108. In such a monetary crisis as that of his time, Locke was naturally obliged to consider the usual resource of raising the denomination of the coin. This, he truly says, would be to rob all creditors of such a proportion of their debts. It is probable that his influence, which was very considerable, may have put a stop to the scheme. He contends in his Further Considerations, in answer to a tract by Lowndes, that clipped money should go only by weight. This seems to have been agreed by both parties; but Lowndes thought the loss should be defrayed by a tax; Locke that it should fall on the holders. Honourably for the government, the former opinion prevailed.

109. The Italians were the first who laid anything like a foundation for statistics or political arithmetic; that which is to the political economist what general history is to the philosopher. |Statistical tracts.| But their numerical reckonings of population, houses, value of lands or stock, and the like, though very curious, and sometimes taken from public documents, were not always more than conjectural, nor are they so full and minute as the spirit of calculation demands. England here again took the lead, in Graunt’s Observations on the Bills of Mortality, 1661, in Petty’s Political Arithmetic (posthumous in 1691), and other treatises of the same ingenious and philosophical person, and, we may add, in the Observations of Gregory King on the Natural and Political State of England; for, though these were not published till near the end of the eighteenth century, the manuscripts had fallen into the hands of Dr. Charles Davenant, who has made extracts from them in his own valuable contributions to political arithmetic. King seems to have possessed a sagacity which has sometimes brought his conjectures nearer to the mark than, from the imperfection of his data, it was reasonable to expect. Yet he supposes that the population of England, which he estimated, perhaps rightly, at five millions and a half, would not reach the double of that number before A.D. 2300. Sir William Petty, with a mind capable of just and novel theories, was struck by the necessary consequences of an uniformly progressive population. Though the rate of movement seemed to him, as in truth it was, much slower than we have latterly found it, he clearly saw that its continuance would, in an ascertainable length of time, overload the world. “And then, according to the prediction of the Scriptures, there must be wars and great slaughter.” He conceived that, in the ordinary course of things, the population of a country would be doubled in two hundred years; but the whole conditions of the problem were far less understood than at present. Davenant’s Essay on Ways and Means, 1693, gained him a high reputation which he endeavoured to augment by many subsequent works, some falling within the seventeenth century. He was a man of more enlarged reading than his predecessors, with the exception of Petty, and of close attention to the statistical documents which were now more copiously published than before; but he seldom launches into any extensive theory, confining himself rather to the accumulation of facts and to the immediate inferences, generally for temporary purposes, which they supplied.

Sect. III.

Works of Leibnitz on Roman Law. 110. In 1667, a short book was published at Frankfort, by a young man of twenty-two years, entitled Methodi Novæ discendæ docendæque Jurisprudentiæ. The science which of all had been deemed to require the most protracted labour, the ripest judgment, the most experienced discrimination, was, as it were, invaded by a boy, but by one who had the genius of an Alexander, and for whom the glories of an Alexander were reserved. This is the first production of Leibnitz; and it is probably in many points of view the most remarkable work that has prematurely united erudition and solidity. We admire in it the vast range of learning (for though he could not have read all the books he names, there is evidence of his acquaintance with a great number, and at least with a well-filled chart of literature), the originality of some ideas, the commanding and comprehensive views he embraces, the philosophical spirit, the compressed style in which it is written, the entire absence of juvenility, of ostentatious paradox,[967] of imagination, ardour, and enthusiasm, which, though Leibnitz did not always want them, would have been wholly misplaced on such a subject. Faults have been censured in this early performance, and the author declared himself afterwards dissatisfied with it.[968]

[967] I use the epithet ostentatious, because some of his original theories are a little paradoxical; thus, he has a singular notion that the right of bequeathing property by testament is derived from the immortality of the soul; the living heirs being as it were the attorneys of those we suppose to be dead. Quia mortui revera adhuc vivunt, ideo manent domini rerum, quos vero hæredes reliquerunt, concipiendi sunt ut procuratores in rem suam. In our own discussions on the law of entail, I am not aware that this argument has ever been explicitly urged, though the advocates of perpetual control seem to have none better.

[968] This tract, and all the other works of Leibnitz on jurisprudence, will be found in the fourth volume of his works by Dutens. An analysis by Bon, professor of law at Turin, is prefixed to the Methodi Novæ, and he has pointed out a few errors. Leibnitz says in a letter, about 1676, that his book was effusus potius quam scriptus, in itinere, sine libris, &c., and that it contained some things he no longer would have said, though there were others of which he did not repent. Lerminier, Hist. du Droit, p. 150.

111. Leibnitz was a passionate admirer of the Roman jurisprudence; he held the great lawyers of antiquity second only to the best geometers for strong and subtle and profound reasoning; not even acknowledging, to any considerable degree, the contradictions (antinomiæ juris), which had perplexed their disciples in later times, and on which many volumes had been written. But the arrangement of Justinian he entirely disapproved; and in another work, Corporis Juris reconcinnandi Ratio, published in 1668, he pointed out the necessity and what he deemed the best method of a new distribution. This appears to be not quite like what he had previously sketched, and which was rather a philosophical than a very convenient method;[969] in this new arrangement, he proposes to retain the texts of the Corpus Juris Civilis, but in a form rather like that of the Pandects than of the Institutes; to the latter of which, followed as it has been among us by Hale and Blackstone, he was very averse.

[969] In this Methodi Novæ he divides law, in the didactic part, according to the several sources of rights—namely, 1. Nature, which gives us right over res nullius, things where there is no prior property. 2. Succession. 3. Possession. 4. Contract. 5. Injury, which gives right to reparation.

