REFORM IN VERSE.
A want of the day is some good fugitive poetry: bad is superabundant. The demand is for short and telling effusions in plain, direct and intelligible English, speaking to feelings possessed by everybody, and placing incidents, scenes and creatures, familiar or exceptional, in a poetic light, bright and warm rather than fierce or dazzling. The millions are waiting to be stirred and charmed, and will be very thankful to the singer who shall do it for them. Studied obscurity of thought and language, verbal finicalities and conceits, and mere ingenuities of any kind, rhythmic, mental or sentimental, will not meet the occasion: that sort of thing is overdone already. It is the "swollen imposthume" of refinement, an excrescence on culture, a penalty of which we have suffered enough. The Heliconian streams which are not deep, but only dark, must run dry if they cannot run clear. Sparkling and pellucid rills, wherein we can all see our own-selves and trace our own dreams, irradiated with light like the flickering of gems, and set off with rich foil, are those to attract the popular eye. Genuine humor, pathos, elevation and delicacy of fancy seek no disguise, but aim at the utmost simplicity of expression. Inversions, like affectation in every shape, are foreign to them. True songsters, like the birds, warble to be heard, understood and loved, and not to astonish or puzzle.
We read the other day, duly headed "For the —— ——," and signed with the contributor's name and place of residence, Wolfe's well-known lines to his wife, the one good thing preserved of him, and better, in our humble judgment, than those on the burial of Moore. The wearer of borrowed plumes was obviously confident that his theft would not be detected, readers of to-day having been so long unfamiliar with poetry of that character as to be sure to set it down as original and hail the reviver of it as a new light. Perhaps he may turn out to have been right in that impression, and figure as the herald, if not an active inaugurator, of a new era of taste in verse. He cannot remain the only practical asserter of the theory that it is better to steal good poetry than to write bad. Should his followers, however, shrink from downright theft, they might consent to shine as adapters. Some who are masters of English undefiled might help the cause by translating some of the best bits of Browning, Swinburne and Rossetti, to say nothing of Tennyson, who has gradually constructed a dialect of his own and trained us to understand it.
By fugitive poetry we mean the work of those usually classed as song-writers and lyrists, leaving out the big guns, if we have had any of the latter tribe since Milton, who was himself strongest in short poems. Most modern poets have made their début in the periodical press, and those who did not have shown a painful tendency to run to epic. The age respectfully declines epics.
We should not despair of the suggested revival. Ours is not the first period that has suffered under the dealers in concetti. They have had things somewhat their own way before—in the century which included Spenser and Donne, for instance. Our euphuists may pass away like those of the Elizabethan era, or, like the best of them, live in spite of faults with which they were gratuitously trammelled.
E. B.
[page 262]