Richard Dowling

“ Nothing can save it but another incursion of Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it. To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the sublime. ”

“ There is a faint smile, the faintest smile the human face is capable of displaying, about the mouth. There is no light in the eyes. The expression of the whole face is infinitely removed from sinister. In it there is kindliness with a touch of wisdom and pity. It asks no question; desires to say no word. It is the face of one who beyond all doubt knows things we do not know, things which can scarcely be shaped into words, things we are in ignorance of. ”

“ Not all the poetry of even the Poets is so, and to one who loves this dear and intimate quality of which we speak, Coleridge, for instance, is a poet of some four poems, Wordsworth of some sixteen, Keats of five, Byron of none, though Byron is great and eloquent, but the thing we prize so much is far away from eloquence. Poetical poetry is the inner garden; there grows the ‘flower of the mind.’ ”

“ The familiar printed text sank into insignificance beside the blurred pencil lines. Any one might buy a fair uncut copy for a crown piece. The text was common property—“’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.” But here before us lay revealed the private workings of a poetic imagination, fired by contact with a master of the craft. To us this volume disclosed one of our heroes, clad in the homely garb of prose, speaking in his own everyday speech, and lifting up his voice in admiration, wonder, awe, to the colossal demi-god, in whose presence we had stood humiliated and afeard. ”

“ I wonder, also, was it at that early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now they are loathsome. With the cold-blooded “morals” attendant upon them they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book, and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness. He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. ”

“ How can I be expected to go on taking an interest in{195} man when not the most credulous or the most crafty publisher in London will as much as look at my Guide to Ignorance? I feel that my life is wasted and that my functions have been usurped by the School Board. I cool the air with sighs for the days when a philosopher might teach his disciples in the porch or the grove. I feel as if I could anticipate earth and turn on man. But some of the genial good nature of the jelly-fish still lingers in my veins. I will not finally desert man until man has finally deserted me. ”

“ Any poet can explain how he makes a poem, but no poet can explain how he makes poetry. He is simply writing a poem and the poetry glides or rushes in. When it comes he is as much astonished by it as you are. The poem may cost him infinite trouble, the poetry he gets as a free gift. He begins a poem to prepare himself{15} for the reception of poetry or to induce its flow. His poem is only a lightning-rod to attract a fluid over which he has no control before it comes to him. There may be a poetic art, such as verse-making, but to talk about the art of poetry is to talk nonsense. ”

“ If you asked him to make you a suit of woad he would certainly detain you while he inquired as to your sanity and sent for your friends. Yet it is only one step, one film, from woad to wampum.
Up to this time in the history of man there has, with few exceptions, been an infatuated pursuit of this will-o’-the-wisp, knowledge. Why should not man now turn his glance to ignorance, if it were only for a little while and for the sake of fair play? ”

“ The man capable of such a dream I should like to see—but through bars of metal made from his own sleep-zoned forehead. “If any one dreams that he hath encountered a cat or killed one, he will commit a thief to prison and prosecute him to the death; for the cat signifies a common thief.” Mercy on us! Does the magistrate who commits usually prosecute, and is thieving a hanging matter now? This is necromancy or nothing; prophecy, inspiration, or something out of the common indeed.
“To dream one plays or sees another play on a clavicord, shows the death of relations, or funeral obsequies.” ”

“ I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for{142} he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for himself. Poe, in his Raven, is, all the time of his most pathetic and terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye. ”

“ There is no reason on earth why he should be pursued by this malignant spectre. He has committed no crime, no sin even. He labours with all the sincerity of a holy man to regain his health and exorcise his foe. He is as crimeless as you or I and infinitely more faultless. He has not deserved his fate, yet he is driven in the end to cut his throat, and you excuse that crime by saying he is mad.
I do not think any additional force is gained in the course of this unique story by the importation of malignant irreverence to Christianity in the latter manifestations of the ape. ”

“ How much of this young person is really our very own? how much the development of untoward fate? Is the memory of our lost one dearer than the presence of this lad who is half stranger? What we lost and mourned was ours surely; how much of what we have regained belongs to us? ”

“ By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur, influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been traversed. ”

“ Before it can be formed there must be great increase of sensibility. Hodge is crude silver, the painter is the polished mirror. The painter can see things which are not, things which he himself makes in his mind. His invention is at least as vivid as his memory.
I suppose then that the man of genius, the painter or poet, is one who, having lost the first skin, or portion of the first skin of his nerves, can create and see in his mind’s eye things never seen by the eye of any other man, and see them as vividly as men of no genius can see objects of memory. ”

“ The music of the generation just past is, I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and have audiences of the angels. ”

“ They are among the settled property of joy to which all mankind are heirs. They come in among the flowers and colours of the sky and earth, and the vocal rapture of the birds, and the perfumes of the breeze, and the love of woman and children and friends and kind. They are sent to us for our mere delight. They never grow less or fade away or change. ”

