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But we believe there is no other age or country in the world (but
ours), in which such genius could have been so degraded!
 XV
LORD BYRON

Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott are among writers now living[139]
the two, who would carry away a majority of suffrages as the
greatest geniuses of the age. The former would, perhaps, obtain the
preference with fine gentlemen and ladies (squeamishness apart)—
the latter with the critics and the vulgar. We shall treat of them in
the same connection, partly on account of their distinguished pre-
eminence, and partly because they afford a complete contrast to
each other. In their poetry, in their prose, in their politics, and in
their tempers, no two men can be more unlike.
If Sir Walter Scott may be thought by some to have been
“Born universal heir to all humanity,”
it is plain Lord Byron can set up no such pretension. He is, in a
striking degree, the creature of his own will. He holds no communion
with his kind; but stands alone, without mate or fellow—
“As if a man were author of himself,
And owned no other kin.”
He is like a solitary peak, all access to which is cut off not more by
elevation than distance. He is seated on a lofty eminence, “cloud-
capt,” or reflecting the last rays of setting suns; and in his poetical
moods reminds us of the fabled Titans, retired to a ridgy steep,
playing on their Pan’s-pipes, and taking up ordinary men and things
in their hands with haughty indifference. He raises his subject to
himself, or tramples on it; he neither stoops to, nor loses himself in
it. He exists not by sympathy, but by antipathy. He scorns all things,
even himself. Nature must come to him to sit for her picture—he
does not go to her. She must consult his time, his convenience, and
his humour; and wear a sombre or a fantastic garb, or his Lordship
turns his back upon her. There is no ease, no unaffected simplicity of
manner, no “golden mean.” All is strained, or petulant in the
extreme. His thoughts are sphered and crystalline; his style “prouder
than when blue Iris bends;” his spirit fiery, impatient, wayward,
indefatigable. Instead of taking his impressions from without, in
entire and almost unimpaired masses, he moulds them according to
his own temperament, and heats the materials of his imagination in
the furnace of his passions.—Lord Byron’s verse glows like a flame,
consuming everything in its way; Sir Walter Scott’s glides like a river,
clear, gentle, harmless. The poetry of the first scorches, that of the
last scarcely warms. The light of the one proceeds from an internal
source, ensanguined, sullen, fixed; the other reflects the hues of
Heaven, or the face of nature, glancing vivid and various. The
productions of the Northern Bard have the rust and the freshness of
antiquity about them; those of the Noble Poet cease to startle from
their extreme ambition of novelty, both in style and matter. Sir
Walter’s rhymes are “silly sooth ”—
“And dally with the innocence of thought,
Like the old age”—
his Lordship’s Muse spurns the olden time, and affects all the
supercilious airs of a modern fine lady and an upstart. The object of
the one writer is to restore us to truth and nature: the other chiefly
thinks how he shall display his own power, or vent his spleen, or
astonish the reader either by starting new subjects and trains of
speculation, or by expressing old ones in a more striking and
emphatic manner than they have been expressed before. He cares
little what it is he says, so that he can say it differently from others.
This may account for the charges of plagiarism which have been
repeatedly brought against the Noble Poet—if he can borrow an
image or sentiment from another, and heighten it by an epithet or an
allusion of greater force and beauty than is to be found in the
original passage, he thinks he shows his superiority of execution in
this in a more marked manner than if the first suggestion had been
his own. It is not the value of the observation itself he is solicitous
about; but he wishes to shine by contrast—even nature only serves
as a foil to set off his style. He therefore takes the thoughts of
others (whether contemporaries or not) out of their mouths, and is
content to make them his own, to set his stamp upon them, by
imparting to them a more meretricious gloss, a higher relief, a
greater loftiness of tone, and a characteristic inveteracy of purpose.
