A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Part 4

[53] See "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature," by Edward T.

McLaughlin, p. 34.

CHAPTER II.

Coleridge, Bowles, and the Pope Controversy.

While Scott was busy collecting the fragments of Border minstrelsy and translating German ballads,[1] two other young poets, far to the south, were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those same years (1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering together over the Somerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and gossamer sails of a s.h.i.+p against the declining sun, like those of the phantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks and talks was that epoch-making book, the "Lyrical Ballads"; the first edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an additional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described by Coleridge himself in the "Biographia Literaria" (1817), Chapter XIV.

"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. . . . The thought suggested itself that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; . . .

for the second cla.s.s, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. . . . It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . With this view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other poems, 'The Dark Ladie' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt."

Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious.

Weighed against the imposing array of Scott's romances in prose and verse,[2] they seem like two or three little gold coins put into the scales to balance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much in the history of English thought, he influenced his own and the following generation on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mere incident in his intellectual history. His blossoming time was short at the best, and ended practically with the century. After his return from Germany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, he produced little verse of any importance beyond the second part of "Christabel" (written in 1800, published in 1816). His creative impulse failed him, and he became more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, political philosophy, and literary criticism.

It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that Coleridge's German biographer, Professor Brandl, should have treated his subject under this special aspect,[3] and attributed to him so leading a place in the romantic movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long and wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historic restoration--Scott, certainly, and not Coleridge was the "high priest of Romanticism." [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists (_Romantiker_), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as in "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814); not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to the compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneous jobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturer of big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not; and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original inspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again, though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century tradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge.

But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; and the pa.s.sage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets as our romantic school _par excellence_. "'Lake School' is a name, but no designation. This was felt in England, where many critics have accordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained that the members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their personal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together, and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be various and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with dry Rationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by bold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let us abjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, with their help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life. These were the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with such changes as local differences demanded. Individuality in person, nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all natural unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed. And, as these men, when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated such elements as 'romantic,' so may they themselves be justly called the 'Romantic School.' But the term is much misused, and requires a little elucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He, however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any one had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to the cla.s.sic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in that of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's circle all branched off from the cla.s.sical path with a directness and consistency which sharply distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.

Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him; Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what is called the 'pig-tail period'! The princ.i.p.al poems composed in the last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to cla.s.sic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed the style of the 'Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of the 'Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful 'Gebir' in the style of Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in German literature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interested themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique character--for 'Iphigenia,' 'Proserpina,' 'Alexis and Dora.' Only when the war with France drew near was the cla.s.sical feeling interrupted.

Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by translations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own people, and rendered them popular with the fas.h.i.+onable world--though only by clothing them in cla.s.sic garb. How different to the 'artificial rust'

of 'Christabel'; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of 'We Are Seven'; and to the rude 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'! When at last, with the fall of Napoleon, the great stars--Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, and later the mature Landor--rose in the hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romantic school a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a number of productive impulses; though, Euphorion-like, they still regarded the antique as their parent. They expressed much appreciation of the Romantic school, but their hearts were with Aeschylus and Pindar. They contended for national character, but only took pleasure in planting it on cla.s.sic soil. Byron's enthusiasm for Pope was not only caprice; nor was it mere chance that Byron should have died in Greece, and Sh.e.l.ley and Keats in Italy. Compared with what we may call these cla.s.sical members of the Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott . . . may be said to have taken nothing, whether in the form of translation or imitation, from cla.s.sical literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the Middle Ages. In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, able, and clever journeyman.

It is therefore fair to consider them, and them alone, as exponents of the Romantic school." [5]

As to Byron and Sh.e.l.ley this criticism may do; as to Chatterton and Keats it is misleading. Wordsworth more romantic than Chatterton! More romantic than Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom, treats subjects from the antique! On the contrary, if "the name is graven on the workmans.h.i.+p," "Michael" and "The Brothers" are as cla.s.sical as "Hyperion" or "Laodamia" or "The Hamadryad"; "bald as the bare mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." Bagehot expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or cla.s.sic art, as distinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson.

