bours in which the imagination watches while the | to relieve a long poem. I do not see why what soul reposes; those recesses in which the Gods pleases us in a star, should not please us in a partook the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals constellation. The coarser bread is that of the the enjoyments of the Gods! larger loaf; we should therefore put into it more salt and leaven. You have treated our poet with courtesy and distinction in your trimmed and measured dress he might be taken for a Frenchman. Do not think me flattering. You have conducted Eve from Paradise to Paris, and she really looks | prettier and smarter than before she tripped. With what elegance she rises from a most awful dream! You represent her (I repeat your expression) as springing up en sursaut, as if you had caught her asleep, and tickled the young creature on that sofa. Homer and Virgil have been excelled in sublimity by Shakspeare and Milton, as the Caucasus and Atlas of the old world by the Andes and Teneriffe of the new but you would embellish them all. Delille. I owe to Voltaire my first sentiment of admiration for Milton and Shakspeare. Landor. He stuck to them as a woodpecker to an old forest-tree, only for the purpose of picking out what was rotten: he has made the holes deeper than he found them, and, after all his cries and chatter, has brought home but scanty sustenance to his starveling nest. Delille. Voltaire is not always light, nor cient in fire. defi Landor. Even smoke hath solid parts, and takes fire sometimes. Delille. You must acknowledge that there are fine verses in his tragedies. I believe you have no adequate translation of the Henriade. I doubt whether I myself have sufficient mastery over the English language to render it worthily. Landor. Is it possible to doubt of your powers? Of France, and Mayenne too, Delille. Ah çà! That last thought is a bright one indeed! Voltaire would have emptied his snuff-box to replenish it with that fine powder. But.. pardon! Our language has certain shades which none but a Frenchman can seize. There are here a few points of difference in the sentiment. You have indeed abundantly compensated for them, by the delicate allusion to our poet's theatre. But.. but.. top-gallery.. Ah Mr. Landor! even Homer would have failed: he would indeed. Our spirit, our finesse, our delicacy, are peculiarly ours. Landor. I will never try again anything so arduous. Delille. Epigram and versification are the main secrets of French poetry; to which must be added an exactness of thought and a brevity of expres sion, such for instance as we admire in Boileau. But you promised me something of Metastasio. Landor. I will repeat the lines, with Voltaire's observations. The King of Parthia is brought in chains before the Emperor Hadrian, and has leisure for the following paraphrase, by which he would signify that his ruin itself shall be subservient to his revenge. Landor. Whenever such is the first observation, be assured, M. l'Abbé, that the poem, if heroic or dramatic, is bad. Should a work of this kind be excellent, we say, "How admirably the characters are sustained! what delicacy of discrimination! there is nothing to be taken away or altered without an injury to the part or to the whole." We may afterward descend on the versification. In poetry there is a greater difference between the good and the excellent, than there is between the bad and the good. Poetry has no golden mean: mediocrity here is of another metal, which Voltaire however had skill enough to encrust and polish. In the least wretched of his tragedies, whatever is tolerable is Shakspeare's; but, gracious Heaven! how deteriorated! When he pretends to extol a poet, he chooses some defective part, and renders it more so whenever he translates it. I will repeat a few verses from Metastasio, in support of my assertion. Metastasio was both a better critic and a better poet, although of the second order in Con quel vento istesso! it must make haste each quality; his tyrants are less philosophical, then. Voltaire had forgotten the art of concealand his chambermaids less dogmatic. Voltaire was however a man of abilities, and author of many passable epigrams, beside those which are contained in his tragedies and heroics; yet it must be confessed, that like your Parisian lackeys, they are usually the smartest when out of place. Delille. What you call epigram gives life and spirit to grave works, and seems principally wanted Sprezza il furor del vento ing his insincerity, when he praised as a sublime air the worst and most far-fetched thought in all the operas of Metastasio. He could read Italian poetry, he could write French: we have seen how he judged of the least familiar, let us now inquire how he judges of the most. He considers then the following lines in Mithridate as a model of perfection. J'ai sçu par une longue et pénible industrie Ah! qu'il m'eût mieux valu, plus