The Four Ages of Poetry (1820)
by Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)
Qui inter hæc nutriuntur non magis sapere possunt, quam bene olere qui in culinâ habitant. PETRONIUS.
¶1 ¡ì1 POETRY, like the world, may be said to have four ages, but in a different order: the first age of poetry being the age of iron; the second, of gold; the third, of silver; and the fourth, of brass.
¶2 ¡ì2 The first, or iron age of poetry, is that in which rude bards celebrate in rough numbers the exploits of ruder chiefs, in days when every man is a warrior, and when the great practical maxim of every form of society, "to keep what we have and to catch what we can," is not yet disguised under names of justice and forms of law, but is the naked motto of the naked sword, which is the only judge and jury in every question of meum and tuum. ¡ì3 In these days, the only three trades flourishing (besides that of priest which flourishes always) are those of king, thief, and beggar: the beggar being for the most part a king deject, and the thief a king expectant. ¡ì4 The first question asked of a stranger is, whether he is a beggar or a thief *: the stranger, in reply, usually assumes the first, and awaits a convenient opportunity to prove his claim to the second appellation.
* See the Odyssey, passim: and Thucydides, I. 5.
¶3 ¡ì5 The natural desire of every man to engross to himself as much power and property as he can acquire by any of the means which might makes right, is accompanied by the no less natural desire of making known to as many people as possible the extent to which he has been a winner in this universal game. ¡ì6 The successful warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief becomes a king: his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent of his possessions; and this organ he finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being first duly inspired by that of his liquor. ¡ì7 This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.
¶4 ¡ì8 Poetry is thus in its origin panegyrical. ¡ì9 The first rude songs of all nations appear to be a sort of brief historical notices, in a strain of tumid hyperbole, of the exploits and possessions of a few pre-eminent individuals. ¡ì10 They tell us how many battles such an one has fought, how many helmets he has cleft, how many breastplates he has pierced, how many widows he has made, how much land he has appropriated, how many houses he has demolished for other people, what a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds, and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the sons of Jupiter, but for whose everlasting songs the names of heroes would perish.
¶5 ¡ì11 This is the first stage of poetry before the invention of written letters. ¡ì12 The numerical modulation is at once useful as a help to memory, and pleasant to the ears of uncultured men, who are easily caught by sound: and from the exceeding flexibility of the yet unformed language, the poet does no violence to his ideas in subjecting them to the fetters of number. ¡ì13 The savage indeed lisps in numbers, and all rude and uncivilized people express themselves in the manner which we call poetical.
¶6 ¡ì14 The scenery by which he is surrounded, and the superstitions which are the creed of his age, form the poet's mind. ¡ì15 Rocks, mountains, seas, unsubdued forests, unnavigable rivers, surround him with forms of power and mystery, which ignorance and fear have peopled with spirits, under multifarious names of gods, goddesses, nymphs, genii, and dæmons. ¡ì16 Of all these personages marvellous tales are in existence: the nymphs are not indifferent to handsome young men, and the gentlemen-genii are much troubled and very troublesome with a propensity to be rude to pretty maidens: the bard therefore finds no difficulty in tracing the genealogy of his chief to any of the deities in his neighbourhood with whom the said chief may be most desirous of claiming relationship.
¶7 ¡ì17 In this pursuit, as in all others, some of course will attain a very marked pre-eminence; and these will be held in high honour, like Demodocus in the Odyssey, and will be consequently inflated with boundless vanity, like Thamyris in the Iliad. ¡ì18 Poets are as yet the only historians and chroniclers of their time, and the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age; and though this knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths, yet, such as it is, they have it to themselves. ¡ì19 They are observing and thinking, while others are robbing and fighting: and though their object be nothing more than to secure a share of the spoil, yet they accomplish this end by intellectual, not by physical, power: their success excites emulation to the attainment of intellectual eminence: thus they sharpen their own wits and awaken those of others, at the same time that they gratify vanity and amuse curiosity. ¡ì20 A skilful display of the little knowledge they have gains them credit for the possession of much more which they have not. ¡ì21 Their familiarity with the secret history of gods and genii obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of inspiration; thus they are not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators: delivering their oracles ex cathedr{^a}, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity: building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.
