Then there is no one who has so sure
an ear for "the chimes at midnight", not even excepting Mr.
an ear for "the chimes at midnight", not even excepting Mr.
Hazlitt - The Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits
A poem is to resemble an exhibition of fireworks,
with a continual explosion of quaint figures and devices, flash after
flash, that surprise for the moment, and leave no trace of light or
warmth behind them. Or modern poetry in its retrograde progress comes at
last to be constructed on the principles of the modern OPERA, where an
attempt is made to gratify every sense at every instant, and where the
understanding alone is insulted and the heart mocked. It is in this
view only that we can discover that Mr. Moore's poetry is vitiated or
immoral,--it seduces the taste and enervates the imagination. It creates
a false standard of reference, and inverts or decompounds the natural
order of association, in which objects strike the thoughts and feelings.
His is the poetry of the bath, of the toilette, of the saloon, of the
fashionable world; not the poetry of nature, of the heart, or of human
life. He stunts and enfeebles equally the growth of the imagination and
the affections, by not taking the seed of poetry and sowing it in the
ground of truth, and letting it expand in the dew and rain, and shoot up
to heaven,
"And spread its sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate its beauty to the sun,"--
instead of which he anticipates and defeats his own object, by plucking
flowers and blossoms from the stem, and setting them in the ground of
idleness and folly--or in the cap of his own vanity, where they soon
wither and disappear, "dying or ere they sicken! " This is but a sort
of child's play, a short-sighted ambition. In Milton we meet with many
prosaic lines, either because the subject does not require raising or
because they are necessary to connect the story, or serve as a relief to
other passages--there is not such a thing to be found in all Mr. Moore's
writings. His volumes present us with "a perpetual feast of nectar'd
sweets"--but we cannot add,--"where no crude surfeit reigns. " He indeed
cloys with sweetness; he obscures with splendour; he fatigues with
gaiety. We are stifled on beds of roses--we literally lie "on the rack
of restless ecstacy. " His flowery fancy "looks so fair and smells so
sweet, that the sense aches at it. " His verse droops and languishes
under a load of beauty, like a bough laden with fruit. His gorgeous
style is like "another morn risen on mid-noon. " There is no passage
that is not made up of blushing lines, no line that is not enriched with
a sparkling metaphor, no image that is left unadorned with a double
epithet--all his verbs, nouns, adjectives, are equally glossy, smooth,
and beautiful. Every stanza is transparent with light, perfumed with
odours, floating in liquid harmony, melting in luxurious, evanescent
delights. His Muse is never contented with an offering from one sense
alone, but brings another rifled charm to match it, and revels in
a fairy round of pleasure. The interest is not dramatic, but
melo-dramatic--it is a mixture of painting, poetry, and music, of the
natural and preternatural, of obvious sentiment and romantic costume. A
rose is a _Gul_, a nightingale a _Bulbul_. We might fancy ourselves in
an eastern harem, amidst Ottomans, and otto of roses, and veils and
spangles, and marble pillars, and cool fountains, and Arab maids and
Genii, and magicians, and Peris, and cherubs, and what not? Mr. Moore
has a little mistaken the art of poetry for the _cosmetic art_. He does
not compose an historic group, or work out a single figure; but throws
a variety of elementary sensations, of vivid impressions together, and
calls it a description. He makes out an inventory of beauty--the smile
on the lips, the dimple on the cheeks, _item_, golden locks, _item_, a
pair of blue wings, _item_, a silver sound, with breathing fragrance and
radiant light, and thinks it a character or a story. He gets together a
number of fine things and fine names, and thinks that, flung on heaps,
they make up a fine poem. This dissipated, fulsome, painted, patch-work
style may succeed in the levity and languor of the _boudoir_, or might
have been adapted to the Pavilions of royalty, but it is not the style
of Parnassus, nor a passport to Immortality. It is not the taste of the
ancients, "'tis not classical lore"--nor the fashion of Tibullus, or
Theocritus, or Anacreon, or Virgil, or Ariosto, or Pope, or Byron, or
any great writer among the living or the dead, but it is the style of
our English Anacreon, and it is (or was) the fashion of the day! Let one
example (and that an admired one) taken from _Lalla Rookh_, suffice to
explain the mystery and soften the harshness of the foregoing criticism.
"Now upon Syria's land of roses
Softly the light of eve reposes,
And like a glory, the broad sun
Hangs over sainted Lebanon:
Whose head in wintry grandeur towers,
And whitens with eternal sleet,
While summer, in a vale of flowers,
Is sleeping rosy at his feet.
To one who look'd from upper air,
O'er all th' enchanted regions there,
How beauteous must have been the glow,
The life, the sparkling from below!
Fair gardens, shining streams, with ranks
Of golden melons on their banks,
More golden where the sun-light falls,--
Gay lizards, glittering on the walls
Of ruin'd shrines, busy and bright
As they were all alive with light;--
And yet more splendid, numerous flocks
Of pigeons, settling on the rocks,
With their rich, restless wings, that gleam
Variously in the crimson beam
Of the warm west, as if inlaid
With brilliants from the mine, or made
Of tearless rainbows, such as span
The unclouded skies of Peristan!
And then, the mingling sounds that come
Of shepherd's ancient reed, with hum
Of the wild bees of Palestine,
Banquetting through the flowery vales--
And, Jordan, those sweet banks of thine,
And woods, so full of nightingales. "--
The following lines are the very perfection of Della Cruscan sentiment,
and affected orientalism of style. The Peri exclaims on finding that old
talisman and hackneyed poetical machine, "a penitent tear"--
"Joy, joy forever! my task is done--
The gates are pass'd, and Heaven is won!
Oh! am I not happy? I am, I am--
To thee, sweet Eden! how dark and sad
Are the diamond turrets of Shadukiam,
And the fragrant bowers of Amberabad. "
There is in all this a play of fancy, a glitter of words, a shallowness
of thought, and a want of truth and solidity that is wonderful, and
that nothing but the heedless, rapid glide of the verse could render
tolerable:----it seems that the poet, as well as the lover,
"May bestride the Gossamer,
That wantons in the idle, summer air,
And yet not fall, so light is vanity! "
Mr. Moore ought not to contend with serious difficulties or with entire
subjects. He can write verses, not a poem. There is no principle of
massing or of continuity in his productions--neither height nor breadth
nor depth of capacity. There is no truth of representation, no strong
internal feeling--but a continual flutter and display of affected airs
and graces, like a finished coquette, who hides the want of symmetry by
extravagance of dress, and the want of passion by flippant forwardness
and unmeaning sentimentality. All is flimsy, all is florid to excess.
His imagination may dally with insect beauties, with Rosicrucian spells;
may describe a butterfly's wing, a flower-pot, a fan: but it should not
attempt to span the great outlines of nature, or keep pace with the
sounding march of events, or grapple with the strong fibres of the human
heart. The great becomes turgid in his hands, the pathetic insipid. If
Mr. Moore were to describe the heights of Chimboraco, instead of the
loneliness, the vastness and the shadowy might, he would only think
of adorning it with roseate tints, like a strawberry-ice, and would
transform a magician's fortress in the Himmalaya (stripped of its
mysterious gloom and frowning horrors) into a jeweller's toy, to be set
upon a lady's toilette. In proof of this, see above "the diamond turrets
of Shadukiam," &c. The description of Mokanna in the fight, though
it has spirit and grandeur of effect, has still a great alloy of the
mock-heroic in it. The route of blood and death, which is otherwise well
marked, is infested with a swarm of "fire-fly" fancies.
"In vain Mokanna, 'midst the general flight,
Stands, like the red moon, in some stormy night.
