4

BOWLES AND PARNASSUS.

adapted to poetry than the manners." Mr. Campbell, and other opponents, maintain, that "the exquisite description of artificial objects and manners is no less characteristic of genius than the description of simple physical appearances." In Mr. Bowles, this appears to be an attempt to erect an arbitrary standard of theories, criteria, and invariable principles, which shall fix the framer (i. e. Mr. Bowles himself) on the pinnacle of excellence, the tip-top of Parnassus! That a literary party, out of the professed pale of eminent authors, should be found to support such pretensions, is rather arrogant, when we reflect that descriptive poetry, however much the merits of its execution may differ, according to the talents of the writer, is so far from deserving such extravagant encomiums, that it is precisely that species which every versifier can attempt, even those who would not venture upon any other theme. Any of the rhyming tribe might aim to follow Lord Byron's path in describing the sea, or a moonlight evening; but they would not dream of depicting the mental struggles and conflicting feelings of the imprisoned Corsair. This very consideration, however, accounts for the number of poets who have espoused these doctrines; for how many delineators of birds, beasts, fishes, and designers of “ sylvan samplers," would find their account in establishing a theory that opens so easy a path to the reputation of first-rate excellence, rather than

CAMPBELL'S DEFENCE OF POPE.

5

digesting the unpalatable precept of Shakespeare, that the climax of the poet's art and merit, consists in giving" to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." Mr. Bowles should have known, before he set up for a critic, that every man has his peculiar fancies, and that it is only by following the bent of his genius that he can hope to arrive at excellence. Milton, Dante, and Voltaire, had their partialities, and so had Pope; and his Rape of the Lock" is not inferior, in its way, to the "Paradise Lost," "The Inferno," or "The Henriade." Pope preferred delineations of domestic life-men and manners-to rural scenery; but his art required full as much of the creative or inventive faculty, the vis poetica, as Mr. Bowles's nature; and as poesy itself is but an art, its most powerful effects are produced by a combination of images in which Nature acts but a secondary part. Mr. Campbell, in his defence of Pope, prefixed to the "Specimens of English Poetry," sought to illustrate this position by the image of a ship about to be launched, as an instance of the superior beauty of art over nature. To this Mr. Bowles replied, that this object would have nothing at all poetical in it, without the more active and commanding powers of the wind and waves. Lord Byron now joined the controversy, and, in Murray, his publisher in London,

a letter to Mr. dated from Ra

venna, he made a spirited attack on Mr. Bowles, as a detractor and calumniator of Pope, and in

6

SQUALL OFF CAPE SIGEUM.

support of the opinion that for poetical effect Art is superior to Nature. Among other instances, in support of his theory, Lord Byron gives the following most beautiful one:

"I look upon myself (says Lord Byron) as entitled to talk of naval matters, at least to poets; with the exception of Walter Scott, Moore, and Southey, perhaps, who have been voyagers, I have swam more miles than all the rest of them together, now living, ever sailed, and have lived for months and months on shipboard; and during the whole period of my life abroad, have scarcely ever passed a month out of sight of the ocean, besides being brought up from two years till ten on the brink of it. I recollect, when anchored off Cape Sigeum, in 1810, in an English frigate, a violent squall coming on at sun-set, so violent as to make us imagine that the ship would part cable, or drive from her anchorage. Mr. Hobhouse and myself, and some officers, had been up the Dardanelles to Abydos, and were just returned in time. The aspect of a storm in the Archipelago is as poetical as need be, the sea being particularly short, dashing, and dangerous, and the navigation intricate, and broken by the isles and currents. Cape Sigeum, the tumuli of the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to the associations of the time. But what seemed the most poetical of all at the moment were the numbers (about two hundred) of Greek and Turkish craft, which were obliged to cut

POETICAL OBJECTS.

7

and run' before the wind from their unsafe anchorage, some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some for the main, and some, it might be, for eternity. The sight of these little scudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of night, with their peculiarly white sails (the Levant sails not being of coarse canvas but of white cotton), skimming along as quickly, but less safely, than the sea-mews which hovered over them; their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the distance, their crowded succession, their littleness, as contending with the giant element, which made our stout forty-four's teak timber creak again; their aspect and their motion all struck me as something far more poetical' than the mere broad, brawling shipless sea, and the sullen winds could possibly have been without them."

His Lordship is certainly right, the aspect of a shipless sea is as barren as the deserts of Arabia, and without some accidental images of ships* on

* The compiler of this work has passed great part of his time on the sea, and can bear witness that there can scarcely be a more dreary scene than the wide expanse of ocean, without a single object intervening between the eye and the horizon. ship heaving in sight, a shark, or a shoal of dolphins or porpoises, afford inconceivable pleasure. Many a night has he seated himself on deck, smoking his pipe, his ideas painfully directed to those friends he was leaving, or if he sought to divert his melancholy, his thoughts were roused to the author of the creation. It may be said that this was sufficient employment. May be B 4

8

COWPER'S NEEDLE and LEAR'S BUTTON.

on the one, or a caravan or horde of Arabs on the other, could never be deemed a poetical subject. The fact is that no image, either of nature or art, can properly be termed poetical of itself, without reference to the ideas with which it is associated. The humblest and most unsightly objects may be made, in certain situations, subservient to poetical beauty. Lord Byron has adduced, very effectually, the example of Cowper's needle, in his "Address to Mary." A button is an object apparently as uninviting to the poet as a needle; yet who can resist the pathos of Lear's-" Please you undo this button, Sir," when the poor old monarch feels his heart bursting? Thus the meanest things may, by a judicious application, be rendered poetical images from the ideas associated with them, barren as the subjects themselves may ap pear to a superficial observer. A due attention to this consideration might have spared Mr. Bowles much trouble; for in every experiment he has made of substituting an artificial for a natural image, in order to prove the superiority of the latter, it will be found on examination that the enfeebled or burlesque effect produced does not proceed from the substituted term being unsus

so;-but if all our poets directed their attentions to that one point, paramount as it is to every other consideration, we should soon grow weary of their lucubrations. Passing images and shifting scenes are requisite to beget new ideas and give a spur to the invention.