Chapter XXI: Part 21

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 constitute 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 entitled 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 aërial flowers and foliage rise, does not pass 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 Titan--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 fashioned, 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 shifts, 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 mass, 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, passionate, 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 thorny fagot load of his own emotions. Yet make them known he must; for they are not those of some private personal grief or passion, 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 hell; 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 fashionable 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 assorting 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 gods.

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 Dickens may well stand beside this burst of glowing enthusiasm.

We have retained, by way of illustrating 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 passionate nobility. We forgive the partisanship for the sincerity of the partisan."

* * * * *

Alexander Smith (1830-1867) was a poet and essayist of some distinction; though A. H. Clough also criticises his exclusive devotion to the "writers of his own immediate time"; and calls him "the latest disciple of the school of Keats." The volume of essays entitled _Dreamthorp_ "entitles him to a place among the best writers of English prose."

ANONYMOUS

There is a similarity, and a difference, between this summary of Christmas literature and Thackeray's. The personal criticism lacks his special geniality, revealing rather a tone which would have perfectly suited Blackwood or the _Quarterly_. Lytton was a favourite subject of abuse to his contemporaries.

THACKERAY ON DICKENS

[From "A Box of Novels," _Fraser's Magazine_, February, 1844]

MR. TITMARSH, in Switzerland, to MR. YORKE

...This introduction, then, will have prepared you for an exceedingly humane and laudatory notice of the packet of works which you were good enough to send me, and which, though they doubtless contain a great deal that the critic would not write (from the extreme delicacy of his taste and the vast range of his learning) also contain, between ourselves, a great deal that the critic _could_ not write if he would ever so; and this is a truth which critics are sometimes apt to forget in their judgments of works of fiction. As a rustical boy, hired at twopence a week, may fling stones at the blackbirds and drive them off and possibly hit one or two, yet if he get into the hedge and begin to sing, he will make a wretched business of the music, and Labin and Colin and the dullest swains of the village will laugh egregiously at his folly; so the critic employed to assault the poet.... But the rest of the simile is obvious, and will be apprehended at once by a person of your experience.

The fact is, that the blackbirds of letters--the harmless, kind singing creatures who line the hedge-sides and chirp and twitter as nature bade them (they can no more help singing, these poets, than a flower can help smelling sweet), have been treated much too ruthlessly by the watch-boys of the press, who have a love for flinging stones at the little innocents, and pretend that it is their duty, and that every wren or sparrow is likely to destroy a whole field of wheat, or to turn out a monstrous bird of prey. Leave we these vain sports and savage pastimes of youth, and turn we to the benevolent philosophy of maturer age.

* * * * *

And now there is but one book left in the box, the smallest one, but oh! how much the best of all. It is the work of the master of all the English humourists now alive; the young man who came and took his place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept it. Think of all we owe Mr. Dickens since these half-dozen years, the store of happy hours that he has made us pass, the kindly and pleasant companions whom he has introduced to us, the harmless laughter, the generous wit, the frank, manly, human love which he has taught us to feel! Every month of these years has brought us some kind token from this delightful genius. His books may have lost in art, perhaps, but could we afford to wait? Since the days when the _Spectator_ was produced by a man of kindred mind and temper, what books have appeared that have taken so affectionate a hold of the English public as these? They have made millions of rich and poor happy; they might have been locked up for nine years, doubtless, and pruned here and there, and improved (which I doubt) but where would have been the reader's benefit all this time, while the author was elaborating his performance? Would the communication between the writer and the public have been what it is now--something continual, confidential, something like personal affection? I do not know whether these stories are written for future ages; many sage critics doubt on this head. There are always such conjurors to tell literary fortunes; and, to my certain knowledge, Boz, according to them, has been sinking regularly these six years. I doubt about that mysterious writing for futurity which certain big wigs prescribe. Snarl has a chance, certainly. His works, which have not been read in this age, _may_ be read in future; but the receipt for that sort of writing has never as yet been clearly ascertained. Shakespeare did not write for futurity, he wrote his plays for the same purpose which inspires the pen of Alfred Bunn, Esquire, viz., to fill his Theatre Royal. And yet we read Shakespeare now. Le Sage and Fielding wrote for their public; and through the great Dr. Johnson put his peevish protest against the fame of the latter, and voted him "a dull dog, sir,--a low fellow," yet somehow Harry Fielding has survived in spite of the critic, and Parson Adams is at this minute as real a character, as much loved by us as the old doctor himself. What a noble, divine power of genius this is, which, passing from the poet into his reader's soul, mingles with it, and there engenders, as it were, real creatures; which is as strong as history, which creates beings that take their place besides nature's own. All that we know of Don Quixote or Louis XIV we got to know in the same way--out of a book. I declare I love Sir Roger de Coverley quite as much as Izaak Walton, and have just as clear a consciousness of the looks, voice, habit, and manner of being of the one as of the other.