Among the fugitive clouds, that hurrying by,
Leave only her unshaken in the sky. "
This simile is fine, and would have been perfect, but that the moon is
not red, and that she seems to hurry by the clouds, not they by her. The
description of the warrior's youthful adversary,
----"Whose coming seems
A light, a glory, such as breaks in dreams. "--
is fantastic and enervated--a field of battle has nothing to do with
dreams:--and again, the two lines immediately after,
"And every sword, true as o'er billows dim
The needle tracks the load-star, following him"--
are a mere piece of enigmatical ingenuity and scientific
_mimminee-pimminee. _
We cannot except the _Irish Melodies_ from the same censure. If these
national airs do indeed express the soul of impassioned feeling in his
countrymen, the case of Ireland is hopeless. If these prettinesses pass
for patriotism, if a country can heave from its heart's core only these
vapid, varnished sentiments, lip-deep, and let its tears of blood
evaporate in an empty conceit, let it be governed as it has been. There
are here no tones to waken Liberty, to console Humanity. Mr. Moore
converts the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box[A]! --We _do_
except from this censure the author's political squibs, and the "Two-
penny Post-bag. " These are essences, are "nests of spicery", bitter and
sweet, honey and gall together. No one can so well describe the set
speech of a dull formalist[B], or the flowing locks of a Dowager,
"In the manner of Ackermann's dresses for May. "
His light, agreeable, polished style pierces through the body of the
court--hits off the faded graces of "an Adonis of fifty", weighs the
vanity of fashion in tremulous scales, mimics the grimace of affectation
and folly, shews up the littleness of the great, and spears a phalanx of
statesmen with its glittering point as with a diamond broach.
"In choosing songs the Regent named
'Had I a heart for falsehood fram'd:'
While gentle Hertford begg'd and pray'd
For 'Young I am, and sore afraid. '"
Nothing in Pope or Prior ever surpassed the delicate insinuation
and adroit satire of these lines, and hundreds more of our author's
composition. We wish he would not take pains to make us think of them
with less pleasure than formerly. --The "Fudge Family" is in the same
spirit, but with a little falling-off. There is too great a mixture of
undisguised Jacobinism and fashionable _slang_. The "divine Fanny Bias"
and "the mountains _à la Russe_" figure in somewhat quaintly with
Buonaparte and the Bourbons. The poet also launches the lightning of
political indignation; but it rather plays round and illumines his own
pen than reaches the devoted heads at which it is aimed!
Mr. Moore is in private life an amiable and estimable man. The
embellished and voluptuous style of his poetry, his unpretending origin,
and his _mignon_ figure soon introduced him to the notice of the
great, and his gaiety, his wit, his good-humour, and many agreeable
accomplishments fixed him there, the darling of his friends and the idol
of fashion. If he is no longer familiar with Royalty as with his garter,
the fault is not his--his adherence to his principles caused the
separation--his love of his country was the cloud that intercepted the
sunshine of court-favour. This is so far well. Mr. Moore vindicates his
own dignity; but the sense of intrinsic worth, of wide-spread fame, and
of the intimacy of the great makes him perhaps a little too fastidious
and _exigeant_ as to the pretensions of others. He has been so long
accustomed to the society of Whig Lords, and so enchanted by the smile
of beauty and fashion, that he really fancies himself one of the _set_,
to which he is admitted on sufferance, and tries very unnecessarily to
keep others out of it. He talks familiarly of works that are or are
not read "in _our_ circle;" and seated smiling and at his ease in a
coronet-coach, enlivening the owner by his brisk sallies and Attic
conceits, is shocked, as he passes, to see a Peer of the realm shake
hands with a poet. There is a little indulgence of spleen and envy, a
little servility and pandering to aristocratic pride in this proceeding.
Is Mr. Moore bound to advise a Noble Poet to get as fast as possible out
of a certain publication, lest he should not be able to give an
account at Holland or at Lansdown House, how his friend Lord B----had
associated himself with his friend L. H----? Is he afraid that the
"Spirit of Monarchy" will eclipse the "Fables for the Holy Alliance" in
virulence and plain speaking? Or are the members of the "Fudge Family"
to secure a monopoly for the abuse of the Bourbons and the doctrine of
Divine Right? Because he is genteel and sarcastic, may not others be
paradoxical and argumentative? Or must no one bark at a Minister or
General, unless they have been first dandled, like a little French
pug-dog, in the lap of a lady of quality? Does Mr. Moore insist on the
double claim of birth and genius as a title to respectability in all
advocates of the popular side--but himself? Or is he anxious to keep the
pretensions of his patrician and plebeian friends quite separate, so
as to be himself the only point of union, a sort of _double meaning_,
between the two? It is idle to think of setting bounds to the weakness
and illusions of self-love as long as it is confined to a man's own
breast; but it ought not to be made a plea for holding back the powerful
hand that is stretched out to save another struggling with the tide
of popular prejudice, who has suffered shipwreck of health, fame and
fortune in a common cause, and who has deserved the aid and the good
wishes of all who are (on principle) embarked in the same cause by equal
zeal and honesty, if not by equal talents to support and to adorn it!
We shall conclude the present article with a short notice of an
individual who, in the cast of his mind and in political principle,
bears no very remote resemblance to the patriot and wit just spoken
of, and on whose merits we should descant at greater length, but that
personal intimacy might be supposed to render us partial. It is well
when personal intimacy produces this effect; and when the light, that
dazzled us at a distance, does not on a closer inspection turn out an
opaque substance. This is a charge that none of his friends will bring
against Mr. Leigh Hunt. He improves upon acquaintance. The author
translates admirably into the man. Indeed the very faults of his style
are virtues in the individual. His natural gaiety and sprightliness of
manner, his high animal spirits, and the _vinous_ quality of his mind,
produce an immediate fascination and intoxication in those who come in
contact with him, and carry off in society whatever in his writings may
to some seem flat and impertinent. From great sanguineness of temper,
from great quickness and unsuspecting simplicity, he runs on to the
public as he does at his own fire-side, and talks about himself,
forgetting that he is not always among friends. His look, his tone are
required to point many things that he says: his frank, cordial manner
reconciles you instantly to a little over-bearing, over-weening self-
complacency. "To be admired, he needs but to be seen:" but perhaps he
ought to be seen to be fully appreciated. No one ever sought his society
who did not come away with a more favourable opinion of him: no one was
ever disappointed, except those who had entertained idle prejudices
against him. He sometimes trifles with his readers, or tires of
a subject (from not being urged on by the stimulus of immediate
sympathy)--but in conversation he is all life and animation, combining
the vivacity of the school-boy with the resources of the wit and the
taste of the scholar. The personal character, the spontaneous impulses,
do not appear to excuse the author, unless you are acquainted with his
situation and habits--like some proud beauty who gives herself what
we think strange airs and graces under a mask, but who is instantly
forgiven when she shews her face. We have said that Lord Byron is a
sublime coxcomb: why should we not say that Mr. Hunt is a delightful
one? There is certainly an exuberance of satisfaction in his manner
which is more than the strict logical premises warrant, and which dull
and phlegmatic constitutions know nothing of, and cannot understand till
they see it. He is the only poet or literary man we ever knew who puts
us in mind of Sir John Suckling or Killigrew or Carew; or who united
rare intellectual acquirements with outward grace and natural gentility.
Mr. Hunt ought to have been a gentleman born, and to have patronised men
of letters. He might then have played, and sung, and laughed, and talked
his life away; have written manly prose, elegant verse; and his _Story
of Rimini_ would have been praised by Mr. Blackwood. As it is, there is
no man now living who at the same time writes prose and verse so well,
with the exception of Mr. Southey (an exception, we fear, that will be
little palatable to either of these gentlemen). His prose writings,
however, display more consistency of principle than the laureate's: his
verses more taste. We will venture to oppose his Third Canto of the
_Story of Rimini_ for classic elegance and natural feeling to any equal
number of lines from Mr. Southey's Epics or from Mr. Moore's Lalla
Rookh. In a more gay and conversational style of writing, we think his
_Epistle to Lord Byron_ on his going abroad, is a masterpiece;--and the
_Feast of the Poets_ has run through several editions. A light, familiar
grace, and mild unpretending pathos are the characteristics of his more
sportive or serious writings, whether in poetry or prose. A smile
plays round the features of the one; a tear is ready to start from the
thoughtful gaze of the other. He perhaps takes too little pains, and
indulges in too much wayward caprice in both. A wit and a poet, Mr. Hunt
is also distinguished by fineness of tact and sterling sense: he has
only been a visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue. What then is the
drawback to so many shining qualities, that has made them useless, or
even hurtful to their owner? His crime is, to have been Editor of the
_Examiner_ ten years ago, when some allusion was made in it to the age
of the present king, and that, though his Majesty has grown older, our
luckless politician is no wiser than he was then!
