章节正文
and in the hearts of the people they have their lives; and the
singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by society or by fame,
are forgotten. "The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth his
Poppy."
Had you been born some years earlier you would have been even as
these unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan--
verses retained only by Memory. You would have been but the
minstrel of your native valley: the wider world would not have
known you, nor you the world. Great thoughts of independence and
revolt would never have burned in you; indignation would not have
vexed you. Society would not have given and denied her caresses.
You would have been happy. Your songs would have lingered in all
"the circle of the summer hills;" and your scorn, your satire, your
narrative verse, would have been unwritten or unknown. To the world
what a loss! and what a gain to you! We should have possessed but a
few of your lyrics, as
When o'er the hill the eastern star
Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo;
And owsen frae the furrowed field,
Return sae dowf and wearie O!
How noble that is, how natural, how unconsciously Greek! You found,
oddly, in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse:
In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
Even Sappho's flame!
But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in
these strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day
[Greek text]? Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some
silent glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of
all that in your songs reminds us of the Poet's Corner in the
"Kirkcudbright Advertiser." We should not have read how
Phoebus, gilding the brow o' morning,
Banishes ilk darksome shade!
Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus,
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met--or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the
thrush would have been untaught in "the style of the Bird of
Paradise."
A quiet life of song, fallentis semita vitae, was not to be yours.
Fate otherwise decreed it. The touch of a lettered society, the
strife with the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride,
neglect and success, were needed to make your Genius what it was,
and to endow the world with "Tam o' Shanter," the "Jolly Beggars,"
and "Holy Willie's Prayer." Who can praise them too highly--who
admire in them too much the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the
unsurpassed energy and courage? So powerful, so commanding, is the
movement of that Beggars' Chorus, that, methinks, it unconsciously
echoed in the brain of our greatest living poet when he conceived
the "Vision of Sin." You shall judge for yourself. Recall:
Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets!
Here's to all the wandering train!
Here's our ragged bairns and callets!
One and all cry out, Amen!
A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty's a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected!
Churches built to please the priest!
Then read this:
Drink to lofty hopes that cool -
Visions of a perfect state:
Drink we, last, the public fool,
Frantic love and frantic hate.
* * *
Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance,
Hob and nob with brother Death!
Is not the movement the same, though the modern speaks a wilder
recklessness?
So in the best company we leave you, who were the life and soul of
so much company, good and bad. No poet, since the Psalmist of
Israel, ever gave the world more assurance of a man; none lived a
life more strenuous, engaged in an eternalconflict of the passions,
and by them overcome--"mighty and mightily fallen." When we think
of you, Byron seems, as Plato would have said, remote by one degree
from actual truth, and Musset by a degree more remote than Byron.
LETTER--To Lord Byron
My Lord,
(Do you remember how Leigh Hunt
Enraged you once by writing MY DEAR BYRON?)
Books have their fates,--as mortals have who punt,
And YOURS have entered on an age of iron.
Critics there be who think your satire blunt,
Your pathos, fudge; such perils must environ
Poets who in their time were quite the rage,
Though now there's not a soul to turn their page.
Yes, there is much dispute about your worth,
And much is said which you might like to know
By modern poets here upon the earth,
Where poets live, and love each other so;
And, in Elysium, it may move your mirth
To hear of bards that pitch your praises low,
Though there be some that for your credit stickle,
As--Glorious Mat,--and not inglorious Nichol.
(This kind of writing is my pet aversion,
I hate the slang, I hate the personalities,
I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dispersion,
Of every rhyme that in the singer's wallet is,
I hate it as you hated the EXCURSION,
But, while no man a hero to his valet is,
The hero's still the model; I indite
The kind of rhymes that Byron oft would write.)
There's a Swiss critic whom I cannot rhyme to,
One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim.
Of him there's much to say, if I had time to
Concern myself in any wise with HIM.
He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb to,
He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's whim,
A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt on
Shakespeare, and Moliere, and you, and Milton.
Ay, much his temper is like Vivien's mood,
Which found not Galahad pure, nor Lancelot brave;
Cold as a hailstorm on an April wood,
He buries poets in an icy grave,
His Essays--he of the Genevan hood!
Nothing so fine, but better doth he crave.