sage ou plus heureux, Alas! the cold of his years, in comparison with the cold of his wit, is but as a flake of snow to a mass of frozen mercury. Delille. There often are quickness and spirit in the criticisms of Voltaire: but these, I acknowledge, do not constitute a good critic, although a good critic will not have been such without them. His versatility and variety are more remarkable than his correctness. On subjects where religion was not concerned, he was more accurate and dispassionate. Landor. The physical world seemed a vast thing to him for it must be a vast thing to contain Paris. He could not imagine that the earth had ever been covered by the sea, but that the shells on mountains were tossed there by Nature in her hours of idleness, to excite, no doubt, the curiosity of English travellers. Never did it once occur to him that changes are taking place eternally in every particle of our solar system, and of other solar systems far remote from ours: never did it occur to him that the ocean and the world within it are less in the hand of God than a bowl of milk with a morsel of bread within it are in a child's, where the one is soon dissolved and dislocates the other. But his taste in high poetry is no better than his judgment in high philosophy. Among the number of his futile and rash remarks, he declares that nothing in Homer is equivalent to Hesiod's description of Pandora. The homely and somewhat dull poem of Hesiod is indeed to a certain degree enlivened by it. But if Voltaire could have read a sentence of Greek, even without understanding one word, the music of those verses in the Odyssea, imitated so well by Lucretius,* on the habitations of the gods, and of those others where the mother of Ulysses+ tells him the cause of her decease, would have checked him in the temerity of his decision. Nothing can excel the harmony of these passages, and the poetry they contain is equally perfect. How contemptible then is that critic, and how greatly more that poet, who prefers an indifferent piece of satire not only to these, but to the parting of Hector and Andromache and to the interview of Priam and Achilles. Delille. Acknowledge at least that in tales and in history he has done something. Landor. Yes, he has united them very dexterously. In the lighter touches of irony and derision he excels Rabelais and rivals Molière; but in that which requires vigour of conception, and there is a kind which does require it, he falls short of Cervantes and Swift. You have other historians not only more faithful, but as powerful in style and as profound in thought. I place him barely on a level with Robertson, although in composition he may have an advantage over him; nor in disquisition is he comparable to Gibbon, whose manner, which many have censured, I think in general well suited to the work. In the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire there is too much to sadden and disgust: a smile in such a narrative on some occasions is far from unacceptable: if it should be succeeded by a sneer, it is not the sneer of bitterness, which falls not on debility, nor of triumph, which accords not with contempt. The colours, it is true, are gorgeous, like those of the setting sun; and such were wanted. The style is much swayed by the sentiment. Would that which is proper for the historian of Fabius and Scipio, of Hannibal and Pyrrhus, be proper too for Augustulus and the Popes? Gibbon could be grave when an Emperor like Julian commanded it; but could he, or could any one, on rising from the narration of a Greek historian, who has described how an empress played "the royal game of goose?" Delille. Gibbon, one would imagine, was a mixed production of two different races in Africa, and borrowed the moral features from the one, the physical from the other. The Kabobiguas have no worship, sacrifice, ceremonies, or priests; and the Housouanas have a nose which projects little more than five or six lines; half the face seems to be forehead. This, however, is no reply to your observations on his style. Accordant it may be indeed with the corruption of government and morals it describes; but is it not accordant likewise with the corruption of language at the time? Landor. I am afraid I should myself be guilty of another great fault attributed to him, that is digression, if I entered into the inquiry with the minuteness and to the extent you might demand. It must be confessed that, in his voluminous work, thirty (or perhaps more) instances of Frenchified or Latinised phraseology may be detected; and, what is worse, sometimes a puerility, contrasting violently with his gravity and pomp, intrudes upon us. His "golden tomb" of the silkworm is worse even than the Alps of Taci tus "faithful to the snow." Delille. You will not then insist on his superiority over Voltaire in prose. Landor. Certainly not: no writer is, where eloquence is uncalled for. Gibbon is