Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes Part 24

Independently of the delineation of the manners and characters of the times to which the story refers, it is impossible to avoid noticing, as a separate excellence, the faithful representation of general nature.

Looking not merely to the litter of novels that peep out for a single day from the mud where they were sp.a.w.ned, but to many of more ambitious pretensions--it is quite evident that in framing them, the authors have first addressed themselves to the involutions and developement of the story, as the princ.i.p.al object of their attention; and that in entangling and unravelling the plot, in combining the incidents which compose it, and even in depicting the characters, they sought for a.s.sistance chiefly in the writings of their predecessors. Baldness, and uniformity, and inanity are the inevitable results of this slovenly and unintellectual proceeding. The volume which this author has studied is the great book of Nature. He has gone abroad into the world in quest of what the world will certainly and abundantly supply, but what a man of great discrimination alone will find, and a man of the very highest genius will alone depict after he has discovered it. The characters of Shakespeare are not more exclusively human, not more perfectly men and women as they live and move, than those of this mysterious author. It is from this circ.u.mstance that, as we have already observed, many of his personages are supposed to be sketched from real life. He must have mixed much and variously in the society of his native country; his studies must have familiarized him to systems of manners now forgotten; and thus the persons of his drama, though in truth the creatures of his own imagination, convey the impression of individuals who we are persuaded must exist, or are evoked from their graves in all their original freshness, entire in their lineaments, and perfect in all the minute peculiarities of dress and demeanour.

Admitting, however, that these portraits are sketched with spirit and effect, two questions arise of much more importance than any thing affecting the merits of the novels--namely, whether it is safe or prudent to imitate, in a fict.i.tious narrative, and often with a view to a ludicrous effect, the scriptural style of the zealots of the seventeenth century; and secondly, whether the recusant presbyterians, collectively considered, do not carry too reverential and sacred a character to be treated by an unknown author with such insolent familiarity.

On the first subject, we frankly own we have great hesitation. It is scarcely possible to ascribe scriptural expressions to hypocritical or extravagant characters without some risk of mischief, because it will be apt to create an habitual a.s.sociation between the expression and the ludicrous manner in which it is used, unfavourable to the reverence due to the sacred text. And it is no defence to state that this is an error inherent in the plan of the novel. Bourdaloue, a great authority, extends this restriction still farther, and denounces all attempts to unmask hypocrisy by raillery, because in doing so the satirist is necessarily compelled to expose to ridicule the religious vizard of which he has divested him. Yet even against such authority it may be stated, that ridicule is the friend both of religion and virtue, when directed against those who a.s.sume their garb, whether from hypocrisy or fanaticism. The satire of Butler, not always decorous in these particulars, was yet eminently useful in stripping off their borrowed gravity and exposing to public ridicule the affected fanaticism of the times in which he lived. It may also be remembered, that in the days of Queen Anne a number of the Camisars or Huguenots of Dauphine arrived as refugees in England, and became distinguished by the name of the French prophets. The fate of these enthusiasts in their own country had been somewhat similar to that of the Covenanters. Like them, they used to a.s.semble in the mountains and desolate places, to the amount of many hundreds, in arms, and like them they were hunted and persecuted by the military. Like them, they were enthusiasts, though their enthusiasm a.s.sumed a character more decidedly absurd. The fugitive Camisars who came to London had convulsion-fits, prophesied, made converts, and attracted the public attention by an offer to raise the dead. The English minister, instead of fine and imprisonment and other inflictions which might have placed them in the rank and estimation of martyrs, and confirmed in their faith their numerous disciples, encouraged a dramatic author to bring out a farce on the subject which, though neither very witty nor very delicate, had the good effect of laughing the French prophets out of their audience and putting a stop to an inundation of nonsense which could not have failed to disgrace the age in which it appeared. The Camisars subsided into their ordinary vocation of psalmodic whiners, and no more was heard of their sect or their miracles. It would be well if all folly of the kind could be so easily quelled: for enthusiastic nonsense, whether of this day or of those which have pa.s.sed away, has no more t.i.tle to shelter itself under the veil of religion than a common pirate to be protected by the reverence due to an honoured and friendly flag.

