Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847.Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847.
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
"It is worthy of remark that Byron's moral perversion never paralysed
or obscured his intellectual powers, though it might lower their
aims. With regard to the plan and style of his works, he showed
strong good sense and clear judgment. The man who indulged such
narrowing egotism, such irrational scorn, would prime and polish
without mercy the stanzas in which he uttered them." (Wonderful! that
an egotist and a misanthrope should have been kept from defacing his
own verses. Then follows our terrible bye-blow.) "And this bewildered
idealist was a very bigot in behoof _of the common-sensical satirist,
the almost peevish realist_--_Pope_!" (P. 76.)
With what consummate disdain does she condescend to give the
_coup-de-grace_ to the unhappy lingering author of the "Epistle to
Arbuthnot," and "The Rape of the Lock!" These poems of the "peevish
realist," shall have no place, since Mrs Margaret Fuller so determines
it, in the new literature of America. We will keep them here in
England--in a casket of gold, if we ever possess one.
One other specimen of the lady's eloquence and critical discrimination
must suffice. She is characterising Southey.
"The muse of Southey is a beautiful statue of crystal, in whose bosom
burns an immortal flame. We hardly admire as they deserve, the
perfection of the finish, and the elegance of the contours, because
our attention is so fixed on the radiance which glows through
them."--(P. 82.)
Of this poet, who has so much flame in him that we cannot distinctly
see his features, it is said in almost the next sentence, "Even in his
most brilliant passages there is nothing of _the heat of inspiration_,
nothing of that _celestial fire_ which makes us feel that the author
has, by intensifying the action of the mind, raised himself to
communion with superior intelligences.(!) It is where he is most calm
that he is most beautiful; and, accordingly, he is more excellent in
the expression of sentiment than in narration." (The force of the
"accordingly" one does not see; surely there may be as much scope for
inspiration in sentiment as in narration.) "Scarce any writer presents
to us a sentiment with such a tearful depth of expression; but though
it is a tearful depth, those tears were shed long since, and Faith and
Love have hallowed them. You nowhere are made to feel the bitterness,
the vehemence of present emotion; _but the phoenix born from passion
is seen hovering over the ashes of what was once combined with it_."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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