CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW (continued 8)

The Ninth Conversation (‘Marchese Pallavicini and Walter Landor‘) contains scandal against the English Government—Conversation X. (‘General Kleber and some French Officers‘) scandal against the French—Conversation XI. 245(‘Buonaparte and the President of the Senate’) scandal against good taste and common decency. Let Mr. Landor cancel it—let his publishers strike their asterisks through it. It is short, and not sweet. These fabulous stories about the expedition into Egypt, these low-minded and scurrilous aspersions on Buonaparte, which the Tories palmed upon the credulity of their gulls, the Jacobin poets, have been long discarded by the inventors, and linger only in the pages, rankle only in the hearts of their converts. We would recommend to Mr. Landor, before he writes on this subject again, to read over the allegory of his friend Spenser, describing Occasion and Furor, and not to be refreshing his groundless and mischievous resentments every moment with a ‘Cymocles, oh! I burn!’ It is by no means a sufficient reason to believe a thing that it provokes our anger, or excites our disgust; nor is it wise or decorous to bay the moon, and then quarrel with the echo of our own voice. Mr. Landor keeps up a clamour raised by the worst men to answer the worst purposes, only to persuade himself, if possible, that he has not been its dupe. This is the worst of our author’s style—it continually explodes and detonates—one cannot read him in security, for fear of springing a mine, if any of his prejudices are touched, or passions roused. He is made of combustible materials—sits hatching treason, like the Guy Faux of letters, and is equally ready to blow up a Legitimate Despot, or pounce upon an usurper! Let us turn to Humphrey Hardcastle and Bishop Burnet,—in which the garrulous, credulous, acute, vulgar, and yet graphic style of the latter, is very pleasingly caricatured.

‘Hardcastle. The pleasure I have taken in the narration of your Lordship is for the greater part independent of what concerns my family. I never knew that my uncle was a poet, and could hardly have imagined that he approached near enough to Mr. Cowley for jealousy or competition.

‘Bishop Burnet. Indeed, they who discoursed on such matters were of the same opinion, excepting some few, who see nothing before them, and every thing behind. These declared that Hum would overtop Abraham, if he could only drink rather less, think rather more, and feel rather rightlier; that he had great spunk and spirit, and that not a fan was left on a lap when any one sang his airs. Poets, like ministers of state, have their parties; and it is difficult to get at truth upon questions not capable of demonstration, nor founded on matter of fact. To take any trouble about them, is an unwise thing: it is like mounting a wall covered with broken glass: you cut your fingers before you reach the top, and you only discover at last that it is within a span or two of equal height on both 246sides. Who would have imagined that the youth who was carried to his long home the other day, I mean my Lord Rochester’s reputed child, Mr. George Nelly, was for several seasons a great poet? Yet I remember the time when he was so famous an one that he ran after Mr. Milton up Snow Hill, as the old gentleman was leaning on his daughter’s arm, from the Poultry, and treading down the heel of his shoe, called him a rogue and a liar, while another poet sprang out from a grocer’s shop, clapping his hands, and crying, “Bravely done! by Belzebub! the young cock spurs the blind buzzard gallantly.” On some neighbour representing to Mr. George the respectable character of Mr. Milton, and the probability that at some future time he might be considered as among our geniuses, and such as would reflect a certain portion of credit on his ward, and asking him withal why he appeared to him a rogue and a liar, he replied, “I have proofs known to few: I possess a sort of drama by him, entitled Comus, which was composed for the entertainment of Lord Pembroke, who held an appointment under the King; and this very John has since changed sides, and written in defence of the Commonwealth.”—Mr. George began with satirizing his father’s friends, and confounding the better part of them with all the hirelings and nuisances of the age, with all the scavengers of lust and all the linkboys of literature; with Newgate solicitors, the patrons of adulterers and forgers, who, in the long vocation, turn a penny by puffing a ballad, and are promised a shilling in silver, for their own benefit, on crying down a religious tract. He soon became reconciled to the latter, and they raised him upon their shoulders above the heads of the wittiest and the wisest. This served a whole winter. Afterwards, whenever he wrote a bad poem, he supported his sinking fame by some signal act of profligacy—an elegy by a seduction, an heroic by an adultery, a tragedy by a divorce. On the remark of a learned man, that irregularity is no indication of genius, he began to lose ground rapidly, when on a sudden he cried out at the Haymarket, There is no God! It was then surmised more generally and more gravely that there was something in him, and he stood upon his legs almost to the last. Say what you will, once whispered a friend of mine, there are things in him strong as poison, and original as sin. Doubts, however, were entertained by some, on more mature reflection, whether he earned all his reputation by that witticism: for soon afterwards he declared at the cockpit, that he had purchased a large assortment of cutlasses and pistols, and that, as he was practising the use of them from morning to night, it would be imprudent in persons who were without them either to laugh or boggle at the Dutch vocabulary with which he had enriched our language.... 247Having had some concern in bringing his reputed father to a sense of penitence for his offences, I waited on the youth likewise in a former illness, not without hope of leading him ultimately to a better way of thinking. I had hesitated too long: I found him far advanced in his convalescence. My arguments are not worth repeating. He replied thus: “I change my mistresses as Tom Southern his shirt, from economy. I cannot afford to keep few: and I am determined not to be forgotten till I am vastly richer. But I assure you, Dr. Burnet, for your comfort, that if you imagine I am led astray by lasciviousness, as you call it, and lust, you are quite as much mistaken as if you called a book of arithmetic a bawdy book. I calculate on every kiss I give, modest or immodest, on lip or paper. I ask myself one question only—what will it bring me?” On my marvelling, and raising up my hands, “You churchmen,” he added, with a laugh, “are too hot in all your quarters for the calm and steddy contemplation of this high mystery.” He spake thus loosely, Mr. Hardcastle, and I confess, I was disconcerted and took my leave of him. If I gave him any offence at all, it could only be when he said, “I should be sorry to die before I have written my life,” and I replied, “Rather say before you have mended it.”—“But, doctor,” continued he, “the work I propose may bring me a hundred pounds;” whereunto I rejoined, “that which I, young gentleman, suggest in preference will be worth much more to you.” At last he is removed from among the living: let us hope the best: to wit, that the mercies which have begun with man’s forgetfulness will be crowned with God’s forgiveness.’ I. 164.

In the Conversation between Peter Leopold and the President du Paty, there is a good deal of curious local information and sensible remark; but there is too constant a balance kept up between the arguments in favour of reform, and the difficulties attending it. Our author is one of those cats-cradle reasoners who never see a decided advantage in any thing but indecision, one of those adepts in political Platonics, who are always in love with the theory of what is right, till it comes to be put in practice. On the subject of this dialogue, we have but one remark to repeat, which is, that in such matters to be nominally humane is to be practically so—that where there is a disposition in governments to lessen the sum of human misery, there is the power,—and that the spirit of humanity is the great thing wanting to society!

We own we like Mr. Landor best when he introduces the great men of antiquity upon the carpet. He seems then to throw aside his narrow and captious prejudices, expands his view with the distance of the objects he contemplates, and infuses a strength, a 248severity, a fervour and sweetness into his style, not unworthy of the admirable models whom he would be supposed to imitate. Such in great part is the tone of the observations that pass between Demosthenes and Eubulides.

‘Eubulides. In your language, O Demosthenes! there is a resemblance to the Ilissus, whose waters, as you must have observed, are in most seasons pure and limpid and equable in their course, yet abounding in depths, of which when we discern the bottom, we wonder that we discern it so clearly: the same river at every storm swells into a torrent, without ford or boundary, and is the stronger and the more impetuous from resistance.

‘Demosthenes. Language is part of a man’s character.

‘Eubulides. It is often artificial.

‘Demosthenes. Often both are so. I spoke not of such language as that of Gorgias and Isocrates, and other rhetoricians, but of that which belongs to eloquence, of that which enters the heart, however closed against it, of that which pierces like the sword of Perseus, of that which carries us away upon its point as easily as Medea her children, and holds the world below in the same suspense and terror.—I had to form a manner, with great models on one side of me and Nature on the other. Had I imitated Plato (the writer then most admired) I must have fallen short of his amplitude and dignity; and his sentences are seldom such as could be admitted into a popular harangue. Xenophon is elegant, but unimpassioned, and not entirely free, I think, from affectation. Herodotus is the most faultless, and perhaps the most excellent of all. What simplicity! what sweetness! what harmony! not to mention his sagacity of inquiry and his accuracy of description: he could not, however, form an orator for the times in which we live. Aristoteles and Thucydides were before me: I trembled lest they should lead me where I might raise a recollection of Pericles, whose plainness and conciseness and gravity they have imitated, not always with success. Laying down these qualities as the foundation, I have ventured on more solemnity, more passion: I have also been studious to bring the powers of action into play, that great instrument in exciting the affections, which Pericles disdained. He and Jupiter could strike my head with their thunderbolts and stand serene and motionless: I could not.’ I. 233.

