[From _The Monthly Repository_, 1833]
_Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession_. London, Saunders & Otley. 1833
The most deeply interesting adventures, the wildest vicissitudes, the
most daring explorations, the mightiest magic, the fiercest conflicts,
the brightest triumphs, and the most affecting catastrophes, are those
of the spiritual world....
The knowledge of mind is the first of sciences; the records of its
formation and workings are the most important of histories; and it is
eminently a subject for poetical exhibition. The annals of a poet's mind
are poetry. Nor has there ever been a genuine bard, who was not himself
more poetical than any of his productions. They are emanations of his
essence. He himself is, or has been, all that he truly and touchingly,
_i.e._, poetically, describes. Wordsworth, indeed, never carried a
pedlar's pack, nor did Byron ever command a pirate ship, or Coleridge
shoot an albatross; but there were times and moods in which their
thoughts intently realised, and identified themselves with the
reflective wanderer, the impetuous Corsair, and the ancient mariner.
They felt _their_ feelings, thought _their_ thoughts, burned with
_their_ passions, dreamed _their_ dreams, and lived their lives, or died
their deaths. In relation to his creations, the poet is the omnific
spirit in whom they have their being. All their vitality must exist in
his life. He only, in them, displays to us fragments of himself. The
poem, in which a great poet should reveal the whole of himself to
mankind would be a study, a delight, and a power, for which there is yet
no parallel; and around which the noblest creations of the noblest
writers would range themselves as subsidiary luminaries.
These thoughts have been suggested by the work before us, which, though
evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has truth and life in it, which
gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of
which has never yet failed us as a test of genius. Whoever the anonymous
author may be, he is a poet. A pretender to science cannot always be
safely judged of by a brief publication, for the knowledge of some facts
does not imply the knowledge of other facts; but the claimant of poetic
honours may generally be appreciated by a few pages, often by a few
lines, for if they be poetry, he is a poet. We cannot judge of the house
by the brick, but we can judge of the statue of Hercules by its foot. We
felt certain of Tennyson, before we saw the book, by a few verses which
had straggled into a newspaper; we are not less certain of the author of
Pauline.
Pauline is the recipient of the confessions: the hero is as anonymous as
the author, and this is no matter, for _poet_ is the title both of the
one and the other. The confessions have nothing in them which needs
names: the external world is only reflected in them in its faintest
shades; its influences are only described after they have penetrated
into the intellect. We have never read anything more purely
confessional. The whole composition is of the spirit, spiritual. The
scenery is in the chambers of thought: the agencies are powers and
passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual
existence to another. And yet the composition is not dreamy; there is on
it a deep stamp of reality. Still less is it characterised by coldness.
It has visions that we love to look upon, and tones that touch the
inmost heart till it responds.
The poet's confessions are introduced with an analysis of his spiritual
constitution, in which he is described as having an intense
consciousness of individuality, combined with a sense of power, a
self-supremacy, and a "principle of restlessness which would be all, have,
see, know, taste, feel all"; of this essential self, imagination is
described as the characteristic quality; an imagination, steady and
unfailing in its power. A "yearning after God," or supreme and universal
good, unconsciously cherished through the earlier stages of the history,
keeps this mind from utterly dissipating itself; and, which seems to us
the only point in which the coherence fails, there is added an unaptness
for love, a mere perception of the beautiful, the perception being felt
more precious than its object....
And now when he has run the whole toilsome yet giddy round and arrived
at the goal, there arises, even though that goal be religion, or because
it is religion, a yearning after human sympathies and affections, which
would not have assorted with any state or moment of the previous
experience; he could not have loved before; at one time it would have
been only a fancy, a cold, and yet perhaps extravagant imagining; at
another, a low and selfish passion. Some souls are purified _by_ love,
others are purified _for_ love. Othello needed not Desdemona to listen
to his tale of disastrous chances; they were only external perils, rapid
by elevated station; but the mind that has gone through more than his
vicissitudes, been in deeper dangers, and deadlier struggles, even when
it rests at last in a far higher repose and dignity, yearns for some one
who will "seriously incline" to listen to the "strange eventful
history," one who will sympathise and soothe, who will receive the
confession, and give the absolution of heaven its best earthly
ratification, that of a pure and loving heart. The poem is addressed to
Pauline; with her it begins, and ends; and her presence is felt
throughout, as that of a second conscience, wounded by evil, but never
stern, and incorporate in a form of beauty, which blends and softens the
strong contrasts of different portions of the poem, so that all might be
murmured by the breath of affection.
The author cannot expect such a poem as this to be popular, to make a
"hit," to produce a "sensation." The public are but slow in recognising
the claims of Tennyson whom in some respects he resembles; and the
common eye scarcely yet discerns among the laurel-crowned, the form of
Shelley, who seems (how justly, we stop not now to discuss), to have
been the god of his early idolatory. Whatever inspiration may have been
upon him from that deity, the mysticism of the original oracles has been
happily avoided. And whatever resemblance he may bear to Tennyson (a
fellow worshipper probably at the same shrine) he owes nothing of the
perhaps inferior melody of his verse to an employment of archaisms which
it is difficult to defend from the charge of affectation. But he has not
given himself the chance for popularity which Tennyson did, and which it
is evident that he easily might have done. His poem stands alone, with
none of those light but taking accompaniments, songs that sing
themselves, sketches that everybody knows, light little lyrics, floating
about like humming birds, around the trunk and foliage of the poem
itself; and which would attract so many eyes, and delight so many ears,
that will be slow to perceive the higher beauty of that composition, and
to whom a sycamore is no sycamore, unless it be "musical with bees."