Note 113 — CANTO IV. GRAND ATTACK!
Reading edition
The Thalaba of English metre.
Mr Southey, in his work with the title of “Thalaba or the Destroyer,” has given us a fine example of a pleasing dreadful performance, which is neither prose, rhyme, nor reason. Indeed, nothing but the inspiration of the gas which we have seen him inhale in the first canto, could have generated the following effusions.
“A Teraph stood against the cavern side, A new born infant’s head, That Khawla at his hour of death had seized, And from the shoulders wrung. It stood upon a plate of gold, An unclean spirit’s name inscribed beneath: The cheeks were deathy dark, Dark the dead skin upon the hairless skull; The lips were bluey pale; Only the eyes had life, They gleamed with demon light.” Book ii.
Again he towers in Book v.
“There where the narrowing chasm Rose loftier in the hill, Stood Zohak, wretched man, condemned to keep His cave of punishment. His was the frequent scream Which far away the prowling Chacal heard, And howled in terror back. Far from his shoulders grew Two snakes of monster size That ever at his head Aimed eager their keen teeth To satiate raving hunger with his brain. He in the eternal conflict oft would seize Their swelling necks, and in his giant grasp Bruise them, and rend their flesh with bloody nails, And howl for agony Feeling the pangs he gave, for of himself Inseparable parts his torturers grew.”
Now, if in this age of turmoils your worships should have occasion to educate a school of assassins, to be employed as Talleyrand employs his agents, for the purpose of promoting modern philanthropy and French projects of universal empire, I should advise you to prepare them intellectual food from such descriptions as we have quoted above. By accustoming your pupils to meditate on such horrible descriptions you will soon enable them to inflict without compunction or remorse, sufferings like those, which they have been in the habit of contemplating.
We are sorry to see, however, that our friend, Dr Darwin, has been pleased to express his disapprobation of this species of the terrible in style, without which your small poets can never become conspicuous. We shall, however, quote one of his sentiments on the subject merely to let the world know that we great wits do not always tally upon every point.
The doctor tells us in his Botanic Garden, p. 115, that there is a “line of boundary between the tragic and the horrid; which line, however, will veer a little this way or that, according to the prevailing manners of the age or country, and the peculiar association of ideas, or idiosyncrasy of mind, of individuals.”
Now I am apprehensive that doctor Darwin would have adjudged the greater part of Mr Southey’s sublimity to be of the “horrid” rather than the tragic or sublime kind. Such an opinion, however, would not only greatly tarnish the reputation of the critic who should venture to pronounce it, but would entirely put down many pretty good poets, who, as the Edinburgh reviewers say, must have a “qu’il mourut,” and a “let there be light” in every line; and all their characters must be in agonies and ecstacies, from their entrance to their exit.[G]
Thalaba, having leaped into a “little car” which appears to have been drawn by “four living pinions, headless, bodyless, sprung from one stem that branched below, in four down arching limbs, and clenched the carrings endlong and aside, with claws of griffin grasp;”
“Down—down, it sank—down—down— Down—down—a mighty depth!— Down—down—and now it strikes.”
There’s the bathos to perfection! Now, if we could in any way have prevailed on Mr Southey to have stopped this side of the centre of gravity, we should have been happy to have hired his “car” for this our dreadful rencontre. But as it appears that the Domdaniel cave soon after fell in, I fancy it would cost more to dig out this vehicle than to get Mr Southey to make us a new one.