reign got up a little quiet coup d'etat of his own, which met the occasion perfectly. He offered to abdicate if his people saw fit! They hesitatedbut not for long. "How shall we better ourselves?" they asked, and the king remained sovereign of Belgium by the grace of God, and, most certainly, by the will of the people. POETRY, GOOD, BAD, AND INDIFFERENT. LIKE a very grievous murrain the cacoethes scribendi is abroad. A terrible disease it is, tingling at the ends of the fingers, and sending horrible delights and pains, shaking hopes, and conceited fears to its source-a verrucose development of the organ of self esteem. It is as it was in the days of Horace; one will spin us out a thousand verses standing on one leg-and one idea. Another will be seized with Pierian thirst, and lo! as he stoops to drink, the fountain subsides, and he is abandoned on the sand of prose. Another, essaying Parnassus, finds when too late he has mistaken the mountain, and that he treads the hill of the terrible Chimera. It is our own fault. The public capacity is Curtian ; it must have the best thrown into it, or it will not close. We ask for writers, and like Tarpeia we are crushed with our own request. The all producing earth never poured forth with such fecundity as the all mothering press. Much need, oh typeful mother! hast thou of a season of barrenness, till some Isaac, full of fresh young life, have time to germinate the child of genius and of joy. Doth not thy leaden bosom throb with indignation as the more leaden sheets pass over thee? How oft has a second edition stirred thee to pain ineffable! Far otherwise was it with thee in the days of thy primal being, when William Caxton drew from thy bosom, where his fame reposed, the deep black letters of the "Recuyell of Troy." What a great antique memory is that! Then men considered for many years before they stamped the immortality of printing on the unexpressed thought. Now we plunge into type, and it never occurs to us that we have made our imaginings immortal. We do not recognize now the importance of our own ideas, and that is the chief reason that they are so generally worthless. Whatever we write is read, will always find readers of some class, and through them we necessarily influence all future time-it may be by infinitesimal gradations. This may seem fanciful, but it is a true and solemn thought. We should ever write with the veiled face of the great Future watching and solemnizing all, as did the Egyptian skeleton. We do not say that men should write only for the future; but, while writing for the present, let them remember that the present is ever changing to the future, in fact, that there is no such thing as present time at all. It is for this reason, that men do not recognize the importance of what they are doing, and for the consequent harmfulness of their productions, that we fearful of the multitudinous poetics of this time. are Every man writeth what is right in his own eyes. The press teems with poems of the foolishest; truly, with few of the noblest kind. There is but one hope for us, and it may seem a paradox to say so. It lies in the very cause of the misfortune. It is the liberty of the press. Is not freedom the parent of all nobleness? and would not the foolish element become sheer idiocy or madness by restraint. There is no hope, of a truth, left for us but in the freedom which will permit this diluted folly to evaporate, and perchance, which may the Gods grant, leave a precipitate of sense at the bottom. But the situation of the poetry-reading public at present is that of a prima donna almost choked with bouquets. The boxes write, the pit writes, the galleries write, and on every possible subject. We are a verse-writing nation. The danger is that we shall cease to be a poetic nation. Let us think more and write less. The red hot bar of poetical feeling is violently hammered out into nothing but sparks, instead of being slowly weld ed into poetry. We think our thought out too fast, and then we are reduced to thinking about thinking, and feeling about feeling, instead of slowly progressing by producing thought from thought, and feeling from feeling. The world is too much with us, late and soon Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. We have given our hearts away-a sordid boon. It is but too true. We give our hearts away, all in a hundred pages or so, and we give nothing worth the giving. We have not kept them long enough. We have never learnt the great lesson of life-to wait. It was not till the idea of Paradise Lost had lain germinating for half a life, that it sprang into the stately tree. It was not till the calm twilight of existence had fallen round the path of the Great Puritan, that the Epic of England was composed. Then, when the destruction of outward sight had separated him from outward beauty, he took refuge in the still cathedral of his soul, and it was filled with the light of Paradise. But