Still, however, we must allow that there is great delicacy and hesitation to be used in employing the weapon of ridicule on any point connected with religion. Some pa.s.sages occur in the work before us for which the writer's sole apology must be the uncontroulable disposition to indulge the peculiarity of his vein of humour--a temptation which even the saturnine John Knox was unable to resist either in narrating the martyrdom of his friend Wisheart or the a.s.sa.s.sination of his enemy Beatson, and in the impossibility of resisting which his learned and accurate biographer has rested his apology for this mixture of jest and earnest.

"There are writers," he says (reb.u.t.ting the charge of Hume against Knox), "who can treat the most sacred subjects with a levity bordering on profanity. Must we at once p.r.o.nounce them profane, and is nothing to be set down to the score of natural temper inclining them to wit and humour? The pleasantry which Knox has mingled with his narrative of his (Cardinal Beatson's) death and burial is unseasonable and unbecoming. But it is to be imputed not to any pleasure which he took in describing a b.l.o.o.d.y scene, but to the strong propensity which he had to indulge his vein of humour. Those who have read his history with attention must have perceived that he is not able to check this even on the very serious occasions."--_Macrie's Life of Knox_, p. 147.

Indeed Dr. Macrie himself has given us a striking instance of the indulgence which the Presbyterian clergy, even of the strictest persuasion, permit to the _vis comica_. After describing a polemical work as "ingeniously constructed and occasionally enlivened with strokes of humour," he transfers, to embellish his own pages, (for we can discover no purpose of edification which the tale serves), a ludicrous parody made by an ignorant parish-priest on certain words of a Psalm, too sacred to be here quoted. Our own innocent pleasantry cannot, in this instance, be quite reconciled with that of the learned biographer of John Knox, but we can easily conceive that his authority may be regarded in Scotland as decisive of the extent to which a humourist may venture in exercising his wit upon scriptural expressions without incurring censure even from her most rigid divines.

It may however be a very different point how far the author is ent.i.tled to be acquitted upon the second point of indictment. To use too much freedom with things sacred is a course much more easily glossed over than that of exposing to ridicule the persons of any particular sect.

Every one knows the reply of the great Prince of Conde to Louis XIV when this monarch expressed his surprize at the clamour excited by Moliere's Tartuffe, while a blasphemous farce called _Scaramouche Hermite_ was performed without giving any scandal: "C'est parceque Scaramouche ne jouoit que le ciel et la religion, dont les devots se soucioient beaucoup moins que d'eux-memes." We believe, therefore, the best service we can do our author in the present case is to shew that the odious part of his satire applies only to that fierce and unreasonable set of extra-presbyterians, whose zeal, equally absurd and cruel, afforded pretexts for the severities inflicted on non-conformists without exception, and gave the greatest scandal and offence to the wise, sober, enlightened, and truly pious among the Presbyterians.

The princ.i.p.al difference betwixt the Cameronians and the rational presbyterians has been already touched upon. It may be summed in a very few words.

After the restoration of Charles II episcopacy was restored in Scotland, upon the unanimous pet.i.tion of the Scottish parliament. Had this been accompanied with a free toleration of the presbyterians, whose consciences preferred a different mode of church-government, we do not conceive there would have been any wrong done to that ancient kingdom.

