The Poetical Works of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Bart. M.P Part 102

THE MASTER TO THE SCHOLAR.

Write for the pedant Few, the vein shall grow Cold at its source and meagre in its flow; But for the vulgar Many wouldst thou write, How coa.r.s.e the pa.s.sion, and the thought how trite!

"Nor Few, nor Many--riddles from thee fall?"

Author, as Nature smiles--so write;--for ALL!

THE TRUE CRITIC.

Taste is to sense, as Charity to soul, A bias less to censure than to praise; A quick perception of the arduous whole, Where the dull eye some careless flaw surveys.

Every true critic--from the Stagirite To Schlegel and to Addison--hath won His fame by serving a reflected light, And clearing vapour from a clouded sun.

Who envies him whose microscopic eyes See but the canker in the glorious rose?

Not much I ween the Zolus we prize, Though even Homer may at moments doze.

Praise not to me the sharp sarcastic sneer, Mocking the Fane which Genius builds to Time.

High works are Sabbaths to the Soul! Revere Even some rare discord in the solemn chime.

When on the gaze the Venus dawns divine, The Cobbler comes the slipper to condemn; The Slave alone descends into the mine To work the dross--the Monarch wears the gem.

TALENT AND GENIUS.

Talent convinces--Genius but excites; This tasks the reason, that the soul delights.

Talent from sober judgment takes its birth, And reconciles the pinion to the earth; Genius unsettles with desires the mind, Contented not till earth be left behind; Talent, the suns.h.i.+ne on a cultured soil; Ripens the fruit, by slow degrees, for toil; Genius, the sudden Iris of the skies, On cloud itself reflects its wondrous dyes: And to the earth, in tears and glory, given, Clasps in its airy arch the pomp of Heaven!

Talent gives all that vulgar critics need-- And frames a horn-book for the Dull to read; Genius, the Pythian of the Beautiful, Leaves its large truths a riddle to the Dull-- From eyes profane a veil the Isis screens, And fools on fools still ask--"What Hamlet means?"

EURIPIDES.

If in less stately mould thy thoughts were cast Than thy twin Masters of the Grecian stage, Lone, 'mid the loftier wonders of the Past, Thou stand'st--more household to the Modern Age;-- Thou mark'st that change in Manners when the frown Of the vast t.i.tans vanish'd from the earth, When a more soft Philosophy stole down From the dark heavens to man's familiar hearth.

With thee came Love and Woman's influence o'er Her sterner Lord; and Poesy, till then A Sculpture, warm'd to Painting;[G] what before Gla.s.s'd but the dim-seen G.o.ds, grew now to men Clear mirrors, and the Pa.s.sions took their place, Where a serene if solemn Awe had made The scene a temple to the elder race: The struggles of Humanity became Not those of t.i.tan with a G.o.d, nor those Of the great Heart with that unbodied Name By which our ignorance would explain our woes And justify the Heavens,--relentless FATE;-- But, truer to the human life, thine art Made thought with thought, and will with will debate, And placed the G.o.d and t.i.tan in the Heart; Thy Phaedra and thy pale Medea were The birth of that most subtle wisdom, which Dawn'd in the world with Socrates, to bear Its last most precious offspring in the rich And genial soul of Shakspeare. And for this Wit blamed thee living, Dulness taunts thee dead.[H]

And yet the Pythian did not speak amiss When in thy verse the latent truths she read, And hail'd thee wiser than thy tribe.[I] Of thee All genius in our softer times hath been The grateful echo; and thy soul we see Still through our tears--upon the later Scene.

Doth the Italian for his frigid thought Steal but a natural pathos,--hath the Gaul To mimes that ape the form of heroes taught One step that reels not underneath the pall Of the dark Muse--this praise we give, nor more They just remind us--thou hast lived before!

But that which made thee wiser than the Schools Was the long sadness of a much-wrong'd life; The sneer of satire, and the gibe of fools, The broken hearth-G.o.ds and the perjured wife.

For Sorrow is the messenger between The Poet and Men's bosoms:--Genius can Fill with unsympathizing G.o.ds the Scene, But Grief alone can teach us what is Man!

[G] The celebrated comparison between Sculpture and the Ancient Painting and the Modern Dramatic Poetry, is not applicable to Euripides, who has a warmth and colour of pa.s.sion which few, indeed, of the moderns have surpa.s.sed, and from which most of the modern writers have mediately, if not directly, borrowed their most animated conceptions.

[H] Among the taunting accusations which Aristophanes, in his Comedy of the Frogs, lavishes upon Euripides, through the medium of aeschylus, is that of having introduced female love upon the stage! aeschylus, indeed, is made, very inconsistently, considering his Clytemnestra (Ran. 1. 1042) to declare that he does not know that _he_ ever represented a single woman in love. At a previous period of the comedy, Euripides is also ridiculed, through a boast ironically a.s.signed to his own lips, for having debased Tragedy by the introduction of domestic interest--(household things, [Greek: oikeia pragmata]). Upon these and similar charges have later critics, partly in England, especially in Germany, sought by duller diatribes to perpetuate a spirit of depreciation against the only ancient tragic poet who has vitally influenced the later stage. The true merit of Euripides is seen in the very ridicule of Aristophanes.

[I] "Wise Sophocles, wiser Euripides, wisest of all, Socrates,"

was the well-known decision of the Delphian Oracle. Yet the wisdom of Euripides was not in the philosophical sentences with which he often mars the true philosophy of the drama. His wisdom is his pathos.

THE BONES OF RAPHAEL.

When the author was in Rome, in the year 1833, the bones of Raphael were discovered, and laid for several days in state in one of the churches.

