much an "idea,' and an idea as valuable, to gain a knowledge of the movements of the human mind,-to see how it is affected by certain causes, and how it adapts itself to various contingencies,-to contemplate it when under extraordinary depression, or when lifted to a state of perilous excitement, as to calculate the expense of provisions, the progress of population, the advantages of a division of labour, or the possible benefit (or otherwise) of certain political institutions. The object of poetry, as well as of prose, is to spread abroad the knowledge of our age, to transmit the accumulated wisdom of foregone ages to the world around us, and to the times to come. They are not two combatants in one arena, with weapons necessarily opposed to each other, in order to secure self-preservation, or some definite reward, which cannot be shared between them. They were both born and brought to light to dispel ignorance, and contend with tyranny and abuse,-to stand up, hand in hand, true champions and assertors of "the Right," for the glory of truth and knowledge, and the undoubted benefit of all the human race. Notwithstanding these things, and notwithstanding all that has been felt and expressed on behalf of this eminent art, we are now called upon to despise it! The world has lasted six thousand years it has had, amongst its millions and millions of generations, some few who have soared above the rest, and become marks for the admiration of their fellows,—whose object has been undeniably good, and whose prodigious intellect is beyond. question greater than that of any writer of our existing time. These men have hitherto been held to be the benefactors of mankind. They have led them into the temple of philosophy, and there given them wholesome instruction. They have directed them to the exercise of every virtue; and such as have obeyed their high lessoning have themselves become good and distinguished. They have held before these their followers the mirror of truth (of "truth severe, in fairy fiction dressed")-have placed before them illustrious examples. They have incited them to gallant deeds have given them delight in peaceful times, and have soothed them in times of pain and sorrow. And now we are told that all this is nothing, or worse than nothing,-and by whom? By those who maintain that knowledge and moral training are the only true blessings of mankind!

There is assuredly much of what is vicious, and more of what is ridiculous, in the world; and all that is decidedly bad should of course be amended. But whether it be well to make a wreck of all that has so been long held valuable and graceful, in order to ensure a certain portion of doubtful good, is at lest worthy of consideration. The question is— whether Poetry and Art, whether all that touches our sympathies and operates upon our affections, should be rooted up and exterminated, like some long-established evil, or wide-spread disease? For our own parts, we think not. We think that they should be permitted to remain; or rather, that they will and must remain, and flourish, in despite of all prophecies and opinions to the contrary. Can it, in truth, be ever otherwise, so long as hope and ambition, our love of the beautiful, and our sense of the sublime, remain integral portions of our nature?

We owe something, surely, to our imagination which has yielded us such frequent delight, as well as to our reason; and we owe yet more to the grand and lofty spirits who have trod the earth before us, and have died, leaving behind them the imperishable records of their glory. Those immortal writings, dictated by the Imagination to poets in their happiest hours, bear upon them the impress of an amazing intellect. They bring

forward, for our instruction, all the varieties of man, setting forth, in the colours of truth, his virtues and vices, his strength, his weakness, his obduracy, his pity, his inconsistencies, and follies of a hundred hues, which are nowhere else so completely marshalled and portrayed,-and to show which, and the consequences of which, equally well, the whole region of literature may be traversed, and all the stores of history and philosophy ransacked and compared in vain. And is all this of so little value, that to have done it should entitle the doer to the contempt of his fellows? Is it indeed a fact, that Shakspeare and Homer, that Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and the rest, have lived for no purpose but to be an idle sound? Was all their wisdom, all their wit, indeed empty, contemptible and useless? Are the great moral pictures of Macbeth and Othello, of Satan, and Timon, and Lear, and all that illustrious array of characters, nothing-but only shadowy and unprofitable illusions? Is there nothing real in their texture nothing of what is good or useful in their histories! Is the philosophic vein of Hamlet worn out or become base! And has his intellectual stature shrunk and fallen below that of every puny logician? Or is it not, after all, that the opposing ideas of the utilitarians on these points are themselves groundless and illusory,-as inimical to true reason as the most extravagant and distorted metaphors of the tawdry rhetorican, and as diffi cult to be reduced to practice as the wildest dreams of the poet?

L

ON THE LAWS WHICH INFLUENCE THE PROGRESS AND DECLINE OF POETRY.*

The laws on which depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and sculpture, operate with little less certainty than those which regulate the periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. Those who seem to lead the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing. Without a just apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded, the merits and defects of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state what we conceive them to be.

