild laughter in the throat of death.’ The poem is like the place it describes:—

‘The double night of ages, and of her,
Night’s daughter, Ignorance, hath wrapt and wrap[47]
All round us: we but feel our way to err:
The ocean hath his chart, the stars their map,
And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;
But Rome is as the desart, where we steer
Stumbling on recollections; now we clap
Our hands, and cry “Eureka!” it is clear—
When but some false mirage[48] of ruin rises near.’

This is undoubtedly fine: but Rome was glorious, before she became a ruin; stately, before she was laid low; was ‘seen of all eyes,’ before she was confounded in oblivion. Lord Byron’s poetry, in its irregular and gloomy magnificence, we fear, antedates its own doom; and is buried in a desolation of his own creating, where the mists of fancy cloud, instead of lighting up the face of nature; and the fierceness of the passions, like the Sirocco of the Desart, withers and consumes the heart. We give this judgment against our wills; and shall be happy, should we live to see it reversed by another generation. All our prejudices are in favour of the Noble Poet, and against his maligners. _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ is dedicated to Mr. Hobhouse, and there are passages both in the dedication and the poem which would bribe our opinions, were they to be bribed either by our admiration of genius or our love of liberty. Such are the following passages:—

[‘What from this barren being do we reap,’ &c. (stanzas 93–95)].

But we must conclude; not, however, till we have made two extracts more. We shall not give the passages relating to his separation from his wife, or the death of the Princess Charlotte: we see nothing remarkable in the events, or in his Lordship’s reflections on them. As to his vow of revenge, which is to end in forgiveness, it is unconscious, constitutional caprice and contradiction: it is self-will exerting itself in straining at a violent conclusion; and then, by another exertion, defeating itself by doing nothing. So also he expatiates on the boundless anticipated glories of a female reign, which were never likely, and are now impossible, only that he may rail at lady Fortune in good set terms, and indulge a deeper disgust at all that is real or possible. We will give what is better than such cant,—the description of the dying Gladiator, and the conclusion of the poem:—

[‘I see before me the Gladiator lie,’ &c. (stanzas 140 and 141)].

_O si sic Omnia!_ All, however, is not so. The stanzas immediately following, on the story of the Grecian Daughter and the Apollo Belvidere, are in as false and sophisticated a taste, as these are pure and sublime. But, at the close of the poem, in addressing the pathless ocean,—the self-willed, untamed mighty world of waters,—his genius resumes its beauty and its power, and the Pilgrim sinks to rest in strains as mild and placid as the breath of childhood, that frets itself asleep.

[‘My task is done—my song hath ceased—my theme,’ &c. (stanzas 185 and
186)].

