Chapter XIII: Part 13

The story, such as we have it, is inartificial enough. Walter, a boy of poetic temperament and endowment, has, it appears, in the society of a poet friend now deceased, grown up with the ambition of achieving something great in the highest form of human speech. Unable to find or make a way, he is diverted from his lofty purposes by a romantic love-adventure, obscurely told, with a ‘Lady’ who finds him asleep, Endymion-like, under a tree. The fervour and force of youth wastes itself here in vain; a quick disappointment--for the lady is betrothed to another--sends him back enfeebled, exhausted, and embittered, to essay once again his task. Disappointed affections, and baffled ambition, contending henceforward in unequal strife with the temptations of scepticism, indifference, apathetic submission, base indulgence, and the like; the sickened and defeated, yet only too strong, too powerful man, turning desperately off, and recklessly at last plunging in mid-unbelief into joys to which only belief and moral purpose can give reality; out of horror-stricken guilt, the new birth of clearer and surer, though humbler, conviction, trust, resolution; these happy changes met, perhaps a little prematurely and almost more than half-way, by success in the aims of a purified ambition, and crowned too, at last, by the blessings of a regenerate affection--such is the argument of the latter half of the poem; and there is something of a current and tide, so to say, of poetic intention in it, which carries on the reader (after the first few scenes), perforce, in spite of criticism and himself, through faulty imagery, turgid periods, occasional bad versification and even grammar, to the close. Certainly, there is something of a real flesh-and-blood heart and soul in the case, or this could not be so.

We quote from the later portion, when Walter returns to the home of his childhood:--

’Twas here I spent my youth, as far removed
From the great heavings, hopes, and fears of man,
As unknown isle asleep in unknown seas.
Gone my pure heart, and with it happy days;
No manna falls around me from on high,
Barely from off the desert of my life
I gather patience and severe content.
God is a worker. He has thickly strewn
Infinity with grandeur. God is Love;
He yet shall wipe away creation’s tears,
And all the worlds shall summer in his smile.
Why work I not. The veriest mote that sports
Its one-day life within the sunny beam
Has its stern duties. Wherefore have I none?
I will throw off this dead and useless past,
As a strong runner, straining for his life,
Unclasps a mantle to the hungry winds.
A mighty purpose rises large and slow
From out the fluctuations of my soul,
As ghostlike from the dim and trembling sea
Starts the completed moon.

Here, in this determination, he writes his poem--attains in this spirit the object which had formerly been his ambition. And here, in the last scene, we find him happy, or peaceful at least, with Violet:--

Thou noble soul,
Teach me, if thou art nearer God than I!
My life was one long dream; when I awoke,
Duty stood like an angel in my path,
And seemed so terrible, I could have turned
Into my yesterdays, and wandered back
To distant childhood, and gone out to God
By the gate of birth, not death. Lift, lift me up
By thy sweet inspiration, as the tide
Lifts up a stranded boat upon the beach.
I will go forth ’mong men, not mailed in scorn,
But in the armour of a pure intent,
Great duties are before me, and great songs,
And whether crowned or crownless, when I fall,
It matters not, so as God’s work is done.
I’ve learned to prize the quiet lightning deed,
Not the applauding thunder at its heels,
Which men call Fame. Our night is past;
We stand in precious sunrise; and beyond,
A long day stretches to the very end.

So be it, O young Poet; Poet, perhaps it is early to affirm; but so be it, at any rate, O young man. While you go forth in that ‘armour of pure intent,’ the hearts of some readers, be assured, will go with you.

‘Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems,’ with its earlier companion volume, ‘The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems,’ are, it would seem, the productions (as is, or was, the English phrase) of a scholar and a gentleman; a man who has received a refined education, seen refined ‘society,’ and been more, we dare say, in the world, which is called the world, than in all likelihood has a Glasgow mechanic. More refined, therefore, and more highly educated sensibilities--too delicate, are they, for common service?--a calmer judgment also, a more poised and steady intellect, the _siccum lumen_ of the soul; a finer and rarer aim, perhaps, and certainly a keener sense of difficulty, in life--these are the characteristics of him whom we are to call ‘A.’ Empedocles, the sublime Sicilian philosopher, the fragments of whose moral and philosophic poems testify to his genius and character--Empedocles, in the poem before us, weary of misdirected effort, weary of imperfect thought, impatient of a life which appears to him a miserable failure, and incapable, as he conceives, of doing anything that shall be true to that proper interior self--

Being one with which we are one with the whole world,

wandering forth, with no determined purpose, into the mountain solitudes, followed for a while by Pausanias, the eager and laborious physician, and at a distance by Callicles, the boy-musician, flings himself at last, upon a sudden impulse and apparent inspiration of the intellect, into the boiling crater of Etna; rejoins there the elements. The music of the boy Callicles, to which he chants his happy mythic stories somewhat frigidly perhaps, relieves, as it sounds in the distance, the gloomy catastrophe.

Tristram and Iseult (these names form the title of the next and only other considerable poem) are, in the old romantic cycle of North-France and Germany, the hero and the heroine of a mournful tale. Tristram of Lyonness, the famed companion of King Arthur, received in youth a commission to bring from across the sea the Princess Iseult of Ireland, the destined bride of the King of Cornwall. The mother of the beautiful princess gave her, as a parting gift, a cup of a magic wine, which she and her royal husband should drink together on their marriage-day in their palace at Tyntagil; so they should love each other perfectly and for ever.