¶8 ¡ì22 The golden age of poetry finds its materials in the age of iron. ¡ì23 This age begins when poetry begins to be retrospective; when something like a more extended system of civil polity is established; when personal strength and courage avail less to the aggrandizing of their possessor and to the making and marring of kings and kingdoms, and are checked by organized bodies, social institutions, and hereditary successions. ¡ì24 Men also live more in the light of truth and within the interchange of observation; and thus perceive that the agency of gods and genii is not so frequent among themselves as, to judge from the songs and legends of the past time, it was among their ancestors. ¡ì25 From these two circumstances, really diminished personal power, and apparently diminished familiarity with gods and genii, they very easily and naturally deduce two conclusions: 1st, That men are degenerated, and 2nd, That they are less in favour with the gods. ¡ì26 The people of the petty states and colonies, which have now acquired stability and form, which owed their origin and first prosperity to the talents and courage of a single chief, magnify their founder through the mists of distance and tradition, and perceive him achieving wonders with a god or goddess always at his elbow. ¡ì27 They find his name and his exploits thus magnified and accompanied in their traditionary songs, which are their only memorials. ¡ì28 All that is said of him is in this character. ¡ì29 There is nothing to contradict it. ¡ì00 The man and his exploits and his tutelary deities are mixed and blended in one invariable association. ¡ì30 The marvellous too is very much like a snowball: it grows as it rolls downward, till the little nucleus of truth which began its descent from the summit is hidden in the accumulation of superinduced hyperbole.
¶9 ¡ì31 When tradition, thus adorned and exaggerated, has surrounded the founders of families and states with so much adventitious power and magnificence, there is no praise which a living poet can, without fear of being kicked for clumsy flattery, address to a living chief, that will not still leave the impression that the latter is not so great a man as his ancestors. ¡ì32 The man must in this case be praised through his ancestors. ¡ì33 Their greatness must be established, and he must be shown to be their worthy descendant. ¡ì34 All the people of a state are interested in the founder of their state. ¡ì35 All states that have harmonized into a common form of society, are interested in their respective founders. ¡ì36 All men are interested in their ancestors. ¡ì37 All men love to look back into the days that are past. ¡ì38 In these circumstances traditional national poetry is reconstructed and brought like chaos into order and form. ¡ì39 The interest is more universal: understanding is enlarged: passion still has scope and play: character is still various and strong: nature is still unsubdued and existing in all her beauty and magnificence, and men are not yet excluded from her observation by the magnitude of cities or the daily confinement of civic life: poetry is more an art: it requires greater skill in numbers, greater command of language, more extensive and various knowledge, and greater comprehensiveness of mind. ¡ì40 It still exists without rivals in any other department of literature; and even the arts, painting and sculpture certainly, and music probably, are comparatively rude and imperfect. ¡ì41 The whole field of intellect is its own. ¡ì42 It has no rivals in history, nor in philosophy, nor in science. ¡ì43 It is cultivated by the greatest intellects of the age, and listened to by all the rest. ¡ì44 This is the age of Homer, the golden age of poetry. ¡ì45 Poetry has now attained its perfection: it has attained the point which it cannot pass: genius therefore seeks new forms for the treatment of the same subjects: hence the lyric poetry of Pindar and Alcæus, and the tragic poetry of æschylus and Sophocles. ¡ì46 The favour of kings, the honour of the Olympic crown, the applause of present multitudes, all that can feed vanity and stimulate rivalry, await the successful cultivator of this art, till its forms become exhausted, and new rivals arise around it in new fields of literature, which gradually acquire more influence as, with the progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction: indeed the maturity of poetry may be considered the infancy of history. ¡ì47 The transition from Homer to Herodotus is scarcely more remarkable than that from Herodotus to Thucydides: in the gradual dereliction of fabulous incident and ornamented language, Herodotus is as much a poet in relation to Thucydides as Homer is in relation to Herodotus. ¡ì48 The history of Herodotus is half a poem: it was written while the whole field of literature yet belonged to the Muses, and the nine books of which it was composed were therefore of right, as well as of courtesy, superinscribed with their nine names.
¶10 ¡ì49 Speculations, too, and disputes, on the nature of man and of mind; on moral duties and on good and evil; on the animate and inanimate components of the visible world; begin to share attention with the eggs of Leda and the horns of Io, and to draw off from poetry a portion of its once undivided audience.
