148 PRÆTERITA-I

good novelists or painters; because they have not sense to manage it, nor the art to give it effect.

(E.) Passion. Lower yet, because all good men and women have as much as either they or the poet ought to have.

(F.) Invention. And this lowest, because one may be a good poet without having this at all. Byron had scarcely any himself, while Scott had any quantity-yet never could write a play.¹

172. But neither the force and precision, nor the rhythm, of Byron’s language, were at all the central reasons for my taking him for master. Knowing the Song of Moses and the Sermon on the Mount by heart, and half the Apocalypse besides, I was in no need of tutorship either in the majesty or simplicity of English words;² and for their logical arrangement, I had had Byron’s own master, Pope, since I could lisp. But the thing wholly new and precious to me in Byron was his measured and living truth-measured, as compared with Homer; and living, as compared with everybody else. My own inexorable measuring wand,- not enchanter’s, but cloth-worker’s and builder’s,-reduced to mere incredibility all the statements of the poets usually called sublime. It was of no use for Homer to tell me that Pelion was put on the top of Ossa.³ I knew perfectly well it wouldn’t go on the top of Ossa. Of no use for Pope to tell me that trees where his mistress looked would crowd into a shade,⁴ because I was satisfied that they would do nothing of the sort. Nay, the whole world, as it was described to me either by poetry or theology, was

¹ [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 33 (Vol. XXVII. p. 621).]

² [Compare the early passage, § 2 (above, p. 14).]

³ [Odyssey, xi. 315, 316.]

⁴ [Pope: Pastorals, ii. (“Summer”), 74:-

“Where’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;

Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade.”

The passage was set to music by Handel. There is another reference to it in the chapter “Of the Pathetic Fallacy” in Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Vol. V. p. 216).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]