And so with regard to this question of futurity; if any benevolent being of the present age is imbued with a desire to know what his great-great-grandchild will think of this or that author--of Mr. Dickens especially, whose claims to fame have raised the question--the only way to settle it is by the ordinary historic method. Did not your great-great-grandfather love and delight in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Have they lost their vitality by their age? Don't they move laughter and awaken affection now as three hundred years ago? And so with Don Pickwick and Sancho Weller, if their gentle humours and kindly wit, and hearty benevolent natures, touch us and convince us, as it were, now, why should they not exist for our children as well as for us, and make the twenty-fifth century happy, as they have the nineteenth? Let Snarl console himself, then, as to the future.

As for the _Christmas Carol_, or any other book of a like nature which the public takes upon itself to criticise, the individual critic had quite best hold his peace. One remembers what Buonaparte replied to some Austrian critics, of much correctness and acumen, who doubted about acknowledging the French republic. I do not mean that the _Christmas Carol_ is quite as brilliant or self-evident as the sun at noonday; but it is so spread over England by this time, that no sceptic, no _Fraser's Magazine_,--no, not even the godlike and ancient _Quarterly_ itself (venerable, Saturnian, big-wigged dynasty!) could review it down. "Unhappy people! deluded race!" One hears the cauliflowered god exclaim, mournfully shaking the powder out of his ambrosial curls, "What strange new folly is this? What new deity do you worship? Know ye what ye do? Know ye that your new idol hath little Latin and less Greek? Know ye that he has never tasted the birch at Eton, nor trodden the flags of Carfax, nor paced the academic flats of Trumpington? Know ye that in mathematics, or logic, this wretched ignoramus is not fit to hold a candle to a wooden spoon? See ye not how, from describing law humours, he now, forsooth, will attempt the sublime? Discern ye not his faults of taste, his deplorable propensity to write blank verse? Come back to your ancient, venerable, and natural instructors. Leave this new, low and intoxicating draught at which ye rush, and let us lead you back to the old wells of classic lore. Come and repose with us there. We are your gods; we are the ancient oracles, and no mistake. Come listen to us once more, and we will sing to you the mystic numbers of _as in presenti_ under the arches of the _Pons asinorum_." But the children of the present generation hear not; for they reply, "Rush to the Strand, and purchase five thousand more copies of the _Christmas Carol_."

In fact, one might as well detail the plot of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ or _Robinson Crusoe_, as recapitulate here the adventures of Scrooge the miser, and his Christmas conversion. I am not sure that the allegory is a very complete one, and protest, with the classics, against the use of blank verse in prose; but here all objections stop. Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, "God bless him!" A Scotch philosopher, who nationally does not keep Christmas, on reading the book, sent out for a turkey, and asked two friends to dine--this is a fact! Many men were known to sit down after perusing it, and write off letters to their friends, not about business, but out of their fulness of heart, and to wish old acquaintances a happy Christmas. Had the book appeared a fortnight earlier, all the prize cattle would have been gobbled up in pure love and friendship, Epping denuded of sausages, and not a turkey left in Norfolk. His royal highness's fat stock would have fetched unheard of prices, and Alderman Bannister would have been tired of slaying. But there is a Christmas for 1844 too; the book will be as early then as now, and so let speculators look out.

