"Sees before him life unroll,
A placid and continuous whole;
That general life which does not cease;
Whose secret is, not joy, but peace;
That life, whose dumb wish is not missed
If birth proceeds, if things subsist;
The life of plants and stones and rain;
The life he craves:--if not in vain
Fate gave, what chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul."--pp. 123-4.
(_Resignation._)
Such is the author's purpose in these poems. He recognises in each
thing a part of the whole: and the poet must know even as he sees, or
breathes, as by a spontaneous, half-passive exercise of a faculty: he
must receive rather than seek.
"Action and suffering tho' he know,
He hath not lived, if he lives so."
Connected with this view of life as "a placid and continuous whole,"
is the principle which will be found here manifested in different
modes, and thro' different phases of event, of the permanence and
changelessness of natural laws, and of the large necessity wherewith
they compel life and man. This is the thought which animates the
"Fragment of an 'Antigone:'" "The World and the Quietest" has no
other scope than this:--
"Critias, long since, I know,
(For fate decreed it so),
Long since the world hath set its heart to live.
Long since, with credulous zeal,
It turns life's mighty wheel:
Still doth for laborers send;
Who still their labor give.
And still expects an end."--p. 109.
This principle is brought a step futher into the relations of life in
"The Sick King in Bokhara," the following passage from which claims
to be quoted, not less for its vividness as description, than in
illustration of this thought:--
"In vain, therefore, with wistful eyes
Gazing up hither, the poor man
Who loiters by the high-heaped booths
Below there in the Registan
"Says: 'Happy he who lodges there!
With silken raiment, store of rice,
And, for this drought, all kinds of fruits,
Grape-syrup, squares of colored ice,
"'With cherries served in drifts of snow.'
In vain hath a king power to build
Houses, arcades, enamelled mosques,
And to make orchard-closes filled
"With curious fruit trees brought from far,
With cisterns for the winter rain;
And, in the desert, spacious inns
In divers places;--if that pain
"Is not more lightened which he feels,
If his will be not satisfied:
And that it be not from all time
The law is planted, to abide."--pp. 47-8.
The author applies this basis of fixity in nature generally to the
rules of man's nature, and avow himself a Quietist. Yet he would not
despond, but contents himself, and waits. In no poem of the volume is
this character more clearly defined and developed than in the sonnets
"To a Republican Friend," the first of which expresses concurrence in
certain broad progressive principles of humanity: to the second we
would call the reader's attention, as to an example of the author's
more firm and serious writing:--
"Yet when I muse on what life is, I seem
Rather to patience prompted than that proud
Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud;
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme:--
Seeing this vale, this earth whereon we dream,
Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high
Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity,
Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.
Nor will that day dawn at a human nod,
When, bursting thro' the net-work superposed
By selfish occupation--plot and plan,
Lust, avarice, envy,--liberated man,
All difference with his fellow-man composed,
Shall be left standing face to face with God."--p. 57.
In the adjuration entitled "Stagyrus," already mentioned, he prays to
be set free
"From doubt, where all is double,
Where Faiths are built on dust;"
and there seems continually recurring to him a haunting presage of
the unprofitableness of the life, after which men have not "any more
a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun." Where he
speaks of resignation, after showing how the less impetuous and
self-concentred natures can acquiesce in the order of this life, even
were it to bring them back with an end unattained to the place whence
they set forth; after showing how it is the poet's office to live
rather than to act in and thro' the whole life round about him, he
concludes thus:
"The world in which we live and move
Outlasts aversion, outlasts love.....
Nay, and since death, which wipes out man,
Finds him with many an unsolved plan,....
Still gazing on the ever full
Eternal mundane spectacle,
This world in which we draw our breath
In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death.....
Enough, we live:--and, if a life
With large results so little rife,
Tho' bearable, seem scarcely worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth,
Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream that falls incessantly,
The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
And, even could the intemperate prayer
Man iterates, while these forbear,
For movement, for an ampler sphere,
Pierce fate's impenetrable ear,
Not milder is the general lot
Because our spirits have forgot,
In actions's dizzying eddy whirled,
The something that infects the world."--pp. 125-8.--_Resignation._
"Shall we," he asks, "go hence and find that our vain dreams are not
dead? Shall we follow our vague joys, and the old dead faces, and the
dead hopes?"
