279. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 2, 91–93.
Hope End.
December 1st 1827.
Sir,
I have been suffering in the affliction of my family,—and was unable to take an immediate advantage of the offer you obligingly made; of lending me the abstract of Porson’s supplementary preface to the Hecuba. [1] I should now be very glad to see it,—& if you should not have repented your first kind intention, perhaps you will trust it to the servant who carries this letter. I see you are quite determined that St Basil shall owe nothing to Lucretius––Procul profani! [2] But tho’ your defence of the Saint interested & amused me, I am not yet persuaded that so extraordinary a correspondence could exist between two passages, without one’s having been suggested by the other: and I think it more difficult to believe that such could be the case, than that St Basil might have, for once, digressed from St Gregory’s line of study. I am almost afraid of you, when I take a middle course, & venture to hint that Basil may have read a translation of the passage in question. I am sure you never will allow this.
I have read the Pharsalia; & am very glad that you do not join in the classical growl against it, given vent to, by most critics—with that Cynic of Criticism, Scaliger, [3] at their head. Lucan is an ardent poet: the lightening of his spirit does not ressemble Salmoneus’s mimic fire, [4] —but has a real stormy grandeur which can only proceed from genius. And whether it wing the Heaven-ward sentiment, or illumine the battle-field, or “serve only to discover sights of fear”, [5] —as in Pompey’s consultation of Erichtho, in the 6th book,—it throws everywhere a fitful tho’ vivid flame,—which burns as well as flashes. Do you recollect this 6th book in all its terror & sublimity? Do you recollect how Erichtho
Adspicit adstantem projecti corporis umbram
Exanimes artus, invisaque claustra timentem
Carceris antiqui– [6]
And how
irataque morti
Verberat immotum vivo serpente cadaver–? [7]
Southey has made use of the last image with striking effect in his poem of Thalaba–
“Speak!” said the sorceress, & she snatched
A viper from the floor,
And, with the living reptile, lashed his neck! [8]
In spite, however, of my admiration of Lucan, I am not prepared to go half so far as you do. I think he has too much effort in his æstrus [9] —too much of the θελω θελω μανηναι, [10] —that his heroes speak too artificially, like orators: & the fault which you attribute to him, viz.—want of Harmony,—seems to me not only to belong to his versification, but to his design & colouring. I cannot conceal my astonishment that you should consider Lucan to be superior to Homer in the delineation of character. Homer’s power of delineating character is, I believe, generally acknowledged as the most wonderful of all his wonderful powers,—nec quidquam simile aut secundum [11] —unless we make a glorious exception in honor of our Shakespeare. The Greek epic is a grand moral Harmonicon,—where heroic courage & tender pathos, glory & fear, love & woe, the pride of life & the desolation of death, meet together in one mighty chorus. Alexander’s gold box was certainly not worthy of its contents. [12]
I should offer to send you Thomas May’s Supplementum Lucani; but you have most probably met with it—and I am sure you must think it spirited & poetical. I say confidently “I am sure”: for as you are no High Church greek scholar, you cannot be a High Church Latin one,—and are not likely to approve of Voltaire’s summary criticism on Du Fresnoy’s elegant Ars Graphica [13] ––“No Latin poetry is bearable, out of the Augustan age.”
I never saw even the outside of the Æthiopica, but I knew of its existence. Does not Ben Jonson make honorable mention of it, in his exquisite “Sad Shepherd”—where he speaks of
The lover’s scriptures, Heliodore & Tatius—? [14]
You amused me extremely by your account of the lava—which,—tho’ very tremendous,—cannot fortunately, do quite as much harm at Malvern, as at Herculaneum.
With sentiments of esteem & obligation,
I remain sincerely yours
E B Barrett.
Have you the work containing the Dissertation on the Greek Tragedies [15] —&, if you have, & should not be using it, could it be trusted with me a little while?
Address, on integral page: Hugh Stuart Boyd Esqr / Ruby Cottage / Malvern Wells.
Publication: EBB-HSB, pp. 12–14.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Added to the 1802 edition of Porson’s Euripidis Hecuba, these supplementary remarks deal with certain rules of iambic and trochaic verse.
2. “Away, you uninitiated!” (cf. Æneid, VI, 258).
3. Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), French classical scholar.
4. Salmoneus, son of Æolus, pretended to be a god, making thunder by dragging kettles behind his chariot, and hurling torches to simulate lightning. He was struck dead by Zeus.
5. Cf. Paradise Lost, I, 64.
6. “… saw beside her the ghost of the unburied corpse. It feared the lifeless frame and the hateful confinement of its former prison” (Pharsalia, VI, 720–722).
7. “Enraged with death, she lashed the passive corpse with a live serpent” (ibid., VI, 726–727).
8. Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), II, 22.
9. “Inspiration; frenzy.”
10. “I desire, desire to be mad” (Anacreon, Ode XIII, “On Himself”). The first two words underscored twice, the third once.
11. “Nothing like or even next to” (cf. Horace, Odes, I, 12, 18).
12. Plutarch tells of a casket, alleged to be the most precious item in the captured baggage of Darius, which Alexander took for himself; in it, he kept his copy of Homer’s Iliad, with Aristotle’s own markings.
13. De Arte Graphica by Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy (1611–65).
14. Act I, sc. 5 of The Sad Shepherd: or, a Tale of Robin Hood (1641).
15. In view of later comments about the scholarship of Johann Gottfried Jacob Hermann (1772–1848), this work may well have been his dissertation De usu antistrophicorum in Græcorum tragædiis … (1810).
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