No More Learning

bk. vi.

When incidents, character, and conduct confess the resemblance, we may,
with certainty, pronounce from whence the copy is taken. Where only a
similar stroke of passion or description occurs, it belongs alone to the
arrogance of dulness, to tell us on what passage the poet had his eye.
Every great poet has been persecuted in this manner: Milton in
particular. His commentators have not left him a flower of his own
growth. Yet, like the creed of the atheist, their system is involved in
the deepest absurdity. It is easy to suppose that men of poetical
feelings, in describing the same thing, should give us the same picture.
But, that the Paradise Lost, which forms one animated whole of the
noblest poetry, is a mere cento, compiled from innumerable authors,
ancient and modern, is a supposition which gives Milton a cast of
talents infinitely more extraordinary and inexplicable than the greatest
poetical genius. When Gaspar Poussin painted clouds and trees in his
landscapes, he did not borrow the green and the blue of the leaf and
the sky from Claude Lorraine. Neither did Camoens, when he painted his
island of Venus, spend the half of his life in collecting his colours
from all his predecessors who had described the beauties of the vernal
year, or the stages of passion. Camoens knew how others had painted the
flowery bowers of love; these formed his taste, and corrected his
judgment. He viewed the beauties of nature with poetical eyes, from
thence he drew his landscapes; he had felt all the allurements of love,
and from thence he describes the agitations of that passion.

Nor is the description of fairy bowers and palaces, though most
favourite topics, peculiar to the romances of chivalry. The poetry of
the orientals also abounds with them, yet, with some characteristic
differences.
Like the constitutions and dress of the Asiatics, the
landscapes of the eastern muse are warm and feeble, brilliant and
slight, and, like the manners of the people, wear an eternal sameness.
The western muse, on the contrary, is nervous as her heroes, sometimes
flowery as her Italian or English fields, sometimes majestically great
as her Runic forests of oak and pine; and always various, as the
character of her inhabitants. Yet, with all those differences of
feature, several oriental fictions greatly resemble the island of Circe,
and the flowery dominions of Alcina. In particular, the adventures of
Prince Agib, or the third Calender, in the Arabian Tales, afford a
striking likeness of painting and catastrophe.

If Ariosto's, however, seem to resemble any eastern fiction, the island
of Venus in Camoens bears a more striking resemblance to a passage in
Chaucer. The following beautiful piece of poetical painting occurs in
the Assembly of the Fowles:--

"The bildir oak, and eke the hardie ashe,
The pillir elme, the coffir unto caraine,
The boxe pipetre, the holme to whippis lasshe,
The sailing firre, the cypres deth to plaine,
The shortir ewe, the aspe for shaftis plaine,
The olive of pece, and eke the dronkin vine,
The victor palme, the laurir to divine.
A gardein sawe I full of blossomed bowis,
Upon a river, in a grene mede
There as sweetness evirmore inough is,
With flouris white, and blewe, yelowe, and rede,
And colde and clere wellestremis, nothing dede,
That swommin full of smale fishis light,
With finnis rede, and scalis silver bright.

On every bough the birdis herd I syng
With voice of angell, in ther harmonie
That busied 'hem, ther birdis forthe to bryng,
And little pretie conies to ther plaie gan hie;
And furthir all about I gan espie
The dredful roe, the buck, the hart and hind,
Squirils, and bestis smal of gentle kind.
Of instrumentes of stringis, in accorde
Herd I so plaie a ravishyng swetnesse,
That God, that makir is of all and Lorde,
Ne herd nevir a better, as I gesse,
There with a winde, unneth it might be lesse,
Made in the levis grene a noise soft
Accordant to the foulis song en loft.

The aire of the place so attempre was,
That ner was there grevaunce of hot ne cold--

* * *

Under a tre beside a well I seye
Cupid our lorde his arrowes forge and file,
And at his fete his bowe all redie laye,
And well his doughtir temprid all the while
The heddis in the well, and with her wile
She couchid 'hem aftir as thei should serve,
Some for to flea, and some to wound and carve.

* * *

And upon pillirs grete of Jaspir long
I saw a temple of Brasse ifoundid strong.

And about the temple dauncid alwaie
Women inow, of which some there ywere
Faire of 'hemself, and some of 'hem were gaie,
In kirtils all disheveled went thei there,
That was ther office or from yere to yere,
And on the temple sawe I white and faire
Of dovis sittyng many a thousande paire. "

Here we have Cupid forging his arrows, the woodland, the streams, the
music of instruments and birds, the frolics of deer and other animals;
and _women enow_. In a word, the island of Venus is here sketched out,
yet Chaucer was never translated into Latin or any language of the
continent, nor did Camoens understand a line of English. The subject was
common, and the same poetical feelings in Chaucer and Camoens pointed
out to each what were the beauties of landscapes and of bowers devoted
to pleasure.

Yet, though the fiction of bowers, of islands, and palaces, was no
novelty in poetry, much, however, remains to be attributed to the
poetical powers and invention of Camoens.