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  BLACKWOOD'S
  EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

  No. CCCLI.    JANUARY, 1845.    Vol. LVII.



  CONTENTS


  Homer, Dante, and Michael Angelo,                     1

  Settled at Last, Or, Red River Recollections,        18

  Borodino. An Ode,                                    30

  A Ramble in Montenegro,                              33

  AEsthetics of Dress. A Case of Hats,                  51

  The Three Guardsmen,                                 59

  Marston; Or the Memoirs of a Statesman. Part XV.,    75

  Janus: From the Fasti of Ovid,                       94

  To a Blind Girl,                                     98

  The Forced Sale,                                     99

  Vanities in Verse. By B. Simmons,                   114

  Coleridge and Opium-eating,                         117

  EDINBURGH:

  WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET.
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  PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND HUGHES, EDINBURGH.




  BLACKWOOD'S
  EDINBURGH
  MAGAZINE.

  VOL. LVII.

  JANUARY-JUNE, 1845.


  WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH,

  AND

  22, PALL-MALL, LONDON.

  1845.




     BLACKWOOD'S
  EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCLI.  JANUARY, 1845.  Vol. LVII.



HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


There is something inexpressibly striking, it may almost be said
awful, in the fame of HOMER. Three thousand years have elapsed since
the bard of Chios began to pour forth his strains; and their
reputation, so far from declining, is on the increase. Successive
nations are employed in celebrating his works; generation after
generation of men are fascinated by his imagination. Discrepancies of
race, of character, of institutions, of religion, of age, of the
world, are forgotten in the common worship of his genius. In this
universal tribute of gratitude, modern Europe vies with remote
antiquity, the light Frenchman with the volatile Greek, the
impassioned Italian with the enthusiastic German, the sturdy
Englishman with the unconquerable Roman, the aspiring Russian with the
proud American. Seven cities, in ancient times, competed for the
honour of having given him birth, but seventy nations have since been
moulded by his productions. He gave a mythology to the ancients; he
has given the fine arts to the modern world. Jupiter, Saturn, Mars,
Juno, are still household words in every tongue; Vulcan is yet the god
of fire, Neptune of the ocean, Venus of love. When Michael Angelo and
Canova strove to embody their conceptions of heroism or beauty, they
portrayed the heroes of the _Iliad_. Flaxman's genius was elevated to
the highest point in embodying its events. Epic poets, in subsequent
times, have done little more than imitate his machinery, copy his
characters, adopt his similes, and, in a few instances, improve upon
his descriptions. Painting and statuary, for two thousand years, have
been employed in striving to portray, by the pencil or the chisel, his
yet breathing conceptions. Language and thought itself have been
moulded by the influence of his poetry. Images of wrath are still
taken from Achilles, of pride from Agamemnon, of astuteness from
Ulysses, of patriotism from Hector, of tenderness from Andromache, of
age from Nestor. The galleys of Rome were, the line-of-battle ships of
France and England still are, called after his heroes. The Agamemnon
long bore the flag of Nelson; the Ajax perished by the flames within
sight of the tomb of the Telamonian hero, on the shores of the
Hellespont; the Achilles was blown up at the battle of Trafalgar.
Alexander the Great ran round the tomb of Achilles before undertaking
the conquest of Asia. It was the boast of Napoleon that his mother
reclined on tapestry representing the heroes of the _Iliad_, when he
was brought into the world. The greatest poets of ancient and modern
times have spent their lives in the study of his genius or the
imitation of his works. Withdraw from subsequent poetry the images,
mythology, and characters of the _Iliad_, and what would remain?
Petrarch spent his best years in restoring his verses. Tasso portrayed
the siege of Jerusalem, and the shock of Europe and Asia, almost
exactly as Homer had done the contest of the same forces, on the same
shores, two thousand five hundred years before. Milton's old age, when
blind and poor, was solaced by hearing the verses recited of the poet,
to whose conceptions his own mighty spirit had been so much indebted;
and Pope deemed himself fortunate in devoting his life to the
translation of the _Iliad_.

No writer in modern times has equalled the wide-spread fame of the
Grecian bard; but it may be doubted whether, in the realms of thought,
and in sway over the reflecting world, the influence of DANTE has not
been almost as considerable. Little more than five hundred years,
indeed, have elapsed--not a sixth of the thirty centuries which have
tested the strength of the Grecian patriarch--since the immortal
Florentine poured forth his divine conceptions; but yet there is
scarcely a writer of eminence since that time, in works even bordering
on imagination, in which traces of his genius are not to be found. The
_Inferno_ has penetrated the world. If images of horror are sought
after, it is to his works that all subsequent ages have turned; if
those of love and divine felicity are desired, all turn to the
_Paradise_ and the _Spirit of Beatrice_. When the historians of the
French Revolution wished to convey an idea of the utmost agonies they
were called on to portray, they contented themselves with saying it
equalled all that the imagination of Dante had conceived of the
terrible. Sir Joshua Reynolds has exerted his highest genius in
depicting the frightful scene described by him, when Ugolino perished
of hunger in the tower of Pisa. Alfieri, Metastasio, Corneille, Lope
de Vega, and all the great masters of the tragic muse, have sought in
his works the germs of their finest conceptions. The first of these
tragedians marked two-thirds of the _Inferno_ and _Paradiso_ as worthy
of being committed to memory. Modern novelists have found in his
prolific mind the storehouse from which they have drawn their noblest
imagery, the chord by which to strike the profoundest feelings of the
human heart. Eighty editions of his poems have been published in
Europe within the last half century; and the public admiration, so far
from being satiated, is augmenting. Every scholar knows how largely
Milton was indebted to his poems for many of his most powerful images.
Byron inherited, though often at second hand, his mantle, in many of
his most moving conceptions. Schiller has embodied them in a noble
historic mirror; and the dreams of Goethe reveal the secret influence
of the terrible imagination which portrayed the deep remorse and
hopeless agonies of Malebolge.

MICHAEL ANGELO has exercised an influence on modern art little, if at
all, inferior to that produced on the realms of thought by Homer and
Dante. The father of Italian painting, the author of the frescoes on
the Sistine Chapel, he was, at the same time, the restorer of ancient
sculpture, and the intrepid architect who placed the Pantheon in the
air. Raphael confessed, that he owed to the contemplation of his works
his most elevated conceptions of their divine art. Sculpture, under
his original hand, started from the slumber of a thousand years, in
all the freshness of youthful vigour; architecture, in subsequent
times, has sought in vain to equal, and can never hope to surpass, his
immortal monument in the matchless dome of St Peters. He found
painting in its infancy--he left it arrived at absolute perfection. He
first demonstrated of what that noble art is capable. In the Last
Judgment he revealed its wonderful powers, exhibiting, as it were, at
one view, the whole circles of Dante's _Inferno_--portraying with
terrible fidelity the agonies of the wicked, when the last trumpet
shall tear the veil from their faces, and exhibit in undisguised truth
that most fearful of spectacles--_a naked human heart_. Casting aside,
perhaps with undue contempt, the adventitious aids derived from
finishing, colouring, and execution, he threw the whole force of his
genius into the design, the expression of the features, the drawing of
the figures. There never was such a delineator of bone and muscle as
Michael Angelo. His frescoes stand out in bold relief from the walls
of the Vatican, like the sculptures of Phidias from the pediment of
the Parthenon. He was the founder of the school of painting both at
Rome and Florence--that great school which, disdaining the
representation of still life, and all the subordinate appliances of
the art, devoted itself to the representation of the grand and the
beautiful; to the expression of passion in all its vehemence--of
emotion in all its intensity. His incomparable delineation of bones
and muscles was but a means to an end; it was the human heart, the
throes of human passion, that his master-hand laid bare. Raphael
congratulated himself, and thanked God that he had given him life in
the same age with that painter; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his last
address to the Academy, "reflected, not without vanity, that his
Discourses bore testimony to his admiration of that truly divine man,
and desired that the last words he pronounced in that academy, and
from that chair, might be the name of Michael Angelo."[1]

The fame of these illustrious men has long been placed beyond the
reach of cavil. Criticism cannot reach, envy cannot detract from,
emulation cannot equal them. Great present celebrity, indeed, is no
guarantee for future and enduring fame; in many cases, it is the
reverse, but there is a wide difference between the judgment of the
present and that of future ages. The favour of the great, the passions
of the multitude, the efforts of reviewers, the interest of
booksellers, a clique of authors, a coterie of ladies, accidental
events, degrading propensities, often enter largely into the
composition of present reputation. But opinion is freed from all these
disturbing influences by the lapse of time. The grave is the greatest
of all purifiers. Literary jealousy, interested partiality, vulgar
applause, exclusive favour, alike disappear before the hand of death.
We never can be sufficiently distrustful of present opinion, so
largely is it directed by passion or interest. But we may rely with
confidence on the judgment of successive generations on departed
eminence; for it is detached from the chief cause of present
aberration. So various are the prejudices, so contradictory the
partialities and predilections of men, in different countries and ages
of the world, that they never can concur through a course of centuries
in one opinion, if it is not founded in truth and justice. The _vox
populi_ is often little more than the _vox diaboli_; but the voice of
ages is the voice of God.

It is of more moment to consider in what the greatness of these
illustrious men really consists--to what it has probably been
owing--and in what particulars they bear an analogy to each other.