So stupid and so solemn in his spite
He dares to print that Moliere could not write!
Enough of these excursions; I was saying
That half our English Bards are turned Reviewers,
And Arnold was discussing and assaying
The weight and value of that work of yours,
Examining and testing it and weighing,
And proved, the gems are pure, the gold endures.
While Swinburne cries with an exceeding joy,
The stones are paste, and half the gold, alloy.
In Byron, Arnold finds the greatest force,
Poetic, in this later age of ours;
His song, a torrent from a mountain source,
Clear as the crystal, singing with the showers,
Sweeps to the sea in unrestricted course
Through banks o'erhung with rocks and sweet with flowers;
None of your brooks that modestly" target="_blank" title="ad.谦虚地；有节制地">modestly meander,
But swift as Awe along the Pass of Brander.
And when our century has clomb its crest,
And backward gazes o'er the plains of Time,
And counts its harvest, yours is still the best,
The richest garner in the field of rhyme
(The metaphoric mixture, 'tis comfest,
Is all my own, and is not quite sublime).
But fame's not yours alone; you must divide all
The plums and pudding with the Bard of Rydal!
WORDSWORTH and BYRON, these the lordly names
And these the gods to whom most incense burns.
"Absurd!" cries Swinburne, and in anger flames,
And in an AEschylean fury spurns
With impious foot your altar, and exclaims
And wreathes his laurels on the golden urns
Where Coleridge's and Shelley's ashes lie,
Deaf to the din and heedless of the cry.
For Byron (Swinburne shouts) has never woven
One honest thread of life within his song;
As Offenbach is to divine Beethoven
So Byron is to Shelley (THIS is strong!),
And on Parnassus' peak, divinely cloven,
He may not stand, or stands by cruel wrong;
For Byron's rank (the examiner has reckoned)
Is in the third class or a feeble second.
"A Bernesque poet" at the very most,
And "never earnest save in politics,"
The Pegasus that he was wont to boast
A blundering, floundering hackney, full of tricks,
A beast that must be driven to the post
By whips and spurs and oaths and kicks and sticks,
A gasping, ranting, broken-winded brute,
That any judge of Pegasi would shoot;
In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far gone
In spavin, curb, and half a hundred woes.
And Byron's style is "jolter-headed jargon;"
His verse is "only bearable in prose."
So living poets write of those that ARE gone,
And o'er the Eagle thus the Bantam crows;
And Swinburne ends where Verisopht began,
By owning you "a very clever man."
Or rather does not end: he still must utter
A quantity of the unkindest things.
Ah! were you here, I marvel, would you flutter
O'er such a foe the tempest of your wings?
'Tis "rant and cant and glare and splash and splutter"
That rend the modest air when Byron sings.
There Swinburne stops: a critic rather fiery.
Animis caelestibus tantaene irae?
But whether he or Arnold in the right is,
Long is the argument, the quarrel long;
Non nobis est to settle tantas lites;
No poet I, to judge of right or wrong:
But of all things I always think a fight is
The MOST unpleasant in the lists of song;
When Marsyas of old was flayed, Apollo
Set an example which we need not follow.
The fashion changes! Maidens do not wear,
As once they wore, in necklaces and lockets
A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron's hair;
"Don Juan" is not always in our pockets -
Nay, a New Writer's readers do not care
Much for your verse, but are inclined to mock its
Manners and morals. Ay, and most young ladies
To yours prefer the "Epic" called "of Hades"!
I do not blame them; I'm inclined to think
singers, after a life obscure and untroubled by society or by fame,
are forgotten. "The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth his
Poppy."
Had you been born some years earlier you would have been even as
these unnamed Immortals, leaving great verses to a little clan--
verses retained only by Memory. You would have been but the
minstrel of your native valley: the wider world would not have
known you, nor you the world. Great thoughts of independence and
revolt would never have burned in you; indignation would not have
vexed you. Society would not have given and denied her caresses.
You would have been happy. Your songs would have lingered in all
"the circle of the summer hills;" and your scorn, your satire, your
narrative verse, would have been unwritten or unknown. To the world
what a loss! and what a gain to you! We should have possessed but a
few of your lyrics, as
When o'er the hill the eastern star
Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo;
And owsen frae the furrowed field,
Return sae dowf and wearie O!
