Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

dence of having been written under à feudal despotism. A few sentences near the close of his history, which he puts into the mouth of Morton at a convention of the nobles held at Stirling, afford full proof of this assertion. They contain the germ of all the modern improvements in government, and are not inferior to any thing in the Defensio pro populo Anglicano.*

His poetry has the rare quality of delighting, by its niceness of adjust ment, and its musically measured cadence, while it is more adequately replenished with ideas, than perhaps that of any subsequent writer of Latin verse. For a ready instance of the two first qualities, it is sufficient to re fer any one who remembers the delight with which he first perused it, to the dedicatory epigram addressed to Queen Mary before the translation of the psalms. As proof that Buchanan wrote from the impulse of a full mind, as well as for the gratification of one of the finest poetical ears-a few lines from his ode to May might suffice. There is no better verse in all Bembus or Fracastorius, and very little poetry any where equal to the whole of that fine ode, for moral tenderness, and an exquisite sensitiveness of fancy, which looks to nature and all times, as they are associated with human feelings.

In the characters and situations of Knox and of Buchanan, there were some peculiar similarities, and some differences equally striking. Both were ardent lovers of liberty,-both vehement in their tempers,-both had been tried in scenes of disappointment and incertitude far from their native land, -and both were ultimately brought into the strong current of popular politics by a chain of imposing events, which it was not unnatural that the fervid imaginations and enthusiastic propensities, which are most nourished in a period of reformation, should have regarded as influenced by the special and direct interposition of the Almighty. In matters of taste and judgment, however, there was no such parallel. In the lucidus ordo animi, Buchanan leaves Knox far behind. His is the true mens sana, giving elegance of dic

[merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

tion, and almost attraction, even to the grossest historical fables of an ignorant and credulous people,-preserving its equilibrium in the heats and sallies of civil commotion,-not forcing mankind, or expecting greatly of them, in any way so much as by a clear and extended view of their interests. There are passages of the "Admonitioun,"* which have remind< ed us of the invectives of Burke, in his "Letters on a Regicide Peace."

Dr Irving discusses every circumstance connected with the life of Buchanan, and much of what relates to the literary men of his time in Europe, with extreme accuracy. The account of the Portuguese literati is copious, and possesses the interest of making an English reader acquainted with au thors not generally known. This part, however, and the notices of those learned men with whom Buchanan was connected, are digressions; and, as they are long and particular, they lead us away from the main story, so that ordinary persons may forget whether they are reading the memoirs of Buchanan, or of Turnebus, Muretus, or Govea. We are also so unfortunate as to think, that these digressive discussions sometimes oblige us to read of names which may be safely consigned to oblivion, and to refer to authors, who, without any offence against good manners, might remain in their protracted obscurity. To those inquirers, whose familiarity with the learned languages may not equal their laudable thirst for knowledge, a full account of Buchanan's pursuits and connections is valuable:-but to this end, it is not necessary that we should resuscitate all the dry bones that ever wore an academical gown during his stay at the conti nental seats of learning.

Dr Irving is a moderate, and there fore a rational, though a firm friend of civil and religious liberty; and we meet in this book with passages which are far superior to the cold and lifeless speculations of a mere scholar,—and, assuredly, of an higher strain than a careless or impatient reader might be apt to perceive, or ready to admit, if he only looked to their com

* Dr Irving has shewn a commendable attention to the completeness of his work, by printing this very curious tract in the appendix.