The Dialogue in the second volume between Pericles and Sophocles breathes the spirit of patriotism and of antiquity, perhaps in a still higher strain, with a bastard allusion, we suspect, to recent politics. The Conversations between Aristotle and Callisthenes, and between Lord Chatham and Lord Chesterfield, (also in the 249second volume), contain an admirable estimate, equally sound and acute, of the characters of Aristotle and Plato. Our critic appears to have studied and to have understood these authors well. In our opinion, he rates Cicero too high; we do not mean as to style or oratory, but as a thinker. In this respect, there is little memorable, or new, or profound, in him; and ‘he was at best’ (as it has been said) ‘but an elegant reporter of the Greek philosophy.’ Neither can we agree that his historian, Middleton, is so entirely free from affectation as our author supposes. It is Lord Chatham who is made to pronounce the panegyric upon Locke, as ‘the most elegant of English prose writers,’ which, if our author were not a deliberate paradox-monger, might seem an uncivil irony. His eulogist does not mend the matter much by his definition of elegance, which one would think intended as a test of Lord Chesterfield’s politeness. He makes it to consist in a mean between too much prolixity and too much conciseness. Now, (supposing this to be intended seriously) Mr. Locke was certainly one of the most circuitous and diffuse of all writers. This distinguished person neither excelled in the graces of style, according to our author’s singular assertion, nor was he (according to the common opinion) the founder of the modern system of metaphysical philosophy. The credit of having laid the basis of this system, and of having completed the great outline of the plan, is beyond all question due to the philosopher of Malmesbury. Mr. Locke’s real forte was great practical good sense, a determination to look at every question, free from prejudice and according to the evidence suggested to him, and a patient and persevering doggedness of understanding in contending with difficulties, and finding out and weighing arguments of opposite tendency. The most valuable parts of his celebrated Essay are those which relate not to the nature but to the conduct of the understanding; and on that subject, he often proves himself a most sage and judicious adviser. Mr. Locke’s Treatise on Education (with all its defects, and an occasional appearance of pedantry), laid the foundation of the modern improvements in that important branch of study; and his book upon Government (written in defence of the Revolution of 1688) remained unimpeached up to the period of the battle of Waterloo. The author of the Essay on Human Understanding undoubtedly ranks as the third name in English philosophy, after Newton and Bacon; yet perhaps others, as Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, Hartley, and, even in our own times, Horne Tooke, have shown a firmer grasp of mind, as well as greater originality and subtlety of invention, in the same field of inquiry. This opinion may, however, be thought by some petulant and daring, not to say 250profane; and we may be accused, in forming or delivering it, of having encroached unawares on the exercise of Mr. Landor’s exclusive right of private judgment and free inquiry.

The controversy between the Abbé Delille and our author in person, of which Boileau is the leading subject, is an amusing specimen of verbal criticism. All that it proves however is, that this kind of criticism proves nothing but the acuteness of the writer, and also that those poets who pique themselves on being most exempt from it are the most liable to it. Pope is an example among ourselves. Those who are in the habit of attending to the smallest things, do not see the farthest before them; and, in polishing and correcting one line, they overlook or fall into some fresh mistake in another. The altering and retouching, after a lapse of time, or during the probation of Horace’s ‘nine years,’ is sure to lead to inconsistency and partial oversights. Mr. Landor, in some instances, we imagine, confounds humour with blunders. Thus the truism in the line—

‘Que, si sous Adam même, et loin avant Noë,’

we should consider as a mere piece of naïveté, in the manner of La Fontaine. We will give up, however, without scruple, Boileau’s mock-heroics, as we would some English ones of later date. But his satire and his sense we cannot relinquish all at once, though he was a Frenchman, and, what is still worse, a Frenchman of the age of Louis XIV.! It is hard that a people who arrogate all perfections to themselves should possess none; nor can we think that so vast and magnificent a reputation as their literature has acquired, could be raised, as Mr. L. would persuade us, without either art or genius? The Dialogue between Kosciusko and Poniatowski (a subject capable of better things) is remarkable for nothing but a mawkish philanthropy, and a problematical defence of General Pichegru for betraying the Republic and leaguing with the Bourbons. We have nothing to say to this; but, as our author has dedicated one of these volumes to General Mina, will he forgive our recommending him to write a third, in order to inscribe it to Balasteros?

When our literary dramatist attempts common or vulgar humour, he fails totally, as in the slang Conversation entitled Cavaliere Punto Michino, and Mr. Denis Eusebius Talcranagh. The interview between David Hume and John Home is another failure, at least in so far as relates to character. The author represents the latter as a quiet contented parish minister,—the fact being, that soon after the publication of his play, he abandoned the clerical profession, and went about a fine gentleman, with a blue coat and a pigtail. Horne 251Tooke’s collision with Dr. Johnson produces only some meagre etymologies and orthographical pedantry, and a tolerably just and highly pointed character of Junius; that between Washington and Franklin only a dull recipe for curing the disorders of Ireland. Prince Maurocordoto and General Colocotroni defend the Greeks, in the Twelfth Conversation of the second volume, on very new and learned principles; but as we have no skill in wood craft, nor in flat-bottomed boats, we pass it over. The last Conversation (supposed to take place between Marcus Tullius Cicero, and his brother Quintus, on the night before his death) is full of an eloquent and philosophic melancholy, which makes it on the whole our favourite:—that between Lopez Banos and Romero Alpuente, we dare be sworn, is the author’s; at least it had need, it will be caviare to the multitude. Par example.

‘Banos. At length, Alpuente, the saints of the Holy Alliance have declared war against us.

‘Alpuente. I have not heard it until now.

‘Banos. They have directed a memorial to the king of France, inviting him to take such measures as his Majesty, in his wisdom, shall deem convenient, in order to avert the calamities of war, and the dangers of discord, from his frontier.

‘Alpuente. God forbid that so great a king should fall upon us! O Lord, save us from our enemy, who would eat us up quick, so despitefully and hungrily is he set against us.

‘Banos. Read the manifesto ... why do you laugh? Is not this a declaration of hostilities?

‘Alpuente. To Spaniards, yes. I laughed at the folly and impudence of men, who, for the present of a tobacco-box with a fool’s head upon it, string together these old peeled pearls of diplomatic eloquence, and foist them upon the world as arguments and truths. Do kings imagine that they can as easily deceive as they can enslave? and that the mind is as much under their snaffle, as the body is under their axe and halter? Show me one of them, Lopez, who has not violated some promise, who has not usurped some territory, who has not oppressed and subjugated some neighbour; then I will believe him, then I will obey him, then I will acknowledge that those literary heralds who trumpet forth his praises with the newspaper in their hands, are creditable and upright and uncorrupted. The courage of Spain delivered these wretches from the cane and drumhead of a Corsican. Which of them did not crouch before him? which did not flatter him? which did not execute his orders? which did not court his protection? which did not solicit his favour? which did not entreat his forbearance? which did not implore his pardon? which did not abandon and betray him?’

252’Tis a pretty picture; and did the author suppose, in his blindness to the past and to the future, that the august personages of whom he speaks, after escaping from this state of abject degradation and subjection to that iron scourge, would voluntarily submit to be at the beck and nod of every puny pretender who sets up an authority over them, and undertakes to tutor and cashier kings at his discretion? But not to interrupt the dialogue, which thus continues:—

‘No ties either of blood or of religion, led or restrained these neophytes in holiness. And now, forsooth, the calamities of war, and the dangers of discord are to be averted, by arming one part of our countrymen against the other, by stationing a military force on our frontier, for the reception of murderers and traitors and incendiaries, and by pointing the bayonet and cannon in our faces. When we smiled at the insults of a beaten enemy, they dictated terms and conditions. At last, his most Christian Majesty tells his army, that the nephew of Henry the fourth shall march against us ... with his feather!

‘Banos. Ah! that weighs more. The French army will march over fields which cover French armies, and over which the oldest and bravest part of it fled in ignominy and dismay, before our shepherd boys and hunters. What the veterans of Napoleon failed to execute, the household of Louis will accomplish. Parisians! let your comic opera-house lie among its ruins; it cannot be wanted this season.

‘Alpuente. Shall these battalions which fought so many years for freedom, so many for glory, be supplementary bands to barbarians from Caucasus and Imaus? Shall they shed the remainder of their blood to destroy a cause, for the maintenance of which they offered up its first libation? Time will solve this problem, the most momentous in its solution that ever lay before man. If we are conquered, of which at present I have no apprehension, Europe must become the theatre of new wars, and be divided into three parts, afterwards into two, and the next generation will see all her states and provinces the property of one autocrat, and governed by the most ignorant and lawless of her nations.^[17]

‘Banos. Never was there a revolution, or material change in government, effected with so little bloodshed, so little opposition, so little sorrow or disquietude, as ours. Months had passed away, 253years were rolling over us, institutions were consolidating, superstition was relaxing, ingratitude and perfidy were as much forgotten by us, as our services and sufferings were forgotten by Ferdinand, when emissaries, and gold and arms, and FAITH, inciting to discord and rebellion, crossed our frontier ... and our fortresses were garnished with the bayonets of France, and echoed with the watchwords of the Vatican. If Ferdinand had regarded his oath, and had acceded, in our sense of the word faith, to the constitution of his country, from which there was hardly a dissentient voice among the industrious and the unambitious, among the peaceable and the wise, would he have eaten one dinner with less appetite, or have embroidered one petticoat with less taste? Would the saints along his chapel-walls have smiled upon him less graciously, or would thy tooth, holy Dominic, have left a less pleasurable impression on his lips? His most Christian Majesty demands that Ferdinand the seventh may give his people those institutions which they can have from him only! Yes, these are his expressions, Alpuente; these the doctrines, for the propagation of which our country is to be invaded with fire and sword; this is government, this is order, this is faith! Ferdinand was at liberty to give us his institutions: he gave them: what were they? The inquisition in all its terrors, absolute and arbitrary sway, scourges and processions, monks and missionaries, and a tooth of St. Dominic to crown them all.... To support the throne that crushes us, and the altar that choaks us, march forward the warlike Louis and the preux Chateaubriant, known among his friends to be as firm in belief as Hobbes, Talleyrand, or Spinoza; and behold them advancing, side by side, against the calm opponents of Roman bulls and French charts. Although his Majesty be brave as Maximin at a breakfast, he will find it easier to eat his sixty-four cutlets than to conquer Spain. I doubt whether the same historian shall have to commemorate both exploits.