On the dreamy seas it so befell, that Iseult and Tristram drank together of the golden cup. Tristram, therefore, and Iseult should love each other perfectly and for ever. Yet nothing the less for this must Iseult be wedded to the King of Cornwall; and Tristram, vainly lingering, fly and go forth upon his way.

But it so chanced that, after long and weary years of passion vainly contended with, years of travel and hard fighting, Tristram, lying wounded in Brittany, was tended by another, a youthful, innocent Iseult, in whose face he seemed to see the look of that Iseult of the past, that was, and yet could not be, his. Weary, and in his sad despondency, Tristram wedded Iseult of Brittany, whose heart, in his stately deep distress, he had moved to a sweet and tender affection. The modern poem opens with the wedded knight come home again, after other long years, and other wars, in which he had fought at King Arthur’s side with the Roman emperor, and subdued the heathen Saxons on the Rhine, lying once more sick and sad at heart, upon what ere long he feels shall be his death-bed. Ere he die, he would see, once yet again, her with whom in his youth he drank of that fatal cup:--

_Tristram._ Is she not come? the messenger was sure.
Prop me upon the pillows once again--
Raise me, my page: this cannot long endure.
Christ! what a night! how the sleet whips the pane!
What lights will those out to the northward be?

_The Page._ The lanterns of the fishing-boats at sea.

And so through the whole of Part I. of our poem lies the sick and weary knight upon his bed, reviewing sadly, while sadly near him stands his timid and loving younger Iseult, reviewing, half sleeping, half awake, those old times, that hapless voyage, and all that thence ensued; and still in all his thought recurring to the proud Cornish Queen, who, it seems, will let him die unsolaced. He speaks again, now broad awake:--

Is my page here? Come, turn me to the fire.
Upon the window panes the moon shines bright;
The wind is down; but she’ll not come to-night.
Ah no,--she is asleep in Tyntagil----

My princess, art thou there? Sweet, ’tis too late.
To bed and sleep; my fever is gone by;
To-night my page shall keep me company.
Where do the children sleep? Kiss them for me.
Poor child, thou art almost as pale as I;
This comes of nursing long and watching late.
To bed--good night.

And so (our poet passing without notice from Tristram’s semidramatic musings and talkings to his own not more coherent narrative)--

She left the gleam-lit fireplace,
She came to the bed-side;
She took his hands in hers; her tears
Down on her slender fingers rained.
She raised her eyes upon his face--
Not with a look of wounded pride--
A look as if the heart complained;
Her look was like a sad embrace;
The gaze of one who can divine
A grief, and sympathise.
Sweet flower, thy children’s eyes
Are not more innocent than thine.

Sleeping with her little ones, and, it may be, dreaming too, though less happily than they, lies Iseult of Brittany. And now--

What voices are those on the clear night air?
What lights in the courts? what steps on the stair?

PART II.

_Tristram._ Raise the light, my page, that I may see her.
--Thou art come at last, then, haughty Queen!
Long I’ve waited, long have fought my fever,
Late thou comest, cruel thou hast been.

_Iseult._ Blame me not, poor sufferer, that I tarried.
I was bound; I could not break the band.
Chide not with the past, but feel the present;
I am here--we meet--I hold thy hand.

Yes, the Queen Iseult of Cornwall, Iseult that was of Ireland, of the ship upon the dreamy seas long since, has crossed these stormy seas to-night, is here, holds his hand. And so proceeds, through some six or seven pages of Part II., the fine colloquy of the two sad, world-worn, late-reunited lovers. When we open upon Part III.,

A year had flown, and in the chapel old
Lay Tristram and Queen Iseult dead and cold.

Beautiful, simple, old mediæval story! We have followed it, led on as much by its own intrinsic charm as by the form and colouring--beautiful too, but indistinct--which our modern poet has given it. He is obscure at times, and hesitates and falters in it; the knights and dames, we fear, of old North-France and Western Germany would have been grievously put to it to make him out. Only upon a fourth re-reading, and by the grace of a happy moment, did we satisfy our critical conscience that, when the two lovers have sunk together in death, the knight on his pillows, and Queen Iseult kneeling at his side, the poet, after passing to the Cornish court where she was yesternight, returns to address himself to a hunter with his dogs, worked in the tapestry of the chamber here, whom he conceives to be pausing in the pictured chase, and staring, with eyes of wonder, on the real scene of the pale knight on the pillows and the kneeling lady fair. But

Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,
Oh hunter! and without a fear
Thy golden-tasselled bugle blow,
And through the glade thy pastime take
For thou wilt rouse no sleepers here,
For these thou seest are unmoved;
Cold, cold as those who lived and loved
A thousand years ago.

Fortunately, indeed, with the commencement of Part III., the most matter-of-fact Quarterly conscience may feel itself pretty well set at ease by the unusually explicit statements that

A year had fled; and in the chapel old
Lay Tristram and Queen Iseult dead and cold.
The young surviving Iseult, one bright day
Had wandered forth; her children were at play
In a green circular hollow in the heath
Which borders the sea shore; a country path
Creeps over it from the tilled fields behind.