He exhorts man to be "_in utrumque paratus_." If the world be the
materialized thought of one all-pure, let him, "by lonely pureness,"
seek his way through the colored dream of life up again to that
all-pure fount:--
"But, if the wild unfathered mass no birth
In divine seats hath known;
In the blank echoing solitude, if earth,
Rocking her obscure body to and fro,
Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,
Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe,
Forms what she forms, alone:"
then man, the only self-conscious being, "seeming sole to awake,"
must, recognizing his brotherhood with this world which stirs at his
feet unknown, confess that he too but seems.
Thus far for the scheme and the creed of the author. Concerning these
we leave the reader to draw his own conclusions.
Before proceeding to a more minute notice of the various poems, we
would observe that a predilection is apparent throughout for
antiquity and classical association; not that strong love which made
Shelley, as it were, the heir of Plato; not that vital grasp of
conception which enabled Keats without, and enables Landor with, the
most intimate knowledge of form and detail, to return to and renew
the old thoughts and beliefs of Greece; still less the mere
superficial acquaintance with names and hackneyed attributes which
was once poetry. Of this conventionalism, however, we have detected
two instances; the first, an allusion to "shy Dian's horn" in
"breathless glades" of the days we live, peculiarly inappropriate in
a sonnet addressed "To George Cruikshank on his Picture of 'The
Bottle;'" the second a grave call to Memory to bring her tablets,
occurring in, and forming the burden of, a poem strictly personal,
and written for a particular occasion. But the author's partiality is
shown, exclusively of such poems as "Mycerinus" and "The Strayed
Reveller," where the subjects are taken from antiquity, rather in the
framing than in the ground work, as in the titles "A Modern Sappho,"
"The New Sirens," "Stagyrus," and "_In utrumque paratus_." It is
Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles who "prop his mind;" the immortal
air which the poet breathes is "Where Orpheus and where Homer are;"
and he addresses "Fausta" and "Critias."
There are four narrative poems in the volume:--"Mycerinus," "The
Strayed Reveller," "The Sick King in Bokhara," and "The Forsaken
Merman." The first of these, the only one altogether narrative in
form, founded on a passage in the 2nd Book of Herodotus, is the story
of the six years of life portioned to a King of Egypt succeeding a
father "who had loved injustice, and lived long;" and tells how he
who had "loved the good" revels out his "six drops of time." He takes
leave of his people with bitter words, and goes out
"To the cool regions of the groves he loved........
Here came the king holding high feast at morn,
Rose-crowned; and ever, when the sun went down,
A hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom,
From tree to tree, all thro' the twinkling grove,
Revealing all the tumult of the feast,
Flushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine;
While the deep-burnished foliage overhead
Splintered the silver arrows of the moon."--p. 7.
(a daring image, verging towards a conceit, though not absolutely
such, and the only one of that character that has struck us in the
volume.)
"So six long years he revelled, night and day:
And, when the mirth waxed loudest, with dull sound
Sometimes from the grove's centre echoes came,
To tell his wondering people of their king;
In the still night, across the steaming flats,
Mixed with the murmur of the moving Nile."--pp. 8, 9.
Here a Tennysonian influence is very perceptible, more especially in
the last quotation; and traces of the same will be found in "The
Forsaken Merman."
In this poem the story is conveyed by allusions and reminiscences
whilst the Merman makes his children call after her who had returned
to her own earth, hearing the Easter bells over the bay, and who is
not yet come back for all the voices calling "Margaret! Margaret!"
The piece is scarcely long enough or sufficiently distinct otherwise
than as a whole to allow of extract; but we cannot but express regret
that a poem far from common-place either in ubject or treatment
should conclude with such sing-song as
------"There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she;
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea."
"The Strayed Reveller" is written without rhyme--(not being blank
verse, however,)--and not unfrequently, it must be admitted, without
rhythm. Witness the following lines:
"Down the dark valley--I saw."--
"Trembling, I entered; beheld"--
"Thro' the islands some divine bard."--
Nor are these by any means the only ones that might be cited in
proof; and, indeed, even where there is nothing precisely contrary to
rhythm, the verse might, generally speaking, almost be read as prose.
