(1816-)
In Bailey we have a striking instance of the man whose reputation is
made suddenly by a single work, which obtains an amazing popularity, and
which is presently almost forgotten except as a name. When in 1839 the
long poem 'Festus' appeared, its author was an unknown youth, who had
hardly reached his majority. Within a few months he was a celebrity.
That so dignified and suggestive a performance should have come from so
young a poet was considered a marvel of precocity by the literary world,
both English and American.
The author of 'Festus' was born at Basford, Nottinghamshire, England,
April 22nd, 1816. Educated at the public schools of Nottingham, and at
Glasgow University, he studied law, and at nineteen entered Lincoln's
Inn. In 1840 he was admitted to the bar. But his vocation in life
appears to have been metaphysical and spiritual rather than legal.
His 'Festus: a Poem,' containing fifty-five episodes or successive
scenes,--some thirty-five thousand lines,--was begun in his twentieth
year. Three years later it was in the hands of the English reading
public. Like Goethe's 'Faust' in pursuing the course of a human soul
through influences emanating from the Supreme Good and the Supreme Evil;
in having Heaven and the World as its scene; in its inclusion of God and
the Devil, the Archangels and Angels, the Powers of Perdition, and
withal many earthly types in its action,--it is by no means a mere
imitation of the great German. Its plan is wider. It incorporates even
more impressive spiritual material than 'Faust' offers. Not only is its
mortal hero, Festus, conducted through an amazing pilgrimage, spiritual
and redeemed by divine Love, but we have in the poem a conception of
close association with Christianity, profound ethical suggestions, a
flood of theology and philosophy, metaphysics and science, picturing
Good and Evil, love and hate, peace and war, the past, the present, and
the future, earth, heaven, and hell, heights and depths, dominions,
principalities, and powers, God and man, the whole of being and of
not-being,--all in an effort to unmask the last and greatest secrets of
Infinity. And more than all this, 'Festus' strives to portray the
sufficiency of Divine Love and of the Divine Atonement to dissipate,
even to annihilate, Evil. For even Lucifer and the hosts of darkness are
restored to purity and to peace among the Sons of God, the Children of
Light! The Love of God is set forth as limitless. We have before us the
birth of matter at the Almighty's fiat; and we close the work with the
salvation and ecstasy--described as decreed from the Beginning--of
whatever creature hath been given a spiritual existence, and made a
spiritual subject and agency. There is in the doctrine of 'Festus' no
such thing as the "Son of Perdition" who shall be an ultimate castaway.
Few English poems have attracted more general notice from all
intelligent classes of readers than did 'Festus' on its advent.
Orthodoxy was not a little aghast at its theologic suggestions.
Criticism of it as a literary production was hampered not a little by
religious sensitiveness. The London Literary Gazette said of it:--"It is
an extraordinary production, out-Heroding Kant in some of its
philosophy, and out-Goetheing Goethe in the introduction of the Three
Persons of the Trinity as interlocutors in its wild plot. Most
objectionable as it is on this account, it yet contains so many
exquisite passages of genuine poetry, that our admiration of the
author's genius overpowers the feeling of mortification at its being
misapplied, and meddling with such dangerous topics." The advance of
liberal ideas within the churches has diminished such criticism, but the
work is still a stumbling-block to the less speculative of sectaries.
The poem is far too long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of
much higher and riper gifts than Bailey's. It is turgid, untechnical in
verse, wordy, and involved. Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at
twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style.
But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated to the
library of things not worth the time to know, to the list of bulky
poetic failures. Its author blossomed and fruited marvelously early; so
early and with such unlooked-for fruit that the unthinking world, which
first received him with exaggerated honor, presently assailed him with
undue dispraise. 'Festus' is not mere solemn and verbose commonplace.
Here and there it has passages of great force and even of high beauty.
The author's whole heart and brain were poured into it, and neither was
a common one. With all its ill-based daring and manifest crudities, it
was such a _tour de force_ for a lad of twenty as the world seldom sees.
Its sluggish current bears along remarkable knowledge, great reflection,
and the imagination of a fertile as well as a precocious brain. It is a
stream which carries with it things new and old, and serves to stir the
mind of the onlooker with unwonted thoughts. Were it but one fourth as
long, it would still remain a favorite poem. Even now it has passed
through numerous editions, and been but lately republished in sumptuous
form after fifty years of life; and in the catalogue of higher
metaphysico-religious poetry it will long maintain an honorable place.
It is cited here among the books whose fame rather than whose importance
_demand_ recognition.