Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes Part 36

The old epics will probably never be surpa.s.sed, any more than the old coats of mail; and for the same reason; n.o.body wants the article; its object is accomplished by other means; they are become mere curiosities....

Poetry, like charity, begins at home. Poetry, like morality, is founded in the precept, know thyself. Poetry, like happiness, is in the human heart. Its inspiration is of that which is in man, and it will never fail because there are changes in costume and grouping. What is the vitality of the Iliad? Character; nothing else. All the rest is only read out of antiquarianism or of affectation. Why is Shakespeare the greatest of poets? Because he was one of the greatest of philosophers.

We reason on the conduct of his characters with as little hesitation as if they were real living human beings. Extent of observation, accuracy of thought, and depth of reflection, were the qualities which won the prize of sovereignty for his imagination, and the effect of these qualities was practically to antic.i.p.ate, so far as was needful for his purposes, the mental philosophy of a future age. Metaphysics must be the stem of poetry for the plant to thrive; but if the stem flourishes we are not likely to be at a loss for leaves, flowers, and fruit. Now, whatever theories may have come into fas.h.i.+on and gone out of fas.h.i.+on, the real science of mind advances with the progress of society like all other sciences. The poetry of the last forty years already shows symptoms of life in exact proportion as it is imbued with this science.

There is least of it in the exotic legends of Southey, and the feudal romances of Scott. More of it, though in different ways, in Byron and Campbell. In Sh.e.l.ley there would have been more still, had he not devoted himself to unsound and mystical theories. Most of all in Coleridge and Wordsworth. They are all going or gone; but here is a little book as thoroughly and unitedly metaphysical and poetical in its spirit as any of them; and sorely shall we be disappointed in its author if it be not the precursor of a series of productions which shall beautifully ill.u.s.trate our speculations, and convincingly prove their soundness.

Do not let our readers be alarmed. These poems are anything but heavy; anything but stiff and pedantic, except in one particular, which shall be noticed before we conclude; anything but cold and logical. They are graceful, very graceful; they are animated, touching, and impa.s.sioned.

And they are so, precisely because they are philosophical; because they are not made up of metrical cant and conventional phraseology; because there is sincerity where the author writes from experience, and accuracy whether he writes from experience or observation; and he only writes from experience and observation, because he has felt and thought, and learned to a.n.a.lyse thought and feeling; because his own mind is rich in poetical a.s.sociations, and he has wisely been content with its riches; and because, in his composition, he has not sought to construct an elaborate and artificial harmony, but only to pour forth his thoughts in those expressive and simple melodies whose meaning, truth, and power, are the soonest recognised, and the quickest felt....

Mr. Tennyson seems to obtain entrance into a mind as he would make his way into a landscape; he climbs the pineal gland as if it were a hill in the centre of the scene; looks around on all objects with their varieties of form, their movements, their shades of colour, and their mutual relations and influences, and forthwith produces as graphic a delineation in the one case as Wilson or Gainsborough could have done in the other, to the great enrichment of our gallery of intellectual scenery....

Our author has the secret of the transmigration of the soul. He can cast his own spirit into any living thing, real or imaginary....

"Mariana" is, we are disposed to think, although there are several poems which rise up reproachfully in our recollection as we say so, altogether, the most perfect composition in the volume. The whole of this poem, of eighty-four lines, is generated by the legitimate process of poetical creation, as that process is conducted in a philosophical mind, from a half sentence in Shakespeare. There is no mere samplification; it is all production, and production from that single germ. That must be a rich intellect, in which thoughts thus take root and grow....

A considerable number of the poems are amatory; they are the expression not of heathen sensuality, nor of sickly refinement, nor of fantastic devotion, but of manly love; and they ill.u.s.trate the philosophy of the pa.s.sion while they exhibit the various phases of its existence and embody its power....

Mr. Tennyson sketches females as well as ever did Sir Thomas Lawrence.

His portraits are delicate, his likenesses (we will answer for them), perfect, and they have life, character, and individuality. They are nicely a.s.sorted also to all the different gradations of emotion and pa.s.sion which are expressed in common with the descriptions of them.

There is an appropriate object for every shade of feeling, from the light touch of a pa.s.sing admiration, to the triumphant madness of soul and sense, or the deep and everlasting anguish of survivors.h.i.+p....

