to do. Forms and conventionalities put on, as a matter of course, the court-dress of the Norman conquerors; but the heart clung sturdily to its old Saxon homespun, and felt the warmer for it. You talk about the golden age of Queen Anne. It was a French pinchbeck age. JOHN. Stay, not so fast. I like the writers of that period, for the transparency of their style, and their freedom from affectation. If I may trust my understanding of your meaning, our modern versifiers have only made the simple discovery, that an appearance of antiquity is the cheapest passport to respect. But the cheapest which we purchase with subservience is too dear. You yourself have no such prejudice against the Augustan age of English literature. I have caught you more than once with the Tatler in your hand, and have heard you praising Dryden's prefaces. PHILIP. You and I have very different notions of what poetry is, and of what its object should be. You may claim for Pope the merit of an envious eye, which could turn the least scratch upon the character of a friend into a fester, of a nimble and adroit fancy, and of an ear so niggardly that it could afford but one invariable cœsura to his verse ; but, when you call him poet, you insult the buried majesty of all earth's noblest and choicest spirits. Nature should lead the true poet by the hand, and he has far better things to do than to busy himself in counting the warts upon it, as Pope did. A cup of water from Hippocrene, tasting, as it must, of innocent pastoral sights and sounds, of the bleat of lambs, of the shadows of leaves and flowers that have leaned over it, of the rosy hands of children whose privilege it ever is to paddle in it, of the low words of lovers who have walked by its side in the moonlight, of the tears of the poor Hagars of the world who have drunk from it, would choke a satirist. His thoughts of the country must have a savor of Jack Ketch, and see no beauty but in a hemp-field. Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls; not by picking out the petty faults of our neighbours to make a mock of. Shall that divine instinct, which has in all ages concerned itself only with what is holiest and fairest in life and nature, degrade itself to go about seeking for the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to grin over with a derision more hideous even than the pitiful quarry it has moused at? Asmodeus's gift, of unroofing the dwellings of his neighbours at will, would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it would be of no worth to a poet. To the satirist the mere outward motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, avarice, these, and the other external vices, are the strings of his unmusical lyre. But the poet need only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness or misery under every roof of the wide world, whether of palace or hovel, is working also in that narrow yet boundless sphere. On that little stage the great drama of life is acted daily. There the creation, the tempting, and the fall, may be seen anew. In that withdrawing-closet, solitude whispers her secrets, and death uncovers his face. There sorrow takes up her abode, to make ready a pillow and a resting-place for the weary head of love, whom the world casts out. To the poet nothing is mean, but everything on earth is a fitting altar to the supreme beauty. But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen Anne's reign, it is enough to prove what a kennel standard of poetry was then established, that Swift's smutchy verses are not even yet excluded from the collections. What disgusting stuff, too, in Prior and Parnell! Yet Swift, perhaps, was the best writer of English whom that period produced. Witness his prose. Pope treated the English language as the image-man has served the bust of Shakspeare yonder. To rid it of some external soils, he has rubbed it down till there is no muscular expression left. It looks very much as his Own "mockery king of snow" must have done after it had begun to melt. Pope is forever mixing water with the good old mother's milk of our tongue. You cannot get a straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of his poetry is so incased in verbiage, that it puts me in mind of those importantlooking packages which boys are fond of sending to their friends. We unfold envelope after envelope, and at last find a couple of cherry-stones. But in Pope we miss the laugh which in the other case follows the culmination of the joke. He makes Homer lisp like the friar in Chaucer, and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike. JOHN. Well, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, but of the archaïsms which have been introduced into modern poetry. What you say of the Bible The forms of speech used in has some force in it. our version of it will always impress the mind, even if applied to an entirely different subject. What else can you bring forward? PHILIP. Only the fact, that, by going back to the more natural style of the Elizabethan writers, our verse has gained in harmony as well as strength. No matter whether Pope is describing the cane of a fop, or the speech of a demigod, the pause must always fall on the same syllable, and the sense be chopped off by the same rhyme. Achilles cannot gallop his horses round the walls of Troy, with Hector dragging behind his chariot, except he keep time to the immitigable seesaw of the couplet. JOHN. But all verse and rhyme are as artificial as you Conceive of Macbeth, a say Pope's casura is. monarch who classed "fools, minstrels, and bards" together in one penal enactment, delivering himself in blank verse! * PHILIP. Shakspeare knew better than he did how he ought to have talked. But I do not agree with you that either rhyme or verse is unnatural. Some of our thoughts refuse to be written except in rhyme, and, in the hands of a true poet, this is no hindrance, but the rhyme seems always to have a meaning of its own, and to add to, or at least confirm, the sentiment. Metre and rhyme are like the skin of the grape. The thought is the pulp. The one is needed to hold the other firmly together in a compact and beautiful shape. We may throw it away, if we will; but often the chief spirit and flavor of the fruit is to be pressed out of it. Without doubt, the fittest vehicle for grave and stately thoughts is the blank verse, and that has not been improved in the dramatic form since the old dramatists, nor in the epic since Milton. * See Bellenden's translation of Boece's Chron. The historian adds, "Thir and siclik lawis war usit by King Makbeth; throw quhilk he governit the realme X yeris in gud justice." |