This is an interesting and in many respects instructive book. Mr. Ward
has done his work, as is fitting, in a loving spirit; and if he
over-estimates both what Percival was and what he did, he enables us to
form our own judgment by letting him so far as possible speak for
himself. The book gives a rather curious picture of what the life of a
man of letters is likely to be in a country not yet ripe for literary
production, especially if he be not endowed with the higher qualities
which command and can wait for that best of all successes which comes
slowly. In a generation where everybody can write verses, and where
certain modes of thought and turns of phrase have become so tyrannous
that it is as hard to distinguish between the productions of one minor
poet and another as among those of so many Minnesingers or Troubadours,
there is a demand for only two things,--for what chimes with the
moment’s whim of popular sentiment and is forgotten when that has
changed, or for what is never an anachronism, because it slakes or seems
to slake the eternal thirst of our nature for those ideal waters that
glimmer before us and still before us in ever-renewing mirage. Percival
met neither of these conditions. With a nature singularly unplastic,
unsympathetic, and self-involved, he was incapable of receiving into his
own mind the ordinary emotions of men and giving them back in music;
and with a lofty conception of the object and purposes of poesy, he had
neither the resolution nor the power which might have enabled him to
realize it. He offers as striking an example as could be found of the
poetic temperament unballasted with those less obvious qualities which
make the poetic faculty. His verse carries every inch of canvas that
diction and sentiment can crowd, but the craft is cranky, and we miss
that deep-grasping keel of reason which alone can steady and give
direction. His mind drifts, too waterlogged to answer the helm, and in
his longer poems, like “Prometheus,” half the voyage is spent in trying
to make up for a leeway which becomes at last irretrievable. If he had a
port in view when he set out, he seems soon to give up all hope of ever
reaching it; and wherever we open the log-book, we find him running for
nowhere in particular, as the wind happens to lead, or lying-to in the
merest gale of verbiage. The truth is, that Percival was led to the
writing of verse by a sentimental desire of the mind, and not by that
concurring instinct of all the faculties which is a self-forgetting
passion of the entire man. Too excitable to possess his subject fully,
as a man of mere talent may often do, he is not possessed by it as the
man of genius is, and seems helplessly striving, the greater part of the
time, to make out what, in the name of common or uncommon sense, he is
after. With all the stock properties of verse whirling and dancing about
his ears puffed out to an empty show of life, the reader of much of his
blank verse feels as if a mob of well-draperied clothes-lines were
rioting about him in all the unwilling ecstasy of a thunder-gust.
Percival, living from 1795 to 1856, arrived at manhood just as the last
war with England had come to an end. Poor, shy, and proud, there is
nothing in his earlier years that might not be paralleled in those of
hundreds of sensitive boys who gradually get the nonsense shaken out of
them in the rough school of life. The length of the schooling needful in
his case is what makes it peculiar. Not till after he was fifty, if even
then, did he learn that the world never takes a man at his own
valuation, and never pays money for what it does not want, or think it
wants. It did not want his poetry, simply because it was not, is not,
and by no conceivable power of argument can be made, interesting,--the
first duty of every artistic product. Percival, who would have thought
his neighbors mad if they had insisted on his buying twenty thousand
refrigerators merely because they had been at the trouble of making
them, and found it convenient to turn them into cash, could never
forgive the world for taking this business view of the matter in his own
case. He went on doggedly, making refrigerators of every possible
pattern, and comforted himself with the thought of a wiser posterity,
which should have learned that the purpose of poetry is to cool and not
to kindle. His “Mind,” which is on the whole perhaps the best of his
writings, vies in coldness with the writings of his brother doctor,
Akenside, whose “Pleasures of Imagination” are something quite other
than pleasing in reality. If there be here and there a semblance of pale
fire, it is but the reflection of moonshine upon ice. Akenside is
respectable, because he really had something new to say, in spite of his
pompous, mouthing way of saying it; but when Percival says it over
again, it is a little too much. In his more ambitious pieces,--and it is
curious how literally the word “pieces” applies to all he did,--he
devotes himself mainly to telling us what poetry ought to be, as if
mankind were not always more than satisfied with any one who fulfils the
true office of poet, by showing them, with the least possible fuss, what
it is. Percival was a professor of poetry rather than a poet, and we
are not surprised at the number of lectures he reads us, when we learn
that in early life he was an excellent demonstrator of anatomy, whose
subject must be dead before his business with it begins. His interest in
poetry was always more or less scientific. He was forever trying
experiments in matter and form, especially the latter. And these were
especially unhappy, because it is plain that he had no musical ear, or
at best a very imperfect one. His attempts at classical metres are
simply unreadable, whether as verse or prose. He contrives to make even
the Sapphic so, which when we read it in Latin moves featly to our
modern accentuation. Let any one who wishes to feel the difference
between ear and no ear compare Percival’s specimens with those in the
same kind of Coleridge, who had the finest metrical sense since Milton.
We take this very experimenting to be a sufficient proof that Percival’s
faculty, such as it was, and we do not rate it highly, was artificial,
and not innate. The true poet is much rather experimented upon by life
and nature, by joy and sorrow, by beauty and defect, till it be found
out whether he have any hidden music in him that can sing them into an
accord with the eternal harmony which we call God.
It is easy to trace the literary influences to which the mind of
Percival was in turn subjected. Early in life we find a taint of
Byronism, which indeed does not wholly disappear to the last. There is
among his poems “An Imprecation,” of which a single stanza will suffice
as a specimen:--
“Wrapped in sheets of gory lightning,
While cursed night-hags ring thy knell,
May the arm of vengeance bright’ning,
O’er thee wave the sword of hell!”
If we could fancy Laura Matilda shut up tipsy in the watch-house, we
might suppose her capable of this melodious substitute for swearing. We
confess that we cannot read it without laughing, after learning from Mr.
Ward that its Salmoneus-thunderbolts were launched at the comfortable
little city of Hartford, because the poet fancied that the inhabitants
thereof did not like him or his verses so much as he himself did. There
is something deliciously ludicrous in the conception of night-hags
ringing the orthodox bell of the Second Congregational or First Baptist
Meeting-house to summon the parishioners to witness these fatal
consequences of not reading Percival’s poems. Nothing less than the fear
of some such catastrophe could compel the perusal of the greater part of
them. Next to Byron comes Moore, whose cloying sentimentalism and too
facile melody are recalled by the subject and treatment of very many of
the shorter lyrics of Percival. In “Prometheus” it is Shelley who is
paramount for the time, and Shelley at his worst period, before his
unwieldy abundance of incoherent words and images, that were merely
words and images without any meaning of real experience to give them
solidity, had been compressed in the stricter moulds of thought and
study. In the blank verse again, we encounter Wordsworth’s tone and
sentiment. These were no good models for Percival, who always
improvised, and who seems to have thought verse the great distinction
between poetry and prose. Percival got nothing from Shelley but the
fatal copiousness which is his vice, nothing from Wordsworth but that
tendency to preach at every corner about a sympathy with nature which is
not his real distinction, and which becomes a wearisome cant at
second-hand. Shelley and Wordsworth are both stilted, though in
different ways. Shelley wreathed his stilts with flowers; while
Wordsworth, protesting against the use of them as sinful, mounts his
solemnly at last, and stalks away conscientiously eschewing whatever
would serve to hide the naked wood,--nay, was it not Gray’s only that
were scandalous, and were not his own, modelled upon those of the
sainted Cowper, of strictly orthodox pattern after all? Percival, like
all imitators, is caught by the defects of what he copies, and
exaggerates them. With him the stilts are the chief matter; and getting
a taller pair than either of his predecessors, he lifts his commonplace
upon them only to make it more drearily conspicuous. Shelley has his
gleams of unearthly wildfire, Wordsworth is by fits the most deeply
inspired man of his generation; but Percival has no lucid interval. He
is pertinaciously and unappeasably dull,--as dull as a comedy of Goethe.
He never in his life wrote a rememberable verse. We should not have
thought this of any consequence now, for we need not try to read him,
did not Mr. Ward with amusing gravity all along assume that he was a
great poet. There was scarce timber enough in him for the making of a
Tiedge or a Hagedorn, both of whom he somewhat resembles.