habituated to a scholastic tone and strut on all occasions, pacing up and down the unventilated school of rhetoric with a measured and heavy step: Voltaire on the contrary is easy and animated, vigorous and supple; there is everywhere nerve enough, and nowhere a superfluity of flesh. His language is always perspicuous; which cannot be said of Gibbon's, and which is the first requisite of style. We will return to him in his criticisms, where he is seldom wrong while he treats on prose. But when he calls the French poetry strong and energetic, he shows himself insensible that the nature both of the language and of the metre prohibits it: when he calls the Italian weak and effeminate and unfit for action, he overlooks his inconsistency in remarking that "we respect Homer but read Tasso." In his criticisms on poetry, I confess to you that, if you will allow me to deliver my opinion in the words of Chaucer, He hath a voice as weak as hath a gote. No continental poet is less weak and effeminate than Chiabrera; whose works, I apprehend, Voltaire was just as incapable of appreciating as Homer's. Did he ever hear of Filicaja? rich in thought as Pindar himself, and, on one occasion, more enthusiastic. Delille. Enthusiastic as Pindar! Ah M. Landor! Landor. Abbé, I said more enthusiastic: for in criticism I love correctness. We have lost the greater and (some believe) the better part of Pindar's poetry: what remains is more distinguished for an exquisite selection of topics than for enthusiasm. There is a grandeur of soul which never leaves him, even in domestic scenes; and his genius does not rise on points or peaks of sublimity, but pervades the subject with a vigorous and easy motion, such as the poets attribute to the herald of the Gods. He is remarkable for the rich economy of his ideas and the temperate austerity of his judgment; and he never says more than what is proper, nor otherwise than what is best. I remember an observation of yours, that "the dithyrambic is almost entirely lost to the moderns, whose language is still less adapted to it than the Latin*." On the contrary, all the modern languages, with the sole exception of yours, are much better adapted to the dithyrambic than that is. The Baron de Couture, in his notes on Lucretius, is enamoured of his native tongue, although less desperately than Henri Etienne, who calls it "the best of all tongues possible".. not existing or extinct, but within the gift of the Divinity. The more judicious lover thus expresses his admiration: "If it were permitted me, without offending anyone, to say a few words to the advantage of our language, it appears to me that we may find in it all the ease, the polish, and the majesty of the Roman. To reproach it with its poverty is an outrage. Do not let us cast upon it our own defects: the sterility is in our thoughts. If we do but think, our language will furnish us with expressions. Perhaps I may be a little too partial to it." Delille. Not at all! not at all! Landor. He proceeds in acknowledging that he may be rather so in placing it with the Latin, to which, beyond all other of its excellences, it is unquestionably the rival (he says) in poetry. His next observation is that, if the Latin had the constraint of measure and of rhyme to vanquish, he doubts whether it ever would attain the charm of the French. Delille. Very reasonably: I doubt it too; or rather, I am certain it would not. Landor. If an organ were forced to imitate a ring of bells, I doubt whether the ring of bells * Se préte moins à la sublimité de l'enthousiasme. would not succeed the best. He might have The business of the higher poetry is to chasten and elevate the mind by exciting the better passions, and to impress on it lessons of terror and of pity by exhibiting the self-chastisement of the worse. There should be as much of passion as is possible, with as much of reason as is consistent with it. How admirable is the union of these in the ode of Filicaja to Sobieski ! Delille. Do you really then prefer this Italian to Boileau? his ode to the King is fine. Landor. There is nearly as much difference between his ode and the Italian, as between Sobieski and Louis; nearly as much as between the liberation of Europe and the conflagration of the Palatinate. Give me the volume, if that in your hand is it.