Even in those collateral ornaments of modern style, slovenliness,
abruptness, and eccentricity (as well as in terseness and
significance), Lord Byron, when he pleases, defies competition and
surpasses all his contemporaries. Whatever he does, he must do in a
more decided and daring manner than any one else—he lounges
with extravagance, and yawns so as to alarm the reader! Self-will,
passion, the love of singularity, a disdain of himself and of others
(with a conscious sense that this is among the ways and means of
procuring admiration) are the proper categories of his mind: he is a
lordly writer, is above his own reputation, and condescends to the
Muses with a scornful grace!
Lord Byron, who in his politics is a liberal, in his genius is haughty
and aristocratic: Walter Scott, who is an aristocrat in principle, is
popular in his writings, and is (as it were) equally servile to nature
and to opinion. The genius of Sir Walter is essentially imitative, or
“denotes a foregone conclusion:” that of Lord Byron is self-
dependent; or at least requires no aid, is governed by no law, but
the impulses of its own will. We confess, however much we may
admire independence of feeling and erectness of spirit in general or
practical questions, yet in works of genius we prefer him who bows
to the authority of nature, who appeals to actual objects, to
mouldering superstitions, to history, observation, and tradition,
before him who only consults the pragmatical and restless workings
of his own breast, and gives them out as oracles to the world. We
like a writer (whether poet or prose-writer) who takes in (or is
willing to take in) the range of half the universe in feeling, character,
description, much better than we do one who obstinately and
invariably shuts himself up in the Bastile of his own ruling passions.
In short, we had rather be Sir Walter Scott (meaning thereby the
Author of Waverley) than Lord Byron, a hundred times over. And for
the reason just given, namely, that he casts his descriptions in the
mould of nature, ever-varying, never tiresome, always interesting
and always instructive, instead of casting them constantly in the
mould of his own individual impressions. He gives us man as he is,
or as he was, in almost every variety of situation, action, and feeling.
Lord Byron makes man after his own image, woman after his own
heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he
gives us the misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns; and with
these two characters, burning or melting in their own fires, he
makes out everlasting centos of himself. He hangs the cloud, the film
of his existence over all outward things—sits in the centre of his
thoughts, and enjoys dark night, bright day, the glitter and the
gloom “in cell monastic”—we see the mournful pall, the crucifix, the
death’s-heads, the faded chaplet of flowers, the gleaming tapers, the
agonized brow of genius, the wasted form of beauty—but we are still
imprisoned in a dungeon, a curtain intercepts our view, we do not
breathe freely the air of nature or of our own thoughts—the other
admired author draws aside the curtain, and the veil of egotism is
rent, and he shows us the crowd of living men and women, the
endless groups, the landscape back-ground, the cloud and the
rainbow, and enriches our imaginations and relieves one passion by
another, and expands and lightens reflection, and takes away that
tightness at the breast which arises from thinking or wishing to think
that there is nothing in the world out of a man’s self!—In this point
of view, the Author of Waverley is one of the greatest teachers of
morality that ever lived, by emancipating the mind from petty,
narrow, and bigotted prejudices: Lord Byron is the greatest
pamperer of those prejudices, by seeming to think there is nothing
else worth encouraging but the seeds or the full luxuriant growth of
dogmatism and self-conceit. In reading the Scotch Novels, we never
think about the author, except from a feeling of curiosity respecting
our unknown benefactor: in reading Lord Byron’s works, he himself
is never absent from our minds. The colouring of Lord Byron’s style,
however rich and dipped in Tyrian dyes, is nevertheless opaque, is in
itself an object of delight and wonder: Sir Walter Scott’s is perfectly
transparent. In studying the one, you seem to gaze at the figures
cut in stained glass, which exclude the view beyond, and where the
pure light of Heaven is only a means of setting off the gorgeousness
of art: in reading the other, you look through a noble window at the
clear and varied landscape without. Or to sum up the distinction in
one word, Sir Walter Scott is the most dramatic writer now living;
and Lord Byron is the least so.—It would be difficult to imagine that
the Author of Waverley is in the smallest degree a pedant; as it
would be hard to persuade ourselves that the Author of Childe
Harold and Don Juan is not a coxcomb, though a provoking and
sublime one. In this decided preference given to Sir Walter Scott
over Lord Byron, we distinctly include the prose-works of the former;
for we do not think his poetry alone by any means entitles him to
that precedence. Sir Walter in his poetry, though pleasing and
natural, is a comparative trifler: it is in his anonymous productions
that he has shown himself for what he is!—
Intensity is the great and prominent distinction of Lord Byron’s
writings. He seldom gets beyond force of style, nor has he produced
any regular work or masterly whole. He does not prepare any plan
beforehand, nor revise and retouch what he has written with
polished accuracy. His only object seems to be to stimulate himself
and his readers for the moment—to keep both alive, to drive away
ennui, to substitute a feverish and irritable state of excitement for
listless indolence or even calm enjoyment. For this purpose he
pitches on any subject at random without much thought or delicacy
—he is only impatient to begin—and takes care to adorn and enrich
it as he proceeds with “thoughts that breathe and words that burn.”