The ages in which the master-pieces of imagination have been produced have by no means been those in which taste has been most correct. It seems that the creative faculty, and the critical faculty, cannot exist together in their highest perfection. The causes of this phenomenon it is not difficult to assign.

It is true, that the man who is best able to take a machine to pieces, and who most clearly comprehends the manner in which all its wheels and springs conduce to its general effects, will be the man most competent to form another machine of similar power. In all the branches of physical and moral science which admit of perfect analysis, he who can resolve will be able to combine. But the analysis which criticism can effect of poetry, is necessarily imperfect. One element must for ever elude its researches; and that is the very element by which poetry is poetry. In the description of nature, for example, a judicious reader will easily detect an incongruous The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Edited by sir Walter Scott.-Vol. xlvii. p. 3. January

image. But he will find it impossible to explain in what consists the art of a writer who, in a few words, brings some spot before him so vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived there from childhood; while another, employing the same materials, the same verdure, the same water, and the same flowers, committing no inaccuracy, introducing nothing which can be positively pronounced superfluous, omitting nothing which can be positively pronounced necessary, shall produce no more effect than an advertisement of a capital residence and a desirable pleasure-ground. To take another example: the great features of the character of Hotspur are obvious to the most superficial reader. We at once perceive that his courage is splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his animal spirits high, his temper careless, arbitrary, and petulant; that he indulges his own humour, without caring whose feelings he may wound, or whose enmity he may provoke, by his levity. Thus far criticism will go. But something is still wanting. A man might have all those qualities, and every other quality which the most minute examiner can introduce into his catalogue of the virtues and faults of Hotspur, and yet he would not be Hotspur. Almost every thing that we have said of him applies equally to Falconbridge. Yet, in the mouth of Falconbridge, most of his speeches would seem out of place. In real life, this perpetually occurs. We are sensible of wide differences between men whom, if we were required to describe them, we should describe in almost the same terms. If we were attempting to draw elaborate characters of them, we should scarcely be able to point out any strong distinction; yet we approach them with feelings altogether dissimilar. We cannot conceive of them as using the expressions or the gestures of each other. Let us suppose, that a zoologist should attempt to give an account of some animal, a porcupine for instance, to people who had never seen it. The porcupine, he might say, is of the genus mammalia, and the order glires. There are whiskers on its face; it is two feet long; it has four toes before, five behind, two fore-teeth, and eight grinders. Its body is covered with hair and quills. And when all this has been said, would any one of the auditors have formed a just idea of a porcupine? Would any two of them have formed the same idea! There might exist innumerable races of animals, possessing all the characteristics which have been mentioned, yet altogether unlike to each other. What the description of our naturalist is to a real porcupine, the remarks of criticism are to the images of poetry. What it so imperfectly decomposes, it cannot perfectly re-construct. It is evidently as impossible to produce an Othello or a Macbeth, by reversing an analytical process so defective, as it would be for an anatomist to form a living man out of the fragments of his dissecting-room. In both cases, the vital principle eludes the finest instruments, and vanishes in the very instant in which its seat is touched. Hence those who, trusting to their critical skill, attempt to write poems, give us, not images of things, but catalogues of qualities. Their characters are allegories; not good men and bad men, but cardinal virtues and deadly sins. We seem to have fallen among the acquaintances of our old friend Christian; sometimes we meet Mistrust and Timorous; sometimes Mr. Hategood and Mr. Love-lust; and then again Prudence, Piety, and Charity.

That critical discernment is not sufficient to make men poets, is generally allowed. Why it should keep them from becoming poets, is not perhaps equally evident but the fact is, that poetry requires not an examining, but a believing frame of mind. Those feel it most, and write it

best, who forget that it is a work of art; to whom its imitations, like the realities from which they are taken, are subjects not for connoisseurship, but for tears and laughter, resentment and affection; who are too much under the influence of the illusion to admire the genius which has produced it; who are too much frightened for Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus, to care whether the pun about Outis be good or bad; who forget that such a person as Shakspeare ever existed, while they weep and curse with Lear. It is by giving faith to the creations of the imagination that a man becomes a poet. It is by treating those creations as deceptions, and by resolving them, as nearly as possible, into their elements, that he becomes a critic. In the moment in which the skill of the artist is perceived, the spell of the art is broken.

These considerations account for the absurdities into which the greatest writers have fallen, when they have attempted to give general rules for composition, or to pronounce judgment on the works of others. They are unaccustomed to analyse what they feel; they, therefore, perpetually refer their emotions to causes which have not in the slightest degree tended to produce them. They feel pleasure in reading a book. They never consider that this pleasure may be the effect of ideas, which some unmeaning expression, striking on the first link of a chain of associations, may have called up in their own minds-that they have themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they admire.

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every schoolboy thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his romance, and knows the lantern jaws of the Knight Errant, and the broad cheeks of the Squire, as well as the faces of his own play-fellows. The most experienced and fastidious judges are amazed at the perfection of that art which extracts inextinguishable laughter from the greatest of human calamities, without once violating the reverence due to it; as that discriminating delicacy of touch, which makes a character exquisitely ridiculous, without impairing its worth, its grace, or its dignity. In Don Quixote are several dissertations on the principles of poetic and dramatic writing. No passages in the whole work exhibit stronger marks of labour and attention; and no passages in any work, with which we are acquainted, are more worthless and puerile. In our time they would scarcely obtain admittance into the literary department of the Morning Post. Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the veneration which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to himself. He will not lift up his eyes from the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all whose works are not worth the worst of his own hundred cantos. He does not venture to walk in the same line with the bombastic Statius. His admiration of Virgil is absolute idolatry. If indeed it had been excited by the elegant, splendid, and harmonious diction of the Roman poet, it would not have been altogether unreasonable; but it is rather as an authority on all points of philosophy, than as a work of imagination, that he values the Æneid. The most trivial passages he regards as oracles of the highest authority, and of the most recondite meaning. He describes his conductor as the sea of all wisdom-the sun which heals every disordered sight. As he judged of Virgil, the Italians of the fourteenth century judged of him; they were proud of him; they praised him; they struck medals bearing his head; they quarrelled for the honour of possessing his remains; they maintained professors to expound his writings. But what they admired, was not that mighty imagination which

called a new world into existence, and made all its sights and sounds familiar to the eye and ear of the mind. They said little of those awful and lovely creations on which later critics delight to dwell-Farinata lifting his haughty and tranquil brow from his couch of everlasting fire-the lion-like repose of Sordello-or the light which shone from the celestial smile of Beatrice. They extolled their great poet, for his smattering of ancient literature and history; for his logic and his divinity; for his absurd physics, and his more absurd metaphysics; for every thing but that in which he preeminently excelled. Like the fool in the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging for gold, which, as he had dreamed, was concealed under its foundations, they laid waste one of the noblest works of human genius, by seeking in it for buried treasures of wisdom, which existed only in their own wild reveries. The finest passages were little valued till they had been debased into some monstrous allegory. Louder applause was given to the lecture on fate and free-will, or to the ridiculous astronomical theories, than to those tremendous lines which disclose the secrets of the tower of hunger; or to that half-told tale of guilty love, so passionate and so full of tears.

We do not mean to say that the contemporaries of Dante read with less emotion than their descendants of Ugolino groping among the wasted corpses of his children, or of Francesca starting at the tremulous kiss, and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We believe that they admired these things less than ourselves, but that they felt them more. We should perhaps say, that they felt them too much to admire them. The progress of a nation from barbarism to civilisation produces a change similar to that which takes place during the progress of an individual from infancy to mature age. What man does not remember with regret the first time that he read Robinson Crusoe? Then, indeed, he was unable to appreciate the powers of the writer; or rather, he neither knew nor cared whether the book had a writer at all. He probably thought it not half so fine as some rant of Macpherson about dark-browed Foldath, and white-bosomed Strinadona. He now values Fingal and Temora only as showing with how little evidence a story may be believed, and with how little merit a book may be popular. Of the romance of Defoe he entertains the highest opinion. He perceives the hand of a master in ten thousand touches, which formerly he passed by without notice. But though he understands the merits of the narrative better than formerly, he is far less interested by it. Xury, and Friday, and pretty Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mutton sail, and the canoe which could not be brought down to the water edge, the tent with its hedge and ladders, the preserve of kids, and the den where the old goat died, can never again be to him the realities which they were. The days when his favourite volume set him upon making wheelbarrows and chairs, upon digging caves and fencing huts in the garden, can never return. Such is the law of our nature. Our judgment ripens, our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the spring of life, and the fruits of its autumn, the pleasures of close investigation, and those of agreeable error. We cannot sit at once in the front of the stage and behind the scenes. We cannot be under the illusion of the spectacle, while we are watching the movements of the ropes and pulleys which dispose it.

The chapter in which Fielding describes the behaviour of Partridge at the theatre affords so complete an illustration of our proposition, that we cannot refrain from quoting some parts of it.