They are all three distinguished by one peculiarity, which doubtless
entered largely into their transcendent merit--they wrote in the
infancy of civilization. Homer, as all the world knows, is the oldest
profane author in existence. Dante flourished about the year 1300: he
lived at a time when the English barons lived in rooms strewed with
rushes, and few of them could sign their names. The long life of
Michael Angelo, extending from 1474 to 1564, over ninety years, if not
passed in the infancy of civilization, was at least passed in the
childhood of the arts: before his time, painting was in its cradle.
Cimabue had merely unfolded the first dawn of beauty at Florence; and
the stiff figures of Pietro Perugino, which may be traced in the first
works of his pupil Raphael, still attest the backward state of the
arts at Rome. This peculiarity, applicable alike to all these three
great men, is very remarkable, and beyond all question had a powerful
influence, both in forming their peculiar character, and elevating
them to the astonishing greatness which they speedily attained.

It gave them--what Johnson has justly termed the first requisite to
human greatness--self-confidence. They were the first--at least the
first known to themselves and their contemporaries--who adventured on
their several arts; and thus they proceeded _fearlessly_ in their
great career. They had neither critics to fear, nor lords to flatter,
nor former excellence to imitate. They portrayed with the pencil, or
in verse, what they severally felt, undisturbed by fear, unswayed by
example, unsolicitous about fame, unconscious of excellence. They did
so for the first time. Thence the freshness and originality, the
vigour and truth, the simplicity and raciness by which they are
distinguished. Shakspeare owed much of his greatness to the same
cause; and thence his similarity, in many respects, to these great
masters of his own or the sister arts. When Pope asked Bentley what he
thought of his translation of the _Iliad_, the scholar replied, "You
have written a pretty book, Mr Pope; but you must not call it Homer."
Bentley was right. With all its pomp of language and melody of
versification, its richness of imagery and magnificence of diction,
Pope's Homer is widely different from the original. He could not avoid
it. The "awful simplicity of the Grecian bard, his artless grandeur
and unaffected majesty," will be sought for in vain in the
translation; but if they had appeared there, it would have been
unreadable in that age. Michael Angelo, in his bold conceptions,
energetic will, and rapid execution, bears a close resemblance to the
father of poetry. In both, the same faults, as we esteem them, are
conspicuous, arising from a too close imitation of nature, and a
carelessness in rejecting images or objects which are of an ordinary
or homely description. Dante was incomparably more learned than
either: he followed Virgil in his descent to the infernal regions; and
exhibits an intimate acquaintance with ancient history, as well as
that of the modern Italian states, in the account of the characters he
meets in that scene of torment. But in his own line he was entirely
original. Homer and Virgil had, in episodes of their poems, introduced
a picture of the infernal regions; but nothing on the plan of Dante's
_Inferno_ had before been thought of in the world. With much of the
machinery of the ancients, it bears the stamp of the spiritual faith
of modern times. It lays bare the heart in a way unknown even to Homer
and Euripides. It reveals the inmost man in a way which bespeaks the
centuries of self-reflection in the cloister which had preceded it. It
is the basis of all the spiritual poetry of modern, as the _Iliad_ is
of all the external imagery of ancient, times.

In this respect there is a most grievous impediment to genius in
later, or, as we term them, more civilized times, from which, in
earlier ages, it is wholly exempt. Criticism, public opinion, the
dread of ridicule--then too often crush the strongest minds. The
weight of former examples, the influence of early habits, the halo of
long-established reputation, force original genius from the untrodden
path of invention into the beaten one of imitation. Early talent feels
itself overawed by the colossus which all the world adores; it falls
down and worships, instead of conceiving. The dread of ridicule
extinguishes originality in its birth. Immense is the incubus thus
laid upon the efforts of genius. It is the chief cause of the
degradation of taste, the artificial style, the want of original
conception, by which the literature of old nations is invariably
distinguished. The early poet or painter who portrays what he feels or
has seen, with no anxiety but to do so powerfully and truly, is
relieved of a load which crushes his subsequent compeers to the earth.
Mediocrity is ever envious of genius--ordinary capacity of original
thought. Such envy in early times is innocuous or does not exist, at
least to the extent which is felt as so baneful in subsequent periods.
But in a refined and enlightened age, its influence becomes
incalculable. Whoever strikes out a new region of thought or
composition, whoever opens a fresh vein of imagery or excellence, is
persecuted by the critics. He disturbs settled ideas, endangers
established reputations, brings forward rivals to dominant fame. That
is sufficient to render him the enemy of all the existing rulers in
the world of taste. Even Jeffrey seriously lamented, in one of his
first reviews of Scott's poems, that he should have identified himself
with the unpicturesque and expiring images of feudality, which no
effort could render poetical. Racine's tragedies were received with
such a storm of criticism as wellnigh cost the sensitive author his
life; and Rousseau was