Read Ebook: The Southern Literary Messenger Vol. I. No. 10 June 1835 by Various Sparhawk Edward Vernon Editor

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this one ballad stands alone--the father of English heroic poetry.

"Res gestae, regumque, ducumque, et tristia bella, Quo scribi possent numero monstravit Homerus."

But he has attained excellence, without following the path which Homer "has shown;" and without using Homer's "numbers," has sung a great song.

But Surrey added more. His love for the fair haired Lady Geraldine sent him "knight-erranting" among the romances and romantic grounds of Italy; and he is said to have been so well acquainted with the Tuscan tongue, and so well read in Italian authors, as to be a marvel, even in the days when Venice was the Paris of young English noblemen, and the Appenines their Switzerland. It may be as well to quote a few lines from Surrey's poems, as he has the reputation of having introduced much of the southern softness into English verse.

"I never sawe my ladie laye apart Her cornet blacke, in colde, nor yet in heate, Sith first she knew my griefe was growen so greate, But on her face, mine eies mote never rest: Yet synce I knew I dyd her love and serve, Her golden tresses--cladd allway with blacke, Her smyling lookes, that had thus evermore, And that restraynes which I desire so sore: So doth this cornet governe me alacke! In sommer sunne, in winter's breathe, a frost Wherebye the lyghte of her fayre lookes I lost."

Sir Philip Sidney's poetry was not without the faults of his time. It abounds with conceits and strained similes, and the versification is occasionally cramped. Nevertheless, many of his sonnets contain beautiful images and deep sentiment, though a little impoverished by this alloy. But Sidney's reputation was won upon crimson fields, as well as upon poetic mountains. He wooed Bellona, as well as the Muses; and his last great act, when dying at Zutphen, is of itself enough to justify the high admiration of his countrymen.

The ancients were particularly fond of allegory. A field as vast as could be desired was here opened for their poets. The whole heathen mythology was a splendid allegory. Virgil's AEnead may be called an allegory. As Eneas conducted the remnant of his countrymen from the Trojan ruins to a new settlement in Italy, so Augustus, from the ruins of the aristocracy, modelled a completely new government. I have not leisure to pursue the parallel. Homer has in the Odyssey many allegorical fables; as for instance those of Circe and Calypso. In imitation of these, Virgil introduced his Dido. Going farther on we find the love of allegory increasing in Italy. Ariosto's Alcina and the Armida of Tasso are "copies from the copy" of Virgil; and coming on English ground we find Spenser stealing from Tasso. As for the kinds of poetry in which allegory should be used--In an epic, persons of the "imaginary life," such as Virgil's

Mr. Pope's remarks in the preface to his pastorals are evidently correct. "The simplest states of life and feeling best suit this style of poetry." Spenser's early pastorals, written

"amongst the cooly shade Of the green alders by the Mulla's shore,"

But the Fairy Queen is his wonderful work. The elegant and sometimes magnificent beauty of that lay, where the "great bard"

"In sage and solemn tunes hath sung Of tourneys and of trophies hung, Of forests and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear"--

has elevated his name to the high place which it fills with such brilliancy. Every poetic palate will relish "the grapes of hidden meaning so abundant under the vine-leaves of his exquisite allegory."

"Spenser and Chaucer, instead of being forced into death by their antiquated language, will, by their use of it, perpetuate its remembrance. The ancient English is their servant. They are not and never will be its victims."

"words-- Spoke in the mermaid"--

but in such a company, wit and humor must have been gods of the entertainment. We are told that in table debate, "Jonson was like a great Spanish gallion, and Shakspeare an English man of war. Master Jonson was built far higher in learning; solid but slow in his performances. Shakspeare lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." We can easily fancy the plethoric Ben writhing and chafing under the quickness of his adversary's attacks.

"Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed That every word doth almost tell my name Showing their birth and where they did proceed? O know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument."