* The high wisdom of a young hero is not the tardy fruit of slow old age. Dear Abbé, can you ever have read this commencement, and call the Author a man of genius or taste? ... Ma muse tremblante Fuit d'un si grand fardeau la charge trop pesante. Vulgarity in the metaphor and redundance in the expression; and look! it occurs again at the Addison tells you that he does, conclusion. what he gives no sign of doing, that he Bridles in his struggling Muse with pain. But it is better to turn a Muse into a mare than into a mule or ass, which Boileau does; and Addison has redeemed the wretchedness of his poetry by the suavity and humour of his prose. Et tandis que ton bras des peuples redouté Va le foudre à la main rétablir l'équité. I always fancied that the foudre is rather a destroyer than an establisher. But why was the arm of Louis feared by the nations, if it was * Our popular critics have never suspected that Boileau is deficient in correctness of thought or expression. It is chiefly for the edification of those who recommend him as a model that this dialogue was written. A grub, if hooked with dexterity, may catch a tunny. armed only to establish equity? The arm with otherwise: but what think you of a horse that the thunderbolt in the hand is worse than tau-jamais ne se lasse? Do not be surprised: he tology. becomes just like another, and Let us turn to his Satires. Satire I. Et puis, comment percer cette foule effroyable It would puzzle me to divine in what this mieux parler consists. There never was a verse more idle than this better-spoken one, or what would incur more ridicule in any notoriously bad writer. The bed and the deux placets show the extremes of Saint-Amant's poverty, without the least expenditure of wit or fancy to light up the chamber any other piece of worthless furniture might have been added. This however did not suit the rhyme, Boileau's goddess of Necessity. He therefore ridicules the man for not having what he had just before ridiculed him for having. Satire II. Pour qui tient Apollon tous ses trésors ouverts, Satire III. Nothing can be more flat and farther out of character than the last lines, from a person who professes just before an utter indifference to the pleasures of the table. Satire IV. Tout hérissé de grec, tout bouffi d'arrogance. All this, excepting the last word, is in another place. The idea of hérissé de grec arose, I presume, from the sharp and slender forms of the Greek letters, as we see them printed. A line of Greek appeared to Boileau like a hedge of aloes. La même erreur les fait errer diversement. A contradiction the more apparent, as he had mentioned the hundred roads in which the travellers wandered, some to the right, some to the left. He has ridiculed the errors into which men have run from the imperfection of their reason: a great folly! He now gravely rails at reason itself: a greater! Que si d'un sort fâcheux la maligne inconstance. Le guérit... par adresse ou plutôt par hasard. Satire v. ... On fait cas d'un coursier qui, fier et plein de cœur... does what? dans la carrière S'est couvert mille fois... d'une noble poussière. Satire VI. A man who reasons must be aware how silly it is to write an angry satire on cats: yet the first thing that provokes the complaints of Boileau against Paris, is the noise of these animals, and their dangerous conspiracies, in league with the rats, against his repose. Such a confederation is about as rational and natural, and must end in the same manner as the alliance of the crowned crimps against your country, in the name of the holy and undivided Trinity. He then calls this disturbance the least of his misfortunes, and attacks the cocks, which of course are a plague to Paris. Yet neither the cocks nor the blacksmith, who falls next under his displeasure, are, if we may judge from the outery he makes, so grievous an evil to him as the former licentious disturbers of his peace. Les voleurs à l'instant s'emparent de la ville. Malheur donc à celui qu'une affaire imprévue He does not seem conscious that the praises he if there is a foundation for this complaint. has been lavishing on Louis are worth nothing, Thieves are not subjects for satire; but those are whose capitals are crowded with them. Il faudrait, dans l'enclos d'un vaste logement, advanced in years. My Landor. I was more fastidious when I was younger, and I could detect a fallacy in composi tion as readily as now. I had been accustomed to none but the best models. I had read Pindar and the great tragedians more than once before I had read half the plays of Shakspeare. prejudices in favour of ancient literature began to wear away on Paradise Lost; and even the great hexameter sounded to me tinkling when I had recited aloud in my solitary walks on the sea-shore the haughty appeal of Satan and the deep penitence of Eve. I was above twenty-five years old when I first looked at Dante; one cyclopian corner of the great quaternion. Delille. You studied much, however; and study sharpens criticism. Landor. I doubt it; unless by references and comparisons. Only four years of my life were given up much to study; and I regret that I This is natural enough: and could not well be spent so many so ill. Even these debarred me Fait paraître en courant sa bouillante vigueur. from no pleasure; for I seldom read or wrote within-doors, excepting a few hours at night. The learning of those who are called the learned is learning at second-hand: the primary and most important must be acquired by reading in our own bosoms; the rest