we will not wait. We imagine every moment of feeling to be an age of feeling. When we are morbid, we feel by intuition that the mantle of Byron has descended on us. In that moment o'er our soul Winters of memory seem to roll. When we feel permeated with the beauty of the world, and recognize therein somewhat akin to our humanity, we cannot but feel that Wordsworth's muse is ours; and sowe begin to write. But it is one thing to feel, and another to express. To but few of the sons of earth is given the gift divine of "adequate expression." It is true that we are these men in a certain sense; intuitions do not lie. Wordsworth's, Byron's very beauty to us is that they express what we feel, and what we are, and what we could not put in words. They call up in us feelings which we find that we have possessed, but which we had not recognized before, which lay in the heart, waiting like silent harp strings for the wind to vibrate. In a few words, they supply our us with, and make known to us our own feeling. But the poetasters of our time write as if expression were as easy as feeling, or thinking. Such is the case only when the ideas to be embodied are fully rounded in the mind of the poet. But these men endeavour to clothe in words thoughts whose shadows they have only seen. Like Ixion, they embrace a cloud instead of a goddess, and a monster is produced; whereas, if they had waited a little longer, they would have realized a good, and avoided a fault. They would have gained the idea; and they would not, owing to their imperfect conception of it, have expressed in twenty lines what might have been done in two. As on a former occasion we have borne witness to the abiding excellence of the highest poetry of the age, and, above all, to the true and filtered purity of the poetic idea, as combining, after years of gradual development, the natural, practical, imaginative, passionate, loving, human, and spiritual elements, it is but fitting that we should say a few words on the lower classes of poetry at present, which have arisen either by imitation, or by a false admixture of the poetical elements. We cannot but compare the writings of some of the poets of the present day to pâtes de foie gras— highly seasoned unwholesome poems. Of this class especially is that to which a living poet has given the sobriquet of spasmodic. It has in reality arisen from an attempt to unite the spiritual and sensual element. In Bulwer's Zanoni, Glyndon, when endeavouring to reach the spiritual existence of a Rosicrucian, is enticed away by sensual pleasure, and attempts to grasp the reward without passing through the stage of trial. It is exactly what these sensualistico-spiritual poets do. They daub the wall with untempered mortar. It is this mixture which causes the indescribable confusion in which the reader finds himself involved, when he is in the centre of a poem like " Balder, or the Life Drama." To poems of this class Horace's description may well apply. "In the upper part a beautiful woman, beneath a loathsome fish." They are essentially unhealthy, certainly in their effect on the generality of readers, and we fear on the minds of the poets themselves. The tendency of youth is to grasp at crude and wild ideas, attractive from their very crudeness and wildness, without thinking of effects. This is a very trite remark, but it is none the less true. The effect of these poems is to make men discontented with plain thinking and strong thinking. Its teaching is that a poet of the soul must pass through a tornado of passion, and personally feel all he aspires to represent. It is identical with the teaching of some to young men-" Sow your wild oats; the corn afterwards will be all the better." Such may be the case; the crop is sometimes all the better for it, but, as Tennyson well writes on the very point, Oh, if we held the doctrine sound For life outliving heats of youth, We may apply the same reasoning to the postulate of this school. A man may make a better poet for having felt passion deeply, but is it necessary? We trow not-we doubt whether Shakspeare was ever as jealous as Othello, or as conscience-stricken as Lady Macbeth. Finally, we have no hesitation in saying that the eager recipient of these Poems has ruined his poetic taste, or if not, when he enters real life, he is disgusted with their unreality; and the strength of thought necessary to get rid of them oftentimes ends in a struggle which makes all poetry distasteful. There is another class of poets who are called, and some of them very falsely so, transcendental. Transcendentalism transferred to poetry has adopted a strange method of explaining itself. What was partially comprehensible before has now become all but incomprehensible. This is owing to the language in which it clothes itself. The Transcendental Poets write for themselves and for no one else. They use a jargon which none but the initiated understand. It is as incomprehensible in common circles as the flash dialect would be in St. James' Square. It is the Mumbo-Jumboism of literature. It is unfortunate that they will make use of their lingual enormities, when Wordsworth has shown us what may be done with simple English, and when Milton has made it almost inspired. It is further unfortunate— for their meaning is oftimes of value. VOL. XLVIII.