All my experience has produced in me the conviction, that periodical and professional criticism has suppressed genius and brought out mediocrity. The critic's praise may give transient popularity; but it will be but momentary, if false. The multitude will repeat the praise; but if they do not feel, they will soon forget: and mechanism and art never touch the bosom. It is an ignorant mistake that the subjects for good poetry are exhausted : out of thousands, very few of the best have yet been touched upon. Secondary minds very properly shrink from them. That creativeness, without which there must be a signal failure, is wanting to them. It is clear that we have two beings here; that which is spiritual, and that which is material. The true poet must deal with the first; he must therefore represent things as they appear in the visionary department of his mind. What the French call chaleur of style is nothing but the heat cast on ideal objects present to the writer, by the flame of imagination. He feels rather than reasons. No art, labour, nor skill in the rules of composition, can give this. Nor can mental culture give invention-no tillage of the soil can produce harvest without seed. It is but a childish pleasure to the mind to be attracted by a trite truth through the means of a happy simile or metaphor. To illustrate what requires no illustration is but idle work; if the image be beautiful let it stand by itself: why join the rare and the common into one band? What is interesting in itself, or by the combination of the story, will only be weakened by collateral lights; each illustration stands separate, and has no connexion with the rest of the story. Some have a genius for sentiment, reflection, and description, but not for weaving a chain of events. There is a sort of talent which, under the name of plot, rouses the attention of the reader at the first perusal, but when it is known, loses, like an enigma, much of its force. By the means of this, plot, sentiments, and descriptions, and incidents, not intrinsically striking, derive an accidental strength, which, if they are separated from their position, vanishes. Like all other things depending on novelty, this is a merit not of the most lasting effect. There are authors who by the aid of memory can take separate incidents from various stories, and new-combine them into one but these never amalgamate into one whole. It will be a piece of joinery which the sagacious and true critic will detect at once. It will not be one web. The common reader will not be able to see the difference, and yet will feel that it loses all charm, and wonder at it; while the author himself is astonished at his own failure, and thinks that great injustice is done to him. It is a singular trait in Sir Walter Scott, that he did not seem absorbed and eccentric, as almost all other authors of great invention. Few who have been endowed with high imagination have been masters of themselves. Ideal presences hold dominion over them, and they are supposed to be bewildered by shadows because they see what others cannot see. But Scott had great vivacity, yet not often great depth and intensity. Byron strove to be a man of the world, but could not be; it was a paltry ambition. In the contest between Bowles and Byron on the true principles of poetry as a test by which to try the merits of Pope, both were labouring under a strange mistiness of mind. Neither of them hit upon the genuine clues. It is not so much the nature of the material, whether imagery, or sentiment, or moral, as the character of the inventiveness and imaginary embodiment, which constitutes the poet. The ingredients of the invention may be all, or any one of them. Let us suppose the poet to draw an imaginary character, who deals exclusively in description, or sentiment, or moral axioms. Still, if he draws it with life and force, he is equally a poet. If Byron had tried himself by the rules he laid down, he would have excluded half the best of his own poetry. He did not see whither his canons were tending, or wrote in mere perverseness of temper, contrary to his own convictions and feelings. I know not how far the present attempted development of the true principles of poetry may be deemed by others to be new and satisfactory. It seems to me to coincide with what has been considered to be the test of poetry in all ages and nations: for that which is merely the fashion of one age or one country must be wrong. And if such exclusiveness has been the fashion of England for the last century, or at any other epoch, it unquestionably ought to be condemned. No. L. W. H. AINSWORTHI, ESQ. We have not the pleasure of being acquainted with Mrs. Ainsworth, but we are sincerely sorry for her- - we deeply commiserate her case. You see what a pretty fellow THE young Novelist of the Season is; how exactly, in fact, he resembles one of the most classically handsome and brilliant of the established lady-killers the only darling of the day—except Cradock, alias Caradocwhose charms have been equally fatal among the nymphs of the Seine and the Thames. No Truefit, anxious to set off his Brutus, could have devised a more neatly-cut countenance; no unstricken Stultze need ask a more dashing outline of back, hip, thigh, leg, &c. &c. &c., for the exhibition of toggery. We may, without swagger, apply to Ainsworth what Theodore Hook has sung of D'Orsay le beau : "See him, gallant and gay, With the chest of Apollo, the waist of a gnat;" but then comes the rub for Mrs. A., as well as the rhyme for " "The delight of the ball, the assembly, the play!" gay:" Alas! it were well if "balls, assemblies, and plays" were all: there are also such things, not undreamt-of in the philosophy of the Mayfair fair ones, as boudoirs and tête-à-têtes; and the best we can say for this Turpin of the cabriolet, whose prancer will never masticate a beef-steak, is, that if he escapes scotfree during the first month of the blaze of his romance, he is a lucky as well as a well-grown lad. Of this all concerned may be only too sure, that many a dove as well as crow will, on the present occasion, "Make wing to the Rooky-wood." Well, Heaven send him a good deliverance! But when we see how even whey-faced, spindle-shanked, musk-smelling baboons, get on occasionally among feathers and furbelows, when once they have attached any thing like a rag of notoriety to their names, we own we regard with fear and trepidation the fiery furnace of flattering sighs, through which this strapping A-Bed-Nego must endeavour to bring his jolly whiskers unsinged. Of the previous history of Walker Hederic Ainsworth, we believe all that the general reader has any concern in may be told in a couple of sentences. He is the grandson, or great-grandson, of the celebrated Latin lexicographer, who was at school with Tom Hill, somewhere about the middle of the reign of George II.; while, by the other side of the house, he is connected with the lineage of the illustrious John Bee. His father was a flourishing gentleman, i. e. solicitor, at Manchester; and the old boy spared no pains to train up his child in the way he should engross. But love and genius will out; and here he is, two hundred miles from the Babylon of spinning-jennies, murdering right and left before and behind the scenes of the Opera--writing Vau-devils for Yates-Inter-lewds for Bunn-and after having had to do, more or less, with we know not how many little pieces of the Olympic, now at length astonishing London and Crœsufying Bentley by a real dashing display of the long-buried inspiration of romance! May he turn out many novels better, none worse than Rookwood; may the Adelphi in the mean time do justice to his Highwayman; and may he, as far as is consistent with the frailty of humanity, penetrate puffery, and avoid the three insatiables of Solomon, king of Israel! Amen. O. Y. P.S.-I perceive old Yorke has left me room to add my view of the subject in sounding rhyme. Here goes: Enjoy thy prime of glory, Master Walker, Fit FRONTISPIECES all for the COURT MAGAZINE.-M. O'D. THE NUN OF LANDISFERN. YOUNG Linda sprang from a lofty line; But though come of such high degree, She told her beads by the midnight lamp; For more divinely pure were they Or the snow-white cloud that sleeps upon The palm-crowned top of Lebanon. To visit this maiden of mortal birth, Their splendours!—what were they to him And saw the throne of God arise He sought the spot where the holy maid Each nun hath heard the convent-bell- With a tone celestial; VOL. X. NO. LV. E |