Andrew Lang

“ Burns was a poet, and popular. Byron was a popular poet, and the world agrees in the verdict of their own generation. But Montgomery, though he sold so well, was no poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the stuff of immortality. Criticism cannot hurt what is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy left Chiméne as fair as ever, and as adorable. It is only pinchbeck that perishes under the acids of satire: gold defies them. Yet I sometimes ask myself, does the existence of popularity like yours justify the malignity of satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who takes? ”

“ In what manner of Paradise are we to conceive that you, Horace, are dwelling, or what region of immortality can give you such pleasures as this life afforded? The country and the town, nature and men, who knew them so well as you, or who ever so wisely made the best of those two worlds? Truly here you had good things, nor do you ever, in all your poems, look for more delight in the life beyond; you never expect consolation for present sorrow, and when you once have shaken hands with a friend the parting seems to you eternal. ”

“ Thus Time,—at Ronsard's wreath that vainly bit,— Has marred the Poet to preserve the Wit, Who almost left on Addison a stain, Whose knife cut cleanest with a poisoned pain,— Yet Thou (strange Fate that clings to all of Thine!) When most a Wit dost most a Poet shine. In Poetry thy Dunciad expires, When Wit has shot 'her momentary Fires.' 'T is Tragedy that watches by the Bed 'Where tawdry Yellow strove with dirty Red,' And men, remembering all, can scarce deny To lay the Laurel where thine Ashes lie! ”

“ Ah, Lucian, we have need of you, of your sense and of your mockery! Here, where faith is sick and superstition is waking afresh; where gods come rarely, and spectres appear at five shillings an interview; where science is popular, and philosophy cries aloud in the market-place, and clamour does duty for government, and Thais and Lais are names of power—here, Lucian, is room and scope for you. Can I not imagine a new “Auction of Philosophers,” and what wealth might be made by him who bought these popular sages and lecturers at his estimate, and vended them at their own? ”

“ But to thee, Theocritus, no twilight of the Hollow Land was dear, but the high suns of Sicily and the brown cheeks of the country maidens were happiness enough. For thee, therefore, methinks, surely is reserved an Elysium beneath the summer of a far-off system, with stars not ours and alien seasons. There, as Bion prayed, shall Spring, the thrice desirable, be with thee the whole year through, where there is neither frost, nor is the heat so heavy on men, but all is fruitful, and all sweet things blossom, and evenly meted are darkness and dawn. ”

“ Therefore, such a religion as thine was not, so to say, a mere innocence of evil in the things of our Belief, but a reasonable and grounded faith, strong in despite of oppositions. Happy was the man in whom temper, and religion, and the love of the sweet country and an angler's pastime so conveniently combined; happy the long life which held in its hand that threefold clue through the labyrinth of human fortunes! Around thee Church and State might fall in ruins, and might be rebuilded, and thy tears would not be bitter, nor thy triumph cruel. ”

“ However it be, in that road, by quiet streams and through green pastures, thou didst walk all thine almost century of years, and we, who stray into thy path out of the highway of life, we seem to hold thy hand, and listen to thy cheerful voice. If our sport be worse, may our content be equal, and our praise, therefore, none the less. Father, if Master Stoddard, the great fisher of Tweed-side, be with thee, greet him for me, and thank him for those songs of his, and perchance he will troll thee a catch of our dear River. ”

“ What said M. de Balzac to M. Chapelain? 'M. de Malherbe, M. de Grasse, and yourself must be very little poets, if Ronsard be a great one.' Time has brought in his revenges, and Messieurs Chapelain and De Grasse are as well forgotten as thou art well remembered. Men could not always be deaf to thy sweet old songs, nor blind to the beauty of thy roses and thy loves. When they took the wax out of their ears that M. Boileau had given them lest they should hear the singing of thy Sirens, then they were deaf no longer, then they heard the old deaf poet singing and made answer to his lays. ”

“ The endless caravan swept past him—“many as fluttering leaves that drop and fall in autumn woods when the first frost begins; many as birds that flock landward from the great sea when now the chill year drives them o’er the deep and leads them to sunnier lands.” Such things was it given to the sacred poet to behold, and “the happy seats and sweet pleasances of fortunate souls, where the larger light clothes all the plains and dips them in a rosier gleam, plains with their own new sun and stars before unknown.” Ah, not frustra pius was Virgil, as you say, Horace, in your melancholy song. ”

