by Thomas Moore
“The dirt and sea-weed whence proud Venice rose?”
Is it the canal which runs between the palace and the prison, or the “Bridge of Sighs,” which connects them, that render it poetical? 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? Mr. Bowles will say, perhaps, that the Rialto is but marble, the palaces and churches only stone, and the gondolas a “coarse” black cloth, thrown over some planks of carved wood, with a shining bit of fantastically formed iron at the prow, “without” the water. And I tell him that without these, the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch; and whoever says the contrary, deserves to be at the bottom of that, where Pope’s heroes are embraced by the mud nymphs. There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for the artificial adjuncts above mentioned; although it is a perfectly natural canal, formed by the sea, and the innumerable islands which constitute the site of this extraordinary city.
The very Cloaca of Tarquin at Rome are as poetical as Richmond Hill; many will think more so: take away Rome, and leave the Tibur and the seven hills, in the nature of Evander’s time. Let Mr. Bowles, or Mr. Wordsworth, or Mr. Southey, or any of the other “naturals,” make a poem upon them, and then see which is most poetical, their production, or the commonest guide-book, which tells you the road from St. Peter’s to the Coliseum, and informs you what you will see by the way. The ground interests in Virgil, because it will be Rome, and not because it is Evander’s rural domain.
Mr. Bowles then proceeds to press Homer into his service, in answer to a remark of Mr. Campbell’s, that “Homer was a great describer of works of art.” Mr. Bowles contends, that all his great power, even in this, depends upon their connection with nature. The “shield of Achilles derives its poetical interest from the subjects described on it.” And from what does the spear of Achilles derive its interest? and the helmet and the mail worn by Patroclus, and the celestial armour, and the very brazen greaves of the well-booted Greeks? Is it solely from the legs, and the back, and the breast, and the human body, which they enclose? In that case, it would have been more poetical to have made them fight naked; and Gulley and Gregson, as being nearer to a state of nature, are more poetical boxing in a pair of drawers than Hector and Achilles in radiant armour, and with heroic weapons.
Instead of the clash of helmets, and the rushing of chariots, and the whizzing of spears, and the glancing of swords, and the cleaving of shields, and the piercing of breast-plates, why not represent the Greeks and Trojans like two savage tribes, tugging and tearing, and kicking and biting, and gnashing, foaming, grinning, and gouging, in all the poetry of martial nature, unencumbered with gross, prosaic, artificial arms; an equal superfluity to the natural warrior, and his natural poet. Is there any thing unpoetical in Ulysses striking the horses of Rhesus with his bow (having forgotten his thong), or would Mr. Bowles have had him kick them with his foot, or smack them with his hand, as being more unsophisticated?
In Gray’s Elegy, is there an image more striking than his “shapeless sculpture?” Of sculpture in general, it may be observed, that it is more poetical than nature itself, inasmuch as it represents and bodies forth that ideal beauty and sublimity which is never to be found in actual nature. This at least is the general opinion. But, always excepting the Venus di Medicis, I differ from that opinion, at least as far as regards female beauty; for the head of Lady Charlemont (when I first saw her nine years ago) seemed to possess all that sculpture could require for its ideal. I recollect seeing something of the same kind in the head of an Albanian girl, who was actually employed in mending a road in the mountains, and in some Greek, and one or two Italian, faces. But of sublimity, I have never seen any thing in human nature at all to approach the expression of sculpture, either in the Apollo, the Moses, or other of the sterner works of ancient or modern art.
Let us examine a little further this “babble of green fields” and of bare nature in general as superior to artificial imagery, for the poetical purposes of the fine arts. In landscape painting, the great artist does not give you a literal copy of a country, but he invents and composes one. Nature, in her actual aspect, does not furnish him with such existing scenes as he requires. Even where he presents you with some famous city, or celebrated scene from mountain or other nature, it must be taken from some particular point of view, and with such light, and shade, and distance, &c. as serve not only to heighten its beauties, but to shadow its deformities. The poetry of nature alone, exactly as she appears, is not sufficient to bear him out. The very sky of his painting is not the portrait of the sky of nature; it is a composition of different skies, observed at different times, and not the whole copied from any particular day. And why? Because nature is not lavish of her beauties; they are widely scattered, and occasionally displayed, to be selected with care, and gathered with difficulty.
Of sculpture I have just spoken. It is the great scope of the sculptor to heighten nature into heroic beauty, i.e. in plain English, to surpass his model. When Canova forms a statue, he takes a limb from one, a hand from another, a feature from a third, and a shape, it may be, from a fourth, probably at the same time improving upon all, as the Greek of old did in embodying his Venus.
Ask a portrait painter to describe his agonies in accommodating the faces with which nature and his sitters have crowded his painting-room to the principles of his art: with the exception of perhaps ten faces in as many millions, there is not one which he can venture to give without shading much and adding more. Nature, exactly, simply, barely nature, will make no great artist of any kind, and least of all a poet — the most artificial, perhaps, of all artists in his very essence. With regard to natural imagery, the poets are obliged to take some of their best illustrations from art. You say that a “fountain is as clear or clearer than glass” to express its beauty: —
“O fons Bandusiæ, splendidior vitro!”