That these poems will have a rapid and extensive popularity we do not antic.i.p.ate. Their very originality will prevent their being appreciated for a time. But that time will come, we hope, to a not far distant end. They demonstrate the possession of powers, to the future direction of which we look with some anxiety. A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present and future generations, to earth and heaven. He, of all men, should have distinct and worthy objects before him, and consecrate himself to their promotion. It is then he best consults the glory of his art, and his own lasting fame. Mr. Tennyson has a dangerous quality in that facility of impersonation on which we have remarked, and by which he enters so thoroughly into the most strange and wayward idiosyncracies of other men. It must not degrade him into a poetical harlequin. He has higher work to do than that of disporting himself among "mystics" and "flowing philosophers." He knows that "the poet's mind is holy ground"; He knows that the poet's portion is to be

Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love;

he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of the poet's destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment. It is not for such men to sink into mere verse-makers for the amus.e.m.e.nt of themselves or others. They can influence the a.s.sociations of unnumbered minds; they can command the sympathies of unnumbered hearts; they can disseminate principles; they can give those principles power over men's imaginations; they can excite in a good cause the sustained enthusiasm that is sure to conquer; they can blast the laurels of tyrants, and hallow the memories of the martyrs'

patriotism; they can act with a force, the extent of which it is difficult to estimate, upon national feelings and character, and consequently upon national happiness.

MILL ON MACAULAY'S "LAYS"

[From _The Westminster Review_. February, 1843]

It is with the two great masters of modern ballad poetry (Campbell and Scott) that Mr. Macaulay's performances are really to be compared, and not with the real ballads or epics of an early age. The "Lays," in point of form, are not in the least like the genuine productions of a primitive age or people, and it is no blame to Mr. Macaulay that they are not. He professes imitation of Homer, but we really see no resemblance, except in the nature of some of the incidents, and the animation and vigour of the narrative; and the "Iliad," after all, is not the original ballads of the Trojan War, but these ballads moulded together, and wrought into the forms of a more civilised and cultivated age. It is difficult to conjecture what the form of the old Roman ballad may have been, and certain, that whatever they were, they could no more satisfy the aesthetic requirements of modern culture, than an ear accustomed to the great organs of Freyburg or Harlem could relish Orpheus's hurdy-gurdy, although the airs which Orpheus played, if they could be recovered, might perhaps be executed with great effect on the more perfect instrument.

The former of Mr. Macaulay's ballad poetry are essentially modern: they are those of the romantic and chivalrous, not the cla.s.sical ages, and even in those they are a reproduction, not of the originals, but of the imitations of Scott. In this we think he has done well, for Scott's style is as near to that of the ancient ballad as we conceive to be at all compatible with real popular effect on the modern mind. The difference between the two may be seen by the most cursory comparison of any real old ballad, "Chevy Chase," for instance, with last canto of Marmion, or with any of these "Lays." Conciseness is the characteristic of the real ballad, diffuseness of the modern adaptation. The old bard did everything by single touches; Scott and Mr. Macaulay by repet.i.tion and acc.u.mulation of particulars. They produce all their effect by what they _say_; he by what he _suggested_; by what he stimulated the imagination to paint for itself. But then the old ballads were not written for the light reading of tired readers. To do the work in _their_ way, they required to be brooded over, or had at least the aid of tune and of impa.s.sioned recitation. Stories which are to be told to children in the age of eagerness and excitability, or sung in banquet halls to a.s.sembled warriors, whose daily ideas and feelings supply a flood of comment ready to gush forth on the slightest hint of the poet, cannot fly too swift and straight to the mark. But Mr. Macaulay wrote to be only read, and by readers for whom it was necessary to do all.

These poems, therefore, are not the worse for being un-Roman in their form; and in their substance they are Roman to a degree which deserves great admiration. Mr. Macaulay's prose writings had not prepared us for the power which he has here manifested of identifying himself easily and completely, with states of feeling and modes of life alien to modern experience. n.o.body could have previously doubted that he possessed fancy, but he has added to it the higher faculty of Imagination. We have not been able to detect, in the four poems, one idea or feeling which was not, or might not have been Roman; while the externals of Roman life, and the feelings characteristic of Rome and of that particular age, are reproduced with great felicity, and without being made unduly predominant over the universal features of human nature and human life.