“ In the hall between the two tempests of Republic and Empire your odes sound 'like linnets in the pauses of the wind.'
What joy there is in these songs! what delight of life, what an exquisite Hellenic grace of art, what a manly nature to endure, what tenderness and constancy of friendship, what a sense of all that is fair in the glittering stream, the music of the waterfall, the hum of bees, the silvery grey of the olive woods on the hillside! How human are all your verses, Horace! what a pleasure is yours in the straining poplars, swaying in the wind! ”

“ It was all your philosophy in that last sad resort to which we are pushed so often—
'With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbour of Despair.'
The Epicurean is at one with the Stoic at last, and Horace with Marcus Aurelius. 'To go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of providence?'
An excellent philosophy, but easier to those for whom no Hope had dawn or seemed to set. ”

“ There, among the vines that bear twelve times in the year, more excellent than all the vineyards of Touraine, while the song-birds bring you flowers from vales enchanted, and the shapes of the Blessed come and go, beautiful in wind-woven raiment of sunset hues; there, in a land that knows not age nor winter, midnight, nor autumn, nor noon, where the silver twilight of summer-dawn is perennial, where youth does not wax spectre-pale and die; there, my Lucian, you are crowned the Prince of the Paradise of Mirth. ”

“ Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour's shape) , it is of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the hill, all the dying refrains of ballad and the fading echoes of story, all the memory of the wild past, each legend of burn and loch, seem to have combined to inform your spirit, and to secure themselves an immortal life in your song. ”

“ There has come no new pastoral poet, though Virgil copied thee, and Pope, and Phillips, and all the buckram band of the teacup time; and all the modish swains of France have sung against thee, as the son challenged Athene. They never knew the shepherd's life, the long' winter nights on dried heather by the fire, the long summer days, when over the dry grass all is quiet, and only the insects hum, and the shrunken burn whispers a silver tune. ”

“ Wits toil and travail round the Plant of Fame, Their Works its Garden, and its Growth their Aim, Then Commentators, in unwieldy Dance, Break down the Barriers of the trim Pleasance, Pursue the Poet, like Actaeon's Hounds, Beyond the fences of his Garden Grounds, Rend from the singing Robes each borrowed gem, Rend from the laurel'd Brows the Diadem, And, if one Rag of Character they spare, Comes the Biographer, and strips it bare! Such, Pope, has been thy Fortune, such thy Doom. ”

“ Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world of letters, he may superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the abundance of his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us when, with all our hearts, we would commend the departed; for they have passed almost beyond the reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no commendation can bring the red.
You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your many-sided excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who have survived your day. ”

“ But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the wise trifling of the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other, but prefers your preaching to another’s playing!
Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as an ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the Chorus, they bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions of human fate and human life, and we turn from your persons to yourself, and again from yourself to your persons, as from the odes of Sophocles or Aristophanes to the action of their characters on the stage. ”

“ I make no doubt, Sir, that envy and jealousy had much to do with the onslaught on your 'Pucelle.' These qualities, alas! are not strange to literary minds; does not even Hesiod tell us 'potter hates potter, and poet hates poet'? But contemporary spites do not harm true genius. Who suffered more than Moliére from cabals? Yet neither the court nor the town ever deserted him, and he is still the joy of the world. I admit that his adversaries were weaker than yours. What were Boursault and Le Boulanger, and Thomas Corneille and De Visé, what were they all compared to your enemy, Boileau? ”

“ Methinks thou hast marked them, and been glad that the old notes were ringing again and the old French lyric measures tripping to thine ancient harmonies, echoing and replying to the Muses of Horace and Catullus. Returning to Nature, poets returned to thee. Thy monument has perished, but not thy music, and the Prince of Poets has returned to his own again in a glorious Restoration.
Through the dust and smoke of ages, and through the centuries of wars we strain our eyes and try to gain a glimpse of thee, Master, in thy good days, when the Muses walked with thee. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Touching the Gods of the Heathen, most reverend Father, thou art not ignorant that even now, as in the time of thy probation on earth, there is great dissension. That these feigned Deities and idols, the work of men’s hands, are no longer worshipped thou knowest; neither do men eat meat offered to idols. Even as spake that last Oracle which murmured forth, the latest and the only true voice from Delphi, even so “the fair-wrought court divine hath fallen; no more hath Phoebus his home, no more his laurel-bough, nor the singing well of water; nay, the sweet-voiced water is silent.” ”