112. There was only one man in the world who could have left so noble a science as philosophical jurisprudence for pursuits of a still more exalted nature, and for which he was still more fitted; and that man was Leibnitz himself. He passed onward to reap the golden harvests of other fields. Yet the study of law has owed much to him; he did much to unite it with moral philosophy on the one hand, and with history on the other; a great master of both, he exacted perhaps a more comprehensive course of legal studies than the capacity of ordinary lawyers could grasp. In England also, its conduciveness to professional excellence might be hard to prove. It is however certain that, in Germany at least, philology, history, and philosophy have more or less since the time of Leibnitz marched together under the robe of law. “He did but pass over that kingdom,” says Lerminier, and he has reformed and enlarged it.”[970]

[970] Biogr. Univ. Lerminier, Hist. du Droit, p. 142.

Civil Jurists—Godefroy—Domat. 113. James Godefroy was thirty years engaged on an edition of the Theodosian Code, published, several years after his death, in 1665. It is by far the best edition of that body of laws, and retains a standard value in the historical department of jurisprudence. Domat, a French lawyer, and one of the Port-Royal connection, in his Loix Civiles dans leur Ordre Naturel, the first of five volumes of which appeared in 1689, carried into effect the project of Leibnitz, by re-arranging the laws of Justinian, which, especially the Pandects, are well known to be confusedly distributed, in a more regular method, prefixing a book of his own on the nature and spirit of law in general. This appears to be an useful digest or abridgment, something like those made by Viner and earlier writers of our own texts, but perhaps with more compression and choice; two editions of an English translation were published. Domat’s Public Law, which might, perhaps, in our language, have been called constitutional, since we generally confine the epithet public to the law of nations, forms a second part of the same work, and contains a more extensive system wherein theological morality, ecclesiastical ordinances, and the fundamental laws of the French monarchy are reduced into method. Domat is much extolled by his countryman; but in philosophical jurisprudence, he seems to display little force or originality. Gravina, who obtained a high name in this literature at the beginning of the next century, was known merely as a professor at the close of this; but a Dutch jurist, |Noodt on Usury.| Gerard Noodt, may deserve mention for his treatise on usury, in 1698, wherein he both endeavours to prove its natural and religious lawfulness, and traces its history through the Roman law. Several other works of Noodt on subjects of historical jurisprudence seem to fall within this century, though I do not find their exact dates of publication.

Law of Nations.—Puffendorf. 114. Grotius was the acknowledged master of all who studied the theory of international right. It was, perhaps, the design of Puffendorf, as we may conjecture by the title of his great work on the Law of Nature and Nations, to range over the latter field with as assiduous diligence as the former. But from the length of his prolix labour on natural law and the rights of sovereigns, he has not more than one twentieth of the whole volume to spare for international questions; and this is in great measure copied or abridged from Grotius. In some instances he disagrees with his master. Puffendorf singularly denies that compacts made during war are binding by the law of nature, but for weak and unintelligible reasons.[971] Treaties of peace extorted by unjust force, he denies with more reason to be binding; though Grotius had held the contrary.[972] The inferior writers on the law of nations, or those who, like Wicquefort in his Ambassador, confined themselves to merely conventional usages, it is needless to mention.

[971] B. viii., chap. 7.

[972] Chap. 8.

CHAPTER XXXI.

Improved tone of Italian poetry. 1. The imitators of Marini, full of extravagant metaphors, and the false thoughts usually called concetti, were in their vigour at the commencement of this period. But their names are now obscure, and have been overwhelmed by the change of public taste which has condemned and proscribed what it once most applauded. This change came on long before the close of the century, though not so decidedly but that some traces of the former manner are discoverable in the majority of popular writers. The general characteristics, however, of Italian poetry became a more masculine tone, a wider reach of topics, and a selection of the most noble, an abandonment, except in the lighter lyrics, of amatory strains, and especially of such as were languishing and querulous, an anticipation, in short, as far as the circumstances of the age would permit, of that severe and elevated style which has been most affected for the last fifty years. It would be futile to seek an explanation of this manlier spirit in any social or political causes; never had Italy, in these respects, been so lifeless; but the world of poets is often not the world around them, and their stream of living waters may flow, like that of Arethusa, without imbibing much from the surrounding brine. Chiabrera had led the way by the Pindaric majesty of his odes, and had disciples of at least equal name with himself.

Guidi. 4. Guidi, a native of Pavia, raised himself to the highest point that any lyric poet of Italy has attained. His odes are written at Rome, from about the year 1685 to the end of the century. Compared with Chiabrera or even Filicaja, he may be allowed the superiority; if he never rises to a higher pitch than the latter, if he has never chosen subjects so animating, if he has never displayed so much depth and truth of feeling, his enthusiasm is more constant, his imagination more creative, his power of language more extensive and more felicitous. “He falls sometimes,” says Corniani, “into extravagance, but never into affectation.... His peculiar excellence is poetical expression, always brilliant with a light of his own. The magic of his language used to excite a lively movement among the hearers when he recited his verses in the Arcadian society.” Corniani adds, that he is sometimes exuberant in words and hyperbolical in images.[973]

[973] Vol. viii., p. 224.

5. The ode of Guidi on Fortune, appears to me, at least, equal to any in the Italian language. If it has been suggested by that of Celio Magno, entitled Iddio, the resemblance does not deserve the name of imitation; a nobleness of thought, imagery, and language, prevails throughout. But this is the character of all his odes. He chose better subjects than Chiabrera; for the ruins of Rome are more glorious than the living house of Medici. He resembles him, indeed, rather than any other poet, so that it might not always be easy to discern one from the other in a single stanza; but Guidi is a bolder, a more imaginative, a more enthusiastic poet. Both adorn and amplify a little to excess; and it may be imputed to Guidi that he has abused an advantage which his native language afforded. The Italian is rich in words, where the sound so well answers to the meaning, that it is hardly possible to hear them without an associated sentiment; their effect is closely analogous to musical expression. Such are the adjectives denoting mental elevation, as superbo, altiero, audace, gagliardo, indomito, maestoso. These recur in the poems of Guidi with every noun that will admit of them; but sometimes the artifice is a little too transparent, and though the meaning is not sacrificed to sound, we feel that it is too much enveloped in it, and are not quite pleased that a great poet should rely so much on a resource which the most mechanical slave of music can employ.

