SELECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS, No. IV. PAINTING, ALLITERATION, EXPRESSION, AND ASSOCIATION, IN POETRY. Ir, in order to claim any share in the honours of Poetry, it were necessary for the candidate to combine in his productions all the arts and embellishments of which they are susceptible, he might exclaim with the friend of Imlac, in the Abyssinian story, "You have convinced me that it is impossible to be a poet." But in the absence of that luminous and complete genius, which at long intervals shines upon the world in the person of Homer, of Shakspeare, or of Milton, we turn with delight to the more fragmentary lustre of a Tasso, an Akenside, or a Collins. The Muse has talked with many at the door of her tent, who have never been admitted to behold the revelations of her perfect loveliness, or to hear unfolded the oracles of her mysteries. It is only for her dearest children-and often in the darkest hour of sorrow and of penury-that the ambrosial cloud is dissolved, and their celestial mother smiles upon them, imparting to their intellectual stature a loftier bearing, and breathing over their features the perpetual serenity and bloom of youth. Venus shed her beauty upon the form and the countenance of her son; the Muse pours it upon the mind of the poet : Namque ipsa decoram Casariem nato genitrix, lumenque juventæ The "book of faëry land” may, indeed, lie closed, and its brazen clasps resist the hand of the ardent aspirant after glory; he may not be able to summon again the enchantments of Ariosto, or build anew the Bower of Spenser; or rear columns, radiant and costly as those which support the poetic architecture of Milton; but he may still open one of the springs of tenderness in our bosoms, or delight us with glimpses of verdant retirements and domestic enjoyments. We will not despise the colours of the plumage, because it has not the vigorous sweep of the eagle; nor the sparkling lustre and music of the fountain, because it does not roll with the majestic fulness of a river. The true poet will, however, strain every nerve to reach the goal, although his strength be altogether unequal to the attempt, and though the prize has often faded from his grasp. The pilgrim of the desert is cheered even by the mirage, and so the poet is led onward by the dancing lights of a buoyant and hopeful fancy. That immense and indefinite excellence, which Cicero yearned after, has always beamed before the intellectual eyes of genius, whether in poetry, oratory, or art. A very beautiful anecdote has been related of the great sculptor Thorwalden, which affords an apt illustration. A friend, who called upon him one day, found him apparently much depressed in spirits; to whom, inquiring the occasion of his distress, the sculptor replied: "My genius is decaying." "What do you mean?” said the visitor-“ Why, here is my statue of Christ; it is the first of my works that I have ever felt satisfied with. Till now, my idea had always been so far beyond what I could execute: but is no longer so I shall never have a great idea." Undoubtedly, when the mind is satisfied with its own creation, the breath of inspiration has departed. But to pursue this interesting theme would divert us from the subject of the present reflections, which more peculiarly apply to the apparatus, than to the invention of the poet. Among these implements,-if the metaphor may be used, for capturing the attention and sensibility of the reader, painting, by happily selected and artfully disposed epithets, is the most important; its success, however, must depend in a great measure upon the language of the country in which the poet is born, and in which his thoughts have been nurtured. A French Homer could not write an Iliad in his own dialect: and here it was that Greece surpassed the world, not less than in originality of sentiment. The Athenian possessed an instrument of poetic effect in his language, with which we are unable to contend. In it the Sculptor of the Fancy, so to speak, found a material, plastic in the highest degree, and flowing with facility into every attitude and every form of expression. The clay was not more flexible to the hand of Praxiteles, than the language to Homer. Here, to adopt, while we extend, the sentiments of a very ingenious and reflective writer, were words and numbers for the boisterous mirth of Aristophanes, the milder grace of Philemon, and the polished irony of Menander; for the burning strains of Sappho, or the elegiac tenderness of Simonides. Here Theocritus found the colours to paint his pastoral landscapes, and Æschylus to light up the solemn scenery of heroic Fable; and Sophocles to delineate the features of love; and Euripides to pourtray the language of the heart, and the tear of Pity. Wherever we turn, we behold the Graces illuminating and harmonising all the elements of learning. Aristotle and Plato found their language equally adapted to the utterance of their wisdom. The one "methodic, orderly; subtle in thought, sparing in ornament; with little address to the passions or imagination; but exhibiting the whole with such a pregnant brevity, that in every sentence we seem to read a page." The other employing a lucidness and purity of diction, through which the severe and dignified features of his conceptions shine in unruffled beauty. The preceding opinion of Aristotle, though authorized by his surviving works, is undoubtedly unjust to his general character. A belief is daily extending itself among the learned, that the remains of the Stagyrite comprise only, as it were, heads