Yet anon, again and thicker now perhaps than ever, the mist of more than poetic dubiousness closes over and around us. And as he sings to us about the widowed lady Iseult, sitting upon the sea-banks of Brittany, watching her bright-eyed children, talking with them and telling them old Breton stories, while still, in all her talk and her story, her own dreamy memories of the past, and perplexed thought of the present, mournfully mingle, it is really all but impossible to ascertain her, or rather his, real meanings. We listen, indeed, not quite unpleased, to a sort of faint musical mumble, conveying at times a kind of subdued half-sense, or intimating, perhaps a three-quarters-implied question; is anything real?--is love anything?--what is anything?--is there substance enough even in sorrow to mark the lapse of time?--is not passion a diseased unrest?--did not the fairy Vivian, when the wise Merlin forgot his craft to fall in love with her, wave her wimple over her sleeping adorer?

Nine times she waved the fluttering wimple round,
And made a little plot of magic ground;
And in that daisied circle, as men say,
Is Merlin prisoner to the judgment-day,
But she herself whither she will can rove,
For she was passing weary of his love.

Why or wherefore, or with what purport, who will venture exactly to say?--but such, however, was the tale which, while Tristram and his first Iseult lay in their graves, the second Iseult, on the sea-banks of Brittany, told her little ones.

And yet, dim and faint as is the sound of it, we still prefer this dreamy patience, the soft submissive endurance of the Breton lady, and the human passions and sorrows of the Knight and the Queen, to the high, and shall we say, pseudo Greek inflation of the philosopher musing above the crater, and the boy Callicles singing myths upon the mountain.

Does the reader require morals and meanings to these stories? What shall they be, then?--the deceitfulness of knowledge and the illusiveness of the affections, the hardness and roughness and contrariousness of the world, the difficulty of living at all, the impossibility of doing anything--_voilà tout_? A charitable and patient reader, we believe (such as is the present reviewer), will find in the minor poems that accompany these pieces, intimations--what more can reader or reviewer ask?--of some better and further thing than these; some approximations to a kind of confidence; some incipiences of a degree of hope; some roots, retaining some vitality, of conviction and moral purpose:--

And though we wear out life, alas,
Distracted as a homeless wind,
In beating where we must not pass,
And seeking what we shall not find,

Yet shall we one day gain, life past,
Clear prospect o’er our being’s whole,
Shall see ourselves, and learn at last
Our true affinities of soul.

We shall not then deny a course
To every thought the mass ignore,
We shall not then call hardness force,
Nor lightness wisdom any more.

In the future, it seems, there is something for us; and for the present also, which is more germane to our matter, we have discovered some precepts about ‘hope, light, and _persistence_,’ which we intend to make the most of. Meantime, it is one promising point in our author of the initial, that his second is certainly on the whole an improvement upon his first volume. There is less obvious study of effect; upon the whole, a plainer and simpler and less factitious manner and method of treatment. This, he may be sure, is the only safe course. Not by turning and twisting his eyes, in the hope of seeing things as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, or Milton saw them; but by seeing them, by accepting them as he sees them, and faithfully depicting accordingly, will he attain the object he desires.

In the earlier volume, one of the most generally admired pieces was ‘The Forsaken Merman.’

Come, dear children, let us away
Down, and away below,

says the Merman, standing upon the seashore, whither he and his children came up to call back the human Margaret, their mother, who had left them to go, for one day--for Easter-day--to say her prayers with her kinsfolk in the little gray church on the shore:--

’Twill be Easter time in the world--ah me,
And I lose my poor soul, Merman, here with thee.

And when she stayed, and stayed on, and it seemed a long while, and the little ones began to moan, at last, up went the Merman with the little ones to the shore, and so on into the town, and to the little gray church, and there looked in through the small leaded panes of the window. There she sits in the aisle; but she does not look up, her eyes are fixed upon the holy page; it is in vain we try to catch her attention:--

Come away, children, call no more,
Come away, come down, call no more.

Down, down to the depths of the sea. She will live up there and be happy, among the things she had known before. Yet sometimes a thought will come across her; there will be times when she will

Steal to the window and look at the sand;
And over the sand at the sea;
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,
A long, long sigh,
For the cold strange eyes of a little mermaiden,
And the gleam of her golden hair.

Come away, children, come down. We will be happy in our bright home under the sea--happy, though the cruel one leaves us lonely for ever. Yet we too, sometimes at midnight, when winds blow softly, and the moonlight falls clear,

Up the still glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright sea-weed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze from the sand hills
At the white sleeping town,
At the church on the hill-side;
And then come back down,--
Singing, ‘There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she,
She left lonely for ever
The Kings of the sea.’

It is a beautiful poem, certainly; and deserves to have been given at full length. ‘The Strayed Reveller’ itself is more ambitious, perhaps a little strained. It is a pleasing and significant imagination, however, to present to us Circe and Ulysses in colloquy with a stray youth from the train of Bacchus, who drinks eagerly the cup of the enchantress, not as did the sailors of the Ithacan king, for gross pleasure, but for the sake of the glorious and superhuman vision and knowledge it imparts:--

But I, Ulysses,
Sitting on the warm steps,
Looking over the valley,
All day long have seen,
Without pain, without labour,
Sometimes a wild-haired mænad,
Sometimes a Faun with torches.

But now, we are fain to ask, where are we, and whither are we unconsciously come? Were we not going forth to battle in the armour of a righteous purpose, with our first friend, with Alexander Smith? How is it we find ourselves here, reflecting, pondering, hesitating, musing, complaining, with ‘A’? As the wanderer at night, standing under a stormy sky, listening to the wild harmonies of winds, and watching the wild movements of the clouds, the tree-tops, or possibly the waves, may, with a few steps, very likely, pass into a lighted sitting-room, and a family circle, with pictures and books, and literary leisure, and ornaments, and elegant small employments--a scene how dissimilar to that other, and yet how entirely natural also--so it often happens too with books. You have been reading Burns, and you take up Cowper. You feel at home, how strangely! in both of them. Can both be the true thing? and if so, in what new form can we express the relation, the harmony, between them? Such a discrepancy there certainly does exist between the two books that have been before us here. We close the one and open the other, and feel ourselves moving to and fro between two totally different, repugnant, and hostile theories of life. Are we to try and reconcile them, or judge between them?

May we escape from all the difficulty by a mere quotation, and pronounce with the shepherd of Virgil,

Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites:
Et vitulâ tu dignus, et hic.

Or will the reader be content to bow down with us in this place, and acknowledge the presence of that highest object of worship among the modern Germans, an _antinomy_? (That is, O unlearned reader, ignorant, not impossibly, of Kant and the modern German religion--in brief, a contradiction in terms, the ordinary _phenomenal_ form of a _noumenal_ Verity; as, for example, _the world must have had a beginning_, and, _the world cannot have had a beginning_, in the transcendental fusion or confusion of which consists the Intelligible or unintelligible truth.) Will you be content, O reader, to plod in German manner over miles of a straight road, that seems to lead somewhere, with the prospect of arriving at last at some point where it will divide at equal angles, and lead equally in two opposite directions, where you may therefore safely pause, and thankfully set up your rest, and adore in sacred doubt the Supreme Bifurcation? Or do you hold, with Voltaire, who said (_à propos_ of the question then debated among the French wits, whether there were or were not a God) that ‘after all, one must take a side?’

With all respect for the Antinomies and Germans, and ‘most distinguished consideration’ for Voltaire and Parisian persiflage, still, it may not be quite necessary for us, on the present occasion, either to stand still in transcendental doubt, or toss up, as it were, for our side. Individuals differ in character, capacity, and positions; and, according to their circumstances, will combine, in every possible variety of degree, the two elements of thoughtful discriminating selection and rejection, and frank and bold acceptance of what lies around them. Between the extremes of ascetic and timid self-culture, and of unquestioning, unhesitating confidence, we may consent to see and tolerate every kind and gradation of intermixture. Nevertheless, upon the whole, for the present age, the lessons of reflectiveness and the maxims of caution do not appear to be more needful or more appropriate than exhortations to steady courage and calls to action. There is something certainly of an over-educated weakness of purpose in Western Europe--not in Germany only, or France, but also in more busy England. There is a disposition to press too far the finer and subtler intellectual and moral susceptibilities; to insist upon following out, as they say, to their logical consequences, the notices of some organ of the spiritual nature; a proceeding which perhaps is hardly more sensible in the grown man than it would be in the infant to refuse to correct the sensations of sight by those of the touch. Upon the whole, we are disposed to follow out, if we must follow out at all, the analogy of the bodily senses; we are inclined to accept rather than investigate; and to put our confidence less in arithmetic and antinomies than in

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules.

Let us remark also in the minor Poems, which accompany ‘Empedocles,’ a disposition, perhaps, to assign too high a place to what is called Nature. It may indeed be true, as the astronomers say, though after all it is no very great piece of knowledge, that the heavenly bodies describe ellipses; and go on, from and to all the ages, performing that self-repeating, unattaining curve. But does it, therefore, of necessity follow that human souls do something analogous in the spiritual spaces? Number is a wonderful thing, and the laws of Nature sublime; nevertheless, have we not a sort of intuition of the existence, even in our own poor human selves, of something akin to a Power superior to, and transcending, all manifestations of Nature, all intelligible forms of Number and Law? We quote one set of verses, entitled ‘Morality,’ in which our author does appear to have escaped for once from the dismal cycle of his rehabilitated Hindoo-Greek theosophy:--

MORALITY.

We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides;--
But tasks, in hours of insight willed,
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day, and wish ’twere done.
Not till the hours of light return,
All we have built do we discern.

Then when the clouds are off the soul,
When thou dost look in Nature’s eye,
Ask how _she_ viewed thy self-control,
Thy struggling tasked morality--
Nature whose free, light, cheerful air,
Oft made thee, in thy gloom, despair.

And she, whose censure thou dost dread,
Whose eye thou wert afraid to seek,--
See, on her face a glow is spread,
A strong emotion on her cheek.
‘Ah child,’ she cries, ‘that strife divine
Whence was it, for it is not mine?

There is no effort on my brow--
I do not strive, I do not weep;
I rush with the swift spheres, and glow
In joy, and when I will, I sleep,--
Yet that severe, that earnest air,
I saw, I felt it once, but where?

I knew not yet the gauge of Time,
Nor wore the manacles of space,--
I felt it in some other clime,
I saw it in some other place.
’Twas when the heavenly house I trod,
And lay upon the breast of God.

