The Spirit of the Age eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 291 pages of information about The Spirit of the Age.

The Spirit of the Age eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 291 pages of information about The Spirit of the Age.
reflects no light from heaven, it emits no cheerful sound:  no flowers of love, of hope, or joy spring up near it, or they bloom only to wither in a moment.  Our poet’s verse does not put a spirit of youth in every thing, but a spirit of fear, despondency, and decay:  it is not an electric spark to kindle or expand, but acts like the torpedo’s touch to deaden or contract.  It lends no dazzling tints to fancy, it aids no soothing feelings in the heart, it gladdens no prospect, it stirs no wish; in its view the current of life runs slow, dull, cold, dispirited, half under ground, muddy, and clogged with all creeping things.  The world is one vast infirmary; the hill of Parnassus is a penitentiary, of which our author is the overseer:  to read him is a penance, yet we read on!  Mr. Crabbe, it must be confessed, is a repulsive writer.  He contrives to “turn diseases to commodities,” and makes a virtue of necessity.  He puts us out of conceit with this world, which perhaps a severe divine should do; yet does not, as a charitable divine ought, point to another.  His morbid feelings droop and cling to the earth, grovel where they should soar; and throw a dead weight on every aspiration of the soul after the good or beautiful.  By degrees we submit, and are reconciled to our fate, like patients to the physician, or prisoners in the condemned cell.  We can only explain this by saying, as we said before, that Mr. Crabbe gives us one part of nature, the mean, the little, the disgusting, the distressing; that he does this thoroughly and like a master, and we forgive all the rest.

Mr. Crabbe’s first poems were published so long ago as the year 1782, and received the approbation of Dr. Johnson only a little before he died.  This was a testimony from an enemy; for Dr. Johnson was not an admirer of the simple in style or minute in description.  Still he was an acute, strong-minded man, and could see truth when it was presented to him, even through the mist of his prejudices and his foibles.  There was something in Mr. Crabbe’s intricate points that did not, after all, so ill accord with the Doctor’s purblind vision; and he knew quite enough of the petty ills of life to judge of the merit of our poet’s descriptions, though he himself chose to slur them over in high-sounding dogmas or general invectives.  Mr. Crabbe’s earliest poem of the Village was recommended to the notice of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds; and we cannot help thinking that a taste for that sort of poetry, which leans for support on the truth and fidelity of its imitations of nature, began to display itself much about that time, and, in a good measure, in consequence of the direction of the public taste to the subject of painting.  Book-learning, the accumulation of wordy common-places, the gaudy pretensions of poetical fiction, had enfeebled and perverted our eye for nature.  The study of the fine arts, which came into fashion about forty years ago, and was then first considered as a polite accomplishment, would

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The Spirit of the Age from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.