of his lectures; rough notes for enlargement and illustration. And this hypothesis is countenanced by the splendid passage preserved in the translation of Cicero, in which we discover all the fire of the poet, and all the ornament of the rhetorician. The Greek language long retained an overflowing spirit of vitality, which permeated every vein; and after the lapse of twenty centuries is not altogether extinguished: so that in our own time, it has been found "easier to grow Greek words than English." Pope, who undoubtedly appreciated the true spirit of the Grecian Epic, however he may have failed in transfusing it, mentions the compound words of Homer as being one of the marks or moles, by which every common eye distinguishes him at the first glance. We acknowledge him, he says, as the father of poetic diction, the first who taught that language of the gods to men. His expression resembles the colouring of the great masters, which discovers itself to be laid on boldly, and executed rapidly. Hence Aristotle might exclaim with justice, that he was the only poet who had discovered living words-all his imagery burns with the intense warmth of his invention-an arrow is impatient to leap from the bow; the spear thirsts to drink the blood of the enemy. But, as this acute, though somewhat underrated, critic has remarked, the expression never swells beyond the sentiment, but the sentiment moulds the diction, contracting or expanding it. And in proportion to the warmth of a thought, will be found the brightness of the expression; the one becoming more conspicuous as the other deepens in strength. His compound words make him the happiest painter by epithets. Pope calls them a sort of supernumerary pictures of the persons or things to which they are united; whether we see the tossing of Hector's plume in the epithet zogubaiones, or the waving landscape of Mount Neritus in that of serves. Similar in spirit is the passage in the Theogony of Hesiod, describing the love distilled from the unnerving eyelids of the Graces: Των καὶ ἀπο βλεφαρων έρος είβετο δερκομένων Λυσιμελής.-ν. 910. No epithet more expressive of the influence of beauty could have been selected than Avorians, although it sounds somewhat harshly in its English form. Hobbes awoke the censure of Dryden for affirming the chief beauty of an epic poem to reside in the diction; but, though not the first, it is among the first, of the poet's qualities. Our elder poets, in particular, have delighted to paint by epithets. Of the Elizabethan writers, many of their compounds glow with the most brilliant sunshine of fancy. Drayton has " silver-sanded shore," the "myrrh-breathing zephyr," and numberless others of equal sweetness. Shakespeare sows his page with them, as the morning scatters her rays, with inexhaustible richness and lustre of invention. In Sylvester, the early favourite of Milton and Dryden, we find the "opal-colour'd morn," and the "flow'rymantled earth." Addison has commended the abundance of these glowing words in the more youthful poems of Milton. He enriched his Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained with almost equal abundance; whether describing the sky-tinctured grain of Raphael's plumes, or the sable-vested night, or the lovelaboured notes of the nightingale. It has been said, that as a metaphor is a short simile, so one of Homer's epithets is a short description. The observation belongs with equal truth to Milton, who by the word "imbrown'd the noontide bowers," produces the very effect desired. It is the property of a poetical picture to convert the reader into a spectator, by the vivid exhibition of the circumstance described. So Silius Italicus, by a single line, brings the boat before us, and makes us hear the lashing of the oars, and the dripping foam of the sea: At patulo surgens jamdudum ex æquore, late Centeno fractus spumabat verbere pontus.-Lib. ii. 487. The art in which Gray almost rivalled Virgil, and by which he has secured an immortality of fame, was his selection of epithets; for he brought very few of his own. Thus "the glittering shafts of war," assigned to Hyperion, come from the lucida tela diei of Lucretius; the " azure deep of air," from the cæli fretum of Ennius; the "twittering swallow," from the strepit hirundo of Ausonius; the "brook that babbles by," from the loquaces lymphæ of Horace; the dancers many-twinkling feet,” from the μαρμαρυγας θηειτο ποδων οι Homer. In his letters, he described from nature; in his poetry, from books. Nothing could be more inappropriate than the epithet of "purple" applied to an English spring, although in the Greek, Italian, or Provençal poets, it was very correctly introduced. In an English ode it is only an exotic image, imported by the fancy; like the "purple light of youth," in Virgil, or of "Love," in Ovid. Pliny relates an anecdote of an ancient painter, who, having produced a picture abounding in character and expression, was mortified, upon its exhibition, to hear the warmest praises lavished upon a partridge which he had introduced into the corner: he effaced it immediately. Sir Joshua Reynolds quotes the story, to show the great and true style of antique painting. The illustration may be applied with equal propriety and force to ancient poetry. Nothing strikes the beholder more powerfully in the contemplation of the descriptions of Homer, Virgil, and the tragic writers of Greece, than the simple majesty of their groupings; in which the beauty of the delineation is never sacrificed to sudden violence of effect, either in posture or in