As for TINY TIM, there is a certain passage in the book regarding that young gentleman, about which a man should hardly venture to speak in print or in public, any more than he would of any other affections of his private heart. There is not a reader in England but that little creature will be a bond of union between the author and him; and he will say of Charles Dickens, as the woman just now, "GOD BLESS HIM!" What a feeling is this for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap.

M. A. T.

CHARLES KINGSLEY ON ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE

[From _Fraser's Magazine_, October, 1853]

_Poems_, by ALEXANDER SMITH. London, Bogue. 1853

On reading this little book, and considering all the exaggerated praise and exaggerated blame which have been lavished on it, we could not help falling into many thoughts about the history of English poetry for the last forty years, and about its future destiny. Great poets, even true poets, are becoming more and more rare among us. There are those even who say that we have none; an assertion which, as long as Mr. Tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty of denying. But, were he, which Heaven forbid, taken from us, whom have we to succeed him? And he, too, is rather a poet of the sunset than of the dawn--of the autumn than of the spring. His gorgeousness is that of the solemn and fading year; not of its youth, full of hope, freshness, gay and unconscious life. Like some stately hollyhock or dahlia of this month's gardens, he endures while all other flowers are dying; but all around is winter--a mild one, perhaps, wherein a few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on; but, like all mild winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, too, are not without their gaudiness, even their beauty, although bred only from the decay of higher organisms, the plagiarists of the vegetable world....

"What matter, after all?" one says to oneself in despair, re-echoing Mr. Carlyle. "Man was not sent into this world to write poetry. What we want is truth--what we want is activity. Of the latter we have enough in all conscience just now. Let the former need be provided for by honest and righteous history, and as for poets, let the dead bury their dead." ... And yet, after all, man will write poetry, in spite of Mr. Carlyle: nay, beings who are not men, but mere forked radishes, will write it. Man is a poetry-writing animal. Perhaps he was meant to be one. At all events, he can no more be kept from it than from eating. It is better, with Mr. Carlyle's leave, to believe that the existence of poetry indicates some universal human hunger, whether after "the beautiful," or after "fame," or after the means of paying butchers' bills, and accepting it as a necessary evil which must be committed, to see that it be committed as well, or at least a little ill, as possible. In excuse of which we may quote Mr. Carlyle against himself, reminding him of a saying in Goethe once bepraised by him in print,--"we must take care of the beautiful for the useful will take care of itself."

And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his _Dunciad_, did the beautiful require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care of itself, and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care of it evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this present time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith's poem is to be taken as a fair expression of "the public taste."

Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander Smith is not the object of our reproaches: but Mr. Smith's models and flatterers. Against him we have nothing whatever to say; for him, very much indeed....

What if he has often copied.... He does not more than all schools have done, copy their own masters.... We by no means agree in the modern outcry for "originality." ...

As for manner, he does sometimes, in imitating his models, out-Herod Herod. But why not? If Herod be a worthy king, let him be by all means out-Heroded, if any man can do it. One cannot have too much of a good thing. If it be right to bedizen verses with metaphors and similes which have no reference, either in tone or in subject, to the matter in hand, let there be as many of them as possible. If a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's harness maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin and severe simplicity--not to say utility, and comfort. If poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, as unlike English: as ungrammatical, abrupt, insolved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphyric, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti; which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. If Marino and Cowley be greater poets than Ariosto and Milton, let young poets imitate the former with might and main, and avoid spoiling their style by any perusal of the too-intelligible common sense of the latter. If Byron's moral (which used to be thought execrable) be really his great excellence, his style (which used to be thought almost perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us have his moral without his style, his matter without his form; or--that we may be sure of never falling for a moment into his besetting sin of terseness, grace, and completeness--without any form at all. If poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, Virgil or Horace, Shakespeare or Spenser, Dante or Tasso, let those too idolised names be rased henceforth from the calendar; let the _Ars Poetica_, be consigned to flames by Mr. Calcraft, and Bartinus Scriblerus's _Art of Sinking_ placed forthwith on the list of the Committee of the Council for Education, that not a working man in England may be ignorant that, whatsoever superstitions about art may have haunted the benighted heathens who built the Parthenon, _nous avons changés tout cela_. In one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style in which almost everyone has been trying to write it since Pope and plain sense went out, and Shelley and the seventh heaven came in; let it be so written: and let him who most perfectly so "sets the age to music," be presented by the assembled guild of critics, not with the obsolete and too classical laurel, but with an electro-plated brass medal, bearing the due inscription, _Ars est nescire artem_. And when, in twelve months' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps descried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.