THE OPERA

_The Yellow Dwarf._] [_May 23, 1818._

The Opera is a fine thing: the only question is, whether it is not too fine. It is the most fascinating, and at the same time the most tantalising of all places. It is not the _too little_, but the _too much_, that offends us. Every object is there collected, and displayed in ostentatious profusion, that can strike the senses or dazzle the imagination; music, dancing, painting, poetry, architecture, the blaze of beauty, ‘the glass of fashion, and the mould of form;’ and yet we are not satisfied—because the multitude and variety of objects distracts the attention, and by flattering us with a vain shew of the highest gratification of every faculty and wish, leaves us at last in a state of listlessness, disappointment, and _ennui_. The powers of the mind are exhausted, without being invigorated; our expectations are excited, not satisfied; and we are at some loss to distinguish an excess of irritation from the height of enjoyment. To sit at the Opera for a whole evening, is like undergoing the process of animal magnetism for the same length of time. It is an illusion and a mockery, where the mind is made ‘the fool of the senses,’ and cheated of itself; where pleasure after pleasure courts us, as in a fairy palace; where the Graces and the Muses, waving in a gay, fantastic round with one another, still turn from our pursuit; where art, like an enchantress with a thousand faces, still allures our giddy admiration, shifts her mask, and again disappoints us. The Opera, in short, proceeds upon a false estimate of taste and morals; it supposes that the capacity for enjoyment may be multiplied with the objects calculated to afford it. It is a species of intellectual prostitution; for we can no more receive pleasure from all our faculties at once than we can be in love with a number of mistresses at the same time. Though we have different senses, we have but one heart; and if we attempt to force it into the service of them all at once, it must grow restive or torpid, hardened or enervated. The spectator may say to the sister-arts of Painting, Poetry, and Music, as they advance to him in a _Pas de Trois_ at the Opera, ‘How happy could I be with either, were t’other dear charmer away;’ but while ‘they all tease him together,’ the heart gives a satisfactory answer to none of them;—is ashamed of its want of resources to supply the repeated calls upon its sensibility, seeks relief from the importunity of endless excitement in fastidious apathy or affected levity; and in the midst of luxury, pomp, vanity, indolence, and dissipation, feels only the hollow, aching void within, the irksome craving of unsatisfied desire, because more pleasures are placed within its reach than it is capable of enjoying, and the interference of one object with another ends in a double disappointment. Such is the best account we can give of the nature of the Opera,—of the contradiction between our expectations of pleasure and our uneasiness there,—of our very jealousy of the flattering appeals which are made to our senses, our passions, and our vanity, on all sides,—of the little relish we acquire for it, and the distaste it gives us for other things. Any one of the sources of amusement to be found there would be enough to occupy and keep the attention alive; the _tout ensemble_ fatigues and oppresses it. One may be stifled to death with roses. A head-ache may be produced by a profusion of sweet smells or of sweet sounds: but we do not like the head-ache the more on that account. Nor are we reconciled to it, even at the Opera.

What makes the difference between an opera of Mozart’s, and the singing of a thrush confined in a wooden cage at the corner of the street? The one is nature, and the other is art: the one is paid for, and the other is not. Madame Fodor sings the air of _Vedrai Carino_ in _Don Giovanni_ so divinely, because she was hired to sing it; she sings it to please the audience, not herself, and does not always like to be _encored_ in it; but the thrush that awakes at daybreak with its song, does not sing because it is paid to sing, or to please others, or to be admired or criticised. It sings because it is happy: it pours the thrilling sounds from its throat, to relieve the overflowings of its own heart—the liquid notes come from, and go to the heart, dropping balm into it, as the gushing spring revives the traveller’s parched and fainting lips. That stream of joy comes pure and fresh to the longing sense, free from art and affectation; the same that rises over vernal groves, mingled with the breath of morning, and the perfumes of the wild hyacinth, that waits for no audience, that wants no rehearsing, and still—

‘Hymns its good God, and carols sweet of love.’

This is the great difference between nature and art, that the one _is_ what the other _seems_, and gives all the pleasure it expresses, because it feels it itself. Madame Fodor sings, as a musical instrument may be made to play a tune, and perhaps with no more real delight: but it is not so with the linnet or the thrush, that sings because God pleases, and pours out its little soul in pleasure. This is the reason why its singing is (so far) so much better than melody or harmony, than bass or treble, than the Italian or the German school, than quavers or crotchets, or half-notes, or canzonets, or quartetts, or any thing in the world but truth and nature!

The Opera is the most artificial of all things. It is not only art, but ostentatious, unambiguous, exclusive art. It does not subsist as an imitation of nature, but in contempt of it; and instead of seconding, its object is to pervert and sophisticate all our natural impressions of things. When the Opera first made its appearance in this country, there were strong prejudices entertained against it, and it was ridiculed as a species of the _mock-heroic_. The prejudices have worn out with time, and the ridicule has ceased; but the grounds for both remain the same in the nature of the thing itself. At the theatre, we see and hear what has been said, thought, and done by various people elsewhere; at the Opera, we see and hear what was never said, thought, or done any where but at the Opera. Not only is all communication with nature cut off, but every appeal to the imagination is sheathed and softened in the melting medium of Siren sounds. The ear is cloyed and glutted with warbled ecstacies or agonies; while every avenue to terror or pity is carefully stopped up and guarded by song and recitative. Music is not made the vehicle of poetry, but poetry of music: the very meaning of the words is lost or refined away in the effeminacy of a foreign language. A grand serious Opera is a tragedy wrapped up in soothing airs, to suit the tender feelings of the nurselings of fortune—where tortured victims swoon on beds of roses, and the pangs of despair sink in tremulous accents into downy repose. Just so much of human misery is given as to lull those who are exempted from it into a deeper sense of their own security: just enough of the picture of human life is shewn to relieve their languor, without disturbing their indifference;—not to excite their sympathy, but ‘with some sweet, oblivious antidote,’ to pamper their sleek and sordid apathy. In a word, the whole business of the Opera is to stifle emotion in its birth, and to intercept every feeling in its progress to the heart. Every impression that, left to itself, might sink deep into the mind, and wake it to real sympathy, is overtaken and baffled by means of some other impression, plays round the surface of the imagination, trembles into airy sound, or expires in an empty pageant. In the grand carnival of the senses,