Wave upon wave, the human ocean stream'd Along the chancel of the solemn pile; And, with a softer day, the tapers beam'd Upon the Bier within the vaulted aisle:-- And, mingled with the crowd, I halted there And ask'd a Roman scholar by my side, What sainted dust invoked the common prayer?

"Stranger!" the man, as in disdain, replied, "Nine days already hath the Disinterr'd Been given again to mortal eye, and all The great of Rome, the Conclave and the Pope, Have flock'd to grace the second funeral Of him whose soul, until it fled, like Hope, Gave Beauty to the World:--But haply thou, A dweller of the North, hast never heard Of one who, if no saint in waking life, Communed in dreams with angels, and transferr'd The heaven in which we trust his soul is now To the mute canvas.--Underneath that pall Repose the bones of Raphael!"

Not a word I answer'd, but in awe I drew more near, And saw the crowd toil on in busy strife, Eager which first should touch the holy bier, I ask'd a boor, more earnest than the rest, "Whose bones are these?"

"I know not what his name; But, since the Pope and Conclave have been here, Doubtless a famous Saint!"

The Boor express'd The very thought the wandering stranger guess'd.

Which wiser, he, the Scholar, who had sneer'd To hear the Stranger canonize the Dead; Or they, the Boor, the Stranger, who revered The Saint, where he the Artist?--Answer, Fame, Whose Saints are not the Calendar's! Perchance Ta.s.so and Raphael, age to age, have given The earth a l.u.s.tre more direct from Heaven Than San Gennaro, or thy Dennis, France; Or English George!--Read History.[J]-- When the crowd Were gone, I slipp'd some coins into the hand Of a grave-visaged Priest, who took his stand Beside the Bier, and bade him lift the shroud; And there I paused, and gazed upon the all The Worm had spared to Raphael.--He had died, As sang the Alfieri of our land, In the embrace of Beauty[K]--beautiful Himself as Cynthia's lover!--That, the skull Once pillow'd on soft bosoms, which still rise With pa.s.sionate life, in canvas;--in the void Of those blank sockets shone the starry eyes, That, _like_ the stars, found home in heaven! The pall With its dark hues, gave forth, in gleaming white, The delicate bones; for still an undestroy'd Beauty, amidst decay, appear'd to dwell About the mournful relics; and the light, In crownlike halo, lovingly did fall On the broad brow,--the hush'd and ruin'd cell Of the old Art--Nature's sweet Oracle!

Believe or not, no horror seem'd to wrap What has most horror for our life--the Dead: The sleep slept soft, as in a mother's lap, As if the Genius of the Grecian Death, That with a kiss inhaled the parting breath, That, wing'd for Heaven, stood by the charnel porch, Lowering, with looks of love, th' extinguish'd torch, Had taken watch beside the narrow bed; And from the wrecks of the beloved clay Had scared, with guardian eyes, each ghastlier shape away!

Come, Moralist, with truths of tritest worth, And tell us how "to this complexion" all That beautify the melancholy earth "Must come at last!" The little and the low, The mob of common men, rejoice to know How the grave levels with themselves the great: For something in the envy of the small Still loves the vast Democracy of Death!

But flatter not yourselves--in death the fate Of Genius still divides itself from yours: Yea, ev'n upon the earth! For Genius lives Not in your life--it does not breathe your breath, It does not share your charnels;--but insures In death itself the life that life survives!

Genius to you what most you value gave, The noisy forum and the glittering mart, The solid goods and mammon of the world, In _these_ your life--and _these_ with life depart!

Grudge not what Genius to itself shall claim-- A life that lived but in the dreams of Art, A world whose suns.h.i.+ne was the smile from Fame.

These die not, Moralist, when all are hurl'd, Fasces and sceptre, in the common grave:-- Genius, in life or death, is still the same-- Death but makes deathless what Life ask'd--THE NAME.

[J] Gibbon, after a powerful sketch of the fraud, the corruption, and the vices of George the Cappadocian, thus concludes:--"The odious stranger, disguising every circ.u.mstance of time and place, a.s.sumed the mask of a martyr, a saint, and a Christian hero; and the infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the renowned St. George of England, the patron of arms, of chivalry, and the garter."--_Gibbon's Decline and Fall_, vol.

iv. c. xxiii.

[K] "Italian Beauty! didst thou not inspire Raphael, who died in thy embrace?"--BYRON.

THE ATHENIAN AND THE SPARTAN.

A DIALOGUE.

THE ATHENIAN.

Stern Prisoner in thy rites of old, To Learning blind, to Beauty cold,-- Never for thee, with garlands crown'd, The lyre and myrtle circle round; Dull to the Lesbian ruby's froth, Thou revellest in thy verjuice broth.

With Phidian art our temples s.h.i.+ne, Like mansions meet for G.o.ds divine; Thou think'st _thy_ G.o.ds despise such toys, And shrines are made--for scourging boys, As triflers, thou canst only see The Drama's Kings--our glorious Three.

No Plato fires your youth to thinking, Your n.o.bler school,--in Helots drinking!

Contented as your sires before-- The Little makes ye loathe The More.

We, ever pus.h.i.+ng forward, still Take power, where powerless, from the will; We, ever straining at the All, With hands that grasp when feet may fall,[L]-- Earth, ocean,--near and far,--we roam, Where Fame, where Fortune,--there a home!

You hold all progress degradation, Improvement but degeneration, And only wear your scarlet coat When self-defence must cut a throat.

Yet ev'n in war, your only calling, A snail would beat your best at crawling; We slew the Mede at Marathon, While you were gazing at the moon![M]

Pshaw, man, lay by these antique graces, True wisdom hates such solemn faces!

Spartans, if only livelier fellows, Would make ev'n US a little jealous!