Christina’s patronage of letters. 9. Rome was to poetry in this age what Florence had once been, though Rome had hitherto done less for the Italian muses than any other great city. Nor was this so much due to her bishops and cardinals, as to a stranger and a woman. Christina finally took up her abode there in 1688. Her palace became the resort of all the learning and genius she could assemble round her; a literary academy was established, and her revenue was liberally dispensed in pensions. If Filicaja and Guidi, both sharers of her bounty, have exaggerated her praises, much may be pardoned to gratitude, and much also to the natural admiration which those who look up to power must feel for those who have renounced it. Christina died in 1690, and her own academy could last no longer; but a phœnix sprang at once from its ashes. |Society of Arcadians.| Crescimbeni, then young, has the credit of having planned the Society of Arcadians, which began in 1690, and has eclipsed in celebrity most of the earlier academies of Italy. Fourteen, says Corniani, were the original founders of this society; among whom were Crescimbeni and Gravina and Zappi. In course of time the Arcadians vastly increased, and established colonies in the chief cities of Italy. They determined to assume every one a pastoral name and a Greek birthplace, to hold their meetings in some verdant meadow, and to mingle with all their compositions, as far as possible, images from pastoral life; images always agreeable, because they recall the times of primitive innocence. This poetical tribe adopted as their device the pipe of seven reeds bound with laurel, and their president or director was denominated general shepherd or keeper (custode generale).[974] The fantastical part of the Arcadian society was common to them with all similar institutions; and mankind has generally required some ceremonial follies to keep alive the wholesome spirit of association. Their solid aim was to purify the national taste. Much had been already done, and in great measure by their own members, Menzini and Guidi; but their influence, which was, of course, more felt in the next century, has always been reckoned both important and auspicious to Italian literature.

[974] Corniani, viii., 301. Tiraboschi, xi., 43. Crescimbeni, Storia d’Arcadia (reprinted by Mathias.)

Sect. II.

ON FRENCH POETRY.

Fontaine—Boileau—Minor French Poets.

La Fontaine. 10. We must pass over Spain and Portugal as absolutely destitute of any name which requires commemoration. In France it was very different if some earlier periods had been not less rich in the number of versifiers, none had produced poets who have descended with so much renown to posterity. The most popular of these was La Fontaine. Few writers have left such a number of verses which, in the phrase of his country, have made their fortune, and been like ready money, always at hand for prompt quotation. His lines have at once a proverbial truth and a humour of expression which render them constantly applicable. This is chiefly true of his Fables; for his Tales, though no one will deny that they are lively enough, are not reckoned so well written, nor do they supply so much for general use.

Character of his Fables. 11. The models of La Fontaine’s style were partly the ancient fabulists whom he copied, for he pretends to no originality; partly the old French poets, especially Marot. From the one he took the real gold of his fables themselves, from the other he caught a peculiar archness and vivacity, which some of them had possessed, perhaps, in no less degree, but which becomes more captivating from his intermixture of a solid and serious wisdom. For notwithstanding the common anecdotes, sometimes, as we may suspect, rather exaggerated, of La Fontaine’s simplicity, he was evidently a man who had thought and observed much about human nature, and knew a little more of the world than he cared to let the world perceive. Many of his Fables are admirable; the grace of the poetry, the happy inspiration that seems to have dictated the turns of expression, place him in the first rank among fabulists. Yet the praise of La Fontaine should not be indiscriminate. It is said that he gave the preference to Phædrus and Æsop above himself, and some have thought that in this he could not have been sincere. It was at least a proof of his modesty. But, though we cannot think of putting Phædrus on a level with La Fontaine, were it only for this reason, that in a work designed for the general reader, and surely fables are of this description, the qualities that please the many are to be valued above those that please the few, yet it is true that the French poet might envy some talents of the Roman. Phædrus, a writer scarcely prized enough, because he is an early school-book, has a perfection of elegant beauty which very few have rivalled. No word is out of its place, none is redundant, or could be changed for a better; his perspicuity and ease make everything appear unpremeditated, yet everything is wrought by consummate art. In many fables of La Fontaine this is not the case; he beats round the subject, and misses often before he hits. Much, whatever La Harpe may assert to the contrary, could be retrenched; in much the exigencies of rhyme and metre are too manifest.[975] He has, on the other hand, far more humour than Phædrus; and, whether it be praise or not, thinks less of his fable and more of its moral. One pleases by enlivening, the other pleases, but does not enliven; one has more felicity, the other more skill; but in such skill there is felicity.

[975] Let us take, for example, the first lines of L’Homme et la Couleuvre.

Un homme vit une couleuere.
Ah méchante, dit-il, je m’en vais faire un œuvre
Agréable à tout l’univers!
A ces mots l’animal pervers
(C’est le serpent que je veux dire,
Et non l’homme, on pourroit aisément s’y tromper)
A ces motes le serpent se laissant attrapper
Est pris, mis en un sac; et, ce qui fut le pire,
On resolut sa mort, fût il coupable ou non.