[Footnote A: Compare his songs with Burns's. ]
[Footnote B:
"There was a little man, and he had a little soul,
And he said, Little soul, let us try," &c. --
Parody on
"There was a little man, and he had a little gun. "--
One should think this exquisite ridicule of a pedantic effusion might
have silenced for ever the automaton that delivered it: but the
official personage in question at the close of the Session addressed an
extra-official congratulation to the Prince Regent on a bill that had
_not_ passed--as if to repeat and insist upon our errors were to justify
them. ]
* * * * *
ELIA, AND GEOFFREY CRAYON.
So Mr. Charles Lamb and Mr. Washington Irvine choose to designate
themselves; and as their lucubrations under one or other of these _noms
de guerre_ have gained considerable notice from the public, we shall
here attempt to discriminate their several styles and manner, and to
point out the beauties and defects of each in treating of somewhat
similar subjects.
Mr. Irvine is, we take it, the more popular writer of the two, or a more
general favourite: Mr. Lamb has more devoted, and perhaps more judicious
partisans. Mr. Irvine is by birth an American, and has, as it were,
_skimmed the cream_, and taken off patterns with great skill and
cleverness, from our best known and happiest writers, so that their
thoughts and almost their reputation are indirectly transferred to his
page, and smile upon us from another hemisphere, like "the pale reflex
of Cynthia's brow:" he succeeds to our admiration and our sympathy by a
sort of prescriptive title and traditional privilege. Mr. Lamb, on the
contrary, being "native to the manner here," though he too has borrowed
from previous sources, instead of availing himself of the most popular
and admired, has groped out his way, and made his most successful
researches among the more obscure and intricate, though certainly not
the least pithy or pleasant of our writers. Mr. Washington Irvine has
culled and transplanted the flowers of modern literature, for the
amusement of the general reader: Mr. Lamb has raked among the dust and
cobwebs of a more remote period, has exhibited specimens of curious
relics, and pored over moth-eaten, decayed manuscripts, for the benefit
of the more inquisitive and discerning part of the public. Antiquity
after a time has the grace of novelty, as old fashions revived are
mistaken for new ones; and a certain quaintness and singularity of style
is an agreeable relief to the smooth and insipid monotony of modern
composition. Mr. Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the _Spirit of
the Age_, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with
the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary
direction. He prefers _bye-ways_ to _highways_. When the full tide of
human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day,
Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll
down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a
tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative
of embryo art and ancient manners. Mr. Lamb has the very soul of an
antiquarian, as this implies a reflecting humanity; the film of the past
hovers for ever before him. He is shy, sensitive, the reverse of every
thing coarse, vulgar, obtrusive, and _common-place_. He would fain
"shuffle off this mortal coil", and his spirit clothes itself in the
garb of elder time, homelier, but more durable. He is borne along with
no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable
phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence
or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear,
though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through
old-fashioned conduit-pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor
strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious and
obvious pretension into the retirement of his own mind.
"The self-applauding bird, the peacock see:--
Mark what a sumptuous pharisee is he!
Meridian sun-beams tempt him to unfold
His radiant glories, azure, green, and gold:
He treads as if, some solemn music near,
His measured step were governed by his ear:
And seems to say--Ye meaner fowl, give place,
I am all splendour, dignity, and grace!
Not so the pheasant on his charms presumes,
Though he too has a glory in his plumes.
He, christian-like, retreats with modest mien
To the close copse or far sequestered green,
And shines without desiring to be seen. "
These lines well describe the modest and delicate beauties of Mr. Lamb's
writings, contrasted with the lofty and vain-glorious pretensions of
some of his contemporaries. This gentleman is not one of those who pay
all their homage to the prevailing idol: he thinks that
"New-born gauds are made and moulded of things past. "
nor does he
"Give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted. "
His convictions "do not in broad rumour lie," nor are they "set off to
the world in the glistering foil" of fashion; but "live and breathe
aloft in those pure eyes, and perfect judgment of all-seeing _time_. "
Mr. Lamb rather affects and is tenacious of the obscure and remote: of
that which rests on its own intrinsic and silent merit; which scorns all
alliance, or even the suspicion of owing any thing to noisy clamour, to
the glare of circumstances. There is a fine tone of _chiaro-scuro_, a
moral perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is
fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the
frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn
to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion:--that
piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial
glance. That which, though gone by, is still remembered, is in his view
more genuine, and has given more "vital signs that it will live," than a
thing of yesterday, that may be forgotten to-morrow. Death has in this
sense the spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author
something substantial in it. Ideas savour most of reality in his mind;
or rather his imagination loiters on the edge of each, and a page of his
writings recals to our fancy the _stranger_ on the grate, fluttering in
its dusky tensity, with its idle superstition and hospitable welcome!
Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to
new customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions
of self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical
advantages, even to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does
not rely upon, or ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in
abhorrence, he utterly abjures and discards them, and places a great
gulph between him and them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of
authorship, all the cant of criticism, and helps to notoriety. He has no
grand swelling theories to attract the visionary and the enthusiast, no
passing topics to allure the thoughtless and the vain. He evades the
present, he mocks the future. His affections revert to, and settle on
the past, but then, even this must have something personal and local in
it to interest him deeply and thoroughly; he pitches his tent in the
suburbs of existing manners; brings down the account of character to the
few straggling remains of the last generation; seldom ventures beyond
the bills of mortality, and occupies that nice point between egotism
and disinterested humanity. No one makes the tour of our southern
metropolis, or describes the manners of the last age, so well as Mr.
Lamb--with so fine, and yet so formal an air--with such vivid obscurity,
with such arch piquancy, such picturesque quaintness, such smiling
pathos. How admirably he has sketched the former inmates of the South-
Sea House; what "fine fretwork he makes of their double and single
entries! " With what a firm, yet subtle pencil he has embodied _Mrs.
Battle's Opinions on Whist_! How notably he embalms a battered _beau_;
how delightfully an amour, that was cold forty years ago, revives in
his pages! With what well-disguised humour he introduces us to his
relations, and how freely he serves up his friends! Certainly, some of
his portraits are _fixtures_, and will do to hang up as lasting and
lively emblems of human infirmity.
Then there is no one who has so sure
an ear for "the chimes at midnight", not even excepting Mr. Justice
Shallow; nor could Master Silence himself take his "cheese and pippins"
with a more significant and satisfactory air. With what a gusto Mr. Lamb
describes the inns and courts of law, the Temple and Gray's-Inn, as if
he had been a student there for the last two hundred years, and had been
as well acquainted with the person of Sir Francis Bacon as he is with
his portrait or writings! It is hard to say whether St. John's Gate is
connected with more intense and authentic associations in his mind, as
a part of old London Wall, or as the frontispiece (time out of mind) of
the Gentleman's Magazine. He haunts Watling-street like a gentle spirit;
the avenues to the play-houses are thick with panting recollections,
and Christ's-Hospital still breathes the balmy breath of infancy in his
description of it! Whittington and his Cat are a fine hallucination for
Mr. Lamb's historic Muse, and we believe he never heartily forgave a
certain writer who took the subject of Guy Faux out of his hands. The
streets of London are his fairy-land, teeming with wonder, with life
and interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye
of childhood; he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a
bright and endless romance!