And Mr. Colvin hesitates to cla.s.sify him with Landor only because of his "suggestive and adumbrative manner"--not, indeed, he acknowledges, a romantic manner, and yet "quite distinct from the cla.s.sical"; i.e., because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. But whatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at his best was a romantic poet. "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner,"

creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination with mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romantic movement.

Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge's poetry, Percy's ballads and Chatterton's "Rowley Poems" are obvious and have already been mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there is manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. William Lisle Bowles. We have noticed the reappearance of this discarded stanza form in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas Warton, about the middle of the last century.[6] In 1782 Mrs. Charlotte Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray, Collins, Pope's "Eloisa" and Goethe's "Werther." But the writer who--through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially--contributed most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he had published a little collection of fourteen sonnets,[7] which reached a second edition with six pieces additional, in the same year. "His sonnets came into Wordsworth's hands (1793)," says Brandl, "just as he was leaving London with some friends for a morning's excursion; he seated himself in a recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till he had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a model." [8] In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817) Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, "the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented" to him by his school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me . . . that I should have received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author." To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope's poetry. "Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet . . . they gave me little pleasure. . . . I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. . . . The matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry."

Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridge vacation, he compared Darwin's "Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace, "glittering, cold, and transitory"; that he expressed a preference for Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his defence of the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language . . . such as "_I will remember thee_," instead of

". . . Thy image on her wing Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring"

he had continually to appeal to the example of the older English poets from Chaucer to Milton. "The reader," he concludes, "must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the sonnets, the 'Monody at Matlock' and the 'Hope' of Mr.

Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is a stiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present day, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head." Coleridge adds in a note that he was not familiar with Cowper's "Task" till many years after the publication of Bowles' sonnets, though it had been published before them (1785).

It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowles' sonnets on Coleridge, did we not remember that it is not necessarily the greatest literature that comes home to us most intimately, but that which, for some reason, touches us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is a familiar experience with every reader, that certain books make an appeal to him which is personal and individual, an appeal which they make to few other readers--perhaps to no other reader--and which no other books make to him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value or charm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of his own, some occult a.s.sociation in depths below consciousness. He has a perfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract, they are not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him; they seem written to him--are more to him, in a way, than Shakspere and Milton and all the public library of the world. In the line of light bringers who pa.s.s from hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there are men of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to take the precious flambeau from a dwarf. That Scott should have admired Monk Lewis, and Coleridge reverenced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles had something to give which Scott and Coleridge were peculiarly ready to receive.

Bowles' sonnets, though now little read, are not unreadable. They are tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were mostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy.

Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs.

His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins, Warton, and the whole "Il Penseroso" school, but with a more personal note, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet. "Those who know him," says the preface, "know the occasions of them to have been real, to the public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving young woman with whom

"Sperabat longos heu! ducere soles, Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . .

"This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure to obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very little share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great difference between _natural_ and _fabricated_ feelings even in poetry."

Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search of dark things--grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and Ostend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of Dover; sunrise on the sea, touching "the lifted oar far off with sudden gleam"; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer of evening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,[9]

or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where

"Pity, at the dark and stormy hour Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high, Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower."

In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" Byron calls Bowles "the maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers," whose

". . . muse most lamentably tells What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells." [10]

Bowles' att.i.tude had thus something more modern than that of the eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge's doctrine, that

". . . we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." [11]

A number of Bowles' sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, the Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems which stand midway between Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Coleridge's "To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence, "On the River Duddon." A single sonnet of Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his quality and to show what Coleridge got from him.[12]

Bowles was a disciple in the "School of Warton." He was "one of Joseph Warton's Winchester wonders," says Peter Cunningham, in a note in the second edition of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and the taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened and confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton was master there." Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester College. His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian manner; the "castle gleaming on the distant steep"; "the pale moonlight in the midnight aisle"; "some convent's ancient walls," along the Rhine.

Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of Netley Abbey:

"The beam Of evening smiles on the gray battlement, And yon forsaken tower that time has rent."

His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their insistence upon the "elvish" things in the plays; "The Tempest," "Midsummer Night's Dream,"

the weird sisters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques.

The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," echo his celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry:

"Though now no more proud chivalry recalls The tourneys bright and pealing festivals; Though now on high her idle spear is hung, Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung," etc.[13]

The "Hymn to Woden" alludes to Gray's "Fatal Sisters." "St. Michael's Mount" summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy,

"Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . .

Would fain the shade of elder days recall, The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall; Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme; Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, Or bid the spectres of the castle hail!"

Bowles' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest volume of verse (1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. This elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The Sigh," "To a Young a.s.s," "To the Autumnal Moon," "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy; imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14]

Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself--and incidentally Bowles--in three sonnets printed at the end of Chapter I. of the "Biographia Literaria," designed to burlesque his own besetting sins, a "doleful egotism," an affected simplicity, and the use of "elaborate and swelling language and imagery."

He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A series of twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with one to Bowles:

"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring," etc.

More important to our inquiries than the poetry of Bowles is the occasion which he gave to the revival, under new conditions, of the Pope controversy. For it was over the body of Pope that the quarrel between cla.s.sic and romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out in France, a few years later, over the question of the dramatic unities and the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the _drame_. In 1806, just a half century after Joseph Warton published the first volume of his "Essay on Pope," Bowles' edition of the same poet appeared. In the life of Pope which was prefixed, the editor made some severe strictures on Pope's duplicity, jealousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not more severe than have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who has backed up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming. The edition contained likewise an essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope,"

in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken by his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. He a.s.serted in brief that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that, except in his "Eloisa" and one or two other pieces, he was the poet of artificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of pa.s.sions.

Bowles' chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following paragraph, upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly hinged: "All images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are more beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art, and they are therefore _per se_ (abstractedly) more poetical. In like manner those pa.s.sions of the human heart, which belong to nature in general, are _per se_ more adapted to the higher species of poetry than those derived from incidental and transient manners."

The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue with his critic, not only upon his general estimate of the poet, but upon the principle here laid down. Thomas Campbell, in his "Specimens of the British Poets"

(1819), defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained that "exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not less characteristic of genius than the description of simple physical appearances." He instanced Milton's description of Satan's spear and s.h.i.+eld, and gave an animated picture of the launching of a s.h.i.+p of the line as an example of the "sublime objects of artificial life." Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on "The Invariable Principles of Poetry." He claimed that it was the appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sublimity to the launch of the s.h.i.+p, and asked: "If images derived from art are as beautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessary to bring your s.h.i.+p off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary whether the description of a game of ombre was as poetical as that of a walk in the forest, and whether "the sylph of Pope, 'trembling over the fumes of a chocolate pot,' be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint Ariel, who sings 'Where the bee sucks, there lurk (_sic_) I.'" Campbell replied in the _New Monthly Magazine_, of which he was editor, and this drew out another rejoinder from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had also attacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to which the indefatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies. The elder Disraeli, Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Martin M'Dermot also took a hand in the fight--all against Bowles--and William Roscoe, the author of the "Life of Lorenzo de Medici," attacked him in an edition of Pope which he brought out in 1824. The rash detractor of the little Twitnam nightingale soon found himself engaged single-handed against a host; but he was equal to the occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and poured out a series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, and concluding with "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public" (1825), followed by "more last words of Baxter," in the shape of "Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe" (1825).

The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that in poetry the subject is nothing, but the execution is all; that one cla.s.s of poetry has, as such, no superiority over another; and that poets are to be ranked by their excellence as artists, and not according to some imaginary scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic, didactic, satiric, etc. "There is, in fact," wrote Roscoe, "no poetry in any subject except what is called forth by the genius of the poet. . . .

There are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of the artist." Byron said that to the question "whether 'the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest,' it may be answered that the materials are certainly not equal, but that the _artist_ who has rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two.

But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr.

Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the water that gave interest to the s.h.i.+p but the s.h.i.+p to the water. "What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the poetical 'calm water' at Wapping or in the London lock or in the Paddington Ca.n.a.l or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural accessories--the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind--Bowles had said, the s.h.i.+p's properties are only blue bunting, coa.r.s.e canvas, and tall poles.

"So they are," admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is gra.s.s; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . . Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any other unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or the ca.n.a.ls? . . . Is it the Ca.n.a.l Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than Rome itself? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the ca.n.a.l of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington."

There was something futile about this whole discussion. It was marked with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular, the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction as was attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher synthesis, man and all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned: