―176―

For the Literary Magazine.

CRITICAL NOTICES.

no. viii.

———“Black as night;
Fierce as ten furies; terrible as hell.”

EVERY reader knows that this
is part of Milton's description of an
imaginary personage called Death.
How few are there among the read-
ers of this, or any popular poet, who
stop to enquire into the propriety or
reasonableness of what they read!
They are told beforehand that this
or that is a sublime production, and,
with a modesty in some respects
praise-worthy, take the work as a
criterion of taste and excellence,
and seldom venture to judge for
themselves, or to derive the reasons
of their approbation from the unbi-
assed and original suggestions of
their own minds.

I, for my part, must acknowledge
myself not prone to this obliging and
obsequious soft of acquiescence.....
Perhaps I am a little captious, and
take more pleasure in detecting
faults, than hi recognizing beauties.
Vanity whispers that to find faults
in a celebrated and generally ad-
mired spectacle is to see farther


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than others, and to evince a superior
penetration. To dissent where
others acquiesce, to be dissatisfied
where others are well pleased, is the
readiest way to consideration and
repute with some people. Among
that number I am half inclined to
place myself; but I am still encou-
raged to indulge this humour in
carping at the bard of Paradise, be-
cause your readers, if they do not
approve my strictures, will be, at
least, prompted to exercise their
judgment in accounting to them-
selves for their disapprobation.

Erroneous criticisms, as they are,
in the same respects, injurious; so
are they likewise, in the same re-
spects, beneficial, as bad reasoning
in politics or religion. They injure
those whom they convince, but they
are profitable to him whem they do
not make a convert, inasmuch as
they induce him to examine and
enquire for himself, and all his ob-
jections to the false system are, at
the same time, arguments in favour
of the true. With these prelimina-
ries, I now will take the liberty of
stating the ideas which the above
quotation has suggested to me.

Poets have frequently attempted
to exhibit Death as a person or
agent. They who have, for this
purpose, described every part of
nature as under the particular su-
perintendance of an invisible agent
or angelic minister, and have
therefore represented the causes
inimical to human life as the agency
or influence of one, who, as in the
Hebrew and Arabian allegories,
may be termed the angel of death,
seem to have been most consistent
with propriety and a just taste. In
this case, the usual symbols of the
angel have been, very properly,
those of a soldier or executioner……
He is painted like a man in armour,
the destroying sword naked in his
hand, and riding on a sable steed at
one time, and hovering over the de-
voted place or person, with menac-
ing attitudes, at another.

Another set of allegorists, among
whom all the vulgar may be ranked,
have made a person and performer

of Death himself. They have given
substance and design to a mere pri-
vation. One not familiar with the
subject, would feel much curiosity
as to the attributes and shape which
so incongruous a freak of fancy
would assume. If I do not mistake,
we shall generally find that Death,
personified under this view, is nei-
ther more nor less than a living
skeleton of a man; the bones kept
together by their ligaments, and
moving by a sort of anatomic power.
With this class of inventors, Death
is nothing more than the osseous
system of some dead individual.

Painters, and particularly Fuseli,
have imagined the spectres of the
dead in a mode, in some respects,
remarkably proper. The appari-
tion of Hamlet's father, for exam-
ple, is no other than the identical
individual risen from the grave. It
is the corporeal frame which we
behold, deprived of every thing but
its bones and muscles. In short, it
is the picture of a man flead alive,
and who continues alive notwith-
standing the loss of his cutaneous
vesture. The propriety, in some
respects, of this conception of a
spectre, is evident; since, if the
skin be not necessary to life, the
muscles, at least, are indispensible
to motion.

This notion of a spectre must be
gained from the experience either
of anatomists or executioners, un-
less, indeed, the right of re-appear-
ance after death were extended to
the lower animals: in which case,
in order to gain an accurate idea of
the apparition of an ox or a sheep,
for example, the poet or painter
may resort to the slaughter-house
of any beef or mutton butcher. He
need only look on while the dead
animal is skinned; nay, may chance
to meet in the market-house, de-
pending from an iron hook, a very
pretty ghost of a lamb.

It is in pursuance of this system
that the portrait of Death is, in like
manner, that of a dead man; but,
in order to be a suitable representa-
tion of the grand destroyer, the
image must be stripped of every

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thing but its bones. Even muscles,
which may account for a ghost's
moving, are denied to this horri-
ble mockery, who, notwithstanding,
stalks about, and even shaken a
dreadful dart.

A young painter, of my acquaint-
ance, was once highly pleased with
a simile, which, though trite and
vulgar, he had just heard for the
first time. Some one, in order to
illustrate the obstinacy with which
a bailiff adhered to an ill-fated
debtor, observed, that he stuck to
him like grim Death to a dead cat.