Mr. Lamb's taste in books is also fine, and it is peculiar. It is not
the worse for a little _idiosyncrasy_. He does not go deep into the
Scotch novels, but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding. He is little
read in Junius or Gibbon, but no man can give a better account of
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or Sir Thomas Brown's Urn-Burial,
or Fuller's Worthies, or John Bunyan's Holy War. No one is more
unimpressible to a specious declamation; no one relishes a recondite
beauty more. His admiration of Shakespear and Milton does not make
him despise Pope; and he can read Parnell with patience, and Gay
with delight. His taste in French and German literature is somewhat
defective: nor has he made much progress in the science of Political
Economy or other abstruse studies, though he has read vast folios of
controversial divinity, merely for the sake of the intricacy of style,
and to save himself the pain of thinking. Mr. Lamb is a good judge of
prints and pictures. His admiration of Hogarth does credit to both,
particularly when it is considered that Leonardo da Vinci is his next
greatest favourite, and that his love of the _actual_ does not
proceed from a want of taste for the _ideal_. His worst fault is an
over-eagerness of enthusiasm, which occasionally makes him take a
surfeit of his highest favourites. --Mr. Lamb excels in familiar
conversation almost as much as in writing, when his modesty does not
overpower his self-possession. He is as little of a proser as possible;
but he _blurts_ out the finest wit and sense in the world. He keeps
a good deal in the back-ground at first, till some excellent conceit
pushes him forward, and then he abounds in whim and pleasantry. There
is a primitive simplicity and self-denial about his manners; and a
Quakerism in his personal appearance, which is, however, relieved by
a fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence! Mr. Lamb is a general
favourite with those who know him. His character is equally singular and
amiable. He is endeared to his friends not less by his foibles than his
virtues; he insures their esteem by the one, and does not wound their
self-love by the other. He gains ground in the opinion of others,
by making no advances in his own. We easily admire genius where the
diffidence of the possessor makes our acknowledgment of merit seem like
a sort of patronage, or act of condescension, as we willingly extend our
good offices where they are not exacted as obligations, or repaid with
sullen indifference. --The style of the Essays of Elia is liable to the
charge of a certain _mannerism_. His sentences are cast in the mould of
old authors; his expressions are borrowed from them; but his feelings
and observations are genuine and original, taken from actual life, or
from his own breast; and he may be said (if any one can) "to have
coined his heart for _jests_," and to have split his brain for fine
distinctions! Mr. Lamb, from the peculiarity of his exterior and address
as an author, would probably never have made his way by detached and
independent efforts; but, fortunately for himself and others, he has
taken advantage of the Periodical Press, where he has been stuck into
notice, and the texture of his compositions is assuredly fine enough to
bear the broadest glare of popularity that has hitherto shone upon them.
Mr. Lamb's literary efforts have procured him civic honours (a thing
unheard of in our times), and he has been invited, in his character of
ELIA, to dine at a select party with the Lord Mayor. We should prefer
this distinction to that of being poet-laureat. We would recommend
to Mr. Waithman's perusal (if Mr. Lamb has not anticipated us) the
_Rosamond Gray_ and the _John Woodvil_ of the same author, as an
agreeable relief to the noise of a city feast, and the heat of city
elections. A friend, a short time ago, quoted some lines[A] from the
last-mentioned of these works, which meeting Mr. Godwin's eye, he was
so struck with the beauty of the passage, and with a consciousness of
having seen it before, that he was uneasy till he could recollect where,
and after hunting in vain for it in Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher,
and other not unlikely places, sent to Mr. Lamb to know if he could help
him to the author!
Mr. Washington Irvine's acquaintance with English literature begins
almost where Mr. Lamb's ends,--with the Spectator, Tom Brown's works,
and the wits of Queen Anne. He is not bottomed in our elder writers, nor
do we think he has tasked his own faculties much, at least on English
ground. Of the merit of his _Knicker-bocker,_ and New York stories,
we cannot pretend to judge. But in his _Sketch-book_ and
_Bracebridge-Hall_ he gives us very good American copies of our British
Essayists and Novelists, which may be very well on the other side of the
water, and as proofs of the capabilities of the national genius, but
which might be dispensed with here, where we have to boast of the
originals. Not only Mr. Irvine's language is with great taste and
felicity modelled on that of Addison, Sterne, Goldsmith, or Mackenzie;
but the thoughts and sentiments are taken at the rebound, and as they
are brought forward at the present period, want both freshness and
probability. Mr. Irvine's writings are literary _anachronisms_. He comes
to England for the first time; and being on the spot, fancies himself in
the midst of those characters and manners which he had read of in the
Spectator and other approved authors, and which were the only idea he
had hitherto formed of the parent country. Instead of looking round
to see what _we are_, he sets to work to describe us as _we were_--at
second hand. He has Parson Adams, or Sir Roger de Coverley in his
"_mind's eye_"; and he makes a village curate, or a country 'squire in
Yorkshire or Hampshire sit to these admired models for their portraits
in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Whatever the ingenious
author has been most delighted with in the representations of books, he
transfers to his port-folio, and swears that he has found it actually
existing in the course of his observation and travels through Great
Britain. Instead of tracing the changes that have taken place in society
since Addison or Fielding wrote, he transcribes their account in a
different hand-writing, and thus keeps us stationary, at least in our
most attractive and praise-worthy qualities of simplicity, honesty,
hospitality, modesty, and good-nature. This is a very flattering mode
of turning fiction into history, or history into fiction; and we should
scarcely know ourselves again in the softened and altered likeness,
but that it bears the date of 1820, and issues from the press in
Albemarle-street. This is one way of complimenting our national and
Tory prejudices; and coupled with literal or exaggerated portraits of
_Yankee_ peculiarities, could hardly fail to please. The first Essay in
the _Sketch-book_, that on National Antipathies, is the best; but after
that, the sterling ore of wit or feeling is gradually spun thinner and
thinner, till it fades to the shadow of a shade. Mr. Irvine is himself,
we believe, a most agreeable and deserving man, and has been led into
the natural and pardonable error we speak of, by the tempting bait of
European popularity, in which he thought there was no more likely method
of succeeding than by imitating the style of our standard authors, and
giving us credit for the virtues of our forefathers.
[Footnote A: The description of sports in the forest:
"To see the sun to bed and to arise,
Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes," &c. ]
* * * * *
We should not feel that we had discharged our obligations to truth or
friendship, if we were to let this volume go without introducing into it
the name of the author of _Virginius_. This is the more proper, inasmuch
as he is a character by himself, and the only poet now living that is a
mere poet. If we were asked what sort of a man Mr. Knowles is, we could
only say, "he is the writer of Virginius. " His most intimate friends see
nothing in him, by which they could trace the work to the author. The
seeds of dramatic genius are contained and fostered in the warmth of the
blood that flows in his veins; his heart dictates to his head. The most
unconscious, the most unpretending, the most artless of mortals, he
instinctively obeys the impulses of natural feeling, and produces a
perfect work of art. He has hardly read a poem or a play or seen any
thing of the world, but he hears the anxious beatings of his own heart,
and makes others feel them by the force of sympathy. Ignorant alike
of rules, regardless of models, he follows the steps of truth and
simplicity; and strength, proportion, and delicacy are the infallible
results. By thinking of nothing but his subject, he rivets the attention
of the audience to it. All his dialogue tends to action, all his
situations form classic groups. There is no doubt that Virginius is the
best acting tragedy that has been produced on the modern stage. Mr.
Knowles himself was a player at one time, and this circumstance has
probably enabled him to judge of the picturesque and dramatic effect of
his lines, as we think it might have assisted Shakespear. There is
no impertinent display, no flaunting poetry; the writer immediately
conceives how a thought would tell if he had to speak it himself. Mr.
Knowles is the first tragic writer of the age; in other respects he is
a common man; and divides his time and his affections between his
plots and his fishing-tackle, between the Muses' spring, and those
mountain-streams which sparkle like his own eye, that gush out like his
own voice at the sight of an old friend. We have known him almost from a
child, and we must say he appears to us the same boy-poet that he ever
was. He has been cradled in song, and rocked in it as in a dream,
forgetful of himself and of the world!
