touch upon it in connection with that literature which it serves more
than could anything else to explain. It was our mental philosophy
which, far more than our ordinary Belles Lettres, drew upon us the
attention of Europe in general. Voltaire was indeed acquainted with
Pope, Dryden, and Swift, but he declared himself openly the student of
Newton and the pupil of Locke; and professed the mission of an apostle
to his countrymen of the doctrines of the English philosophy; and in
that philosophy only we can expect to find the fundamental convictions
upon which, when the worst came to the worst, Englishmen of that age
conceived they could retreat: it therefore must be considered as
the substantial reality upon which the fleeting phenomena of plays,
poetry, and novels are sustained. Its temper was, I suppose, narrow
and material: bent upon the examination of phenomena, it admitted only
such as present themselves to the lower and grosser senses; to the
notices of the higher and purer it peremptorily refused its attention.
We cannot live without the impalpable air which we breathe, any more
than without the solid earth which we tread upon; the intimations of
a spiritual world of which we cannot be rigidly, and, as it were, by
all our senses, certified, constitute for our inner life an element
as essential as the plain matter of fact without which nothing can be
done. But it is certain also that without that matter of fact nothing
can be done, and, moreover, very little can be thought: palpable
things, by divine right, by inevitable necessity, and intelligent
ordinance, claim our habitual attention; we are more concerned with our
steps upon the ground than our inhalation of the atmosphere; stories of
the apparition of ghosts may very likely be true, but even if they are
it matters extremely little.
This austere love of truth; this righteous abhorrence of illusion;
this rigorous, uncompromising rejection of the vague, the untestified,
the merely probable; this stern conscientious determination without
paltering and prevarication to admit, _if_ things are bad, that they
are so; this resolute, upright purpose, as of some transcendental man
of business, to go thoroughly into the accounts of the world and make
out once for all how they stand: such a spirit as this, I may say, I
think, claims more than our attention--claims our reverence.
We must not lose it--we must hold fast by it, precious to us as
Shakespeare’s intellectual or Milton’s moral sublimities; while our
eyes look up with them, our feet must stay themselves firmly here.
Such, I believe, is the strong feeling of the English nation; the
spirit of Newton and of Locke possesses us at least in as full measure
as that of any one of their predecessors.
To trace that spirit working in the minds and morals of our fathers
of the last century would be curiously instructive. Pure intellectual
action is apt, no doubt, to be for the time so absorbing as to draw
to itself all the agencies of our nature, as to suspend the just
and fitting exercise of other, and it may be nobler, functions.
Philosophers are frequently dim of sight for the phenomena of everyday
life, a little hard of hearing for the calls of plain humanity. Let
that moral purpose which should first embark, and through the whole
voyage should accompany, the true philosopher be his justification. It
is a special service that he undertakes, and he may be excused if, to
execute it, he does not act wholly as others do, or as in itself would
be best.
Such a pervading moral purpose is in England exhibited by the chief
philosophers of the eighteenth century. Such a moral purpose, perhaps,
we may claim for the century itself in general; admitting, however,
at the same time, whether it be the fault of philosophy or of that
particular style of philosophy which then prevailed, that, at any rate
amongst the upper and more educated classes, both morality and religion
seem to have held disadvantageous and precarious ground, to have
maintained or struggled to maintain themselves in a position only just
tenable. The maxim of the time appears to be that it is man’s duty to
sustain himself upon a minimum of moral assumption; in point of fact,
to strive to solve the problem of habituation to living on nothing.
Morality survives, we know not well how, in Hume. Religion appears
to be driven to its inmost line of defences, to be fighting from its
encincture of fortification, in Butler’s analogical argument. And
Johnson, in the last resort, can but confute Hume, as Berkeley--with a
stamp upon the ground.
Of what dubious cogency, compared with ancient doctrine, is the
morality implied in the summary of character with which Mary Queen
of Scots is dismissed from the English History. How different from
the idea of a religion meeting all the otherwise disappointed hopes,
fulfilling all the profoundest and most secret needs of our spiritual
nature, is the great argument of the ‘Analogy,’ which, nakedly stated,
would seem to run, that we have no right to claim a religion according
to our own fancies, that as the world of ordinary facts is full of
difficulties, so also it is to be expected will be religion also. How
matter-of-fact, and, as good people now would say, how low is the
morality of Johnson; how indiscriminate, moreover, he is obliged,
in his extreme need, to be in his religious faith and devotional
observances.
