Kitabı oku: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 20, No. 569, October 6, 1832», sayfa 5

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THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

SCRAPS FROM THE DIARY OF A TRAVELLER

BY THOMAS MOORE, ESQ

O poets, poets, dream at home,
If you would still have visions haunt you;
Trust me, if once abroad you roam,
That mar-all, Truth, will disenchant you.
Still think of VENICE, as in dreams
You've seen her, by her ocean-streams;—
Fancy the calm and cool delights
Of gondolas on summer nights:
Of sailing o'er the bright Lagoon,
And listening, as you glide along,
To lays from TASSO, by that moon
Whose beams, alas! he felt too strong,
And of whose mad'ning philters all,
Who feel the Muse's genuine call,
Are doom'd, at times, to drink as deep,
As did Endymion in his sleep!

Still by your fire-sides sit, and think
Of palaces, along the brink
Of ocean-floods,—whose shadows there
Look like the ruins, grand and fair,
Of some lost ATALANTIS, seen
Beneath the wave, when heaven's serene.
People those palaces with forms
Lovely as TITIAN ever drew—
Bright creatures, whom the sunbeam warms
With that ethereal gas, all through.
Which finds a vent at lips and eyes,
And lights up in a lover's sighs.
Fancy these young Venetian maids
Listening, at night, to serenades
From amorous lutes, where Music, such
As southern skies alone afford,
Echoes to every burning touch,
And thrills in each impassion'd chord.

All this imagine, and still more,—
For whither may not Fancy soar,
If Truth do not, alas! too soon,
Puncture her brilliant air-balloon—
But go not to the spot, I pray;
O do not, do not, some fine day.
Order, like STERNE, your travelling breeches;—
All's lost, if once upon your way,
The passport of Lord –
Is death to Fancy—like his speeches.

If you would save some dreams of youth
From the torpedo touch of Truth,
Go not to VENICE—do not blight
Your early fancies with the sight
Of her true, real, dismal state—
Her mansions, foul and desolate,—
Her close canals, exhaling wide
Such fetid airs as—with those domes
Of silent grandeur, by their side,
Where step of life ne'er goes or comes,
And those black barges plying round
With melancholy, plashing sound,—
Seem like a city, where the Pest
Is holding her last visitation,
And all, ere long, will be at rest,
The dead, sure rest of desolation.

So look'd, at night-fall, oft to me
That ruin'd City of the Sea;
And, as the gloomy fancy grew
Still darker with night's darkening hue,
All round me seem'd by Death o'ercast,—
Each footstep in those halls the last;
And the dim boats, as slow they pass'd,
All burial-barks, with each its load
Of livid corpses, feebly row'd
By fading hands, to find a bed
In waters less choked up with dead.

—Metropolitan.

ON THE DEATH OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

By the Author of "Eugene Aram."

The blow is struck—the lyre is shattered—the music is hushed at length. The greatest—the most various—the most commanding genius of modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his renown which, in all probability, a remote generation alone will furnish forth. It is true that we have been long prepared for the event—it does not fall upon us suddenly—leaf after leaf was stripped from that noble tree before it was felled to the earth at last;—our sympathy in his decay has softened us to the sorrow for his death. It is not now our intention to trace the character or to enumerate the works of the great man whose career is run;—to every eye that reads—every ear that hears—every heart that remembers, this much at least, of his character is already known,—that he had all the exuberance of genius and none of its excesses; that he was at once equitable and generous—that his heart was ever open to charity—that his life has probably been shortened by his scrupulous regard for justice. His career was one splendid refutation of the popular fallacy, that genius has of necessity vices—that its light must be meteoric—and its courses wayward and uncontrolled. He has left mankind two great lessons,—we scarcely know which is the most valuable. He has taught us how much delight one human being can confer upon the world; he has taught us also that the imagination may aspire to the wildest flights without wandering into error. Of whom else among our great list of names—the heir-looms of our nation—can we say that he has left us everything to admire, and nothing to forgive?

It is in four different paths of intellectual eminence that Sir Walter Scott has won his fame; as a poet, a biographer, an historian, and a novellist. It is not now a time (with the great man's clay scarce cold) to enter into the niceties of critical discussion. We cannot now weigh, and sift, and compare. We feel too deeply at this moment to reason well–but we ourselves would incline to consider him greatest as a poet. Never, indeed, has there been a poet so thoroughly Homeric as Scott—the battle—the feast—the council—the guard-room at Stirling—the dying warrior at Flodden—the fierce Bertram speeding up the aisle—all are Homeric;—all live—move—breathe and burn—alike poetry, but alike life! There is this difference, too, marked and prominent—between his verse and his prose;—the first is emphatically the verse of Scott—the latter (we mean in its style) may be the prose of any one—the striking originality, the daring boldness, the astonishing vigour of the style, in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, are lost in The Antiquary and Guy Mannering.

Scott may be said, in prose, to have no style. There are those, we know, who call this very absence of style a merit—we will not dispute it: if it be so, Scott is the first great prose writer from Bacon to Gibbon,—nay, from Herodotus, in Greek, to Paul Courier, in French—who has laid claim to it. For our own part, we think him great, in spite of the want of style, and not because of it. As a biographer, he has been unfortunate in his subjects; the two most important of the various lives he has either delineated or sketched—that of Dryden and that of Swift—are men, to whose inexpiable baseness genius could neither give the dignity of virtue nor the interest of error.