THE END.
with a continual explosion of quaint figures and devices, flash after
flash, that surprise for the moment, and leave no trace of light or
warmth behind them. Or modern poetry in its retrograde progress comes at
last to be constructed on the principles of the modern OPERA, where an
attempt is made to gratify every sense at every instant, and where the
understanding alone is insulted and the heart mocked. It is in this
view only that we can discover that Mr. Moore's poetry is vitiated or
immoral,--it seduces the taste and enervates the imagination. It creates
a false standard of reference, and inverts or decompounds the natural
order of association, in which objects strike the thoughts and feelings.
His is the poetry of the bath, of the toilette, of the saloon, of the
fashionable world; not the poetry of nature, of the heart, or of human
life. He stunts and enfeebles equally the growth of the imagination and
the affections, by not taking the seed of poetry and sowing it in the
ground of truth, and letting it expand in the dew and rain, and shoot up
to heaven,
"And spread its sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate its beauty to the sun,"--
instead of which he anticipates and defeats his own object, by plucking
flowers and blossoms from the stem, and setting them in the ground of
idleness and folly--or in the cap of his own vanity, where they soon
wither and disappear, "dying or ere they sicken! " This is but a sort
of child's play, a short-sighted ambition. In Milton we meet with many
prosaic lines, either because the subject does not require raising or
because they are necessary to connect the story, or serve as a relief to
other passages--there is not such a thing to be found in all Mr. Moore's
writings. His volumes present us with "a perpetual feast of nectar'd
sweets"--but we cannot add,--"where no crude surfeit reigns. " He indeed
cloys with sweetness; he obscures with splendour; he fatigues with
gaiety. We are stifled on beds of roses--we literally lie "on the rack
of restless ecstacy. " His flowery fancy "looks so fair and smells so
sweet, that the sense aches at it. " His verse droops and languishes
under a load of beauty, like a bough laden with fruit. His gorgeous
style is like "another morn risen on mid-noon. " There is no passage
that is not made up of blushing lines, no line that is not enriched with
a sparkling metaphor, no image that is left unadorned with a double
epithet--all his verbs, nouns, adjectives, are equally glossy, smooth,
and beautiful. Every stanza is transparent with light, perfumed with
odours, floating in liquid harmony, melting in luxurious, evanescent
delights. His Muse is never contented with an offering from one sense
alone, but brings another rifled charm to match it, and revels in
a fairy round of pleasure. The interest is not dramatic, but
melo-dramatic--it is a mixture of painting, poetry, and music, of the
natural and preternatural, of obvious sentiment and romantic costume. A
rose is a _Gul_, a nightingale a _Bulbul_. We might fancy ourselves in
an eastern harem, amidst Ottomans, and otto of roses, and veils and
spangles, and marble pillars, and cool fountains, and Arab maids and
Genii, and magicians, and Peris, and cherubs, and what not? Mr. Moore
has a little mistaken the art of poetry for the _cosmetic art_. He does
not compose an historic group, or work out a single figure; but throws
a variety of elementary sensations, of vivid impressions together, and
calls it a description. He makes out an inventory of beauty--the smile
on the lips, the dimple on the cheeks, _item_, golden locks, _item_, a
pair of blue wings, _item_, a silver sound, with breathing fragrance and
radiant light, and thinks it a character or a story. He gets together a
number of fine things and fine names, and thinks that, flung on heaps,
they make up a fine poem. This dissipated, fulsome, painted, patch-work
style may succeed in the levity and languor of the _boudoir_, or might
have been adapted to the Pavilions of royalty, but it is not the style
of Parnassus, nor a passport to Immortality. It is not the taste of the
ancients, "'tis not classical lore"--nor the fashion of Tibullus, or
Theocritus, or Anacreon, or Virgil, or Ariosto, or Pope, or Byron, or
any great writer among the living or the dead, but it is the style of
our English Anacreon, and it is (or was) the fashion of the day! Let one
example (and that an admired one) taken from _Lalla Rookh_, suffice to
explain the mystery and soften the harshness of the foregoing criticism.
"Now upon Syria's land of roses
Softly the light of eve reposes,
And like a glory, the broad sun
Hangs over sainted Lebanon:
Whose head in wintry grandeur towers,
And whitens with eternal sleet,
While summer, in a vale of flowers,
Is sleeping rosy at his feet.
To one who look'd from upper air,
O'er all th' enchanted regions there,
How beauteous must have been the glow,
The life, the sparkling from below!
Fair gardens, shining streams, with ranks
Of golden melons on their banks,
More golden where the sun-light falls,--
Gay lizards, glittering on the walls
Of ruin'd shrines, busy and bright
As they were all alive with light;--
And yet more splendid, numerous flocks
Of pigeons, settling on the rocks,
With their rich, restless wings, that gleam
Variously in the crimson beam
Of the warm west, as if inlaid
With brilliants from the mine, or made
Of tearless rainbows, such as span
The unclouded skies of Peristan!
And then, the mingling sounds that come
Of shepherd's ancient reed, with hum
Of the wild bees of Palestine,
Banquetting through the flowery vales--
And, Jordan, those sweet banks of thine,
And woods, so full of nightingales. "--
The following lines are the very perfection of Della Cruscan sentiment,
and affected orientalism of style. The Peri exclaims on finding that old
talisman and hackneyed poetical machine, "a penitent tear"--
"Joy, joy forever! my task is done--
The gates are pass'd, and Heaven is won!
Oh! am I not happy? I am, I am--
To thee, sweet Eden! how dark and sad
Are the diamond turrets of Shadukiam,
And the fragrant bowers of Amberabad. "
There is in all this a play of fancy, a glitter of words, a shallowness
of thought, and a want of truth and solidity that is wonderful, and
that nothing but the heedless, rapid glide of the verse could render
tolerable:----it seems that the poet, as well as the lover,
"May bestride the Gossamer,
That wantons in the idle, summer air,
And yet not fall, so light is vanity! "
Mr. Moore ought not to contend with serious difficulties or with entire
subjects. He can write verses, not a poem. There is no principle of
massing or of continuity in his productions--neither height nor breadth
nor depth of capacity. There is no truth of representation, no strong
internal feeling--but a continual flutter and display of affected airs
and graces, like a finished coquette, who hides the want of symmetry by
extravagance of dress, and the want of passion by flippant forwardness
and unmeaning sentimentality. All is flimsy, all is florid to excess.
His imagination may dally with insect beauties, with Rosicrucian spells;
may describe a butterfly's wing, a flower-pot, a fan: but it should not
attempt to span the great outlines of nature, or keep pace with the
sounding march of events, or grapple with the strong fibres of the human
heart. The great becomes turgid in his hands, the pathetic insipid. If
Mr. Moore were to describe the heights of Chimboraco, instead of the
loneliness, the vastness and the shadowy might, he would only think
of adorning it with roseate tints, like a strawberry-ice, and would
transform a magician's fortress in the Himmalaya (stripped of its
mysterious gloom and frowning horrors) into a jeweller's toy, to be set
upon a lady's toilette. In proof of this, see above "the diamond turrets
of Shadukiam," &c. The description of Mokanna in the fight, though
it has spirit and grandeur of effect, has still a great alloy of the
mock-heroic in it. The route of blood and death, which is otherwise well
marked, is infested with a swarm of "fire-fly" fancies.
"In vain Mokanna, 'midst the general flight,
Stands, like the red moon, in some stormy night.