‘Alpuente. In wars the least guilty are the sufferers. In these, as in everything, we should contract as much as possible the circle of human misery. The deluded and enslaved should be so far spared as is consistent with security: the most atrocious of murderers and incendiaries, the purveyors and hirers of them, should be removed at any expense or hazard. If we show little mercy to the robber who enters a house by force, and if less ought to be shown to him who should enter it in the season of distress and desolation, what portion of it ought to be extended towards those who assail every house in our country? How much of crime and wretchedness may often be averted, how many years of tranquillity may sometimes be ensured to the world by one well-chosen example! Is it not better than to witness 254the grief of the virtuous for the virtuous, and the extinction of those bright and lofty hopes, for which the best and wisest of every age contended? Where is the man, worthy of the name, who would be less affected at the lamentation of one mother for her son, slain in defending his country, than at the extermination of some six or seven usurpers, commanding or attempting its invasion? National safety legitimates every mean employed upon it. Criminals have been punished differently in different countries: but all enlightened, all honest, all civilised men, must agree who are criminals. The Athenians were perhaps as well-informed and intelligent as the people on lake Ladoga: they knew nothing of the knout, I confess; and no family amongst them boasted a succession of assassins, in wives, sons, fathers, and husbands: but he who endangered or injured his country was condemned to the draught of hemlock! They could punish the offence in another manner: if any nation cannot, shall that nation therefore leave it unpunished? And shall the guiltiest of men enjoy impunity, from a consideration of modes and means? Justice is not to be neglected, because what is preferable is unattainable. A house-breaker is condemned to die, a city-breaker is celebrated by an inscription over the gate. The murder of thousands, soon perpetrated and past, is not the greatest mischief he does: it is followed by the baseness of millions, deepening for ages. Every virtuous man in the universe is a member of that grand Amphictyonic council, which should pass sentence on the too powerful, and provide that it be duly executed. It is just, and it is necessary, that those who pertinaciously insist on so unnatural a state of society, should suffer by the shock things make in recovering their equipoise.’ II. 269.

We have given this tirade, not with any view to comment on the sentiments it conveys, but to justify what we have said of the outrageous spirit that so frequently breaks out in the present work, and that might reasonably ‘condemn the author to the draught of hellebore.’ We believe the attempt to revive the exploded doctrine of tyrannicide is peculiar to the reformed Jacobins. We remember a long and well-timed article in the Friend, some years ago, on this subject; nor do the strong allusions to the same remedy, in a celebrated journal, form an exception to this remark, at a time when a renegado from the same school directed its attacks upon the Corsican hero. These modern monks and literary jesuits, who would fain set up their own fanatic notions against law and reason, and dictate equally to legitimate kings and revolutionary usurpers, find fault with Napoleon for having thrown his sword into the scale of opinion; and now, finding the want of it, sooner than be baulked of their fancy, would (as far as 255we can understand their meaning) substitute the dagger. We cannot applaud their expedients; nor sympathize with that ‘final hope’ which seems ‘flat despair.’ If these pragmatical persons could have every thing their own way—if they could confer power and take away the abuse of it—if they could put down tyrants with the sword, and give the law to conquerors with the pen—we should not despair of seeing some good result from this new theocracy. The worst we could fear would be from their fickleness, rashness, and inconsiderate thirst for novelty; but they would not, by their ill-timed servility and gratuitous phrensy, help to bring down the iron hand of power upon us, or enclose us in the dungeons of prejudice and superstition! As it is, they have contrived to throw open the flood-gates of despotism—‘to shut exceeds their power:’ they have got rid of one tyrant, to establish the principle in perpetuity, and to root out the very name of Freedom. Those of them who are sincere, who are not bribed to silence by places and pensions obtained by their momentary complaisance and seeming inconsistency, speak out, and are sorry for the part they have taken, now that it is too late. They strike ‘the marble table with their palm’—they call their country recreant and base—they invoke the shade of Leonidas—they apostrophize the spirit of Bolivar—they polish their style like a steel breastplate—they point their sentences like daggers against the bloated apathy of legitimacy—they publish satires on the constitution, and print libels on departed ministers in asterisks—they invent new modes of warfare, and recommend new modes of extermination against despots;—and, in return for all this, the Holy Allies laugh at them, their credulity, their rage, their helplessness, and disappointment. There was one man whom they did not laugh at, but whom they feared and hated; and they persuaded Mr. Landor and others that what they feared and hated above all other things, was out of love to Liberty and Humanity!

Mr. Landor has interspersed some pieces of poetry through these volumes. His muse still retains her implicit and inextricable style. The author, some five-and-twenty years ago, published a poem under the title of Gebir, in Latin and English, and equally unintelligible in both, but of which we have heard two lines quoted by his admirers.

‘Pleas’d they remember their august abodes,

And murmur as the ocean murmurs there.’

This relates to the sound which sea-shells make if placed close to the ear, and is beautiful and mystic, like something composed in a dream. His tragedy of Count Julian we have not seen.

256

SHELLEY’S POSTHUMOUS POEMS

Vol. xl.] [July 1824.

Mr. Shelley’s style is to poetry what astrology is to natural science—a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstractions,—a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature, associating ideas by contraries, and wasting great powers by their application to unattainable objects.

Poetry, we grant, creates a world of its own; but it creates it out of existing materials. Mr. Shelley is the maker of his own poetry—out of nothing. Not that he is deficient in the true sources of strength and beauty, if he had given himself fair play (the volume before us, as well as his other productions, contains many proofs to the contrary): But, in him, fancy, will, caprice, predominated over and absorbed the natural influences of things; and he had no respect for any poetry that did not strain the intellect as well as fire the imagination—and was not sublimed into a high spirit of metaphysical philosophy. Instead of giving a language to thought, or lending the heart a tongue, he utters dark sayings, and deals in allegories and riddles. His Muse offers her services to clothe shadowy doubts and inscrutable difficulties in a robe of glittering words, and to turn nature into a brilliant paradox. We thank him—but we must be excused. Where we see the dazzling beacon-lights streaming over the darkness of the abyss, we dread the quicksands and the rocks below. Mr. Shelley’s mind was of ‘too fiery a quality’ to repose (for any continuance) on the probable or the true—it soared ‘beyond the visible diurnal sphere,’ to the strange, the improbable, and the impossible. He mistook the nature of the poet’s calling, which should be guided by involuntary, not by voluntary impulses. He shook off, as an heroic and praiseworthy act, the trammels of sense, custom, and sympathy, and became the creature of his own will. He was ‘all air,’ disdaining the bars and ties of mortal mould. He ransacked his brain for incongruities, and believed in whatever was incredible. Almost all is effort, almost all is extravagant, almost all is quaint, incomprehensible, and abortive, from aiming to be more than it is. Epithets are applied, because they do not fit: subjects are chosen, because they are repulsive: the colours of his style, for their gaudy, changeful, startling effect, resemble the display of fireworks in the dark, and, like them, have neither durability, nor keeping, nor discriminate form. Yet Mr. Shelley, with all his faults, 257was a man of genius; and we lament that uncontrollable violence of temperament which gave it a forced and false direction. He has single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare beauty, detached passages of extreme tenderness; and, in his smaller pieces, where he has attempted little, he has done most. If some casual and interesting idea touched his feelings or struck his fancy, he expressed it in pleasing and unaffected verse: but give him a larger subject, and time to reflect, and he was sure to get entangled in a system. The fumes of vanity rolled volumes of smoke, mixed with sparkles of fire, from the cloudy tabernacle of his thought. The success of his writings is therefore in general in the inverse ratio of the extent of his undertakings; inasmuch as his desire to teach, his ambition to excel, as soon as it was brought into play, encroached upon, and outstripped his powers of execution.

Mr. Shelley was a remarkable man. His person was a type and shadow of his genius. His complexion, fair, golden, freckled, seemed transparent with an inward light, and his spirit within him

——‘so divinely wrought,

That you might almost say his body thought.’

He reminded those who saw him of some of Ovid’s fables. His form, graceful and slender, drooped like a flower in the breeze. But he was crushed beneath the weight of thought which he aspired to bear, and was withered in the lightning-glare of a ruthless philosophy! He mistook the nature of his own faculties and feelings—the lowly children of the valley, by which the skylark makes its bed, and the bee murmurs, for the proud cedar or the mountain-pine, in which the eagle builts its eyry, ‘and dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.’—He wished to make of idle verse and idler prose the frame-work of the universe, and to bind all possible existence in the visionary chain of intellectual beauty—

‘More subtle web Arachne cannot spin,

Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see

Of scorched dew, do not in th’ air more lightly flee.’

Perhaps some lurking sense of his own deficiencies in the lofty walk which he attempted, irritated his impatience and his desires; and urged him on, with winged hopes, to atone for past failures by more arduous efforts, and more unavailing struggles.