Percival came to maturity at an unfortunate time for a man so liable to
self-delusion. Leaving college with so imperfect a classical training
(in spite of the numerous “testimonials” cited by Mr. Ward) that he was
capable of laying the accent on the second syllable of Pericles, he
seems never to have systematically trained even such faculty as was in
him, but to have gone on to the end mistaking excitability of brain for
wholesome exercise of thought. The consequence is a prolonged
immaturity, which makes his latest volume, published in 1843, as crude
and as plainly wanting in enduring quality as the first number of his
“Clio.” We have the same old complaints of neglected genius,--as if
genius could ever be neglected so long as it has the perennial
consolation of its own divine society,--the same wilted sentiment, the
same feeling about for topics of verse in which he may possibly find
that inspiration from without which the true poet cannot flee from in
himself. These tedious wailings about heavenly powers suffocating in the
heavy atmosphere of an uncongenial, unrecognizing world, and Percival is
profuse of them, are simply an advertisement to whoever has ears of some
innate disability in the man who utters them. Heavenly powers know very
well how to take care of themselves. The poor “World,” meaning thereby
that small fraction of society which has any personal knowledge of an
author or his affairs, has had great wrong done it in such matters. It
is not, and never was, the powers of a man that it neglects,--it could
not if it would,--but his weaknesses, and especially the publication of
them, of which it grows weary. It can never supply any man with what is
wanting in himself, and the attempt to do it only makes bad worse. If a
man can find the proof of his own genius only in public appreciation,
still worse, if his vanity console itself with taking it as an evidence
of rare qualities in himself that his fellow-mortals are unable to see
them, it is all up with him. The “World” resolutely refused to find
Wordsworth entertaining, and it refuses still, on good grounds; but the
genius that was in him bore up unflinchingly, would take no denial, got
its claim admitted on all hands, and impregnated at last the literature
of an entire generation, though _habitans in sicco_, if ever genius did.
But Percival seems to have satisfied himself with a syllogism something
like this: Men of genius are neglected; the more neglect, the more
genius; I am altogether neglected,--_ergo_, wholly made up of that
priceless material.
The truth was that he suffered rather from over-appreciation; and
“when,” says a nameless old Frenchman, “I see a man go up like a
rocket, I expect before long to see the stick come down.” The times were
singularly propitious to mediocrity. As in Holland one had only to
“Invent a shovel and be a magistrate,”
so here to write a hundred blank verses was to be immortal, till
somebody else wrote a hundred and fifty blanker ones. It had been
resolved unanimously that we must and would have a national literature.
England, France, Spain, Italy, each already had one, Germany was getting
one made as fast as possible, and Ireland vowed that she once had one
far surpassing them all. To be respectable, we must have one also, and
that speedily. That we were not yet, in any true sense, a nation; that
we wanted that literary and social atmosphere which is the breath of
life to all artistic production; that our scholarship, such as it was,
was mostly of that theological sort which acts like a prolonged drouth
upon the brain; that our poetic fathers were Joel Barlow and Timothy
Dwight,--was nothing to the purpose; a literature adapted to the size of
the country was what we must and would have. Given the number of square
miles, the length of the rivers, the size of the lakes, and you have the
greatness of the literature we were bound to produce without further
delay. If that little dribble of an Avon had succeeded in engendering
Shakespeare, what a giant might we not look for from the mighty womb of
Mississippi! Physical Geography for the first time took her rightful
place as the tenth and most inspiring Muse. A glance at the map would
satisfy the most incredulous that she had done her best for us, and
should we be wanting to the glorious opportunity? Not we indeed! So
surely as Franklin invented the art of printing, and Fulton the
steam-engine, we would invent us a great poet in time to send the news
by the next packet to England, and teach her that we were her masters in
arts as well as arms.