a deep insight into other men's. What is written is mostly an imperfect and unfaithful copy. Delille. You have taken little from others. A significant nod, to give the sentence the appearance of wit, which, if it lies anywhere in it, lies dans le fond. Phébus a-t-il pour vous aplani le Parnasse? The word aplani is not a very happy one since the difficulties of Parnassus are the triumphs, of the poet. I must observe here, that Apollo, Parnassus, &c., are too frequently used by your Landor. When I had irrigated my field from poets, and that nothing shows barrenness of inthe higher sources of literature, I permitted the vention more evidently, than a perpetual recurwaste water to run off again. Few things re-it. I know but one thing so subversive of illusion rence to mythology on subjects unconnected with mained in my memory as they entered; more encumbered it; many assumed fresh combinations. Come; we must talk no longer about so obscure man, in the presence of this severe censor and eminent poet. We will open Satire VII. Mais tout fat me déplaît... et me blesse les yeux; Idle and silly! were it practicable, it would be the ruin of Satire. Delille. Turn over, and you will find Boileau warmed by the fine French sentiment of loyalty to his King. Ay, that pleases you, I see. Landor. No sentiment is more just or reasonable than loyalty; but it should belong as much to Kings as to their people: where it is not reciprocal it is worth nothing. What insincerity! what baseness! to rave against the wild ambition of Alexander, who had all the spirit and all the talents of a consummate warrior, and to crouch at the feet of Louis with every expression of homage and admiration; of Louis, who had no such talents, no such spirit, who exposed his person in no battle, but who ordered a massacre to win the favour of a saint, and consumed a province to cure a heresy: a coward, a bigot, perfidious, ungrateful, perjured, who died so despised and hated, that his worshippers jumped up from their kneeling, and pelted his carcass with mire and ordure as it went to burial. Delille. Ah, M. Landor! you can not do him justice. You must exaggerate or you must detract. Landor. Fénelon, than whom there never was a more dispassionate judge, or a more veracious man, says of him in a letter to Madame de Maintenon, which it is probable he intended she should show to him, " that he had no idea of his kingly duties." Of what duties had he any? The satire we have dipped into is borrowed in many parts from Horace, in many from Juvenal; yet Boileau has contrived to torpify with prose and puffing all the gaiety of the one, and to weaken with cold and hoarseness all the declamation of the other. Satire IX. C'est à vous, mon Esprit, à qui je veux parler. It is a pity that his Esprit was not summoned to this conference earlier; but even now it is only called to be talked to, and has more to hear than to say. Mais moi qui, dans le fond, sçais bien ce.. in works of fiction. Delille. What is that? Landor. The cant-word of novelists, our hero; by which you meet the Author face to face inopportunely, and the vision is intercepted by him bodily. The hero whom he represents to us is perhaps a young gentleman fresh from college, whose feats of heroism have been upon a Wilton carpet, or in a pleasant walk among the trees with Emily, or in an innocent ride between two It closes with falling in love, turnpike-gates. with struggling to get out of it, with succeeding by the Leucadian leap of marriage, or in case of failure, as may happen, with blessing her devoutly "on his last legs," as we say in England. But again to an Author who never was in this predicament, and who certainly leads us not into temptation of any kind. Et ne sçavez-vous pas que, sur ce mont sacré, Qui ne vole au sommet tombe au plus bas degré. This is neither true nor ingenious. Horace has misled him by being misunderstood, where he says: mediocribus esse poetis ... Non homines, non di, non concessere columnæ. Now Horace himself, and Catullus, and Tibullus, have never reached nor attempted to reach the summit of Parnassus; and equally certain is it that they have not fallen au plus bas degré. Their poetry is excellent in its kind; as among the French is that of La Fontaine. It is only those whose poetry has risen no higher than to mediocrity in its kind, whatever that kind may be, whose existence as poets is destined to a short duration. Catullus and Horace will be read as long as Homer and Virgil, and more often and by more readers. Par l'éclat d'un fardeau trop pesant à porter. This is the third time within a few pages that I have observed the metaphor; but I never heard until now that a fardeau could have an éclat. If it ever is attended by one, it must be, not while it is borne, but at the moment when it is thrown off. Peindre Bellone en feu, tonnant de toutes parts ... And what else? Mars, Minerva, Jupiter, the Fates, the Furies! |