pactness and simplicity of enunciation. There is an exemplary coolness of judgment, and calmness of manner, about our author, which is strongly evinced in the management of this biography. He never attempts to reason his reader into an admiration of his theme, by supposing motives which the most clear exposition of Buchanan's conduct, or the most obvious construction of his own language, when he speaks for himself, would not fully warrant. He may fail in ease, or variety, or graphical delineation ;-but he has no fits of languor. He has energy without invective, or assumption, or declamation, or straining for effect. All this may be called inane mediocrity, by those who love a continual smartness of manner and fulness of assertion,and it may not half please those ardent spirits who look back on times that are gone as better than our times, and on the men as perfect who supported their speculative opinions strenuously and successfully in practice at a period of revolution, trying enough, we confess, to internal vigour and capacity of action. But it appears to our old-fashioned eyes, that a man evinces accurate taste, and a masculine understanding, when he never attempts to raise his subject out of its natural limits. In history and biography, severe truth is a cardinal requisite. The one can never be honestly made an agreeable tale, made up of something that did occur, and more that might be imagined, nor the other safely rendered a partial pleading, calculated to bring a frail man much nearer perfection than his own estimate of him self, or the opinion of his contemporaries, could ever have led him to aspire to. The literary, as well as personal character of our age is remarkable, we think, for a struggling vivacity-an appearance of easy powerfulness and careless vigour, which seems to attempt and accomplish great things, more by a strenuous grasp of first principles, and a rapid felicity of representation, than by patient thought and a silent attention to the truth of particulars. Dr Irving's self-denying sobriety in speculation, and full attention to the truth of history, point him out as an honourable exception from those peculiarities which future ages may consider as the odd variety of our own.

Dr Irving's taste for classical literature is pure and highly informed. He has been advantageously known to the public for several years, as the author of a very complete and useful little book on the elements of composition; and his own style, if it wants variety and softness, is not tinged with any thing like vulgarity. The most accurate scrutiny could not produce from the whole of this volume more than two or three instances of peculiarity of diction, or violation of the idiom of our language. The whole shews a taste which has been formed on the best models, or rather, which always seems so much under the guidance of a judgment remarkable for clearness, method, and order, as to require no models to work from.

The former edition of this book contained some asperities of controversy, all of which are suppressed. Throughout the whole, there is not a single attempt to flatter vulgar prejudices; and what is still more virtuous, because there is a temptation to it which is always more difficult to resist,

-we never find this manly writer affording the incense of adulation to great names, or foisting in the pretensions of some considerable living person, in order to speak courteously of them. We know no biographer or historian, who could more firmly exclaim, fiat justicia, than Dr Irving; and as we are quite sure that his book is a full and trust-worthy record, -so we are convinced that it will be long valued by the judicious few who expect moderately, and judge coolly. We bid farewell to him and to it with a feeling of respect, and something like regret that our limits do not allow us to expatiate longer on the merits of either.

The Craniad, or Spurzheim Illustrated; a Poem, in two parts. 12mo. Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1817..

THE Craniad is the worst poem we have now in Scotland. The author has it in his power at once to decide the great craniological controversy: Let him submit his skull to general inspection, and if it exhibits a single intellectual organ, Spurzheim's theory is overthrown.

[merged small][ocr errors]
[blocks in formation]

LORD BYRON has been elected by acclamation to the throne of poetical supremacy; nor are we disposed to question his title to the crown. There breathes over all his genius an air of kingly dignity; strength, vigour, energy, are his attributes; and he wields his faculties with a proud conscious ness of their power, and a confident anticipation of their effect. Living poets perhaps there are, who have taken a wider range, but none who have achieved such complete, such perfect triumphs. In no great attempt has he ever failed; and, soon as he begins his flight, we feel that he is to soar upon unflagging wings-that when he has reached the black and tempestuous elevation of his favourite atmosphere, he will, eagle-like, sail on undisturbed through the heart of clouds, storms, and darkness.

To no poet was there ever given so awful a revelation of the passions of the human soul. He surveys, with a stern delight, that tumult and conflict of terrible thoughts from which other highly gifted and powerful minds have involuntarily recoiled; he calmly and fearlessly stands upon the brink of that abyss from which the soul would seem to shrink with horror; and he looks down upon, and listens to, the everlasting agitation of the howling waters. There are in his poetry feelings, thoughts, sentiments, and passions, that we at once recognise to be human, though we know not whence they come: they break upon us like the sudden flash of a returning dream, like some wild cry from another world. And even those whose lives have had little experience of the wilder passions, for a moment feel that an unknown region of their own souls has been revealed to them, and that there are indeed fearful mysteries in our human

nature.