‘The cloister’d heart
Sits squat at home, like Pagod in a niche
Obscure’;—

the pulse of life is suspended, the link which binds us to humanity is broken; the soul is fretted by the sense of excessive softness into a feverish hectic dream; truth becomes a fable, good and evil matters of perfect indifference, except as they can be made subservient to our selfish gratification; and there is hardly a vice for which the mind on coming out of the Opera is not prepared, no virtue of which it is capable!

But what shall we say of the company at the Opera? Is it not grand, select, splendid, and imposing? Do we not see there ‘the flower of Britain’s warriors, her statesmen, and her fair,’ her nobles and her diplomatic characters? First, we only know the diplomatic characters by their taking prodigious quantities of snuff. As to great warriors, some that we know had better not shew their faces—if there is any truth in physiognomy; and as to great men, we know of but one in modern times, and neither Europe nor the Opera-house was big enough to hold him. With respect to Lords and Ladies, we see them as we do gilded butterflies in glass cases. We soon get tired of them, for they seem tired of themselves, and one another. They gape, stare, affect to whisper, laugh, or talk loud, to fill up the vacuities of thought and expression. They do not gratify our predilection for happy faces! But do we not feel the throb of pleasure from the blaze of beauty in the side-boxes? That blaze would be brighter, were it not quenched in the sparkling of diamonds. As for the rest, _the grapes are sour_. Beauty is a thing that is not made only to be seen. Who can behold it without a transient wish to be near it, to adore, to possess it? He must be a fool or a coxcomb, whom the sight of a beauty dazzles, but does not warm; whom a thousand glances shot from a thousand heavenly faces pierce without wounding; who can behold without a pang the bowers of Paradise opening to him by a thousand doors, and barred against him by magic spells!—Bright creatures, fairest of the fair, ye shine above our heads, bright as Ariadne’s crown, fair as the dewy star of evening: but ye are no more to us! There is no golden chain let down to us from you: we have sometimes seen you at a play, or caught a glimpse of your faces passing in a coronet-coach; but——As we are growing romantic, we shall take a turn into the _crush-room_, where, following the train of the great statesmen, the warriors, and the diplomatic characters, we shall meet with a nearly equal display of external elegance and accomplishment, without the pride of sex, rank, or virtue! If the women were all Junos before, here they are all Venuses, and no less Goddesses! Those who complained of inaccessible beauty before, may here find beauty more accessible, and take their revenge on the boxes in the lobbies!

* * * * *

In fine, though we do not agree with a contemporary critic, that the Opera is an entertainment that ought to be held in general estimation, yet we think the present a very proper time for its encouragement. It may serve to assist the _euthanasia_ of the British character, of British liberty, and British morals,—by hardening the heart, while it softens the senses, and dissolving every manly and generous feeling in an atmosphere of voluptuous effeminacy.

