with verse writing knows, and knows by painful experience, that the familiar style is of all styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of rhyme -is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake. He that could accomplish this task was Prior; many have imitated his excellence in this particular, but the best copies have fallen far short of the original.1 The true estimate of Prior's genius seems to lie between the depreciation of Johnson and the appreciation of Cowper. Johnson, with a keen eye to the defects of Prior's serious style, and thinking especially of those in Solomon, exaggerated them, after his manner, by his trenchant epigrams, without regard to the poet's more characteristic excellences. Cowper, admiring warmly Prior's achievements in familiar verse, tried to persuade himself that the same qualities were to be found in his more elaborate compositions, such as Henry and Emma. Johnson observes of Prior's love poems : Venus, after the example of the Greek epigram, asks when she was seen naked and bathing. Then Cupid is mistaken; then Cupid is disarmed; then he loses his darts to Ganymede; then Jupiter sends him a summons by Mercury. Then Chloe goes a-hunting with an ivory quiver graceful by her side; Diana mistakes her for one of her nymphs, and Cupid laughs at the blunder. All this is surely despicable.2 3 It scarcely seems a sufficient reply to say, with Cowper, that there "there is a fashion in such things"; for it is the aim of all true and permanent art to overcome fashion. Prior wrote, as an English poet, when the formal classical tide was running at its strongest throughout Europe, and he is sometimes at the mercy of the fashion. In his panegyrical verse, modelled on Cowley's pseudo- Pindaric manner, there is that straining after effect to to which Johnson alludes. His Alexandrian epigrams on Chloe are often as puerile as the mythology 1 Letter to Unwin, January 17, 1782. 2 Lives of the Poets: Prior. 3 Letter to Unwin, January 5, 1782. of Chiabrera in Italy, of Voiture in France, of Waller in England; his Henry and Emma makes a futile attempt to apply the external classical style to what is in its essence romantic, just as Pope's Messiah seeks to Hellenise ideas that are in spirit Hebraic. But it is unjust to judge Prior mainly by these comparative failures. Wherever he has thoroughly imbibed and assimilated the classical spirit, and has adapted it to his own civic surroundings, there— that is to say, in all his most characteristic poems-his poetic triumph is complete. He is a master in the art of blending the grave and gay, the humorous and pathetic, as may be best seen perhaps in his verses, To a Child of Quality, Five Years Old, the Author supposed Forty : Lords, knights, and 'squires, the numerous band My pen among the rest I took, Lest those bright eyes, that cannot read, Nor quality, nor reputation, Forbid me yet my flame to tell; For while she makes her silk-worms' beds She may receive and own my flame, For, though the strictest prudes should know¡it, She'll pass for a most virtuous dame, And I for an unhappy poet. Then too, alas! when she shall tear The lines some younger rival sends, For as our different ages move, "Tis so ordained (would Fate but mend it !) That I shall be past making love, When she begins to comprehend it. The mellowed philosophy of life, in which Horace. shows his sympathy with human infirmities, pervades Prior's poems of humorous reflection, a good specimen of which is the epigram Written in the beginning of Mezeray's History of France: Whate'er thy countrymen have done Yet for the fame of all these deeds, With lameness broke, with blindness smitten, To have been either Mezeray, Or any monarch he has written? It strange, dear author, yet it true is, Resolve me Cambray or Fontaine. The man in graver tragic known (Though his best part long since was done) And he who played the Harlequin Unwilling to retire, though weary. Not less charming, in a different style, is the description, with its touches of melancholy, of the travellers recalling old memories at an inn, in the ballad of Down Hall (the farm that Lord Harley presented to Prior): Into an old inn did this equipage roll At a town they call Hodson, the sign of the Bull, Come here, my sweet landlady, pray how d'ye do? And where is your sister, so mild and so dear, If I know to which question to answer you first: And Prue left a child for the parish to nurse; She has lain in the churchyard full many a year. In poems like these we reach the high-water mark of the familiar style in English poetry. There is, however, scarcely less merit in the more strictly conversational form of octosyllabic verse which Prior employs for the reproduction of the Horatian manner. His longest poem in this kind is Alma, a humorous dialogue between himself and his friend Richard Shelton, the purpose of which is apparently to put forward, in a vein of gaiety, the Pyrrhonist opinions about science that he had expressed more seriously in Solomon. The conclusion as to the vanity of human pursuits is certainly the same in both poems: Dick, thus we act; and thus we are, For could I my remarks sustain, Who in these times would read my books But Tom o' Stiles or John o' Nokes? It is characteristic of the author that Dick is made to wind up the poem with a sneer at Matthew's own system : Sir, if it be your wisdom's aim To make me merrier than I am, I'll be all night at your devotion— Come on, friend; broach the pleasing notion : But if you would depress my thought, Your system is not worth a groat— For Plato's fancies what care I? To heathens in his native Greek. If to be sad is to be wise, I do most heartily despise Dear Drift, to set the matter right, I do not understand why Cowper should have questioned Johnson's statement that Alma is an imitation of Hudibras.1 Not only is the form of the dialogue obviously modelled on the philosophical discussions between Hudibras and Ralpho, but Prior himself, at the beginning of Canto ii., declares that he is the "mimic of his master's dance." When, on the other hand, Johnson says that the imitation lacks the "bullion" of that master, the criticism seems to be irrelevant; for it was not Prior's object to reproduce the encyclopædic erudition of Butler, but rather to adapt the easy flow of his predecessor's octosyllabic verse to his own familiar, but polished, vein of Horatian discourse. Perhaps the most successful 1 Letter to Unwin, March 21, 1784. |