colouring. Mr. Coleridge even hesitated to acknowledge the Homeric genuineness of the danguler yeλaoaoa, which sounded to him, he said, more like the prettiness of Bion or Moschus. But the critic must have been a very superficial observer of human nature, if he believed the justice of his own remark; for what could be more natural than that the joy of the mother, in clasping her babe, should be overcast by apprehensions for the safety of its father in the fearful combats to which he was returning? Every proverbial expression must have its origin in universal sympathy. Smiling through tears, is a familiar phrase to represent the very common combination and struggle of hope with sorrow: it occurs in Chaucer, and, we believe, in Lydgate. There is a remark of the learned Buttman upon Homer, which it may be beneficial to remember; that while the tragic and later poets constructed for themselves bold and ornamented expressions, the epic poets, on the contrary, employed a fixed and ascertained language, which they never changed in order to become poetical. This language, in its simplicity and beauty, expired with Plato. Virgil, with that consummate delicacy of attention which has made his poetry the most charming in the world, very rarely breaks in upon the unity alluded to. In two or three instances, however, his taste is supposed to have slept; and, among others, in the magnificent description of a storm, in the first Georgic: Sæpe etiam immensum cœlo venit agmen aquarum, Geor. i. Alison considers the lines in italics not perfectly free from liability to conjecture; and regards the implentur fosse, in particular, an unnecessary and degrading circumstance, when compared with the general grandeur of the picture. The unity of the description, he thinks, is destroyed. Upon this point we venture to differ from him, and rather esteem the familiar truth of the circumstance a proof of the rural taste of the author. If the reader will take the trouble to compare this passage with Dryden's translation of the earlier portion, he will perceive the full force of this painting and expression in poetry, and how difficult it is to preserve them in a copy. Campbell observes, with his accustomed elegance, that Virgil's three lines and a half might challenge the sublimest pencil of Italy. His words are no sooner read than, with the rapidity of light, they collect a picture before the mind, which stands confessed in all its parts. There is no interval, he says, between the objects, as they are presented to our perception. At one and the same moment we behold the form, the uplifted arm, and dazzling thunderbolts of Jove, amidst a night of clouds; the earth trembling, and the wild beasts scudding for shelter-fugere: they have vanished while the poet describes them. This is the true magic of the pencil; this is the making of life, as Davenant called it, which constitutes the spell of the real poet. Cowper used to say that, in reading a book of travels, be became the friend and companion of the traveller. So is it with the reader and the poet; he never loses sight of him, whether it be Horace leisurely journeying in a litter to his country farm, or Chaucer leading the Pilgrims out of the Tabard in the Borough. We see the foaming horses of Hector, and the gliding form of Helen; or shudder with Lucan in the desert; or weep with the stricken mother of Marcellus: and these effects are the result, oftentimes, of a single stroke. In the following vivid description of the onset of the Caledonian boar, Ovid, in the last line, causes us to behold, as it were, the furious bound of the animal : Concava vallis erat, quá se demittere rivi Met., lib. viii. The flash of lightning was not more instantaneous than the spring of the boar. Another celebrated passage in the Georgics, which has not escaped censure, is the account of the mortality among the cattle: Ecce autem duro fumans sub vomere taurus Georg. iii. Without attempting to palliate the impropriety of taste manifested in the commencement of this description-an impropriety, however, arising out of the vividness of the poet's conception, and which might be supported by the authority of Homer, and countenanced by the example of some of our own sublime writers-we would point out the beauty of the succeeding incidents; the husbandman sorrowfully plodding over the furrows to separate the oxen, and leaving the plough in the midst of the field. Nothing can be more picturesque, or, at the same time, more affecting. When we come to examine more carefully the composition of the Georgics, we shall have abundant cause to admire the felicitous manner in which the poet heightens his pictures by the introduction of some natural object. He gives us a glimpse of rural scenery even through the grandeur of an historical procession. While we hang upon the sublime unity and simplicity of Raphael, we can still turn a loving eye upon the natural touches of Gainsborough. Mr. Coleridge has expressed his surprise at Milton's silence respecting the Italian painters, or of the art in general, although, in the following verses from the seventh book of Paradise Lost, he appears to have copied the fresco in the Sistine chapel at Rome: Now half appear'd The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane. Adam bending over the sleeping Eve was the only other proper picture which Mr. Coleridge remembered in our great Epic. The passage (Book V. v. 8), which is well known, is one of surpassing loveliness, with all the graceful outline and bland colouring of Raphael. * Campbell's Essay on English Poetry, p. 259. |