How noble that is, how natural, how unconsciously Greek! You found,
oddly, in good Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse:
In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
Even Sappho's flame!
But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in
these strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day
[Greek text]? Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some
silent glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of
all that in your songs reminds us of the Poet's Corner in the
"Kirkcudbright Advertiser." We should not have read how
Phoebus, gilding the brow o' morning,
Banishes ilk darksome shade!
Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus,
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met--or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the
thrush would have been untaught in "the style of the Bird of
Paradise."
A quiet life of song, fallentis semita vitae, was not to be yours.
Fate otherwise decreed it. The touch of a lettered society, the
strife with the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride,
neglect and success, were needed to make your Genius what it was,
and to endow the world with "Tam o' Shanter," the "Jolly Beggars,"
and "Holy Willie's Prayer." Who can praise them too highly--who
admire in them too much the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the
unsurpassed energy and courage? So powerful, so commanding, is the
movement of that Beggars' Chorus, that, methinks, it unconsciously
echoed in the brain of our greatest living poet when he conceived
the "Vision of Sin." You shall judge for yourself. Recall:
Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets!
Here's to all the wandering train!
Here's our ragged bairns and callets!
One and all cry out, Amen!
A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty's a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected!
Churches built to please the priest!
Then read this:
Drink to lofty hopes that cool -
Visions of a perfect state:
Drink we, last, the public fool,
Frantic love and frantic hate.
* * *
Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance,
While we keep a little breath!
Drink to heavy Ignorance,
Hob and nob with brother Death!
Is not the movement the same, though the modern speaks a wilder
recklessness?
So in the best company we leave you, who were the life and soul of
so much company, good and bad. No poet, since the Psalmist of
Israel, ever gave the world more assurance of a man; none lived a
life more strenuous, engaged in an eternalconflict of the passions,
and by them overcome--"mighty and mightily fallen." When we think
of you, Byron seems, as Plato would have said, remote by one degree
from actual truth, and Musset by a degree more remote than Byron.
LETTER--To Lord Byron
My Lord,
(Do you remember how Leigh Hunt
Enraged you once by writing MY DEAR BYRON?)
Books have their fates,--as mortals have who punt,
And YOURS have entered on an age of iron.
Critics there be who think your satire blunt,
Your pathos, fudge; such perils must environ
Poets who in their time were quite the rage,
Though now there's not a soul to turn their page.
Yes, there is much dispute about your worth,
And much is said which you might like to know
By modern poets here upon the earth,
Where poets live, and love each other so;
And, in Elysium, it may move your mirth
To hear of bards that pitch your praises low,
Though there be some that for your credit stickle,
As--Glorious Mat,--and not inglorious Nichol.
(This kind of writing is my pet aversion,
I hate the slang, I hate the personalities,
I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dispersion,
Of every rhyme that in the singer's wallet is,
I hate it as you hated the EXCURSION,
But, while no man a hero to his valet is,
The hero's still the model; I indite
The kind of rhymes that Byron oft would write.)
There's a Swiss critic whom I cannot rhyme to,
One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim.
Of him there's much to say, if I had time to
Concern myself in any wise with HIM.
He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb to,
He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's whim,
A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt on
Shakespeare, and Moliere, and you, and Milton.
Ay, much his temper is like Vivien's mood,
Which found not Galahad pure, nor Lancelot brave;
Cold as a hailstorm on an April wood,
He buries poets in an icy grave,
His Essays--he of the Genevan hood!
Nothing so fine, but better doth he crave.
So stupid and so solemn in his spite
He dares to print that Moliere could not write!
Enough of these excursions; I was saying
That half our English Bards are turned Reviewers,
And Arnold was discussing and assaying
The weight and value of that work of yours,
Examining and testing it and weighing,
And proved, the gems are pure, the gold endures.
While Swinburne cries with an exceeding joy,
The stones are paste, and half the gold, alloy.
In Byron, Arnold finds the greatest force,
Poetic, in this later age of ours;
His song, a torrent from a mountain source,
Clear as the crystal, singing with the showers,
Sweeps to the sea in unrestricted course
Through banks o'erhung with rocks and sweet with flowers;
None of your brooks that modestly" target="_blank" title="ad.谦虚地；有节制地">modestly meander,
But swift as Awe along the Pass of Brander.