Seldom indeed, as it appears to us, is the attempt to write without
some fixed laws of metrical construction attended with success;
never, perhaps, can it be considered as the most appropriate
embodiment of thought. The fashion has obtained of late years; but it
is a fashion, and will die out. But few persons will doubt the
superiority of the established blank verse, after reading the
following passage, or will hesitate in pronouncing that it ought to
be the rule, instead of the exception, in this poem:
"They see the merchants
On the Oxus stream:--but care
_Must visit first them too, and make them pale:_
Whether, thro' whirling sand,
_A cloud of desert robber-horse has burst_
_Upon their caravan; or greedy kings,_
_In the walled cities the way passes thro',_
Crushed them with tolls; or fever airs
On some great river's marge
Mown them down, far from home."--p. 25.
The Reveller, going to join the train of Bacchus in his temple, has
strayed into the house of Circe and has drunk of her cup: he believes
that, while poets can see and know only through participation in
endurance, he shares the power belonging to the gods of seeing
"without pain, without labour;" and has looked over the valley all
day long at the Moenads and Fauns, and Bacchus, "sometimes, for a
moment, passing through the dark stems." Apart from the inherent
defects of the metre, there is great beauty of pictorial description
in some passages of the poem, from which the following (where he is
speaking of the gods) may be taken as a specimen:--
"They see the Indian
Drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to
A floating isle, thick-matted
With large-leaved low-creeping melon plants,
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them,
Drifting--drifting:--round him,
Round his green harvest-plot,
Flow the cool lake-waves:
The mountains ring them."--p. 20.
From "the Sick King in Bokhara," we have already quoted at some
length. It is one of the most considerable, and perhaps, as being the
most simple and life-like, the best of the narrative poems. A vizier
is receiving the dues from the cloth merchants, when he is summoned
to the presence of the king, who is ill at ease, by Hussein: "a
teller of sweet tales." Arrived, Hussein is desired to relate the
cause of the king's sickness; and he tells how, three days since, a
certain Moollah came before the king's path, calling for justice on
himself, whom, deemed a fool or a drunkard, the guards pricked off
with their spears, while the king passed on into the mosque: and how
the man came on the morrow with yesterday's blood-spots on him, and
cried out for right. What follows is told with great singleness and
truth: "Thou knowest," the man says,
"'How fierce
In these last day the sun hath burned;
That the green water in the tanks
Is to a putrid puddle turned;
And the canal that from the stream
Of Samarcand is brought this way
Wastes and runs thinner every day.
"'Now I at nightfall had gone forth
Alone; and, in a darksome place
Under some mulberry-trees, I found
A little pool; and, in brief space,
With all the water that was there
I filled my pitcher, and stole home
Unseen; and, having drink to spare,
I hid the can behind the door,
And went up on the roof to sleep.
"'But, in the night, which was with wind
And burning dust, again I creep
Down, having fever, for a drink.
"'Now, meanwhile, had my brethren found
The water-pitcher, where it stood
Behind the door upon the ground,
And called my mother: and they all,
As they were thirsty and the night
Most sultry, drained the pitcher there;
That they sat with it in my sight,
Their lips still wet, when I came down.
"'Now mark: I, being fevered, sick,
(Most unblessed also,) at that sight
Brake forth and cursed them. Dost thou hear?
One was my mother. Now, do right.'
"But my lord mused a space, and said,
'Send him away, sirs, and make on.
It is some madman,' the king said.
As the king said, so was it done.
"The morrow at the self-same hour,
In the king's path, behold, the man,
Not kneeling, sternly fixed. He stood
Right opposite, and thus began,
"Frowning grim down: 'Thou wicked king,
Most deaf where thou shouldst most give ear;
What? Must I howl in the next world,
Because thou wilt not listen here?
"'What, wilt thou pray and get thee grace,
And all grace shall to me be grudged?
Nay but, I swear, from this thy path
I will not stir till I be judged.'
"Then they who stood about the king
Drew close together and conferred;
Till that the king stood forth and said:
'Before the priests thou shalt be heard.'