“ The sparrow had done no harm beyond intruding. He had not injured the furniture, or burned any of the swallow’s gas, or broken into the wine-cellar. Justice would have been vindicated by the expulsion of the intruder and his brood. But what takes place instead? The door is built up, and the sparrow with his innocent young is murdered! Surely if this is a fruitful fable, the moral is immoral. This is the old Mosaic theory of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and a little, or rather a great deal more. It is hideously un-Christian. I believe Cobbett professed Christianity. ”

“ The man of genius is not exactly under delusions. He does not think he is in China because he is writing of Canton in London, but his optic nerve, wanting the outer coating, can build up images out of statistics until the images are as full of line and colour and as incapable of change at will as the image of a barrel of cider which occupies Hodge’s retina when it is imminent to his desires, present to his touch. The sensibility of the nerves of genius is greater than the sensibility of the nerves of Hodge. ”

“ If instead of taking the whole of this imaginary skin off the optic nerve, we simply injure it ever so slightly, the nerve may become alive to some of these spirits; and this premature perception of what is around all of us, but perceived by few, we call seeing ghosts. It may be objected that all space is not vast enough to afford room for such a stupendous panorama. When we begin to talk of limits of space to anything beyond our knowledge and the touch of our inch-tape, we talk like fools. There is no good in allotting space with a two-foot rule. ”

“ I love my little sixpenny volume for one reason chiefly. I can lend it without fear, and lose it without a pang.{167} Why, the beggarliest miser alive can’t think much of fourpence-halfpenny! I have already dispensed a few copies of the Opium-eater, price fourpence-halfpenny. As it lies on my table now, I take no more care of it than one does of yesterday’s morning paper. When I read it I double it back, to show to myself how little I value the gross material of the book. Any one coming in likely to appreciate the book, and who has not read it is welcome to carry it off as a gift. ”

“ It is a child alleged or alleging itself to be the child we lost. It is more correctly not a child at all, but a lad or lass whom we knew when young, and whose acquaintance we have to make over again. Our personality has become dim to it, and we have to occupy ourselves seriously in trying to identify the unwieldy bulk of the stranger with our memory of the wanderer. When the boy went from us we mourned for him as dead, and now he comes back to us from the tomb altered all out of memory. He is not wholly our child. ”

“ For a while, the consciousness that my book{87} was safe compensated for the unfamiliarity of its appearance and my constitutional antipathy to contact with brown paper, even a lively image of which makes me cringe.
But as days went on the brown paper entered into my soul and rankled. What! was my Keats to be clad in that wretched union garb, that livery of poverty acknowledged, that corduroy of the bookshelf? Intolerable! Should I, who had, like other men, only my time to live, be denied all friendly sight of the natural seeming of my prime friend? My Keats would last my time ”

“ The barbarous hordes of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from{122} Greece had been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy for principles of beauty. ”

“ Now neither Cobbett nor any other sane preacher believes anything of the kind. This is a lie, pure and simple; a lie no doubt told with a good object, but a lie all the same. Cobbett had too much common-sense not to know that it is not always “thus” with the “unjust.” As a rule, the unjust go scot free when they stop short of crime. The people who say otherwise are yielding to a feminine, sentimental weakness. Poetic justice no doubt does exist—in poetry. Most men are as unjust as they dare be, and most men get on comfortably from their cradles to their graves. ”

“ It would be a work undertaken in honour of the modern god, Progress, through the graves of the oldest peoples, to link the three great forms of faith. All the action of the epic would take place on earth, and all the actors would be men. There would be no need for evolving the god from the machine, for the machine itself would be the god. ”

“ It is the most dull and tedious and monstrous book of any note in the English language, and how any man with a gleam of imagination can like it is more than I can understand. If one has been familiar with it when young, one may tolerate it on the score of tenderness—tenderness for memories and laziness in new enterprises ”

“ Here the city he made to himself is as firm and sturdy and solid and full of life as the Canton of this day on the southern coast of China. Here throng the unrecorded visions of all the poets. Here are the counterfeits of all{26} the dead in all their phases. Here float the dreams of men, the unbroken scrolls of life and action and thought complete of all beings, man and beast, that have lived since time began. In the world of matter nothing is lost; in the world of spirit nothing is lost either. ”

“ Man is at heart a rapacious brute. All his centuries of civilization have not quelled the predatory spirit in him. Any man will become a thief if he only be sufficiently tempted when he is sufficiently{68} desperate. The crime of the sparrow in appropriating the swallow’s nest is intelligible, the crime of the swallow in murdering the sparrow and his brood is intelligible, the crime of lying committed by the moralist is abominable. ”

“ What bravery of arms and beauty of women are renewed; what glowing argosies, long mouldered,{39} sparkle once more in the sun! What brazen trumpets blare of conquest, and dust of battle roll along the plain! What plenitude of life, of movement, of man is revealed! A dictionary is to me the key-note in the orchestra where mankind sit tuning their reeds for the overture to the final cataclysm of the world.
My second book would be Whitaker’s Almanack. Owing to miserable ill-luck I have not been able to get a copy of the almanac for this year. ”