In the speech of Mark Antony, the body of Cæsar is displayed, but so also is his mantle: —
“You all do know this mantle,” &c.
“Look! in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through.”
If the poet had said that Cassius had run his fist through the rent of the mantle, it would have had more of Mr. Bowles’s “nature” to help it; but the artificial dagger is more poetical than any natural hand without it. In the sublime of sacred poetry, “Who is this that cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozrah?” Would “the comer” be poetical without his “dyed garments?” which strike and startle the spectator, and identify the approaching object.
The mother of Sisera is represented listening for the “wheels of his chariot.” Solomon, in his Song, compares the nose of his beloved to “a tower,” which to us appears an eastern exaggeration. If he had said, that her stature was like that of a “tower’s,” it would have been as poetical as if he had compared her to a tree.
“The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex,”
is an instance of an artificial image to express a moral superiority. But Solomon, it is probable, did not compare his beloved’s nose to a “tower” on account of its length, but of its symmetry; and making allowance for eastern hyperbole, and the difficulty of finding a discreet image for a female nose in nature, it is perhaps as good a figure as any other.
Art is not inferior to nature for poetical purposes. What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements. A Highlander’s plaid, a Mussulman’s turban, and a Roman toga, are more poetical than the tattooed or untattooed buttocks of a New Sandwich savage, although they were described by William Wordsworth himself like the “idiot in his glory.”
I have seen as many mountains as most men, and more fleets than the generality of landsmen; and, to my mind, a large convoy with
a few sail of the line to conduct them is as noble and as poetical a prospect as all that inanimate nature can produce. I prefer the “mast of some great ammiral,” with all its tackle, to the Scotch fir or the alpine tannen; and think that more poetry has been made out of it. In what does the infinite superiority of “Falconer’s Shipwreck” over all other shipwrecks consist? In his admirable application of the terms of his art; in a poet-sailor’s description of the sailor’s fate. These very terms, by his application, make the strength and reality of his poem. Why? because he was a poet, and in the hands of a poet, art will not be found less ornamental than nature. It is precisely in general nature, and in stepping out of his element, that Falconer fails; where he digresses to speak of ancient Greece, and “such branches of learning.”
In Dyer’s Grongar Hill, upon which his fame rests, the very appearance of nature herself is moralised into an artificial image:
“Thus is nature’s vesture wrought,
To instruct our wandering thought;
Thus she dresses green and gay,
To disperse our cares away.”
And here also we have the telescope; the misuse of which, from Milton, has rendered Mr. Bowles so triumphant over Mr. Campbell: —
“So we mistake the future’s face,
Eyed through Hope’s deluding glass.”
And here a word en passant to Mr. Campbell: —
“As yon summits, soft and fair
Clad in colours of the air,
Which to those who journey near
Barren, brown, and rough appear,
Still we tread the same coarse way —
The present’s still a cloudy day.”
Is not this the original of the far-famed —
“’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue?”
To return once more to the sea. Let any one look on the long wall of Malamocco, which curbs the Adriatic, and pronounce between the sea and its master. Surely that Roman work (I mean Roman in conception and performance), which says to the ocean, “Thus far shalt thou come, and no further,” and is obeyed, is not less sublime and poetical than the angry waves which vainly break beneath it.
Mr. Bowles makes the chief part of a ship’s poesy depend upon the “wind:” then why is a ship under sail more poetical than a hog in a high wind? The hog is all nature, the ship is all art, “coarse canvass,” “blue bunting,” and “tall poles;” both are violently acted upon by the wind, tossed here and there, to and fro, and yet nothing but excess of hunger could make me look upon the pig as the more poetical of the two, and then only in the shape of a griskin.
Will Mr. Bowles tell us that the poetry of an aqueduct consist in the water which it conveys? Let him look on that of Justinian, on those of Rome, Constantinople, Lisbon, and Elvas, or even at the remains of that in Attica.
We are asked, “What makes the venerable towers of Westminster Abbey more poetical, as objects, than the tower for the manufactory of patent shot, surrounded by the same scenery?” I will answer — the architecture. Turn Westminster Abbey, or Saint Paul’s into a powder magazine, their poetry, as objects, remains the same; the Parthenon was actually converted into one by the Turks, during Morosini’s Venetian siege, and part of it destroyed in consequence. Cromwell’s dragoons stalled their steeds in Worcester cathedral; was it less poetical as an object than before? Ask a foreigner on his approach to London, what strikes him as the most poetical of the towers before him: he will point out Saint Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, without, perhaps, knowing the names or associations of either, and pass over the “tower for patent shot,” — not that, for any thing he knows to the contrary, it might not be the mausoleum of a monarch, or a Waterloo column, or a Trafalgar monument, but because its architecture is obviously inferior.
