Thomas Moore- Collected Poetical Works

by Thomas Moore

  The artillery of the demons was but the first step of his mistake, the thunder the next, and it is a step lower. It would have been fit for Jove, but not for Jehovah. The subject altogether was essentially unpoetical; he has made more of it than another could, but it is beyond him and all men.

  In a portion of his reply, Mr. Bowles asserts that Pope “envied Phillips,” because he quizzed his pastorals in the Guardian, in that most admirable model of irony, his paper on the subject. If there was any thing enviable about Phillips, it could hardly be his pastorals. They were despicable, and Pope expressed his contempt. If Mr. Fitzgerald published a volume of sonnets, or a “Spirit of Discovery,” or a “Missionary,” and Mr. Bowles wrote in any periodical journal an ironical paper upon them, would this be “envy?” The authors of the “Rejected Addresses” have ridiculed the sixteen or twenty “first living poets” of the day, but do they “envy” them? “Envy” writhes, it don’t laugh. The authors of the Rejected Addresses may despise some, but they can hardly “envy” any of the persons whom they have parodied; and Pope could have no more envied Phillips than he did Welsted, or Theobald, or Smedley, or any other given hero of the Dunciad. He could not have envied him, even had he himself not been the greatest poet of his age. Did Mr. Ings “envy” Mr. Phillips when he asked him, “How came your Pyrrhus to drive oxen and say, I am goaded on by love?” This question silenced poor Phillips; but it no more proceeded from “envy” than did Pope’s ridicule. Did he envy Swift? Did he envy Bolingbroke? Did he envy Gay the unparalleled success of his “Beggar’s Opera?” We may be answered that these were his friends — true: but does friendship prevent envy? Study the first woman you meet with, or the first scribbler, let Mr. Bowles himself (whom I acquit fully of such an odious quality) study some of his own poetical intimates: the most envious man I ever heard of is a poet, and a high one; besides, it is an universal passion. Goldsmith envied not only the puppets for their dancing, and broke his shins in the attempt at rivalry, but was seriously angry because two pretty women received more attention than he did. This is envy; but where does Pope show a sign of the passion? In that case Dryden envied the hero of his Mac Flecknoe. Mr. Bowles compares, when and where he can, Pope with Cowper — (the same Cowper whom in his edition of Pope he laughs at for his attachment to an old woman, Mrs. Unwin; search and you will find it; I remember the passage, though not the page;) in particular he requotes Cowper’s Dutch delineation of a wood, drawn up, like a seedsman’s catalogue, with an affected imitation of Milton’s style, as burlesque as the “Splendid Shilling.” These two writers, for Cowper is no poet, come into comparison in one great work, the translation of Homer. Now, with all the great, and manifest, and manifold, and reproved, and acknowledged, and uncontroverted faults of Pope’s translation, and all the scholarship, and pains, and time, and trouble, and blank verse of the other, who can ever read Cowper? and who will ever lay down Pope, unless for the original? Pope’s was “not Homer, it was Spondanus;” but Cowper’s is not Homer either, it is not even Cowper. As a child I first read Pope’s Homer with a rapture which no subsequent work could ever afford, and children are not the worst judges of their own language. As a boy I read Homer in the original, as we have all done, some of us by force, and a few by favour; under which description I come is nothing to the purpose, it is enough that I read him. As a man I have tried to read Cowper’s version, and I found it impossible. Has any human reader ever succeeded?

  [Footnote 1: I will submit to Mr. Bowles’s own judgment a passage from another poem of Cowper’s, to be compared with the same writer’s Sylvan Sampler. In the lines to Mary, —

  “Thy needles, once a shining store,

  For my sake restless heretofore,

  Now rust disused, and shine no more,

  My Mary,”

  contain a simple, household, “indoor,” artificial, and ordinary image; I refer Mr. Bowles to the stanza, and ask if these three lines about “needles” are not worth all the boasted twaddling about trees, so triumphantly re-quoted? and yet, in fact, what do they convey? A homely collection of images and ideas, associated with the darning of stockings, and the hemming of shirts, and the mending of breeches; but will any one deny that they are eminently poetical and pathetic as addressed by Cowper to his nurse? The trash of trees reminds me of a saying of Sheridan’s. Soon after the “Rejected Address” scene in 1812, I met Sheridan. In the course of dinner, he said, “Lord Byron, did you know that, amongst the writers of addresses, was Whitbread himself?” I answered by an enquiry of what sort of an address he had made. “Of that,” replied Sheridan, “I remember little, except that there was a phoenix in it.”— “A phoenix!! Well, how did he describe it?”— “Like a poulterer,” answered Sheridan: “it was green, and yellow, and red, and blue: he did not let us off for a single feather.” And just such as this poulterer’s account of a phoenix is Cowper’s stick-picker’s detail of a wood, with all its petty minutiæ of this, that, and the other.]