With all his faults, Mr. Shelley was an honest man. His unbelief and his presumption were parts of a disease, which was not combined in him either with indifference to human happiness, or contempt for human infirmities. There was neither selfishness nor malice at the 258bottom of his illusions. He was sincere in all his professions; and he practised what he preached—to his own sufficient cost. He followed up the letter and the spirit of his theoretical principles in his own person, and was ready to share both the benefit and the penalty with others. He thought and acted logically, and was what he professed to be, a sincere lover of truth, of nature, and of human kind. To all the rage of paradox, he united an unaccountable candour and severity of reasoning: in spite of an aristocratic education, he retained in his manners the simplicity of a primitive apostle. An Epicurean in his sentiments, he lived with the frugality and abstemiousness of an ascetick. His fault was, that he had no deference for the opinions of others, too little sympathy with their feelings (which he thought he had a right to sacrifice, as well as his own, to a grand ethical experiment)—and trusted too implicitly to the light of his own mind, and to the warmth of his own impulses. He was indeed the most striking example we remember of the two extremes described by Lord Bacon as the great impediments to human improvement, the love of Novelty, and the love of Antiquity. ‘The first of these (impediments) is an extreme affection of two extremities, the one Antiquity, the other Novelty; wherein it seemeth the children of time do take after the nature and malice of the father. For as he devoureth his children, so one of them seeketh to devour and suppress the other; while Antiquity envieth there should be new additions, and Novelty cannot be content to add, but it must deface. Surely the advice of the Prophet is the true direction in this matter: Stand upon the old ways, and see which is the right and good way, and walk therein. Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way; but when the discovery is well taken, then to take progression. And to speak truly, Antiquitas seculi Juventus mundi. These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we count ancient, ordine retrogrado, by a computation backwards from ourselves.’ (Advancement of Learning, Book I. p. 46.)—Such is the text: and Mr. Shelley’s writings are a splendid commentary on one half of it. Considered in this point of view, his career may not be uninstructive even to those whom it most offended; and might be held up as a beacon and warning no less to the bigot than the sciolist. We wish to speak of the errors of a man of genius with tenderness. His nature was kind, and his sentiments noble; but in him the rage of free inquiry and private judgment amounted to a species of madness. Whatever was new, untried, unheard of, unauthorized, exerted a kind of fascination over his mind. The examples of the world, the opinion of others, instead of acting as a check upon him, served but 259to impel him forward with double velocity in his wild and hazardous career. Spurning the world of realities, he rushed into the world of nonentities and contingencies, like air into a vacuum. If a thing was old and established, this was with him a certain proof of its having no solid foundation to rest upon: if it was new, it was good and right. Every paradox was to him a self-evident truth; every prejudice an undoubted absurdity. The weight of authority, the sanction of ages, the common consent of mankind, were vouchers only for ignorance, error, and imposture. Whatever shocked the feelings of others, conciliated his regard; whatever was light, extravagant, and vain, was to him a proportionable relief from the dulness and stupidity of established opinions. The worst of it however was, that he thus gave great encouragement to those who believe in all received absurdities, and are wedded to all existing abuses: his extravagance seeming to sanction their grossness and selfishness, as theirs were a full justification of his folly and eccentricity. The two extremes in this way often meet, jostle,—and confirm one another. The infirmities of age are a foil to the presumption of youth; and ‘there the antics sit,’ mocking one another—the ape Sophistry pointing with reckless scorn at ‘palsied eld,’ and the bed-rid hag. Legitimacy, rattling her chains, counting her beads, dipping her hands in blood, and blessing herself from all change and from every appeal to common sense and reason! Opinion thus alternates in a round of contradictions: the impatience or obstinacy of the human mind takes part with, and flies off to one or other of the two extremes ‘of affection’ and leaves a horrid gap, a blank sense and feeling in the middle, which seems never likely to be filled up, without a total change in our mode of proceeding. The martello-towers with which we are to repress, if we cannot destroy, the systems of fraud and oppression should not be castles in the air, or clouds in the verge of the horizon, but the enormous and accumulated pile of abuses which have arisen out of their continuance. The principles of sound morality, liberty and humanity, are not to be found only in a few recent writers, who have discovered the secret of the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers, but are truths as old as the creation. To be convinced of the existence of wrong, we should read history rather than poetry: the levers with which we must work out our regeneration are not the cobwebs of the brain, but the warm, palpitating fibres of the human heart. It is the collision of passions and interests, the petulance of party-spirit, and the perversities of self-will and self-opinion that have been the great obstacles to social improvement—not stupidity or ignorance; and the caricaturing one side of the question and shocking the most pardonable prejudices on the other, 260is not the way to allay heats or produce unanimity. By flying to the extremes of scepticism, we make others shrink back, and shut themselves up in the strongholds of bigotry and superstition—by mixing up doubtful or offensive matters with salutary and demonstrable truths, we bring the whole into question, fly-blow the cause, risk the principle, and give a handle and a pretext to the enemy to treat all philosophy and all reform as a compost of crude, chaotic, and monstrous absurdities. We thus arm the virtues as well as the vices of the community against us; we trifle with their understandings, and exasperate their self-love; we give to superstition and injustice all their old security and sanctity, as if they were the only alternatives of impiety and profligacy, and league the natural with the selfish prejudices of mankind in hostile array against us. To this consummation, it must be confessed that too many of Mr. Shelley’s productions pointedly tend. He makes no account of the opinions of others, or the consequences of any of his own; but proceeds—tasking his reason to the utmost to account for every thing, and discarding every thing as mystery and error for which he cannot account by an effort of mere intelligence—measuring man, providence, nature, and even his own heart, by the limits of the understanding—now hallowing high mysteries, now desecrating pure sentiments, according as they fall in with or exceeded those limits; and exalting and purifying, with Promethean heat, whatever he does not confound and debase.

Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry grasped with one hand in his bosom! These are two out of four poets, patriots and friends, who have visited Italy within a few years, both of whom have been soon hurried to a more distant shore. Keats died young; and ‘yet his infelicity had years too many.’ A canker had blighted the tender bloom that o’erspread a face in which youth and genius strove with beauty; the shaft was sped—venal, vulgar, venomous, that drove him from his country, with sickness and penury for companions, and followed him to his grave. And yet there are those who could trample on the faded flower—men to whom breaking hearts are a subject of merriment—who laugh loud over the silent urn of Genius, and play out their game of venality and infamy with the crumbling bones of their victims! To this band of immortals a third has since been added!—a mightier genius, a haughtier spirit, whose stubborn impatience and Achilles-like pride only Death could quell. Greece, Italy, the world, have lost their poet-hero; and his death has spread a wider gloom, and been recorded with a deeper awe, than has waited on the obsequies of any of the many great who have died in our remembrance. Even detraction has been silent at 261his tomb; and the more generous of his enemies have fallen into the rank of his mourners. But he set like the sun in his glory; and his orb was greatest and brightest at the last; for his memory is now consecrated no less by freedom than genius. He probably fell a martyr to his zeal against tyrants. He attached himself to the cause of Greece, and dying, clung to it with a convulsive grasp, and has thus gained a niche in her history; for whatever she claims as hers is immortal, even in decay, as the marble sculptures on the columns of her fallen temples!

The volume before us is introduced by an imperfect but touching Preface by Mrs. Shelley, and consists almost wholly of original pieces, with the exception of Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, which was out of print; and the admirable Translation of the May-day Night, from Goethe’s Faustus.

Julian and Maddalo (the first Poem in the collection) is a Conversation or Tale, full of that thoughtful and romantic humanity, but rendered perplexing and unattractive by that veil of shadowy or of glittering obscurity, which distinguished Mr. Shelley’s writings. The depth and tenderness of his feelings seems often to have interfered with the expression of them, as the sight becomes blind with tears. A dull, waterish vapour, clouds the aspect of his philosophical poetry, like that mysterious gloom which he has himself described as hanging over the Medusa’s Head of Leonardo da Vinci. The metre of this poem, too, will not be pleasing to every body. It is in the antique taste of the rhyming parts of Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson—blank verse in its freedom and unbroken flow, falling into rhymes that appear altogether accidental—very colloquial in the diction—and sometimes sufficiently prosaic. But it is easier showing than describing it. We give the introductory passage.

‘I rode one evening with Count Maddalo

Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow

Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand

Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,

Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,

Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,

Is this: an uninhabited sea-side,

Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,

Abandons; and no other object breaks

The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes

Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes

A narrow space of level sand thereon,

Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down.

This ride was my delight. I love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste

262The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:

And such was this wide ocean, and this shore

More barren than its billows; and yet more

Than all, with a remember’d friend I love

To ride as then I rode;—for the winds drove

The living spray along the sunny air

Into our faces; the blue heavens were bare,

Stripped to their depths by the awakening North;

And, from the waves, sound like delight broke forth

Harmonising with solitude, and sent

Into our hearts aerial merriment.

So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought,

Winging itself with laughter, lingered not,

But flew from brain to brain,—such glee was ours,

Charged with light memories of remembered hours,

None slow enough for sadness: till we came

Homeward, which always makes the spirit tame.’ &c.

‘Meanwhile the sun paused ere it should alight

O’er the horizon of the mountains—Oh!

How beautiful is sunset, when the glow

Of heaven descends upon a land like thee,

Thou paradise of exiles, Italy!

Thy mountains, seas, and vineyards, and the towers

Of cities they encircle!—It was ours

To stand on thee, beholding it: and then,

Just where we had dismounted, the Count’s men

Were waiting for us with the gondola.