-XO. CCLXXXVI. We do not believe that this strange tongue is natural to them; it is but a grotesque suit of clothes. Let it be thrown off. It is better to be naked to all the world than dressed for a few. We fear that these men who pass, twisting and circling like "the serpent more subtle than any beast of the field," through the fair Paradise of the English language, will finally gain for themselves the serpent's curse. Emerson, who, is perhaps the essence of Transcendentalism, is yet comprehensible enough; for he condescends to use his native tongue in its purity, and frames his sentences according to the understood rules of English grammar. Mr. Browning, for example, whom we recognize as a true poet, and whose dramas are strong with intuitive conception, is yet so strange and uncouth in his modes of expression, that he repels numbers whom he might attract. The story of the great comedian who took up as his first book, on recovering from a fever, Browning's "Sordello," and after reading three lines cast it down, and with a face, half terror, half fun, exclaimed, "Merciful Goodness, have I lost my senses?" is but the story of thousands. Next on the list is another class. The voluminous. This is a more melancholy case than the last. The transcendental expression gives at least a spur to thought. But the characteristic, the essential difference of the poems written by this class of men, is an inexplicable absence of thought. These are men who flow in rhyme as naturally, as copiously, and not so beneficially as the village pump in water, "in one weak, washy, everlasting flood." These are men who to a hundred pages of sentimentality add a single thought as a flavor; whose minds seem diluted to the consistency of weak whey; who can, as the three madmen, get drunk each night on toast and water; who "die of a rose in aromatic pain," and whose only striking fault is that they each and all labor under an inexplicable impulse to impart their weaknesses to the public, which wades hopefully as of old thro' volumes of stanzas and sonnets, and poems and poemettes, and finally dozes off to sleep, thankful at least for the innocent nature of the narcotic. There is yet another class of poets, GG and it is at these that we look with sorrow, for they have forfeited their individuality. There are several phases of this, but the chief one takes its rise from a desire of displaying a distinctive peculiarity to the world, and so gaining surprise or admiration. It is strange that in aiming at this they lose the very thing they aspire to. Poets of this class devote themselves to a particular line, and when they have chosen this, set themselves to work that they may develop feeling for it. Many of these men are writing now. We are afflicted with The Patriot, The Sorrowful, The Lonely, The Sentimentalist, The Worshipper of the Beautiful, The All-admiring, The All-denouncing. All are equally bad, so far as they cease to be natural. We do not complain of their writing, but we do complain of their not writing what they are, or what they feel. Nothing is more interesting to the individual than the experience of another individual. The expression of true, real conceptions, were it even on an apothecary's bottle, would be pleasant to read. We should be able to form some idea of what the man was. "But no," say they, "that would be too common; the public must see our conservatory where we keep our exotics." They will not give us flowers from the garden or the hills of the heart; they even go further, for it is these flowers which they pre-eminently despise, though we hope in some cases unconsciously. The minds of these men are filled with ideas culled from foreign parterres, till finally they believe that these, and these alone, are their own. For this they pay a terrible penalty. They lose the power of individual thinking and feeling. They do not even know when an idea belongs to them, or to some other man. They live a false life. They are adrift in a sea of tumbling confusion, and at last, if they will not recognize their error, this confusion becomes their proper life. In this they sink to the very deepest depth of intellectual futility. If they would but realize that there is no need of separating themselves from the whole of humanity in order to become distinct, they would regain their individuality. Only as participating in and working in the universal, do we keep ourselves individual. Only in dividing from the whole do we cease to be individual, Let each one of us be, as Emerson says, "a unit in creation;" a unit out of