But instead of this, the most violent means of enforcing conformity were resorted to without scruple, and the ejected presbyterian clergy were persecuted by penal statutes and prohibited from the exercise of their ministry. These rigours only made the people more anxiously seek out and adhere to the silenced preachers. Driven from the churches, they held conventicles in houses. Expelled from cities and the mansions of men, they met on the hills and deserts like the French Huguenots. a.s.sailed with arms, they repelled force by force. The severity of the rulers, instigated by the episcopal clergy, increased with the obstinacy of the recusants, until the latter, in 1666, a.s.sumed arms for the purpose of a.s.serting their right to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d in their own way. They were defeated at Pentland; and in 1669 a gleam of common sense and justice seems to have beamed upon the Scottish councils of Charles. They granted what was called an _indulgence_ (afterwards repeatedly renewed) to the presbyterian clergy, a.s.signed them small stipends, and permitted them to preach in such deserted churches as should be a.s.signed to them by the Scottish Privy Council. This "indulgence," though clogged with harsh conditions and frequently renewed or capriciously recalled, was still an acceptable boon to the wiser and better part of the presbyterian clergy, who considered it as an opening to the exercise of their ministry under the lawful authority, which they continued to acknowledge. But fiercer and more intractable principles were evinced by the younger ministers of that persuasion. They considered the submitting to exercise their ministry under the controul of any visible authority as absolute erastianism, a desertion of the great invisible and divine Head of the church, and a line of conduct which could only be defended, says one of their tracts, by nullifidians, time-servers, infidels, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. They held up to ridicule and abhorrence such of their brethren as considered mere toleration as a boon worth accepting. Every thing, according to these fervent divines, which fell short of re-establis.h.i.+ng presbytery as the sole and predominating religion, all that did not imply a full restoration of the Solemn League and Covenant, was an imperfect and unsound composition between G.o.d and mammon, episcopacy and prelacy. The following extracts from a printed sermon by one of them, on the subject of "soul-confirmation," will at once exemplify the contempt and scorn with which these high-flyers regarded their more sober-minded brethren, and serve as a specimen of the homely eloquence with which they excited their followers. The reader will probably be of opinion that it is worthy of Kettledrummle himself, and will serve to clear Mr. Jedediah Cleishbotham of the charge of exaggeration.

There is many folk that has a face to the religion that is in fas.h.i.+on, and there is many folk, they have ay a face to the old company, they have a face for G.o.dly folk, and they have a face for persecutors of G.o.dly folk, and they will be daddies bairns and minnies bairns both; they will be _prelates_ bairns and they will be _malignants_ bairns and they will be the people of G.o.d's bairns. And what think ye of that b.a.s.t.a.r.d temper? Poor Peter had a trial of this soupleness, but G.o.d made Paul an instrument to take him by the neck and shake it from him: And O that G.o.d would take us by the neck and shake our soupleness from us.

Therefore you that keeps only your old job-trot, and does not mend your pace, you will not wone at _soul-confirmation,_ there is a whine (i.e., _a few_) old job-trot, and does not mend your pace, you will not wone at _soul-confirmation,_ there is a whine old job-trot ministers among us, a whine old job-trot professors, they have their own pace, and faster they will not go; O therefore they could never wine to _soul-confirmation_ in the mettere of G.o.d. And our old job-trot ministers is turned _curates_, and our old job-trot professors is joined with them, and now this way G.o.d has turned them inside out, and has made it manifest and when their heart is hanging upon this braw, I will not give a gray groat for them and their profession both.

The devil has the ministers and professors of Scotland, now in a sive, and O as he sifts, and O as he riddles, and O as he rattles, and O the chaff he gets; And I fear there be more chaff nor there be good corn, and that will be found among us or all be done: but the _soul-confirmed_ man leaves ever the devil at two more, and he has ay the matter gadged, and leaves ay the devil in the lee side,--Sirs O work in the day of the cross.