¶11 ¡ì50 Then comes the silver age, or the poetry of civilized life. ¡ì51 This poetry is of two kinds, imitative and original. ¡ì52 The imitative consists in recasting, and giving an exquisite polish to, the poetry of the age of gold: of this Virgil is the most obvious and striking example. ¡ì53 The original is chiefly comic, didactic, or satiric: as in Menander, Aristophanes, Horace, and Juvenal. ¡ì54 The poetry of this age is characterized by an exquisite and fastidious selection of words, and a laboured and somewhat monotonous harmony of expression: but its monotony consists in this, that experience having exhausted all the varieties of modulation, the civilized poetry selects the most beautiful, and prefers the repetition of these to ranging through the variety of all. ¡ì55 But the best expression being that into which the idea naturally falls, it requires the utmost labour and care so to reconcile the inflexibility of civilized language and the laboured polish of versification with the idea intended to be expressed, that sense may not appear to be sacrificed to sound. ¡ì56 Hence numerous efforts and rare success.
¶12 ¡ì57 This state of poetry is however a step towards its extinction. ¡ì58 Feeling and passion are best painted in, and roused by, ornamental and figurative language; but the reason and the understanding are best addressed in the simplest and most unvarnished phrase. ¡ì59 Pure reason and dispassionate truth would be perfectly ridiculous in verse, as we may judge by versifying one of Euclid's demonstrations. ¡ì60 This will be found true of all dispassionate reasoning whatever, and all reasoning that requires comprehensive views and enlarged combinations. ¡ì61 It is only the more tangible points of morality, those which command assent at once, those which have a mirror in every mind, and in which the severity of reason is warmed and rendered palatable by being mixed up with feeling and imagination, that are applicable even to what is called moral poetry: and as the sciences of morals and of mind advance towards perfection, as they become more enlarged and comprehensive in their views, as reason gains the ascendancy in them over imagination and feeling, poetry can no longer accompany them in their progress, but drops into the back ground, and leaves them to advance alone.
¶13 ¡ì62 Thus the empire of thought is withdrawn from poetry, as the empire of facts had been before. ¡ì63 In respect of the latter, the poet of the age of iron celebrates the achievements of his contemporaries; the poet of the age of gold celebrates the heroes of the age of iron; the poet of the age of silver re-casts the poems of the age of gold: we may here see how very slight a ray of historical truth is sufficient to dissipate all the illusions of poetry. ¡ì64 We know no more of the men than of the gods of the Iliad; no more of Achilles than we do of Thetis; no more of Hector and Andromache than we do of Vulcan and Venus: these belong altogether to poetry; history has no share in them: but Virgil knew better than to write an epic about Cæsar; he left him to Livy; and travelled out of the confines of truth and history into the old regions of poetry and fiction.
¶14 ¡ì65 Good sense and elegant learning, conveyed in polished and somewhat monotonous verse, are the perfection of the original and imitative poetry of civilized life. ¡ì66 Its range is limited, and when exhausted, nothing remains but the crambe repetita of common-place, which at length becomes thoroughly wearisome, even to the most indefatigable readers of the newest new nothings.
¶15 ¡ì67 It is now evident that poetry must either cease to be cultivated, or strike into a new path. ¡ì68 The poets of the age of gold have been imitated and repeated till no new imitation will attract notice: the limited range of ethical and didactic poetry is exhausted: the associations of daily life in an advanced state of society are of very dry, methodical, unpoetical matters-of-fact: but there is always a multitude of listless idlers, yawning for amusement, and gaping for novelty: and the poet makes it his glory to be foremost among their purveyors.
¶16 ¡ì69 Then comes the age of brass, which, by rejecting the polish and the learning of the age of silver, and taking a retrograde stride to the barbarisms and erude traditions of the age of iron, professes to return to nature and revive the age of gold. ¡ì70 This is the second childhood of poetry. ¡ì71 To the comprehensive energy of the Homeric Muse, which, by giving at once the grand outline of things, presented to the mind a vivid picture in one or two verses, inimitable alike in simplicity and magnificence, is substituted a verbose and minutely-detailed description of thoughts, passions, actions, persons, and things, in that loose rambling style of verse, which any one may write, stans pede in uno, at the rate of two hundred lines in an hour. ¡ì72 To this age may be referred all the poets who flourished in the decline of the Roman Empire. ¡ì73 The best specimen of it, though not the most generally known, is the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, which contains many passages of exceeding beauty in the midst of masses of amplification and repetition.