None of these lines appear to me very happy; but there can be no doubt about that in Italics, which spoils the effect of the preceding, and is feebly redundant. The last words are almost equally bad; no question could arise about the serpent’s guilt, which had been assumed before. But these petty blemishes are abundantly redeemed by the rest of the fable, which is beautiful in choice of thoughts and language, and may be classed with the best in the collection.

Boileau.—His epistles. 12. The first seven satires of Boileau appeared in 1666; and these, though much inferior to his later productions, are characterised by La Harpe as the earliest poetry in the French language where the mechanism of its verse was fully understood, where the style was always pure and elegant, where the ear was uniformly gratified. The Art of Poetry was published in 1673, the Lutrin in 1674; the Epistles followed at various periods. Their elaborate though equable strain, in a kind of poetry which, never requiring high flights of fancy, escapes the censure of mediocrity and monotony which might sometimes fall upon it, generally excites more admiration in those who have been accustomed to the numerous defects of less finished poets, than it retains in a later age, when others have learned to emulate and preserve the same uniformity. The fame of Pope was transcendant for this reason, and Boileau is the analogue of Pope in French literature.

His Art of Poetry. 13. The Art of Poetry has been the model of the Essay on Criticism; few poems more resemble each other. I will not weigh in opposite scales two compositions, of which one claims an advantage from its originality, the other from the youth of its author. Both are uncommon efforts of critical good sense, and both are distinguished by their short and pointed language, which remains in the memory. Boileau has very well incorporated the thoughts of Horace with his own, and given them a skilful adaptation to his own times. He was a bolder critic of his contemporaries than Pope. He took up arms against those who shared the public favour, and were placed by half Paris among great dramatists and poets, Pradon, Desmarests, Brebœuf. This was not true of the heroes of the Dunciad. His scorn was always bitter and probably sometimes unjust; yet posterity has ratified almost all his judgments. False taste, it should be remembered, had long infected the poetry of Europe; some steps had been lately taken to repress it, but extravagance, affectation, and excess of refinement, are weeds that can only be eradicated by a thorough cleansing of the soil, by a process of burning and paring which leaves not a seed of them in the public mind. And when we consider the gross blemishes of this description that deform the earlier poetry of France, as of other nations, we cannot blame the severity of Boileau, though he may occasionally have condemned in the mass what contained some intermixture of real excellence. We have become of late years in England so enamoured of the beauties of our old writers, and certainly they are of a superior kind, that we are sometimes more than a little blind to their faults.

Comparison with Horace. 14. By writing satires, epistles, and an art of poetry, Boileau has challenged an obvious comparison with Horace. Yet they are very unlike; one easy, colloquial, abandoning himself to every change that arises in his mind, the other uniform as a regiment under arms, always equal, always laboured, incapable of a bold neglect. Poetry seems to have been the delight of one, the task of the other. The pain that Boileau must have felt in writing communicates itself in some measure to the reader; we are fearful of losing some point, of passing over some epithet without sufficiently perceiving its selection; it is as with those pictures which are to be viewed long and attentively, till our admiration of detached proofs of skill becomes wearisome by repetition.

The Lutrin. 15. The Lutrin is the most popular of the poems of Boileau. Its subject is ill chosen; neither interest nor variety could be given to it. Tassoni and Pope have the advantage in this respect; if there leading theme is trifling, we lose sight of it in the gay liveliness of description and episode. In Boileau, after we have once been told that the canons of a church spend their lives in sleep and eating, we have no more to learn, and grow tired of keeping company with a race so stupid and sensual. But the poignant wit and satire, the elegance and correctness, of numberless couplets, as well as the ingenious adaptation of classical passages, redeem this poem, and confirm its high place in the mock-heroic line.

General character of his poetry. 16. The great deficiency of Boileau is insensibility. Far below Pope or even Dryden in this essential quality, which the moral epistle or satire not only admits but requires, he rarely quits two paths, those of reason and of raillery. His tone on moral subjects is firm and severe, but not very noble; a trait of pathos, a single touch of pity or tenderness, will rarely be found. This of itself serves to gives a dryness to his poetry, and it may be doubtful, though most have read Boileau, whether many have read him twice.

Benserade. 18. Benserade was called peculiarly the poet of the court; for twenty years it was his business to compose verses for the ballets represented before the king. His skill and tact were shown in delicate contrivances to make those who supported the characters of gods and goddesses in these fictions, being the nobles and ladies of the court, betray their real inclinations, and sometimes their gallantries. He even presumed to shadow in this manner the passion of Louis for Mademoiselle La Vallière, before it was publicly acknowledged. Benserade must have had no small ingenuity and adroitness; but his verses did not survive those who called them forth. In a different school, not essentially, perhaps, much more vicious than the court, but more careless of appearances, and rather proud of an immorality which it had no interest to conceal, that of Ninon l’Enclos, several of higher reputation grew up; Chapelle (whose real name was L’Huillier), La Fare, Bachaumont, Lainez, and Chaulieu. |Chaulieu.| The first, perhaps, and certainly the last of these, are worthy to be remembered. La Harpe has said, that Chaulieu alone retains a claim to be read in a style where Voltaire has so much left all others behind, that no comparison with him can ever be admitted. Chaulieu was an original genius, his poetry has a marked character, being a happy mixture of a gentle and peaceable philosophy with a lively imagination. His verses flow from his soul, and though often negligent through indolence, are never in bad taste or affected. Harmony of versification, grace and gaiety, with a voluptuous and Epicurean, but mild and benevolent turn of thought, belong to Chaulieu, and these are qualities which do not fail to attract the majority of readers.[976]

[976] La Harpe. Bouterwek, vi. 127. Biogr. Univ.