Nevertheless, there is a cogency in this resting upon only the lowest
grounds; the winter-vitality of the moral convictions of Hume is worth
more than any summer exuberance of sentiment. Butler’s argument does
hold water: Johnson’s character does prove something.
But by this time we are seeming to hear a sound as of very different
voices, and it is well that we should begin to break off. Religious
enthusiasm, wholly unconscious that amongst the upper classes it had
been proved a chimera, awakening in all the extravagant force of youth
at the touch of Wesley and Whitfield, had this long time, amongst the
despised and neglected, been extending its dominions and augmenting its
powers. Methodism, long plebeian, is attaining its literary patriciate
in Cowper. We must listen, too, while in homely Scots vernacular we are
told by an Ayrshire ploughman authentic tidings of living instincts, of
spontaneous belief, which not all the philosophy in the brain of the
intellectual can banish from the breast of the human being.
In France, also, even Parisian dilettanti are neglecting the persiflage
of Voltaire for the sentiment of Rousseau, and the common people are
‘hearing him gladly.’
As men after long abstraction or too careful self-introspection
need some sudden change to replace them in their ordinary attitude
of life and action; or, as in the ancient Roman Empire, when the
old civilisation, with its laws, its government, its intellectual
superiority, its literary upper classes, was gradually sinking more
and more into a sort of paralytic incapacity, the emergence from below
of a plebeian, unintellectual, unrefined religion, and the inroad from
without of Northern barbarian races, gave back life to the world--even
so in England from the elements representable by Wesley and Burns, in
France from what spoke by the mouth of the watchmaker’s son of Geneva,
came strange renovation.
You observe, upon referring to a table of chronology, how as the stars,
whose courses we have been contemplating, begin to disappear below,
so already above the horizon there may be seen showing themselves
the lights of a new generation. Before Johnson had left the world
you see Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Southey already entered upon
it; entering it much about the time that Hume and Goldsmith quit it.
Gibbon sees that last volume, which in his garden at Lausanne he
rejoiced to lay down completed, issue from the press; and Byron is
already born. The men whom we ourselves have seen, some of whom still
survive--the men of whose careers some in this room may have been
immediate witnesses, the impress from whose spirit is more immediately
set upon us all, are already alive and even at work. Were I to pass
over the momentous barrier of the great French Revolution, and look
into the last decade of the eighteenth century, we should see there,
while the light of Burns suddenly goes out, and the feeble spark which
testifies to the existence of Cowper expires sadly with the expiring
centenary, we should see there Coleridge and Wordsworth and Southey
busy, and before the public, Coleridge and Southey planning as in a
dream a Pantisocratic community on the banks of the smooth-sounding
Susquehanna, Coleridge and Wordsworth presently writing in country
seclusion together poems which the former never, the latter scarcely
ever, improved upon.
But I shall be doing wrong, I feel and see, in overstepping this
magic limit of the century. I am leading you unawares from a gallery
of portraits of the dead through a door that opens upon a meeting of
living, moving, and acting men. From history I am seducing you to
self-observation; from the ripe and gathered sheaves I am diverting you
to the field where good and bad, by no rash hand to be sundered, must
grow together to an harvest which is not yet. Of the characteristics of
this new epoch, of its purport and significance, let us not dream of
seeking any analysis or giving any representation.
Twenty years hence, when the hot blood of Byron shall have cooled in
the veins of the generation he addressed, and when Scott’s mountain
excursions shall seem an exploded amusement, and Wordsworth’s evening
walks a faded reverie, twenty years hence it will be time enough to
meet together and discuss our past selves and the literature of the
commencement of the nineteenth century.
REVIEW OF SOME POEMS
BY
ALEXANDER SMITH AND MATTHEW ARNOLD.
(Published in the ‘North American Review’ for July 1853,
Vol. lxxvii., No. 160.)