Percival was only too ready to be invented, and he forthwith produced
his bale of verses from a loom capable of turning off a hitherto
unheard-of number of yards to the hour, and perfectly adapted to the
amplitude of our territory, inasmuch as it was manufactured on the
theory of covering the largest surface with the least possible amount of
meaning that would hold words together. He was as ready to accept the
perilous emprise, and as loud in asserting his claim thereto, as Sir Kay
used to be, and with much the same result. Our critical journals--and
America certainly _has_ led the world in a department of letters which
of course requires no outfit but the power to read and write,
gratuitously furnished by our public schools--received him with a shout
of welcome. Here came the true deliverer at last, mounted on a steed to
which he himself had given the new name of “Pegāsus,”--for we were to be
original in everything,--and certainly blowing his own trumpet with
remarkable vigor of lungs. Solitary enthusiasts, who had long awaited
this sublime avatar, addressed him in sonnets which he accepted with a
gravity beyond all praise. (To be sure, even Mr. Ward seems to allow
that his sense of humor was hardly equal to his other transcendent
endowments.) His path was strewn with laurel--of the native variety,
altogether superior to that of the Old World, at any rate not precisely
like it. Verses signed “P.,” as like each other as two peas, and as much
like poetry as that vegetable is like a peach, were watched for in the
corner of a newspaper as an astronomer watches for a new planet. There
was never anything so comically unreal since the crowning in the Capitol
of Messer Francesco Petrarca, Grand Sentimentalist in Ordinary at the
Court of King Robert of Naples. Unhappily, Percival took it all quite
seriously. There was no praise too ample for the easy elasticity of his
swallow. He believed himself as gigantic as the shadow he cast on these
rolling mists of insubstantial adulation, and life-long he could never
make out why _his_ fine words refused to butter his parsnips for him,
nay, to furnish both parsnips and sauce. While the critics were debating
precisely how many of the prime qualities of the great poets of his own
and preceding generations he combined in his single genius, and in what
particular respects he surpassed them all,--a point about which he
himself seems never to have had any doubts,--the public, which could
read Scott and Byron with avidity, and which was beginning even to taste
Wordsworth, found his verses inexpressibly wearisome. They would not
throng and subscribe for a collected edition of those works which singly
had been too much for them. With whatever dulness of sense they may be
charged, they have a remarkably keen scent for tediousness, and will
have none of it unless in a tract or sermon, where, of course, it is to
be expected. Percival never forgave the public; but it was the critics
that he never should have forgiven, for of all the maggots that can make
their way into the brains through the ears, there is none so disastrous
as the persuasion that you are a great poet. There is surely something
in the construction of the ears of small authors which lays them
specially open to the inroads of this pest. It tickles pleasantly while
it eats away the fibre of will, and incapacitates a man for all honest
commerce with realities. Unhappily its insidious titillation seems to
have been Percival’s one great pleasure during life.
We began by saying that the book before us was interesting and
instructive; but we meant that it was so not so much from any positive
merits of its own as by the lesson which almost every page of it
suggests. To those who have some knowledge of the history of literature,
or some experience in life, it is from beginning to end a history of
weakness mistaking great desires for great powers. If poetry, in Bacon’s
noble definition of it, “adapt the shows of things to the desires of the
mind,” sentimentalism is equally skilful in making realities shape
themselves to the cravings of vanity. The theory that the poet is a
being above the world and apart from it is true of him as an observer
only who applies to the phenomena about him the test of a finer and more
spiritual sense. That he is a creature divinely set apart from his
fellow-men by a mental organization that makes them mutually
unintelligible to each other, is in flat contradiction with the lives of
those poets universally acknowledged as greatest. Dante, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Calderon, Milton, Molière, Goethe,--in what conceivable sense
is it true of them that they wanted the manly qualities which made them
equal to the demands of the world in which they lived? That a poet
should assume, as Victor Hugo used to do, that he is a reorganizer of
the moral world, and that works cunningly adapted to the popular whim of
the time form part of some mysterious system which is to give us a new
heaven and a new earth, and to remodel laws of art which are as
unchangeable as those of astronomy, can do no very great harm to any one
but the author himself, who will thereby be led astray from his proper
function, and from the only path to legitimate and lasting success. But
when the theory is carried a step further, and we are asked to believe,
as in Percival’s case, that, because a man can write verses, he is
exempt from that inexorable logic of life and circumstance to which all
other men are subjected, and to which it is wholesome for them that
they should be, then it becomes mischievous, and calls for a protest
from all those who have at heart the interests of good morals and
healthy literature. It is the theory of idlers and _dilettanti_, of
fribbles in morals and declaimers in verse, which a young man of real
power may dally with during some fit of mental indigestion, but which
when accepted by a mature man, and carried along with him through life,
is a sure mark of feebleness and of insincere dealing with himself.
Percival is a good example of a class of authors unhappily too numerous
in these latter days. In Europe the natural growth of a world ill at
ease with itself and still nervous with the frightful palpitation of the
French Revolution, they are but feeble exotics in our healthier air.