He composes (as he himself has said) whether he is in the bath, in
his study, or on horseback—he writes as habitually as others talk or
think—and whether we have the inspiration of the Muse or not, we
always find the spirit of the man of genius breathing from his verse.
He grapples with his subject, and moves, penetrates, and animates
it by the electric force of his own feelings. He is often monotonous,
extravagant, offensive; but he is never dull, or tedious, but when he
writes prose. Lord Byron does not exhibit a new view of nature, or
raise insignificant objects into importance by the romantic
associations with which he surrounds them; but generally (at least)
takes common-place thoughts and events and endeavours to
express them in stronger and statelier language than others. His
poetry stands like a Martello tower by the side of his subject. He
does not, like Mr. Wordsworth, lift poetry from the ground, or create
a sentiment out of nothing. He does not describe a daisy or a
periwinkle, but the cedar or the cypress; not “poor men’s cottages,
but princes’ palaces.” His Childe Harold contains a lofty and
impassioned review of the great events of history, of the mighty
objects left as wrecks of time, but he dwells chiefly on what is
familiar to the mind of every schoolboy; has brought out few new
traits of feeling or thought; and has done no more than justice to
the reader’s preconceptions by the sustained force and brilliancy of
his style and imagery.
Lord Byron’s earlier productions, Lara, the Corsair, etc. were wild
and gloomy romances, put into rapid and shining verse. They
discover the madness of poetry, together with the inspiration; sullen,
moody, capricious, fierce, inexorable, gloating on beauty, thirsting for
revenge, hurrying from the extremes of pleasure to pain, but with
nothing permanent, nothing healthy or natural. The gaudy
decorations and the morbid sentiments remind one of flowers
strewed over the face of death! In his Childe Harold (as has been
just observed) he assumes a lofty and philosophic tone, and
“reasons high of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate.” He
takes the highest points in the history of the world, and comments
on them from a more commanding eminence: he shows us the
crumbling monuments of time, he invokes the great names, the
mighty spirit of antiquity. The universe is changed into a stately
mausoleum:—in solemn measures he chaunts a hymn to fame. Lord
Byron has strength and elevation enough to fill up the moulds of our
classical and time-hallowed recollections, and to rekindle the earliest
aspirations of the mind after greatness and true glory with a pen of
fire. The names of Tasso, of Ariosto, of Dante, of Cincinnatus, of
Cæsar, of Scipio, lose nothing of their pomp or their lustre in his
hands, and when he begins and continues a strain of panegyric on
such subjects, we indeed sit down with him to a banquet of rich
praise, brooding over imperishable glories,
“Till Contemplation has her fill.”
Lord Byron seems to cast himself indignantly from “this bank and
shoal of time,” or the frail tottering bark that bears up modern
reputation, into the huge sea of ancient renown, and to revel there
with untired, outspread plume. Even this in him is spleen—his
contempt of his contemporaries makes him turn back to the lustrous
past, or project himself forward to the dim future!—Lord Byron’s
tragedies, Faliero,[140] Sardanapalus, etc. are not equal to his other
works. They want the essence of the drama. They abound in
speeches and descriptions, such as he himself might make either to
himself or others, lolling on his couch of a morning, but do not carry
the reader out of the poet’s mind to the scenes and events recorded.
