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Poetical Imitations And Similarities |
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Title: Poetical Imitations And Similarities Author: Isaac Disraeli [More Titles by Disraeli] Tantus amor florum, et generandi gloria mellis. Such rage of honey in our bosom beats,
This kind of literary amusement is not despicable: there are few men of letters who have not been in the habit of marking parallel passages, or tracing imitation, in the thousand shapes it assumes; it forms, it cultivates, it delights taste to observe by what dexterity and variation genius conceals, or modifies, an original thought or image, and to view the same sentiment, or expression, borrowed with art, or heightened by embellishment. The ingenious writer of "A Criticism on Gray's Elegy, in continuation of Dr. Johnson's," has given some observations on this subject, which will please. "It is often entertaining to trace imitation. To detect the adopted image; the copied design; the transferred sentiment; the appropriated phrase; and even the acquired manner and frame, under all the disguises that imitation, combination, and accommodation may have thrown around them, must require both parts and diligence; but it will bring with it no ordinary gratification. A book professedly on the 'History and Progress of Imitation in Poetry,' written by a man of perspicuity, an adept in the art of discerning likenesses, even when minute, with examples properly selected, and gradations duly marked, would make an impartial accession to the store of human literature, and furnish rational curiosity with a high regale." Let me premise that these notices (the wrecks of a large collection of passages I had once formed merely as exercises to form my taste) are not given with the petty malignant delight of detecting the unacknowledged imitations of our best writers, but merely to habituate the young student to an instructive amusement, and to exhibit that beautiful variety which the same image is capable of exhibiting when retouched with all the art of genius. Gray, in his "Ode to Spring," has
Gray, in the "Ode to Adversity," addresses the power thus, Thou tamer of the human breast,
Gray, in his "Ode to Adversity," has Light THEY DISPERSE, and with them go Fond of this image, he has it again in his "Bard," They SWARM, that in thy NOONTIDE BEAM are born, Perhaps the germ of this beautiful image may be found in Shakspeare:-- ---- for men, like BUTTERFLIES, And two similar passages in _Timon of Athens_:-- The swallow follows not summer more willingly than we your lordship. _Timon_. Nor more willingly leaves winter; such _summer birds_ are Again in the same, ----one cloud of winter showers
In climes beyond the SOLAR ROAD.
which he calls extremely bold and poetical. I confess a critic might be allowed to be somewhat fastidious in this unpoetical diction on the _high-way_, which I believe Dryden never used. I think his line was thus:-- Pope has expressed the image more elegantly, though copied from Dryden, Gray has in his "Bard," Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes, Gray himself points out the imitation in Shakspeare of the latter image; but it is curious to observe that Otway, in his _Venice Preserved_, makes Priuli most pathetically exclaim to his daughter, that she is
Gray tells us that the image of his "Bard," Loose his beard and hoary hair was taken from a picture of the Supreme Being by Raphael. It is, however, remarkable, and somewhat ludicrous, that the _beard_ of Hudibras is also compared to a _meteor_: and the accompanying observation of Butler almost induces one to think that Gray derived from it the whole plan of that sublime Ode--since his _Bard_ precisely performs what the _beard_ of Hudibras _denounced_. These are the verses:-- I have been asked if I am serious in my conjecture that "the _meteor beard_" of Hudibras might have given birth to the "_Bard_" of Gray? I reply, that the _burlesque_ and the _sublime_ are extremes, and extremes meet. How often does it merely depend on our own state of mind, and on our own taste, to consider the sublime as burlesque! A very vulgar, but acute genius, Thomas Paine, whom we may suppose destitute of all delicacy and refinement, has conveyed to us a notion of the _sublime_, as it is probably experienced by ordinary and uncultivated minds; and even by acute and judicious ones, who are destitute of imagination. He tells us that "the _sublime_ and the _ridiculous_ are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again." May I venture to illustrate this opinion? Would it not appear the ridiculous or burlesque to describe the sublime revolution of the _Earth_ on her axle, round the _Sun_, by comparing it with the action of a _top_ flogged by a boy? And yet some of the most exquisite lines in Milton do this; the poet only alluding in his mind to the _top_. The earth he describes, whether
Very similar to Gray's _Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air!_ Gray has been severely censured by Johnson for the expression, Give _ample room and verge enough_, On the authority of the most unpoetical of critics, we must still hear that the poet _has no line so bad_.--"_ample room_" is feeble, but would have passed unobserved in any other poem but in the poetry of Gray, who has taught us to admit nothing but what is exquisite. "_Verge enough_" is poetical, since it conveys a material image to the imagination. No one appears to have detected the source from whence, probably, the _whole line_ was derived. I am inclined to think it was from the following passage in Dryden: Gray in his Elegy has Even in our ashes live their wonted fires. This line is so obscure that it is difficult to apply it to what precedes it. Mason in his edition in vain attempts to derive it from a thought of Petrarch, and still more vainly attempts to amend it; Wakefield expends an octavo page to paraphrase this single verse. From the following lines of Chaucer, one would imagine Gray caught the recollected idea. The old Reve, in his prologue, says of himself, and of old men, Gray has a very expressive _word_, highly poetical, but I think not common:
Daniel has, as quoted in Cooper's Muses' Library, A line of Pope's, in his Dunciad, "High-born Howard," echoed in the ear of Gray, when he gave, with all the artifice of alliteration, Johnson bitterly censures Gray for giving to adjectives the termination of participles, such as the _cultured_ plain; the _daisied_ bank: but he solemnly adds, I was sorry to see in the line of a scholar like Gray, "the _honied_ spring." Had Johnson received but the faintest tincture of the rich Italian school of English poetry, he would never have formed so tasteless a criticism. _Honied_ is employed by Milton in more places than one.