The more moderate presbyterian ministers saw with pain and resentment the lower part of their congregation, who had least to lose by taking desperate courses, withdrawn from their flocks, by their more zealous pretenders to purity of doctrine, while they themselves were held up to ridicule, old jog trot professors and chaff-winnowed out and flung away by Satan. They charged the Cameronian preachers with leading the deluded mult.i.tude to slaughter at Bothwell, by prophesying a certainty of victory, and dissuading them from accepting the amnesty offered by Monmouth. "All could not avail," says Mr. Law, himself a presbyterian minister, "with McCargill, Kidd, Douglas, and other witless men amongst them, to hearken to any proposals of peace. Among others that Douglas, sitting on his horse, and preaching to the confused mult.i.tude, told them that they would come to terms with them, and like a drone was always droning on these terms with them: 'they would give us a half Christ, but we will have a whole Christ,' and such like impertinent speeches as these, good enough to feed those that are served with wind and not with the sincere milk of the word of G.o.d." Law also censures these irritated and extravagant enthusiasts, not only for intending to overthrow the government, but as binding themselves to kill all that would not accede to their opinion, and he gives several instances of such cruelty being exercised by them, not only upon straggling soldiers whom they shot by the way or surprized in their quarters, but upon those who, having once joined them, had fallen away from their principles. Being asked why they committed these cruelties in cold blood, they answered, 'they were obliged to do it by their sacred bond.' Upon these occasions they practised great cruelties, mangling the bodies of their victims that each man might have his share of the guilt. In these cases the Cameronians imagined themselves the direct and inspired executioners of the vengeance of heaven. Nor did they lack the usual incentives of enthusiasm. Peden and others among them set up a claim to the gift of prophecy, though they seldom foretold any thing to the purpose. They detected witches, had bodily encounters with the enemy of mankind in his own shape, or could discover him as, lurking in the disguise of a raven, he inspired the rhetoric of a Quaker's meeting. In some cases, celestial guardians kept guard over their field-meetings. At a conventicle held on the Lomond-hills, the Rev. Mr. Blacader was credibly a.s.sured, under the hands of four honest men, that at the time the meeting was disturbed by the soldiers, some women who had remained at home, "clearly perceived as the form of a tall man, majestic-like, stand in the air in stately posture with the one leg, as it were, advanced before the other, standing above the people all the time of the soldiers shooting."

Unluckily this great vision of the Guarded Mount did not conclude as might have been expected. The divine sentinel left his post too soon, and the troopers fell upon the rear of the audience, plundered and stripped many, and made eighteen prisoners.

But we have no delight to dwell either upon the atrocities or absurdities of a people whose ignorance and fanaticism were rendered frantic by persecution. It is enough for our present purpose to observe that the present Church of Scotland, which comprizes so much sound doctrine and learning, and has produced so many distinguished characters, is the legitimate representative of the indulged clergy of the days of Charles II, settled however upon a comprehensive basis. That after the revolution, it should have succeeded episcopacy as the national religion, was natural and regular, because it possessed all the sense, learning, and moderation fit for such a change, and because among its followers were to be found the only men of property and influence who acknowledged presbytery. But the Cameronians continued long as a separate sect, though their preachers were bigoted and ignorant, and their hearers were gleaned out of the lower ranks of the peasantry.

Their principle, so far as it was intelligible, a.s.serted that paramount species of presbyterian church-government which was established in the year 1648, and they continued to regard the established church as erastian and time-serving, because they prudently remained silent upon certain abstract and delicate topics, where there might be some collision between the absolute liberty a.s.serted by the church and the civil government of the state. The Cameronians, on the contrary, disowned all kings and government whatsoever, which should not take the Solemn League and Covenant; and long retained hopes of re-establis.h.i.+ng that great national engagement, a bait which was held out to them by all those who wished to disturb the government during the reign of William and Anne, as is evident from the Memoirs of Ker of Kersland, and the Negotiations of Colonel Hooke with the Jacobites and disaffected of the year.

A party so wild in their principles, so vague and inconsistent in their views, could not subsist long under a free and unlimited toleration.