Poems by Alexander Smith, a volume recently published in London, and by
this time reprinted in Boston, deserve attention. They have obtained in
England a good deal more notice than is usually accorded there to first
volumes of verse; nor is this by any means to be ascribed to the mere
fact that the writer is, as we are told, a mechanic; though undoubtedly
that does add to their external interest, and perhaps also enhances
their intrinsic merit. It is to this, perhaps, that they owe a force
of purpose and character which makes them a grateful contrast to the
ordinary languid collectanea published by young men of literary habits;
and which, on the whole, may be accepted as more than compensation for
many imperfections of style and taste.
The models whom this young poet has followed have been, it would
appear, predominantly, if not exclusively, the writers of his own
immediate time, _plus_ Shakspeare. The antecedents of the ‘Life-Drama,’
the one long poem which occupies almost the whole of his volume, are to
be found in the ‘Princess,’ in parts of Mrs. Browning, in the love of
Keats, and the _habit_ of Shakspeare. There is no Pope, or Dryden,[22]
or even Milton; no Wordsworth, Scott, or even Byron to speak of.
We have before us, we may say, the latest disciple of the school of
Keats, who was indeed no well of English undefiled, though doubtless
the fountain-head of a true poetic stream. Alexander Smith is young
enough to free himself from his present manner, which does not seem his
simple and natural own. He has given us, so to say, his Endymion; it
is certainly as imperfect, and as mere a promise of something wholly
different, as was that of the master he has followed.
We are not sorry, in the meantime, that this Endymion is not upon
Mount Latmos. The natural man does pant within us after _flumina
silvasque_; yet really, and truth to tell, is it not, upon the whole,
an easy matter to sit under a green tree by a purling brook, and indite
pleasing stanzas on the beauties of Nature and fresh air? Or is it,
we incline to ask, so very great an exploit to wander out into the
pleasant field of Greek or Latin mythology, and reproduce, with more or
less of modern adaptation--
the shadows
Faded and pale, yet immortal, of Faunus, the Nymphs, and the Graces?
Studies of the literature of any distant age or country; all the
imitations and _quasi_-translations which help to bring together into
a single focus the scattered rays of human intelligence; poems after
classical models, poems from Oriental sources, and the like, have
undoubtedly a great literary value. Yet there is no question, it is
plain and patent enough, that people much prefer ‘Vanity Fair’ and
‘Bleak House.’ Why so? Is it simply because we have grown prudent and
prosaic, and should not welcome, as our fathers did, the Marmions and
the Rokebys, the Childe Harolds and the Corsairs? Or is it, that to be
widely popular, to gain the ear of multitudes, to shake the hearts of
men, poetry should deal, more than at present it usually does, with
general wants, ordinary feelings, the obvious rather than the rare
facts of human nature? Could it not attempt to convert into beauty
and thankfulness, or at least into some form and shape, some feeling,
at any rate, of content--the actual, palpable things with which our
everyday life is concerned; introduce into business and weary task-work
a character and a soul of purpose and reality; intimate to us relations
which, in our unchosen, peremptorily appointed posts, in our grievously
narrow and limited spheres of action, we still, in and through all,
retain to some central, celestial fact? Could it not console us with
a sense of significance, if not of dignity, in that often dirty, or
at least dingy, work which it is the lot of so many of us to have to
do, and which some one or other, after all, must do? Might it not
divinely condescend to all infirmities; be in all points tempted as we
are; exclude nothing, least of all guilt and distress, from its wide
fraternisation; not content itself merely with talking of what may be
better elsewhere, but seek also to deal with what _is_ here? We could
each one of us, alas, be so much that somehow we find we are not; we
have all of us fallen away from so much that we still long to call
ours. Cannot the Divine Song in some way indicate to us our unity,
though from a great way off, with those happier things; inform us, and
prove to us, that though we are what we are, we may yet, in some way,
even in our abasement, even by and through our daily work, be related
to the purer existence?
The modern novel is preferred to the modern poem, because we do here
feel an attempt to include these indispensable latest addenda--these
phenomena which, if we forget on Sunday, we must remember on
Monday--these positive matters of fact, which people, who are not
verse-writers, are obliged to have to do with.
Et fortasse cupressum
Scis simulare; quid hoc, si fractis enatat exspes
Navibus, ære dato qui pingitur?
