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Life of Lord ByronBy John
GaltBeing the first volume of the National
Library. 12mo.
We are loth to begin our reviews with a hostile article: if
There is no fool so great, says
Here is a book upon the eternal and now tiresome subject of Literary Gazette
Our opinion of the amount of gentle dulness loving a joke,
”
were too much for us. When
The
But we shall not say all this without a favourable specimen or two as the
reviewers call it, and which, to save us the trouble of cutting up our copy (which is a daring
action, and to be paid for) we shall quote from the laudatory pages of The following admirable
delineation of genius,
” (says shews the true feeling with which the author enters on his task.” This is a
very new and true style of criticism, and the reader will doubtless congratulate himself on
the new light Mr Galt has thrown on the subject.
“Genius of every kind belongs to some
” innate temperament; it does not necessarily imply a particular bent, because that
may possibly be the effect of circumstances; but without question, the peculiar quality is
inborn, and particular to the individual. All hear and see much
alike; but there is an undefinable though wide difference between the ear of the musician,
or the eye of the painter, compared with the hearing and seeing organs of ordinary men; and
it is in something like that difference in which genius consists.
Genius is, however, an ingredient of mind more easily described by its effects than by its
qualities. It is as the fragrance,
independent of the freshness and complexion of the rose; as the light on
the cloud; as the bloom on the cheek of the beauty, of which the possessor is
unconscious until the charm has been seen by its influence on others; it is the internal
golden flame of the opal; a something which may be
abstracted from the thing in which it appears, without changing the quality of its
substance, its form, or its affinities.
It is thus blunders round
about a meaning,
” and leaves his poor reader either gasping for information, or
taking himself for as wise a man in his non-perceptions as the author.
“How just again,
” quoth the admiring are the remarks as to influence of scenery!
” (He here quotes a
ridiculous assertion of Mr Galt, that the inspiration arising from scenery is entirely
dependant on “tradition” and “local associations,” and then proceeds
with his extract:)—
“There is not more poesy in the sight
of mountains than of plains; it is the local associations that throw enchantment over all
scenes, and resemblance that awakens them, binding them to new connections: nor does this admit
of much controversy; for mountainous regions, however favourable to musical feeling, are but
little too poetical. The Welsh have no eminent bard, the Swiss have no
renown as poets; nor are the mountainous regions of Greece or of the
Appennines celebrated for poetry. The Highlands in Scotland, save the equivocal bastardy of forlorn in a foreign land.
’”
“Local associations,
” therefore, according to
were no poets; or if they were, it was because they did not live on the mountains but only
among them, or saw a great deal of them. Why who supposes that a man is bound to pace about on
a mountain, and write verses, before he can prove its inspiration? or that to see mountains,
and feel their grandeur, is not the one thing needful to associate them with poetical ideas?
It was with this understanding that What!
” said he,
“he who has never seen a mountain!
” He did not require him to have lived
on a mountain. A man may live on a mountain, and see no more of it than a fly does of a wall.
The question is, whether he has seen it, and been conscious of the might and dignity of its
presence.
In a succeeding quotation we find our author saying that
” and that in all the
thousands of lines which he has written upon the subject of love, there is “bodiless admiration of beauty,not
one
” which shews “a sexual feeling of female attraction.
” Oh
dull rogue! How our fair readers will smile at seeing this passage! Oh, how the noble author of
refined over the compliment!
This piece of absurdity reminds us that we are wasting our paper; but there is
one bit more, so exquisite in its kind, and so calculated to restore our readers from their
weariness, that we cannot omit it.
We much like the ensuing:—
“The supposition that poets must be dreamers, because
there is often much dreaminess in poesy, is a mere hypothesis. Of all the professors of
metaphysical discernment, poets require the finest tact, and
” contemplation is with them a sign of inward abstract
reflection, more than of any process of mind by which resemblance is traced, and
associations waked. There is no account of any great poet whose genius was of that cartilaginous kind which hath its being in
haze and draws its nourishment from lights and shadows; which ponders over the
mysteries of trees, and interprets the
Surely we have seen this writing somewhere in a Sunday paper, which it
threatened once to bear down. A genius of a “cartilaginous kind!
” and
“which hath its being in haze!
” We have heard of an old gentleman, who
was always using the word “mucilaginous;” and of another, a doctor, equally
addicted to the epithet “farinaceous.” These worthies, however, had some reason in
the application of their terms; but a cartilaginous author! a man with a turn for reflection
something neither bone nor ligament, “which hath its being in
haze;” and derives its nourishment, to wit, for the cartilage, from lights and shadows!
This it is to explain one mist by another; a thing not understood, by the
“no-meaning” for which these wits are famous. But this also is writing like men of
business, and supplying the market. O Thou, says
Perhaps we shall have something to say on the painful subject of