And when our century has clomb its crest,
And backward gazes o'er the plains of Time,
And counts its harvest, yours is still the best,
The richest garner in the field of rhyme
(The metaphoric mixture, 'tis comfest,
Is all my own, and is not quite sublime).
But fame's not yours alone; you must divide all
The plums and pudding with the Bard of Rydal!
WORDSWORTH and BYRON, these the lordly names
And these the gods to whom most incense burns.
"Absurd!" cries Swinburne, and in anger flames,
And in an AEschylean fury spurns
With impious foot your altar, and exclaims
And wreathes his laurels on the golden urns
Where Coleridge's and Shelley's ashes lie,
Deaf to the din and heedless of the cry.
For Byron (Swinburne shouts) has never woven
One honest thread of life within his song;
As Offenbach is to divine Beethoven
So Byron is to Shelley (THIS is strong!),
And on Parnassus' peak, divinely cloven,
He may not stand, or stands by cruel wrong;
For Byron's rank (the examiner has reckoned)
Is in the third class or a feeble second.
"A Bernesque poet" at the very most,
And "never earnest save in politics,"
The Pegasus that he was wont to boast
A blundering, floundering hackney, full of tricks,
A beast that must be driven to the post
By whips and spurs and oaths and kicks and sticks,
A gasping, ranting, broken-winded brute,
That any judge of Pegasi would shoot;
In sooth, a half-bred Pegasus, and far gone
In spavin, curb, and half a hundred woes.
And Byron's style is "jolter-headed jargon;"
His verse is "only bearable in prose."
So living poets write of those that ARE gone,
And o'er the Eagle thus the Bantam crows;
And Swinburne ends where Verisopht began,
By owning you "a very clever man."
Or rather does not end: he still must utter
A quantity of the unkindest things.
Ah! were you here, I marvel, would you flutter
O'er such a foe the tempest of your wings?
'Tis "rant and cant and glare and splash and splutter"
That rend the modest air when Byron sings.
There Swinburne stops: a critic rather fiery.
Animis caelestibus tantaene irae?
But whether he or Arnold in the right is,
Long is the argument, the quarrel long;
Non nobis est to settle tantas lites;
No poet I, to judge of right or wrong:
But of all things I always think a fight is
The MOST unpleasant in the lists of song;
When Marsyas of old was flayed, Apollo
Set an example which we need not follow.
The fashion changes! Maidens do not wear,
As once they wore, in necklaces and lockets
A curl ambrosial of Lord Byron's hair;
"Don Juan" is not always in our pockets -
Nay, a New Writer's readers do not care
Much for your verse, but are inclined to mock its
Manners and morals. Ay, and most young ladies
To yours prefer the "Epic" called "of Hades"!
I do not blame them; I'm inclined to think
- valley [´væli]