The novelist does try to build us a real house to be lived in; and this
common builder, with no notion of the orders, is more to our purpose
than the student of ancient art who proposes to lodge us under an
Ionic portico. We are, unhappily, not gods, nor even marble statues.
While the poets, like the architects, are--a good thing enough in its
way--studying ancient art, comparing, thinking, theorising, the common
novelist tells a plain tale, often trivial enough, about this, that,
and the other, and obtains one reading at any rate; is thrown away
indeed to-morrow, but is devoured to-day.
We do not at all mean to prepare the reader for finding the great
poetic desideratum in this present Life-Drama. But it has at least the
advantage, such as it is, of not showing much of the _littérateur_ or
connoisseur, or indeed the student; nor is it, as we have said, mere
pastoral sweet piping from the country. These poems were not written
among books and busts, nor yet
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
They have something substantive and lifelike, immediate and first-hand,
about them. There is a charm, for example, in finding, as we do,
continual images drawn from the busy seats of industry; it seems to
satisfy a want that we have long been conscious of, when we see the
black streams that welter out of factories, the dreary lengths of urban
and suburban dustiness,
The squares and streets,
And the faces that one meets,
irradiated with a gleam of divine purity.
There are moods when one is prone to believe that, in these last days,
no longer by ‘clear spring or shady grove,’ no more upon any Pindus
or Parnassus, or by the side of any Castaly, are the true and lawful
haunts of the poetic powers; but, we could believe it, if anywhere,
in the blank and desolate streets, and upon the solitary bridges of
the midnight city, where Guilt is, and wild Temptation, and the dire
Compulsion of what has once been done--there, with these tragic sisters
around him, and with pity also, and pure Compassion, and pale Hope,
that looks like despair, and Faith in the garb of doubt, there walks
the discrowned Apollo, with unstrung lyre; nay, and could he sound it,
those mournful Muses would scarcely be able, as of old, to respond and
‘sing in turn with their beautiful voices.’
To such moods, and in such states of feeling, this ‘Life-Drama’
will be an acceptable poem. Under the guise of a different story,
a story unskilful enough in its construction, we have seemed
continually to recognise the ingenious, yet passionate, youthful
spirit, struggling after something like right and purity amidst the
unnumbered difficulties, contradictions, and corruptions of the heated
and crowded, busy, vicious, and inhuman town. Eager for action,
incapable of action without some support, yet knowing not on what arm
to dare to lean; not untainted; hard pressed; in some sort, at times,
overcome--still we seem to see the young combatant, half combatant,
half martyr, resolute to fight it out, and not to quit this for some
easier field of battle--one way or other to make something of it.
The story, such as we have it, is inartificial enough. Walter, a
boy of poetic temperament and endowment, has, it appears, in the
society of a poet friend now deceased, grown up with the ambition of
achieving something great in the highest form of human speech. Unable
to find or make a way, he is diverted from his lofty purposes by a
romantic love-adventure, obscurely told, with a ‘Lady’ who finds him
asleep, Endymion-like, under a tree. The fervour and force of youth
wastes itself here in vain; a quick disappointment--for the lady
is betrothed to another--sends him back enfeebled, exhausted, and
embittered, to essay once again his task. Disappointed affections,
and baffled ambition, contending henceforward in unequal strife with
the temptations of scepticism, indifference, apathetic submission,
base indulgence, and the like; the sickened and defeated, yet only too
strong, too powerful man, turning desperately off, and recklessly at
last plunging in mid-unbelief into joys to which only belief and moral
purpose can give reality; out of horror-stricken guilt, the new birth
of clearer and surer, though humbler, conviction, trust, resolution;
these happy changes met, perhaps a little prematurely and almost more
than half-way, by success in the aims of a purified ambition, and
crowned too, at last, by the blessings of a regenerate affection--such
is the argument of the latter half of the poem; and there is something
of a current and tide, so to say, of poetic intention in it, which
carries on the reader (after the first few scenes), perforce, in spite
of criticism and himself, through faulty imagery, turgid periods,
occasional bad versification and even grammar, to the close. Certainly,
there is something of a real flesh-and-blood heart and soul in the
case, or this could not be so.
We quote from the later portion, when Walter returns to the home of his
childhood:--
’Twas here I spent my youth, as far removed
From the great heavings, hopes, and fears of man,
As unknown isle asleep in unknown seas.