Without faith or hope, and deprived of that outward support in the
habitual procession of events and in the authoritative limitations of
thought which in ordinary times gives steadiness to feeble and timid
intellects, they are turned inward, and forced, like Hudibras’s sword,
“To eat into themselves, for lack
Of other thing to hew and hack.”
Compelled to find within them that stay which had hitherto been supplied
by creeds and institutions, they learned to attribute to their own
consciousness the grandeur which belongs of right only to the mind of
the human race, slowly endeavoring after an equilibrium between its
desires and the external conditions under which they are attainable.
Hence that exaggeration of the individual, and depreciation of the
social man, which has become the cant of modern literature. Abundance of
such phenomena accompanied the rise of what was called Romanticism in
Germany and France, reacting to some extent even upon England, and
consequently America. The smaller poets erected themselves into a kind
of guild, into which all were admitted who gave proof of a certain
feebleness of character which rendered them superior to their grosser
fellow-men. It was a society of cripples undertaking to teach the new
generation how to walk. Meanwhile, the object of their generous
solicitude, what with clinging to Mother Past’s skirts, and helping
itself by every piece of household furniture it could lay hands on,
learned, after many a tumble, to get on its legs, and to use them as
other generations had done before it. Percival belonged to this new
order of bards, weak in the knees, and thinking it healthy exercise to
climb the peaks of Dreamland. To the vague and misty views attainable
from those sublime summits into his own vast interior, his reports in
blank verse and otherwise did ample justice, but failed to excite the
appetite of mankind. He spent his life, like others of his class, in
proclaiming himself a neglected Columbus, ever ready to start on his
voyage when the public would supply the means of building his ships.
Meanwhile, to be ready at a moment’s warning, he packs his mind pellmell
like a carpet-bag, wraps a geologist’s hammer in a shirt with a Byron
collar, does up Volney’s “Ruins” with an odd volume of Wordsworth, and
another of Bell’s “Anatomy” in a loose sheet of Webster’s Dictionary,
jams Moore’s poems between the leaves of Bopp’s Grammer,--and forgets
only such small matters as combs and brushes. It never seems to have
entered his head that the gulf between genius and its new world is never
too wide for a stout swimmer. Like all sentimentalists, he reversed the
process of nature, which makes it a part of greatness that it is a
simple thing to itself, however much of a marvel it may be to other men.
He discovered his own genius, as he supposed,--a thing impossible had
the genius been real. Donne never wrote a profounder verse than
“Who knows his virtue’s name and place, hath none.”
Percival’s life was by no means a remarkable one, except, perhaps, in
the number of chances that seem to have been offered him to make
something of himself, if anything were possibly to be made. He was never
without friends, never without opportunities, if he could have availed
himself of them. It is pleasant to see Mr. Ticknor treating him with
that considerate kindness which many a young scholar can remember as
shown so generously to himself. But nothing could help Percival, whose
nature had defeat worked into its very composition. He was not a real,
but an imaginary man. His early attempt at suicide (as Mr. Ward seems to
think it) is typical of him. He is not the first young man who, when
crossed in love, has spoken of “loupin o’er a linn,” nor will he be the
last. But that any one who really meant to kill himself should put
himself resolutely in the way of being prevented, as Percival did, is
hard to believe. Châteaubriand, the arch sentimentalist of these latter
days, had the same harmless _velleity_ of self-destruction,--enough to
scare his sister and so give him a smack of sensation,--but a very
different thing from the settled will which would be really perilous.
Shakespeare, always true to Nature, makes Hamlet dally with the same
exciting fancy. Alas! self is the one thing the sentimentalist never
truly wishes to destroy! One remarkable gift Percival seems to have had,
which may be called memory of the eye. What he saw he never forgot, and
this fitted him for a good geological observer. How great his power of
combination was, which alone could have made him a great geologist, we
cannot determine. But he seems to have shown but little in other
directions. His faculty of acquiring foreign tongues we do not value so
highly as Mr. Ward. We have known many otherwise inferior men who
possessed it. Indeed, the power to express the same nothing in ten
different languages is something to be dreaded rather than admired. It
gives a horrible advantage to dulness. The best thing to be learned from
Percival’s life is that he was happy for the first time when taken away
from his vague pursuit of the ideal, and set to practical work.