They have neither action, character, nor interest, but are a sort of
gossamer tragedies, spun out, and glittering, and spreading a flimsy
veil over the face of nature. Yet he spins them on. Of all that he has
done in this way, the Heaven and Earth (the same subject as Mr.
Moore’s Loves of the Angels) is the best. We prefer it even to
Manfred. Manfred is merely himself with a fancy-drapery on: but in
the dramatic fragment published in the Liberal, the space between
Heaven and Earth, the stage on which his characters have to pass to
and fro, seems to fill his Lordship’s imagination; and the Deluge,
which he has so finely described, may be said to have drowned all
his own idle humours.
We must say we think little of our author’s turn for satire. His
“English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” is dogmatical and insolent, but
without refinement or point. He calls people names, and tries to
transfix a character with an epithet, which does not stick, because it
has no other foundation than his own petulance and spite; or he
endeavours to degrade by alluding to some circumstance of external
situation. He says of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry, that “it is his
aversion.” That may be: but whose fault is it? This is the satire of a
lord, who is accustomed to have all his whims or dislikes taken for
gospel, and who cannot be at the pains to do more than signify his
contempt or displeasure. If a great man meets with a rebuff which
he does not like, he turns on his heel, and this passes for a repartee.
The Noble Author says of a celebrated barrister and critic, that he
was “born in a garret sixteen stories high.” The insinuation is not
true; or if it were, it is low. The allusion degrades the person who
makes it, not him to whom it is applied. This is also the satire of a
person of birth and quality, who measures all merit by external rank,
that is, by his own standard. So his Lordship, in a “Letter to the
Editor of my Grandmother’s Review,” addresses him fifty times as
“my dear Robarts;” nor is there any other wit in the article. This is
surely a mere assumption of superiority from his Lordship’s rank, and
is the sort of quizzing he might use to a person who came to hire
himself as a valet to him at Long’s—the waiters might laugh, the
public will not. In like manner, in the controversy about Pope, he
claps Mr. Bowles on the back with a coarse facetious familiarity, as if
he were his chaplain whom he had invited to dine with him, or was
about to present to a benefice. The reverend divine might submit to
the obligation, but he has no occasion to subscribe to the jest. If it is
a jest that Mr. Bowles should be a parson, and Lord Byron a peer,
the world knew this before; there was no need to write a pamphlet
to prove it.
The Don Juan indeed has great power; but its power is owing to the
force of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast
between that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded.
From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh
and are surprised that any one should turn round and travestie
himself: the drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and
feelings. He makes virtue serve as a foil to vice; dandyism is (for
want of any other) a variety of genius. A classical intoxication is
followed by the splashing of soda-water, by frothy effusions of
ordinary bile. After the lightning and the hurricane, we are
introduced to the interior of the cabin and the contents of the wash-
hand basins. The solemn hero of tragedy plays Scrub in the farce.
This is “very tolerable and not to be endured.” The Noble Lord is
almost the only writer who has prostituted his talents in this way. He
hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in defacing the
images of beauty his hands have wrought; and raises our hopes and
our belief in goodness to Heaven only to dash them to the earth
again, and break them in pieces the more effectually from the very
height they have fallen. Our enthusiasm for genius or virtue is thus
turned into a jest by the very person who has kindled it, and who
thus fatally quenches the spark of both. It is not that Lord Byron is
sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profligate, and
sometimes moral—but when he is most serious and most moral, he
is only preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader by putting a
pitiful hoax upon him. This is a most unaccountable anomaly. It is as
if the eagle were to build its eyry in a common sewer, or the owl
were seen soaring to the mid-day sun. Such a sight might make one
laugh, but one would not wish or expect it to occur more than once!