As those who pause on some delightful way,

Tho’ bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood,

Looking upon the evening and the flood,

Which lay between the city and the shore,

Paved with the image of the sky; the hoar

And aery Alps, towards the North, appeared,

Thro’ mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared

Between the east and west; and half the sky

Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,

Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew

Down the steep west into a wondrous hue

Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent

Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent

Among the many-folded hills—they were

Those famous Euganean hills, which bear,

As seen from Lido thro’ the harbour piles,

The likeness of a clump of peaked isles—

And then, as if the earth and sea had been

Dissolv’d into one lake of fire, were seen

Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame,

Around the vaporous sun, from which there came

263The inmost purple spirit of light, and made

Their very peaks transparent. “Ere it fade,”

Said my companion, “I will show you soon

A better station.” So, o’er the lagune

We glided; and from that funereal bark

I leaned, and saw the city, and could mark

How from their many isles, in evening’s gleam,

Its temples and its palaces did seem

Like fabrics of enchantment piled to Heaven.

I was about to speak, when—“We are even

Now at the point I meant”—said Maddalo,

And bade the gondolieri cease to row.

“Look, Julian, on the west, and listen well

If you hear not a deep and heavy bell.”

I looked, and saw between us and the sun

A building on an island, such an one

As age to age might add, for uses vile—

A windowless, deformed, and dreary pile;

And on the top an open tower, where hung

A bell, which in the radiance swayed and swung,

We could just hear its hoarse and iron tongue:

The broad sun sank behind it, and it tolled

In strong and black relief. “What you behold

Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,”—

Said Maddalo, “and even at this hour,

Those who may cross the water hear that bell,

Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,

To vespers,” &c.

‘The broad star

Of day meanwhile had sunk behind the hill;

And the black bell became invisible;

And the red tower looked grey; and all between,

The churches, ships, and palaces, were seen

Huddled in gloom. Into the purple sea

The orange hues of heaven sunk silently.

We hardly spoke, and soon the gondola

Conveyed me to my lodging by the way.’

The march of these lines is, it must be confessed, slow, solemn, sad: there is a sluggishness of feeling, a dearth of imagery, an unpleasant glare of lurid light. It appears to us, that in some poets, as well as in some painters, the organ of colour (to speak in the language of the adepts) predominates over that of form; and Mr. Shelley is of the number. We have everywhere a profusion of dazzling hues, of glancing splendours, of floating shadows, but the objects on which they fall are bare, indistinct, and wild. There is something in the preceding extract that reminds us of the arid style 264and matter of Crabbe’s versification, or that apes the labour and throes of parturition of Wordsworth’s blank verse. It is the preface to a story of Love and Madness—of mental anguish and philosophic remedies—not very intelligibly told, and left with most of its mysteries unexplained, in the true spirit of the modern metaphysical style—in which we suspect there is a due mixture of affectation and meagreness of invention.

This poem is, however, in Mr. Shelley’s best and least mannered manner. If it has less brilliancy, it has less extravagance and confusion. It is in his stanza-poetry, that his Muse chiefly runs riot, and baffles all pursuit of common comprehension or critical acumen. The Witch of Atlas, the Triumph of Life, and Marianne’s Dream, are rhapsodies or allegories of this description; full of fancy and of fire, with glowing allusions and wild machinery, but which it is difficult to read through, from the disjointedness of the materials, the incongruous metaphors and violent transitions, and of which, after reading them through, it is impossible, in most instances, to guess the drift or the moral. They abound in horrible imaginings, like records of a ghastly dream;—life, death, genius, beauty, victory, earth, air, ocean, the trophies of the past, the shadows of the world to come, are huddled together in a strange and hurried dance of words, and all that appears clear, is the passion and paroxysm of thought of the poet’s spirit. The poem entitled the Triumph of Life, is in fact a new and terrific Dance of Death; but it is thus Mr. Shelley transposes the appellations of the commonest things, and subsists only in the violence of contrast. How little this poem is deserving of its title, how worthy it is of its author, what an example of the waste of power, and of genius ‘made as flax,’ and devoured by its own elementary ardours, let the reader judge from the concluding stanzas.

... ‘The grove

Grew dense with shadows to its inmost covers,

The earth was grey with phantoms, and the air

Was peopled with dim forms; as when there hovers

A flock of vampire-bats before the glare

Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,

Strange night upon some Indian vale;—thus were

Phantoms diffused around; and some did fling

Shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves,

Behind them; some like eaglets on the wing

Were lost in the white day; others like elves

Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes

Upon the sunny streams and grassy shelves;

265And others sate chattering shrill like restless apes

On vulgar hands, * * * * *

Some made a cradle of the ermined capes

Of kingly mantles; some across the tire

Of pontiffs rode, like demons; others played

Under the crown which girded with empire

A baby’s or an idiot’s brow, and made

Their nests in it. The old anatomies

Sate hatching their bare broods under the shade

Of demon wings, and laughed from their dead eyes

To reassume the delegated power,

Array’d in which those worms did monarchize,

Who make this earth their charnel. Others more

Humble, like falcons, sate upon the fist

Of common men, and round their heads did soar;

Or like small gnats and flies, as thick as mist

On evening marshes, thronged about the brow

Of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist;—

And others, like discoloured flakes of snow,

On fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,

Fell, and were melted by the youthful glow

Which they extinguished * * * * *

The marble brow of youth was cleft

With care; and in those eyes where once hope shone,

Desire, even like a lioness bereft

Of her last cub, glared ere it died; each one

Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly

These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown

In autumn evening from a poplar tree.

Each like himself, and like each other were

At first; but some, distorted, seemed to be

Obscure clouds, moulded by the casual air;

And of this stuff the car’s creative ray

Wrapt all the busy phantoms that were there,

As the sun shapes the clouds, &c.’

Any thing more filmy, enigmatical, discontinuous, unsubstantial than this, we have not seen; nor yet more full of morbid genius and vivifying soul. We cannot help preferring The Witch of Atlas to Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude; for, though the purport of each is equally perplexing and undefined, (both being a sort of mental 266voyage through the unexplored regions of space and time), the execution of the one is much less dreary and lamentable than that of the other. In the ‘Witch,’ he has indulged his fancy more than his melancholy, and wantoned in the felicity of embryo and crude conceits even to excess.

‘And there lay Visions, swift, and sweet, and quaint,

Each in its thin sheath like a chrysalis;

Some eager to burst forth, some weak and faint

With the soft burthen of intensest bliss;

‘And odours in a kind of aviary

Of ever-blooming Eden-trees she kept,

Clipt in a floating net, a love-sick Fairy

Had woven from dew-beams while the moon yet slept;

As bats at the wired window of a dairy,

They beat their vans; and each was an adept,

When loosed and missioned, making wings of winds,

To stir sweet thoughts or sad in destined minds.’ p. 34.

We give the description of the progress of the ‘Witch’s’ boat as a slight specimen of what we have said of Mr. Shelley’s involved style and imagery.

‘And down the streams which clove those mountains vast,

Around their inland islets, and amid

The panther-peopled forests, whose shade cast

Darkness and odours, and a pleasure hid

In melancholy gloom, the pinnace past:

By many a star-surrounded pyramid

Of icy crag cleaving the purple sky,

And caverns yawning round unfathomably.

· · · · ·

‘And down the earth-quaking cataracts which shiver

Their snow-like waters into golden air,

Or under chasms unfathomable ever

Sepulchre them, till in their rage they tear

A subterranean portal for the river,

It fled—the circling sunbows did upbear

Its fall down the hoar precipice of spray,

Lighting it far upon its lampless way.’

This we conceive to be the very height of wilful extravagance and mysticism. Indeed it is curious to remark every where the proneness to the marvellous and supernatural, in one who so resolutely set his face against every received mystery, and all traditional faith. Mr. Shelley must have possessed, in spite of all his obnoxious and indiscreet 267scepticism, a large share of credulity and wondering curiosity in his composition, which he reserved from common use, and bestowed upon his own inventions and picturesque caricatures. To every other species of imposture or disguise he was inexorable; and indeed it is only his antipathy to established creeds and legitimate crowns that ever tears the veil from his ideal idolatries, and renders him clear and explicit. Indignation makes him pointed and intelligible enough, and breathes into his verse a spirit very different from his own boasted spirit of Love.

The Letter to a Friend in London shows the author in a pleasing and familiar, but somewhat prosaic light; and his Prince Athanase, a Fragment, is, we suspect, intended as a portrait of the writer. It is amiable, thoughtful, and not much overcharged. We had designed to give an extract, but from the apparently personal and doubtful interest attached to it, perhaps it had better be read altogether, or not at all. We rather choose to quote a part of the Ode to Naples, during her brief revolution,—in which immediate and strong local feelings have at once raised and pointed Mr. Shelley’s style, and made of light-winged “toys of feathered cupid,” the flaming ministers of Wrath and Justice.

· · · · ·

‘Naples! thou Heart of men which ever pantest

Naked, beneath the lidless eye of heaven!

Elysian City which to calm enchantest

The mutinous air and sea: they round thee, even

As sleep round Love, are driven!

Metropolis of a ruined Paradise

Long lost, late won, and yet but half regained!

· · · · ·

‘What though Cimmerian Anarchs dare blaspheme

Freedom and thee! thy shield is as a mirror

To make their blind slaves see, and with fierce gleam

To turn his hungry sword upon the wearer.

A new Acteon’s error

Shall their’s have been—devoured by their own hounds!

Be thou like the imperial Basilisk

Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!

Gaze on oppression, till at that dead risk

Aghast she pass from the Earth’s disk,

Fear not, but gaze—for freemen mightier grow,

And slaves more feeble, gazing on their foe;

If Hope and Truth and Justice may avail,

Thou shalt be great—All hail!