ON THE QUESTION WHETHER POPE WAS A POET

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_February, 1818._

The question whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled, and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must have been a great prose writer, that is, he was a great writer of some sort. He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a good one. If, indeed, by a great poet we mean one who gives the utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the contrary way; namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his critical essays; or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point of view, as in his satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity, as in his poems of fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression, and all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his epistles. He was not then distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm, of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation, and the world; with a keen relish for the elegancies of art, or of nature when embellished by art, a quick _tact_ for propriety of thought and manners, as established by the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the sentiments and habitudes of human life, as he felt them, within the little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet not of nature but of art: and the distinction between the two is this. The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with, and to foreknow, and to record the feelings of all men, at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest; for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of it. He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakespeare had an intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart of man in all possible circumstances; Pope had an exact knowledge of all that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his daring flight from heaven to earth through chaos and old night. Pope’s muse never wandered with safety but from his library to his grotto, or from his grotto into his library again. His mind dwelt with greater pleasure on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could describe the faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own person better than the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the face of heaven; a piece of cut glass, or a pair of paste buckles with more brilliance and effect than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun. He would be more delighted with a patent lamp than with ‘the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow,’ that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre, trembles through the cottage casement, and cheers the watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to him was the greatest: the fashion of the day bore sway in his mind over the immutable laws of nature. He preferred the artificial to the natural in external objects, because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with the self-love of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw than admiration of that which was interesting to all mankind alike. He preferred the artificial to the natural in passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating impulses of the one hurried him away with a force and vehemence with which he could not grapple, while he could trifle with the conventional and superficial modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or admire, put them on or off like a masquerade dress, make much or little of them, indulge them for a longer or a shorter time as he pleased, and because, while they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind was the antithesis of strength and grandeur: its power was the power of indifference. He had none of the inspired raptures of poetry: he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion. It cannot be denied that his chief excellence lay more in diminishing than ‘in aggrandizing objects,—in checking than in encouraging our enthusiasm,—in sneering at the extravagancies of fancy or passion, instead of giving a loose to them,—in describing a row of pins and needles rather than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans,—in penning a lampoon or a compliment,—and in praising Martha Blount!

Shakespeare says,—

‘In fortune’s ray and brightness
The herd hath more annoyance by the brize
Than by the tyger: But when the splitting wind
Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,
And flies fled under shade, why then
The thing of courage,
As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathize,
And with an accent tuned i’ th’ self-same key,
Replies to chiding fortune.’

There is hardly any of this rough work in Pope. His muse was on a peace establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered flatteries; his forked lightnings playful sarcasms; for the ‘gnarled oak’ he gives us ‘the soft myrtle’; for rocks, and seas, and mountains, artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a china-jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of the passions, we have

‘Calm contemplation and poetic ease.’

Yet within this retired and narrow circle, how much, and that how exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy, what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new consequence,—where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and slightest shades of difference,—when the little becomes gigantic, the deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the magnifier is, to be sure, held to every thing; but still the exhibition is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or surprised.

ON RESPECTABLE PEOPLE.