It is wonderful what stores of really valuable thought may lie neglected in a book, simply because they are not put in that form which serves our present occasions. But if we have been inclined to yield to a preference for the picture of simple, strong, and certain, rather than of subtle, shifting, and dubious feelings, and in point of tone and matter to go along with the young mechanic, in point of diction and manner, we must certainly assign the palm to ‘A,’ in spite of a straining after the rounded Greek form, such as, to some extent, vitiates even the style of Milton. Alexander Smith lies open to much graver critical carping. He writes, it would almost seem, under the impression that the one business of the poet is to coin metaphors and similes. He tells them out as a clerk might sovereigns at the Bank of England. So many comparisons, so much poetry; it is the sterling currency of the realm. Yet he is most pleased, perhaps, when he can double or treble a similitude; speaking of A, he will call it a B, which is, as it were, the C of a D. By some maturer effort we may expect to be thus conducted even to Z. But simile within simile, after the manner of Chinese boxes, are more curious than beautiful; nor is it the true aim of the poet, as of the Italian boy in the street, to poise upon his head, for public exhibition, a board crowded as thick as they can stand with images, big and little, black and white, of anybody and everybody, in any possible order of disorder, as they happen to pack. _Tanquam scopulum, insolens verbum_, says the precept of ancient taste, which our author seems to accept freely, with the modern comment of--

In youth from rock to rock I went
With pleasure high and turbulent,--
Most pleased when most uneasy.

The movement of his poem is indeed rapid enough; there is a sufficient impetus to carry us over a good deal of rough and ‘rocky’ ground; there is a real continuity of poetic purpose;--but it is so perpetually presumed upon; the attention, which the reader desires to devote to the pursuit of the main drift of what calls itself a single poem, _simplex et unum_, is so incessantly called off to look at this and look at that; when, for example, we would fain follow the thought and feeling of Violet and of Walter, we are with such peremptory and frequent eagerness summoned to observe how like the sky is to _x_ and the stars are to _y_, that on the whole, though there _is_ a real continuity of purpose, we cannot be surprised that the critic of the ‘London Examiner’ failed to detect it. Keats and Shelley, and Coleridge, perhaps, before them, with their extravagant love for Elizabethan phraseology, have led to this mischief. Has not Tennyson followed a little too much in their train? Coleridge, we suppose, would have maintained it to be an excellence in the ‘myriad-minded’ dramatist, that he so often diverts us from the natural course of thought, feeling, and narrative, to see how curiously two trifles resemble each other, or that, in a passage of deep pathos, he still finds time to apprise us of a paronomasia. But faults which disfigure Shakspeare are not beauties in a modern volume.

I rot upon the waters when my prow
Should _grate_ the golden isles,

may be a very Elizabethan, but is certainly rather a vicious expression. Force and condensation are good, but it is possible to combine them with purity of phrase. One of the most successful delineations in the whole poem is contained in the following passage, which introduces Scene VII.:--

[_A balcony overlooking the sea._]

The lark is singing in the blinding sky,--
Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride,
And in the fulness of his marriage joy,
He decorates her tawny front with shells--
Retires a space to see how fair she looks,
Then proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair,--
All glad, from grass to sun. Yet more I love
Than this, the shrinking day that sometimes comes
In winter’s front, so fair ’mongst its dark peers,
It seems a straggler from the files of June,
Which in its wanderings had lost its wits,
And half its beauty, and when it returned,
Finding its old companions gone away,
It joined November’s troop, then marching past;
And so the frail thing comes, and greets the world
With a thin crazy smile, then bursts in tears--
And all the while it holds within its hand
A few half-withered flowers;--I love and pity it.

It may be the fault of our point of view; but certainly we do not find even here that happy, unimpeded sequence which is the charm of really good writers. Is there not something incongruous in the effect of the immediate juxtaposition of these two images? We have lost, it may be, that impetuosity, that _élan_, which lifts the young reader over hedge and ditch at flying leaps, across country, or we should not perhaps entertain any offence, or even surprise, at being transferred _per saltum_ from the one field to the other. But we could almost ask, was the passage, so beautiful, though perhaps a little prolonged, about the June day in November, written consecutively, and in one flow with the previous, and also beautiful, one about ocean and his bride? We dare say it was: but it does not read, somehow, in the same straight line with it--

Tantum series juncturaque pollet.

We venture, too, to record a perhaps hypercritical objection to ‘the _blinding_ sky’ in this particular collocation. Perhaps in the first line of a scene, while the reader has not yet warmed to his duty, simplicity should be especially observed--a single image, without any repeated reflection, so to speak, in a second mirror, should suffice. The following, which open Scene XI., are better:--

Summer hath murmured with her leafy lips
Around my home, and I have heard her not;
I’ve missed the process of three several years
From shaking wind flowers to the tarnished gold
That rustles sere on Autumn’s aged limbs.

Except the two last lines. Our author will not keep his eye steady upon the thing before him; he goes off, and distracts us, and breaks the impression he had begun to succeed in giving, by bidding us look now at something else. Some simpler epithets than _shaking_, and some plainer language than _tarnished gold_ or _aged limbs_, would have done the work better. We are quite prepared to believe that these faults and these _disagreeables_ have personally been necessities to the writer, are awkwardnesses of growth, of which the full stature may show no trace. He should be assured, however, that though the rude vigour of the style of his Life-Drama may attract upon the first reading, yet in any case, it is not the sort of writing which people recur to with pleasure and fall back upon with satisfaction. It may be a groundless fancy, yet we do fancy, that there is a whole hemisphere, so to say, of the English language which he has left unvisited. His diction feels to us as if between Milton and Burns he had not read, and between Shakspeare and Keats had seldom admired. Certainly there is but little inspiration in the compositions of the last century; yet English was really best and most naturally written when there was, perhaps, least to write about. To obtain a real command of the language, some familiarity with the prose writers, at any rate, of that period, is almost essential; and to write out, as a mere daily task, passages, for example, of Goldsmith, would do a verse-composer of the nineteenth century as much good, we believe, as the study of Beaumont and Fletcher.