· · · · ·

268‘Didst thou not start to hear Spain’s thrilling pæan

From land to land re-echoed solemnly,

Till silence became music? From the Æean^[18]

To the cold Alps, eternal Italy

Starts to hear thine! The Sea

Which paves the desart streets of Venice, laughs

In light and music; widowed Genoa wan

By moonlight spells ancestral epitaphs,

Murmuring, where is Doria? fair Milan,

Within whose veins long ran

The vipers^[19] palsying venom, lifts her heel

To braise his head. The signal and the seal

(If Hope and Truth and Justice can avail)

Art Thou of all these hopes.—O hail!

‘Florence! beneath the sun,

Of cities fairest one,

Blushes within her bower for Freedom’s expectation;

From eyes of quenchless hope

Rome tears the priestly cope,

As ruling once by power, so now by admiration

An athlete stript to run

From a remoter station

For the high prize lost on Philippi’s shore:—

As then Hope, Truth, and Justice did avail,

So now may Fraud and Wrong!—O hail!

‘Hear ye the march as of the Earth-born Forms

Arrayed against the everliving Gods?

The crash and darkness of a thousand storms

Bursting their inaccessible abodes

Of crags and thunder-clouds?

See ye the banners blazoned to the day,

Inwrought with emblems of barbaric pride?

Dissonant threats kill Silence far away,

The serene Heaven which wraps our Eden, wide

With iron light is dyed!

The Anarchs of the North lead forth their legions,

Like Chaos o’er creation, uncreating;

An hundred tribes nourished on strange religions

And lawless slaveries,—down the aërial regions

Of the white Alps, desolating,

Famished wolves that bide no waiting,

Blotting the glowing footsteps of old glory,

Trampling our columned cities into dust,

Their dull and savage lust

269On Beauty’s corse to sickness satiating—

They come! The fields they tread look black and hoary

With fire—from their red feet the streams run gory!

‘Great Spirit, deepest Love!

Which rulest and dost move

All things which live and are, within the Italian shore;

Who spreadest heaven around it,

Whose woods, rocks, waves, surround it:

Who sittest in thy star, o’er Ocean’s western floor,

Spirit of beauty! at whose soft command

The sunbeams and the showers distil its foison

From the Earth’s bosom chill;

O bid those beams be each a blinding brand

Of lightning! bid those showers be dews of poison!

Bid the Earth’s plenty kill!

Bid thy bright heaven above,

Whilst light and darkness bound it,

Be their tomb who planned

To make it ours and thine!

Or with thine harmonising ardours fill

And raise thy sons, as o’er the prone horizon

Thy lamp feeds every twilight wave with fire—

Be man’s high hope and unextinct desire

The instrument to work thy will divine!

Then clouds from sunbeams, antelopes from leopards,

And frowns and fears from Thee

Would not more swiftly flee

Than Celtic wolves from the Ausonian shepherds.

Whatever, Spirit, from thy starry shrine

Thou yieldest or withholdest, O let be

This city of thy worship ever free!’

This Ode for Liberty, though somewhat turbid and overloaded in the diction, we regard as a fair specimen of Mr. Shelley’s highest powers—whose eager animation wanted only a greater sternness and solidity to be sublime. The poem is dated September 1820. Such were then the author’s aspirations. He lived to see the result,—and yet Earth does not roll its billows over the heads of its oppressors! The reader may like to contrast with this the milder strain of the following stanzas, addressed to the same city in a softer and more desponding mood.

‘The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

The waves are dancing fast and bright,

Blue isles and snowy mountains wear

The purple noon’s transparent light

270Around its unexpanded buds;

Like many a voice of one delight,

The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,

The City’s voice itself is soft, like Solitude’s.

‘I see the Deep’s untrampled floor

With green and purple seaweeds strown;

I see the waves upon the shore,

Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:

I sit upon the sands alone,

The lightning of the noon-tide ocean

Is flashing round me, and a tone

Arises from its measured motion,

How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

‘Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are;

I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne and yet must bear,

Till death like sleep might steal on me,

And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.

‘Some might lament that I were cold,

As I, when this sweet day is gone,

Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,

Insults with this untimely moan;

They might lament—for I am one

Whom men love not,—and yet regret,

Unlike this day, which, when the sun

Shall on its stainless glory set,

Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.’

We pass on to some of Mr. Shelley’s smaller pieces and translations, which we think are in general excellent and highly interesting. His Hymn of Pan we do not consider equal to Mr. Keats’s sounding lines in the Endymion. His Mont Blanc is full of beauties and of defects; but it is akin to its subject, and presents a wild and gloomy desolation. Ginevra, a fragment founded on a story in the first volume of the ‘Florentine Observer,’ is like a troublous dream, disjointed, painful, oppressive, or like a leaden cloud, from which the big tears fall, and the spirit of the poet mutters deep-toned thunder. We are too much subject to these voluntary inflictions, these ‘moods of mind,’ these effusions of ‘weakness and melancholy,’ in the perusal of modern poetry. It has shuffled off, no doubt, its old pedantry and formality; but has at the same time lost all shape or purpose, except 271that of giving vent to some morbid feeling of the moment. The writer thus discharges a fit of the spleen or a paradox, and expects the world to admire and be satisfied. We are no longer annoyed at seeing the luxuriant growth of nature and fancy clipped into armchairs and peacocks’ tails; but there is danger of having its stately products choked with unchecked underwood, or weighed down with gloomy nightshade, or eaten up with personality, like ivy clinging round and eating into the sturdy oak! The Dirge, at the conclusion of this fragment, is an example of the manner in which this craving after novelty, this desire ‘to elevate and surprise,’ leads us to ‘overstep the modesty of nature,’ and the bounds of decorum.

‘Ere the sun through heaven once more has roll’d

The rats in her heart

Will have made their nest,

And the worms be alive in her golden hair,

While the spirit that guides the sun,

Sits throned in his flaming chair,

She shall sleep.’

The ‘worms’ in this stanza are the old and traditional appendages of the grave;—the ‘rats’ are new and unwelcome intruders; but a modern artist would rather shock, and be disgusting and extravagant, than produce no effect at all, or be charged with a want of genius and originality. In the unfinished scenes of Charles I., (a drama on which Mr. Shelley was employed at his death) the radical humour of the author breaks forth, but ‘in good set terms’ and specious oratory. We regret that his premature fate has intercepted this addition to our historical drama. From the fragments before us, we are not sure that it would be fair to give any specimen.

The Translations from Euripides, Calderon, and Goethe in this Volume, will give great pleasure to the scholar and to the general reader. They are executed with equal fidelity and spirit. If the present publication contained only the two last pieces in it, the Prologue in Heaven, and the May-day Night of the Faust (the first of which Lord Leveson Gower has omitted, and the last abridged, in his very meritorious translation of that Poem), the intellectual world would receive it with an All Hail! We shall enrich our pages with a part of the May-day Night, which the Noble Poet has deemed untranslateable.

‘Chorus of Witches. The stubble is yellow, the corn is green,

Now to the brocken the witches go;

The mighty multitude here may be seen

Gathering, witch and wizard, below.

272Sir Urean is sitting aloft in the air;

Hey over stock; and hey over stone!

’Twixt witches and incubi, what shall be done?

Tell it who dare! tell it who dare!

A Voice. Upon a snow-swine, whose farrows were nine,

Old Baubo rideth alone.

Chorus. Honour her to whom honour is due,

Old mother Baubo, honour to you!

An able sow, with old Baubo upon her,

Is worthy of glory, and worthy of honour!

The legion of witches is coming behind,

Darkening the night, and outspeeding the wind.

A Voice. Which way comest thou?

A Voice. Over Ilsenstein;

The owl was awake in the white moonshine;

I saw her at rest in her downy nest,

And she stared at me with her broad, bright eye.

Voices. And you may now as well take your course on to Hell,

Since you ride by so fast, on the headlong blast.

A Voice. She dropt poison upon me as I past.

Here are the wounds—

Chorus of Witches. Come away! come along!

The way is wide, the way is long,

But what is that for a Bedlam throng?

Stick with the prong, and scratch with the broom!

The child in the cradle lies strangled at home,

And the mother is clapping her hands—

Semi-Chorus of Wizards I. We glide in

Like snails when the women are all away;

And from a house once given over to sin

Woman has a thousand steps to stray.

Semi-Chorus II. A thousand steps must a woman take,

Where a man but a single spring will make.

Voices above. Come with us, come with us, from Felunsee.

Voices below. With what joy would we fly, through the upper sky!

We are washed, we are ’nointed, stark naked are we:

But our toil and our pain is forever in vain.

Both Chorusses. The wind is still, the stars are fled,

The melancholy moon is dead;

The magic notes, like spark on spark,

Drizzle, whistling through the dark.

Come away!

Voices below. Stay, oh stay!

Meph. What thronging, dashing, raging, rustling;

What whispering, babbling, hissing, bustling;

What glimmering, spurting, stinking, burning,

As Heaven and Earth were overturning.

There is a true witch-element about us.

Take hold on me, or we shall be divided—

273Where are you?

Faust (from a distance). Here.

Meph. What!

I must exert my authority in the house.

Place for young Voland! Pray make way, good people.

Take hold on me, Doctor, and with one step

Let us escape from this unpleasant crowd:

They are too mad for people of my sort.

I see young witches naked there, and old ones

Wisely attired with greater decency.

Be guided now by me, and you shall buy

A pound of pleasure with a drachm of trouble.

I hear them tune their instruments—one must

Get used to this damned scraping. Come, I’ll lead you

Among them; and what there you do and see

As a fresh compact ’twixt us two shall be.

