“I have been scandalously lazy in answering your kind epistle, received I don’t know how long since; but then I had been long your creditor, and I fancy correspondents, like merchants, are often glad to plead their friends’ neglect of their accompt-current as an apology for their own, especially when they know that the value of the payments being adjusted, must leave a sad balance against them. I have run up an attempt on the Curse of Kehama for the Quarterly; a strange thing it is—the Curse, I mean—and the critique is not, as the blackguards say, worth a damn; but what I could I did, which was to throw as much weight as possible upon the beautiful passages, of which there are many, and to slur over the absurdities, of which there are not a few. It is infinite pity of Southey, with genius almost to exuberance, so much learning and real good feeling of poetry, that, with the true obstinacy of a foolish papa, he will be most attached to the defects of his poetical offspring. This said Kehama affords cruel openings for the quizzers, and I suppose will get it roundly in the Edinburgh Review. I would have made a very different hand of it indeed, had the order of the day been pour déchirer.*
“I told you how much I was delighted with your critique on the Lady; but, very likely moved by the same
* See this article in his Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. xvii. pp. 301—337. |
| THE LADY OF THE LAKE. | 303 |
‘Achilles’ wrath to
Greece, the direful spring Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess sing, That wrath which sent to Pluto’s gloomy
reign The souls of mighty chiefs in battle slain, Whose bones unburied on the desert shore, Devouring dogs and hungry vultures
tore.’ |
“Now, since it is true that by throwing out the
epithets underscored, we preserve the sense without diminishing the force of
the verses—and since it is also true that scarcely one of the epithets are more
than merely expletive—I do really think that the structure of verse which
requires least of this sort of bolstering, is most likely to be forcible and
animated. The case is different in descriptive poetry, because there epithets,
if they are happily selected, are rather to be sought after than avoided, and
admit of being varied ad infinitum. But if in narrative you are frequently
compelled to tag your substantives with adjectives, it must frequently happen
that you are forced upon those that are merely commonplaces, such as ‘heavenly goddess,’ ‘desert shore,’ and so forth; and I need not tell you, that
whenever any syllable is obviously inserted for the completion of a couplet,
the reader is disposed to quarrel with it. Be-
| 304 | LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. |