In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded; naturalness produced by studious art; daring sublimity by strict self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue among poetasters, by honest faith in God....

Yes, Pope knew, as well as Wordsworth and our "Naturalisti," that no physical fact was so mean or coarse as to be below the dignity of poetry--when in its right place. He could draw a pathos and sublimity out of the dirty inn-chamber, such as Wordsworth never elicited from tubs and daffodils--because he could use them according to the rules of art, which are the rules of sound reason and of true taste....

The real cause of the modern vagueness is rather to be found in shallow and unsound culture, and in that inability, or carelessness about seeing any object clearly, which besets our poets just now; as the cause of antique clearness lies in the nobler and healthier manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of thought, the sounder philosophic and critical training which enabled Spenser and Milton to draw up a state paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics, with the same manful possession of their subject which gives grace and completeness to the _Penseroso_ or the _Epithalmion_. And if our poets have their doubts, they should remember, that those to whom doubt and enquiry are real and stern, are not inclined to sing about them till they can sing poems of triumph over them. There has no temptation taken our modern poets save that which is common to man--the temptation of wishing to make the laws of the universe and of art fit them, as they do not feel inclined to make themselves fit the laws, or care to find them out....

The "poetry of doubt," however pretty, would stand us in little stead if we were threatened with a second Armada. It will conduce little to the valour, "virtues," manhood of any Englishman to be informed by any poet, even in the most melodious verse, illustrated by the most startling and pan-cosmic metaphors, "See what a highly organised and peculiar stomach-ache I have had! Does it not prove indisputably that I am not as other men are?" What gospel there can be in such a message to any honest man who has either to till the earth, plan a railroad, colonise Australia, or fight the despots, is hard to discover. Hard indeed to discover how this most practical, and therefore most epical of ages, is to be "set to music," when all those who talk about so doing persist obstinately in poring, with introverted eyes, over the state of their own digestion, or creed.

What man wants, what art wants, perhaps what the maker of the both wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other men are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language which all men can understand. This is the only road to that gift of prophecy which most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to arrogate to themselves....

There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the commonsense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge. Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether fragmentary-- _disjecta membra poetarum_; they need some uniting idea. And what idea?

Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. Nevertheless we answer simply. What our poets want is faith. There is little or no faith nowadays. And without faith there can be no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm, coherent belief....

In the meanwhile, poets write about poets, and poetry, and guiding the age, and curbing the world, and waking it, and thrilling it, and making it start, and weep, and tremble, and self-conceit only knows what else; and yet the age is not guided, or the world curbed, or thrilled, or waked, or anything else, by them. Why should it be? Curb and thrill the world? The world is just now a most practical world; and these men are utterly unpractical. The age is given up to physical science: these men disregard and outrage it in every page by their false analogies....