To the question, “Whether the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest?” it may be answered, that the materials are certainly not equal; but that “the artist,” who has rendered the “game of cards poetical,” is by far the greater of the two. But all this “ordering” of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different “orders” of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art.
Tragedy is one of the highest presumed orders. Hughes has written a tragedy, and a very successful one; Fenton another; and Pope none. Did any man, however, — will even Mr. Bowles himself, — rank Hughes and Fenton as poets above Pope? Was even Addison (the author of Cato), or Rowe (one of the higher order of dramatists as far as success goes), or Young, or even Otway and Southerne, ever raised for a moment to the same rank with Pope in the estimation of the reader or the critic, before his death or since? If Mr. Bowles will contend for classifications of this kind, let him recollect that descriptive poetry has been ranked as among the lowest branches of the art, and description as a mere ornament, but which should never form the “subject” of a poem. The Italians, with the most poetical language, and the most fastidious taste in Europe, possess now five great poets, they say, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and, lastly, Alfieri; and whom do they esteem one of the highest of these, and some of them the very highest? Petrarch the sonneteer: it is true that some of his Canzoni are not less esteemed, but not more; who ever dreams of his Latin Africa?
[Footnote 1: Of these there is one ranked with the others for his SONNETS, and two for compositions which belong to no class at all? Where is Dante? His poem is not an epic; then what is it? He himself calls it a “divine comedy;” and why? This is more than all his thousand commentators have been able to explain. Ariosto’s is not an epic poem; and if poets are to be classed according to the genus of their poetry, where is he to be placed? Of these five, Tasso and Alfieri only come within Aristotle’s arrangement, and Mr. Bowles’s class-book. But the whole position is false. Poets are classed by the power of their performance, and not according to its rank in a gradus. In the contrary case, the forgotten epic poets of all countries would rank above Petrarch, Dante, Ariosto, Burns, Gray, Dryden, and the highest names of various countries. Mr. Bowles’s title of “invariable principles of poetry,” is, perhaps, the most arrogant ever prefixed to a volume. So far are the principles of poetry from being “invariable,” that they never were nor ever will be settled. These “principles” mean nothing more than the predilections of a particular age; and every age has its own, and a different from its predecessor. It is now Homer, and now Virgil; once Dryden, and since Walter Scott; now Corneille, and now Racine; now Crebillon, now Voltaire. The Homerists and Virgilians in France disputed for half a century. Not fifty years ago the Italians neglected Dante — Bettinelli reproved Monti for reading “that barbarian;” at present they adore him. Shakspeare and Milton have had their rise, and they will have their decline. Already they have more than once fluctuated, as must be the case with all the dramatists and poets of a living language. This does not depend upon their merits, but upon the ordinary vicissitudes of human opinions. Schlegel and Madame de Stael have endeavoured also to reduce poetry to two systems, classical and romantic. The effect is only beginning.]
Were Petrarch to be ranked according to the “order” of his compositions, where would the best of sonnets place him? with Dante and the others? no; but, as I have before said, the poet who executes best, is the highest, whatever his department, and will ever be so rated in the world’s esteem.
Had Gray written nothing but his Elegy, high as he stands, I am not sure that he would not stand higher; it is the corner-stone of his glory: without it, his odes would be insufficient for his fame. The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenuous boast,
“That not in fancy’s maze he wandered long,
But stoop’d to truth, and moralised his song.”
He should have
written “rose to truth.” In my mind, the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human powers, and has failed in all human hands except Milton’s and Dante’s, and even Dante’s powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances. What made Socrates the greatest of men? His moral truth — his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the very first order of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the “forests” that ever were “walked” for their “description,” and all the epics that ever were founded upon fields of battle. The Georgics are indisputably, and, I believe, undisputedly even a finer poem than the Æneid. Virgil knew this; he did not order them to be burnt.
“The proper study of mankind is man.”
It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call “imagination” and “invention,” the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whiskey in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems. What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect; his moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious.
In speaking of artificial objects, I have omitted to touch upon one which I will now mention. Cannon may be presumed to be as highly poetical as art can make her objects. Mr. Bowles will, perhaps, tell me that this is because they resemble that grand natural article of sound in heaven, and simile upon earth — thunder. I shall be told triumphantly, that Milton made sad work with his artillery, when he armed his devils therewithal. He did so; and this artificial object must have had much of the sublime to attract his attention for such a conflict. He has made an absurd use of it; but the absurdity consists not in using cannon against the angels of God, but any material weapon. The thunder of the clouds would have been as ridiculous and vain in the hands of the devils, as the “villanous saltpetre:” the angels were as impervious to the one as to the other. The thunderbolts become sublime in the hands of the Almighty not as such, but because he deigns to use them as a means of repelling the rebel spirits; but no one can attribute their defeat to this grand piece of natural electricity: the Almighty willed, and they fell; his word would have been enough; and Milton is as absurd, (and, in fact, blasphemous,) in putting material lightnings into the hands of the Godhead, as in giving him hands at all.