Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/236



" is Lowell," says one who ought to know him well—That "distinction 'twixt singing and preaching" is, indeed, very commonly overlooked by poets and poetasters of his school—the school of Progress—the school which has a Mission, and must give it vent in heroics, or lyrics, or lameters, as the case may be, whether the Peoples will hear or whether they will forbear. Charles Lamb describes the "modern schoolmaster" as an uncomfortable omniscient who is expected, and eke prepared, to "improve" every passing scene and circumstance—to seize every occasion—the season of the year, the time of the day, a fleeting cloud, a rainbow, a waggon of hay, a regiment of soldiers going by—to inculcate something useful; so that he can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object of instruction. "He cannot relish a beggarman, or a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement. Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses." The didactic pedagogue—didactic —has his uncomfortable parallel in the didactic bard or bardling. Didactic poetry may be pronounced, in scientific criticism, a paradox in words, a solecism, a thing of nought; but poets there have been and are, who, notwithstanding, plume themselves on, and are widely honoured for, the didactic form, or spirit, of their verse. They would annul the "distinction 'twixt singing and preaching"—they would make it a distinction without a difference—they would tag each line of their fable with a moral, solidify every dulce by an utile, burden every couplet with a deduction, and charge their exquisite rhymes with most exquisite reasons. Says Byron, in one of his wickedest moods—It is because Pegasus was not designed for the "grave paces" and cumbrous harness of didactic verse, that we count it an unkind thing, and an unnatural, to force him thereto. The systematically didactic poet seems to suppose that he can bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades to his