This brooding and inward looking is a common habit. Chatterton, Kirk White, and Dermody, have dissected their very hearts. Byron lives in his vagrant "Childe," and bating some most disgusting affectation in his Corsair--Lara--Giaour. Shelley groans with his Prometheus--breathes in his Laon--and draws his own image with the life of his Helen. This may have been the case with Shakspeare. Giving free scope to his heart's inmost workings, he has given posterity, in his sonnets, a record of feeling so expressed as to render it easy to build upon it a fabric of fact--a true and accurate 'life.'

"Why should my heart think that a several plot Which my heart knows the wide world's common place?"

Then pauses in the midst of the deeply affecting portraiture of self-feeling, to whisper the exquisite self-excuse: "How could

Love's eye be true That is so vexed with watching and with tears."

Perhaps self-portraiture might be even detected in his plays. Goethe's comprehension of the incomprehensible Hamlet, may have been a picture of Shakspeare's self: violent ambition acting upon the poet's fine nature, as other passions did upon that of Hamlet.

I have occupied so much space with that part of Shakspeare's history little known, that it has given me an excuse for shunning the beaten track altogether. I will however quote Dryden's eulogy, as it is short and famous for its pith.

"He was the man who of all modern and perhaps all ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clinches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

'Quantum lenta solent inter viberna cupressi.'"

Old Ben, as he was called, was once young, but the history of his youth is rather cloudy. It seems probable, however, that the accounts delivered us by his contemporaries, are true, notwithstanding Mr. Gifford's sweeping denial. Following them, we learn, that Ben's step-father was a bricklayer; that Ben himself "served at the trade," until he left it from weariness, and joined a company of strolling players: that he enlisted and went with the English army into Flanders, where he "killed his man, and bore off the spoils." His prime and after life were spent in literary pursuits.

Old Ben was a quarrelsome, peevish companion; his body that of a bloated giant; his face filthy, with a scorbutic affection, or, as Decker quaintly says, "a face par-boiled, punched full of eyelet holes, like the cover of a warming pan." His literary quarrels with Decker, Marston, and other "men of London," eventuated in a surly retreat on the part of Jonson. He was driven from comedy to Tragedy, and we find him closing one of his poetic defences with the consoling reflection, that

"There's something come into my thought, That must and shall be sung, high and aloof, Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof."

But the poet "died of sack," and lies in Westminster with a plain slab above him, on which are these words:

"O RARE BEN JONSON!"

"I grieve, yet dare not shew my discontent; I love, and yet am forst to seem to hate; I doe, yet dare not say I ever meant; I seeme starke mute, but inwardly do prate; I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned, Since from myself my other self I turned."

"DRINKING.

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks and gapes for drink again; The plants suck from the earth, and are With constant drinking fresh and fair; The sea itself, Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up, So filled that they o'erflow the cup. The busy sun, Drinks up the sea; and when he's done, The moon and stars drink up the sun: They drink and dance by their own light; They drink and revel all the night. Nothing in nature's sober found, But an eternal health goes round; Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high; Fill all the glasses there; for why Should every creature drink but I? Why, man of morals, tell me why?"

The question in the last line, is easily answered. If in no other way, by the ridiculous death of Polycrates' minion, the immortal Anacreon, who lost his mortality through the agency of an ingrate grape stone.

"A genius universal as his theme; Astonishing as chaos; as the bloom Of blowing Eden, fair; as heaven, sublime,"

Rimmon, too--he so dreaded by the "men of Abbana and Pharphar;" and the wily Mammon,

Comparisons have been instituted between Milton and Dant?; but however excellent the Florentine may be, he had not the grasp, nor the soaring power of the English poet. The images of Dant?, pass by like the phantasms on a wall, clear indeed, and picturesque; but although true, in a great measure to fact, wanting in reality. They have complexion and shape, but not flesh or blood. Milton's earthly creatures have the flush of living beauty upon them, and shew the changes of human infirmity. They inhale the odors of the garden of Paradise, and wander at will over lawns and flowers: they listen to God; they talk to angels; they love, and are tempted, and fall! and with all this there is a living principle about them, and they are brought before the reader, and made, not the shadows of what once existed, but present probable truths. His fiercer creations possess the grandeur of dreams, but they have vitality within them also, and in character and substance are as solid as the rock.

