or a microscope. To the eye only they are more perfect than any other landscapes that ever were or will be painted; they give more of nature, as cognizable by one sense alone; but they lay an equal stress on all visible impressions. They do not interpret one sense by another; they do not distinguish the character of different objects as we are taught, and can only be taught, to distinguish them by their effect on the different senses. That is, his eye wanted imagination: it did not strongly sympathize with his other faculties. He saw the atmosphere, but he did not feel it. He painted the trunk of a tree or a rock in the foreground as smooth?with as complete an abstraction of the gross, tangible impression, as any other part of the picture. His trees are perfectly beautiful, but quite immovable; they have a look of enchantment. In short, his landscapes are unequaled imitations of nature, released from its subjection to the elements, as if all objects were become a delightful fairy vision, and the eye had rarefied and refined away the other senses.
The gusto in the Greek statues is of a very singular kind. The sense of perfect form nearly occupies the whole mind, and hardly suffers it to dwell on any other feeling. It seems enough for them to be, without acting or suffering. Their forms are ideal, spiritual. Their beauty is power. By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of pain or passion; by their beauty they are deified.
The infinite quantity of dramatic invention in Shakespeare takes from his gusto. The power he delights to show is not intense, but discursive. He never insists on anything as much as he might, except a quibble.5 Milton has great gusto. He repeats his blows twice; grapples with and exhausts his subject. His imagination has a double relish of its objects, an inveterate attachment to the things he describes, and to the words describing them.
Or where Chineses drive With sails and wind their cany waggons light.
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.6
There is a gusto in Pope's compliments, in Dryden's satires, and Prior's tales; and among prose writers Boccaccio and Rabelais had the most of it.7 We will only mention one other work which appears to us to be full of gusto, and that
3. I.e., someone who delights in the beauties of the countryside. Hazlitt adds a footnote: 'Raphael not only could not paint a landscape; he could not paint people in a landscape. He could not have painted the heads or the figures, or even the dresses, of the St. Peter Martyr. His figures have always an in-door look, that is, a set, determined, voluntary, dramatic character, arising from their own passions, or a watchfulness of those of others, and want [lack] that wild uncertainty of expression, which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the elements. He has nothing romantic about him.' 4. Claude Lorraine (1600?1682), French painter renowned for his landscapes and seascapes.
5. I.e., pun. In 'The Preface to Shakespeare' (1765), Samuel Johnson had written that the fascinations of quibble were for Shakespeare 'irresistible': 'A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it.' 6. Paradise Lost 3.438-39 and 5.297. 7. The 14th-century Italian writer Boccaccio and the 16th-century French writer Rabelais are singled out here perhaps for their bawdy comedy. 'Prior's tales': a group of somewhat racy narrative poems by the early-18th-century poet Matthew Prior.
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MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS / 541
is the Beggar's Opera.8 If it is not, we are altogether mistaken in our notions on this delicate subject.
1816 1817
My First Acquaintance with Poets1
My father was a Dissenting Minister, at Wem, in Shropshire; and in the year 1798 (the figures that compose that date are to me like the 'dreaded name of Demogorgon'2) Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach, in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the description but a round-faced man, in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket) which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give an account of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I know of. He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he remained there, 'fluttering the proud Salopians, like an eagle in a dovecote';3 and the Welsh mountains that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of
High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewellyn's lay!4
As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed their blue tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red rustling leaves of the sturdy oak trees by the roadside, a sound was in my ears as of a Siren's song; I was stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; but I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting from the deadly bands that bound them,
With Styx nine times round them,5
my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up
8. The popular comic opera by John Gay, pro-Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. duced in 1728. 3. Shakespeare's Roman general Coriolanus 1. This essay was written in 1823, a quarter cen-reminds his enemies that in, in his days of military tury after the events it describes. By then Coleridge glory, 'like an eagle in a dove-cote, I / Fluttered and Wordsworth had long given up their early rad-your Volscians' (Coriolanus 5.6.115?16), 'Salopiicalism, and both men had quarreled with Hazlitt? ans': inhabitants of Shropshire. hence the essays elegiac note in dealing with the 4. Thomas Gray's 'The Bard,' line 28?names of genius of the two poets. famous bards silenced by King Edward's conquest 2. Paradise Lost 2.964?65. To mythographers of of Wales. the Renaissance, Demogorgon was a mysterious 5. Adapted from Pope's 'Ode on St. Cecilia's and terrifying demon, sometimes described as Day,' lines 90-91. ancestor of all the gods. He plays a central role in
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54 2 / WILLIAM HAZLITT
in the prison house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge. But this is not to my purpose.