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_August 1818._

There is not any term that is oftener misapplied, or that is a stronger instance of the abuse of language, than this same word, _respectable_. By a _respectable man_ is generally meant a person whom there is no reason for respecting, or none that we choose to name: for if there is any good reason for the opinion we wish to express, we naturally assign it as the ground of his respectability. If the person whom you are desirous to characterize favourably, is distinguished for his good-nature, you say that he is a good-natured man; if by his zeal to serve his friends, you call him a friendly man; if by his wit or sense, you say that he is witty or sensible; if by his honesty or learning, you say so at once; but if he is none of these, and there is no one quality which you can bring forward to justify the high opinion you would be thought to entertain of him, you then take the question for granted, and jump at a conclusion, by observing gravely, that ‘he is a very respectable man.’ It is clear, indeed, that where we have any striking and generally admitted reasons for respecting a man, the most obvious way to ensure the respect of others, will be to mention his estimable qualities; where these are wanting, the wisest course must be to say nothing about them, but to insist on the general inference which we have our particular reasons for drawing, only vouching for its authenticity. If, for instance, the only motive we have for thinking or speaking well of another is, that he gives us good dinners, as this is not a valid reason to those who do not, like us, partake of his hospitality, we may (without going into particulars) content ourselves with assuring them, that he is a most respectable man: if he is a slave to those above him, and an oppressor of those below him, but sometimes makes us the channels of his bounty or the tools of his caprice, it may be as well to say nothing of the matter, but to confine ourselves to the safer generality, that he is a person of the highest respectability: if he is a low dirty fellow, who has amassed an immense fortune, which he does not know what to do with, the possession of it alone will guarantee his respectability, if we say nothing of the manner in which he has come by it, or in which he spends it. A man may be a knave or a fool, or both (as it may happen), and yet be a most respectable man, in the common and authorized sense of the term, provided he keeps up appearances, and does not give common fame a handle for no longer keeping up the imposture. The best title to the character of respectability lies in the convenience of those who echo the cheat, and in the conventional hypocrisy of the world. Any one may lay claim to it who is willing to give himself airs of importance, and can find means to divert others from inquiring too strictly into his pretensions. It is a disposable commodity,—not a part of the man, that sticks to him like his skin, but an appurtenance, like his goods and chattels. It is meat, drink, and clothing to those who take the benefit of it by allowing others the credit. It is the current coin, the circulating medium, in which the fictitious intercourse of the world is carried on, the bribe which interest pays to vanity. Respectability includes all that vague and indefinable mass of respect floating in the world, which arises from sinister motives in the person who pays it, and is offered to adventitious and doubtful qualities in the person who receives it. It is spurious and nominal; hollow and venal. To suppose that it is to be taken literally or applied to sterling merit, would betray the greatest ignorance of the customary use of speech. When we hear the word coupled with the name of any individual, it would argue a degree of romantic simplicity to imagine that it implies any one quality of head or heart, any one excellence of body or mind, any one good action or praiseworthy sentiment; but as soon as it is mentioned, it conjures up the ideas of a handsome house with large acres round it, a sumptuous table, a cellar well stocked with excellent wines, splendid furniture, a fashionable equipage, with a long list of elegant contingencies. It is not what a man _is_, but what he _has_, that we speak of in the significant use of this term. He may be the poorest creature in the world in himself, but if he is well to do, and can spare some of his superfluities, if he can lend us his purse or his countenance upon occasion, he then ‘buys golden opinions’ of us;—it is but fit that we should speak well of the bridge that carries us over, and in return for what we can get from him, we embody our servile gratitude, hopes, and fears, in this word respectability. By it we pamper his pride, and feed our own necessities. It must needs be a very honest uncorrupted word that is the go-between in this disinterested kind of traffic. We do not think of applying this word to a great poet or a great painter, to the man of genius or the man of virtue, for it is seldom we can _spunge_ upon them. It would be a solecism for any one to pretend to the character who has a shabby coat to his back, who goes without a dinner, or has not a good house over his head. He who has reduced himself in the world by devoting himself to a particular study, or adhering to a particular cause, excites only a smile of pity, or a shrug of the shoulders at the mention of his name; while he who has raised himself in it by a different course, who has become rich for want of ideas, and powerful from want of principle, is looked up to with silent homage, and passes for a respectable man. ‘The learned pate ducks to the golden fool.’ We spurn at virtue and genius in rags; and lick the dust in the presence of vice and folly in purple. When Otway was left to starve after having produced _Venice Preserv’d_, there was nothing in the phrenzied action with which he devoured the food that choked him, to provoke the respect of the mob, who would have hooted at him the more for knowing that he was a poet. Spenser, kept waiting for the hundred pounds which Burleigh grudged him ‘for a song,’ might feel the mortification of his situation; but the statesman never felt any diminution of his sovereign’s favour in consequence of it. Charles II.’s neglect of his favourite poet Butler did not make him look less gracious in the eyes of his courtiers, or of the wits and critics of the time. Burns’s embarrassments, and the temptations to which he was exposed by his situation, degraded him, but left no stigma on his patrons, who still meet to celebrate his memory, and consult about his monument, in the face of day. To enrich the mind of a country by works of art or science, and leave yourself poor, is not the way for any one to rank as respectable, at least in his lifetime:—to oppress, to enslave, to cheat, and plunder it, is a much better way. ‘The time gives evidence of it.’ But the instances are common.