Let the poets of the new school consider carefully Wolfe's "Sir John Moore," Campbell's "Hohenlinden," "Mariners of England," and "Rule Britannia," Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and "Bridge of Sighs," and then ask themselves, as men who would be poets, were it not better to have written any one of these glorious lyrics than all which John Keats has left behind him; and let them be sure that, howsoever they may answer the question to themselves, the sound heart of the English people has already made its choice, and that when that beautiful "Hero and Leander," in which Hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers at their own weapons, by virtue of that very terseness, clearness, and manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the Crashawes and Marines, his "Song of the Shirt" and his "Bridge of Sighs," will be esteemed by great new English nations far beyond the seas, for what they are--two of the most noble lyric poems ever written by an English pen. If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new time, they will find them there. If they want the truly sublime and awful, they will find them there also. But they will find none of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a metaphor; no taint of this new poetic diction into which we have now fallen, after all our abuse of the far more manly and sincere "poetic diction" of the eighteenth century; they will find no loitering by the way to argue and moralise, and grumble at Providence, and show off the author's own genius and sensibility; they will find, in short, two real works of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what they want to say, saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the calmest, the most finished words. Saying it--rather taught to say it. For if that "divine inspiration of poets," of which the poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have, indeed, as all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from an unrighteous man to a righteous God, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems to be that mere passionate sensibility, which our modern Draco once described when speaking of poor John Keats, as "an infinite hunger after all manner of pleasant things, crying to the universe, 'oh, that thou wert one great lump of sugar, that I might suck thee!'"

ANONYMOUS

NOVELS FOR CHRISTMAS, 1837

[From _Fraser's Magazine_, January, 1838]

If[1] against the inroads of the evangelical party the orthodox church has need of a defender, it hardly would wish, we should think, to be assisted _tali auxilio_. Mrs. Trollope has not exactly the genius which is best calculated to support the Church of England, or to argue upon so grave a subject as that on which she has thought proper to write.

[1] _The Vicar of Wrexhill_. By Mrs. Trollope. London, 1837.

With a keen eye, a very sharp tongue, a firm belief, doubtless, in the high church doctrines, and a decent reputation from the authorship of half-a-dozen novels, or other light works, Mrs. Trollope determined on no less an undertaking than to be the champion of oppressed Orthodoxy. These are feeble arms for one who would engage in such a contest, but our fair Mrs. Trollope trusted entirely in her own skill, and the weapon with which she proposed to combat a strong party is no more nor less than this novel of _The Vicar of Wrexhill_. It is a great pity that the heroine ever set forth on such a foolish errand; she has only harmed herself and her cause (as a bad advocate always will), and had much better have remained home, pudding-making or stocking-mending, than have meddled with matters which she understands so ill.

In the first place (we speak it with due respect for the sex), she is guilty of a fault which is somewhat too common among them; and having very little, except prejudice, on which to found an opinion, she makes up for want of argument by a wonderful fluency of abuse. A woman's religion is chiefly that of the heart, and not of the head. She goes through, for the most part, no tedious process of reasoning, no dreadful stages of doubt, no changes of faith: she loves God as she loves her husband--by a kind of instinctive devotion. Faith is a passion with her, not a calculation; so that, in the faculty of believing, though they far exceed the other sex, in the power of convincing they fall far short of them.

Oh! we repeat once more, that ladies would make puddings and mend stockings! that they would not meddle with religion (what is styled religion, we mean), except to pray to God, to live quietly among their families, and move lovingly among their neighbours! Mrs. Trollope, for instance, who sees so keenly the follies of the other party--how much vanity there is in Bible Meetings--how much sin even at Missionary Societies--how much cant and hypocrisy there is among those who desecrate the awful name of God, by mixing it with their mean interests and petty projects--Mrs. Trollope cannot see that there is any hypocrisy or bigotry on her part. She, who designates the rival party as false, and wicked, and vain--tracing all their actions to the basest motives, declaring their worship of God to be only one general hypocrisy, their conduct at home one fearful scene of crime, is blind to the faults on her own side. Always bitter against the Pharisees, she does as the Pharisees do. It is vanity, very likely, which leads these people to use God's name so often, and to devote all to perdition who do not coincide in their peculiar notions. Is Mrs. Trollope less vain than they when she declares, and merely _declares_, her own to be the real creed, and stigmatises its rival so fiercely? Is Mrs. Trollope serving God, in making abusive licencious pictures of those who serve Him in a different way? Once, as Mrs. Trollope has read--it was a long time ago!--there was a woman taken in sin; the people brought her before a great Teacher of Truth, who lived in those days. Shall we not kill her? said they; the laws command that all adulteresses be killed. We can fancy a Mrs. Trollope in the crowd, shouting, "oh, the wretch! oh, the abominable harlot! kill her, by all means--stoning is really too good for her!" But what did the Divine Teacher say? He was quite as anxious to prevent the crime as any Mrs. Trollope of them all; but he did not even make an allusion to it--he did not describe the manner in which the poor creature was caught--He made no speech to detail the indecencies which she committed, or to raise the fury of the mob against her--He said "let the man who is without sin himself throw the first stone!" Whereupon the Pharisees and Mrs. Trollope slunk away, for they knew they were no better than she. There was as great a sin in His eyes as that of the poor erring woman--it was the sin of pride.