Among the fugitive clouds, that hurrying by,
Leave only her unshaken in the sky. "
This simile is fine, and would have been perfect, but that the moon is
not red, and that she seems to hurry by the clouds, not they by her. The
description of the warrior's youthful adversary,
----"Whose coming seems
A light, a glory, such as breaks in dreams. "--
is fantastic and enervated--a field of battle has nothing to do with
dreams:--and again, the two lines immediately after,
"And every sword, true as o'er billows dim
The needle tracks the load-star, following him"--
are a mere piece of enigmatical ingenuity and scientific
_mimminee-pimminee. _
We cannot except the _Irish Melodies_ from the same censure. If these
national airs do indeed express the soul of impassioned feeling in his
countrymen, the case of Ireland is hopeless. If these prettinesses pass
for patriotism, if a country can heave from its heart's core only these
vapid, varnished sentiments, lip-deep, and let its tears of blood
evaporate in an empty conceit, let it be governed as it has been. There
are here no tones to waken Liberty, to console Humanity. Mr. Moore
converts the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box[A]! --We _do_
except from this censure the author's political squibs, and the "Two-
penny Post-bag. " These are essences, are "nests of spicery", bitter and
sweet, honey and gall together. No one can so well describe the set
speech of a dull formalist[B], or the flowing locks of a Dowager,
"In the manner of Ackermann's dresses for May. "
His light, agreeable, polished style pierces through the body of the
court--hits off the faded graces of "an Adonis of fifty", weighs the
vanity of fashion in tremulous scales, mimics the grimace of affectation
and folly, shews up the littleness of the great, and spears a phalanx of
statesmen with its glittering point as with a diamond broach.
"In choosing songs the Regent named
'Had I a heart for falsehood fram'd:'
While gentle Hertford begg'd and pray'd
For 'Young I am, and sore afraid. '"
Nothing in Pope or Prior ever surpassed the delicate insinuation
and adroit satire of these lines, and hundreds more of our author's
composition. We wish he would not take pains to make us think of them
with less pleasure than formerly. --The "Fudge Family" is in the same
spirit, but with a little falling-off. There is too great a mixture of
undisguised Jacobinism and fashionable _slang_. The "divine Fanny Bias"
and "the mountains _à la Russe_" figure in somewhat quaintly with
Buonaparte and the Bourbons. The poet also launches the lightning of
political indignation; but it rather plays round and illumines his own
pen than reaches the devoted heads at which it is aimed!
Mr. Moore is in private life an amiable and estimable man. The
embellished and voluptuous style of his poetry, his unpretending origin,
and his _mignon_ figure soon introduced him to the notice of the
great, and his gaiety, his wit, his good-humour, and many agreeable
accomplishments fixed him there, the darling of his friends and the idol
of fashion. If he is no longer familiar with Royalty as with his garter,
the fault is not his--his adherence to his principles caused the
separation--his love of his country was the cloud that intercepted the
sunshine of court-favour. This is so far well. Mr. Moore vindicates his
own dignity; but the sense of intrinsic worth, of wide-spread fame, and
of the intimacy of the great makes him perhaps a little too fastidious
and _exigeant_ as to the pretensions of others. He has been so long
accustomed to the society of Whig Lords, and so enchanted by the smile
of beauty and fashion, that he really fancies himself one of the _set_,
to which he is admitted on sufferance, and tries very unnecessarily to
keep others out of it. He talks familiarly of works that are or are
not read "in _our_ circle;" and seated smiling and at his ease in a
coronet-coach, enlivening the owner by his brisk sallies and Attic
conceits, is shocked, as he passes, to see a Peer of the realm shake
hands with a poet. There is a little indulgence of spleen and envy, a
little servility and pandering to aristocratic pride in this proceeding.
Is Mr. Moore bound to advise a Noble Poet to get as fast as possible out
of a certain publication, lest he should not be able to give an
account at Holland or at Lansdown House, how his friend Lord B----had
associated himself with his friend L. H----? Is he afraid that the
"Spirit of Monarchy" will eclipse the "Fables for the Holy Alliance" in
virulence and plain speaking? Or are the members of the "Fudge Family"
to secure a monopoly for the abuse of the Bourbons and the doctrine of
Divine Right? Because he is genteel and sarcastic, may not others be
paradoxical and argumentative? Or must no one bark at a Minister or
General, unless they have been first dandled, like a little French
pug-dog, in the lap of a lady of quality? Does Mr. Moore insist on the
double claim of birth and genius as a title to respectability in all
advocates of the popular side--but himself? Or is he anxious to keep the
pretensions of his patrician and plebeian friends quite separate, so
as to be himself the only point of union, a sort of _double meaning_,
between the two? It is idle to think of setting bounds to the weakness
and illusions of self-love as long as it is confined to a man's own
breast; but it ought not to be made a plea for holding back the powerful
hand that is stretched out to save another struggling with the tide
of popular prejudice, who has suffered shipwreck of health, fame and
fortune in a common cause, and who has deserved the aid and the good
wishes of all who are (on principle) embarked in the same cause by equal
zeal and honesty, if not by equal talents to support and to adorn it!
We shall conclude the present article with a short notice of an
individual who, in the cast of his mind and in political principle,
bears no very remote resemblance to the patriot and wit just spoken
of, and on whose merits we should descant at greater length, but that
personal intimacy might be supposed to render us partial. It is well
when personal intimacy produces this effect; and when the light, that
dazzled us at a distance, does not on a closer inspection turn out an
opaque substance. This is a charge that none of his friends will bring
against Mr. Leigh Hunt. He improves upon acquaintance. The author
translates admirably into the man. Indeed the very faults of his style
are virtues in the individual. His natural gaiety and sprightliness of
manner, his high animal spirits, and the _vinous_ quality of his mind,
produce an immediate fascination and intoxication in those who come in
contact with him, and carry off in society whatever in his writings may
to some seem flat and impertinent. From great sanguineness of temper,
from great quickness and unsuspecting simplicity, he runs on to the
public as he does at his own fire-side, and talks about himself,
forgetting that he is not always among friends. His look, his tone are
required to point many things that he says: his frank, cordial manner
reconciles you instantly to a little over-bearing, over-weening self-
complacency. "To be admired, he needs but to be seen:" but perhaps he
ought to be seen to be fully appreciated. No one ever sought his society
who did not come away with a more favourable opinion of him: no one was
ever disappointed, except those who had entertained idle prejudices
against him. He sometimes trifles with his readers, or tires of
a subject (from not being urged on by the stimulus of immediate
sympathy)--but in conversation he is all life and animation, combining
the vivacity of the school-boy with the resources of the wit and the
taste of the scholar. The personal character, the spontaneous impulses,
do not appear to excuse the author, unless you are acquainted with his
situation and habits--like some proud beauty who gives herself what
we think strange airs and graces under a mask, but who is instantly
forgiven when she shews her face. We have said that Lord Byron is a
sublime coxcomb: why should we not say that Mr. Hunt is a delightful
one? There is certainly an exuberance of satisfaction in his manner
which is more than the strict logical premises warrant, and which dull
and phlegmatic constitutions know nothing of, and cannot understand till
they see it. He is the only poet or literary man we ever knew who puts
us in mind of Sir John Suckling or Killigrew or Carew; or who united
rare intellectual acquirements with outward grace and natural gentility.
Mr. Hunt ought to have been a gentleman born, and to have patronised men
of letters. He might then have played, and sung, and laughed, and talked
his life away; have written manly prose, elegant verse; and his _Story
of Rimini_ would have been praised by Mr. Blackwood. As it is, there is
no man now living who at the same time writes prose and verse so well,
with the exception of Mr. Southey (an exception, we fear, that will be
little palatable to either of these gentlemen). His prose writings,
however, display more consistency of principle than the laureate's: his
verses more taste. We will venture to oppose his Third Canto of the
_Story of Rimini_ for classic elegance and natural feeling to any equal
number of lines from Mr. Southey's Epics or from Mr. Moore's Lalla
Rookh. In a more gay and conversational style of writing, we think his
_Epistle to Lord Byron_ on his going abroad, is a masterpiece;--and the
_Feast of the Poets_ has run through several editions. A light, familiar
grace, and mild unpretending pathos are the characteristics of his more
sportive or serious writings, whether in poetry or prose. A smile
plays round the features of the one; a tear is ready to start from the
thoughtful gaze of the other. He perhaps takes too little pains, and
indulges in too much wayward caprice in both. A wit and a poet, Mr. Hunt
is also distinguished by fineness of tact and sterling sense: he has
only been a visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue. What then is the
drawback to so many shining qualities, that has made them useless, or
even hurtful to their owner? His crime is, to have been Editor of the
_Examiner_ ten years ago, when some allusion was made in it to the age
of the present king, and that, though his Majesty has grown older, our
luckless politician is no wiser than he was then!