They continued to hold their preachings on the hills, but they lost much of their zeal when they were no longer liable to be disturbed by dragoons, sheriffs, and lieutenants of Militia.--The old fable of the Traveller's Cloak was in time verified, and the fierce sanguinary zealots of the days of Claverhouse sunk into such quiet and peaceable enthusiasts as Howie of Lochgoin, or Old Mortality himself. It is, therefore, upon a race of sectaries who have long ceased to exist, that Mr. Jedediah Cleishbotham has charged all that is odious, and almost all that is ridiculous, in his fict.i.tious narrative; and we can no more suppose any moderate presbyterian involved in the satire, than we should imagine that the character of Hampden stood committed by a little raillery on the person of Ludovic Claxton, the Muggletonian. If, however, there remain any of those sectaries who, confining the beams of the Gospel to the Goshen of their own obscure synagogue, and with James Mitch.e.l.l, the intended a.s.sa.s.sin, giving their sweeping testimony against prelacy and popery, The Whole Duty of Man and bordles, promiscuous dancing and the Common Prayer-book, and all the other enormities and backslidings of the time, may perhaps be offended at this idle tale, we are afraid they will receive their answer in the tone of the revellers to Malvolio, who, it will be remembered, was something a kind of Puritan: "Doest thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?--Aye, by Saint Anne, and ginger will be hot in the mouth too."

ON LEIGH HUNT

[From _The Quarterly Review_, January, 1816]

_The Story of Rimini, a Poem_. By LEIGH HUNT. fc. 8vo. pp. 111. London, 1816.

A considerable part of this poem was written in Newgate, where the author was some time confined, we believe for a libel which appeared in a newspaper, of which he is said to be the conductor. Such an introduction is not calculated to make a very favourable impression.

Fortunately, however, we are as little prejudiced as possible on this subject: we have never seen Mr. Hunt's newspaper; we have never heard any particulars of his offence; nor should we have known that he had been imprisoned but for his own confession. We have not, indeed, ever read one line that he has written, and are alike remote from the knowledge of his errors or the influence of his private character. We are to judge him solely from the work now before us; and our criticism would be worse than uncandid if it were swayed by any other consideration.

The poem is not dest.i.tute of merit; but--and this, we confess, was our main inducement to notice it--it is written on certain pretended _principles_, and put forth as a pattern for imitation, with a degree of arrogance which imposes on us the duty of making some observations on this new theory, which Mr. Leigh Hunt, with the weight and authority of his venerable name, has issued, ex cathedra, as the canons of poetry and criticism.

These canons Mr. Hunt endeavours to explain and establish in a long preface, written in a style which, though Mr. Hunt implies that it is meant to be perfectly natural and unaffected, appears to us the most strange, laboured, uncouth, and unintelligible species of prose that we ever read, only indeed to be exceeded in these qualities by some of the subsequent verses; and both the prose and the verse are the first eruptions of this disease with which Mr. Leigh Hunt insists upon inoculating mankind.

Mr. Hunt's _first_ canon is that there should be a _great freedom_ _of versification_--this is a proposition to which we should have readily a.s.sented; but when Mr. Hunt goes on to say that by _freedom of versification_ he means something which neither Pope nor Johnson possessed, and of which even "they knew less than any poets perhaps who ever wrote," we check our confidence; and, after a little consideration, find that by freedom Mr. Hunt means only an inaccurate, negligent, and harsh style of versification, which our early poets fell into from want of polish, and such poets as Mr. Hunt still practise from want of ease, of expression, and of taste.

"_License_ he means, when he cries _liberty_."

Mr. Hunt tells us that Dryden, Spenser and Ariosto, Shakespeare and Chaucer (so he arranges them), are the greatest masters of _modern_ versification; but he, in the next few sentences, leads us to suspect that he really does not think much more reverently of these great names than of Pope and of Johnson; and that, if the whole truth were told, he is decidedly of opinion that the only good master of versification, in modern times, is--Mr. Leigh Hunt.