His "Il Pensoroso," L'Allegro, and many of his sonnets, are enriched by an antique vein. "Barbaric pearl and gold," crusted with age, mingle with the airy and twinkling gems of his fancy. His spirit was, at times, idle, dreaming, and voluptuous. He sometimes seems as though he had slumbered through summer evenings in caves or forests, by solitary streams, or by the murmuring ocean.

These remarks are confined to his sublimity; but beauty, tender beauty, was on the catalogue of his excellencies. I heard a lady once liken Milton's mind to a sea shell. The wildest and most terrible blasts, the gentlest and most honeyed breathings issue from the same secret depths.

Milton has many singularities. One which, Addison I believe, praises, is a habit of repeating in the answer the words of the question. Take for example, these lines in Comus:

"Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night? I did not err: there does a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night."

He was also a pedant; but pedantry should only call forth censure, when coupled with weakness. He used inversion to excess; about the propriety of which no two critics agree. And any other faults than these excusable ones, it would be difficult to discover.

In his Sampson Agonistes, he manifested great solidity and power: in his Lycidas, the most exquisitely pathetic elegance; in his Comus, a fine wandering philosophy. All these qualities were united in his Paradise Lost, and in the "Paradise Regained."

"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."

Hudibras is well known as a rough satire, but few, even of those familiar with that poem, I presume, ever thought of giving Butler credit for the refinement of thought and style so frequently entwined about masses of obscurity and ridiculous vulgarity. These silver threads are often visible to the searching eye, and lead the student to believe, that had the satirist not fallen into the vein, since his day called Hudibrastic, he would have taken fair place among the followers of Wyat.

Butler was, in his intercourse with the world, dull and unmoved, wholly wanting in the rich humor for which his writings are so famous. King Charles could scarcely be persuaded, that a man, to all appearances, so stupid, could be the author of so much written wit.

In one night, Dryden began and completed the greatest ode in the English language. The ode to St. Cecilia stands an unrivalled example of lyric excellence. The ode by Pope with the same title, that by Addison sung on the same day, fall far short of it, as do Cowley's famous paraphrases from Pindar. Indeed, Campbell's Last Man is the only lyric poem in the language at all akin in merit to that of Dryden.

Pindar full of the spirit of his age, committed no extravagance in the opinion of those who heard him at the Olympic games. But being regarded as the father of lyric poetry, his wildness was imitated in after ages, when that spirit was departed. This led to a great many extravagant absurdities in Italy and in England. Poets made Pindar their master and forgot Horace. The odes of the fifteenth century are scarcely intelligible; and how those who preach simplicity, and complain that Shelly's obscurity renders his poetry a sealed book, can, as I have sometimes heard them do--applaud Cowley for the beauty of his Pindarics is rather wonderful. In this unnatural state the ode fell into Dryden's hands, and he new-modelled it with strange felicity.

As a translator, Dryden shunned the latitude of those who, like Cowley, paraphrased instead of translating, and at the same time avoided the opposite evil. His translations are sufficiently accurate to convey the original author's meaning, and sufficiently polished to please an ear not too fastidious. He has fallen into error by carrying out what he calls his principle of adaptation too far. It was his opinion that "translation should be adapted to the present." For example, that the sailors of Virgil should speak the sea phrases of modern times, in order to make the description seem natural to the modern reader. This principle he carried on shore too, and many laughable instances of its application are to be found in his version of the AEneid. He translates--

"Laeva tibi tellus, et longo laeva petantur AEquora circuitu: dextrum fuge et littas"--

"Tack to the larboard and stand off to sea Veer starboard sea and land."

A direction which Scott suspects would have been unintelligible not only to Palinurus, but to the best pilot in the British navy.

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