Poetical Works | Page 7

a pugilist than a poet, laying about him on all sides, giving and taking strong blows, and approving himself, in the phrase of "the fancy," game to the backbone. His faults, besides those incident to most satirists,--such as undue severity, intrusion into private life, anger darkening into malignity, and spleen fermenting into venom,--were carelessness of style, inequality, and want of condensation. Compared to the satires of Pope, Churchill's are far less polished, and less pointed. Pope stabs with a silver?bodkin--Churchill hews down his opponent with a broadsword. Pope whispers a word in his enemy's ear which withers the heart within him, and he sinks lifeless to the ground; Churchill pours out a torrent of blasting invective which at once kills and buries his foe. Dryden was his favourite model; and although he has written no such condensed masterpieces of satire as the characters of Shaftesbury and Buckingham, yet his works as a whole are not much inferior, and justify the idea that had his life been spared, he might have risen to the level of "Glorious John." His versification, too, is decidedly of the Drydenic type. It is a free, fierce, rushing, sometimes staggering, race across meadow, moor, and mountain, dreading nothing except repose and languor, the lines chasing, and sometimes tumbling over each other in their haste, like impatient hounds at a fox-hunt. But more than Dryden, we think, has Churchill displayed the genuine poetic faculty, as well as often a loftier tone of moral indignation. This latter feeling is the inspiration of "The Candidate," and of "The Times," which, although coarse in subject, and coarse in style, burns with a fire of righteous indignation, reminding you of Juvenal. The finest display of his imaginative power is in "Gotham," which is throughout a glorious rhapsody, resembling some of the best prose effusions of Christopher North, and abounding in such lines as these:--
"The cedar, whose top mates the highest cloud,?Whilst his old father Lebanon grows proud?Of such a child, and _his vast body laid?Out many a mile, enjoys the filial shade_."
It is of "Gotham" that Cowper says that few writers have equalled it for its "bold and daring strokes of fancy; its numbers so hazardously ventured upon, and so happily finished; its matter so compressed, and yet so clear; its colouring so sparingly laid on, and yet with such a beautiful effect."
One great objection to Churchill's poetry lies in the temporary interest of the subjects to which most of it is devoted. The same objection, however, applies to the letters of Junius, and to the speeches and papers of Burke; and the same answer to it will avail for all. Junius, by the charm of his style, by his classic severities, and purged, poignant venom, contrives to interest us in the paltry political feuds of the past. Burke's does the same, by the general principles he extracts from, and by the poetry with which he gilds, the rubbish. And so does Churchill, by the weighty sense, the vigorous versification, the inextinguishable spirit, and the trenchant satire and invective of his song. The wretched intrigues of Newcastle and Bute, the squabbles of the aldermen and councillors of the day, the petty quarrels of petty patriots among themselves, and the poverty, spites, and frailties of forgotten players, are all shown as in a magnifying-glass, and shine upon us transfigured in the light of the poet's genius.
We have not room for lengthened criticism on all his separate productions. "The Rosciad" is the most finished, pointed, and Pope-like of his satires; it has more memorable and quotable lines than any of the rest. "The Prophecy of Famine" is full of trash; but contains, too, many lines in which political hatred, through its intense fervour, sparkles into poetry: such as--
"No birds except as birds of passage flew;"
the account of the creatures which, when admitted into the ark,
"Their saviour shunn'd, and rankled in the dark;"
and the famous line--
"Where half-starved spiders prey on half-starved flies."
"The Ghost" is the least felicitous of all his poems, although its picture of Pomposo (Dr Johnson) is exceedingly clever. The "Dedication to Warburton" is a strain of terrible irony, but fails to damage the Atlantean Bishop. "The Journey" is not only interesting as his last production, but contains some affecting personal allusions, intermingled with its stinging scorn--like pale passion-flowers blended with nettles and nightshade. The most of the others have been already characterised.
Churchill has had two very formidable enemies to his fame and detractors from his genius--Samuel Johnson and Christopher North. The first pronounced him "a prolific blockhead," "a huge and fertile crab-tree;" the second has wielded the knout against his back with peculiar gusto and emphasis, in a paper on satire and satirists, published in Blackwood for 1828. Had Churchill been alive, he could have easily "retorted scorn"--set a "Christophero" over