Sir Joshua
Reynolds; and we cannot help thinking that a taste for that sort of
poetry, which leans for support on the truth and fidelity of its
imitations of nature, began to display itself much about that time, and,
in a good measure, in consequence of the direction of the public taste
to the subject of painting. Book-learning, the accumulation of wordy
common-places, the gaudy pretensions of poetical fiction, had enfeebled
and perverted our eye for nature. The study of the fine arts, which came
into fashion about forty years ago, and was then first considered as a
polite accomplishment, would tend imperceptibly to restore it. Painting
is essentially an imitative art; it cannot subsist for a moment on empty
generalities: the critic, therefore, who had been used to this sort of
substantial entertainment, would be disposed to read poetry with the
eye of a connoisseur, would be little captivated with smooth, polished,
unmeaning periods, and would turn with double eagerness and relish to
the force and precision of individual details, transferred, as it were,
to the page from the canvas. Thus an admirer of Teniers or Hobbima
might think little of the pastoral sketches of Pope or Goldsmith; even
Thompson describes not so much the naked object as what he sees in his
mind's eye, surrounded and glowing with the mild, bland, genial vapours
of his brain:--but the adept in Dutch interiors, hovels, and pig-styes
must find in Mr. Crabbe a man after his own heart. He is the very thing
itself; he paints in words, instead of colours: there is no other
difference. As Mr. Crabbe is not a painter, only because he does not use
a brush and colours, so he is for the most part a poet, only because
he writes in lines of ten syllables. All the rest might be found in a
newspaper, an old magazine, or a county-register. Our author is himself
a little jealous of the prudish fidelity of his homely Muse, and tries
to justify himself by precedents. He brings as a parallel instance of
merely literal description, Pope's lines on the gay Duke of Buckingham,
beginning "In the worst inn's worst room see Villiers lies!" But surely
nothing can be more dissimilar. Pope describes what is striking, Crabbe
would have described merely what was there. The objects in Pope stand
out to the fancy from the mixture of the mean with the gaudy, from the
contrast of the scene and the character. There is an appeal to the
imagination; you see what is passing in a poetical poi