Respectability means a man’s situation and success in life, not his character or conduct. The city merchant never loses his respectability till he becomes bankrupt. After that, we hear no more of it or him. The justice of the peace, and the parson of the parish, the lord and the squire, are allowed, by immemorial usage, to be very respectable people, though no one ever thinks of asking why. They are a sort of fixtures in this way. To take an example from one of them. The country parson may pass his whole time, when he is not employed in the cure of souls, in flattering his rich neighbours, and leaguing with them to _snub_ his poor ones, in seizing poachers, and encouraging informers; he may be exorbitant in exacting his tithes, harsh to his servants, the dread and bye-word of the village where he resides, and yet all this, though it may be notorious, shall abate nothing of his respectability. It will not hinder his patron from giving him another living to play the petty tyrant in, or prevent him from riding over to the squire’s in his carriage and being well received, or from sitting on the bench of justices with due decorum and with clerical dignity. The poor curate, in the mean time, who may be a real comfort to the bodies and minds of his parishioners, will be passed by without notice. Parson Adams, drinking his ale in Sir Thomas Booby’s kitchen, makes no very respectable figure; but Sir Thomas himself was right worshipful, and his widow a person of honour! A few such historiographers as Fielding would put an end to the farce of respectability, with others like it. Peter Pounce, in the same author, was a consummation of this character, translated into the most vulgar English. The character of Captain Blifil, his epitaph, and funeral sermon, are worth tomes of casuistry, and patched up theories of moral sentiments. Pope somewhere exclaims, in his fine indignant way,

‘What can ennoble sots, or knaves, or cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.’

But this is the heraldry of poets, not of the world. In fact, the only way for a poet now-a-days to emerge from the obscurity of poverty and genius, is to prostitute his pen, turn literary pimp to some borough-mongering lord, canvass for him at elections, and by this means aspire to the same importance, and be admitted on the same respectable footing with him as his valet, his steward, or his practising attorney. A Jew, a stock-jobber, a war contractor, a successful monopolist, a nabob, an Indian director, or an African slave-dealer, are all very respectable people in their turn. A member of parliament is not only respectable, but _honourable_;—‘all honourable men!’ Yet this circumstance, which implies such a world of respect, really means nothing. To say of any one that he is a member of parliament, is to say, at the same time, that he is not at all distinguished as such. No body ever thought of telling you, that Mr. Fox or Mr. Pitt were members of parliament. Such is the constant difference between names and things!

The most mischievous and offensive use of this word has been in politics. By respectable people (in the fashionable cant of the day) are meant those who have not a particle of regard for any one but themselves, who have feathered their own nests, and only want to lie snug and warm in them. They have been set up and appealed to as the only friends of their country and the constitution, while in truth they were friends to nothing but their own interest. With them all is well, if they are well off. They are raised by their lucky stars above the reach of the distresses of the community, and are cut off by their situation and sentiments, from any sympathy with their kind. They would see their country ruined before they would part with the least of their superfluities. Pampered in luxury and their own selfish comforts, they are proof against the calls of patriotism, and the cries of humanity. They would not get a scratch with a pin to save the universe. They are more affected by the overturning of a plate of turtle soup than by the starving of a whole county. The most desperate characters, picked up from the most necessitous and depraved classes, are not worse judges of politics than your true, staunch, thorough-paced ‘lives and fortunes men,’ who have what is called a stake in the country, and see every thing through the medium of their cowardly and unprincipled hopes and fears. London is, perhaps, the only place in which the standard of respectability at all varies from the standard of money. There things go as much by appearance as by weight; and he may be said to be a respectable man who cuts a certain figure in company by being dressed in the fashion, and venting a number of common-place things with tolerable grace and fluency. If a person there brings a certain share of information and good manners into mixed society, it is not asked, when he leaves it, whether he is rich or not. Lords and fiddlers, authors and common council men, editors of newspapers and parliamentary speakers, meet together, and the difference is not so much marked as one would suppose. To be an Edinburgh Reviewer is, I suspect, the highest rank in modern literary society.

ON FASHION

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_September 1818._

‘Born of nothing, begot of nothing.’

‘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 of his gait might easily appear;
For still he far’d as dancing in delight,
And in his hands a windy fan did bear,
That in the idle air he mov’d still here and there.’