Pastoral poetry. 19. It is rather singular that a style so uncongenial to the spirit of the age as pastoral poetry appears was quite as much cultivated as before. But it is still true that the spirit of the age gained the victory, and drove the shepherds from their shady bowers, though without substituting anything more rational in the fairy tales which superseded the pastoral romance. At the middle of the century, and partially till near its close, the style of D’Urfé and Scudery retained its popularity. |Segrais.| Three poets of the age of Louis were known in pastoral; Segrais, Madame Deshoulières, and Fontenelle. The first belongs most to the genuine school of modern pastoral; he is elegant, romantic, full of complaining love; the Spanish and French romances had been his model in invention, as Virgil was in style. La Harpe allows him nature, sweetness, and sentiment, but he cannot emulate the vivid colouring of Virgil, and the language of his shepherds, though simple, wants elegance and harmony. The tone of his pastorals seems rather insipid, though La Harpe has quoted some pleasing lines. Madame Deshoulières, with a purer style than Segrais, according to the same critic, has less genius. |Deshoulières.| Others have thought her Idylls the best in the language.[977] But these seem to be merely trivial moralities addressed to flowers, brooks, and sheep, sometimes expressed in a manner both ingenious and natural, but on the whole, too feeble to give much pleasure. Bouterwek observes that her poetry is to be considered as that of a woman, and that its pastoral morality would be somewhat childish in the mouth of man; whether this says more for the lady, or against her sex, I must leave to the reader. She has occasionally some very pleasing and even poetical passages.[978] |Fontenelle.| The third among these poets of the pipe is Fontenelle. But his pastorals, as Bouterwek says, are too artificial for the ancient school, and too cold for the romantic. La Harpe blames, besides this general fault, the negligence and prosaic phrases of his style. The best is that entitled Ismene. It is in fact a poem for the world; yet as love and its artifices are found everywhere, we cannot censure anything as absolutely unfit for pastoral, save a certain refinement which belonged to the author in everything, and which interferes with our sense of rural simplicity.

[977] Biogr. Univ.

[978] Bouterwek, vi. 152.

Bad epic poems. 20. In the superior walks of poetry France had nothing of which she has been inclined to boast. Chapelain, a man of some credit as a critic, produced his long-laboured epic, La Pucelle, in 1656, which is only remembered by the insulting ridicule of Boileau. A similar fate has fallen on the Clovis of Desmarests, published in 1684, though the German historian of literature has extolled the richness of imagination it shows, and observed that if those who saw nothing but a fantastic writer in Desmarests had possessed as much fancy, the national poetry would have been of a higher character.[979] Brebœuf’s translation of the Pharsalia is spirited, but very extravagant.

[979] Bouterwek, vi. 157.

German Poetry. 21. The literature of Germany was now more corrupted by bad taste than ever. A second Silesian school, but much inferior to that of Opitz, was founded by Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein. The first had great facility, and imitated Ovid and Marini with some success. The second, with worse taste, always tumid and striving at something elevated, so that the Lohenstein swell became a by-word with later critics, is superior to Hoffmanswaldau in richness of fancy, in poetical invention, and in warmth of feeling for all that is noble and great. About the end of the century arose a new style, known by the unhappy name spiritless (geistlos), which, avoiding the tone of Lohenstein, became wholly tame and flat.[980]

[980] Id. vol. x., p. 288. Heinsius. iv. 287. Eichhorn, Geschichte der Cultur, iv. 776.

Sect. III.

ON ENGLISH POETRY.

Waller—Butler—Milton—Dryden—The Minor Poets.

Waller. 22. We might have placed Waller in the former division of the seventeenth century, with no more impropriety than we might have reserved Cowley for the latter; both belong by the date of their writings to the two periods. And perhaps the poetry of Waller bears rather the stamp of the first Charles’s age than of that which ensued. His reputation was great, and somewhat more durable than that of similar poets have generally been; he did not witness its decay in his own protracted life, nor was it much diminished at the beginning of the next century. Nor was this wholly undeserved. Waller has a more uniform elegance, a more sure facility and happiness of expression, and, above all, a greater exemption from glaring faults, such as pedantry, extravagance, conceit, quaintness, obscurity, ungrammatical and unmeaning constructions, than any of the Caroline era with whom he would naturally be compared. We have only to open Carew or Lovelace to perceive the difference; not that Waller is wholly without some of these faults, but that they are much less frequent. If others may have brighter passages of fancy or sentiment, which is not difficult, he husbands better his resources, and though left behind in the beginning of the race, comes sooner to the goal. His Panegyric on Cromwell was celebrated. “Such a series of verses,” it is said by Johnson, “had rarely appeared before in the English language. Of these lines some are grand, some are graceful, and all are musical. There is now and then a feeble verse, or a trifling thought; but its great fault is the choice of its hero.” It may not be the opinion of all, that Cromwell’s actions were of that obscure and pitiful character which the majesty of song rejects, and Johnson has before observed, that Waller’s choice of encomiastic topics in this poem is very judicious. Yet his deficiency in poetical vigour will surely be traced in this composition; if he rarely sinks, he never rises very high, and we find much good sense and selection, much skill in the mechanism of language and metre, without ardour and without imagination. In his amorous poetry, he has little passion or sensibility; but he is never free and petulant, never tedious, and never absurd. His praise consists much in negations; but in a comparative estimate, perhaps negations ought to count for a good deal.