Independently therefore of their value as poems, these compositions are a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made Niebuhr ill.u.s.trious, familiar to the minds of general readers. This is no trifling matter, even in relation to present interests, for there is no estimating the injury which the cause of popular inst.i.tutions has suffered, and still suffers from misrepresentations of the early condition of the Roman and Plebs, and its n.o.ble struggles against its taskmasters. And the study of the manner in which the heroic legends of early Rome grew up as poetry and gradually became history, has important bearings on the general laws of historical evidence, and on the many things which, as philosophy advances, are more and more seen to be therewith connected. On this subject Mr. Macaulay has not only presented, in an agreeable form, the results of previous speculation, but has, though in an entirely unpretending manner, thrown additional light upon it by his own remarks: as where he shows, by incontestible instances, that a similar transformation of poetic fiction into history has taken place on various occasions in modern and sceptical times....

We are more disposed to break a lance with our author on the general merits of Roman literature, which, by a heresy not new with him, he sacrifices, in what appears to us a most unfair degree, on the score of its inferior originality to the Grecian. It is true the Romans had no Aeschylus nor Sophocles, and but a secondhand Homer, though this last was not only the most finished but even the most original of imitators.

But where was the Greek model of the n.o.ble poem of Lucretius? What, except the mere idea, did the Georgics borrow from Hesiod? and whoever thinks of comparing the two poems? Where, in Homer or the Euripides, will be found the original of the tender and pathetic pa.s.sages in the Aeneid, especially the exquisitely told story of Dido? There is no extraordinary merit in the "Carmen Secculare" as we have it, the only production of Horace which challenges comparison with Pindar; although we are not among those who deem Pindar one of the brightest stars in the Greek heaven. But from whom are the greater part of Horace's _Carmina_ borrowed (they should never be termed Odes), any more than those of Burns or Beranger, the a.n.a.logous authors in modern times? and by what Greek minor poems are they surpa.s.sed? We say nothing of Catullus, whom some competent judges prefer to Horace. Does the lyric, then, or even the epic poetry of the Romans, deserve no better t.i.tle than that of "a hot-house plant, which, in return for a.s.siduous and skilful culture, yielded only scanty and sickly fruits?" The complete originality and eminent merit of their satiric poetry, Mr. Macaulay himself acknowledges. As for prose, we give up Cicero as compared with Demosthenes, but with no one else; and is Livy less original, or less admirable, than Herodotus? Tacitus may have imitated, even to affectation, the condensation of Thucydides, as Milton imitated the Greek and Hebrew poets; but was the mind of the one as essentially original as that of the other? Is the Roman less an unapprochable master, in his peculiar line, that of sentimental history, than the Grecian in his? and what Greek historian has written anything similar or comparable to the sublime peroration of the _Life of Agricola_? The Latin genius lay not in speculation, and the Romans did undoubtedly borrow all their philosophical principles from the Greeks. Their originality _there_, as is well said by a remarkable writer in the most remarkable of his works,[1] consisted in taking these principles _au serieux_. They _did_ what the others talked about. Zeno, indeed, was not a Roman; but Poetus Thrasea and Marcus Antoninus were.

[1] Mr. Maurice, in the essay on the history of moral speculation and culture, which forms the article "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy"

in the _Encyclopaedia Metropolitana._

JOHN STERLING ON CARLYLE

[From _London and Westminster Review_ October, 1839]

All countries at all times require, and England perhaps at the present not less than others, men having a faith at once distinct and large, the expression of what is best in their times, and having also the courage to proclaim it, and take their stand upon it....

But in our day such visionaries are less and less possible. The spread of shallow but clear knowledge, like the cold snow-water issuing from the glaciers, daily chills and disenchants the hearts of millions once credulous. Daily, therefore, does it become more probable that millions will follow in the track of those who are called their betters. Thus will they find in the world nothing but an epicurean stye, to be managed, with less dirt and better food, by patent steam-machinery; but still a place for swine, though the swine may be washed, and their victuals more equally divided.

Is it not then strange that in such a world, in such a country, and among those light-hearted Edinburgh Reviewers, a man should rise and proclaim a creed; not a new and more ingenious form of words, but a truth to be embraced with the whole heart, and in which the heart shall find as he has found, strength for all combats, and consolation, though stern not festal, under all sorrows? Amid the ma.s.ses of English printing sent forth every day, part designed for the most trivial entertainment, part black with the narrowest and most lifeless sectarian dogmatism, part, and perhaps the best, exhibiting only facts and theories in physical science, and part filled with the vulgarest economical projects and details, which would turn all life into a process of cookery, culinary, political, or sentimental--how few writings are there that contain like these a distinct doctrine as to the position and calling of man, capable of affording nourishment to the heart, and support to the will, and in harmony at the same time with the social state of the world, and with the most enlarged and brightened insight which human wisdom has yet attained to?