creation ceases to be one, it becomes a nothing. Let us take a lesson from nature. There is not a leaf on any tree which is the same as another, and yet the thousand leaves of one oak wave in a beautiful and satisfying unity. In these remarks we would not be understood as referring to any persons, but merely urging on the poetic minds of this time the necessity of avoiding the falsehood of extremes, the incongruous admixture of opposing elements, and the necessity of a free self-determination towards the natural and truthful in the poetic development of the individual mind. We are not blaming persons; we are considering classes of poetry abstractedly. Moreover, even in the very lowest of these classes there is an element which elevates, and which must necessarily influence our island homes for good. There is an earnestness, however misdirected; there is a love, however faint, of the beautiful, true, pure, and good, which raises our poetic idea, even in its meanest outward development, above that of the Byronic period. There is a faith in something higher and repose in the thought of the future. There is a stretching forth of hands and hearts into the darkness unexplored, that they may feel after and find truth, which promises a clearer heaven of song to England. Men, as has been said, are in some sort that which they desire to be," and then let but the desire last, and it will gradually fulfill itself. We speak not here of those poets who have crowned the time with thought; yet we cannot but say, that if many of those who are called second-rate were but to shake off the formalism and imitation to which they have self-determined their own will, and step forward freedmen in the sight of the infinite things to be received by an open heart, they would reach heights which would rival the summits where, content with glory, and self-wrapped in the intuitive realization of everlasting beauty, our great poetic fathers sit. But to attain this they must be selfdetermined men. They must allow the activity of free thought to work freely in a free world. They must gain the power of receiving impressions from all things into a heart which has all its windows open, and where the unchartered air dissipates all prejudices, all foreign collections of ideas, and allows the judgment free course for calm and well balanced conclusions. When they succeed in this, in freeing their own mind, the imagination and the passion will work forth on the judgment without influencing it too much, and they will become poetically free. This will increase poetic power in the nation; this will impart new pulsations to the veins of all men; for in the harmonious diversity which makes the being of all things, and of society, no one can work for all without working for himself, or work for himself without working for all. The success or failure of one is the success or failure of all. Taking up one of the books committed to our criticism, we were rejoiced to find one which approached this ideal. "The Rev. Archer Gurney's Poems," though not exhibiting much delicate or metaphysical thought, and very little of the imaginative faculty, yet are well worth reading, if it were only that here we meet with a free man; one who, having attained to a consciousness of his own self-activity, necessarily wishes that all men should be similarly free. This desire runs as a clear clang of joy through most of his poems. It is refreshing as a cataract to meet with such a manly vigorous sense of life, with one who does what he has to do because God has given it him to do, and who sees a reality and an influence in all things. This is the opening poem of the book, and it is a fitting portal: FOR WHOSO NEEDS. Come, rouse thyself, Acastor, man! All vain despondency is guilt, For God can ne'er forget thee. This still foreboding angry strain Methinks, at once t'were better place Grey head on boyish shoulder, Than wax in every moment's space Some thousand ages older. Come, rouse thee! God was never served Thou seem'st as wholly given O cheer thee! cast aside for aye These hypochondriac fancies. Of phantasies up-buoy us; Then as this moral strain began, The boundless heavens are o'er thee. For God can ne'er forget thee. Before a heartfelt, clear smile like this, we naturally expect that Humbug should drop abashed; and so it is, and moreover, the wailing, and crying, and marvellous roaring of certain Carlylists, who say that every body is wrong, and never show any body what is right, but are content with denouncing, are treated in the following lines, as they should be, with a genial life which smiles them into good humour and truth. AN ANGRY HOUR. Am I then born out of season, O would'st thou hurry me, nature, Back to those frank days of yore, When art had swathed not a creature, Bolstered behind and before! Let me but 'scape from this chatter, Songs of Early Summer, by Rev. Archer Gurney. London: Longman, Brown, Greene, and Longmans. |