The celebrated stanza in Gray's Elegy seems partly to be borrowed.
Pope had said: There kept by charms conceal'd from mortal eye, Young says of nature: In distant wilds by human eye _unseen_ And Shenstone has-- And like the _desert's lily_ bloom to fade!
Milton thus paints the evening sun:
In the Duenna we find this thought differently illustrated; by no means imitative, though the satire is congenial. Don Jerome alluding to the _serenaders_ says, "These amorous orgies that steal the senses in the _hearing_; as they say Egyptian embalmers serve mummies, _extracting the brain through the ears_." The wit is original, but the subject is the same in the three passages; the whole turning on the allusion to the _head_ and to the _ears_. When Pope composed the following lines on Fame,
The same thought may be found in Sir George Mackenzie's "Essay on preferring Solitude to public Employment," first published in 1665: Hudibras preceded it by two years. The thought is strongly expressed by the eloquent Mackenzie: "_Fame is a revenue payable only to our ghosts_; and to deny ourselves all present satisfaction, or to expose ourselves to so much hazard for this, were as great madness as to starve ourselves, or fight desperately for food, to be laid on our tombs after our death." Dryden, in his "Absalom and Achitophel," says of the Earl of Shaftesbury,
Howell has prefixed to his Letters a tedious poem, written in the taste of the times, and he there says of _letters_, that they are It is probable that Pope had noted this thought, for the following lines seem a beautiful heightening of the idea: Then he adds, they _Speed the soft intercourse_ from soul to soul, There is another passage in "Howell's Letters," which has a great affinity with a thought of Pope, who, in "the Rape of the Lock," says, Howell writes, p. 290, "'Tis a powerful sex:--they were too strong for the first, the strongest and wisest man that was; they must needs be strong, when _one hair of a woman can draw more than an hundred pair of oxen_." Pope's description of the death of the lamb, in his "Essay on Man," is finished with the nicest touches, and is one of the finest pictures our poetry exhibits. Even familiar as it is to our ear, we never examine it but with undiminished admiration. After pausing on the last two fine verses, will not the reader smile that I should conjecture the image might originally have been discovered in the following humble verses in a poem once considered not as contemptible:
I consider the following lines as strictly copied by Thomas Warton:
Sir Philip Sidney, in his "Defence of Poesie," has the same image. He writes, "Tragedy openeth the greatest _wounds_, and showeth forth the _ulcers_ that are _covered with tissue_." The same appropriation of thought will attach to the following lines of Tickell: En vain contre le Cid un ministre se ligue;
Doubtless at that moment echoed in his poetical ear the energetic and caustic epigram of Andrew Marvel, against Blood stealing the crown dressed in a parson's cassock, and sparing the life of the keeper: The following passages seem echoes to each other, and it is but justice due to Oldham, the satirist, to acknowledge him as the parent of this antithesis:
It seems evidently borrowed by Pope, when he applies the thought to Erasmus:-- Young remembered the antithesis when he said, Of some for _glory_ such the boundless rage, Voltaire, a great reader of Pope, seems to have borrowed part of the expression:-- De Caux, an old French poet, in one of his moral poems on an hour-glass, inserted in modern collections, has many ingenious thoughts. That this poem was read and admired by Goldsmith, the following beautiful image seems to indicate. De Caux, comparing the world to his hour-glass, says beautifully, Goldsmith applies the thought very happily-- Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
Thomson, in his pastoral story of Palemon and Lavinia, appears to have copied a passage from Otway. Palemon thus addresses Lavinia:-- Chamont employs the same image when speaking of Monimia; he says-- You took her up a _little tender flower_,
Thomson probably caught this strain of imagery: Sudden to heaven Gray, in repeating this imagery, has borrowed a remarkable epithet from Milton: Along the crisped shades and bowers Collins, in his Ode to _Fear_, whom he associates with _Danger_, there grandly personified, was I think considerably indebted to the following stanza of Spenser: Warm from its perusal, he seems to have seized it as a hint to the Ode to Fear, and in his "Passions" to have very finely copied an idea here: The stanza in Beattie's "Minstrel," first book, in which his "visionary boy," after "the storm of summer rain," views "the rainbow brighten to the setting sun," and runs to reach it: The same train of thought and imagery applied to the same subject, though the image itself be somewhat different, may be found in the poems of the platonic John Norris; a writer who has great originality of thought, and a highly poetical spirit. His stanza runs thus:
There is undoubtedly singular merit in this description. I shall contrast it with one which the French Virgil has written, in an age whose faith was stronger in ghosts than ours, yet which perhaps had less skill in describing them. There are some circumstances which seem to indicate that the author of the _Castle Spectre_ lighted his torch at the altar of the French muse. Athalia thus narrates her dream, in which the spectre of Jezabel, her mother, appears:
Goldsmith very pathetically applies a similar image: E'en now where Alpine solitudes ascend, Akenside illustrates the native impulse of genius by a simile of Memnon's marble statue, sounding its lyre at the touch of the sun:
In that sublime passage in "Pope's Essay on Man," Epist. i. v. 237, beginning, and proceeds to From nature's chain whatever link you strike, Pope seems to have caught the idea and image from Waller, whose last verse is as fine as any in the "Essay on Man:"-- It has been observed by Thyer, that Milton borrowed the expression _imbrowned_ and _brown_, which he applies to the evening shade, from the Italian. See Thyer's elegant note in B. iv., v. 246: And B. ix., v. 1086: ---- Where highest Woods impenetrable
The same observation may be made on two other poetical epithets. I shall notice the epithet "LAUGHING" applied to inanimate objects; and "PURPLE" to beautiful objects." The natives of Italy and the softer climates receive emotions from the view of their WATERS in the SPRING not equally experienced in the British roughness of our skies. The fluency and softness of the water are thus described by Lucretius:--
The roughest sea puts on smooth looks, and SMILES. Dryden more happily, The ocean SMILES, and smooths her wavy breast. But Metastasio has copied Lucretius:-- A te fioriscono It merits observation, that the _Northern Poets_ could not exalt their imagination higher than that the water SMILED, while the modern Italian, having before his eyes _a different Spring_, found no difficulty in agreeing with the ancients, that the waves LAUGHED. Modern poetry has made a very free use of the animating epithet LAUGHING. Gray has LAUGHING FLOWERS: and Langhorne in two beautiful lines personifies Flora:--
It is extremely difficult to conceive what the ancients precisely meant by the word _purpureus_. They seem to have designed by it anything BRIGHT and BEAUTIFUL. A classical friend has furnished me with numerous significations of this word which are very contradictory. Albinovanus, in his elegy on Livia, mentions _Nivem purpureum_. Catullus, _Quercus ramos purpureos_. Horace, _Purpureo bibet ore nectar_, and somewhere mentions _Olores purpureos_. Virgil has _Purpuream vomit ille animam_; and Homer calls the sea _purple_, and gives it in some other book the same epithet, when in a storm. The general idea, however, has been fondly adopted by the finest writers in Europe. The PURPLE of the ancients is not known to us. What idea, therefore, have the moderns affixed to it? Addison, in his Vision of the Temple of Fame, describes the country as "being covered with a kind of PURPLE LIGHT." Gray's beautiful line is well known:-- And Tasso, in describing his hero Godfrey, says, Heaven Gli empie d'onor la faccia, e vi riduce
Dryden has omitted the _purple light_ in his version, nor is it given by Pitt; but Dryden expresses the general idea by It is probable that Milton has given us his idea of what was meant by _this purple light_, when applied to the human countenance, in the felicitous expression of Gray appears to me to be indebted to Milton for a hint for the opening of his Elegy: as in the first line he had Dante and Milton in his mind, he perhaps might also in the following passage have recollected a congenial one in Comus, which he altered. Milton, describing the evening, marks it out by
The _lowing herd_ wind slowly o'er the lea, Warton has made an observation on this passage in Comus; and observes further that it is a _classical_ circumstance, but not a _natural_ one, in an _English landscape_, for our ploughmen quit their work at noon. I think, therefore, the imitation is still more evident; and as Warton observes, both Gray and Milton copied here from books, and not from life. There are three great poets who have given us a similar incident. Dryden introduces the highly finished picture of the _hare_ in his Annus Mirabilis:-- 132. Thomson paints the _stag_ in a similar situation:-- ----Fainting breathless toil Shakspeare exhibits the same object:-- The wretched animal heaved forth such _groans_,
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