Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets Part 98

'Far n.o.bler blessings wait the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's lot; Conceived in rapture, and with fire begot!

Strong as necessity, he starts away, Climbs against wrongs, and brightens into day.'

Thus unprophetic, lately misinspired, I sung: gay fluttering hope my fancy fired: Inly secure, through conscious scorn of ill, Nor taught by wisdom how to balance will, Rashly deceived, I saw no pits to shun, But thought to purpose and to act were one; Heedless what pointed cares pervert his way, Whom caution arms not, and whom woes betray; But now exposed, and shrinking from distress, I fly to shelter while the tempests press; My Muse to grief resigns the varying tone, The raptures languish, and the numbers groan.

O Memory! thou soul of joy and pain!

Thou actor of our pa.s.sions o'er again!

Why didst thou aggravate the wretch's woe?

Why add continuous smart to every blow?

Few are my joys; alas! how soon forgot!

On that kind quarter thou invad'st me not; While sharp and numberless my sorrows fall, Yet thou repeat'st and multipli'st them all.

Is chance a guilt? that my disastrous heart, For mischief never meant; must ever smart?

Can self-defence be sin?--Ah, plead no more!

What though no purposed malice stained thee o'er?

Had Heaven befriended thy unhappy side, Thou hadst not been provoked--or thou hadst died.

Far be the guilt of homeshed blood from all On whom, unsought, embroiling dangers fall!

Still the pale dead revives, and lives to me, To me! through Pity's eye condemned to see.

Remembrance veils his rage, but swells his fate; Grieved I forgive, and am grown cool too late.

Young, and unthoughtful then; who knows, one day, What ripening virtues might have made their way?

He might have lived till folly died in shame, Till kindling wisdom felt a thirst for fame.

He might perhaps his country's friend have proved; Both happy, generous, candid, and beloved, He might have saved some worth, now doomed to fall; And I, perchance, in him, have murdered all.

O fate of late repentance! always vain: Thy remedies but lull undying pain.

Where shall my hope find rest?--No mother's care Shielded my infant innocence with prayer: No father's guardian hand my youth maintained, Called forth my virtues, or from vice restrained.

Is it not thine to s.n.a.t.c.h some powerful arm, First to advance, then screen from future harm?

Am I returned from death to live in pain?

Or would imperial Pity save in vain?

Distrust it not--What blame can mercy find, Which gives at once a life, and rears a mind?

Mother, miscalled, farewell--of soul severe, This sad reflection yet may force one tear: All I was wretched by to you I owed, Alone from strangers every comfort flowed!

Lost to the life you gave, your son no more, And now adopted, who was doomed before; New-born, I may a n.o.bler mother claim, But dare not whisper her immortal name; Supremely lovely, and serenely great!

Majestic mother of a kneeling state!

Queen of a people's heart, who ne'er before Agreed--yet now with one consent adore!

One contest yet remains in this desire, Who most shall give applause, where all admire.

THOMAS WARTON THE ELDER.

The Wartons were a poetical race. The father of Thomas and Joseph, names so intimately a.s.sociated with English poetry, was himself a poet. He was of Magdalene College in Oxford, vicar of Basingstoke and Cobham, and twice chosen poetry professor. He was born in 1687, and died in 1745.

Besides the little American ode quoted below, we are tempted to give the following

VERSES WRITTEN AFTER SEEING WINDSOR CASTLE.

From beauteous Windsor's high and storied halls, Where Edward's chiefs start from the glowing walls, To my low cot, from ivory beds of state, Pleased I return, unenvious of the great.

So the bee ranges o'er the varied scenes Of corn, of heaths, of fallows, and of greens; Pervades the thicket, soars above the hill, Or murmurs to the meadow's murmuring rill; Now haunts old hollowed oaks, deserted cells, Now seeks the low vale-lily's silver bells; Sips the warm fragrance of the greenhouse bowers, And tastes the myrtle and the citron flowers;-- At length returning to the wonted comb, Prefers to all his little straw-built home.

This seems sweet and simple poetry.

AN AMERICAN LOVE ODE.

FROM THE SECOND VOLUME OF MONTAIGNE'S ESSAYS.

Stay, stay, thou lovely, fearful snake, Nor hide thee in yon darksome brake: But let me oft thy charms review, Thy glittering scales, and golden hue; From these a chaplet shall be wove, To grace the youth I dearest love.

