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and the two had fled with as much propriety to Scotland as up the Nile. The story hangs on the slightest possible thread of incident; the dramatis persona have no life-likeness or substantive character about them; but the whole owes its charm to the gorgeous tints spread over the externals; the fancy is perpetually employed in reconstructing for us scenes of splendour and startling novelty. The broad Nile glitters in the sun, starred with the green islands; boats flit here and there, the stately temples are laid open, lamps shine, music echoes in our ears, dancing forms, lovely faces bewilder our eyes; we think we are at the opera-house, and the ballet is divine. Never was a spectacle got up with more skill or with a more lavish expenditure of materials. Alethe and Alciphron in a pas-de-deux, emblematic of the power of love and the Christian religion, display a grace and tenderness that move the hearts of all spectators. There is enjoyment of a certain sort in reading of this kind, something like that we have in seeing good fireworks; but as inferior to the pleasure real poetry gives as fireworks are

"To sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,

Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine."

In our first youth, indeed, when the imagination is awakening, and the intellect and the feelings at once keenly alive and undisciplined and uninformed by realities, this sort of stimulant to the fancy seems delightful; we devour it with absorbing interest, the artificiality does not spoil the sentiment, we don't see the poverty that all this glitter enwraps. At that age we don't care about our heroes and heroines being true to the complex realities of human beings; enough for us if the women are incarnations of loveliness, and the men paragons in courage and intellect. Moore's is the vin mousseux of poetry; adolescents and some women drink it with pleasure; men prefer something with more body and real flavour.

His witty verses do not require any very minute examination. He has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a happy knack of expression; his poems are made up of a series of epigrammatic points, very felicitously turned, but revolving too much on the double meanings of words and phrases. He has humour, but he doesn't give it free play; he compresses it into the forms of wit, where it moves hampered, like the jovial Bob Fudge in his French stays. Sometimes both idea and expression are genuinely humorous; as where he makes the bishops say, when reminded of the self-denying habits of their early predecessors,

"We think it pious, but absurd;"

and where, in one of his letters, he complains that "nothing goes right in this world, except for those with whom every thing, please God, will go wrong in the other." This almost rivals a saying he tells of Charles Lamb's, when an elderly lady, after boring him with all the good qualities of some friend of hers, ended with, "I know him, bless him!" "Well, I don't," said Lamb; "but damn him at a hazard!"

For his social qualities we are mainly dependent on the evidence of others: but they must have been great to secure him the advantages they did. Besides his peculiar gift in singing, he had a bonhomie, a vivacity, a readiness and brilliancy of wit, and an easy familiarity with social forms, which the world found irresistible; and which took an additional attraction for English circles from their association with that sort of warmth which an Irishman or a Frenchman throws into his demeanour during the most casual intercourse, and which only seems insincere to an Englishman, because to him it is not natural unless his feelings are more deeply and permanently engaged. He was quite at home in the polished and aristocratic sphere in which he moved, and never seems to have made any false com

His

pliances to gain or keep his position there. He judged things, no doubt, somewhat too much by a worldly test; and in his mode of speaking of some of his fellow poets, men of infinitely higher genius than himself, there is some trace of an air as if he had mistaken his social for real superiority. He speaks of the difficulty of not appearing fine in "such society" as he met at Christopher North's house in Edinburgh. He makes the most of any weak point in Wordsworth. He is a little superciliously surprised that Lamb only got 1707. for his Essays of Elia; "should have thought it more," he says. He estimated that he himself had made at least 20,0007. by his writings. Still, on the whole, he carried his singular fortunes without undue elation, and, though not a man who went out of his own way to interest himself in the history or welfare of others, was a kindly and well-meaning member of the brotherhood. poetry, great as are its real shortcomings and defects when compared with the reputation it once enjoyed, has this merit, that it is original; and independently of its connection with music, it will always retain a place in the history of English literature, for it has been widely read, and has a distinctive character of its own. But its cloying assemblage of all that is most captivating to the senses, and to those emotions which lie nearest to them, can never have more than a passing interest for mature and cultivated minds. The mere jingle of words without sense will please children; glitter of fancy, vague declamation, and abstract passion, are sufficient for the next stage of development; but as the mind advances, it asks for harmony throughout all the form and essence of a poem, and in the poet for an insight wide and deep into the concrete forms of existence, above all, into those highest ones of individual life and character.

169

THE THEORY OF POETIC EXPRESSION:

GRAY.*

[August 1854.]

OF Gray's serious poems, the Elegy alone was received with general applause during his lifetime, and alone will secure his reputation. It was published by Dodsley in 1751, and before very long passed through eleven editions. Few poems have enjoyed such universal and constant attention. It is popular because the sentiments and ideas are level to universal comprehension, and it is full of tender feeling, expressed with exquisite. finish of diction and harmony of verse, and with greater simplicity of language than is to be found in his other poems for Gray often loses by the over-anxious care he bestowed on the verbal clothing of his conceptions.

In the highest mode of poetical imagination, the language and the idea are united like body and spirit, and the poet would find it hard to say which suggested the other; the whole springs complete from the forming mind, and is incapable of correction; in a second and lower mode, the mind is occupied by some vivid conception, or haunted by some image of beauty: it yearns to express it, to give it outward form and utterance-it ponders over the capacities of language, and revolves all its subtle analogies to find the true outward vestiture, which shall body forth in words to itself and

* The following formed part of a criticism in the Prospective Review for August 1854, on the Correspondence of Gray and Mason, edited by the Rev. John Mitford.

others the very thing which thus possesses the imagination. Mason's poetical power (such as it was) worked in this manner. He had creative impulse-ideas and fancies did visit him and call for expression. But they were neither of a high order nor took a firm hold upon him. He possessed neither patience nor a conscientious artistic feeling. He had few fine conceptions to be true to, and cared little to be true to such as he had. His habits of poetical composition betray his indolence and indifference to a high standard. His thoughts, as those of any man will do with a little practice, readily flowed into verse, and his custom was to write down what occurred to him, in such language and rhythm as came readiest to hand, and to preserve this rough and hasty sketch for future correction. In one place he speaks of the practice ascribed to Racine of writing out his plays in prose before he put them in verse, and is persuaded that, had he written in English, he would have availed himself of blank verse for this purpose. He is very

much mistaken. The same practice has been ascribed to several eminent dramatic writers; but their object was not to have a crude first sketch to be part used, part rejected, and by degress patched and cobbled into

poem; they desired to fix and give definiteness and precision to the conception which was to obtain poetical expression from another and different effort. Thus their system is the very reverse of his own. The one requires to build a framework of thought before it ventures on the execution, the other hastens to execution before either the thoughts or the form they should bear have been adequately conceived. Gray saw clearly the defectiveness of Mason's mode of composing, and animadverted on it, but it was too natural a result from the whole cast of his mind, for him to be capable of relinquishing it. The instance that called for Gray's stricture affords in itself a curious enough specimen of Mason's careless facility alike in producing and abandoning

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