When this dark and powerful spirit for a while withdraws from the contemplation of his own wild world, and condescends to look upon the ordinary shews and spectacles of life, he often seems unexpectedly to participate in the feelings and emotions of beings with whom it might be thought he could claim no kindred; and thus many passages are to be found in his

poetry, of the most irresistible and overpowering pathos, in which the depth of his sympathy with common sorrows and common sufferers, seems as profound as if his nature knew nothing more mournful than sighs and tears.

We have no intention of drawing Lord Byron's poetical character, and have been led, we know not how, into these very general and imperfect observations. But perhaps the little we have said may in some degree shew, why hitherto this great poet has dealt so seldom with the forms of the external world. He has so deeply looked into the soul of man, and so intensely sympathized with all the struggles there that he has had no feelings or passions to fling away on the mere earth he inhabits. But it is evident that the same powers, which he has so gloriously exerted upon man as their subject, would kindle up and enlighten, or darken and disturb, the features of external nature; and that, if he so willed it, his poetry, instead of being rife with wrath, despair, remorse, and all other agitating passions, might present an equally sublime assemblage of woods, glens, and mountains, of lakes and rivers, cataracts and oceans. In the third canto of Childe Harold, accordingly, he has delivered up his soul to the impulses of Nature, and we have seen how that high communion has elevated and sublimed it. He instantly penetrated into her heart, as he had before into the heart of Man; and, in a few months of solitary wandering among the Alps, his soul became as deeply embued with her glory and magnificence, as if, from youth, he had dedicated himself to no other power, and had for ever devoutly worshipped at her altar. He leapt at once into the first rank of descriptive poets. He came into competition with Wordsworth upon his own ground, and with his own weapons; and in the first encounter he vanquished and overthrew him. His description of the stormy night among the Alps-of the blending the mingling-the fusion of his own soul, with the raging elements around him, is alone worth all the dull metaphysics of the Excursion, and shews that he might enlarge the limits of human consciousness regarding the operations of matter upon mind, as widely as he has enlarged them regarding the operations of mind upon itself.

In the very singular, and, we sus pect, very imperfect poem, of which we are about to give a short account, Lord Byron has pursued the same course as in the third canto of Childe Harold, and put out his strength upon the same objects. The action is laid among the mountains of the Alps the characters are all, more or less, formed and swayed by the operations of the magnificent scenery around them, and every page of the poem teems with imagery and passion, though, at the same time, the mind of the poet is often overborne, as it were, by the strength and novelty of its own conceptions; and thus the composition, as a whole, is liable to many and fatal objections.

But there is a still more novel exhi

bition of Lord Byron's powers in this extraordinary drama. He has here burst into the world of spirits; and, in the wild delight with which the elements of nature seem to have inspired him, he has endeavoured to embody and call up before him their ministering agents, and to employ these wild Personifications, as he formerly employed the feelings and passions of man. We are not prepared to say, that, in this daring attempt, he has completely succeeded. We are inclined to think, that the plan he has conceived, and the principal Character which he has wished to delineate, would require a fuller developement than is here given to them; and accordingly, a sense of imperfection, incompleteness, and confusion, accompanies the mind throughout the perusal of the poem, owing either to some failure on the part of the poet, or to the inherent mystery of the subject. But though on that account it is difficult to comprehend distinctly the drift of the composition, and almost impossible to give any thing like a distinct account of it, it unquestionably exhibits many noble delineations of mountain scenery,many impressive and terrible pictures of passion, and many wild and awful visions of imaginary horror.

