tions of the English adventurer in his solitary place of confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he says: As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner, locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh, and look upon the ground for an hour or two together, and this was still worse to me, for if I could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it would go off, and the grief, having exhausted itself, would abate. The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey, it is true; but the relator had the true genius of a poet. It has been made a question whether Richardson's romances 35 are poetry; and the answer perhaps is, that they are not poetry because they are not romance. The interest is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an infinite number of little things, by incessant labor and calls upon the attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is unforced and spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The story does not "give an echo to the seat where love is throned." The heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which the Lilliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace. Sir Charles Grandison is a coxcomb. What sort of a figure 35 Pamela, 1740; Clarissa Harlowe, 1747-8; Sir Charles Grandison, would he cut, translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her ruffles, in her gloves, in her samplers, her aunts and uncles-she is interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination. There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted from a caput mortuum of circumstances: it does not evaporate of itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and requires an artificial process to let it out. Shakespeare says: Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes our gentle flame Burke's writings are not poetry, notwithstanding the vividness of his fancy,37 because the subject-matter is abstruse and dry, not natural but artificial. The difference between poetry and eloquence is, that the one is the eloquence of the imagination and the other of the understanding.38 Eloquence tries to persuade the will, and convince the reason; poetry produces its effect by instantaneous sympathy. Nothing is a subject for poetry that admits of a dispute. Poets are in general bad prose writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not to the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetry wants the forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic. And some of our own 36 Timon of Athens, I, i, 21-25. 37 Compare a passage in Hazlitt's essay on "The Prose Style of Poets": "It has always appeared to me that the most perfect prose style, the most powerful, the most dazzling, the most daring, that which went nearest to the verge of poetry, and yet never fell over, was Burke's. It differs from poetry, as I conceive, like the chamois from the eagle; it climbs to an almost equal heignt, touches upon a cloud, overlooks a precipice, is picturesque, sublime, but all the while, instead of soaring through the air, it stands upon a rocky cliff, clambers up by abrupt and intricate ways, and browses on the roughest bark, or crops the tender flower. The principle which guides his pen is truth, not beauty." 38 This subject, the relation of poetry to eloquence, is discussed by John Stuart Mill in his essay called "Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties." poetry which has been most admired is only poetry in the rhyme, and in the studied use of poetic diction.30 ... SIR WALTER SCOTT, RACINE, AND SHAKESPEARE WILLIAM HAZLITT [One of the essays of the collection called The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, published 1826. Two or three introductory pages, irrelevant to the subject, are omitted.] The subject occurred to me from some conversation with a French lady, who entertains a project of introducing Shakespeare in France. As I demurred to the probability of this alteration in the national taste, she endeavored to overcome my despondency by several lively arguments, and among other things urged the instantaneous and universal success of the Scotch Novels among all ranks and conditions of the French people. As Shakespeare had been performing quarantine among them for a century and a half to no purpose, I thought this circumstance rather proved the difference in the genius of the two writers than a change in the taste of the nation. Madame B. stoutly maintained the contrary opinion; and when an Englishman argues with a Frenchwoman, he has very considerable odds against him. The only advantage you have in this case is that you can plead inability to express yourself properly, and may be supposed to have a meaning where you have none. An eager manner will supply the place of distinct ideas, and you have only not to surrender in form, to appear to come off with flying colors. The not being able to make others understand me, however, prevents me from understanding myself, and I was by no means satisfied with the reasons I alleged in the present instance. I tried to mend them the next day, and the following is the result. 39 The concluding paragraphs, here omitted, contain "some remarks on four of the principal works of poetry in the world," Homer, the Bible, Dante, and Ossian. It was supposed at one time that the genius of the author of Waverley was confined to Scotland; that his novels and tales were a bundle of national prejudices and local traditions, and that his superiority would desert him, the instant he attempted to cross the Border. He made the attempt, however, and, contrary to these unfavorable prognostics, succeeded. Ivanhoe, if not equal to the very best of the Scotch Novels, is very nearly so; and the scenery and manners are truly English. In Quentin Durward, again, he made a descent upon France, and gained new laurels, instead of losing his former ones. This seemed to bespeak a versatility of talent and a plastic power, which in the first instance had been called in question. A Scotch mist had been suspected to hang its mystery over the page; his imagination was borne up on Highland superstitions and obsolete traditions, "sailing with supreme dominion" through the murky regions of ignorance and barbarism; and if ever at a loss, his invention was eked out and got a cast by means of ancient documents and the records of criminal jurisprudence or fanatic rage. The Black Dwarf was a paraphrase of the current anecdotes of David Ritchie, without any additional point or interest; and the story of Effie Deans had slept for a century in the law reports and depositions relative to the Heart of Mid-Lothian. To be sure, nothing could be finer or truer to nature; for the human heart, wherever or however it is awakened, has a stirring power in it, and as to the truth of nature, nothing can be more like nature than the facts, if you know where to find them. But as to sheer invention, there appeared to be about as much as there is in the getting up the melodramatic represensation of The Maid and the Magpie1 from the Causes Célèbres. The invention is much greater and the effect is not less in Mrs. Inchbald's Nature and Art,2 where there is nothing that can have been given in evidence but the Trial Scene near the end, and even that is not a legal anecdote, but a pure dramatic fiction. Before I proceed, I may as well dwell on this point a little. The A comedy, which Hazlitt reviewed for The Examiner in September, 1815. The Causes Célèbres was a French collection of accounts of celebrated criminal trials. 2 A novel, published 1796. 3 heroine of the story, the once innocent and beautiful Hannah, is brought by a series of misfortunes and crimes (the effect of a misplaced attachment) to be tried for her life at the Old Bailey, and as her Judge, her former lover and seducer, is about to pronounce sentence upon her, she calls out in an agony-“Oh! not from you!" and, as the Hon. Mr. Norwynne proceeds to finish his solemn address, falls in a swoon, and is taken senseless from the bar. I know nothing in the world so affecting as this. Now if Mrs. Inchbald had merely found this story in the Newgate Calendar, and transplanted it into a novel, I conceive that her merit in point of genius (not to say feeling) would be less than if, having all the other circumstances given, and the apparatus ready, and this explanation alone left blank, she had filled it up from her own heart, that is, from an intense conception of the situation of the parties, so that from the harrowing recollections passing through the mind of the poor girl so circumstanced this uncontrollable gush of feeling would burst from her lips. Just such I apprehend, generally speaking, is the amount of the difference between the genius of Shakespeare and that of Sir Walter Scott. It is the difference between originality and the want of it, between writing and transcribing. Almost all the finest scenes and touches, the great master strokes, in Shakespeare are such as must have belonged to the class of invention, where the secret lay between him and his own heart, and the power exerted is in adding to the given materials and working something out of them. In the author of Waverley, not all, but the principal and characteristic beauties are such as may and do belong to the class of compilation, that is, consist in bringing the materials together and leaving them to produce their own effect. Sir Walter Scott is much such a writer as the Duke of Wellington is a general (I am profaning a number of great names in this article by unequal comparisons). The one gets a hundred thousand men together, and wisely leaves it to them to fight out the battle, for if he meddled with it he might spoil sport; the other gets an innumerable quantity of facts together, 3 A record of criminals confined in Newgate Prison. |