Mrs. Trollope may make a licentious book, of which the heroes and heroines are all of the evangelical party; and it may be true, that there are scoundrels belonging to that party as to every other; but her shameful error has been in fixing upon the evangelical _class_ as an object of satire, making them necessarily licentious and hypocritical, and charging everyone of them with the vices which belong to only a very few of all sects....

There are some books, we are told, in the libraries of Roman Catholic theologians, which, though written for the most devout purposes, are so ingeniously obscene as to render them quite dangerous for common eyes. The groom, in the old story, had never learned the art of greasing horses' teeth, to prevent their eating oats, until the confessor, in interrogating him as to his sins, asked him the question. The next time the groom came to confess, he _had_ greased the horses' teeth. It was the holy father who taught him, by the very fact of warning him against it. By which we mean, that there are some scenes of which it is better not to speak at all.

Our fair moralist, however, has no such squeamishness. She will show up these odious evangelicals; she will expose them and chastise them, wherever they be. So have we seen, in that beautiful market in Thames Street, whither the mariners of England bring the glittering produce of their nets--so have we seen, we say, in Billingsgate, a nymph attacking another of her sisterhood. How keenly she detects and proclaims the number and enormity of her rival's faults! How eloquently she enlarges upon the gin she has drunk, the children she has confided to the parish, the watchmen whose noses she has broken, and the bridewells which she has visited in succession! No one can but admire the lady's eloquence and talent in conducting the case for the prosecution; no one will, perhaps, doubt the guilt of the hapless object on whom her wrath is vented. But, with all her rage for morality, had not that fair accused have better left the matter alone? That torrent of slang and oath, O nymph! falls ill from thy lips, which should never open but for a soft word or a smile; that accurate description of vice, sweet orator [-tress or-trix]! only shows that thou thyself art but too well acquainted with scenes which thy pure eyes should never have beheld. And when we come to the matter in dispute--a simple question of mackerel--O, Mrs. Trollope! Why, why should you abuse other people's fish, and not content yourself with selling your _own_....

There can be little doubt as to the cleverness of this novel, but, coming from a women's pen, it is most odiously and disgustingly indecent. As a party attack, it is an entire failure; and as a representation of a very large portion of English Christians, a shameful and wicked slander.

BULWER'S "ERNEST MALTRAVERS"