[Footnote A: Compare his songs with Burns's. ]
[Footnote B:
"There was a little man, and he had a little soul,
And he said, Little soul, let us try," &c. --
Parody on
"There was a little man, and he had a little gun. "--
One should think this exquisite ridicule of a pedantic effusion might
have silenced for ever the automaton that delivered it: but the
official personage in question at the close of the Session addressed an
extra-official congratulation to the Prince Regent on a bill that had
_not_ passed--as if to repeat and insist upon our errors were to justify
them. ]
* * * * *
ELIA, AND GEOFFREY CRAYON.
So Mr. Charles Lamb and Mr. Washington Irvine choose to designate
themselves; and as their lucubrations under one or other of these _noms
de guerre_ have gained considerable notice from the public, we shall
here attempt to discriminate their several styles and manner, and to
point out the beauties and defects of each in treating of somewhat
similar subjects.
Mr. Irvine is, we take it, the more popular writer of the two, or a more
general favourite: Mr. Lamb has more devoted, and perhaps more judicious
partisans. Mr. Irvine is by birth an American, and has, as it were,
_skimmed the cream_, and taken off patterns with great skill and
cleverness, from our best known and happiest writers, so that their
thoughts and almost their reputation are indirectly transferred to his
page, and smile upon us from another hemisphere, like "the pale reflex
of Cynthia's brow:" he succeeds to our admiration and our sympathy by a
sort of prescriptive title and traditional privilege. Mr. Lamb, on the
contrary, being "native to the manner here," though he too has borrowed
from previous sources, instead of availing himself of the most popular
and admired, has groped out his way, and made his most successful
researches among the more obscure and intricate, though certainly not
the least pithy or pleasant of our writers. Mr. Washington Irvine has
culled and transplanted the flowers of modern literature, for the
amusement of the general reader: Mr. Lamb has raked among the dust and
cobwebs of a more remote period, has exhibited specimens of curious
relics, and pored over moth-eaten, decayed manuscripts, for the benefit
of the more inquisitive and discerning part of the public. Antiquity
after a time has the grace of novelty, as old fashions revived are
mistaken for new ones; and a certain quaintness and singularity of style
is an agreeable relief to the smooth and insipid monotony of modern
composition. Mr. Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the _Spirit of
the Age_, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with
the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary
direction. He prefers _bye-ways_ to _highways_. When the full tide of
human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day,
Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll
down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a
tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative
of embryo art and ancient manners. Mr. Lamb has the very soul of an
antiquarian, as this implies a reflecting humanity; the film of the past
hovers for ever before him. He is shy, sensitive, the reverse of every
thing coarse, vulgar, obtrusive, and _common-place_. He would fain
"shuffle off this mortal coil", and his spirit clothes itself in the
garb of elder time, homelier, but more durable. He is borne along with
no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable
phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence
or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear,
though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through
old-fashioned conduit-pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor
strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious and
obvious pretension into the retirement of his own mind.
"The self-applauding bird, the peacock see:--
Mark what a sumptuous pharisee is he!
Meridian sun-beams tempt him to unfold
His radiant glories, azure, green, and gold:
He treads as if, some solemn music near,
His measured step were governed by his ear:
And seems to say--Ye meaner fowl, give place,
I am all splendour, dignity, and grace!
Not so the pheasant on his charms presumes,
Though he too has a glory in his plumes.
He, christian-like, retreats with modest mien
To the close copse or far sequestered green,
And shines without desiring to be seen. "
These lines well describe the modest and delicate beauties of Mr. Lamb's
writings, contrasted with the lofty and vain-glorious pretensions of
some of his contemporaries. This gentleman is not one of those who pay
all their homage to the prevailing idol: he thinks that
"New-born gauds are made and moulded of things past. "
nor does he
"Give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o'er-dusted. "
His convictions "do not in broad rumour lie," nor are they "set off to
the world in the glistering foil" of fashion; but "live and breathe
aloft in those pure eyes, and perfect judgment of all-seeing _time_. "
Mr. Lamb rather affects and is tenacious of the obscure and remote: of
that which rests on its own intrinsic and silent merit; which scorns all
alliance, or even the suspicion of owing any thing to noisy clamour, to
the glare of circumstances. There is a fine tone of _chiaro-scuro_, a
moral perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is
fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the
frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn
to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion:--that
piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial
glance. That which, though gone by, is still remembered, is in his view
more genuine, and has given more "vital signs that it will live," than a
thing of yesterday, that may be forgotten to-morrow. Death has in this
sense the spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author
something substantial in it. Ideas savour most of reality in his mind;
or rather his imagination loiters on the edge of each, and a page of his
writings recals to our fancy the _stranger_ on the grate, fluttering in
its dusky tensity, with its idle superstition and hospitable welcome!
Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to
new customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions
of self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical
advantages, even to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does
not rely upon, or ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in
abhorrence, he utterly abjures and discards them, and places a great
gulph between him and them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of
authorship, all the cant of criticism, and helps to notoriety. He has no
grand swelling theories to attract the visionary and the enthusiast, no
passing topics to allure the thoughtless and the vain. He evades the
present, he mocks the future. His affections revert to, and settle on
the past, but then, even this must have something personal and local in
it to interest him deeply and thoroughly; he pitches his tent in the
suburbs of existing manners; brings down the account of character to the
few straggling remains of the last generation; seldom ventures beyond
the bills of mortality, and occupies that nice point between egotism
and disinterested humanity. No one makes the tour of our southern
metropolis, or describes the manners of the last age, so well as Mr.
Lamb--with so fine, and yet so formal an air--with such vivid obscurity,
with such arch piquancy, such picturesque quaintness, such smiling
pathos. How admirably he has sketched the former inmates of the South-
Sea House; what "fine fretwork he makes of their double and single
entries! " With what a firm, yet subtle pencil he has embodied _Mrs.
Battle's Opinions on Whist_! How notably he embalms a battered _beau_;
how delightfully an amour, that was cold forty years ago, revives in
his pages! With what well-disguised humour he introduces us to his
relations, and how freely he serves up his friends! Certainly, some of
his portraits are _fixtures_, and will do to hang up as lasting and
lively emblems of human infirmity.
Then there is no one who has so sure
an ear for "the chimes at midnight", not even excepting Mr. Justice
Shallow; nor could Master Silence himself take his "cheese and pippins"
with a more significant and satisfactory air. With what a gusto Mr. Lamb
describes the inns and courts of law, the Temple and Gray's-Inn, as if
he had been a student there for the last two hundred years, and had been
as well acquainted with the person of Sir Francis Bacon as he is with
his portrait or writings! It is hard to say whether St. John's Gate is
connected with more intense and authentic associations in his mind, as
a part of old London Wall, or as the frontispiece (time out of mind) of
the Gentleman's Magazine. He haunts Watling-street like a gentle spirit;
the avenues to the play-houses are thick with panting recollections,
and Christ's-Hospital still breathes the balmy breath of infancy in his
description of it! Whittington and his Cat are a fine hallucination for
Mr. Lamb's historic Muse, and we believe he never heartily forgave a
certain writer who took the subject of Guy Faux out of his hands. The
streets of London are his fairy-land, teeming with wonder, with life
and interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye
of childhood; he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a
bright and endless romance!
