Bentley, one of a number of distinguished men Pope in the blindness of rage or envy had placed in his pillory— "The mighty Scholiast, whose unweary'd pains Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.” 1 In its new form the Dunciad gained the final and most generally admired passage, which concludes— "Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall, And universal Darkness buries All ”— a passage, it is said, the author could not read without betraying emotion, but in respect of the general plan Pope's second thought was unfortunate. No decay of power is visible in the Dunciad, rather it is the decay of character. Never able to control his malice, Pope disturbed a hive of enemies, their petty stings enraged him still further, and he grew more spiteful with the years. This satire, instead of ridding him of his foes, added to their number, fury, and pertinacity, and the delights of revenge brought him small compensation for the counter assaults it provoked. More than this, a life-long preoccupation with personal animosities injured his art, which suffered in judgment and breadth. "The great fault of the 'Dunciad," said Warton, "is the excessive vehemence of the satire.” No satire, however, fails from this cause. The victims of Pope's dislike are "monster-breeding," "blockheads," "coxcombs," "fools," "asses," "industrious bugs," "vaticides," "monkeymimics," "blind puppies," "low-born," "cell-bred," "owls," "wolves," "zanies." But the violence of the abuse is a minor defect only. The only reason, but a good one, that it now finds no readers-for who but the student now reads the Dunciad ?-is to be sought elsewhere. It is steeped in interests purely local and temporary, it deals not in universals but in particulars, scores of particulars about Ozell and Ridpath, Eusden and Settle, Mears, Warner, Wilkins, Tutchin, Roper, Osborne, Welsted, Dunton, Arnall, Ralph, Concanen—is there 1 Perhaps Bentley was not undeserving of the censure. "The world," as De Quincey said, "never before beheld such a scene of massacre as his Paradise Lost exhibited. . . . The carnage was like that after a pitched battle." any need to extend the list of never-famous, now forgotten names? It may be argued and fairly argued that, its form apart, the subject-matter of a poem should, if translated into another language, retain a general and human interest. We need not inquire whether to a Frenchman or an Italian this chronicle of Grub Street can afford entertainment; it provides even for English readers little but instruction, with the help of the notes, in the life of the eighteenth-century literary slums. Pope wrote to suit the taste of his age; well, so did Shakespeare! A complete survey of English mock-heroic poetry might be treated in a volume; a chapter could hardly do more than enumerate the names of authors who in some form attempted it, either for purposes of satire or pleasantry. The eighteenth century alone is strewn with Scribleriads, Hilliads, Battiads, Fribleriads. But the task of writing the history of tame genius, of the would-be Popes and Butlers, may well be postponed to that age foreseen by the goddess in the Dunciad, when "This fav'rite Isle, long sever'd from her reign, CHAPTER XIII NARRATIVE POETRY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY-SCOTT, SOUTHEY, BYRON UNLIKE its predecessor the nineteenth century in England made no attempt to comply with the requirements of formal epic. Possibly no attempt to comply with them will ever again be made. Have we not witnessed the triumph of what some call individualism and some caprice? In the century just closed romance was preferred; freer modes in art accompanied the freer modes of thought; it was discovered and preached that the only "laws of poetry were those imposed by the nature of the subject chosen. What these were none knew, indeed, and few cared to inquire; the most competent judge-how could one doubt?—was the author himself. So far, however, from becoming an extinct species-though a serious rival, the novel, the "comic epic poem in prose," as defined by Fielding, had arisen-narrative poetry flourished in the nineteenth century as never before. But in what varied and bewildering forms! Recall the florid graces of Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini, the mystic charm of The Ancient Mariner, the sensuous music of The Eve of St. Agnes, the Oriental embroideries of Lalla Rookh, the austere pathos of Wordsworth's Michael, the humours and amours of Byron's Beppo and Parisina; recall Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Landor's Gebir, Southey's Thalaba, Tennyson's Enoch Arden and Idylls of the King, Browning's The Ring and the Book, Morris's Earthly Paradise, Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, Clough's Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich-to select a few names from the imposing series-and we perceive that no poet of any eminence forbore to essay the novel in verse, that the whole world was scoured for plot and pattern, all types and modes of narrative explored. Manifestly if narrative poetry were epic poetry, the nineteenth century was the great age of epic. But as manifestly, however, make your definition as generous as you please, few if any of these stories in verse will fall within it. Is it possible to propose a clue by means of which this labyrinth may be traversed? Distinguish and divide we may, but frankly it is not possible. Type merges into type, classical forms melt into romantic to produce a confused panorama of scenes, characters, actions, where the distinctions that prevailed prevail no longer, where the old designations fail us. We have reached the ocean where all tributary streams and rivers are lost. At length, then, it seems we are about to reap the fruits of the folly censured by Croce, the folly of attempting to distinguish among works of art by a system of classification. Our main category has broken down; epic, if the word be any longer employed, is bereft of meaning. We have struggled to preserve it, but the attempt must at last, to all appearance, be abandoned. What then remains? Two courses seem open-either to close the survey by the declaration that the term is outworn and must be cast aside, that a category once useful is useful no longer, by the simple admission that epic poetry, even what proposes to be epic poetry, is no longer written; or confessing, as we have already had to confess, that we overstep the proper limits of the subject, so throw our net as to bring within consideration certain of the larger and more ambitious narratives, such as both represent the class to which they rightly belong, and at the same time by their structure, their breadth and scope, recall in some degree the features of the older poetry cast in the traditional epic form. We may attempt-and this is the course proposed to test these modern narratives, as suggested in a previous chapter, by the quality of impressiveness, distinguishing greatness from that which is less great; we may say that for our purposes any narrative poetry, if it be sufficiently impressive, here claims consideration. One is tempted, indeed, to stray from the immediate inquiry and to ask with Arnold 1 whether poetry, such narrative poetry, for example, as the nineteenth century produced, has not, after all, "its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws," whether 1 Preface to First Edition of Poems (1853). success has in any large measure attended upon the departures from the formal tradition; whether, too, the selection of subjects, where instead of action and the conduct of the action, the presentation of " a continued state of mental distress," occupies and absorbs the poet, does not in the end lead to a period of poetic exhaustion and depression. Arnold held that where "everything is endured, nothing done," where expression is exalted above the situation which calls for expression, the prospects of poetry are not bright, that the only remedy lies in turning resolutely once more to the large and noble themes and the presentation of such themes with the Greek regard for simplicity and grandeur of design. Take what side you prefer in such a debate, the infirmity of narrative poetry in the last century-who can be unaware of it?-is the infirmity which springs from the insistent, overwhelming presence of the artist in his work. Whether we take Byron or Keats, Tennyson or Browning, the reader never escapes the poet, who everywhere thrusts himself in. But to be constantly reminded of the author is to forget his theme. What, then, some one asks, do you wish? I wish to be left uninterruptedly with the action, the situations, the characters, that I may ponder them for the sake of their own significance, their inherent interest and quality, their immediate and native power. In The Prisoner of Chillon, "a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistence," "everything is to be endured, nothing to be done." We are imprisoned with the prisoner's emotion. When we recall Isabella it is to recall chiefly accessories and lovely lines "For them the Ceylon diver held his breath "And thou art distant in mortality." "all We have here " a poem which seems to exist for the sake of single lines and passages." In The Ring and the Book, made out of an Old Bailey story," as Carlyle said, “that might |