Its arrangement. 26. The ordonnance or composition of the Paradise Lost is admirable; and here we perceive the advantage which Milton’s great familiarity with the Greek theatre, and his own original scheme of the poem had given him. Every part succeeds in an order, noble, clear, and natural. It might have been wished, indeed, that the vision of the eleventh book had not been changed into the colder narration of the twelfth. But what can be more majestic than the first two books, which open this great drama? It is true that they rather serve to confirm the sneer of Dryden that Satan is Milton’s hero; since they develop a plan of action in that potentate, which is ultimately successful; the triumph that he and his host must experience in the fall of man being hardly compensated by their temporary conversion into serpents; a fiction rather too grotesque. But it is, perhaps, only pedantry to talk about the hero, as if a high personage were absolutely required in an epic poem to predominate over the rest. The conception of Satan is doubtless the first effort of Milton’s genius. Dante could not have ventured to spare so much lustre for a ruined archangel, in an age when nothing less than horns and a tail were the orthodox creed.[981]

[981] Coleridge has a fine passage which I cannot resist my desire to transcribe. “The character of Satan is pride and sensual indulgence, finding in itself the motive of action. It is the character so often seen in little on the political stage. It exhibits all the restlessness, temerity, and cunning which have marked the mighty hunters of mankind from Nimrod to Napoleon. The common fascination of man is that these great men, as they are called, must act from some great motive. Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. To place this lust of self in opposition to denial of self or duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and what pains endure, to accomplish its end, is Milton’s particular object in the character of Satan. But around this character he has thrown a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity.” Coleridge’s Remains, p. 176.

In reading such a paragraph as this, we are struck by the vast improvement of the highest criticism, the philosophy of æsthetics, since the days of Addison. His papers in the Spectator on Paradise Lost were, perhaps, superior to any criticism that had been written in our language; and we must always acknowledge their good sense, their judiciousness, and the vast service they did to our literature, in settling the Paradise Lost on its proper level. But how little they satisfy us, even in treating of the natura naturata, the poem itself! and how little conception they show of the natura naturans, the individual genius of the author! Even in the periodical criticism of the present day, in the midst of much that is affected, much that is precipitate, much that is written for mere display, we find occasional reflections of a profundity and discrimination which we should seek in vain through Dryden or Addison, or the two Wartons, or even Johnson, though much superior to the rest. Hurd has perhaps the merit of being the first who in this country aimed at philosophical criticism; he had great ingenuity, a good deal of reading, and a facility in applying it; but he did not feel very deeply, was somewhat of a coxcomb, and having always before his eyes a model neither good in itself, nor made for him to emulate, he assumes a dogmatic arrogance, which, as it always offends the reader, so for the most part stands in the way of the author’s own search for truth.

Characters of Adam and Eve. 27. Milton has displayed great skill in the delineations of Adam and Eve; he does not dress them up, after the fashion of orthodox theology, which had no spell to bind his free spirit, in the fancied robes of primitive righteousness. South, in one of his sermons, has drawn a picture of unfallen man, which is even poetical; but it might be asked by the reader, Why then did he fall? The first pair of Milton are innocent of course, but not less frail than their posterity; nor except one circumstance, which seems rather physical intoxication than anything else, do we find any sign of depravity super-induced upon their transgression. It might even be made a question for profound theologians whether Eve, by taking amiss what Adam had said, and by self-conceit, did not sin before she tasted the fatal apple. The necessary paucity of actors in Paradise Lost is perhaps the apology of Sin and Death; they will not bear exact criticism, yet we do not wish them away.

He owes less to Homer than the tragedians. 28. The comparison of Milton with Homer has been founded on the acknowledged pre-eminence of each in his own language, and on the lax application of the word epic to their great poems. But there was not much in common either between their genius or its products; and Milton has taken less in direct imitation from Homer than from several other poets. His favourites had rather been Sophocles and Euripides; to them he owes the structure of his blank verse, his swell and dignity of style, his grave enunciation of moral and abstract sentiment, his tone of description, neither condensed like that of Dante, nor spread out with the diffuseness of the other Italians and of Homer himself. Next to these Greek tragedians, Virgil seems to have been his model; with the minor Latin poets, except Ovid, he does not, I think, show any great familiarity; and though abundantly conversant with Ariosto, Tasso, and Marini, we cannot say that they influenced his manner, which, unlike theirs, is severe and stately, never light, nor in the sense we should apply the words to them, rapid and animated.[982]

[982] The solemnity of Milton is striking in those passages where some other poets would indulge a little in voluptuousness, and the more so, because this is not wholly uncongenial to him. A few lines in Paradise Lost are rather too plain, and their gravity makes them worse.

Compared with Dante. 29. To Dante, however, he bears a much greater likeness. He has, in common with that poet, an uniform seriousness, for the brighter colouring of both is but the smile of a pensive mind, a fondness for argumentative speech, and for the same strain of argument. This, indeed, proceeds in part from the general similarity, the religious and even theological cast of their subjects; I advert particularly to the last part of Dante’s poem. We may almost say, when we look to the resemblance of their prose writings, in the proud sense of being born for some great achievement, which breathes through the Vita Nuova, as it does through Milton’s earlier treatises, that they were twin spirits, and that each might have animated the other’s body, that each would, as it were, have been the other, if he had lived in the other’s age. As it is, I incline to prefer Milton, that is, the Paradise Lost, both because the subject is more extensive, and because the resources of his genius are more multifarious. Dante sins more against good taste, but only, perhaps, because there was no good taste in his time; for Milton has also too much a disposition to make the grotesque accessory to the terrible. Could Milton have written the lines on Ugolino? Perhaps he could. Those on Francesca? Not, I think, every line. Could Dante have planned such a poem as Paradise Lost? Not certainly, being Dante in 1300; but, living when Milton did, perhaps he could. It is, however, useless to go on with questions that no one can fully answer. To compare the two poets, read two or three cantos of the Purgatory or Paradise, and then two or three hundred lines of Paradise Lost. Then take Homer, or even Virgil, the difference will be striking. Yet, notwithstanding this analogy of their minds, I have not perceived that Milton imitates Dante very often, probably from having committed less to memory while young (and Dante was not the favourite poet of Italy when Milton was there), than of Ariosto and Tasso.