¶17 ¡ì74 The iron age of classical poetry may be called the bardic; the golden, the Homeric; the silver, the Virgilian; and the brass, the Nonnic.
¶18 ¡ì75 Modern poetry has also its four ages: but "it wears its rue with a difference."
¶19 ¡ì76 To the age of brass in the ancient world succeeded the dark
ages, in which the light of the Gospel began to spread over Europe, and in
which, by a mysterious and inscrutable dispensation, the darkness thickened
with the progress of the light. ¡ì77 The tribes that overran the Roman Empire
brought back the days of barbarism, but with this difference, that there were
many books in the world, many places in which they were preserved, and
occasionally some one by whom they were read, who indeed (if he escaped being
burned ¶20 ¡ì83 From these ingredients of the iron age of modern poetry,
dispersed in the rhymes of minstrels and the songs of the troubadours, arose
the golden age, in which the scattered materials were harmonized and blended
about the time of the revival of learning; but with this peculiar difference,
that Greek and Roman literature pervaded all the poetry of the golden age of
modern poetry, and hence resulted a heterogeneous compound of all ages and
nations in one picture; an infinite licence, which gave to the poet the free
range of the whole field of imagination and memory. ¡ì84 This was carried very
far by Ariosto, but farthest of all by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who
used time and locality merely because they could not do without them, because
every action must have its when and where: but they made no scruple of
deposing a Roman Emperor by an Italian Count, and sending him off in the
disguise of a French pilgrim to be shot with a blunderbuss by an English
archer. ¡ì85 This makes the old English drama very picturesque, at any rate,
in the variety of costume, and very diversified in action and character;
though it is a picture of nothing that ever was seen on earth except a
Venetian carnival.
¶21 ¡ì86 The greatest of English poets, Milton, may be said to stand
alone between the ages of gold and silver, combining the excellencies of both;
for with all the energy, and power, and freshness of the first, he united all
the studied and elaborate magnificence of the second.
¶22 ¡ì87 The silver age succeeded; beginning with Dryden, coming to
perfection with Pope, and ending with Goldsmith, Collins, and Gray.
¶23 ¡ì88 Cowper divested verse of its exquisite polish; he thought in
metre, but paid more attention to his thoughts than his verse. ¡ì89 It would
be difficult to draw the boundary of prose and blank verse between his letters
and his poetry.
¶24 ¡ì90 The silver age was the reign of authority; but authority now
began to be shaken, not only in poetry but in the whole sphere of its
dominion. ¡ì91 The contemporaries of Gray and Cowper were deep and elaborate
thinkers. ¡ì92 The subtle scepticism of Hume, the solemn irony of Gibbon, the
daring paradoxes of Rousseau, and the biting ridicule of Voltaire, directed
the energies of four extraordinary minds to shake every portion of the reign
of authority. ¡ì93 Enquity was roused, the activity of intellect was excited,
and poetry came in for its share of the general result. ¡ì94 The changes had
been rung on lovely maid and sylvan shade, summer heat and green retreat,
waving trees and sighing breeze, gentle swains and amorous pains, by
versifiers who took them on trust, as meaning something very soft and tender,
without much caring what: but with this general activity of intellect came a
necessity for even poets to appear to know something of what they professed to
talk of. ¡ì95 Thomson and Cowper looked at the trees and hills which so many
ingenious gentlemen had rhymed about so long without looking at them at all,
and the effect of the operation on poetry was like the discovery of a new
world. ¡ì96 Painting shared the influence, and the principles of picturesque
beauty were explored by adventurous essayists with indefatigable pertinacity.