We have been so little prepared to look for such an appearance that it is difficult for us to realize the conception of a genuine coherent view of life thus presented to us in a book of our day, which shall be neither a slight compendium of a few moral truisms, flavoured with a few immoral refinements and paradoxes, such as const.i.tute the floating ethics and religion of the time; nor a fierce and gloomy distortion of some eternal idea torn from its pure sphere of celestial light to be raved about by the ignorant whom it has half-enlightened, and half made frantic. But here, in our judgment--that is, in the judgment of one man who speaks considerately what he fixedly believes--we have the thought of a wide, and above all, of a deep soul, which has expressed in fitting words, the fruits of patient reflection, of piercing observation, of knowledge many-sided and conscientious, of devoutest awe and faithfullest love....

The clearness of the eye to see whatever is permanent and substantial, and the fervour and strength of heart to love it as the sole good of life, are, in our view, Mr. Carlyle's pre-eminent characteristics, as those of every man ent.i.tled to the fame of the most generous order of greatness. Not to paint the good which he sees and loves, or see it painted, and enjoy the sight; not to understand it, and exult in the knowledge of it; but to take his position upon it, and for it alone to breathe, to move, to fight, to mourn, and die--this is the destination which he has chosen for himself. His avowal of it and exhortation to do the like is the object of all his writings. And, reasonably considered, it is no small service to which he is thus bound. For the real, the germinal truth of nature, is not a dead series of physical phenomena into the like of which all phenomena are cunningly to be explained away.

This pulseless, rigid iron frame-work, on which the soft soil of human life is placed, and above which its aerial flowers and foliage rise, does not pa.s.s with him for the essential and innermost principle of all.

It is rather that which, being itself poorest, the poorest of faculties can apprehend. As physical mechanism, it is that which is most palpable, and undeniable by any, because it is that which lies nearest the nothingness whence it has been hardly rescued, and is therefore, most akin to minds in whose meanness of structure or culture, even human existence might seem scarce better than nothingness. He knows, few in our nation so well, that of a world of new machinery, the highest king and priest would be the neatest clockwork figure. And in such a world, a being feeling ever towards or somewhat beyond what he can weigh and measure, and looking up to find above himself that which is too high for him to understand, would be an anomaly as lawless and incredible as the wildest fabled monster, the Minotaur or the Chimera, the t.i.tan--the Sphynx itself--nay a more delirious riddle than any that in dreams it proposes to us.

On the other hand, neither is for him the solid, abiding, inexhaustible, that merely which is received as such by the popular acquiescence. It must needs be a truth which the spirit, cleared and strengthened by manifold knowledge and experience, and above all by steadfast endeavour, can rest in and say: This I mean; not because it is told me, were my informants all the schools of Rabbins or a hierarchy of angels; but because I have looked into it, tried it, found it healthful and sufficient, and thus know that it will stand the stress of life. We may be right or wrong in our estimate of Mr. Carlyle, but we cannot be mistaken in supposing that on this kind of anvil have all truly great men been fas.h.i.+oned, and of metal thus honest and enduring.

Further it must be said that, true as is his devotion to the truth, so flaming and cordial is his hatred of the false, in whatever shapes and names delusions may show themselves. Affectations, quackeries, tricks, frauds, swindlings, commercial or literary, baseless speculations, loud ear-catching rhetoric, melodramatic sentiment, moral drawlings and hyperboles, religious cant, clever political s.h.i.+fts, and conscious or half-conscious fallacies, all in his view, come under the same hangman's rubric,--proceed from the same offal heart. However plausible, popular, and successful, however dignified by golden and purple names, they are lies against ourselves, against whatever in us is not altogether reprobate and infernal. His great argument, theme of his song, spirit of his language, lies in this, that there is a work for man worth doing, which is to be done with the whole of his heart, not the half or any other fraction. Therefore, if any reserve be made, any corner kept for something unconnected with this true work and sincere purpose, the whole is thereby vitiated and accurst. So far as his arm reaches he is undoing whatever in nature is holy: ruining whatever is the real creation of the great worker of all. This truth of purpose is to the soul what life is to the body of man; that which unites and organises the ma.s.s, keeping all the parts in due proportion and concord, and restraining them from sudden corruption into worthless dust....