30. Each of these great men chose the subject that suited his natural temper and genius. What, it is curious to conjecture, would have been Milton’s success in his original design, a British story? Far less surely than in Paradise Lost; he wanted the rapidity of the common heroic poem, and would always have been sententious, perhaps arid and heavy. Yet, even as religious poets, there are several remarkable distinctions between Milton and Dante. It has been justly observed that, in the Paradise of Dante, he makes use of but three leading ideas, light, music, and motion, and that Milton has drawn Heaven in less pure and spiritual colours.[983] The philosophical imagination of the former, in this third part of his poem, almost defecated from all sublunary things by long and solitary musing, spiritualizes all it touches. The genius of Milton, though itself subjective, was less so than that of Dante; and he has to recount, to describe, to bring deeds and passions before the eye. And two peculiar causes may be assigned for this difference in the treatment of celestial things between the Divine Comedy and the Paradise Lost; the dramatic form which Milton had originally designed to adopt, and his own theological bias towards anthropomorphitism, which his posthumous treatise on religion has brought to light. This was, no doubt, in some measure inevitable in such a subject as that of Paradise Lost; yet much that is ascribed to God, sometimes with the sanction of Scripture, sometimes without it, is not wholly pleasing; such as “the oath that shook Heaven’s vast circumference,” and several other images of the same kind, which bring down the Deity in a manner not consonant to philosophical religion, however it may be borne out by the sensual analogies, or mythic symbolism of Oriental writing.[984]

[983] Quarterly Review, June, 1825. This article contains some good and some questionable remarks on Milton; among the latter I reckon the proposition, that his contempt for women is shown in the delineation of Eve; an opinion not that of Addison or of many others who have thought her exquisitely drawn. It is true that, if Milton had made her a wit or a blue, the fall would have been accounted for with as little difficulty as possible, and spared the serpent his trouble.

[984] Johnson thinks that Milton should have secured the consistency of this poem by keeping immateriality out of sight, and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But here the subject forbade him to preserve consistency, if, indeed, there be inconsistency in supposing a rapid assumption of form by spiritual beings. For, though the instance that Johnson alleges of inconsistency in Satan’s animating a toad was not necessary, yet his animation of the serpent was absolutely indispensable. And the same has been done by other poets, who do not scruple to suppose their gods, their fairies or devils, or their allegorical personages, inspiring thoughts, and even uniting themselves with the soul, as well as assuming all kinds of form, though their natural appearance is almost always anthropomorphic. And, after all, Satan does not animate a real toad, but takes the shape of one. “Squat like a toad close by the ear of Eve.” But he does enter a real serpent, so that the instance of Johnson is ill chosen. If he had mentioned the serpent, everyone would have seen that the identity of the animal serpent with Satan is part of the original account.

Elevation of his style. 31. We rarely meet with feeble lines in Paradise Lost,[985] though with many that are hard, and, in a common use of the word, might be called prosaic. Yet few are truly prosaic; few wherein the tone is not some way distinguished from prose. The very artificial style of Milton, sparing in English idiom, and his study of a rhythm, not always the most grateful to our ears, but preserving his blank verse from a trivial flow, is the cause of this elevation. It is, at least, more removed from a prosaic cadence than the slovenly rhymes of such contemporary poets as Chamberlayne. His versification is entirely his own, framed on a Latin and chiefly a Virgilian model, the pause less frequently resting on the close of the line than in Homer, and much less than in our own dramatic poets. But it is also possible that the Italian and Spanish blank verse may have had some effect upon his ear.

[985] One of the few exceptions is in the sublime description of Death, where a wretched hemistich, “Fierce as ten furies,” stands as an unsightly blemish.

His blindness. 32. In the numerous imitations, and still more numerous traces of older poetry which we perceive in Paradise Lost, it is always to be kept in mind that he had only his recollection to rely upon.[986] His blindness seems to have been complete before 1654; and I scarcely think that he had begun his poem, before the anxiety and trouble into which the public strife of the commonwealth and the restoration had thrown him, gave leisure for immortal occupations. Then the remembrance of early reading came over his dark and lonely path like the moon emerging from the clouds. Then it was that the muse was truly his; not only as she poured her creative inspiration into his mind, but as the daughter of Memory, coming with fragments of ancient melodies, the voice of Euripides and Homer and Tasso; sounds that he had loved in youth, and treasured up for the solace of his age. They who, though not enduring the calamity of Milton, have known what it is, when afar from books, in solitude, or in travelling, or in the intervals of worldly care, to feed on poetical recollections, to murmur over the beautiful lines whose cadence has long delighted their ear, to recall the sentiments and images which retain by association the charm that early years once gave them—they will feel the inestimable value of committing to the memory, in the prime of its power, what it will easily receive and indelibly retain. I know not, indeed, whether an education that deals much with poetry, such as is still usual in England, has any more solid argument among many in its favour, than that it lays the foundation of intellectual pleasures at the other extreme of life.

[986] I take this opportunity of mentioning, on the authority of Mr. Todd’s Inquiry into the Origin of Paradise Lost (edit. of Milton, vol. ii., p. 229), that Lauder, whom I have taxed with ignorance, Vol. III., p. 522, really published the poem of Barlæus on the nuptials of Adam and Eve.