Then ages hence, when thou no more Shalt creep along the sunny sh.o.r.e, Thy copied beauties shall be seen; Thy red and azure mixed with green, In mimic folds thou shalt display;-- Stay, lovely, fearful adder, stay.

JONATHAN SWIFT.

In contemplating the lives and works of the preceding poets in this third volume of 'Specimens,' we have been impressed with a sense, if not of their absolute, yet of their comparative mediocrity. Beside such neglected giants as Henry More, Joseph Beaumont, and Andrew Marvell, the Pomfrets, Sedleys, Blackmores, and Savages sink into insignificance. But when we come to the name of Swift, we feel ourselves again approaching an Alpine region. The air of a stern mountain-summit breathes chill around our temples, and we feel that if we have no amiability to melt, we have alt.i.tude at least to measure, and strange profound secrets of nature, like the ravines of lofty hills, to explore. The men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be compared to Lebanon, or Snowdown, or Benlomond towering grandly over fertile valleys, on which they smile--Swift to the tremendous Romsdale Horn in Norway, shedding abroad, from a brow of four thousand feet high, what seems a scowl of settled indignation, as if resolved not to rejoice even over the wide- stretching deserts which, and nothing but which, it everlastingly beholds. Mountains all of them, but what a difference between such a mountain as Shakspeare, and such a mountain as Swift!

Instead of going minutely over a path so long since trodden to mire as the life of Swift, let us expend a page or two in seeking to form some estimate of his character and genius. It is refreshing to come upon a new thing in the world, even though it be a strange or even a bad thing; and certainly, in any age and country, such a being as Swift must have appeared an anomaly, not for his transcendent goodness, not for his utter badness, but because the elements of good and evil were mixed in him into a medley so astounding, and in proportions respectively so large, yet unequal, that the a.n.a.lysis of the two seemed to many competent only to the Great Chymist, Death, and that a sense of the disproportion seems to have moved the man himself to inextinguishable laughter,--a laughter which, radiating out of his own singular heart as a centre, swept over the circ.u.mference of all beings within his reach, and returned crying, 'Give, give,' as if he were demanding a universal sphere for the exercise of the savage scorn which dwelt within him, and as if he laughed not more 'consumedly' at others than he did at himself.

Ere speaking of Swift as a man, let us say something about his genius.

That, like his character, was intensely peculiar. It was a compound of infinite ingenuity, with very little poetical imagination--of gigantic strength, with a propensity to incessant trifling--of pa.s.sionate purpose, with the clearest and coldest expression, as though a furnace were fuelled with snow. A Brobdignagian by size, he was for ever toying with Lilliputian slings and small craft. One of the most violent of party men, and often fierce as a demoniac in temper, his favourite motto was _Vive la bagatelle_. The creator of entire new worlds, we doubt if his works contain more than two or three lines of genuine poetry. He may be compared to one of the locusts of the Apocalypse, in that he had a tail like unto a scorpion, and a sting in his tail; but his 'face is not as the face of man, his hair is not as the hair of women, and on his head there is no crown like gold.' All Swift's creations are more or less disgusting. Not one of them is beautiful. His Lilliputians are amazingly life-like, but compare them to Shakspeare's fairies, such as Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mustardseed; his Brobdignagians are excrescences like enormous warts; and his Yahoos might have been sp.a.w.ned in the nightmare of a drunken butcher. The same coa.r.s.eness characterises his poems and his 'Tale of a Tub.' He might well, however, in his old age, exclaim, in reference to the latter, 'Good G.o.d! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!' It is the wildest, wittiest, wickedest, wealthiest book of its size in the English language. Thoughts and figures swarm in every corner of its pages, till you think of a disturbed nest of angry ants, for all the figures and thoughts are black and bitter. One would imagine the book to have issued from a mind that had been gathering gall as well as sense in an antenatal state of being.

Swift, in all his writings--sermons, political tracts, poems, and fictions--is essentially a satirist. He consisted originally of three princ.i.p.al parts,--sense, an intense feeling of the ludicrous, and selfish pa.s.sion; and these were sure, in certain circ.u.mstances, to ferment into a spirit of satire, 'strong as death, and cruel as the grave.' Born with not very much natural benevolence, with little purely poetic feeling, with furious pa.s.sions and unbounded ambition, he was entirely dependent for his peace of mind upon success. Had he become, as by his talents he was ent.i.tled to be, the prime minister of his day, he would have figured as a greater tyrant in the cabinet than even Chatham.