TWO LETTERS

OF

PAREPIDEMUS.

(Published in ‘Putnam’s Monthly,’ New York, for July and
August 1853.)

I.

MY DEAR SIR,--I left this country as nearly as possible (next June, I believe, will complete it) one quarter of a century back, to go to school. I was sent ‘home,’ as they called it--that is, away from home, to the land which my parents, and, I presume, yours also, long ago belonged to--to be educated.

Does one get educated in twenty-five years, I wonder? The wisest of the seven wise men of Greece describes to us how that he

Each day grew older and learnt something new.

And, since the something new may possibly contradict, and will assuredly modify, the everything not so new before it, at what age may one consider oneself entitled, for example, to write letters in print to the editor of a magazine? At what figure does one attain one’s real majority and right of speech? How soon may one venture to affirm anything which everybody else does not already know and believe? And, in the meantime, is there any good in talking merely to be assented to? Is it so agreeable an exercise on the part of the reader to express mentally to himself that assent? If agreeable, is it therefore useful? ‘Were it not better done as others use?’ to follow the plough or the ledger, to find a Neæra in agriculture, or an Amaryllis in commerce? ‘What boots it, with incessant care, to tend the slighted’ bookmaker’s trade, ‘and strictly meditate the thankless muse’ of magazines? Will posterity know anything of our miserably imperfect, impotent fugitive verses, or contemporaneity be none the worse for them? Are we not most likely corrupting the pure taste which would otherwise turn with a natural appetite to Shakspeare and Milton, to Addison and Goldsmith, to Virgil and Homer? Goethe, I have heard, said not long before his death, that had he known ere he began writing how many good books there were in the world before, he would never have written a word.

There is one thing, indeed, I think one might do, could one only believe that one could. No so certain a way of learning the merit of a great picture as an attempt to copy it or represent something like it. And as we, if we look to it and take pains, may by our indifferent writing learn to appreciate the worth and merit of great writers, whom before we thought but little of, so it is also possible that our faithful, though small attempts, may help people to appreciate the great originals.

Every new age has something new in it--takes up a new position; the view presented by the writers of an anterior age is not readily seized, or adopted by those born in a later century. It may, I think, be one good work attainable to the efforts of the humble, modern _littérateur_, to elevate and direct to the noblest objects the tastes and enjoyments of his contemporaries. He holds a position common with them: he may avail himself of this for their edification. As the traveller who knows the country will show his less experienced companion at each new stage, each further remove, under changed aspects, the high mountain points they are retiring from; will point out the Mont Blanc whose shadow they stood in at Chamouni, in its full magnificent outline at Sallanches, and again, far distant, yet not less rose-tinged, at sunset from Geneva, so the writers (that is, or should be, the more instructed readers) of each new century may successively restore each successive generation to connection with the teachers of the past. Such is a possible function for a writer. Do twenty-five years educate one, I wonder, for this--twenty-five years of the universal slovenly habits of writing, speaking, hearing, thinking, remembering, which pervade our time? ‘Twenty-five years have I spent in learning,’ said the young man to the old. ‘Return,’ said the sage, ‘and spend another twenty-five in unlearning.’ ‘Each day grow older and _un_learn something’--is this to be our other reading of Solon’s maxim? Alas! it would seem there is need of it. We submit ourselves for instruction to teachers, and they teach us (or is it our awkwardness that we learn from them?) their faults and mistakes. Each new age and each new year has its new direction; and we go to the well-informed of the season before ours, to be put by them in the direction which, because right for their time, is therefore not quite right for ours.

Upon the water in a boat,
I sit and sketch as there we float;
The scene is fair, the stream is strong,
I sketch it as we float along.

The stream is strong, and as I sit
And view the picture that we quit,
It flows and flows, and bears the boat,
And I sit sketching as we float.

Still as we go, the things I see,
E’en as I see them, cease to be,
The angles shift, and with the boat
The whole perspective seems to float.

Each pointed height, each wavy line,
To new and other forms combine;
Proportions change and colours fade,
And all the landscape is remade.

Depicted--neither far nor near,
And larger there and smaller here,
And partly old, and partly new,
E’en I can hardly think it true.

Yet still I look, and still I sit,
Adjusting, shaping, altering it;
And still the current bears the boat
And me, still sketching as we float.

Did I really read or only dream somewhere that anecdote of an elderly painter, who, going over one day, with a friend of his youth, who had known him in his prime and promise, a series of his popular and most admired pieces, said mournfully, ‘All these poor, unmeaning, ill-designed, half-executed things, I have made to earn bread and time to do _that_,’ pointing to a chaotic, unfinished canvas at the end of the room, ‘and _that_, after all, is as bad as any of them.’ ‘This also,’ saith the Preacher, ‘is a sore evil that I have seen under the sun.’