As an historian, we confess that we prize him more highly than as a biographer: it is true that the same faults are apparent in both, but there is in the grand History of Napoleon more scope for redeeming beauties. His great, his unrivalled, excellence in description is here brought into full and ample display: his battles are vivid, with colours which no other historian ever could command. And all the errors of the history still leave scenes and touches of unrivalled majesty to the book.

As a novelist, Scott has been blamed for not imparting a more useful moral to his fictions, and for dwelling with too inconsiderate an interest on the chivalric illusions of the past. To charges of this nature all writers are liable. Mankind are divided into two classes; and he who belongs to the one will ever incur the reproach of not seeing through the medium of the other. Certain it is, that we, with utterly different notions on political truths from the great writer who is no more, might feel some regret—some natural pain—that that cause which we believe the best, was not honoured by his advocacy; but when we reflect on the real influence of his works, we are satisfied they have been directed to the noblest ends, and have embraced the largest circle of human interests. We do not speak of the delight he has poured forth over the earth—of the lonely hours he has charmed—of the sad hearts he has beguiled—of the beauty and the music which he has summoned to a world where all travail and none repose; this, indeed, is something—this, indeed, is a moral—this, indeed, has been a benefit to mankind. And this is a new corroborant of one among the noblest of intellectual truths, viz. that the books which please, are always books that, in one sense, benefit; and that the work which is largely and permanently popular—which sways, moulds, and softens the universal heart—cannot appeal to vulgar and unworthy passions (such appeals are never widely or long triumphant!); the delight it occasions is a proof of the moral it inspires.

But this power to charm and to beguile is not that moral excellence to which we refer. Scott has been the first great genius—Fielding alone excepted—who invited our thorough and uncondescending sympathy to the wide mass of the human family—who has stricken (for in this artificial world it requires an effort) into our hearts a love and a respect for those chosen from the people. Shakspeare has not done this—Shakspeare paints the follies of the mob with a strong and unfriendly hand. Where, in Skakspeare, is there a Jeanie Deans? Take up which you will of those numerous works which have appeared, from Waverley to the Chronicles of the Canongate,—open where you please, you will find portraits from the people—and your interest keeping watch beside the poor man's hearth. Not, in Scott, as they were in the dramatists of our language, are the peasant, the artificer, the farmer, dragged on the stage merely to be laughed at for their brogue, and made to seem ridiculous because they are useful.

He paints them, it is true, in their natural language, but the language is subservient to the character; he does not bow the man to the phrase, but the phrase to the man. Neither does he flatter on the one hand, as he does not slight on the other. Unlike the maudlin pastoralists of France he contents himself with the simple truth—he contrasts the dark shadows of Meg Merrilies, or of Edie Ochiltree, with the holy and pure lights that redeem and sanctify them—he gives us the poor, even to the gipsey and the beggar, as they really are—contented, if our interest is excited, and knowing that nature is sufficient to excite it. From the palaces of kings—from the tents of warriors, he comes—equally at home with man in all aspects—to the cotter's hearth:—he bids us turn from the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's daughter—he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No never was there one—not even Burns himself—who forced us more intimately to acknowledge, or more deeply to feel, that

"The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd, for a' that."

Scott, is not, we apprehend, justly liable to the charge of wanting a sound moral—even a great political moral—(and political morals are the greatest of all)—in the general tenor of works which have compelled the highest classes to examine and respect the lowest. In this, with far less learning, far less abstract philosophy, than Fielding, he is only exceeded by him in one character—(and that, indeed, the most admirable in English fiction)—the character of Parson Adams. Jeanie Deans is worth a thousand such as Fanny Andrews. Fielding, Le Sage, and Cervantes are the only three writers, since the world began, with whom, as a novelist, he can be compared. And perhaps he excels them, as Voltaire excelled all the writers of his nation, not by the superior merits of one work, but by the brilliant aggregate of many. Tom Jones, Gil Blas, Don Quixote, are, without doubt, greater, much greater, productions than Waverley; but the authors of Tom Jones, Gil Blas, and even of Don Quixote, have not manifested the same fertile and mighty genius as author of the Waverley Novels.

And that genius—seemingly so inexhaustible—is quenched at length! We can be charmed no more—the eloquent tongue is mute—the master's wand is broken up—the right hand hath forgot its cunning-the cord that is loosened was indeed of silver—and the bowl that is broken at the dark well was of gold beyond all price.

When a great man dies, he leaves a chasm which eternity cannot fill. Others succeed to his fame—but never to the exact place which he held in the world's eye;—they may be greater than the one we have lost—but they are not he. Shakspeare built not his throne on the same site as Homer—nor Scott on that whence Shakspeare looked down upon the universe. The gap which Scott leaves in the world is the token of the space he filled in the homage of his times. A hundred ages hence our posterity will still see that wide interval untenanted—a vast and mighty era in the intellectual world, which will prove how spacious were "the city and the temple, whose summit has reached to Heaven."