Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/165

Rh of his mistress, and compose his lyrics in solitude, cannot retire from the presence of his Maker. The motives of religion he felt to be too awful and too omnipresent to permit of the play of imagination. His view is based ultimately not on argument, but on reverential fear. Even thanksgiving ‘is to be felt rather than expressed.’ All that can be said of the Supreme Being is said when his name is named.

Dr. Isaac Watts, in his long critical preface to the Horae Lyricae, had argued with no less fervour on the other side. ‘There is nothing,’ he said, ‘amongst all the ancient Fables or later Romances, that have two such Extremes united in them, as the Eternal God becoming an Infant of Days; the Possessor of the Palace of Heaven laid to sleep in a manger;… and the Sovereign of Life stretching his Arms on a Cross, bleeding and expiring: The Heaven and the Hell in our Divinity are infinitely more delightful and dreadful than the Childish Figments of a Dog with three Heads, the Buckets of the Belides, the Furies with snaky Hairs, or all the flowry Stories of Elysium. And if we survey the one as Themes divinely true, and the other as a Medley of Fooleries which we can never believe, the Advantage for touching the Springs of Passion will fall infinitely on the Side of the Christian Poet; our Wonder and our Love, our Pity, Delight, and Sorrow, with the long Train of Hopes and Fears, must needs be under the Command of an harmonious Pen, whose every Line makes a Part of the Reader’s Faith, and is the very Life or Death of his Soul.’

Where theory is thus divided, the appeal must be to practice. Watts himself strengthens his case by quoting the poetry of the Psalms and the Book of Job.