n.谷；河谷；流域 (初中英语单词) - independence [,indi´pendəns] n.独立，自主，自立 (初中英语单词)
- circle [´sə:kəl] n.圆圈 v.环绕；盘旋 (初中英语单词)
- remind [ri´maind] vt.提醒；使记(想)起 (初中英语单词)
- otherwise [´ʌðəwaiz] ad.另外 conj.否则 (初中英语单词)
- poverty [´pɔvəti] n.贫穷(乏，瘠)；不足 (初中英语单词)
- genius [´dʒi:niəs] n.天才(人物)；天赋 (初中英语单词)
- humour [´hju:mə] n.幽默，诙谐 (初中英语单词)
- wisdom [´wizdəm] n.智慧，聪明，才智 (初中英语单词)
- energy [´enədʒi] n.活力，精力；能力 (初中英语单词)
- chorus [´kɔ:rəs] n.合唱；齐声 v.合唱 (初中英语单词)
- glorious [´glɔ:riəs] a.光荣的；辉煌的 (初中英语单词)
- movement [´mu:vmənt] n.活动；运动；动作 (初中英语单词)
- eternal [i´tə:nəl] a.永远的；永恒的 (初中英语单词)
- conflict [´kɔnflikt, kən´flikt] n.&vi.战斗；抵触 (初中英语单词)
- remote [ri´məut] a.遥远的；偏僻的 (初中英语单词)
- actual [´æktʃuəl] a.现实的；实际的 (初中英语单词)
- writing [´raitiŋ] n.书写；写作；书法 (初中英语单词)
- dispute [di´spju:t] v.&n.争论，辩论；争吵 (初中英语单词)
- aimless [´eimlis] a.没有目标；无目的的 (初中英语单词)
- critic [´kritik] n.批评家；吹毛求疵者 (初中英语单词)
- poetry [´pəuitri] n.诗；诗意 (初中英语单词)
- temper [´tempə] n.韧度 v.锻炼；调和 (初中英语单词)
- stupid [´stju:pid] a.愚蠢的；糊涂的 (初中英语单词)
- solemn [´sɔləm] a.严肃的；隆重的 (初中英语单词)
- crystal [´kristəl] n.水晶 a.水晶的 (初中英语单词)
- backward [´bækwəd] ad.向后 a.向后的 (初中英语单词)
- harvest [´hɑ:vist] n.&v.收获；收割 (初中英语单词)
- mixture [´mikstʃə] n.混合；混合比；混合物 (初中英语单词)
- divine [di´vain] a.神圣的 v.预言 (初中英语单词)
- feeble [´fi:bəl] a.虚弱的，无力的 (初中英语单词)
- earnest [´ə:nist] a.认真的 n.认真；诚恳 (初中英语单词)
- driven [´driv(ə)n] drive 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- marvel [´mɑ:vəl] n.令人惊异的事；奇迹 (初中英语单词)
- splash [splæʃ] v.&n.溅水声；涉水而进 (初中英语单词)
- modest [´mɔdist] a.谦虚的；朴素的 (初中英语单词)
- argument [´ɑ:gjumənt] n.辩论；争论；论证 (初中英语单词)
- indignation [,indig´neiʃən] n.愤慨；气愤 (高中英语单词)
- discontent [´diskən´tent] n.&a.不满(平)(的) (高中英语单词)
- methinks [mi´θiŋks] vi.据我看来 (高中英语单词)
- ragged [´rægid] a.衣服破烂的 (高中英语单词)
- frantic [´fræntik] a.发狂的；急忙的 (高中英语单词)
- assurance [ə´ʃuərəns] n.保证；自信；信任 (高中英语单词)
- reckless [´rekləs] a.不注意的；鲁莽的 (高中英语单词)
- torrent [´tɔrənt] n.奔流，激流，洪流；迸发 (高中英语单词)
- pudding [´pudiŋ] n.布丁 (高中英语单词)
- incense [´insens, in´sens] n.香(气) vt.激怒 (高中英语单词)
- tempest [´tempist] n.暴风雨 (高中英语单词)
- unpleasant [ʌn´plezənt] a.不愉快的；不合意的 (高中英语单词)
- blindly [blaindli] ad.盲目地；没头脑地 (英语四级单词)
- satire [´sætaiə] n.讽刺；讽刺作品 (英语四级单词)
- unconsciously [ʌn´kɔʃəsli] ad.无意识地；不觉察地 (英语四级单词)
- pastoral [´pɑ:stərəl] a.牧(羊)人的 n.田园诗 (英语四级单词)
- strenuous [´strenjuəs] a.费力的；奋发的 (英语四级单词)
- loathe [ləuð] vt.厌恶，嫌恶 (英语四级单词)
- wallet [´wɑ:lit] n.(放钞票等的)皮夹子 (英语四级单词)
- exceeding [ik´si:diŋ] a.超越的，非常的 (英语四级单词)
- heedless [´hi:dlis] a.不注意的，不留心的 (英语四级单词)
- iniquity [i´nikwiti] n.不公正；邪恶 (英语六级单词)
- oblivion [ə´bliviən] n.(被)忘却；漠视 (英语六级单词)
- modestly [´mɔdistli] ad.谦虚地；有节制地 (英语六级单词)
- garner [´gɑ:nə] v.收藏；取得 (英语六级单词)
- lordly [´lɔ:dli] a.高贵的；高傲的 (英语六级单词)
- impious [´impiəs] a.不敬的；不孝的 (英语六级单词)
- examiner [ig´zæminə] n.审查者；主考者 (英语六级单词)
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章节正文
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