Note Book of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas de Quincey [the reading list .TXT] 📗

is no more than fair) to have a second 'shy' at your pretty Indian pocket-handkerchief, so as to convince you, on cooler reflection, that he does not _always_ miss. Thirdly--Mr. Landor leaves it doubtful what verses those are of Wordsworth's which celebrate the power 'of the Pagan creed;' whether that sonnet in which Wordsworth wishes to exchange for glimpses of human life, _then and in those circumstances_, 'forlorn,' the sight

'----Of Proteus coming from the sea,
And hear old Triton wind his wreathed horn;'

whether this, or the passage on the Greek mythology in 'The Excursion.' Whichever he means, I am the last man to deny that it is beautiful, and especially if he means the latter. But it is no presumption to deny firmly Mr. Landor's assertion, that these are 'the best verses Wordsworth ever wrote.' Bless the man!

'There are a thousand such elsewhere,
As worthy of your wonder:'--

Elsewhere, I mean, in Wordsworth's poems. In reality it is _impossible_ that these should be the best; for even if, in the executive part, they were so, which is not the case, the very nature of the thought, of the feeling, and of the relation, which binds it to the general theme, and the nature of that theme itself, forbid the possibility of merits so high. The whole movement of the feeling is fanciful: it neither appeals to what is deepest in human sensibilities, nor is meant to do so. The result, indeed, serves only to show Mr. Landor's slender acquaintance with Wordsworth. And what is worse than being slenderly acquainted, he is erroneously acquainted even with these two short breathings from the Wordsworthian shell. He mistakes the logic. Wordsworth does not celebrate any power at all in Paganism. Old Triton indeed! he's little better, in respect of the terrific, than a mail-coach guard, nor half as good, if you allow the guard his official seat, a coal-black night, lamps blazing back upon his royal scarlet, and his blunderbuss correctly slung. Triton would not stay, I engage, for a second look at the old Portsmouth mail, as once I knew it. But, alas! better things than ever stood on Triton's pins are now as little able to stand up for themselves, or to startle the silent fields in darkness, with the sudden flash of their glory--gone before it had fall come--as Triton is to play the Freyschutz chorus on his humbug of a horn. But the logic of Wordsworth is this--not that the Greek mythology is potent; on the contrary, that it is weaker than cowslip tea, and would not agitate the nerves of a hen sparrow; but that, weak as it is--nay, by means of that very weakness--it does but the better serve to measure the weakness of something which _he_ thinks yet weaker--viz. the death-like torpor of London society in 1808, benumbed by conventional apathy and worldliness--

'Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.'

This seems a digression from Milton, who is properly the subject of this colloquy. But, luckily, it is not one of _my_ sins. Mr. Landor is lord within the house of his own book; he pays all accounts whatever; and readers that have either a bill, or bill of exceptions, to tender against the concern, must draw upon _him_. To Milton he returns upon a very dangerous topic indeed--viz. the structure of his blank verse. I know of none that is so trying to a wary man's nerves. You might as well tax Mozart with harshness in the divinest passages of 'Don Giovanni,' as Milton with any such offence against metrical science. Be assured, it is yourself that do not read with understanding, not Milton that by possibility can be found deaf to the demands of perfect harmony. You are tempted, after walking round a line threescore times, to exclaim at last-- 'Well, if the Fiend himself should rise up before me at this very moment, in this very study of mine, and say that no screw was loose in that line, then would I reply--'Sir, with submission, you are----.' 'What!' suppose the Fiend suddenly to demand in thunder; 'what am I?' 'Horribly wrong,' you wish exceedingly to say; but, recollecting that some people are choleric in argument, you confine yourself to the polite answer-'That, with deference to his better education, you conceive him to lie;'--that's a bad word to drop your voice upon in talking with a fiend, and you hasten to add--'under a slight, a _very_ slight mistake.' Ay, you might venture on that opinion with a fiend. But how if an angel should undertake the case? And angelic was the ear of Milton. Many are the _prima facie_ anomalous lines in Milton; many are the suspicious lines, which in many a book I have seen many a critic peering into, with eyes made up for mischief, yet with a misgiving that all was not quite safe, very much like an old raven looking down a marrow-bone. In fact, such is the metrical skill of the man, and such the perfection of his metrical sensibility, that, on any attempt to take liberties with a passage of his, you feel as when coming, in a forest, upon what seems a dead lion; perhaps he may _not_ be dead, but only sleeping; nay, perhaps he may _not_ be sleeping, but only shamming. And you have a jealousy, as to Milton, even in the most flagrant case of almost palpable error, that, after all, there may be a plot in it. You may be put down with shame by some man reading the line otherwise, reading it with a different emphasis, a different caesura, or perhaps a different suspension of the voice, so as to bring out a new and self-justifying effect. It must be added, that, in reviewing Milton's metre, it is quite necessary to have such books as 'Nare's English Orthoepy' (_in a late edition_), and others of that class, lying on the table; because the accentuation of Milton's age was, in many words, entirely different from ours. And Mr. Landor is not free from some suspicion of inattention as to this point. Over and above his accentual difference, the practice of our elder dramatists in the resolution of the final _tion_ (which now is uniformly pronounced _shon_), will be found exceedingly important to the appreciation of a writer's verse. Contribution, which now is necessarily pronounced as a word of four syllables, would then, in verse, have five, being read into con-tri-bu-ce-on. Many readers will recollect another word, which for years brought John Kemble into hot water with the pit of Drury Lane. It was the plural of the word ache. This is generally made a dissyllable by the Elizabethan dramatists; it occurs in the 'Tempest.' Prospero says--

