VI.

THE PROSE STYLE OF POETS.

HAZLITT's view is, that poets write bad prose for a variety of reasons, which we will consider in order. In the course of his essay, * he lays down certain positions that we cannot regard as tenable, and shall consequently attempt to show their unsoundness. The paper was probably written to attract attention rather than to decide the dogma; it is brilliant and half true, but only half true. It contains some very fine special pleading, and certainly many valuable hints; but it is written to suit a theory, in defiance of facts, and from too narrow a generalization. We shall try to avoid doing injustice (even while advocating the opposite side) to the real merits of the essay; to dwell upon the beauty, acuteness and eloquence of which, might alone occupy the space of a separate criticism.

The principal arguments our critic employs to confirm his decision are these: Poets, in writing prose (strange as it seems), display a want of cadence, have no principle of modulation in the musical construction of their periods; but missing rhyme or blank verse, the regular accompaniment to which their words are to be said or sung, fall into a slovenly manner, devoid of art or melody. The prose

* On the same subject, and bearing the same title.

works of Sydney, Milton, Cowley, Dryden, Goldsmith and Dana, afford instances sufficient to disprove this assertion. At the same time it must be confessed, that rhyme has helped out many a bold thought and expanded (by rhetorical skill) many a half formed idea. It is no less true that certain eminent poets have as assuredly failed in attaining a first rate prose style, as certain capital prose writers have failed in writing even tolerable verse. We agree with Hazlitt, that Byron's prose is bad, inasmuch as he aims to make it too effective; trying to knock down and stun an antagonist with the latter end of a sentence, as with the butt-end of a coach whip. Coleridge's prose, too, is not inaptly compared to the cast-off finery of a lady's wardrobe. The poet's prose muse being a sort of hand-maiden to his poetical (and true) mistress, and tricked out in the wornout trappings of the latter, and ornaments at second hand. The Ancient Mariner, Love, the sonnets, tragedies, and occasional poetry of this author, are master-pieces: but his Watchman and Conciones ad Populum have been honestly censured as mere trash.

Hazlitt is very caustic in his remarks on poetical prose, and with great justice. It is the weakest of all sorts of prose; we prefer to it the very baldest expression, so it is only precise and clear. And so far from manifesting richness of fancy or imagination, it is proof only of a good memory and a liberally stocked wardrobe of metaphorical commonplaces. It is the style of most sentimental writers, of the majority of orators, of fashionable preachers, and mystical philosophers. It is not the style of a manly thinker, of a man who has anything to say, or of a man of genius. No great orator or logician employs it; we find it in no popular manuals of philosophy or politics. It is

never used by a good historian or a great novelist, nor indeed by any one who can write anything else.

The critic gives a further reason for the bad prose style of the poets. He says, the same liberty of inversion is not to be allowed in prose that prevails in poetry: that there is more restraint and severity in prose composition. Yet what can be more rigorous than the laws of verse; what style so compressed and close, yet so pithy and "matterfull," as the style of the finest poets? Truth, adds the author of Table-Talk, is the essential object of the proseman (we suspect he meant the philosopher, from the authorities that follow): but beauty is the supreme intent of the poet. At the present day, have we not learnt a better lesson than this, after the teaching of centuries? Is not the poet the moralist and "right popular philosopher?" Do we not learn the truest and deepest metaphysics (so far as we can learn that internal and individual science from books) from the best poets: do we not obtain our highest ethical maxims and our truest æsthetical views from the same sources? Doth not the poet impress our hearts and arouse our inmost sympathies, with a skill far superior to that of the priest or seraphic doctor? But we need not dilate upon that head, nor repeat in plain terms, the comprehensive and philosophical picture of the true poet, drawn by one* of the greatest and most eloquent of the craft, in the rich and glowing colors of fancy.

Hazlitt has very strangely fallen into the obsolete doctrines of Johnson and the Anglo-Gallic school of criticism (the English pupils of Dubos, Bossu and Bouhours); that pleasure is the highest aim of the poet: that his noblest

Sidney.

powers tend only to amuse or recreate.

This is true of

purely fan

To restrict Is David, or

the minor and lighter poets, but not of poets of the first class. It holds with regard to Swift and Prior, not to Milton or Young. It refers more correctly to ciful poets, than grandly imaginative writers. ourselves to a single nation-the Hebrews. Job, or Solomon, a "pretty" poet: do their writings furnish merely entertainment? Are they not rather profoundly instructive, as well as sublime and impassioned? Is Homer, or Dante, a trifler: or are we to estimate Shakspeare and Eschylus as ordinary playwrights? Every critical tyro knows better. But our critic reduces the question to one of metaphysical morality. He says, in part truly, as others have written before him, that fortitude is not the characteristical virtue of poets. This, too, is a hasty assertion: it is not the virtue of the majority of the poets, nor of the mass of mankind, but it is a distinguishing trait of the largest souls. If Milton and Dante, Johnson and Scott, possessed not this noble virtue, there were none ever did. And look at the manly resolution of Burns, of Elliott, of Bryant, of Dana, of Cowper, and Wordsworth. If these are not teachers of long suffering and patient endurance, we know not where such are to be found.

From the want of sufficient self-command, reasons Hazlitt, the poets have been unable to conquer a sense of beauty, by which they were fascinated and had become enslaved. Nor need they to conquer it, save when opposed to truth, a higher and rarer form of intellectual beauty. Truth is more beautiful than what we ordinarily style beauty, or rather the highest truth is beauty itself in the abstract. Sensual beauty is truth materialized, and de

rives its charms from the union of proportion, fitness, utility, and an innate harmony-what Hazlitt meant is, that poets too much regard ornament, and fall in love with their own figurative fancies, worshipping the idols they have set up in their own imaginations, of their own creation, like the heathen of old. They seem to mistake fiction for fact, and rather dally with fancy than are filled with faith. They accumulate beautiful metaphors without regard to their connection or logical sequence. They do not hunt for illustrations to the general text, so much as for striking analysis of any description, whether suited to the subject in hand or not. This, again, we conceive to be palpably a misrepresentation. Where are the reasoning Pope and Dryden; that master of the argumentum ad absurdum, Butler; those logicians of the parlor, Swift and Prior, and Wolcot and Moore ? Where is the whole race of metaphysical poets placed? Then, too, the large class of professedly didactic or speculative poets from Hesiod to Wordsworth, what becomes of them? Where is the critical Churchill, the moral Johnson, the religious Cowper? In fact, the poets are the greatest reasoners, the most accurate, brief and pointed, conveying an argument in a couplet, and a syllogism in a line. The Germans and Coleridge have settled the doctrine of the logical method of imagination, in her (apparently) wildest career, and that she has a law and sequence of her own, not to be measured by mechanical reasons. It must be conceded, besides, that poetical teaching is more beautiful than the lessons of the prose-man; that fancy's illustrative coloring affords a grateful relief to the over-worked reason. In effect, too, the most captivating pictures afford the strongest arguments; an illustration is always an argument by analogy, a descriptive syllogism, or reasoning by picture.