[141]

In fact, Lord Byron is the spoiled child of fame as well as fortune. He

has taken a surfeit of popularity, and is not contented to delight,
unless he can shock the public. He would force them to admire in
spite of decency and common-sense—he would have them read
what they would read in no one but himself, or he would not give a
rush for their applause. He is to be “a chartered libertine,” from
whom insults are favours, whose contempt is to be a new incentive
to admiration. His Lordship is hard to please: he is equally averse to
notice or neglect, enraged at censure and scorning praise. He tries
the patience of the town to the very utmost, and when they show
signs of weariness or disgust, threatens to discard them. He says he
will write on, whether he is read or not. He would never write
another page, if it were not to court popular applause, or to affect a
superiority over it. In this respect also, Lord Byron presents a
striking contrast to Sir Walter Scott. The latter takes what part of the
public favour falls to his share, without grumbling (to be sure, he
has no reason to complain); the former is always quarrelling with the
world about his modicum of applause, the spolia opima of vanity,
and ungraciously throwing the offerings of incense heaped on his
shrine back in the faces of his admirers. Again, there is no taint in
the writings of the Author of Waverley, all is fair and natural and
above-board: he never outrages the public mind. He introduces no
anomalous character: broaches no staggering opinion. If he goes
back to old prejudices and superstitions as a relief to the modern
reader, while Lord Byron floats on swelling paradoxes—
“Like proud seas under him;”
if the one defers too much to the spirit of antiquity, the other
panders to the spirit of the age, goes to the very edge of extreme
and licentious speculation, and breaks his neck over it. Grossness
and levity are the playthings of his pen. It is a ludicrous
circumstance that he should have dedicated his Cain to the worthy
Baronet! Did the latter ever acknowledge the obligation? We are not
nice, not very nice; but we do not particularly approve those
subjects that shine chiefly from their rottenness: nor do we wish to
see the Muses dressed out in the flounces of a false or questionable
philosophy, like Portia and Nerissa in the garb of Doctors of Law. We
like metaphysics as well as Lord Byron; but not to see them making
flowery speeches, nor dancing a measure in the fetters of verse. We
have as good as hinted, that his Lordship’s poetry consists mostly of
a tissue of superb common-places; even his paradoxes are common-
place. They are familiar in the schools: they are only new and
striking in his dramas and stanzas, by being out of place. In a word,
we think that poetry moves best within the circle of nature and
received opinion: speculative theory and subtle casuistry are
forbidden ground to it. But Lord Byron often wanders into this
ground wantonly, wilfully, and unwarrantably. The only apology we
can conceive for the spirit of some of Lord Byron’s writings, is the
spirit of some of those opposed to him. They would provoke a man
to write anything. “Farthest from them is best.” The extravagance
and license of the one seems a proper antidote to the bigotry and
narrowness of the other. The first Vision of Judgment was a set-off
to the second, though
“None but itself could be its parallel.”

Perhaps the chief cause of most of Lord Byron’s errors is, that he is
that anomaly in letters and in society, a Noble Poet. It is a double
privilege, almost too much for humanity. He has all the pride of birth
and genius. The strength of his imagination leads him to indulge in
fantastic opinions; the elevation of his rank sets censure at defiance,
he becomes a pampered egotist. He has a seat in the House of
Lords, a niche in the Temple of Fame. Everyday mortals, opinions,
things, are not good enough for him to touch or think of. A mere
nobleman is, in his estimation, but “the tenth transmitter of a foolish
face:” a mere man of genius is no better than a worm. His Muse is
also a lady of quality. The people are not polite enough for him: the
Court is not sufficiently intellectual. He hates the one and despises
the other. By hating and despising others, he does not learn to be
satisfied with himself. A fastidious man soon grows querulous and
splenetic. If there is nobody but ourselves to come up to our idea of
fancied perfection, we easily get tired of our idol. When a man is
tired of what he is, by a natural perversity he sets up for what he is
not. If he is a poet, he pretends to be a metaphysician: if he is a
patrician in rank and feeling, he would fain be one of the people. His
ruling motive is not the love of the people, but of distinction;—not of
truth, but of singularity. He patronises men of letters out of vanity,
and deserts them from caprice, or from the advice of friends. He
embarks in an obnoxious publication to provoke censure, and leaves
it to shift for itself for fear of scandal. We do not like Sir Walter’s
gratuitous servility: we like Lord Byron’s preposterous liberalism little
better. He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his
privilege of peerage, upon occasion. His Lordship has made great
offers of service to the Greeks—money and horses. He is at present
in Cephalonia, waiting the event!