This grotesque, yet powerful
image, took such strong hold of my
friend's fancy, that he resolved to
paint the groupe. Inquiring as to
what sort of forms he designed to
bestow upon the two personages, he
answered, “that the model of a
dead cat was to be easily found in
any kennel, but that as to the grim
Death, he had been under some dif-
ficulty. The usual portraits of
Death had been taken from the
human figure; but this was evi-
dently a consideration of Death in
relation to the human subject. It
was, therefore, inapplicable to a
scene in which cats, and not men,
were to be actors and patients.”

I endeavoured to remove his diffi-
culties, by suggesting that analogy
required that the Death which he
was desirous of making visible,
should be copied from the skeleton
of a cat. The power that kills cats
may assume the form of the cat,
with just as much propriety as the
man-killing power is made to as-
sume the form of a man. As to
the kingly crown and the shaken
dart (Death, it seems, is a royal and
a military personage) I confessed
myself at a loss to propose a substi-
tute. Death, though an arrant mur-
derer, is not always a homicide ;
must less is he himself constantly of
the human species. The composer
of the famous epitaph on “P. P.
clerk of this parish,” was not quite
as wise as he was poetical, when he
asserted that

“Do all we can,
Death is a man
That never spareth none.”

This disquisition has led me away
from my purpose, which was, not
to censure the shocking and hideous
incongruity which Milton, in com-
mon with the vulgar, has been
guilty of in his portrait of Death,
but merely to comment on the
images contained in the above quo-
tation. There are three attributes
of this offspring of his brain, which
these comparisons are designed to
illustrate. In the first place, the
creature is black as night; next, he
is fierce as ten furies; and, lastly,
he is terrible as hell.

How it may appear to others I
cannot tell, but these images appear
to me either vague or grotesque.
Black as night is an image the most
trite, obvious, and unprecise imagi-
nable. Absolute darkness, which
implies the utter exclusion of all
light, produces to the eye the effect
of the most perfect blackness; but
not so night. The night is, in dif-
ferent degrees, dark or gloomy;
but its darkness, and, consequently,
its blackness, is never absolute. Of
the three kinds of night known in
this upper world, the moon-light
and star-light ones are resplendent.
Infernal or Tartarian night is con-
stantly irradiated by an upper,
nether, and surrounding fires. We
should have smiled perhaps, had
the poet chosen to say, black as
ebony; and yet, would he not have
gained in precision what he lost in
sublimity?

The ferocity of ten furies is more
formidable or destructive than that
of one, as ten hells are more terri-
ble than one hell; but degrees of fe-
rocity are entirely distinct, from the
multitude of the fierce. As swift as
ten race-horses, is a comparison
without a meaning. As poetical as
ten Homers, infallible as ten popes,
brave as ten Diomeds, wise as ten
Newtons, tall as ten giants, are all
similies, the grotesqueness and ab-
surdity of which are evident at first

―179―

sight; but Milton's ten furies are
exactly parallel to these.

A tattered woman once applied
to me for alms; I offered her a trifle,
but she demanded six times as much:
"For see,” says she, “I am as poor
as half a dozen beggars.” Now,
this rhetoric was quite as correct as Milton's.

I once overheard two children
contending about the superior ex-
cellence of the lump of sugar which
each had just received. One said
that “his lump was as sweet….as
any thing; as big….as big could be;
and as white….as a snow-ball.” The
other instantly retorted, that “his
was sweeter than any thing; bigger
than big could be; and white as a
hundred snow-balls." Now, the
whiteness of a hundred snow-balls
is nowise greater than the whiteness
of any individual snow-ball. To be
mud as an army of maniacs does
not even imply a madness equal to
that of the maddest trooper in the
army; it simply means nothing.

That Death should be as terrible
as hell, is not an unnatural thought,
especially with those to whom one
is only a conductor to the other:
but this is just as if one should say,
that a hangman is as hateful as the
gallows, a dun as the bailiff, or a
bailiff as the prison.

Every thing is desirable or other-
wise, according to the good or bad
effects it produces or is expected to
produce. Strictly speaking, Death
is as terrible to sinners as hell, be-
cause of the connection which one
has with the other; but this affinity
is rather moral than poetical.

The most powerful and magnifi-
cent conception that was ever form-
ed of Death, is probably conveyed
in the common phrase of “the king
of terrors.” This image, however,
has no relation to crowns, swords,
or skeletons. By these it is enfee-
bled and debased; nor is it possible,
without incongruity and oddity, to
attempt to paint the image. Such
images it is the prerogative of poe-
try to call up; but the fault of the
painter is essentially committed by
the poet, when he attempts to exhi-

bit such a portrait of his terrific
majesty as a painter might copy.