A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century. Henry A. Beers

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СКАЧАТЬ poles. "So they are," admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy. … Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. … Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any other unenclosed down. … There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or the canals? … Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than Rome itself? … Without these the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch. … There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington."

      There was something futile about this whole discussion. It was marked with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular, the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction as was attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher synthesis, man and all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned:

      "Nature is made better by no mean

       But nature makes that mean: so over that art

       Which you say adds to nature, is an art

       That nature made: the art itself is nature."

      Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, i.e., with the life of man in society, but how differently! The reason why Pope's poetry fails to satisfy the heart and the imagination resides not in his subjects—so far Campbell and Byron were right—but in his mood; in his imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the highest qualities of the poet's soul. I may illustrate this by an arrow from Byron's own quiver. To prove how much poetry may be associated with "a simple, household, 'indoor,' artificial, and ordinary image," he cites the famous stanza in Cowper's poem to Mrs. Unwin:

      "Thy needles, once a shining store,

       For my sake restless heretofore.

       Now rust disused and shine no more,

       My Mary."

      Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from "The Rape of the

       Lock," which also contains an artificial image:

      "On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore

       Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore."

      What is the difference? It is in the feeling of the poet Pope's couplet is very charming, but it is merely gallantry, a neatly turned compliment, playful, only half sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugared words; while in Cowper's lines the humble domestic implement is made sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection with which it is associated. The reason why Pope is not a high poet—or perhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word—is indicated by Coleridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sentence already quoted; that Pope's poetry both in matter and diction was "characterised not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry."

      Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the controversy; his instinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist. As a poet in the minor key, he was tolerable, but as a prose writer, he was a very dull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy; he tried to be sarcastic and couldn't, he had damnable iteration. Lowell speaks of his "peculiarly helpless way," and says: "Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose." Indeed, the most interesting feature of the Pope controversy is Byron's part in it and the light which it sheds on his position in relation to the classic and romantic schools. Before the definite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked Bowles for his depreciation of Pope, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809), in a passage in which he wished that Bowles had lived in Pope's time, so that Pope might have put him into the "Dunciad."

      It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron's evidently sincere admiration for Pope with the ultra-romantic cast of his own poetry—romantic, as Pater says, in mood if not in subject. In his early fondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his exaltation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, of the desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of his verse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in the work—in all these particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to have had little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron—and William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side—viz., his wit and understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides the manuscript of "Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain "Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he was eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "Childe Harold." "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is a thoroughly Popeian satire, and "The Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in ottava rima, is one of the best personal satires in English. It has all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had. Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his contemporaries."

      With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and he delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was everything that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his "object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; he thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun with him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled "Some Observations upon an article in Blackwood's Magazine," [15] contains a long passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary poetry—a passage which is important not only as showing Byron's opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the public hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second volume for twenty-six years. "The great cause of the present deplorable state of English poetry," writes Byron, "is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets, both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect and harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says, "had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope … but they have been joined in it by … the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion, where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"? To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he will undertake to find more lines teeming with imagination in Pope than in any two living poets. "In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got instead? … The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and unintelligible romances imitated from Scott СКАЧАТЬ