Anyone who should take up the writings themselves with no other preconception than that which we have attempted to give him, would doubtless be startled at the strangeness of the style which prevails more or less throughout them. They are not careless, headstrong, pa.s.sionate, confused; but they bear a constant look of oddity which seems at first mere wilful wantonness, and which we only afterwards find to be the discriminating stamp of original and strong feeling. This-- this feeling, rooted in profound susceptibility and matured into a central vivifying power--is, we should say, the author's most extraordinary distinction. For it is not the ostentatious, impetuous sentiment, which calls, a sufficient audience being by, on heaven and earth for sympathy, and would wish for that of Tartarus too, as an additional acknowledgment of its sublime sincerity. Here, on the contrary, the feeling is not that which the man is proud of, and would fain exhibit. He shrinks from the profession, nay from the sense of it; even painfully labours to trifle, and be at ease, that he may hide from others, and may for himself forget, the th.o.r.n.y f.a.got load of his own emotions. Yet make them known he must; for they are not those of some private personal grief or pa.s.sion, from which he may escape into literature or science, and leave his pains and longings behind him; but his sensibilities are burning with a slow, immense fire, kindled by the very theme on which he writes, and compelling him to write. The greatness and weakness, the infinite hopes and unquenchable reality of human life; the aching pressure of the body and its wants on the myriads of millions in whom celestial force sleeps and dreams of h.e.l.l; the sight of follies, frauds, cruelties, and lascivious luxury in the midst of a race then endowed and thus suffering; and the unconquerable will and thought with which the few work out the highest calling of all men; these it is, and not self-indulging distresses and theatrical aspirations of his own, which boil and storm within. Therefore does he speak with the solid strength and energy, which gives so serious and rugged an aspect to his sentences; while, perpetually checking himself, from a wise man's shame at excessive emotion, and from the knowledge that others will but half sympathise with him, he adds to his most weighty utterances a turn of irony which relieves the excessive strain.... Add to this, that Mr. Carlyle's resolution to convey his meaning at all hazards, makes him seize the most effectual and sudden words in spite of usage and fas.h.i.+onable taste; and that, therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some strange--we must call it--Carlylism; English, Scotch, German, Greek, Latin, French, Technical, Slang, American, or Lunar, or altogether superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere--he uses it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a Hades, void even of vocables....

Here must end our remarks on the admirable writings of a great man.

Could it be hoped, that by what has been said, any readers, and especially any thinkers, will be led to give them the attention they require, but also deserve, in this there would be ample repayment, even were there not at all events a higher reward, for the labour, which is not a slight one, of forming and a.s.sorting distinct opinions on a matter so singular and so complex. For few bonds that unite human beings are purer or happier than a common understanding and reverence of what is truly wise and beautiful. This also is religion. Standing at the threshold of these works, we may imitate the saying of the old philosopher to the friends who visited him on their return from the temples--Let us enter, for here too are G.o.ds.

FRASER'S MAGAZINE

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

(1811-1863)

There can be no occasion to enlarge upon this generous tribute of one of the greatest of our Victorian novelists to another. Considering how inevitably the critic is driven to compare these two, if not to set one up against the other, we can experience no feeling but pleasure and pride in humanity, before the evidence of their mutual appreciation.

_The Cornhill_ "In Memoriam" article of Charles d.i.c.kens may well stand beside this burst of glowing enthusiasm.

We have retained, by way of ill.u.s.trating our general subject, a paragraph from the earlier part of the article, in which Thackeray falls foul of reviewers in general, for characteristics from which he himself was singularly free.

CHARLES KINGSLEY

(1819-1875)

The brilliant versatility of Kingsley's work will prepare us, in some measure, for his virile impatience, here revealed, with elements in the romantic revival of poetry among his contemporaries, which were an offence to his "muscular" morality. "There are certain qualities which may be called moral in all his work, evincing a literary faculty of the highest kind. Always instructive without being exactly instructed, always argumentative without being very guarded in argument, he yet displays a marvellously contagious enthusiasm for his own creeds, and surrounds his own ideals with an atmosphere of pa.s.sionate n.o.bility. We forgive the partisans.h.i.+p for the sincerity of the partisan."