To talk of _Ernest Maltravers_ now, is to rake up a dead man's ashes. The poor creature came into the world almost still-born, and, though he has hardly been before the public for a month, is forgotten as much as _Rienzi_ or the _Disowned_. What a pity that Mr. Bulwer will not learn wisdom with age, and confine his attention to subjects at once more grateful to the public and more suitable to his own powers! He excels in the _genre_ of Paul de Kock, and is always striving after the style of Plato; he has a keen perception of the ridiculous and, like Liston or Cruikshank, and other comic artists, persists that his real vein is the sublime. What a number of sparkling magazine-papers, what an outpouring of fun and satire, might we have had from Neddy Bulwer, had he not thought fit to turn moralist, metaphysician, politician, poet, and be Edward Lytton, Heaven--knows--what Bulwer, Esquire and M.P., a dandy, a philosopher, a spouter at Radical meetings. We speak feelingly, for we knew the youth at Trinity Hall, and have a tenderness even for his tomfooleries. He has thrown away the better part of himself--his great inclination for the LOW, namely; if he would but leave off scents for his handkerchief, and oil for his hair; if he would but confine himself to three clean shirts a week, a couple of coats in a year, a beefsteak and onions for dinner, his beaker a pewter-pot, his carpet a sanded floor, how much might be made of him even yet! An occasional pot of porter too much--a black eye, in a tap-room fight with a carman--a night in the watch-house--or a surfeit produced by Welsh-rabbit and gin and beer, might, perhaps, redden his fair face and swell his slim waist; but the _mental_ improvement which he would acquire under such treatment-- the intellectual pluck and vigour which he would attain by the stout diet--the manly sports and conversation in which he would join at the Coal-Hole, or the Widow's, are far better for him than the feeble fribble of the Reform Club (not inaptly called "The Hole in the Wall"); the windy French dinners, which, as we take it, are his usual fare; and, above all, the unwholesome Radical garbage which form the political food of himself and his clique in the House of Commons.

For here is the evil of his present artificial courses--the humbug required to keep up his position as dandy, politician, and philosopher (in neither of which latter characters the man is in earnest), must get into _his heart_ at last; and then his trade is ruined. A little more politics and Plato, and the natural disappears altogether from Mr. Bulwer's writings: the individual man becomes as undistinguishable amidst the farrago of philosophy in which he has chosen to envelope himself, as a cutlet in the sauces of a French cook. The idiosyncracy of the mutton perishes under the effects of the adjuncts: even so the moralising, which may be compared to the mushrooms, of Mr. Bulwer's style; the poetising, which may be likened unto the flatulent turnips and carrots; and the politics, which are as the gravy, reeking of filthy garlic, greasy with rancid oil;--even so, we say, pursuing this savoury simile to its fullest extent, the natural qualities of young Pelham--the wholesome and juicy _mutton of the mind_, is shrunk and stewed away.

Or, to continue in this charming vein of parable, the author of _Pelham_ may be likened to Beau Tibbs. Tibbs, as we all remember, would pass for a pink of fashion, and had a wife whom he presented to the world as a paragon of virtue and _ton_, and who was but the cast-off mistress of a lord. Mr. Bulwer's philosophy is his Mrs. Tibbs; he thrusts her forward into the company of her betters, as if her rank and reputation never admitted of a question. To all his literary undertakings this goddess of his accompanies him; what a cracked, battered truly she is! with a person and morals that would suit Vinegar yard, and a chastity that would be hooted in Drury Lane.

The morality which Mr. Bulwer has acquired in his researches, political and metaphysical, is of the most extraordinary nature. For one who is always preaching of Truth of Beauty, the dulness of his moral sense is perfectly ludicrous. He cannot see that the hero into whose mouth he places his favourite metaphysical gabble--his dissertations about the stars, the passions, the Greek plays, and what not--his eternal whine about what he calls the good and the beautiful--is a fellow as mean and paltry as can be well imagined; a man of rant, and not of action; foolishly infirm of purpose, and strong only in desire; whose beautiful is a tawdry strumpet, and whose good would be crime in the eyes of an honest man. So much for the portrait of Ernest Maltravers: as for the artist, we cannot conceive a man to have failed more completely. He wishes to paint an amiable man, and he succeeds in drawing a scoundrel: he says he will give us the likeness of a genius, and it is only the picture of a _humbug_.

