BLACKWOOD’SEDINBURGH MAGAZINE.No. CCCCLXXXIV. FEBRUARY, 1856. Vol. LXXIX.
BLACKWOOD’SEDINBURGH MAGAZINE.No. CCCCLXXXIV. FEBRUARY, 1856. Vol. LXXIX.
BLACKWOOD’SEDINBURGH MAGAZINE.No. CCCCLXXXIV. FEBRUARY, 1856. Vol. LXXIX.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLXXXIV. FEBRUARY, 1856. Vol. LXXIX.
MODERN LIGHT LITERATURE—POETRY.
“Poets,” said the ancient wisdom, “are not made, but born.” We have made miraculous progress in all the arts of manufacture since the time of this saying, but we have not been able to controvert the judgment of our forefathers. Education, refinement, taste, and talent, are great things in their way, and men do wonders with them; but we have not fallen yet upon a successful method of bringing down the divine spark into the marble, let us work it ever so curiously. The celestial gift in these new times, as in the old, comes down with divine impartiality, yet seldom into the tenement most specially built and garnished for its reception. We can make critics, connoisseurs, “an enlightened audience,” but, let us labour at it as we will, we cannot make a poet.
And indeed, to tell the truth, it is but small help we can give, with all our arts and ingenuities, even to the perfecting of the poet born. Science discusses the subject gravely—at one time troubled with apprehensions lest her severe shadow should kill the singer outright, as Reason killed Love—at another, elate with the happier thought of increasing all his conquests, and sending forth as her own esquire, bearing her ponderous lance and helmet, the glorious boy in his perennial youth. It is a vain speculation. The poet glances past this important figure with a calm eye and a far-shining smile. His vocation is beyond and beyond the range of all the sciences. The heart and soul that were in the first home, ere ever even spade and distaff were invented, when two forlorn hopeful creatures, wistfully looking back to the sunset of Eden, wistfully looking forward to the solemn nightfall of the drear world without, with all its starry promises of another morning and a higher heaven, were all the human race—are world and scope enough for the humanest and most divine of arts. That God has made of one blood all the nations and all the generations of this many-peopled earth, is the argument on which he speaks; that heart answers unto heart all the world over, is the secret of his power. The petulant passion of a child, the heroisms and exultations and agonies of that fantastical sweet youth, over whose unconscious mockery of our real conflict we graver people smile and weep, are of more import to the poet than all the secrets of the earth, and all the wonders of the sky; and he turns—it is his vocation—from the discovery of a planet, forgetting all about it, to make the whole world ring with joy over a cottage cradle, or weigh down the very wings of the winds with wailing over some uncommemorated grave.
Yes, it is a humiliating confession—but in reality we are quite as like to injure as to elevate our poet by all our educations. Perhaps the heavenly glamour in his eyne had best be left entirely unobscured by any laws save those of nature; but at all events it seems tolerably sure, that the more we labour at his training, the less satisfactory is the result of it. A school of poets is the most hopeless affair in existence; and whether it dwindle into those smallest of small rhymsters, leaden echoes of the silver chimes of Pope, in whom the eighteenth century delighted, or to the present makers of dislocated verses, whose glory it is to break stones upon the road where the Laureate’s gilded coach flashes by, we wait with equal weariness and equal impatience for the Coming Man, who knows neither school nor education—whose business it is to rout the superannuated spinsters, and make the world ring once more with the involuntary outburst of song and youth.
But we who are but the unhappy victims of the mania, why do we blame ourselves? Alas! it is not we, but our poets, foolish fraternity, who have set about this fatal task of making a school and perfecting themselves in their art. How do you suppose they are to do it, kindest reader? In other arts and professions the self-love of the student in most instances suffers a woeful downfall at his very outset. Tutors and books, dire conspirators against his innocence, startle the hapless neophyte out of all his young complacency; professors set him down calmly as a know-nothing; chums, with storms of laughter, drive him out of his last stronghold. He has to shut himself out from his college doors; seal himself up, poor boy, in his home letters, and so sit down and study other people’s wisdom, till he comes by that far away and roundabout process to some true estimate of his own.
But the poet, say the poets, needs other training. For him it is safest that we shut him up with himself. Himself, a separated creature, garlanded and crowned for the sacrifice, is, in one noble concentration, all the ethics, the humanity, and the religion with which he has to do; significances, occult and mysterious, are in every breath of wind that whispers about his dedicated head; his smallest actions are note-worthy, his sport is a mystery, his very bread and cheese symbolical. He is a poet—everywhere, and in all places, it is the destiny of this unfortunate to reverence himself, to contemplate himself, to expound and study the growth of a poet’s mind, the impulses of a poet’s affections; he is not to be permitted to be unconscious of the sweet stirrings within him of the unspoken song; he is not to be allowed to believe with that sweetest simplicity of genius that every other youthful eye beholds “the light that never was on sea or land,” as well as his own. Unhappy genius! ill-fated poet! for him alone of all men must the heavens and the earth be blurred over with a miserable I,—and so he wanders, a woeful Narcissus, seeing his own image only, and nothing better, in all the lakes and fountains; and, bound by all the canons of his art, falls at last desperately either in love or in hate with the persistent double, which, go where he will, still looks him in the face.
But we bethink us of the greater poets, sons of the elder time. There was David, prince of lyric-singers; there was Shakespeare, greatest maker among men. The lyricist was a king, a statesman, a warrior, and a prophet; the leisure of his very youth was the leisure of occupation, when the flocks were feeding safe in the green pastures, and by the quiet waters; and even then the dreaming poet-eye had need to be wary, and sometimes flashed into sudden lightning at sight of the lion which the stripling slew.Hesung out of the tumult and fulness of his heart—out of the labours, wars, and tempests of his most human and most troubled life: his business in this world was to live, and not to make poems. Yet what songs he made! They are Holy Writ, inspired and sacred; yet they are human songs, the lyrics of a struggling and kingly existence—the overflow of the grand primal human emotions to which every living heart resounds. His “heart moved him,” his “soul was stirred within him”—true poet-heart—true soul of inspiration! and not what other men might endure, glassed in the mirror of his own profound poetic spirit, a study of mankind; but of what himself was bearing there and at that moment, the royal singer made his outcry, suddenly, and “in his haste,” to God. What cries of distress and agony are these! what bursts of hope amid the heartbreak! what shouts and triumphs of great joy! For David did not live to sing, but sang because he strove and fought, rejoiced and suffered, in the very heart and heat of life.
Let us say a word of King David ere we go further. Never crowned head had so many critics as this man has had in these two thousand years; and many a scorner takes occasion by his failings, and religious lips have often faltered to call him “the man after God’s own heart;” yet if we would but think of it, how touching is this name! Not the lofty and philosophic Paul, though his tranced eyes beheld the very heaven of heavens; not John, although the human love of the Lord yearned towards that vehement angel-enthusiast, whose very passion was for God’s honour; but on this sinning, struggling, repenting David, who fights and falls, and rises only to fall and fight again—who only never will be content to lie still in his overthrow, and acknowledge himself vanquished—who bears about with him every day the traces of some downfall, yet every day is up again, struggling on as he can, now discouraged, now desperate, now exultant; who has a sore fighting life of it all his days, with enemies within and without, his hands full of wars, his soul of ardours, his life of temptations. Upon this man fell the election of Heaven. And small must his knowledge be, of himself or of his race, who is not moved to the very soul to think upon God’s choice of this David, as themanafter His own heart. Heaven send us all as little content with our sins as had the King of Israel! Amen.
And then there is Shakespeare: never man among men, before or after him, has made so many memorable people; yet amid all the crowding faces on his canvass, we cannot point to one as “the portrait of the painter.” He had leisure to make lives and histories for all these men and women, but not to leave a single personal token to us of himself. The chances seem to be, that this multitudinous man, having so many other things to think of, thought marvellously little of William Shakespeare; and that all that grave, noble face would have brightened into mirthfullest laughter had he ever heard, in his own manful days, of the Swan of Avon. His very magnitude, so to speak, lessens him in our eyes; we are all inclined to be apologetic when we find him going home in comfort and good estate, and ending his days neither tragically nor romantically, but in ease and honour. He is the greatest of poets, but he is not what you call a poetical personage. He writes his plays for theGlobe, but, once begun upon them, thinks only of his Hamlet or his Lear, and not a whit of his audience; nor, in the flush and fulness of his genius, does a single shadow of himself cross the brilliant stage, where, truth to speak, there is no need of him. The common conception of a poet, the lofty, narrow, dreamy soul, made higher and more abstract still by the glittering crown of light upon his crested forehead, is entirely extinguished in the broad flood of sunshine wherein stands this Shakespeare, a common man, sublimed and radiant in a very deluge and overflow of genial power. Whether it be true or not that these same marvellous gifts of his would have made as great a statesman or as great a philosopher as they made a poet, it does not lie in our way to discover; but to know that the prince of English poets did his work, which no man has equalled, with as much simplicity and as little egotism as any labouring peasant of his time—to see him setting out upon it day by day, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race, but never once revealing to us those laborious tokens of difficulties overcome, which of themselves, as Mr Ruskin says, are among the admirable excellences of Art—to perceive his ease and speed of progress, and how his occupation constantly is with his story and never with himself,—what a lesson it is! But alas, and alas! we are none of us Shakespeares. Far abovehismotives, we would scorn to spend our genius on a Globe Theatre, or on any other vulgar manner of earning daily bread. The poet is a greater thing than his poem; let us takeitsolely as an evidence of his progress; and in the mean time, however he may tantalise the world with his gamut and his exercises, let all the world look on with patience, with awe, and with admiration. True, he is not making an Othello or a Hamlet; but never mind, he is making Himself.
Yet the thought will glide in upon us woefully unawares,—What the better are we? We are ever so many millions of people, and only a hundred or two of us at the utmost can be made happy in the personal acquaintanceship of Mr Tennyson or (we humbly crave the Laureate’s pardon for the conjunction) Mr Dobell. In this view of the question, it is not near so important to us that these gentlemen should perfect the poet, as that they should make the poem. We ask the Laureate for a battle-song, and he gives us a skilful fantasia upon the harp; we hush our breath and open our ears, and, listening devoutly to the “Eureka!” of here and there a sanguine critic, who has found a poet, wait, longing for the lay that is to follow. Woe is upon us!—all that we can hear in the universal twitter is, that every man is trying his notes. We are patient, but we are not a stoic; and in the wrath of our disappointment are we not tempted a hundred times to plunge these melodious pipes into the abyss of our waste-paper basket, and call aloud forPunch, and theTimes?
Yes, that great poetic rebel, Wordsworth, has heavier sins upon his head than Betty Foy and Alice Fell; it is to him we owe it, that the poet in these days is to be regarded as a delicate monster, a creature who lives not life but poetry, a being withdrawn out of the common existence, and seeing its events only in the magic mirror of his own consciousness, as the Lady of Shallott saw the boats upon the river, and the city towers burning in the sun. The Poet of the Lakes had no imaginary crimes to tell the world of, nor does it seem that he regarded insanity as one of the highest and most poetic states of man; but we venture to believe there never would have been aBalder, andMaudshould have had no crazy lover, had there been no Recluse, solemnly living a long life for Self and Poetry in the retired and sacred seclusion of Rydal Mount.
It is in this way that the manner which is natural and a necessity to some one great spirit, becomes an intolerable bondage and oppression to a crowd of smaller ones. The solemn egotism, self-reserved and abstract, which belonged to Wordsworth, is more easily copied than the broad, bright, manful nature of our greatest English poet, who was too mighty to be peculiar; and the delusion has still a deeper root. It is in our nature, as it seems, to scorn what is familiar and common to all the world; priesthoods, find them where you will, are bound to profess a more ethereal organisation, and seek a separated atmosphere. Wordsworth is a very good leader; but for a thorough out-and-out practical man, admitting no compromise with his theory, commend us to Anthony the Eremite, the first of all monkish deserters from this poor sinking vessel, the world. The poet is the priest of Nature; out with him from this Noah’s ark of clean and unclean,—this field of wheat and tares, growing together till the harvest,—this ignoble region of common life. Let the interpreter betake him to his monastery, his cloister, his anchorite’s cell—and when he is there? Yes, when he is there—he will sing to us poor thralls whom he has left behind, but not of our ignoble passions and rejoicings, or the sorrows that rend our hearts. Very different from our heavy-handed troubles, rough troopers in God’s army of afflictions, are the spectre shapes of this poetic world. True, their happiness is rapture, their misery of the wildest, their remorse the most refined; but the daylight shines through and through these ghostly people, and leaves nothing of them but bits of cloud. Alas, the preaching is vain and without profit! What can the poet do—when he is tired of hisMystic, sick of hisBalder, weary of Assyrian bulls and lords with rabbit-mouths? Indeed, there seems little better left for him than what his predecessors did before. The monk spent his soul upon some bright-leaved missal, and left the record of his life in the illumination of an initial letter, or the border of foliage on a vellum page; the poet throws away his in some elaborate chime of words, some new inverted measure, or trick of jingling syllables. Which is the quaintest? for it is easy to say which is the saddest waste of the good gifts of God.
Also it is but an indifferent sign of us, being, as we undoubtedly are, so far as poetry is concerned, a secondary age, that there can be no dispute about the first poet of our day. There is no elder brotherhood to compete for the laurel; no trio like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; no guerilla like Byron to seize upon the contested honour, nor Irish minstrel to strike a sugared note of emulation. Should a chance arrow at this moment strike down our poetic champion, so far from comforting ourselves, like King Henry, that we have “five hundred as good as he,” we could not find for our consolation one substitute for Tennyson. Echoes of him we could indeed find by the score; but no one his entire equal in all the field. Let no one say we do not appreciate poetry; in these mechanical days there are still a goodly number of singers who could echo that unfortunate admission which cost Haverillo his life, and was the last stroke of exasperation to the redoubtable Firmilian, “I have a third edition in the press.” But in spite of Smith and Dobell, the Brownings and the Mystics, our Laureate holds his place; holding his laurel with justice and right less disputable than most of his predecessors. Yet our admiration of Tennyson is perplexed and unsatisfactory. He is the first in his generation, but out of his generation he does not bear comparison with any person of note and fame equal to his own. He is small in the presence of Wordsworth, a very inferior magician indeed by the side of Coleridge; his very music—pardon us, all poets and all critics!—does notflow. It may be melodious, but it is not winged; one stanza will not float into another. It is a rosary of golden beads, some of them gemmed and radiant, fit to be set in a king’s crown; but you must tell them one by one, and take leisure for your comment while they drop from your fingers. They are beautiful, but they leave you perfectly cool and self-possessed in the midst of your admiration. To linger over them is a necessity; it becomes them to be read with criticism; you go over the costly beadroll and choose your single favourites here and there, as you might do in a gallery of sculpture. And thus the poet chooses to make you master of his song,—itdoes not seize uponyou.
This is a kind and manner of influence which poets have not often aimed at. Hitherto it has been the object of this fraternity to arrest and overpower their audience as the Ancient Mariner fascinated the wedding guest; and we all know how helplessly, and with what complete submission, we have followed in the train of these enchanters, wheresoever it pleased them to turn their wayward footsteps. But Mr Tennyson aims at a more refined and subtle influence than this downright enslaving. A poet who writes, or seems to write, because he cannot help it,—and a poet who writes, or seems to write, of set purpose andmalice prepense, are two very different persons. A man of the first class could not have writtenIn Memoriam. Hadhebeen mourning, he must have mourned a closer grief, and broken his heart over it, ere he had wept the half of those melodious tears; but for the poet quietly selecting a subject for his poem, the wisest philosopher could not have suggested a better choice. A great deal has been said and written on this subject, and we are fully aware that grief does not make books, or even poems, except in very rare and brief instances, and that the voice of a great sorrow is a sharp and bitter outcry, and not a long and eloquent monologue. But Mr Tennyson does not present himself to us under the strong and violent compulsion of a great sorrow. It is not grief at his heart which makes him speak, using his gifts to give ease and utterance to its burden of weeping; but it is himself who uses his grief, fully perceiving its capabilities, and the entrance it will give him into the sacred and universal sympathy of his fellows. For, like all great works of art, this poem appeals to one of the primitive and universal emotions of human nature. The dead—the early dead, the beloved, the gifted, the young: we may discuss the appropriateness of the tribute, but we cannot refuse to be moved by its occasion. No man can look on these pages without finding here and there a verse which strikes home; for few of us are happy enough to live so much as twenty years in this weary world of ours without someIn Memoriamof our own.
Yet we cannot complain of Mr Tennyson that he makes merchandise of any of the nearest and closest bereavements, the afflictions which shake the very balance of the world to those who suffer them. His sorrow is as much of the mind as of the heart; he weeps a companion beloved, yet almost more honoured and esteemed than beloved—a friend, not even a brother, still less a child or a wife;—enough of the primitive passion to claim sympathy from all of us, but not so much that our sympathy loses itself in a woe beyond consolation. Pure friendship is seldom so impassioned; but had it been a commoner tie—a relationship more usual—these gradual revelations of grief in all its successive phases must have been too much at once for the poet and his audience. This nice discrimination secures for us that we are able to read and follow him into all those solemn regions of thought and fancy which open at the touch of death;hedoes not fall down upon the grave, the threshold, as we are but too like to do, and we wander after him wistfully, beguiled with the echo of this thoughtful weeping, which must have overpowered us had it been as close or as personal as our own. We feel that over our own minds these same thoughts have flashed now and then—a momentary gleam—while we were wading in the bitter waters, and woefully making up our minds, a hundred times in an hour, to the will of God; but who could follow them out? The poet, more composed, does what we could not do; he makes those flashes of hope or of agony into pictures visible and true. Those glimpses of the face of the dead, of the moonlight marking out upon the marble the letters of his name, those visions of his progress now from height to height in the pure heavens, all the inconsistent lights and shadows—mingled thoughts of the silence in the grave, and of the sound and sunshine of heaven—not one of them is passed over. People say it is not one poem, but a succession of poems. It must have been so, or it would not have been true. One after another they come gleaming through the long reverie of grief—one after another, noting well their inconsistencies, their leaps from day to night, from earth to heaven, the poet has set them down. He knows that we think of the lost, in the same instant, as slumbering under the sod and as awaking above the sky; he knows that we realise themhereandthere, as living and yet as dead; he knows that our
“fancy fuses old and new,And flashes into false and true,And mingles all without a plan.”
“fancy fuses old and new,And flashes into false and true,And mingles all without a plan.”
“fancy fuses old and new,And flashes into false and true,And mingles all without a plan.”
“fancy fuses old and new,
And flashes into false and true,
And mingles all without a plan.”
It is the excellence ofIn Memoriamthat it is a succession of poems—that the thread of connection runs loosely—now and then drops, and as unexpectedly comes to light again—that the sequence of these fancies knows no logic, and that they come in the strain as they come to the heart.
At the same time it is equally true that all this is done of set purpose and intention—that the act with which, glimpse by glimpse, the whole tearful chronicle is made visible, is a calm deliberate act, and not a voice out of the present passion of a heartbreaking grief. The poet has chosen the theme—it is not the theme which urges with an overpowering impulse the utterance of the poet.
And so it is with all Mr Tennyson’s verses, for—no disparagement to his poetic power—verses we must call them. It is true he is now and then moved by some sudden exclamation, and shouts it out with an unexpected force which startles his readers, for the moment, into a more eager sympathy—but for the most part this poet holds his verse in perfect subordination, and is never overcome or led away by it. His poetry ismade, it is not born. When he can round a sentence into a stanza, the effect, of its kind, is perfect; but the very form of his favourite measure, the rhythm ofIn Memoriam, is against any real outburst of involuntary song; for the verse which falls so sweetly when it contains all that belongs to it within its perfect crystal round, like a dewdrop, makes only a most blurred and unshapely strain when it has to eke out its sense with another and another stanza. When the necessities of his subject force him to this, the poet labours like a man threading together a succession of fish-ponds in hopes of making a river. Of themselves these silvery globes are perfect, but there is no current in them, and, work as you will, they can never flow and glow into a living stream. Yes, our Laureate unhappily is always far too much “master of his subject;” would that his subject now and then could but master him!
If it should happen, by any chance, that Mr Tennyson shared in Wordsworth’s solemn conceit, and designed to make a Gothic cathedral out of his works and life, we marvel much what place in it could be given toThe Princess, that prettiest of poetic extravagances. Not a Lady-chapel, though it is of a college of ladies that the story treats—not a delicate shrine, all wrought in lilies and graces of foliage, like the shrine of some sweet maiden-saint. No; the Marys, the Catherines, and the Margarets, symbolised an entirely different fashion of womankind; yet have we the greatest kindness for Ida in her girlish heroics, sincerest of all fictions—in her grand words, and her pride, her inconstant subjects, and her own self-betraying heart. For our own part, we are so entirely weary of symbols, that we do not pause to inquire whetherThe Princessmeans anything more than it professes to mean. To us it is only a pleasant picture of the phantasies of youth.
The sweet and daring folly of girlish heroics and extravagance has not done half so much service to the poet and story-teller as has the corresponding stage in the development of man. Yet there is more innocence in it, and perhaps in its full bloom its pretensions are even more sublime. The delicate temerity which dares everything, yet at its very climax starts away in a little sudden access of fear—the glorious young stoic, who could endure a martyrdom, yet has very hard ado to keep from crying when you lose her favourite book or break her favourite flower—the wild enthusiast dreamer, scorning all authorities, who yet could not sleep o’ nights if she had transgressed by ever so little the sweet obedience of home,—there is a charm about this folly almost more delightful than the magic of the bolder youth, with all its bright vagaries; and it is this which makes our tenderness for the Princess Ida and all her “girl graduates in their golden hair.”
Strange enough, however, this phase of youthfulness does not seem to have struck any woman-poet. We have heroines pensive and heroines sublime, heroines serious and heroines merry, but very few specimens of that high fantastical which embraces all these, and into which most men, and doubtless most women, on their way to soberer life, have the luck to fall. Mrs Browning is too sad, too serious, too conscious of the special pangs and calamities which press heaviest on her sisterhood, to take note of any happier peculiarity. Nor is this special eye to feminine troubles confined to Mrs Browning: a weeping and a melancholy band are the poetesses of all generations. “Woman is the lesser man,” says the Laureate; but only woman is the sadder man—the victim set apart on a platform of injury—the wronged and slighted being whose lot it is to waste her sweetness on hearts unkind and ungrateful, say all the ladies. “Herlot is on you.” The mature woman has no better thought, when she looks over the bright girl-heads, bent in their morning prayer; and wherever we have a female singer, there stands woman, deject and pensive, betrayed, forsaken, unbeloved, weeping immeasurable tears. Is a woman, then, the only creature in God’s universe whom He leaves without compensation? Out upon the thought! but there ought to be some Ida bold enough to proclaim the woman’s special happinesses—the exuberant girl-delights—the maiden meditation, fancy free—the glory of motherhood—the blessings as entirely her own as are the griefs.Bertha in the Laneis a most moving story, sweetly told; but ye are not always weeping, O gentlest sisterhood! and where are your songs of joy?
If Mr Tennyson intends the hysterical folly ofMaudfor a companion picture to this one, he is indeed elevating the woman to a higher pedestal than even Ida dreamed of; for the youth is a miserable conception in comparison with this sunbright girl. In the beginning of the last reign of poets—when men, disturbed by the great rustle of the coming wings, endeavoured to find out wherein the magic consisted, to which they could not choose but yield—we remember to have seen many clever speculations on the nature of poetry “One said it was the moon—another said nay”; and it was very hard to understand the unreasonable potency of this enchantment—which, indeed, clever people, unwilling to yield to an influence which they cannot measure, are perpetually accounting for by rules and principles of art. “It has always been our opinion,” says Lord Jeffrey, “that the very essence of poetry, apart from the pathos, the wit, or the brilliant description which may be embodied in it, but may exist equally in prose, consists in the fine perception and vivid expression of that subtle and mysterious analogy which exists between the physical and the moral world—which makes outward things and qualities the natural types and emblems of inward gifts and emotions, and leads us to ascribe life and sentiment to everything that interests us in the aspects of external nature.” Lord Jeffrey is a good authority, though sometimes this troublesome poetry put even the accomplished critic out of his reckoning; but we are sadly afraid that this deliverance of his, or at least the idea it contains, has had some share in the present insanity of all our poets in regard to Nature. Mr Tennyson may have a private reason of his own for making such a miserable grumbler as his last hero. Mr Dobell may hold himself justified, in the heights of self-complacence, and for the benefit of art, for his atrociousBalder, a criminal, by all poetic laws, for prosiness interminable, worse than murder; but we would crave to know what right these gentlemen may have to seize upon our genial nature, and craze her healthful looks and voices to their hysterical and ghastly fancy? We are content, if he uses his own materials, that the Laureate should dabble his hollow with blood to his heart’s content; but we will not consent, for a hundred laureates, to make the free heather of our hills, the kindly blossom sacred to home and to liberty, an image of disgust and horror. After all, this is a very poor trick and a contemptible—at its best much like that which Mr Ruskin denounces as the most ignoble thing in painting, the excitement of mind which comes from a successful deception, the consciousness that the thing we look at is not what it appears to be. When we feel Nature sympathising with us, it is well; but it is not well when we force her to echo our own mad fancies, of themselves forced and unreal enough. The “frantic rain,” the “shuddering dark,” the “maddened beach”—alas, poor poets! is force of expression not to be found by better means than by this juggle of misplaced adjectives? How widely different was the “sea change into something rich and strange” of the sweeter imagination and the greater heart!
But it is doubtless a very perturbed atmosphere in which we find ourselves when we come face to face with the last new arrival in the land of poesy, the unfortunate young gentleman whose hard fate it is to love Maud, and to shoot her brother. He has no name, this ill-fated youth; but doubtless Balder is reckoned in his roll of cousinships, and so is Mr Alexander Smith. There are three of them, ladies and gentlemen, and they are an amiable trio. Strangely as their garb and intentions are altered, there is a lingering reminiscence about them of a certainChilde Haroldwho once set the world aflame. Like him they are troubled with a weight of woe and misfortune mysteriously beyond the conception of common men; but unlike him—and the difference is characteristic—these unhappy lads are solemnly bent on “improving their minds,” in spite of their misery. For our own part, we are much disposed, in the first instance, to set downMaudas one of the greatest impertinences ever perpetrated by a poet; but we confess, after an hour’s trial ofBalder, and the ceaseless singing of that wife of his, which of itself certainly was almost enough to drive a sober man crazy, and ought to be received as an extenuating circumstance, we return in a kinder spirit to the nameless young gentleman who wrote the Laureate’s poem. After all, he is only an idle boy, scorning other people, as idle boys are not unwont to scorn their neighbours in the world; he does not think himself a divinity; he has not a manuscript at hand to draw forth and gaze upon with delighted eyes; he is not—let us be grateful—a poet. His history is all pure playing with the reader, a wanton waste of our attention and the singer’s powers; but, after all, there is something of the breath of life in it, when we compare it with the solemn foolery of its much-pretending contemporaries, the lauds of the self-worshipping man, or the rhapsodies of the self-admiring youth.
We remember to have heard a very skilful painter of still life describe how the composition, the light and shade, and arrangement of one of his pictures, was taken from a great old picture of a scriptural scene. Instead of men and women, the story and the action of the original, our friend had only things inanimate to group upon his canvass, but he kept the arrangement, the sunshine and the shadow, the same. One can suppose that some such artistic whim had seized upon Mr Tennyson. In the wantonness of conscious power, he has been looking about him for some feat to do—when, lo! the crash of a travelling orchestra smote upon the ears of the poet. Are there German bands in the Isle of Wight? or was it the sublimer music of some provincial opera which woke the Laureate’s soul to this deed of high emprise? Yes,Maudis an overture done into words; beginning with a jar and thunder—all the breath of all the players drawn out in lengthened suspiration upon the noisy notes; then bits of humaner interlude—soft flute-voices—here and there a momentary silvery trumpet-note, or the tinkle of a harp, and then a concluding crash of all the instruments, a tumult of noises fast and furious, an assault upon our ears and our patience, only endurable because we see the end. Such is this poem—which indeed it is sad to call a poem, especially in those hard days. We mean no disparagement to Mr Tennyson’s powers. It is perhaps only when we compare this with other poems of the day that we see how prettily managed is the thread of the story, and how these morsels of verse carry us through every scene as clear as if every scene was a picture; but a man who knows only too consciously that a whole nation of people acknowledge him as their best singer—a man who also doubtless must have noted how the good public, those common people who take their ill names so tenderly, hurry his books into sixth and tenth editions, a fact which ought somewhat to counterbalance the cheating yard-wand—and one, moreover, so thoroughly acquainted with the gravity and passion of this time, and how it has been startled into a humbler estimate of itself by the fiery touch of war,—that such a man, at such an hour, should send forth this piece of trifling as his contribution to the courage and heartening of his country, is as near an insult to the audience he addresses as anything which is not personal can be.
Mr Tennyson, however, has insight and perception to keep him from the strand on which his imitators—the smaller people who endeavour to compete with him in poetry, and triumphantly excel him in extravagance—go ashore.Heknows that a poet’s hero ought not to be a poet—that a man’s genius was given him, if not for the glory of God, its best aim, yet, at worst, for the glory of some other man, and not for the pitiful delight of self-laudation, meanest of human follies. A great book is a great thing, and a great poem is the most immortal of great books; yet, notwithstanding, one cannot help a smile at the “Have you read my book?” of Mr Smith’sLife Drama, or the
“O thou first last work! my early planned,Long meditate, and slowly-written epic,”
“O thou first last work! my early planned,Long meditate, and slowly-written epic,”
“O thou first last work! my early planned,Long meditate, and slowly-written epic,”
“O thou first last work! my early planned,
Long meditate, and slowly-written epic,”
of Mr Dobell! The poet’s glory is to celebrate other achievements than his own. His inspiration is the generous flush of sympathy which triumphs in another’s triumph: “Arms and the man I sing;” and so it becomes him to throw his heart into his subject, and leave his own reputation with a noble indifference to the coming ages, who will take care of that. But it is a perilous day for poetry when poets magnify their office through page after page of lengthy argument—not to say, besides, that it is very unjust to us, who are not poets but common people, and cannot be expected to follow into these recondite regions the soaring wing of genius. The greater can comprehend the less, but not the less the greater.Hecan descend to us in our working-day cares, but it is not to be expected that many of us can ascend to him in that sublime retirement of his among the visions and the shadows. To takeBalder, for instance: marvellously few of us, even at our vainest, think either kings or gods of ourselves; ordinary human nature, spite of its prides and pretensions, is seldom without a consciousness at its heart of its own littleness and poverty; and when we hear a man declaring his sublime superiority, we are puzzled, and pause, and smile, and try to make it out a burlesque or an irony. If he says it in sport, we can understand him, for Firmilian is out of sight a more comprehensible person than his prototype; but if our hero is in earnest, we shake our perplexed heads and let him go by—we know him not. There may be such a person—far be it from us to limit the creative faculty; but how does anybody suppose that we—
“Creatures not too wise nor goodFor human nature’s daily food,”
“Creatures not too wise nor goodFor human nature’s daily food,”
“Creatures not too wise nor goodFor human nature’s daily food,”
“Creatures not too wise nor good
For human nature’s daily food,”
can be able to comprehend a being who makes no secret of his own intense superiority, his elevation over our heads? Again, we say, the greater comprehends the less, and not the less the greater. We can enter into the trials and the delights of ordinary men like ourselves; but, alas! we are not able to enter into those pleasures and poetic pains “which only poets know.” And the poet knows we cannot appreciate him—nay, glories in our wonder as we gape after him in his erratic progress—showers upon us assurances that we cannot understand, and laughs at our vain fancy if we venture humbly to suppose that we might; but in the name of everything reasonable, we crave to know, this being the case, why this infatuated singer publishes his poem? “Have you read my book?” says Walter, in theLife Drama; and being answered, “I have:” “It is enough,” says the satisfied poet,—
“The Book was only written for two souls,And they are thine and mine.”
“The Book was only written for two souls,And they are thine and mine.”
“The Book was only written for two souls,And they are thine and mine.”
“The Book was only written for two souls,
And they are thine and mine.”
Very well! So be it! We did not ask Mr Smith for a poem, neither did our importunity besiege the tower ofBalder; but if they were not written for us, why tantalise us with these mysterious revelations? For two souls theLife Dramamight have answered exceeding well in manuscript, and within the bounds of a private circulation the exceptional men who possibly could comprehend him might have studiedBalder. How does it happen that Shakespeare’s wonderful people, with all their great individualities, are never exceptional men? It is a singular evidence of the vast and wide difference between great genius and “poetic talent.” For Shakespeare, you perceive, can afford to let us all understand; thanks to his commentators, there are a great many obscurephrasesin the Prince of Poets—but all the commentators in the world cannot make one character unintelligible, or throw confusion into a single scene.
Balder, we presume, has not yet been hanged, indisputable as are his claims to that apotheosis; for this is only part the first, and our dangerous hero has yet to progress through sundry other “experiences,” and to come at last “from a doubtful mind to a faithful mind,”—how about his conscience and the law, meanwhile, Mr Dobell does not say. But we have no objections to make to the story ofBalder. That such a being should exist at all, or, existing, should, of all places in the world, manage to thrust himself into a poem, is the head and front of the offending, to our thought. The author of this poetic Frankenstein mentions Haydon, Keats, and David Scott as instances of the “much-observed and well-recorded characters of men,” in which “the elements of his hero exist uncombined and undeveloped.” Poor Keats’s passionate poet-vanity seems out of place beside the marvellous and unexampled egotism of the two painters; but we do not see how the poet improves his position by this reference; nay, had we demonstration that Balder himself was a living man, we do not see what better it would be. He is a monster, were he twenty people; and, worse than a monster, he is a bore; and, worse than a bore, he is an unbearable prig! One longs to thrust the man out of the window, as he sits mouthing over his long-meditated epic, and anticipating his empire of the world. Yet it really is a satisfaction to be told that this incarnate vanity represents “the predominant intellectual misfortune of the day.” Is this then the Doubt of which Mr Maurice is respectful, which Mr Kingsley admires, and Isaac Taylor lifts his lance to demolish? Alas, poor gentlemen, how they are all deceived! It is like the story we all believed till truth-telling war found out the difference for us, of the painted ramparts and wooden bullets of the Russian fortresses. If Mr Dobell is right, we want no artillery against the doubter—he will make few proselytes, and we may safely leave him to any elaborate processes he chooses for the killing of himself.
“Many things go to the making of all things,” says a quaint proverb—and we require more than a shower of similes, pelting upon us like thebonbonsof a carnival—more than a peculiar measure, a characteristic cadence, to make poetry. There is our Transatlantic cousin rhyming forth his chant to all the winds. Well!—we thought we knew poetry once upon a time—once in the former days our heart leaped at sight of a poetry-book, and the flutter of the new white pages was a delight to our soul. But alas, and alas! our interest fails us as much for theSong of Hiawathaas for the musings ofBalder; there is no getting through the confused crowd of Mr Browning’sMen and Women, and with reverential awe we withdraw us fromThe Mystic, not even daring a venturesome glance upon that globe of darkness. What areweto do with these books? They suppose a state of leisure, of ease, of quietness, unknown to us for many a day. It pleases the poet to sing of a distempered vanity brooding by itself over fictitious misfortunes, and what is it to us whether aMaudor aBalderbe the issue?—or he treats of manners and customs, names and civilisations, and what care we whether it be an Indian village or a May fair? We have strayed by mistake into a delicate manufactory—anatelierof thebeaux arts—and even while we look at the workmen and admire the exquisite manipulation of the precious toys before us, our minds stray away out of doors with a sigh of weariness to the labours of this fighting world of ours and the storms of our own life. There is no charm here to hold us, none to cheat us into a momentary forgetfulness of either our languors or our labours. If it is all poetry, it has lost the first heritage and birthright of the Muse: it speaks to the ear—it does not speak to the heart.
Yet in this contention of cadences, where every man’s ambition is for a new rhythm,Hiawathahas a strong claim upon the popular fancy. Possibly it is not new; but if Mr Longfellow is the first to make it popular, it matters very little who invented it; and to talk of plagiarism is absurd. But, unhappily for the poet, this is the very measure to attract the parodist.Punchhas opened the assault, and we will not attempt to predict how many gleeful voices may echo his good-humoured mockery before the year is out. The jingle of this measure is irresistible, and with a good vocabulary of any savage language at one’s elbow, one feels a pleasing confidence that the strain might spin on for ever, and almost make itself. But for all that, though the trick of the weaving is admirable—though we are roused into pleasant excitement now and then by a hairbreadth escape from a rhyme, and applaud the dexterity with which this one peril is evaded, we are sadly at a loss to find any marks of a great or note-worthy poem in this chant, which is fatally “illustrative of” a certain kind of life, but contains very little in itself of any life at all. The greatest works of art,—and we say it at risk of repeating ourselves—are those which appeal to the primitive emotions of nature; and in gradual descent, as you address the secondary and less universal emotions, you fail in interest, in influence, and in greatness.Hiawathacontains a morsel of a love-story, and a glimpse of a grief; but these do not occupy more than a few pages, and are by no means important in the song. The consequence is, of course, that we listen to it entirely unmoved. It was not meant to move us. The poet intends only that we should admire him, and be attracted by the novelty of his subject; and so wedoadmire him—and so weareamused by the novel syllables—attracted by the chime of the rhythm, and the quaint conventionalities of the savage life. But we cannot conceal from ourselves that itisconventional, though it is savage; and that in reality we see rather less of the actual human life and nature under the war-paint of the Indian than is to be beheld every day under the English broadcloth. The Muse is absolute in her conditions; we cannot restrain her actual footsteps; from the highest ideal to the plainest matter of fact there is no forbidden ground to the wandering minstrel; but it is the very secret of her individuality, that wherever she goes she sounds upon the chords of her especial harp, the heart;—vibrations of human feeling ring about her in her wayfaring—the appeal of the broken heart and the shout of the glad one thrust in to the very pathway where her loftiest abstraction walks in profounder calm; and though it may please her to amuse herself among social vanities now and then, we are always reminded of her identity by a deeper touch, a sudden glance aside into the soul of things—a glimpse of that nature which makes the whole world kin. It is this perpetual returning, suddenly, involuntarily, and almost unawares, to the closest emotions of the human life, which distinguishes among his fellows the true poet. It is the charm of his art that he startles us in an instant, and when we least expected it, out of mere admiration into tears; but such an effect unfortunately can never be produced by customs, or improvements, or social reforms. The greatest powers of the external world are as inadequate to this as are the vanities of a village; and even a combination of both is a fruitless expedient. No, Mr Longfellow has not shot his arrow this time into the heart of the oak—the dart has glanced aside, and fallen idly among the brushwood. HisSongis a quaint chant, a happy illustration of manners, but it lacks all the important elements which go to the making of a poem. We are interested, pleased, attracted, yet perfectly indifferent; the measure haunts our ear, but not the matter—and we care no more forHiawatha, and are still as little concerned for the land of the Objibbeways, as if America’s best minstrel had never made a song. The poet was more successful in the wistfulness of hisEvangeline, to which even these lengthened, desolate, inquiring hexameters lent a charm of appropriate symphony; but it is a peculiarity of this sweet singer that his best strains are alwayswistful, longing, true voices of the night.