We had written thus far when news came of the death of Lord
Byron, and put an end at once to a strain of somewhat peevish
invective, which was intended to meet his eye, not to insult his
memory. Had we known that we were writing his epitaph, we must
have done it with a different feeling. As it is, we think it better and
more like himself, to let what we had written stand, than to take up
our leaden shafts, and try to melt them into “tears of sensibility,” or
mould them into dull praise, and an affected show of candour. We
were not silent during the author’s life-time, either for his reproof or
encouragement (such as we could give, and he did not disdain to
accept) nor can we now turn undertakers’ men to fix the glittering
plate upon his coffin, or fall into the procession of popular woe.—
Death cancels every thing but truth; and strips a man of every thing
but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization. It makes
the meanest of us sacred—it installs the poet in his immortality, and
lifts him to the skies. Death is the great assayer of the sterling ore of
talent. At his touch the drossy particles fall off, the irritable, the
personal, the gross, and mingle with the dust—the finer and more
ethereal part mounts with the winged spirit to watch over our latest
memory, and protect our bones from insult. We consign the least
worthy qualities to oblivion, and cherish the nobler and imperishable
nature with double pride and fondness. Nothing could show the real
superiority of genius in a more striking point of view than the idle
contests and the public indifference about the place of Lord Byron’s
interment, whether in Westminster Abbey or his own family-vault. A
king must have a coronation—a nobleman a funeral-procession.—
The man is nothing without the pageant. The poet’s cemetery is the
human mind, in which he sows the seeds of never-ending thought—
his monument is to be found in his works:
“Nothing can cover his high fame but Heaven;
No pyramids set off his memory,
But the eternal substance of his greatness.”
Lord Byron is dead: he also died a martyr to his zeal in the cause of
freedom, for the last, best hopes of man. Let that be his excuse and
his epitaph!
 XVI
ON POETRY IN GENERAL

The best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the
natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an
involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing,
by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds,
expressing it.
In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of the subject-matter of it,
next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and
afterwards of its connection with harmony of sound.
Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates
to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It
comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but
what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible
shape, can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language
which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt
for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for any thing
else. It is not a mere frivolous accomplishment, (as some persons
have been led to imagine) the trifling amusement of a few idle
readers or leisure hours—it has been the study and delight of
mankind in all ages. Many people suppose that poetry is something
to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten syllables with like
endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or
harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a
flower that “spreads its sweet leaves to the air and dedicates its
beauty to the sun,”—there is poetry, in its birth. If history is a grave
study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper,
and are spread wider. History treats, for the most part, of the
cumbrous and unwieldy masses of things, the empty cases in which
the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue or
war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is no
thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man,
which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they
would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is
not a branch of authorship: it is “the stuff of which our life is made.”
The rest is “mere oblivion,” a dead letter: for all that is worth
remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry,
love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse,
admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry
is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises
our whole being: without it “man’s life is poor as beast’s.” Man is a
poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of
poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Molière’s Bourgeois
Gentilhomme, who had always spoken prose without knowing it. The
child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or
repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet,
when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the
countryman, when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-
apprentice, when he gazes after the Lord-Mayor’s show; the miser,
when he hugs his gold; the courtier, who builds his hopes upon a
smile; the savage, who paints his idol with blood; the slave, who
worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who fancies himself a god;—the
vain, the ambitious, the proud, the choleric man, the hero and the
coward, the beggar and the king, the rich and the poor, the young
and the old, all live in a world of their own making; and the poet
does no more than describe what all the others think and act. If his
art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness at second hand.