Ernest Maltravers is an eccentric and enthusiastic young man, to whom we are introduced upon his return from a German university. Fond of wild adventure and solitary rambles, we find him upon a heath, wandering alone, tired, and benighted. The two first chapters of the book are in Mr. Bulwer's very best manner; the description of the lone hut to which the lad comes--the ruffian who inhabits it--the designs which he has upon the life of his new guest, and the manner in which his daughter defeats them, are told with admirable liveliness and effect. The young man escapes, and with him the girl who had prevented his murder. Both are young, interesting, and tender hearted; she loves but him, and would die of starvation without him. Ernest Maltravers cannot resist the claim of so unprotected a creature; he hires a cottage for her, and a writing-master. He is a young man of genius, and generous dispositions; he is a Christian, and instructs the ignorant Alice in the awful truth of his religion; moreover he is deep in poetry, philosophy, and the German metaphysics. How should such a Christian instruct an innocent and beautiful child, his pupil? What should such a philosopher do? Why seduce her, to be sure! After a deal of namby-pamby Platonism, the girl, as Mr. Bulwer says, "goes to the deuce." The expression is as charming as the morality, and appears amidst a quantity of the very finest writing about the good and the beautiful, youth, love, passion, nature and so forth. It is curious how rapidly one turns from good to bad in this book. How clever the descriptions are! how neatly some of the minor events and personalities are hit off! and yet, how astonishingly vile and contemptible the chief part of it is!--that part, we mean, which contains the adventures of the hero, and, of course, the choice reflections of the author.

The declamations about virtue are endless, as soon as Maltravers appears upon the scene; and yet we find him committing the agreeable little _faux pas_ of which we have just spoken. In one place, we have him making violent love to another man's wife; in another place, raging for blood like a tiger and swearing for revenge....

It is curious and painful to read Mr. Bulwer's [philosophy], and to mark the easy vanity with which virtue is assumed here, self-knowledge arrogated, and a number of windy sentences, which really possess no meaning, are gravely delivered with all the emphasis of truth and the air of profound conviction.

"I have learned," cries our precious philosopher, "to lean on my own soul, and not look eleswhere [Transcriber's note: sic] for the reeds that a wind can break!" And what has he learned by leaning on his own soul? Is it to be happier than others? or to be better? Not he!--he is as wretched and wicked a dog as any unhung. He "leans on his own soul," and makes love to the Countess and seduces Alice Darvell. A ploughboy is a better philosopher and moralist than this mouthing Maltravers, with his boasted love of mankind (which reduces itself to a very coarse love of _woman_kind), and his scorn of "the false gods and miserable creeds" of the world, and his soul "lifting its crest to heaven!" A Catholic whipping himself before a stone-image, a Brahmin dangling on a hook, or standing on one leg for a year, has a higher notion of God than this ranting fool, who is always prating about his own perfections and his divine nature; the one is humble, at least, though blind; the other is proud of his very imperfections and glories in his folly. What does this creature know of virtue, who finds it _by leaning on his own soul_, forsooth? What does he know of God, who, in looking for him, can see but himself, steeped in sin, bloated and swollen with monstrous pride, and strutting before the world and the creator as a maker of systems, a layer down of morals, and a preacher of beauty and truth?...

[Some of the] characters are excellently drawn; how much better than "_their lips spake of sentiment, and their eyes applied it_!" How soon these philosophers begin ogling! how charmingly their unceasing gabble about beauty and virtue is exemplified in their actions! Mr. Bulwer's philosophy is like a French palace--it is tawdry, shady, splendid; but, _gare aux nez sensibles_! one is always reminded of the sewer. "Their lips spoke sentiment, and their eyes applied it." O you naughty, naughty Mr. Bulwer!

WILLIAM JOHN FOX

The dedicatory inscription in the volume of _The Monthly Repository_, in which the following review appears, will indicate--in a few words--the motives inspiring the editor, W. J. Fox, in his journalistic career:-- "To the Working People of Great Britain and Ireland; who, whether they produce the means of physical support and enjoyment, or aid the progress of moral, political, and social reform and improvement, are fellow-labourers for the well-being of the entire community."

* * * * *

_Pauline_ was published, when Browning was 21, at his aunt's expense. It secured only _one_ favourable notice, here printed; while the author and his sister deliberately destroyed the unsold copies.

W. J. FOX ON BROWNING

[From _The Monthly Repository_, 1833]

_Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession_. London, Saunders & Otley. 1833

The most deeply interesting adventures, the wildest vicissitudes, the most daring explorations, the mightiest magic, the fiercest conflicts, the brightest triumphs, and the most affecting catastrophes, are those of the spiritual world....