His passion for music. 33. It is owing, in part, to his blindness, but more, perhaps, to his general residence in a city, that Milton, in the words of Coleridge, is “not a picturesque but a musical poet;” or, as I would prefer to say, is the latter more of the two. He describes visible things, and often with great powers of rendering them manifest, what the Greeks called εναργεια, though seldom with so much circumstantial exactness of observation, as Spenser or Dante; but he feels music. The sense of vision delighted his imagination, but that of sound wrapped his whole soul in ecstacy. One of his trifling faults may be connected with this, the excessive passion he displays for stringing together sonorous names, sometimes so obscure that the reader associates nothing with them, as the word Namancos in Lycidas, which long baffled the commentators. Hence, his catalogues, unlike those of Homer and Virgil, are sometimes merely ornamental and misplaced. Thus, the names of unbuilt cities come strangely forward in Adam’s vision,[987] though he has afterwards gone over the same ground with better effect in Paradise Regained. In this there was also a mixture of his pedantry. But, though he was rather too ostentatious of learning, the nature of his subject demanded a good deal of episodical ornament. And this, rather than the precedents he might have alledged from the Italians and others, is, perhaps, the best apology for what some grave critics have censured, his frequent allusions to fable and mythology. |Faults in Paradise Lost.| These give much relief to the severity of the poem, and few readers would dispense with them. Less excuse can be made for some affectation of science which has produced hard and unpleasing lines; but he had been born in an age when more credit was gained by reading much than by writing well. The faults, however, of Paradise Lost are, in general, less to be called faults than necessary adjuncts of the qualities we most admire, and idiosyncrasies of a mighty genius. The verse of Milton is sometimes wanting in grace, and almost always in ease; but what better can be said of his prose? His foreign idioms are too frequent in the one; but they predominate in the other.

[987] Par. Lost, xi., 386.

Its progress to fame. 34. The slowness of Milton’s advance to glory is now generally owned to have been much exaggerated; we might say that the reverse was nearer the truth. “The sale of 1,300 copies in two years,” says Johnson, “in opposition to so much recent enmity, and to a style of versification new to all and disgusting to many, was an uncommon example of the prevalence of genius. The demand did not immediately increase; for many more readers than were supplied at first the nation did not afford. Only 3,000 were sold in eleven years.” It would hardly however be said, even in this age, of a poem 3,000 copies of which had been sold in eleven years, that its success had been small; and I have some few doubts, whether Paradise Lost, published eleven years since, would have met with a greater demand. There is sometimes a want of congeniality in public taste which no power of genius will overcome. For Milton it must be said by every one conversant with the literature of the age that preceded Addison’s famous criticism, from which some have dated the reputation of Paradise Lost, that he took his place among great poets from the beginning. The fancy of Johnston that few dared to praise it, and that “the revolution put an end to the secrecy of love,” is without foundation; the government of Charles II. was not so absurdly tyrannical, nor did Dryden, the court’s own poet, hesitate, in his preface to the State of Innocence, published soon after Milton’s death, to speak of its original, Paradise Lost, as “undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.”

Paradise Regained. 35. The neglect which Paradise Lost never experienced, seems to have been long the lot of Paradise Regained. It was not popular with the world; it was long believed to manifest a decay of the poet’s genius, and, in spite of all the critics have written, it is still but the favourite of some whose predilections for the Miltonic style are very strong. The subject is so much less capable of calling forth the vast powers of his mind, that we should be unfair in comparing it throughout with the greater poem; it has been called a model of the shorter epic, an action comprehending few characters and a brief space of time.[988] The love of Milton for dramatic dialogue, imbibed from Greece, is still more apparent than in Paradise Lost; the whole poem, in fact, may almost be accounted a drama of primal simplicity, the narrative and descriptive part serving rather to diversify and relieve the speeches of the actors, than their speeches, as in the legitimate epic, to enliven the narration. Paradise Regained abounds with passages equal to any of the same nature in Paradise Lost; but the argumentative tone is kept up till it produces some tediousness, and perhaps, on the whole, less pains have been exerted to adorn and elevate even that which appeals to the imagination.

[988] Todd’s Milton, vol. v., p. 308.

Samson Agonistes. 36. Samson Agonistes is the latest of Milton’s poems; we see in it, perhaps, more distinctly than in Paradise Regained, the ebb of a mighty tide. An air of uncommon grandeur prevails throughout; but the language is less poetical than in Paradise Lost; the vigour of thought remains, but it wants much of its ancient eloquence. Nor is the lyric tone well kept up by the chorus; they are too sententious, too slow in movement, and, except by the metre, are not easily distinguishable from the other personages. But this metre is itself infelicitous; the lines being frequently of a number of syllables, not recognised in the usage of English poetry, and, destitute of rhythmical language, fall into prose. Milton seems to have forgotten that the ancient chorus had a musical accompaniment.

37. The style of Samson, being essentially that of Paradise Lost, may show us how much more the latter poem is founded on the Greek tragedians than on Homer. In Samson we have sometimes the pompous tone of Æschylus, more frequently the sustained majesty of Sophocles; but the religious solemnity of Milton’s own temperament, as well as the nature of the subject, have given a sort of breadth, an unbroken severity, to the whole drama. It is, perhaps, not very popular even with the lovers of poetry; yet, upon close comparison, we should find that it deserves a higher place than many of its prototypes. We might search the Greek tragedies long for a character so powerfully conceived and maintained as that of Samson himself; and it is only conformable to the sculptural simplicity of that form of drama which Milton adopted, that all the rest should be kept in subordination to it. “It is only,” Johnson says, “by a blind confidence in the reputation of Milton, that a drama can be praised in which the intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten nor retard the catastrophe.” Such a drama is certainly not to be ranked with Othello and Macbeth, or even with the Œdipus or the Hippolytus; but a similar criticism is applicable to several famous tragedies in the less artificial school of antiquity, to the Prometheus and the Persæ of Æschylus, and if we look strictly, to not a few of the two other masters.