To grow old, therefore, learning and unlearning, is such the conclusion? Conclusion or no conclusion, such, alas! appears to be our inevitable lot, the fixed ordinance of the life we live. The cruel king Tarchetius gave his daughters a web to weave, upon the completion of which he said they should get married; and what these involuntary Penelopes did in the daytime, servants by his orders undid at night. A hopeless and a weary work, indeed, especially for young people desirous to get married.

Weaving and unweaving, learning and unlearning, learning painfully, painfully unlearning, under the orders of the cruel king Tarchetius, behold--are we to say, ‘our life’? ‘Every new lesson,’ saith the Oriental proverb, ‘is another grey hair; and time will pluck out this also.’ And what saith the Preacher? ‘I, the Preacher, was King over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under the heavens; this sore travail hath God given to the sons of men to be exercised therewith.’ _Perchè pensa? Pensando s’invecchia_,’ said the young, unthinking Italian to the grave German sitting by him in the diligence, whose name was Goethe. Is it true?

To spend uncounted years of pain
Again, again, and yet again,
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here;
To gather facts from far and near;
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And, knowing more may yet appear,
Unto one’s latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw,--
Is this the object, end, and law
And purpose of our being here?

Nevertheless, to say something, to talk to one’s fellow-creatures, to relieve oneself by a little exchange of ideas, is there no good, is there no harm, in that? Prove to the utmost the imperfection of our views, our thoughts, our conclusions; yet you will not have established the uselessness of writing.

Most true, indeed, by writing we relieve ourselves, we unlearn; it is the one best recipe for facilitating that needful process.

Each day write something, and unlearn it so.

Most true, indeed! The observations that we can make nothing of, the maxims that have ceased to be serviceable to us, our spent theories, our discarded hypotheses, the wit that has become stale to us, the wisdom that has grown fusty with us, the imaginations that molest us, the illhumours that fret us, our follies, fancies, falsities; oh, happy relief!--away with them to the magazine!

Yes, methinks I see it so, through the long series of ages. The ‘Iliad’ is but the scum of the mind of Homer, and Plato’s dialogues the refuse of his thought. Who that reads the ‘Odyssey’ perceives not that it is an act of penitence for the ‘Iliad,’ and feels not that, had the poet lived, the ‘Odyssey’ also would have had its Palinode? In the divine eloquence of Plato there are intonations in which I hear him saying to me, ‘You know I don’t quite _mean_ all this.’

Alas! ’tis true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,

is the Great Dramatist’s profoundest feeling about himself, his doings, his sayings, his writings. Virgil bade his ‘Æneid’ be burnt; and what we read as his is not his deliberate word, but that of Varius and Tucca. As Rousseau, it is said, in his old age, smiled sadly at the fervent disciples of the ‘Social Contract,’ the ‘Émile,’ and the ‘Julie’; so, doubt it not, did greater than Rousseau. So felt Raphael of his paintings, and Phidias of his sculptures; Michael Angelo, also, of his Pantheon suspended in the heavens. Dante, from some strange region of the spiritual spaces, looks down, half scorn, half remorse, on the worshippers of the Divine Comedy of his human spleen and bitterness. Cervantes laughs aloud to hear philosophers discriminate the pure reason in Don Quixote and the understanding in Sancho; and Montaigne, with open eyes of more than mortal wonder, repeats his ‘_Que sçais-je?_’ at the sight of grave worshippers of his levities. May it not be true that when I quote from Milton, a shade of severe vexation darkens his spiritual features, and when I repeat the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, an ethereal frown contracts the immortal forehead of the Preacher?

You are feeding, oh you students of Greek and lovers of Latin, you that add to your German, French, and to your French, Italian and Spanish, you inquirers afar off into Persian and Sanscrit, you devotees of Chaucer and votaries of Shakspeare and Milton--you are feeding upon that, precisely, which was tried by these wise men of old and found wanting. You stand picking up the dross where those before you have carried away the gold; you are swallowing as truth what they put away from them--_expressed_, because it was false or insufficient.

Or is this, peradventure, confined to our own weaker selves, our more impatient, irretentive, unthoughtful age? For, certainly, my dear sir, what you and I and the young people read in any modern page is, in the manner aforestated, ‘the thing that is not.’ Each striking new novel does but reveal a theory of life and action which its writer is anxious to be rid of; each enthusiastic address or oration is but that which its speaker is just beginning to feel disgusted with. Oh! happy and happy again, and thrice happy relief to the writer; but to the reader----?

Said the Tree to the Children, ‘How can you go and pick up those dirty dead leaves I have thrown away?’ Said the Children to the Tree, ‘Will you grow us any better next year?’ Said the Tree to the Children, ‘What! are you positively going to put into your mouths those horrid things (fruit, do you call it?) that have fallen from my branches?’ Said the Children to the Tree, ‘Why, they are very nice.’ Said the Tree then to itself, ‘Suppose I were to restrain myself next spring, and not grow any leaves, and to suppress, ascetically, all tendencies to blossom? Should I not then produce something better? By all that is wise and moral I will try.’ Said the Springtime six months after to the Tree, ‘My dear Tree, that is out of the question.’ The Children came again the next fall, and the Tree made no remark.