Mr. Lamb's taste in books is also fine, and it is peculiar. It is not
the worse for a little _idiosyncrasy_. He does not go deep into the
Scotch novels, but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding. He is little
read in Junius or Gibbon, but no man can give a better account of
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or Sir Thomas Brown's Urn-Burial,
or Fuller's Worthies, or John Bunyan's Holy War. No one is more
unimpressible to a specious declamation; no one relishes a recondite
beauty more. His admiration of Shakespear and Milton does not make
him despise Pope; and he can read Parnell with patience, and Gay
with delight. His taste in French and German literature is somewhat
defective: nor has he made much progress in the science of Political
Economy or other abstruse studies, though he has read vast folios of
controversial divinity, merely for the sake of the intricacy of style,
and to save himself the pain of thinking. Mr. Lamb is a good judge of
prints and pictures. His admiration of Hogarth does credit to both,
particularly when it is considered that Leonardo da Vinci is his next
greatest favourite, and that his love of the _actual_ does not
proceed from a want of taste for the _ideal_. His worst fault is an
over-eagerness of enthusiasm, which occasionally makes him take a
surfeit of his highest favourites. --Mr. Lamb excels in familiar
conversation almost as much as in writing, when his modesty does not
overpower his self-possession. He is as little of a proser as possible;
but he _blurts_ out the finest wit and sense in the world. He keeps
a good deal in the back-ground at first, till some excellent conceit
pushes him forward, and then he abounds in whim and pleasantry. There
is a primitive simplicity and self-denial about his manners; and a
Quakerism in his personal appearance, which is, however, relieved by
a fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence! Mr. Lamb is a general
favourite with those who know him. His character is equally singular and
amiable. He is endeared to his friends not less by his foibles than his
virtues; he insures their esteem by the one, and does not wound their
self-love by the other. He gains ground in the opinion of others,
by making no advances in his own. We easily admire genius where the
diffidence of the possessor makes our acknowledgment of merit seem like
a sort of patronage, or act of condescension, as we willingly extend our
good offices where they are not exacted as obligations, or repaid with
sullen indifference. --The style of the Essays of Elia is liable to the
charge of a certain _mannerism_. His sentences are cast in the mould of
old authors; his expressions are borrowed from them; but his feelings
and observations are genuine and original, taken from actual life, or
from his own breast; and he may be said (if any one can) "to have
coined his heart for _jests_," and to have split his brain for fine
distinctions! Mr. Lamb, from the peculiarity of his exterior and address
as an author, would probably never have made his way by detached and
independent efforts; but, fortunately for himself and others, he has
taken advantage of the Periodical Press, where he has been stuck into
notice, and the texture of his compositions is assuredly fine enough to
bear the broadest glare of popularity that has hitherto shone upon them.
Mr. Lamb's literary efforts have procured him civic honours (a thing
unheard of in our times), and he has been invited, in his character of
ELIA, to dine at a select party with the Lord Mayor. We should prefer
this distinction to that of being poet-laureat. We would recommend
to Mr. Waithman's perusal (if Mr. Lamb has not anticipated us) the
_Rosamond Gray_ and the _John Woodvil_ of the same author, as an
agreeable relief to the noise of a city feast, and the heat of city
elections. A friend, a short time ago, quoted some lines[A] from the
last-mentioned of these works, which meeting Mr. Godwin's eye, he was
so struck with the beauty of the passage, and with a consciousness of
having seen it before, that he was uneasy till he could recollect where,
and after hunting in vain for it in Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher,
and other not unlikely places, sent to Mr. Lamb to know if he could help
him to the author!
Mr. Washington Irvine's acquaintance with English literature begins
almost where Mr. Lamb's ends,--with the Spectator, Tom Brown's works,
and the wits of Queen Anne. He is not bottomed in our elder writers, nor
do we think he has tasked his own faculties much, at least on English
ground. Of the merit of his _Knicker-bocker,_ and New York stories,
we cannot pretend to judge. But in his _Sketch-book_ and
_Bracebridge-Hall_ he gives us very good American copies of our British
Essayists and Novelists, which may be very well on the other side of the
water, and as proofs of the capabilities of the national genius, but
which might be dispensed with here, where we have to boast of the
originals. Not only Mr. Irvine's language is with great taste and
felicity modelled on that of Addison, Sterne, Goldsmith, or Mackenzie;
but the thoughts and sentiments are taken at the rebound, and as they
are brought forward at the present period, want both freshness and
probability. Mr. Irvine's writings are literary _anachronisms_. He comes
to England for the first time; and being on the spot, fancies himself in
the midst of those characters and manners which he had read of in the
Spectator and other approved authors, and which were the only idea he
had hitherto formed of the parent country. Instead of looking round
to see what _we are_, he sets to work to describe us as _we were_--at
second hand. He has Parson Adams, or Sir Roger de Coverley in his
"_mind's eye_"; and he makes a village curate, or a country 'squire in
Yorkshire or Hampshire sit to these admired models for their portraits
in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Whatever the ingenious
author has been most delighted with in the representations of books, he
transfers to his port-folio, and swears that he has found it actually
existing in the course of his observation and travels through Great
Britain. Instead of tracing the changes that have taken place in society
since Addison or Fielding wrote, he transcribes their account in a
different hand-writing, and thus keeps us stationary, at least in our
most attractive and praise-worthy qualities of simplicity, honesty,
hospitality, modesty, and good-nature. This is a very flattering mode
of turning fiction into history, or history into fiction; and we should
scarcely know ourselves again in the softened and altered likeness,
but that it bears the date of 1820, and issues from the press in
Albemarle-street. This is one way of complimenting our national and
Tory prejudices; and coupled with literal or exaggerated portraits of
_Yankee_ peculiarities, could hardly fail to please. The first Essay in
the _Sketch-book_, that on National Antipathies, is the best; but after
that, the sterling ore of wit or feeling is gradually spun thinner and
thinner, till it fades to the shadow of a shade. Mr. Irvine is himself,
we believe, a most agreeable and deserving man, and has been led into
the natural and pardonable error we speak of, by the tempting bait of
European popularity, in which he thought there was no more likely method
of succeeding than by imitating the style of our standard authors, and
giving us credit for the virtues of our forefathers.
[Footnote A: The description of sports in the forest:
"To see the sun to bed and to arise,
Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes," &c. ]
* * * * *
We should not feel that we had discharged our obligations to truth or
friendship, if we were to let this volume go without introducing into it
the name of the author of _Virginius_. This is the more proper, inasmuch
as he is a character by himself, and the only poet now living that is a
mere poet. If we were asked what sort of a man Mr. Knowles is, we could
only say, "he is the writer of Virginius. " His most intimate friends see
nothing in him, by which they could trace the work to the author. The
seeds of dramatic genius are contained and fostered in the warmth of the
blood that flows in his veins; his heart dictates to his head. The most
unconscious, the most unpretending, the most artless of mortals, he
instinctively obeys the impulses of natural feeling, and produces a
perfect work of art. He has hardly read a poem or a play or seen any
thing of the world, but he hears the anxious beatings of his own heart,
and makes others feel them by the force of sympathy. Ignorant alike
of rules, regardless of models, he follows the steps of truth and
simplicity; and strength, proportion, and delicacy are the infallible
results. By thinking of nothing but his subject, he rivets the attention
of the audience to it. All his dialogue tends to action, all his
situations form classic groups. There is no doubt that Virginius is the
best acting tragedy that has been produced on the modern stage. Mr.
Knowles himself was a player at one time, and this circumstance has
probably enabled him to judge of the picturesque and dramatic effect of
his lines, as we think it might have assisted Shakespear. There is
no impertinent display, no flaunting poetry; the writer immediately
conceives how a thought would tell if he had to speak it himself. Mr.
Knowles is the first tragic writer of the age; in other respects he is
a common man; and divides his time and his affections between his
plots and his fishing-tackle, between the Muses' spring, and those
mountain-streams which sparkle like his own eye, that gush out like his
own voice at the sight of an old friend. We have known him almost from a
child, and we must say he appears to us the same boy-poet that he ever
was. He has been cradled in song, and rocked in it as in a dream,
forgetful of himself and of the world!
THE END.