'I'll fill thy bones with aches.'

What follows, which I do not remember _literatim_, is such metrically as to _require_ two syllables for aches. But how, then, was this to be pronounced? Kemble thought _akies_ would sound ludicrous; _aitches_ therefore he called it: and always the pit howled like a famished _menagerie_, as they did also when he chose (and he constantly chose) to pronounce _beard_ like _bird_. Many of these niceties must be known, before a critic can ever allow _himself_ to believe that he is right in _obelizing_, or in marking with so much as a ? any verse whatever of Milton's. And there are some of these niceties, I am satisfied, not even yet fully investigated.

It is, however, to be borne in mind, after all allowances and provisional reservations have been made that Bentley's hypothesis (injudiciously as it was managed by that great scholar) has really a truth of fact to stand upon. Not only must Milton have composed his three greatest poems, the two 'Paradises, and the 'Samson,' in a state of blindness--but subsequently, in the correction of the proofs, he must have suffered still more from this conflict with darkness and, consequently, from this dependence upon careless readers. This is Bentley's case: as lawyers say: 'My lord, that is my case.' It is possible enough to write correctly in the dark, as I myself often do, when losing or missing my lucifers--which, like some elder lucifers, are always rebelliously straying into place where they _can_ have no business. But it is quite impossible to _correct a proof_ in the dark. At least, if there _is_ such an art, it must be a section of the black art. Bentley gained from Pope that admirable epithet of _slashing, ['the ribbalds--from slashing Bentley down to piddling Theobalds_,' i.e. _Tibbulds_ as it was pronounced], altogether from his edition of the 'Paradise Lost.' This the doctor founded on his own hypothesis as to the advantage taken of Milton's blindness; and corresponding was the havoc which he made of the text. In fact, on the really just allegation that Milton must have used the services of an amanuensis; and the plausible one that this amanuensis, being often weary of his task, would be likely to neglect punctilious accuracy; and the most improbable allegation that this weary person would also be very conceited, and add much rubbish of his own; Bentley resigned himself luxuriously, without the whisper of a scruple, to his own sense of what was or was not poetic, which sense happened to be that of the adder for music. The deaf adder heareth not though the musician charm ever so wisely. No scholarship, which so far beyond other men Bentley had, could gain him the imaginative sensibility which, in a degree so far beyond average men, he wanted. Consequently, the world never before beheld such a scene of massacre as his 'Paradise Lost' exhibited. He laid himself down to his work of extermination like the brawniest of reapers going in steadily with his sickle, coat stripped off, and shirt sleeves tucked up, to deal with an acre of barley. One duty, and no other, rested upon _his_ conscience; one voice he heard--Slash away, and hew down the rotten growths of this abominable amanuensis. The carnage was like that after a pitched battle. The very finest passages in every book of the poem were marked by italics, as dedicated to fire and slaughter. 'Slashing Dick' went through the whole forest, like a woodman marking with white paint the giant trees that must all come down in a month or so. And one naturally reverts to a passage in the poem itself, where God the Father is supposed to say to his Filial assessor on the heavenly throne, when marking the desolating progress of Sin and Death,--

'See with what havoc these fell dogs advance
To ravage this fair world.'

But still this inhuman extravagance of Bentley, in following out his hypothesis, does not exonerate _us_ from bearing in mind so much truth as that hypothesis really must have had, from the pitiable difficulties of the great poet's situation.

My own opinion, therefore, upon the line, for instance, from 'Paradise Regained,' which Mr. Landor appears to have indicated for the reader's amazement, viz.:--

'As well might recommend
_Such solitude before choicest society_,'

is--that it escaped revision from some accident calling off the ear of Milton whilst in the act of having the proof read to him. Mr. Landor silently prints it in italics, without assigning his objection; but, of course that objection must be--that the line has one foot too much. It is an Alexandrine, such as Dryden scattered so profusely, without asking himself why; but which Milton never tolerates except in the choruses of the Samson.

'_Not difficult, if thou hearken to me_'--

is one of the lines which Mr. Landor thinks that 'no authority will reconcile' to our ears. I think otherwise. The caesura is meant to fall not