Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 | Page 2

highest pretensions. It
is no wonder, then, that common readers should be mistaken in their
book-worship. To such persons, for all their blind reverence, Dante
must in reality be a wild beast--a fine animal, it is true, but still a wild
beast--and our own Milton a polemical pedant arguing by the light of
poetry. To such readers, the spectacle of Ugolino devouring the head of
Ruggieri, and wiping his jaws with the hair that he might tell his story,
cannot fail to give a feeling of horror and disgust, which even the
glorious wings of Dante's angels--the most sublime of all such
creations--would fail to chase away. The poetry of the Divine Comedy

belongs to nature; its superstition, intolerance, and fanaticism, to the
thirteenth century. These last have either passed away from the modern
world or they exist in new forms, and with the first alone can we have
any real healthy sympathy.
One of our literary idols is Shakspeare--perhaps the greatest of them all;
but although the most universal of poets, his works, taken in the mass,
belong to the age of Queen Elizabeth, not to ours. A critic has well said,
that if Shakspeare were now living, he would manifest the same
dramatic power, but under different forms; and his taste, his knowledge,
and his beliefs would all be different. This, however, is not the opinion
of the book-worshippers: it is not the poetry alone of Shakspeare, but
the work bodily, which is preeminent with them; not that which is
universal in his genius, but that likewise which is restricted by the
fetters of time and country. The commentators, in the same way, find it
their business to bring up his shortcomings to his ideal character, not to
account for their existence by the manners and prejudices of his age, or
the literary models on which his taste was formed. It would be easy to
run over, in this way, the list of all our great authors, and to shew that
book-worship, as contradistinguished from a wise and discriminating
respect, is nothing more than a vulgar superstition.
We are the more inclined to put forth these ideas, at a time when
reprints are the order of the day--when speculators, with a singular
blindness, are ready to take hold of almost anything that comes in their
way without the expense of copyright. It would be far more judicious to
employ persons of a correct and elegant taste to separate the local and
temporary from the universal and immortal part of our classics, and
give us, in an independent form, what belongs to ourselves and to all
time. A movement was made some years ago in this direction by Mr
Craik, who printed in one of Charles Knight's publications a summary
of the Faëry Queen, converting the prosaic portions into prose, and
giving only the true poetry in the rich and musical verses of Spenser. A
travelling companion like this, we venture to assure our clerical friend,
would not be pocketed so wearily as the original work. The harmony of
the divine poet would saturate his heart and beam from his eyes; and
when wandering where we met him, among the storied ruins of the

Rhine, he would have by his side not the man Spenser, surrounded by
the prejudices and rudenesses of his age, but the spirit Spenser,
discoursing to and with the universal heart of nature. Leigh Hunt, with
more originality--more of the quality men call genius, but a less correct
perception of what is really wanted--has done the same thing for the
great Italian poets; and in his sparkling pages Dante, Ariosto, Tasso,
and the rest of the tuneful train, appear unfettered by the more
unpleasing peculiarities of their mortal time. But the criticism by which
their steps are attended, though full of grace and acuteness, is absolute,
not relative. They are judged by a standard of taste and feeling existing
in the author's mind: the Inferno is a magnificent caldron of everything
base and detestable in human nature; and the Orlando, a paradise of
love, beauty, and delight. Dante, the sublime poet, but inexorable bigot,
meets with little tolerance from Leigh Hunt; while Ariosto, exhaustless
in his wealth, ardent and exulting--full of the same excess of life which
in youth sends the blood dancing and boiling through the veins--has his
warmest sympathy. This kind of criticism is but a new form of the error
we have pointed out; for both poets receive his homage--the one
praised in the spontaneous outpourings of his heart, the other served
with the rites of devil-worship.
When we talk of the great authors of one generation pressing forward
to claim the sympathy of the maturer genius of the next, we mean
precisely what we say. We are well aware that some of the