  And now that we have heard the Catholic repreached with envy, duplicity, licentiousness, avarice — what was the Calvinist? He attempted the most atrocious of crimes in the Christian code, viz. suicide — and why? because he was to be examined whether he was fit for an office which he seems to wish to have made a sinecure. His connection with Mrs. Unwin was pure enough, for the old lady was devout, and he was deranged; but why then is the infirm and then elderly Pope to be reproved for his connection with Martha Blount: Cowper was the almoner of Mrs. Throgmorton; but Pope’s charities were his own, and they were noble and extensive, far beyond his fortune’s warrant. Pope was the tolerant yet steady adherent of the most bigoted of sects; and Cowper the most bigoted and despondent sectary that ever anticipated damnation to himself or others. Is this harsh? I know it is, and I do not assert it as my opinion of Cowper personally, but to show what might be said, with just as great an appearance of truth and candour, as all the odium which has been accumulated upon Pope in similar speculations. Cowper was a good man, and lived at a fortunate time for his works.

  [Footnote: One more poetical instance of the power of art, and even its superiority over nature, in poetry; and I have done: — the bust of Antinous! Is there any thing in nature like this marble, excepting the Venus? Can there be more poetry gathered into existence than in that wonderful creation of perfect beauty? But the poetry of this bust is in no respect derived from nature, nor from any association of moral exaltedness; for what is there in common with moral nature, and the male minion of Adrian? The very execution is not natural, but super-natural, or rather super-artificial, for nature has never done so much.

  Away, then, with this cant about nature, and “invariable principles of poetry!” A great artist will make a block of stone as sublime as a mountain, and a good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than inhabits the forests of America. It is the business and the proof of a poet to give the lie to the proverb, and sometimes to “make a silken purse out of a sow’s ear;” and to conclude with another homely proverb, “a good workman will not find fault with his tools.”]

  Mr. Bowles, apparently not relying entirely upon his own arguments, has, in person or by proxy, brought forward the names of Southey and Moore. Mr. Southey “agrees entirely with Mr. Bowles in his invariable principles of poetry.” The least that Mr. Bowles can do in return is to approve the “invariable principles of Mr. Southey.” I should have thought that the word “invariable” might have stuck in Southey’s throat, like Macbeth’s “Amen!” I am sure it did in mine, and I am not the least consistent of the two, at least as a voter. Moore (et tu, Brute!) also approves, and a Mr. J. Scott. There is a letter also of two lines from a gentleman in asterisks, who, it seems, is a poet of “the highest rank:” — who can this be? not my friend, Sir Walter, surely. Campbell it can’t be; Rogers it won’t be.

  “You have hit the nail in the head, and * * * * [Pope, I presume] on the head also.

  “I remain yours, affectionately, “(Five Asterisks.)”

  And in aste
risks let him remain. Whoever this person may be, he deserves, for such a judgment of Midas, that “the nail” which Mr. Bowles has “hit in the head,” should he driven through his own ears; I am sure that they are long enough.

  The attempt of the poetical populace of the present day to obtain an ostracism against Pope is as easily accounted for as the Athenian’s shell against Aristides; they are tired of hearing him always called “the Just.” They are also fighting for life; for, if he maintains his station, they will reach their own by falling. They have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from whose practice I have borrowed the figure, they are not contented with their own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy the prior, and purely beautiful fabric which preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be told that amongst those I have been (or it may be, still am) conspicuous — true, and I am ashamed of it. I have been amongst the builders of this Babel, attended by a confusion of tongues, but never amongst the envious destroyers of the classic temple of our predecessor. I have loved and honoured the fame and name of that illustrious and unrivalled man, far more than my own paltry renown, and the trashy jingle of the crowd of “Schools” and upstarts, who pretend to rival, or even surpass him. Sooner than a single leaf should be torn from his laurel, it were better that all which these men, and that I, as one of their set, have ever written, should

  “Line trunks, clothe spice, or, fluttering in a row,

  Befringe the rails of Bedlam, or Soho!”

  There are those who will believe this, and those who will not. You, sir, know how far I am sincere, and whether my opinion, not only in the short work intended for publication, and in private letters which can never be published, has or has not been the same. I look upon this as the declining age of English poetry; no regard for others, no selfish feeling, can prevent me from seeing this, and expressing the truth. There can be no worse sign for the taste of the times than the depreciation of Pope. It would be better to receive for proof Mr. Cobbett’s rough but strong attack upon Shakspeare and Milton, than to allow this smooth and “candid” undermining of the reputation of the most perfect of our poets, and the purest of our moralists. Of his power in the passions, in description, in the mock heroic, I leave others to descant. I take him on his strong ground as an ethical poet: in the former, none excel; in the mock heroic and the ethical, none equal him; and in my mind, the latter is the highest of all poetry, because it does that in verse, which the greatest of men have wished to accomplish in prose. If the essence of poetry must be a lie, throw it to the dogs, or banish it from your republic, as Plato would have done. He who can reconcile poetry with truth and wisdom, is the only true “poet” in its real sense, “the maker” “the creator,” — why must this mean the “liar,” the “feigner,” the “tale-teller?” A man may make and create better things than these.

  I shall not presume to say that Pope is as high a poet as Shakspeare and Milton, though his enemy, Warton, places him immediately under them. I would no more say this than I would assert in the mosque (once Saint Sophia’s), that Socrates was a greater man than Mahomet. But if I say that he is very near them, it is no more than has been asserted of Burns, who is supposed

  “To rival all but Shakspeare’s name below.”

