Part 19 (1/2)
Gray's _Elegy_.
The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry At every lewd, low character, 'That's _I_'.
Dryden's _Prologue to the Pilgrim_.
What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
_About two hundred pounds a-year._ And that which was proved true before, Prove false again? _Two hundred more._
_Hudibras._
Compound for sins they are _inclin'd to_, By d.a.m.ning those they have _no mind to_.
_Id._
----Stor'd with deletery _med'cines_, Which whosoever took is _dead since_.
_Id._
Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler to force his rhyme, thus showing a laughing wilful power over the most stubborn materials:
Win The women, and make them draw in The men, as Indians with a _female_ Tame elephant inveigle _the_ male.
_Hudibras._
He made an instrument to know If the moon s.h.i.+nes at full or no; That would, as soon as e'er she _shone, straight_ Whether 'twere day or night _demonstrate_; Tell what her diameter to an _inch is_, And prove that she's not made of _green cheese_.
_Id._
p.r.o.nounce it, by all means, _grinches_, to make the joke more wilful.
The happiest triple rhyme, perhaps, that ever was written, is in _Don Juan_:
But oh! ye lords of ladies _intellectual_, Inform us truly,--haven't they _hen-peck'd you all_?
The sweepingness of the a.s.sumption completes the flowing breadth of effect.
Dryden confessed that a rhyme often gave him a thought. Probably the happy word 'sprung' in the following pa.s.sage from Ben Jonson was suggested by it; but then the poet must have had the feeling in him.
--Let our trumpets sound, And cleave both air and ground With beating of our drums.
Let every lyre be strung, Harp, lute, theorbo, _sprung_ _With touch of dainty thumbs_.
Boileau's trick for appearing to rhyme naturally was to compose the second line of his couplet first! which gives one the crowning idea of the 'artificial school of poetry'. Perhaps the most perfect master of rhyme, the easiest and most abundant, was the greatest writer of comedy that the world has seen,--Moliere.
If a young reader should ask, after all, What is the quickest way of knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best, and so on? the answer is, the only and twofold way: first, the perusal of the best poets with the greatest attention; and, second, the cultivation of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every true reader of poetry partakes a more than ordinary portion of the poetic nature; and no one can be completely such, who does not love, or take an interest in, everything that interests the poet, from the firmament to the daisy,--from the highest heart of man to the most pitiable of the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in hand, marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets the attention, realizes the greatest amount of enjoyment, and facilitates reference. It enables the reader also, from time to time, to see what progress he makes with his own mind, and how it grows up towards the stature of its exalter.
If the same person should ask, What cla.s.s of poetry is the highest? I should say, undoubtedly, the Epic; for it includes the drama, with narration besides; or the speaking and action of the characters, with the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to relate all well for so long a time, particularly in the pa.s.sages least sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this cla.s.s has included the greatest poet, is another question still under trial; for Shakespeare perplexes all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer; though, if a judgement may be drawn from his early narratives (_Venus and Adonis_, and the _Rape of Lucrece_), it is to be doubted whether even Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that incessant activity and superfoetation of thought, a little less of which might be occasionally desired even in his plays;--if it were possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away. Next to Homer and Shakespeare come such narrators as the less universal, but still intenser Dante; Milton, with his dignified imagination; the universal, profoundly simple Chaucer; and luxuriant, remote Spenser--immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes: then the great second-rate dramatists; unless those who are better acquainted with Greek tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer: then the airy yet robust universality of Ariosto; the hearty, out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist; the finest lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior cla.s.s may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination, teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next; wit the last.
Thought by itself makes no poet at all; for the mere conclusions of the understanding can at best be only so many intellectual matters of fact. Feeling, even dest.i.tute of conscious thought, stands a far better poetical chance; feeling being a sort of thought without the process of thinking,--a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that thought does. An idle distinction has been made between taste and judgement. Taste is the very maker of judgement. Put an artificial fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the difference between judging from taste or tact, and judging from the abstract figment called judgement. The latter does but throw you into guesses and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish us in the gravest, and even subtlest, thinkers, whose taste is not proportionate to their mental perceptions; men like Donne, for instance; who, apart from accidental personal impressions, seem to look at nothing as it really is, but only as to what may be thought of it. Hence, on the other hand, the delightfulness of those poets who never violate truth of feeling, whether in things real or imaginary; who are always consistent with their object and its requirements; and who run the great round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to make themselves and us happy. And luckily, delightfulness is not incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing.
This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty; their sphere has more territories less fertile; but it has enchantments of its own, which excess of thought would spoil,--luxuries, laughing graces, animal spirits; and not to recognize the beauty and greatness of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in sympathy. Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north, and others uniting both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful or too dull to like anything but the greatest possible stimulus of reflection or pa.s.sion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally says as fine things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakespeare; but the business of both is to enjoy; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight; and as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or pa.s.sion, so from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting.