BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLXXXIV. FEBRUARY 1856. VOL. LXXIX.
CONTENTS.
MODERN LIGHT LITERATURE—POETRY, 125
A MILITARY ADVENTURE IN THE PYRENEES—_concluded_, 138
THE WONDROUS AGE, 154
PUBLIC LECTURES—MR WARREN ON LABOUR, 170
TOUCHING OXFORD, 179
THE ANCIENT COINS OF GREECE, 193
TICKLER AMONG THE THIEVES! 200
THE DRAMA, 209
LESSONS FROM THE WAR, 232
RELIGION IN COMMON LIFE, 243
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PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
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. _He_ sung 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 the _man_
after 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 the _Globe_, 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 above _his_
motives, 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 take _it_ solely 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 for _Punch_, and the
_Times_?
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 a _Balder_, and _Maud_ should 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 his _Mystic_, sick of his _Balder_, 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 not _flow_. 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,—_it_ does not seize upon _you_.
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 and _malice
prepense_, are two very different persons. A man of the first class
could not have written _In Memoriam_. Had _he_ been 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 some _In Memoriam_ of 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; _he_ does 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 them _here_ and _there_,
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.”
It is the excellence of _In Memoriam_ that 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 is
_made_, 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 of _In 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 to
_The 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 whether _The Princess_ means 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.
“_Her_ lot 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 Lane_ is 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 of _Maud_ for 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 atrocious _Balder_, 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 certain
_Childe Harold_ who 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 down _Maud_ as one of the
greatest impertinences ever perpetrated by a poet; but we confess, after
an hour’s trial of _Balder_, 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, _Maud_ is 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. _He_ knows 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’s _Life Drama_, or the
“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. _He_ can 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 take
_Balder_, 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 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 the _Life 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.”
Very well! So be it! We did not ask Mr Smith for a poem, neither did our
importunity besiege the tower of _Balder_; but if they were not written
for us, why tantalise us with these mysterious revelations? For two
souls the _Life Drama_ might have answered exceeding well in manuscript,
and within the bounds of a private circulation the exceptional men who
possibly could comprehend him might have studied _Balder_. 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 obscure _phrases_ in
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 of _Balder_. 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 the
_bonbons_ of 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 the _Song of Hiawatha_
as for the musings of _Balder_; there is no getting through the confused
crowd of Mr Browning’s _Men and Women_, and with reverential awe we
withdraw us from _The Mystic_, not even daring a venturesome glance upon
that globe of darkness. What are _we_ to 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 a
_Maud_ or a _Balder_ be 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—an _atelier_ of the _beaux 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, _Hiawatha_ has 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. _Punch_ has 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. _Hiawatha_ contains 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 we _do_ admire him—and
so we _are_ amused 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 it _is_ conventional, 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. His _Song_ is 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 for _Hiawatha_, 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 his _Evangeline_, 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 always _wistful_, 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 that _Lay 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
things _born_ in 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—_he_ likes 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 his _Men and Women_ is 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.
And _he_ too 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.
A MILITARY ADVENTURE IN THE PYRENEES.
BY A PENINSULAR MEDALLIST.
CONCLUSION.
CHAPTER XIII.
On arriving at our billet, we there found the Padre, who expressed his
profound regrets at the insult offered by the villagers to my companion,
and repeated his assurance that nothing of the kind should happen again.
“Señor Padre,” said I, “that is hardly sufficient. I think that people
who misconduct themselves as the villagers have done, should be made
sensible of their error by stringent measures.”
“This time let it pass,” said M. le Tisanier. “Should the same thing
happen again, I shall hold the alcalde responsible, and shall invite
him” (M. le T. twists his mustache) “to a promenade outside the
village.”
The Padre was in a little bit of a fidget. We had come upon him in the
kitchen, with a ladle on the stove, and sleeves turned up. He was
casting bullets.
“No news of this French column,” said he; “I have been waiting about
here, expecting intelligence all the morning.”
“Why not send out some of the villagers?” I asked. “They might pick up
information.”
“Señor Capitan,” he replied, “I have thought of a better plan than that.
You and I were to have gone out shooting to-day. Suppose we go to-morrow
morning.”
“With much pleasure,” said I, “but what are we to effect by that?”
“We will take a new direction,” he replied. “We will not go northwards,
as hitherto; we will go southwards. This will bring us towards the point
from which the enemy are approaching. We may obtain tidings; perhaps we
may get a sight of them.”
“You must be guide, then,” I answered. “Of course, you know the ground.”
“Trust me for that,” said he. “I will not take you by the direct route
across the open plain. We will strike off to the right, and skirt the
foot of the hills.”
“Why go over rough ground, in preference to level?” I asked.
“Ah,” said he, “you are, I perceive, a novice in guerilla warfare.
Regular tactics are your line. If they caught sight of us on the open
plain, don’t you see they would be sure to overtake and capture us? If
we have the hills on our flank, cannot we at any time escape up the
rocks and gullies? They are not likely to follow us there. If they do,
at any rate, I promise you some beautiful shooting.”
“Let alone a little bloodletting among the thorn-bushes,” said I;
“trousers in tatters, and our beasts rolling heels over head down all
sorts of places.”
“We must go on foot,” he replied.
“Very good,” said I; “you know best. Only recollect my left leg is in
far better walking order for half-a-league than for half-a-dozen.
Suppose I knock up?”
“Chito! then I will carry you on my back.”
“Be it so,” said I, inwardly determining to drop dead tired for the fun
of the thing, and take a spell out of the Padre as long as I found it
pleasant. “Then, to-morrow after breakfast——”
“We must start before breakfast,” said the Padre.
Supposing the enemy at hand, it really was desirable to know what they
were about. So I ended by assenting, with one proviso, to all the
Padre’s propositions. The proviso was, that in the interval we received
no intelligence sufficiently conclusive of itself, and rendering our
reconnaissance superfluous.