  [Footnote 1: If the opinions cited by Mr. Bowles, of Dr. Johnson against Pope, are to be taken as decisive authority, they will also hold good against Gray, Milton, Swift, Thomson, and Dryden: in that case what becomes of Gray’s poetical, and Milton’s moral character? even of Milton’s poetical character, or, indeed, of English poetry in general? for Johnson strips many a leaf from every laurel. Still Johnson’s is the finest critical work extant, and can never be read without instruction and delight.]

  I say nothing against this opinion. But of what “order,” according to the poetical aristocracy, are Burns’s poems? There are his opus magnum, “Tam O’Shanter,” a tale; the Cotter’s Saturday Night, a descriptive sketch; some others in the same style: the rest are songs. So much for the rank of his productions; the rank of Burns is the very first of his art. Of Pope I have expressed my opinion elsewhere, as also of the effect which the present attempts at poetry have had upon our literature. If any great national or natural convulsion could or should overwhelm your country in such sort, as to sweep Great Britain from the kingdoms of the earth, and leave only that, after all, the most living of human things, a dead language, to be studied and read, and imitated by the wise of future and far generations, upon foreign shores; if your literature should become the learning of mankind, divested of party cabals, temporary fashions, and national pride and prejudice; an Englishman, anxious that the posterity of strangers should know that there had been such a thing as a British Epic and Tragedy, might wish for the preservation of Shakspeare and Milton; but the surviving world would snatch Pope from the wreck, and let the rest sink with the people. He is the moral poet of all civilisation; and as such, let us hope that he will one day be the national poet of mankind. He is the only poet that never shocks; the only poet whose faultlessness has been made his reproach. Cast your eye over his productions; consider their extent, and contemplate their variety: — pastoral, passion, mock heroic, translation, satire, ethics, — all excellent, and often perfect. If his great charm be his melody, how comes it that foreigners adore him even in their diluted translations? But I have made this letter too long. Give my compliments to Mr. Bowles.

  Yours ever, very truly,

  BYRON.

  To John Murray, Esq.

  Post Scriptum. — Long as this letter has grown, I find it necessary to append a postscript; if possible, a short one. Mr. Bowles denies that he has accused Pope of “a sordid money-getting passion;” but, he adds, “if I had ever done so, I should be glad to find any testimony that, might show he was not so.” This testimony he may find to his heart’s content in Spence and elsewhere. First, there is Martha Blount, who, Mr. Bowles charitably says, “probably thought he did not save enough for her, as legatee.” Whatever she thought upon this point, her words are in Pope’s favour. Then there is Alderman Barber; see Spence’s Anecdotes. There is Pope’s cold answer to Halifax when he proposed a pension; his behaviour to Craggs and to Addison upon like occasions, and his own two lines —

  “And, thanks to Homer, since I live and thrive,

  Indebted to no prince or peer alive;”

  written when princes would have been proud to pension, and peers to promote him, and when the whole army of dunces were in array against him, and would have been but too happy to deprive him of this boast of independence. But there is something a little more serious in Mr. Bowles’s declaration, that he “would have spoken” of his “noble generosity to the outcast Richard Savage,” and other instances of a compassionate and generous heart, “had they occurred to his recollection when he wrote.” What! is it come to this? Does Mr. Bowles sit down to write a minute and laboured life and edition of a great poet? Does he anatomise his character, moral and poetical? Does he present us with his faults and with his foibles? Does he sneer at his feelings, and doubt of his sincerity? Does he unfold his vanity and duplicity? and then omit the good qualities which might, in part, have “covered this multitude of sins?” and then plead that “they did not occur to his recollection?” Is this the frame of mind and of memory with which the illustrious dead are to be approached? If Mr. Bowles, who must have had access to all the means of refreshing his memory, did not recollect these facts, he is unfit for his task; but if he did recollect and omit them, I know not what he is fit for, but I know what would be fit for him. Is the plea of “not recollecting” such prominent facts to be admitted? Mr. Bowles has been at a public school, and as I have been publicly educated also, I can sympathise with his predilection. When we were in the third form even, had we pleaded on the Monday morning, that we had not brought up the Saturday’s exercise, because “we had forgotten it,” what would have been the reply? And is an excuse, whi
ch would not be pardoned to a schoolboy, to pass current in a matter which so nearly concerns the fame of the first poet of his age, if not of his country? If Mr. Bowles so readily forgets the virtues of others, why complain so grievously that others have a better memory for his own faults? They are but the faults of an author; while the virtues he omitted from his catalogue are essential to the justice due to a man.

  Mr. Bowles appears, indeed, to be susceptible beyond the privilege of authorship. There is a plaintive dedication to Mr. Gifford, in which he is made responsible for all the articles of the Quarterly. Mr. Southey, it seems, “the most able and eloquent writer in that Review,” approves of Mr. Bowles’s publication. Now it seems to me the more impartial, that notwithstanding that “the great writer of the Quarterly” entertains opinions opposite to the able article on Spence, nevertheless that essay was permitted to appear. Is a review to be devoted to the opinions of any one man?