Manfred, whose strange and extraordinary sufferings pervade the whole drama, is a nobleman who has for many years led a solitary life in his castle among the Bernese Alps. From early youth he has been a wild misanthrope, and has so perplexed himself with his views of human nature, that he comes at last to have no fixed

principles of belief on any subject-to be perpetually haunted by a dread of the soul's mortality, and bewildered among dark and gloomy ideas concerning the existence of a First Cause. We cannot do better than let this mysterious personage speak for himself. In á conversation, which we find him holding by the side of a mountain-cataract, with the "Witch of the Alps," whom he raises up by a spell "beneath the arch of the sun-beam of the torrent," we find him thus speaking:

"Man. Well, though it torture me, 'tis but the same;

My Pang shall find a voice. From my youth upwards

My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men, Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes; The thirst of their ambition was not mine; The aim of their existence was not mine;

My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my

powers,

Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,

me

I had no sympathy with breathing flesh,
Nor midst the creatures of clay that guided
Was there but one who-but of her anon.
I said, with men, and with the thoughts of
men,

I held but slight communion; but instead,
My joy was in the Wilderness, to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,
Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's
wing

Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge
On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave
Into the torrent, and to roll along
Of river, stream, or ocean, in their flow.
To follow through the night the moving
In these my early strength exulted; or

moon,

The stars and their developement; or catch The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew

dim ;

Or to look, list'ning, on the scattered leaves, While Autumn winds were at their evening

song.

For if the beings,of whom I was one,
These were my pastimes, and to be alone;
Hating to be so,-cross'd me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again. And then I dived,
In my lone wanderings, to the caves of death,
Searching its cause in its effect; and drew
From wither'd bones, and sculls, and heap'd
up dust,

Conclusions most forbidden. Then I pass'd
The nights of years in sciences untaught,
Save in the old time; and with time and toil,

And terrible ordeal, and such penance
As in itself hath power upon the air,
And spirits that do compass air and earth,
Space and the peopled infinite, I made
Mine eyes familiar with Eternity.”—

In another scene of the drama, where

a pious old abbot vainly endeavours to administer to his troubled spirit the consolations of religion, he still farther illustrates his own character.

"Man. Ay.-Father! I have had those
earthly visions

And noble aspirations in my youth,
To make my own the mind of other men,
The enlightener of nations; and to rise
I knew not whither it might be to fall;
But fall, even as the mountain-cataract,
Which having leapt from its more dazzling
height,

Even in the foaming strength of its abyss,
(Which cast up misty columns, that become
Clouds raining from the re-ascended skies,)
Lies low, but mighty still.-But this is past,
My thoughts mistook themselves.

Abbot.

-And wherefore so ?

Man. I could not tame my nature down; for he

Must serve who fain would sway-and sooth and sue

And watch all time-and pry into all place-
And be a living lie-who would become
A mighty thing amongst the mean, and such
The mass are; I disdain to mingle with
A herd, though to be leader-and of wolves.
The lion is alone, and so am I.

Abbot. And why not live and act with other

men?

Man. Because my nature was averse from
life,

And yet not cruel; for I would not make
But find a desolation ;-like the wind,
The red-hot breath of the most lone Simoom,
Which dwells but in the desert, and sweeps
o'er

The barren sands which bear no shrubs to blast,

And revels o'er their wild and arid waves, And seeketh not, so that it is not sought, But being met is deadly; such hath been The course of my existence; but there came Things in my path which are no more."

But besides the anguish and perturbation produced by his fatal scepticism in regard to earth and heaven, vice and virtue, man and God,-Manfred's soul, has been stained by one secret and dreadful sin, and is bowed down by the weight of blood. It requires to read the drama with more than ordinary attention, to discover the full import of those broken, short, and dark expressions, by which he half confesses, and half conceals, even from himself, the perpetration of this inexpiable guilt. In a conversation with a chamois-hunter, in his Alpine cottage, he thus suddenly breaks out :"Man. Away, away! there's blood upon the brim!

Will it then never-never sink in the earth? C. Hun. What dost thou mean? thy senses wander from thee.

[blocks in formation]
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

I saw-and could not staunch it."

From these, and several other passages, it seems that Manfred had conceived a mad and insane passion for his sister, named Astartè, and that she had, in consequence of their mutual guilt, committed suicide. This is the terrible catastrophe which for ever haunts his soul*-drives him into the mountainwilderness-and, finally, by the poig nancy of unendurable anguish, forces

* See Sketch of a Tradition related by a Monk in Switzerland,' page 270.

« ForrigeFortsæt »