¡ì97 The success which attended these experiments, and the pleasure which
resulted from them, had the usual effect of all new enthusiasms, that of
turning the heads of a few unfortunate persons, the patriarchs of the age of
brass, who, mistaking the prominent novelty for the all-important totality,
seem to have ratiocinated much in the following manner: "Poetical genius
is the finest of all things, and we feel that we have more of it than any one
ever had. ¡ì98 The way to bring it to perfection is to cultivate poetical
impressions exclusively. ¡ì99 Poetical impressions can be received only among
natural scenes: for all that is artificial is anti-poetical. ¡ì100 Society is
artificial, therefore we will live out of society. ¡ì101 The mountains are
natural, therefore we will live in the mountains. ¡ì102 There we shall be
shining models of purity and virtue, passing the whole day in the innocent and
amiable occupation of going up and down hill, receiving poetical impressions,
and communicating them in immortal verse to admiring generations." To
some such perversion of intellect we owe that egregious confraternity of
rhymesters, known by the name of the Lake Poets; who certainly did receive and
communicate to the world some of the most extraordinary poetical impressions
that ever were heard of, and ripened into models of public virtue, too
splendid to need illustration. ¡ì103 They wrote verses on a new principle; saw
rocks and rivers in a new light; and remaining studiously ignorant of history,
society, and human nature, cultivated the phantasy only at the expence of the
memory and the reason; and contrived, though they had retreated from the world
for the express purpose of seeing nature as she was, to see her only as she
was not, converting the land they lived in into a sort of fairy-land, which
they peopled with mysticisms and chimæras. ¡ì104 This gave what is
called a new tone to poetry, and conjured up a herd of desperate imitators,
who have brought the age of brass prematurely to its dotage.
¶25 ¡ì105 The descriptive poetry of the present day has been called by
its cultivators a return to nature. ¡ì106 Nothing is more impertinent than
this pretension. ¡ì107 Poetry cannot travel out of the regions of its birth,
the uncultivated lands of semi-civilized men. ¡ì108 Mr. Wordsworth, the great
leader of the returners to nature, cannot describe a scene under his own eyes
without putting into it the shadow of a Danish boy or the living ghost of Lucy
Gray, or some similar phantastical parturition of the moods of his own mind.
¶26 ¡ì109 In the origin and perfection of poetry, all the associations
of life were composed of poetical materials. ¡ì110 With us it is decidedly the
reverse. ¡ì111 We know too that there are no Dryads in Hyde-park nor Naiads in
the Regent's-canal. ¡ì112 But barbaric manners and supernatural interventions
are essential to poetry. ¡ì113 Either in the scene, or in the time, or in
both, it must be remote from our ordinary perceptions. ¡ì114 While the
historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress
of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and
raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown
babies of the age. ¡ì115 Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of
the ancient border. ¡ì116 Lord Byron cruises for thieves and pirates on the
shores of the Morea and among the Greek Islands. ¡ì117 Mr. Southey wades
through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he
carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially
poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings
them into an epic. ¡ì118 Mr. Wordsworth picks up village legends from old
women and sextons; and Mr. Coleridge, to the valuable information acquired
from similar sources, superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the
mysticisms of German metaphysics, and favours the world with visions in verse,
in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, Jeremy Taylor, and
Emanuel Kant, are harmonized into a delicious poetical compound. ¡ì119 Mr.
Moore presents us with a Persian, and Mr. Campbell with a Pennsylvanian tale,
both formed on the same principle as Mr. Southey's epics, by extracting from a
perfunctory and desultory perusal of a collection of voyages and travels, all
that useful investigation would not seek for and that common sense would
reject.
¶27 ¡ì120 These disjointed relics of tradition and fragments of
second-hand observation, being woven into a tissue of verse, constructed on
what Mr. Coleridge calls a new principle (that is, no principle at all),
compose a modern-antique compound of frippery and barbarism, in which the
puling sentimentality of the present time is grafted on the misrepresented
ruggedness of the past into a heterogeneous congeries of unamalgamating
manners, sufficient to impose on the common readers of poetry, over whose
understandings the poet of this class possesses that commanding advantage,
which, in all circumstances and conditions of life, a man who knows something,
however little, always possesses over one who knows nothing.