It is odd to remark the entire family aspect and resemblance which our English poets bear to one another. Mr Tennyson is the eldest of the group, and they all take after him; but they are true brothers, and have quite a family standard of merit by which to judge themselves. Mr Dobell is the sulky boy—Mr Browning the boisterous one—Mr Smith the younger brother, desperately bent on being even with the firstborn, and owning no claim of birthright. There is but one sister in the melodious household, and she is quite what the one sister generally is in such a family—not untouched by even the schoolboy pranks of the surrounding brothers—falling into their ways of speaking—moved by their commotions—very feminine, yet more acquainted with masculine fancies than with the common ways of women. Another sister or two to share her womanly moderatorship in this noisy household might have made a considerable difference in Mrs Browning: but her position has a charm of its own;—she never lags behind the fraternal band, nay, sometimes stimulated by a sudden impulse, glides on first, and calls “the boys” to follow her: nor does she quite refuse now and then to join a wild expedition to the woods or the sea-shore. If she has sometimes a feminine perception that the language of the brothers is somewhat too rugged or too obscure for common comprehension, she partly adopts the same, with a graceful feminine artifice, to show how, blended with her sweeter words, this careless diction can be musical after all; and you feel quite confident that she will stand up stoutly for all the brotherhood, even when she does not quite approve of their vagaries. She has songs of her own, sweet and characteristic, such as “Little Ellie,” and leaps into the heart of a great subject once in thatLay of the Children, which everybody knows and quotes, and which has just poetic exaggeration sufficient to express the vehement indignation with which the song compelled the singer’s utterance. Altogether, Mrs Browning’s poems, rank them how you will in intellectual power, have more of the native mettle of poetry than most modern verses. She is less artificial than her brotherhood—and there is something of the spring and freedom of thingsbornin her two earlier volumes; she is not so assiduously busy over the things which have to be made.
And Robert Browning is the wild boy of the household—the boisterous noisy shouting voice which the elder people shake their heads to hear. It is very hard to make out what he would be at with those marvellous convolutions of words; but, after all, he really seems to mean something, which is a comfort in its way. Then there is an unmistakable enjoyment in this wild sport of his—helikes it, though we are puzzled; and sometimes he works like the old primitive painters, with little command of his tools, but something genuine in his mind, which comes out in spite of the stubborn brushes and pigments, marvellous ugly, yet somehow true. Only very few of hisMen and Womenis it possible to make out: indeed, we fear that the Andrea and the Bishop Blougram are about the only intelligible sketches, to our poor apprehension, in the volumes; but there is a pleasant glimmer of the author himself through the rent and tortured fabric of his poetry, which commends him to a kindly judgment; and, unlike those brothers of his who use the dramatic form with an entire contravention of its principles, this writer of rugged verses has a dramatic gift, the power of contrasting character, and expressing its distinctions.
But altogether, not to go further into these characteristic differences, they are a united and affectionate family this band of poets, and chorus each other with admirable amiability; yet we confess, for poetry’s sake, we are jealous of the Laureate’s indisputable pre-eminence. It is not well for any man—unless he chance to be a man like Shakespeare, a happy chance, which has never happened but once in our race or country—to have so great a monopoly; and it is a sad misfortune for Tennyson himself, that he has no one to try his mettle, but is troubled with a shadowy crowd of competitors eagerly contending which shall reflect his peculiarities best.
For the manfuller voices are all busy with serious prose or that craft of novel-writing which is more manageable for common uses than the loftier vehicle of verse. True, there are such names as Aytoun and Macaulay, and we all know the ringing martial ballad-notes which belong to these distinguished writers; but Macaulay and Aytoun have taken to other courses, and strike the harp no more. And while the higher places stand vacant, the lower ones fill with a crowd of choral people, who only serve to show us the superiority of the reigning family, such as it is. It is a sad fact, yet we cannot dispute it—poetry is fast becoming an accomplishment, and the number of people in “polite society” who write verses is appalling. Only the other day, two happy samples of Young England came by chance across our path—one a young clergyman, high, high, unspeakably high, riding upon the very rigging of the highest roof of Anglican churchmanship, bland, smooth, and gracious, a bishop in the bud; the other, his antipodes and perfect opposite, gone far astray after the Warringtons and Pendennises—a man of mirth and daring, ready for everything. They had but one feature of resemblance—an odd illustration of what we have just been saying. Both of them had modestly ventured into print; both of them were poets.
And yet that stream of smooth and facile verse which surrounded us in former days has suffered visible diminution. It is a different kind of fare which our minor minstrels shower down upon that wonderful appetite of youth, which doubtless cracks those rough-husked nuts of words with delighted eagerness, as we once drank in the sugared milk-and-water of a less pretending Helicon. After all, we suspect it is the youthful people who are the poets’ best audience. These heirs of Time, coming leisurely to their inheritance, have space for song by the way; but in the din and contest of life we want a more potent influence. If the poet has anything to say to us, he must even seize us by the strong hand, and compel our listening; for we are very unlike to pause of our own will, or take time to hear his music on any weaker argument than this.
Andhetoo at last has gone away to join his old long-departed contemporaries, that old old man, with his classic rose-garland, from the classic table, where generations of men and poets have come and gone, a world of changing guests. He was not a great poet certainly, and his festive, and prosperous, and lengthened life called for no particular exercise of our sympathies; yet honour and gentle recollection be with the last survivor of the last race of Anakim, though he himself was not among the giants. The day has changed since that meridian flush which left a certain splendour of reflection upon Samuel Rogers, the last of that great family of song. Ours is only a twilight kind of radiance, however much we may make of it. It differs sadly from the full unclouded shining of that Day of the Poets which is past.