"Joy, joy for ever.--my task is done--
"The Gates are past and Heaven is won!"
"And this," said the Great Chamberlain, "is poetry! this flimsy
manufacture of the brain, which in comparison with the lofty and durable
monuments of genius is as the gold filigree-work of Zamara beside the
eternal architecture of Egypt!" After this gorgeous sentence, which, with
a few more of the same kind, FADLADEEN kept by him for rare and important
occasions, he proceeded to the anatomy of the short poem just recited. The
lax and easy kind of metre in which it was written ought to be denounced,
he said, as one of the leading causes of the alarming growth of poetry in
our times. If some check were not given to this lawless facility we should
soon be overrun by a race of bards as numerous and as shallow as the
hundred and twenty thousand Streams of Basra.[179] They who succeeded in
this style deserved chastisement for their very success;--as warriors have
been punished even after gaining a victory because they had taken the
liberty of gaining it in an irregular or unestablished manner. What then
was to be said to those who failed? to those who presumed as in the
present lamentable instance to imitate the licence and ease of the bolder
sons of song without any of that grace or vigor which gave a dignity even
to negligence;--who like them flung the jereed[180] carelessly, but not,
like them, to the mark;--"and who," said he, raising his voice to excite a
proper degree of wakefulness in his hearers, "contrive to appear heavy and
constrained in the midst of all the latitude they allow themselves, like
one of those young pagans that dance before the Princess, who is ingenious
enough to move as if her limbs were fettered, in a pair of the lightest
and loosest drawers of Masulipatam!"
It was but little suitable, he continued, to the grave march of criticism
to follow this fantastical Peri of whom they had just heard, through all
her flights and adventures between earth and heaven, but he could not help
adverting to the puerile conceitedness of the Three Gifts which she is
supposed to carry to the skies,--a drop of blood, forsooth, a sigh, and a
tear! How the first of these articles was delivered into the Angel's
"radiant hand" he professed himself at a loss to discover; and as to the
safe carriage of the sigh and the tear, such Peris and such poets were
beings by far too incomprehensible for him even to guess how they managed
such matters.
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