An illustration, however, is not the same thing as an argument; though sometimes, indeed, it may be better. It is a game, in any case, for two to play at. For it is also told of the Phœnix, that, having reached its term of years it proceeded to Arabia, and built up carefully its pyre of odoriferous combustibles, and sat down to expect the new birth. But when the fire began to kindle, and the odoriferous sticks crackled, the odours indeed were beautiful (ornithologists, however, are uncertain whether the Phœnix has any sense of smell), the flame meantime was most undoubtedly painful in the extreme when it got within the feathers (the Phœnix, there is no question, has the sense of touch). The Phœnix started up and exclaimed to itself, ‘Oh! surely, surely, I am young again now!’ ‘Sit still, sit still, poor Phœnix; not till pain has deprived thee of the very sense of pain, not until thought and self-consciousness are burnt out and out of thee--not, by many pangs, yet--is the new creature born in thee!’ with which exhortation the story concludes.

And with which illustration, upon which side, my dear sir, is the truth, or the most of the truth? ‘As the leaves are, so are the lives of men;’ and so also their writings? Shall we yield to the promptings of nature, and let the eager sap aspire forth in germination, and the leaflets open out, and display themselves, to fall from us dead and uncomely in November? Or shall we burn slowly, in silence, that hereafter something better may be born of us? _Quien sabe?_

Was it the silence or the speech of previous ages that formed the more perfect writers? Was Perugino necessary to Raphael, or had Raphael been more himself without him? Some function, indeed, higher than that of mere self-relief, we must conceive of for the writer. To sum up the large experience of ages, to lay the finger on yet unobserved, or undiscovered, phenomena of the inner universe, something we can detect of these in the spheric architecture of St. Peter’s, in the creative touches of the ‘Tempest.’

Imperfect, no doubt, both this and that is; short of the better thing to come--the real thing that is. Yet not impotent, not wholly unavailing.

In conclusion, will you let me offer you the last ‘modern invocation’ to the poet--shall we say in modern phrase--of the future? ‘Come, poet, come’--no, I will trouble you only with a few verses at the end:--

In vain I seem to call, and yet
Think not the living years forget:
Ages of heroes fought and fell,
That Homer, in the end, might tell;
O’er grovelling generations past
The Doric column rose at last.
A thousand hearts on thousand years
Had wasted labour, hopes, and fears,
Knells, laughters, and unmeaning tears,
Ere England Shakspeare saw, or Rome,
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others, I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead have sown--
The dead, forgotten and unknown.

Let me sign myself, my dear sir (as we are all ‘strangers and pilgrims,’ so myself in an especial sense),

Your faithful and obliged

PAREPIDEMUS.

II.

MY DEAR SIR,--Do people in general, upon this side of the great water, read Homer? Virgil, I know, in some parts of the Union, is a lady’s book; nor is there, I think, any ancient author that better deserves the honour. But the man’s book, Homer? It is not every boy that learns Greek; and not all who learn Greek read through the whole forty-eight books of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’ Is Pope much studied? I should fancy not: and, indeed, though one is glad to hear any one say that he has, in the past tense, read that ingenious composition, it is not easy to bid any one, in the future, go and read it. And, if not Pope, whom can we recommend? Chapman is barbarous, dissonant, obsolete, incorrect. In Hobbes there are two good lines, well known, but they cannot be repeated too often--

And like a star upon her bosom, lay
His beautiful and shining golden head.

(They are of Astyanax in the arms of his mother; and how that first of English prosaists was inspired with them remains a problem to all generations.) Cowper, who could read, however much enjoined to it? In short there neither is, nor has been, nor in all probability ever will be, anything like a translation. And the whole Anglo-Saxon world of the future will, it is greatly to be feared, go forth upon its way, clearing forests, building clippers, weaving calicoes, and annexing Mexicos, accomplishing its natural manifest destiny, and subsiding into its primitive aboriginal ignorance. Accomplishing our manifest destiny! to be, that is, the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ to the human race in general; and then, peradventure, when the wood has all been hewn, and the water drawn, to cease to exist, to be effaced from the earth we have subdued--

Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thine earthly task hast done,
Homeward gone, and ta’en thy wages.

To cease to exist, to vanish, to give place, in short, to some nobler kind of men, in whose melodious and flexible form of speech the old Homer will have a chance of reappearing unimpaired, or possibly some new Homer singing the wrath of another Achilles and the wanderings of a wiser Ulysses.

_Fiat voluntas!_ Let us go forward to our manifest destiny with content, or at least resignation, and bravely fill up the trench, which our nobler successors may thus be able to pass.

In the meantime, various attempts in ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ and elsewhere, have been made in the last few years at rendering Homer in modern English hexameter verse. We venture to pronounce them unsuccessful. It is not an easy thing to make readable English hexameters at all; not an easy thing even in the freedom of original composition, but a very hard one, indeed, amid the restrictions of faithful translation. Mr. Longfellow has gained, and has charmed, has instructed in some degree, and attuned the ears of his countrymen and countrywomen (in literature we may be allowed to say), upon both sides of the Atlantic, to the flow and cadence of this hitherto unacceptable measure. Yet the success of ‘Evangeline’ was owing not more, we think, to the author’s practised skill in versification than to his judgment in the choice of his material. Even his powers, we believe, would fail to obtain a wide popularity for a translation even from a language so nearly akin to our own as the German. In Greek, where grammar, inflection, intonation, idiom, habit, character, and genius are all most alien, the task is very much more hopeless.