How say you now? This space is wide enough—

Look forth, you cannot see the end of it—

An hundred bonfires burn in rows, and they

Who throng around them seem innumerable:

Dancing and drinking, jabbering, making love,

And cooking are at work. Now tell me, friend,

What is there better in the world than this?

Faust. In introducing us, do you assume

The character of wizzard or of devil?

Meph. In truth, I generally go about

In strict incognito: and yet one likes

To wear one’s orders upon gala days.

I have no ribbon at my knee; but here

At home, the cloven foot is honourable.

See you that snail there?—she comes creeping up,

And with her feeling eyes hath smelt out something.

I could not, if I would, mask myself here.

Come now, we’ll go about from fire to fire:

I’ll be the pimp and you shall be the lover.’ p. 409.

The preternatural imagery in all this medley is, we confess, (comparatively speaking) meagre and monotonous; but there is a squalid nudity, and a fiendish irony and scorn thrown over the whole, that is truly edifying. The scene presently after proceeds thus.

‘Meph. Why do you let that fair girl pass from you,

Who sung so sweetly to you in the dance?

Faust. A red mouse in the middle of her singing

Sprung from her mouth!

Meph. That was all right, my friend;

Be it enough that the mouse was not grey.

Do not disturb your hour of happiness

274With close consideration of such trifles.

Faust. Then saw I—

Meph. What?

Faust. Seest thou not a pale

Fair girl, standing alone, far, far away?

She drags herself now forward with slow steps,

And seems as if she moved with shackled feet;

I cannot overcome the thought that she

Is like poor Margaret!

Meph. Let it be—pass on—

No good can come of it—it is not well

To meet it.—It is an enchanted phantom,

A lifeless idol; with its numbing look

It freezes up the blood of man; and they

Who meet its ghastly stare are turned to stone,

Like those who saw Medusa.

Faust. Oh, too true!

Her eyes are like the eyes of a fresh corpse

Which no beloved hand has closed, alas!

That is the heart which Margaret yielded to me—

Those are the lovely limbs which I enjoyed!

Meph. It is all magic, poor deluded fool;

She looks to every one like his first love.

Faust. Oh, what delight! what woe! I cannot turn

My looks from her sweet piteous countenance.

How strangely does a single blood-red line,

Not broader than the sharp edge of a knife,

Adorn her lovely neck!

Meph. Aye, she can carry

Her head under her arm upon occasion;

Perseus has cut it off for her! These pleasures

End in delusion!’—

The latter part of the foregoing scene is to be found in both translations; but we prefer Mr. Shelley’s, if not for its elegance, for its simplicity and force. Lord Leveson Gower has given, at the end of his volume, a translation of Lessing’s Faust, as having perhaps furnished the hint for the larger production. There is an old tragedy of our own, founded on the same tradition, by Marlowe, in which the author has treated the subject according to the spirit of poetry, and the learning of his age. He has not evaded the main incidents of the fable (it was not the fashion of the dramatists of his day), nor sunk the chief character in glosses and episodes (however subtle or alluring), but has described Faustus’s love of learning, his philosophic dreams and raptures, his religious horrors and melancholy fate, with appropriate gloom or gorgeousness of colouring. The character of the old enthusiastic inquirer after the philosopher’s stone, and dealer 275with the Devil, is nearly lost sight of in the German play: its bold development forms the chief beauty and strength of the old English one. We shall not, we hope, be accused of wandering too far from the subject, if we conclude with some account of it in the words of a contemporary writer. ‘The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus, though an imperfect and unequal performance, is Marlowe’s greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but is a gigantic one. This character may be considered as a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity, sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse. He is hurried away, and, as it were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art, and to extend his power with his knowledge. He would realize all the fictions of a lawless imagination, would solve the most subtle speculations of abstruse reason; and for this purpose, sets at defiance all mortal consequences, and leagues himself with demoniacal power, with “fate and metaphysical aid.” The idea of witchcraft and necromancy, once the dread of the vulgar, and the darling of the visionary recluse, seems to have had its origin in the restless tendency of the human mind, to conceive of, and aspire to, more than it can achieve by natural means; and in the obscure apprehension, that the gratification of this extravagant and unauthorized desire can only be attained by the sacrifice of all our ordinary hopes and better prospects, to the infernal agents that lend themselves to its accomplishment. Such is the foundation of the present story. Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at once, and for a few short years, all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is willing to give in exchange his soul and body to the great enemy of mankind. Whatever he fancies, becomes by this means present to his sense: whatever he commands, is done. He calls back time past, and anticipates the future: the visions of antiquity pass before him, Babylon in all its glory, Paris and Œnone: all the projects of philosophers, or creations of the poet, pay tribute at his feet: all the delights of fortune, of ambition, of pleasure and of learning, are centred in his person; and, from a short-lived dream of supreme felicity and drunken power, he sinks into an abyss of darkness and perdition. This is the alternative to which he submits; the bond which he signs with his blood! As the outline of the character is grand and daring, the execution is abrupt and fearful. The thoughts are vast and irregular, and the style halts and staggers under them.’^[20]

276

LADY MORGAN’S LIFE OF SALVATOR

Vol. xl.] [July 1824.

We are not among the devoted admirers of Lady Morgan. She is a clever and lively writer—but not very judicious, and not very natural. Since she has given up making novels, we do not think she has added much to her reputation—and indeed is rather more liable than before to the charge of tediousness and presumption. There is no want, however, either of amusement or instruction in her late performances—and we have no doubt she would write very agreeably, if she was only a little less ambitious of being always fine and striking. But though we are thus clear-sighted to her defects, we must say, that we have never seen anything more utterly unjust, or more disgusting and disgraceful, than the abuse she has had to encounter from some of our Tory journals—abuse, of which we shall say no more at present, than that it is incomparably less humiliating to the object than to the author.

Common justice seemed to require this observation from us—nor will it appear altogether out of place when we add, that we cannot but suspect that it is to a feeling connected with that subject that we are indebted for the work now before us. Salvator Rosa was, like his fair biographer, in hostility with the High-church and High-monarchy men of his day; and the enemy of the Holy Alliance, in the nineteenth century, must have followed with peculiar interest the fortunes of an artist who was so obnoxious to the suspicions of the Holy Office in the seventeenth.

There are few works more engaging than those which reveal to us the private history of eminent individuals; the lives of painters seem to be even more interesting than those of almost any other class of men; and, among painters, there are few names of greater note, or that have a more powerful attraction, than that of Salvator Rosa. We are not sure, however, that Lady Morgan’s work is not, upon the whole, more calculated to dissolve than to rivet the spell which these circumstances might, at first, throw over the reader’s mind. The great charm of biography consists in the individuality of the details, the familiar tone of the incidents, the bringing us acquainted with the persons of men whom we have formerly known only by their works or names, the absence of all exaggeration or pretension, and the immediate appeal to facts instead of theories. We are afraid, that, if tried by these rules, Lady Morgan will be found not to have written biography. A great part of the work is, accordingly, very fabulous and apocryphal. We are supplied with few anecdotes or striking 277traits, and have few data to go upon, during the early and most anxious period of Salvator’s life; but a fine opportunity is in this way afforded to conjecture how he did or did not pass his time; in what manner, and at what precise era, his peculiar talents first developed themselves; and how he must have felt in certain situations, supposing him ever to have been placed in them. In one place, for example, she employs several pages in describing Salvator’s being taken by his father from his village-home to the College of Somasco, with a detailed account of the garments in which he and his father may be presumed to have been dressed; the adieus of his mother and sisters; the streets, the churches by which they passed; in short, with an admirable panoramic view of the city of Naples and its environs, as it would appear to any modern traveller; and an assurance at the end, that ‘Such was the scenery of the Vomiro in the beginning of the seventeenth century; such is it now!’ Added to all which, we have, at every turn, pertinent allusions to celebrated persons who visited Rome and Italy in the same century, and perhaps wandered in the same solitudes, or were hid in the recesses of the same ruins; and learned dissertations on the state of the arts, sciences, morals, and politics, from the earliest records up to the present day. On the meagre thread of biography, in short, Lady Morgan has been ambitious to string the flowers of literature and the pearls of philosophy, and to strew over the obscure and half-forgotten origin of poor Salvator the colours of a sanguine enthusiasm and a florid imagination! So fascinated indeed is she with the splendour of her own style, that whenever she has a simple fact or well-authenticated anecdote to relate, she is compelled to apologize for the homeliness of the circumstance, as if the flat realities of her story were unworthy accompaniments to the fine imaginations with which she has laboured to exalt it.

We could have wished, certainly, that she had shown less pretension in this respect. Women write well, only when they write naturally: And therefore we could dispense with their inditing prize-essays or solving academic questions;—and should be far better pleased with Lady Morgan if she would condescend to a more ordinary style, and not insist continually on playing the diplomatist in petticoats, and strutting the little Gibbon of her age!

Another circumstance that takes from the interest of the present work is, that the subject of it was both an author and an artist, or, as Lady Morgan somewhat affectedly expresses it, a painter-poet. It is chiefly in the latter part of this compound character, or as a satirist, comic writer and actor, that he comes upon the stage in these volumes; and the enchantment of the scene is hurt by it.