“There is warrant for it.” Poets alone have not “such seething brains,
such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler reason”
can.
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
The madman. While the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
 The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heav’n to earth, from earth to
heav’n;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination.”

If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is a

fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they
are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality.
Ariosto has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro; but was not
Medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees,
as much enamoured of her charms as he? Homer has celebrated the
anger of Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato
banished the poets from his Commonwealth, lest their descriptions
of the natural man should spoil his mathematical man, who was to
be without passions and affections, who was neither to laugh nor
weep, to feel sorrow nor anger, to be cast down nor elated by any
thing. This was a chimera, however, which never existed but in the
brain of the inventor; and Homer’s poetical world has outlived Plato’s
philosophical Republic.
Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the
passions are a part of man’s nature. We shape things according to
our wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most
emphatical language that can be found for those creations of the
mind “which ecstacy is very cunning in.” Neither a mere description
of natural objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings,
however distinct or forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of
poetry, without the heightenings of the imagination. The light of
poetry is not only a direct but also a reflected light, that while it
shows us the object, throws a sparkling radiance on all around it:
the flame of the passions, communicated to the imagination, reveals
to us, as with a flash of lightning, the inmost recesses of thought,
and penetrates our whole being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as
they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other
feelings. Poetry puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe. It
describes the flowing, not the fixed. It does not define the limits of
sense, or analyze the distinctions of the understanding, but signifies
the excess of the imagination beyond the actual or ordinary
impression of any object or feeling. The poetical impression of any
object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot
be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame
bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred
beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest
forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by
expressing it in the boldest manner, and by the most striking
examples of the same quality in other instances. Poetry, according to
Lord Bacon, for this reason “has something divine in it, because it
raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the
shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the
soul to external things, as reason and history do.” It is strictly the
language of the imagination; and the imagination is that faculty
which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as they
are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite variety
of shapes and combinations of power. This language is not the less
true to nature, because it is false in point of fact; but so much the
more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object
under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for
instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear—
and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it
into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear.
“Our eyes are made the fools” of our other faculties. This is the
universal law of the imagination,
“That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy:
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!”
When Iachimo says of Imogen,
“The flame o’ th’ taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her
lids
To see the enclosed lights”—
this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord
with the speaker’s own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally
with the poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks
of shining gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has,
from novelty and a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect
to the imagination than the purest gold. We compare a man of
gigantic stature to a tower: not that he is any thing like so large, but
because the excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to
expect, or the usual size of things of the same class, produces by
contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous strength than
another object of ten times the same dimensions. The intensity of
the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects. Things are
equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the
mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love.
When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, “for they are
old like him,” there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime
identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image
which could do justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and his
despair!
Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with
the forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain,
by blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the
most striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most
impassioned species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the
utmost point of sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or
contrast; loses the sense of present suffering in the imaginary
exaggeration of it; exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited
indulgence of it; grapples with impossibilities in its desperate
impatience of restraint; throws us back upon the past, forward into
the future; brings every moment of our being or object of nature in
startling review before us; and in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us
from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations on human life.
When Lear says, of Edgar, “Nothing but his unkind daughters could
have brought him to this;” what a bewildered amazement, what a
wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of
any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and
absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood, supplies
the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the mad
scene, “The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see,
they bark at me!” it is passion lending occasion to imagination to
make every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude
and insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes,
searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the
last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his
breast, only to torture and kill it! In like manner the “So I am” of
Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a
weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon
it for years. What a fine return of the passion upon itself is that in
Othello—with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he clings
to the last traces of departed happiness—when he exclaims,
“Oh now, for ever
Farewel the tranquil mind. Farewel content;
Farewel the plumed troops and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! Oh farewel!
Farewel the neighing steed, and the shrill
trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war:
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th’ immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewel! Othello’s occupation’s gone!”