"But, when the Ulema were met
And the thing heard, they doubted not;
But sentenced him, as the law is,
To die by stoning on the spot.
"Now the king charged us secretly:
'Stoned must he be: the law stands so:
Yet, if he seek to fly, give way;
Forbid him not, but let him go.'
"So saying, the king took a stone,
And cast it softly: but the man,
With a great joy upon his face,
Kneeled down, and cried not, neither ran.
"So they whose lot it was cast stones,
That they flew thick and bruised him sore:
But he praised Allah with loud voice,
And remained kneeling as before.
"My lord had covered up his face:
But, when one told him, 'He is dead;'
Turning him quickly to go in,
'Bring thou to me his corpse,' he said.
"And truly, while I speak, oh king,
I hear the bearers on the stair.
Wilt thou they straightway bring him in?--
Ho! enter ye who tarry there."--pp. 39-43.
The Vizier counsels the king that each man's private grief suffices
him, and that he should not seek increase of it in the griefs of
other men. But he answers him, (this passage we have before quoted,)
that the king's lot and the poor man's is the same, for that neither
has his will; and he takes order that the dead man be buried in his
own royal tomb.
We know few poems the style of which is more unaffectedly without
labor, and to the purpose, than this. The metre, however, of the
earlier part is not always quite so uniform and intelligible as might
be desired; and we must protest against the use, for the sake of
rhyme, of _broke_ in lieu of _broken_, as also of _stole_ for
_stolen_ in "the New Sirens." While on the subject of style, we may
instance, from the "Fragment of an Antigone," the following uncouth
stanza, which, at the first reading, hardly appears to be correctly
put together:
"But hush! Hoemon, whom Antigone,
Robbing herself of life in burying,
Against Creon's laws, Polynices,
Robs of a loved bride, pale, imploring,
Waiting her passage,
Forth from the palace hitherward comes."--p. 30.
Perhaps the most perfect and elevated in tone of all these poems is
"The New Sirens." The author addresses, in imagination, a company of
fair women, one of whose train he had been at morning; but in the
evening he has dreamed under the cedar shade, and seen the same forms
"on shores and sea-washed places," "With blown tresses, and with
beckoning hands."
He thinks how at sunrise he had beheld those ladies playing between
the vines; but now their warm locks have fallen down over their arms.
He prays them to speak and shame away his sadness; but there comes
only a broken gleaming from their windows, which "Reels and shivers
on the ruffled gloom." He asks them whether they have seen the end of
all this, the load of passion and the emptiness of reaction, whether
they dare look at life's latter days,
"When a dreary light is wading
Thro' this waste of sunless greens,
When the flashing lights are fading
On the peerless cheek of queens,
When the mean shall no more sorrow,
And the proudest no more smile;
While the dawning of the morrow
Widens slowly westward all that while?"
And he implores them to "let fall one tear, and set him free." The
past was no mere pretence; it was true while it lasted; but it is
gone now, and the East is white with day. Shall they meet again, only
that he may ask whose blank face that is?
"Pluck, pluck cypress, oh pale maidens;
Dusk the hall with yew."
This poem must be read as a whole; for not only would it be difficult
to select particular passages for extraction, but such extracts, if
made, would fail in producing any adequate impression.
We have already quoted so larely from the concluding piece,
"Resignation," that it may here be necessary to say only that it is
in the form of speech held with "Fausta" in retracing, after a lapse
of ten years, the same way they had once trod with a joyful company.
The tone is calm and sustained, not without touches of familiar
truth.
The minor poems comprise eleven sonnets, among which, those "To the
Duke of Wellington, on hearing him mispraised," and on "Religious
Isolation," deserve mention; and it is with pleasure we find one, in
the tenor of strong appreciation, written on reading the Essays of
the great American, Emerson. The sonnet for "Butler's Sermons" is
more indistinct, and, as such, less to be approved, in imagery than
is usual with this poet. That "To an Independent Preacher who
preached that we should be in harmony with nature," seems to call for
some remark. The sonnet ends with these words:
"Man must begin, know this, where nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends;
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave."