278The great secret of our curiosity respecting the lives of painters is, that they seem to be a different race of beings, and to speak a different language from ourselves. We want to see what is the connecting link between pictures and books, and how colours will translate into words. There is something mystical and anomalous to our conceptions in the existence of persons who talk by natural signs, and express their thoughts by pointing to the objects they wish to represent. When they put pen to paper, it is as if a dumb person should stammer out his meaning for the first time, or as if the bark of a tree (repeating the miracle in Virgil) should open its lips and discourse. We have no notion how Titian could be witty, or Raphael learned; and we wait for the solution of the problem, as for the result of some curious experiment in natural history. Titian’s acquitting himself of a compliment to Charles V., or Raphael’s writing a letter to a friend, describing his idea of the Galatea, excites our wonder, and holds us in a state of breathless suspense, more than the first having painted all the masterpieces of the Escurial, or than the latter’s having realized the divine idea in his imagination. Because they have a language which we want, we fancy they must want, or cannot be at home in ours;—we start and blush to find, that, though few are painters, all men are, and naturally must be, orators and poets. We have a stronger desire to see the autographs of artists than of authors or emperors; for we somehow cannot imagine in what manner they would form their tottering letters, or sign their untaught names. We in fact exercise a sort of mental superiority and imaginary patronage over them (delightful in proportion as it is mixed up with a sense of awe and homage in other respects); watch their progress like that of grown children; are charmed with the imperfect glimmerings of wit or sense; and secretly expect to find them,—or express all the impertinence of an affected surprise if we do not—what Claude Lorraine is here represented to have been out of his painting room, little better than natural changelings and drivellers. It pleases us therefore to be told, that Gaspar Poussin, when he was not painting, rode a hunting; that Nicolas was (it is pretended) a miser and a pedant—that Domenichino was retired and modest, and Guido and Annibal Caracci unfortunate! This is as it should be, and flatters our self-love. Their works stand out to ages bold and palpable, and dazzle or inspire by their beauty and their brilliancy;—That is enough—the rest sinks into the ground of obscurity, or is only brought out as something odd and unaccountable by the patient efforts of good-natured curiosity. But all this fine theory and flutter of contradictory expectations is balked and knocked on the head at once, when, instead of a dim and shadowy figure in the back-ground, a mere 279name, of which nothing is remembered but its immortal works, a poor creature performing miracles of art, and not knowing how it has performed them, a person steps forward, bold, gay, gaillard, with all his faculties about him, master of a number of accomplishments which he is not backward to display, mingling with the throng, looking defiance around, able to answer for himself, acquainted with his own merits, and boasting of them, not merely having the gift of speech, but a celebrated improvisatore, musician, comic actor and buffoon, patriot and cynic, reciting and talking equally well, taking up his pen to write satires, and laying it down to paint them. There is a vulgarity in all this practical bustle and restless stage-effect, that takes away from that abstracted and simple idea of art which at once attracts and baffles curiosity, like a distinct element in nature. ‘Painting,’ said Michael Angelo, is jealous, and requires the whole man to herself.’ And there is some thing sacred and privileged in the character of those heirs of fame, and their noiseless reputation, which ought not, we think, to be gossipped to the air, babbled to the echo, or proclaimed by beat of drum at the corners of streets, like a procession or a puppet-show. We may peep and pry into the ordinary life of painters, but it will not do to strip them stark-naked. A speaking portrait of them—an anecdote or two—an expressive saying dropped by chance—an incident marking the bent of their genius, or its fate, are delicious; but here we should draw the curtain, or we shall profane this sort of image-worship. Least of all do we wish to be entertained with private brawls, or professional squabbles, or multifarious pretensions. ‘The essence of genius,’ as Lady Morgan observes, ‘is concentration.’ So is that of enthusiasm. We lay down the ‘Life and Times of Salvator Rosa,’ therefore, with less interest in the subject than when we took it up. We had rather not read it. Instead of the old and floating traditions on the subject,—instead of the romantic name and romantic pursuits of the daring copyist of Nature, conversing with her rudest forms, or lost in lonely musing,—eyeing the clouds that roll over his head, or listening to the waterfal, or seeing the fresh breeze waving the mountain-pines, or leaning against the side of an impending rock, or marking the bandit that issues from its clefts, ‘housing with wild men, with wild usages,’ himself unharmed and free,—and bequeathing the fruit of his uninterrupted retirement and out-of-doors studies as the best legacy to posterity,—we have the Coviello of the Carnival, the causeur of the saloons, the political malecontent, the satirist, sophist, caricaturist, the trafficker with Jews, the wrangler with courts and academies, and, last of all, the painter of history, despising his own best works, and angry with all who admired or purchased them.

The worst fault that Lady Morgan has committed is in siding 280with this infirmity of poor Salvator, and pampering him into a second Michael Angelo. The truth is, that the judgment passed upon him by his contemporaries was right in this respect. He was a great landscape painter; but his histories were comparatively forced and abortive. If this had been merely the opinion of his enemies, it might have been attributed to envy and faction; but it was no less the deliberate sentiment of his friends and most enthusiastic partisans; and if we reflect on the nature of our artist’s genius or his temper, we shall find that it could not well have been otherwise. This from a child was wayward, indocile, wild and irregular, unshackled, impatient of restraint, and urged on equally by success or opposition into a state of jealous and morbid irritability. Those who are at war with others, are not at peace with themselves. It is the uneasiness, the turbulence, the acrimony within that recoils upon external objects. Barry abused the Academy, because he could not paint himself. If he could have painted up to his own idea of perfection, he would have thought this better than exposing the ill-directed efforts or groundless pretensions of others. Salvator was rejected by the Academy of St. Luke, and excluded, in consequence of his hostility to reigning authorities, and his unlicensed freedom of speech, from the great works and public buildings in Rome; and though he scorned and ridiculed those by whose influence this was effected, yet neither the smiles of friends and fortune, nor the flatteries of fame, which in his lifetime had spread his name over Europe, and might be confidently expected to extend it to a future age, could console him for the loss, which he affected to despise, and would make no sacrifice to obtain. He was indeed hard to please. He denounced his rivals and maligners with bitterness; and with difficulty tolerated the enthusiasm of his disciples, or the services of his patrons. He was at all times full of indignation, with or without cause. He was easily exasperated, and not willing soon to be appeased, or to subside into repose and good humour again. He slighted what he did best; and seemed anxious to go out of himself. In a word, irritability rather than sensibility, was the category of his mind: he was more distinguished by violence and restlessness of will, than by dignity or power of thought. The truly great, on the contrary, are sufficient to themselves, and so far satisfied with the world. ‘Their mind to them is a kingdom,’ from which they look out, as from a high watchtower or noble fortress, on the passions, the cabals, the meannesses and follies of mankind. They shut themselves up ‘in measureless content;’ or soar to the great, discarding the little; and appeal from envious detraction or ‘unjust tribunals under change of times,’ to posterity. They are not satirists, cynics, nor the prey of these; but painters, poets, and philosophers.

281Salvator was the victim of a too morbid sensibility, or of early difficulty and disappointment. He was always quarrelling with the world, and lay at the mercy of his own piques and resentments. But antipathy, the spirit of contradiction, captious discontent, fretful impatience, produce nothing fine in character, neither dwell on beauty, nor pursue truth, nor rise into sublimity. The splenetic humourist is not the painter of humanity. Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy. Our artist, escaping from the herd of knaves and fools, sought out some rude solitude, and found repose there. Teased by the impertinence, stung to the quick by the injustice of mankind, the presence of the works of nature would be a relief to his mind, and would, by contrast, stamp her striking features more strongly there. In the coolness, in the silence, in the untamed wildness of mountain scenery, in the lawless manners of its inhabitants, he would forget the fever and the anguish, and the artificial restraints of society. We accordingly do not find in Salvator’s rural scenes either natural beauty or fertility, or even the simply grand; but whatever seizes attention by presenting a barrier to the will, or scorning the power of mankind, or snapping asunder the chain that binds us to the kind—the barren, the abrupt, wild steril regions, the steep rock, the mountain torrent, the bandit’s cave, the hermit’s cell,—all these, while they released him from more harassing and painful reflections, soothed his moody spirit with congenial gloom, and found a sanctuary and a home there. Not only is there a corresponding determination and singleness of design in his landscapes (excluding every approach to softness, or pleasure, or ornament), but the strength of the impression is confirmed even by the very touch and mode of handling; he brings us in contact with the objects he paints; and the sharpness of a rock, the roughness of the bark of a tree, or the ruggedness of a mountain path are marked in the freedom, the boldness, and firmness of his pencilling. There is not in Salvator’s scenes the luxuriant beauty and divine harmony of Claude, nor the amplitude of Nicolas Poussin, nor the gorgeous richness of Titian—but there is a deeper seclusion, a more abrupt and total escape from society, more savage wildness and grotesqueness of form, a more earthy texture, a fresher atmosphere, and a more obstinate resistance to all the effeminate refinements of art. Salvator Rosa then is, beyond all question, the most romantic of landscape painters; because the very violence and untractableness of his temper threw him with instinctive force upon those objects in nature which would be most likely to sooth and disarm it; while, in history, he is little else than a caricaturist (we mean compared with such men as Raphael, Michael Angelo, &c.), because the same acrimony and impatience have made him fasten on 282those subjects and aspects of the human mind which would most irritate and increase it; and he has, in this department, produced chiefly distortion and deformity, sullenness and rage, extravagance, squalidness, and poverty of appearance. But it is time to break off this long and premature digression, into which our love of justice and of the arts (which requires, above all, that no more than justice should be done to any one) had led us, and return to the elegant but somewhat fanciful specimen of biography before us. Lady Morgan (in her flattery of the dead, the most ill-timed and unprofitable, but least disgusting of all flattery) has spoken of the historical compositions of Salvator in terms that leave no distinction between him and Michael Angelo; and we could not refrain from entering our protest against such an inference, and thus commencing our account of her book with what may appear at once a piece of churlish criticism and a want of gallantry.