Gone my pure heart, and with it happy days;
No manna falls around me from on high,
Barely from off the desert of my life
I gather patience and severe content.
God is a worker. He has thickly strewn
Infinity with grandeur. God is Love;
He yet shall wipe away creation’s tears,
And all the worlds shall summer in his smile.
Why work I not. The veriest mote that sports
Its one-day life within the sunny beam
Has its stern duties. Wherefore have I none?
I will throw off this dead and useless past,
As a strong runner, straining for his life,
Unclasps a mantle to the hungry winds.
A mighty purpose rises large and slow
From out the fluctuations of my soul,
As ghostlike from the dim and trembling sea
Starts the completed moon.
Here, in this determination, he writes his poem--attains in this spirit
the object which had formerly been his ambition. And here, in the last
scene, we find him happy, or peaceful at least, with Violet:--
Thou noble soul,
Teach me, if thou art nearer God than I!
My life was one long dream; when I awoke,
Duty stood like an angel in my path,
And seemed so terrible, I could have turned
Into my yesterdays, and wandered back
To distant childhood, and gone out to God
By the gate of birth, not death. Lift, lift me up
By thy sweet inspiration, as the tide
Lifts up a stranded boat upon the beach.
I will go forth ’mong men, not mailed in scorn,
But in the armour of a pure intent,
Great duties are before me, and great songs,
And whether crowned or crownless, when I fall,
It matters not, so as God’s work is done.
I’ve learned to prize the quiet lightning deed,
Not the applauding thunder at its heels,
Which men call Fame. Our night is past;
We stand in precious sunrise; and beyond,
A long day stretches to the very end.
So be it, O young Poet; Poet, perhaps it is early to affirm; but so be
it, at any rate, O young man. While you go forth in that ‘armour of
pure intent,’ the hearts of some readers, be assured, will go with you.
‘Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems,’ with its earlier companion
volume, ‘The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems,’ are, it would seem,
the productions (as is, or was, the English phrase) of a scholar
and a gentleman; a man who has received a refined education, seen
refined ‘society,’ and been more, we dare say, in the world, which
is called the world, than in all likelihood has a Glasgow mechanic.
More refined, therefore, and more highly educated sensibilities--too
delicate, are they, for common service?--a calmer judgment also, a
more poised and steady intellect, the _siccum lumen_ of the soul;
a finer and rarer aim, perhaps, and certainly a keener sense of
difficulty, in life--these are the characteristics of him whom we
are to call ‘A.’ Empedocles, the sublime Sicilian philosopher, the
fragments of whose moral and philosophic poems testify to his genius
and character--Empedocles, in the poem before us, weary of misdirected
effort, weary of imperfect thought, impatient of a life which appears
to him a miserable failure, and incapable, as he conceives, of doing
anything that shall be true to that proper interior self--
Being one with which we are one with the whole world,
wandering forth, with no determined purpose, into the mountain
solitudes, followed for a while by Pausanias, the eager and laborious
physician, and at a distance by Callicles, the boy-musician, flings
himself at last, upon a sudden impulse and apparent inspiration of
the intellect, into the boiling crater of Etna; rejoins there the
elements. The music of the boy Callicles, to which he chants his happy
mythic stories somewhat frigidly perhaps, relieves, as it sounds in the
distance, the gloomy catastrophe.
Tristram and Iseult (these names form the title of the next and
only other considerable poem) are, in the old romantic cycle of
North-France and Germany, the hero and the heroine of a mournful tale.
Tristram of Lyonness, the famed companion of King Arthur, received in
youth a commission to bring from across the sea the Princess Iseult
of Ireland, the destined bride of the King of Cornwall. The mother of
the beautiful princess gave her, as a parting gift, a cup of a magic
wine, which she and her royal husband should drink together on their
marriage-day in their palace at Tyntagil; so they should love each
other perfectly and for ever.
On the dreamy seas it so befell, that Iseult and Tristram drank
together of the golden cup. Tristram, therefore, and Iseult should
love each other perfectly and for ever. Yet nothing the less for this
must Iseult be wedded to the King of Cornwall; and Tristram, vainly
lingering, fly and go forth upon his way.