I am inclined for other pasture,
having long ago satisfied myself by a good deal of dogged reading that
every generation is sure of its own share of bores without borrowing from
the past.
A little later came Gawain Douglas, whose translation of the Aeneid is
linguistically valuable, and whose introductions to the seventh and
twelfth books--the one describing winter and the other May--have been
safely praised, they are so hard to read. There is certainly some poetic
feeling in them, and the welcome to the sun comes as near enthusiasm as
is possible for a ploughman, with a good steady yoke of oxen, who lays
over one furrow of verse, and then turns about to lay the next as
cleverly alongside it as he can. But it is a wrong done to good taste to
hold up this _item_ kind of description any longer as deserving any other
credit than that of a good memory. It is a mere bill of parcels, a
_post-mortem_ inventory of nature, where imagination is not merely not
called for, but would be out of place. Why, a recipe in the cookery-book
is as much like a good dinner as this kind of stuff is like true
word-painting. The poet with a real eye in his head does not give us
everything, but only the _best_ of everything. He selects, he combines,
or else gives what is characteristic only; while the false style of which
I have been speaking seems to be as glad to get a pack of impertinences
on its shoulders as Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress was to be rid of
his.
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