Now, as far as this sonnet shows of the discourse which occasioned
it, we cannot see anything so absurd in that discourse; and where the
author confutes the Independent preacher by arguing that
"Nature is cruel; man is sick of blood:
Nature is stubborn; man would fain adore:
Nature is fickle; man hath need of rest:"
we cannot but think that, by attributing to nature a certain human
degree of qualities, which will not suffice for man, he loses sight
of the point really raised: for is not man's nature only a part of
nature? and, if a part, necessary to the completeness of the whole?
and should not the individual, avoiding a factitious life, order
himself in conformity with his own rule of being? And, indeed, the
author himself would converse with the self-sufficing progress of
nature, with its rest in action, as distinguished from the troublous
vexation of man's toiling:--
"Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee,
Two lessons that in every wind are blown;
Two blending duties harmonised in one,
Tho' the loud world proclaim their enmity."--p. 1.
The short lyric poem, "To Fausta" has a Shelleian spirit and grace in
it. & "The Hayswater Boat" seems a little _got up_, and is scarcely
positive enough. This remark applies also, and in a stonger degree,
to the "Stanzas on a Gipsy Child," which, and the "Modern Sappho,"
previously mentioned, are the pieces least to our taste in the
volume. There is a something about them of drawing-room
sentimentality; and they might almost, without losing much save in
size, be compressed into poems of the class commonly set to music. It
is rather the basis of thought than the writing of the "Gipsy Child,"
which affords cause for objection; nevertheless, there is a passage
in which a comparison is started between this child and a "Seraph in
an alien planet born,"--an idea not new, and never, as we think,
worth much; for it might require some subtlety to show how a planet
capable of producing a Seraph should be alien from that Seraph.
We may here notice a few cases of looseness, either of thought or of
expression, to be met with in these pages; a point of style to be
particularly looked to when the occurrence or the absence of such
forms one very sensible difference between the first-rate and the
second-rate poets of the present times.
Thus, in the sonnet "Shakspear," the conclusion says,
"All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole _voice_ in that victorious brow;"
whereas a brow's voice remains to be uttered: nor, till the nature of
the victory gained by the brow shall have been pointed out, are we
able to hazard an opinion of the precise value of the epithet.
In the address to George Cruikshank, we find: "Artist, whose hand
with horror _winged_;" where a similar question arises; and,
returning to the "Gipsy Child," we are struck with the unmeaningness
of the line: "Who massed round that slight brow these clouds of
doom?"
Nor does the following, from the first of the sonnets, "To a
Republican Friend," appear reconcileable with any ideas of
appropriateness:
----"While before me _flow_
The _armies_ of the homeless and unfed."
It is but right to state that the only instance of the kind we
remember throughout the volume have now been mentioned.
To conclude. Our extracts will enable the reader to judge of this
Poet's style: it is clear and comprehensive, and eschews flowery
adornment. No particular model has been followed, though that general
influence which Tennyson exercises over so many writers of this
generation may be traced here as elsewhere. It may be said that the
author has little, if anything, to unlearn. Care and consistent
arrangement, and the necessary subordination of the parts to the
whole, are evident throughout; the reflective, which appears the more
essential form of his thought, does not absorb the due observation or
presentment of the outward facts of nature; and a well-poised and
serious mind shows itself in every page.
_Published Monthly, price 1s._
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opening article of the month.
An attempt will be made, both intrinsically and by review, to claim
for Poetry that place to which its present development in the
literature of this country so emphatically entitles it.
The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will be to
encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of
nature; and also to direct attention, as an auxiliary medium, to the
comparatively few works which Art has yet produced in this spirit. It
need scarcely be added that the chief object of the etched designs
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execution will permit; in which purpose they will be produced with
the utmost care and completeness.
No. 3. (_Price One Shilling_.) MARCH, 1850.
With an Etching by F. Madox Brown.
Art and Poetry: Being Thoughts towards Nature Conducted principally
by Artists.
When whoso merely hath a little thought
Will plainly think the thought which is in him,--
Not imaging another's bright or dim,
Not mangling with new words what others taught;
When whoso speaks, from having either sought
Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim
A shallow surface with words made and trim,
But in that very speech the matter brought:
Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!--
A thing I might myself have thought as well,
But would not say it, for it was not worth!"
Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell
That, be the theme a point or the whole earth,
Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?
London:
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