But as he was prevented from being the first statesman, he became the first satirist of his time. From vain efforts to grasp supremacy for himself and his party, he retired growling to his Dublin den; and there, as Haman thought scorn to lay his hand on Mordecai, but extended his murderous purpose to all the people of the Jews,--and as Nero wished that Rome had one neck, that he might destroy it at a blow,--so Swift was stung by his personal disappointment to hurl out scorn at man and suspicion at his Maker. It was not, it must be noticed, the evil which was in man which excited his hatred and contempt; it was man himself. He was not merely, as many are, disgusted with the selfish and malignant elements which are mingled in man's nature and character, and disposed to trace them to any cause save a Divine will, but he believed man to be, as a whole, the work and child of the devil; and he told the imaginary creator and creature to their face, what he thought the truth,--'The devil is an a.s.s.' His was the very madness of Manichaeism.

That heresy held that the devil was one of two aboriginal creative powers, but Swift seemed to believe at times that he was the only G.o.d.

From a Yahoo man, it was difficult to avoid the inference of a demon deity. It is very laughable to find writers in _Blackwood_ and elsewhere striving to prove Swift a Christian, as if, whatever were his professions, and however sincere he might be often in these, the whole tendency of his writings, his perpetual and unlimited abuse of man's body and soul, his denial of every human virtue, the filth he pours upon every phase of human nature, and the doctrine he insinuates--that man has fallen indeed, but fallen, not from the angel, but from the animal, or, rather, is just a bungled brute,--were not enough to shew that either his notions were grossly erroneous and perverted, or that he himself deserved, like another Nebuchadnezzar, to be driven from men, and to have a beast's heart given unto him. Sometimes he reminds us of an impure angel, who has surprised man naked and asleep, looked at him with microscopic eyes, ignored all his peculiar marks of fallen dignity and incipient G.o.dhood, and in heartless rhymes reported accordingly.

Swift belonged to the same school as Pope, although the feminine element which was in the latter modified and mellowed his feelings. Pope was a more successful and a happier man than Swift. He was much smaller, too, in soul as well as in body, and his gall-organ was proportionably less.

Pope's feeling to humanity was a tiny malice; Swift's became, at length, a black malignity. Pope always reminds us of an injured and pouting hero of Lilliput, 'doing well to be angry' under the gourd of a pocket-flap, or squealing out his griefs from the centre of an empty snuff-box; Swift is a man, nay, monster of misanthropy. In minute and microscopic vision of human infirmities, Pope excels even Swift; but then you always conceive Swift leaning down a giant, though gnarled, stature to behold them, while Pope is on their level, and has only to look straight before him. Pope's wrath is always measured; Swift's, as in the 'Legion-Club'

is a whirlwind of 'black fire and horror,' in the breath of which no flesh can live, and against which genius and virtue themselves furnish no shield.

After all, Swift might, perhaps, have put in the plea of Byron--

'All my faults perchance thou knowest, All my madness none can know.'

There was a black spot of madness in his brain, and another black spot in his heart; and the two at last met, and closed up his destiny in night. Let human nature forgive its most determined and systematic reviler, for the sake of the wretchedness in which he was involved all his life long. He was born (in 1667) a posthumous child; he was brought up an object of charity; he spent much of his youth in dependence; he had to leave his Irish college without a degree; he was flattered with hopes from King William and the Whigs, which were not fulfilled; he was condemned to spend a great part of his life in Ireland, a country he detested; he was involved--partly, no doubt, through his own blame--in a succession of fruitless and miserable intrigues, alike of love and politics; he was soured by want of success in England, and spoiled by enormous popularity in Ireland; he was tried by a kind of religious doubts, which would not go out to prayer or fasting; he was haunted by the fear of the dreadful calamity which at last befell him; his senses and his soul left him one by one; he became first giddy, then deaf, and then mad; his madness was of the most terrible sort--it was a 'silent rage;' for a year or two he lay dumb; and at last, on the 19th of October 1745,

'Swift expired, a driveller and a show,'

leaving his money to found a lunatic asylum, and his works as a many- volumed legacy of curse to mankind.

[Note: It has been a.s.serted that there were circ.u.mstances in extenuation of Swift's conduct, particularly in reference to the ladies whose names were connected with his, which _cannot be publicly brought forward_.]

BAUCIS AND PHILEMON.