¶28 ¡ì121 A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized
community. ¡ì122 He lives in the days that are past. ¡ì00 His ideas, thoughts,
feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and
exploded superstitions. ¡ì123 The march of his intellect is like that of a
crab, backward. ¡ì124 The brighter the light diffused around him by the
progress of reason, the thicket is the darkness of antiquated barbarism, in
which he buries himself like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his
Cimmerian labours. ¡ì125 The philosophic mental tranquillity which looks round
with an equal eye on all external things, collects a store of ideas,
discriminates their relative value, assigns to all their proper place, and
from the materials of useful knowledge thus collected, appreciated, and
arranged, forms new combinations that impress the stamp of their power and
utility on the real business of life, is diametrically the reverse of that
frame of mind which poetry inspires, or from which poetry can emanate. ¡ì126
The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the
rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant
of factitious sentiment: and can therefore serve only to ripen a splendid
lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveller like Werter, or a morbid dreamer
like Wordsworth. ¡ì127 It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor
in any class of life an useful or rational man. ¡ì128 It cannot claim the
slightest share in any one of the comforts and utilities of life of which we
have witnessed so many and so rapid advances. ¡ì129 But though not useful, it
may be said it is highly ornamental, and deserves to be cultivated for the
pleasure it yields. ¡ì130 Even if this be granted, it does not follow that a
writer of poetry in the present state of society is not a waster of his own
time, and a robber of that of others. ¡ì131 Poetry is not one of those arts
which, like painting, require repetition and multiplication, in order to be
diffused among society. ¡ì132 There are more good poems already existing than
are sufficient to employ that portion of life which any mere reader and
recipient of poetical impressions should devote to them, and these having been
produced in poetical times, are far superior in all the characteristics of
poetry to the artificial reconstructions of a few morbid ascetics in
unpoetical times. ¡ì133 To read the promiscuous rubbish of the present time to
the exclusion of the select treasures of the past, is to substitute the worse
for the better variety of the same mode of enjoyment.
¶29 ¡ì134 But in whatever degree poetry is cultivated, it must
necessarily be to the neglect of some branch of useful study: and it is a
lamentable spectacle to see minds, capable of better things, running to seed
in the specious indolence of these empty aimless mockeries of intellectual
exertion. ¡ì135 Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of
intellect in the infancy of civil society: but for the maturity of mind to
make a serious business of the playthings of its childhood, is as absurd as
for a full-grown man to rub his gums with coral, and cry to be charmed to
sleep by the jingle of silver bells.
¶30 ¡ì136 As to that small portion of our contemporary poetry, which
is neither descriptive, nor narrative, nor dramatic, and which, for want of a
better name, may be called ethical, the most distinguished portion of it,
consisting merely of querulous, egotistical rhapsodies, to express the
writer's high dissatisfaction with the world and every thing in it, serves
only to confirm what has been said of the semibarbarous character of poets,
who from singing dithyrambics and "Io Triumphe," while society was
savage, grow rabid, and out of their element, as it becomes polished and
enlightened.
¶31 ¡ì137 Now when we consider that it is not the thinking and
studious, and scientific and philosophical part of the community, not to those
whose minds are bent on the pursuit and promotion of permanently useful ends
and aims, that poets must address their minstrelsy, but to that much larger
portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of
valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to any thing beyond being charmed,
moved, excited, affected, and exalted: charmed by harmony, moved by sentiment,
excited by passion, affected by pathos, and exalted by sublimity: harmony,
which is language on the rack of Procrustes; sentiment, which is canting
egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a
weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and
sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head: when we consider that the
great and permanent interests of human society become more and more the main
spring of intellectual pursuit; that in proportion as they become so, the
subordinacy of the ornamental to the useful will be more and more seen and
acknowledged; and that therefore the progress of useful art and science, and
of moral and political knowledge, will continue more and more to withdraw
attention from frivolous and unconducive, to solid and conducive studies: that
therefore the poetical audience will not only continually diminish in the
proportion of its number to that of the rest of the reading public, but will
also sink lower and lower in the comparison of intellectual acquirement: when
we consider that the poet must still please his audience, and must therefore
continue to sink to their level, while the rest of the community is rising
above it: we may easily conceive that the day is not distant, when the
degraded state of every species of poetry will be as generally recognized as
that of dramatic poetry has long been: and this not from any decrease either
of intellectual power, or intellectual acquisition, but because intellectual
power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and
better channels, and have abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to
the degenerate fry of modern rhymesters, and their olympic judges, the
magazine critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry,
as if it were still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of
intellectual progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as
mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians,
politicians, and political economists, who have built into the upper air of
intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of which they see the modern Parnassus
far beneath them, and, knowing how small a place it occupies in the
comprehensiveness of their prospect, smile at the little ambition and the
circumscribed perceptions with which the drivellers and mountebanks upon it
are contending for the poetical palm and the critical chair.
Copytext: Brett-Smith
1921: 3-19. ¡¡
Online text
copyright © 2004, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English,
University of Toronto. ¡¡
Source: "The Four Ages of Poetry," Olliers Literary Miscellany in
Prose and Verse by Several Hands to be Continued Occasionally, no. 1
(1820): 183-200.
Ed. (text): H. F. B. Brett-Smith.
Ed. (e-text): Ian Lancashire, Rep. Criticism On-line (1996).
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