Dryden, Mr. Hunt thinks, is apt to be _artificial_ in his style; or, in other words, he has improved the harmony of our language from the rudeness of Chaucer, whom Mr. Hunt (in a sentence which is not grammar, p. xv) says that Dryden (though he spoke of and borrowed from him) neither relished nor understood. Spenser, he admits, was musical from pure taste, but Milton was only, as he elegantly expresses it, "_learnedly_ so." Being _learned in music_, is intelligible, and, of Milton, true; but what can Mr. Hunt mean by saying that Milton had "_learnedly_ a _musical ear_"? "Ariosto's fine ear and _animal spirits_ gave a _frank_ and exquisite tone to all he said"--what does this mean?-- a fine ear may, perhaps, be said to _give_, as it contributes to, an exquisite tone; but what have _animal spirits_ to do here? and what, in the matter of _tones_ and _sounds_, is the effect of _frankness_? We shrewdly suspect that Mr. Hunt, with all his affectation of Italian literature, knows very little of Ariosto; it is clear that he knows nothing of Ta.s.so. Of Shakespeare he tells us, "that his versification escapes us because he _over-informed_ it with knowledge and sentiment,"

by which it appears (as well, indeed, as by his own verses), that this new Stagyrite thinks that good versification runs a risk of being spoiled by having _too much meaning_ included in its lines.

To wind up the whole of this admirable, precise, and useful criticism by a recapitulation as useful and precise, he says, "all these are about as different from Pope as the church organ is from the bell in the steeple, or, to give him a more decorous comparison, the song of the nightingale from that of the cuckoo."--p. xv.

Now we own that what there is so _indecorous_ in the first comparison, or so especially _decorous_ in the second, we cannot discover; neither can we make out whether Pope is the organ or the bell--the nightingale or the cuckoo; we suppose that Mr. Hunt knows that Pope was called by his contemporaries the _nightingale_, but we never heard Milton and Dryden called _cuckoos_; or, if the comparison is to be taken the other way, we apprehend that, though Chaucer may be to Mr. Hunt's ears a _church organ_, Pope cannot, to any ear, sound like the _church bell_.

But all this theory, absurd and ignorant as it is, is really nothing to the practice of which it effects to be the defence.

Hear the warblings of Mr. Hunt's nightingales.

A horseman is described--

The patting hand, that best persuades the check, _And makes the quarrel up with a proud neck_, The thigh broad pressed, the spanning palm _upon it_, And the jerked feather _swaling_ in the _bonnet_.--p. 15.

Knights wear ladies' favours--

Some tied about their arm, some at the breast, _Some, with a drag, dangling from the cap's crest_.--p. 14.

Paulo pays his compliments to the destined bride of his brother--

And paid them with an air so frank and bright, As to a friend _appreciated at sight_; That air, in short, which sets you at your ease, Without _implying_ your perplexities, That _what with the surprize in every way_, The hurry of the time, the appointed day,-- She knew _not how to object_ in her confusion.--p. 29.

The meeting of the brothers, on which the catastrophe turns, is excellent: the politeness with which the challenge is given would have delighted the heart of old Caranza.

May I request, Sir, said the prince, and frowned, Your ear a moment in the tilting ground?

_There_, brother? answered Paulo with an _air_ Surprized and _shocked_. Yes, _brother_, cried he, _there_.

The word smote _crus.h.i.+ngly_.--p. 92.

Before the duel, the following spirited explanation takes place:

The prince spoke low, And said: Before _you answer what you can_, I wish to tell you, _as a gentleman_, That what you may confess-- Will implicate no person known to you, More than disquiet in _its_ sleep may do.--p. 93.

Paulo falls--and the event is announced in these exquisite lines:

Her _aged_ nurse-- Who, shaking her _old_ head, and pressing close Her withered _lips_ to _keep the tears_ that rose--p. 101.

"By the way," does Mr. Leigh Hunt suppose that the aged nurses of Rimini weep with their mouths? or does he mistake crying for drivelling?--In fact, the young lady herself seems to have adopted the same mode of weeping: