There is certainly food for thought here; and that, too, thought of a kind in which the public has a direct interest. 210 If such be the dissipating effect of writing for newspapers and the lighter periodicals, it is surely natural to infer that the exclusive reading of such works must have a dissipating effect also. It is too obvious that the feverish mediocrity of overwrought brains becomes infectious among the class who place themselves in too constant and unbroken connection with it, and that from the closets of over-toiled littérateurs an excited superficiality creeps out upon the age. And hence the necessity to which we have oftener than once referred, that men should keep themselves in wholesome connection with the master minds of the past. Mr. Smibert’s remarks preface, as we have said, a volume of sweet and tasteful verse; and we find him saying that, ‘most of all, the operation of Periodicalism has been unfavourably felt in the domain of poetry.’
‘The position of literature,’ he adds, ‘in the times of the Wordsworths, Crabbes, and Campbells of the age just gone by, was more favourable than at present to the devotion of talent to great undertakings. These men were assuredly not beset by the same seductive facilities as the littérateurs of the current generation for expending their powers on petty objects,––facilities all the more fascinating, as comprising the pleasures of immediate publicity, and perhaps even of repute for a day, if not also of some direct remuneration. These influences of full-grown Periodicalism extend now to all who can read and write. But it entices most especially within its vortex those who exhibit an unusually large share of early literary promise, involves them in multitudinous and multifarious occupation, and, in short, divides and subdivides the operations of talent, until all prominent identity is destroyed, both in works and workers. To the growth of this modern system, beyond question, is largely to be referred the comparative disappearance from among us of great literary individualities; or, to use other and more accurate words, by that system have 211 men of capacity been chiefly diverted from the composition of great individual works, and more particularly great poems.’
We are less sure of the justice of this remark of Mr. Smibert’s, than of that of many of the others. It is not easy, we have said, to smother a true poet; and we know that in the present age very genuine poetry has been produced in the offices of very busy newspaper editors. Poor Robert Nicoll never wrote truer poetry than when he produced his ‘Puir Folk’ and his ‘Saxon Chapel,’ at a time when he was toiling, as even modern journalist has rarely toiled, for the columns of the Leeds Times; and James Montgomery produced his ‘World before the Flood,’ ‘Greenland,’ and ‘The Pelican Island,’ with many a sweet lyric of still higher merit, when laboriously editing the Sheffield Iris. The ‘Salamandrine’ of Mr. Charles Mackay was written when he was conducting the sub-editorial department of a daily London paper; nor did he ever write anything superior to it. And we question whether Mr. Smibert himself, though he might have produced longer poems, would have written better ones than some of those contained in the present volume, even had his life been one of unbroken leisure. It seems natural to literary men, who fail in realizing their own conceptions of what they had wished and hoped to perform, to cast the blame upon their circumstances. Johnson could speak as feelingly, not much later than the middle of the last century, of the ‘dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer,’ as any literary man of the present time, who, while solicitously desirous to give himself wholly to the muses, is compelled to labour as a periodicalist for the wants of the day that is passing over him. But perhaps the best solace for the dissatisfaction which would thus wreak itself on mere circumstances, is that which Johnson himself supplies. ‘To reach below his own aim,’ says the moralist, ‘is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied 212 with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little.’ But to labour and be forgotten is the common lot; and why should a literary man be more disposed to repine because his productions perish after serving a temporary purpose, than the gardener or farmer, whose vocation it is to supply the people with their daily food? If the provisions furnished, whether for mind or body, be wholesome, and if they serve their purpose, the producers must learn to be content, even should they serve the purpose only once, and but for a day. The danger of over-cropping, and of consequent exhaustion, is, of course, another and more serious matter; and of this the mind of the periodicalist is at least as much in danger as either field or garden when unskilfully wrought. But mere rest, which in course of time restores the exhausted earth, is often not equally efficient in restoring the exhausted mind; nor does mere rest, even were it a specific in the case, lie within the reach of the periodic writer. It is often the luxury for which he pants, but which he cannot command. One of the surest specifics in the case is, the specific of working just a little more,––of working for the work’s sake, whether at poem or history, or in the prosecution of some science, or in some antiquarian pursuit. There is an exquisite passage in one of the essays of Washington Irving, in which he compares the great authors––Shakespeare, for instance––who seem proof against the mutability of language, to ‘gigantic trees, that we see sometimes on the banks of a stream, which, by their vast and deep roots, penetrating through the mere surface, and laying hold on the very foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a neighbouring plant to perpetuity.’ And such is the service rendered by some pervading pursuit of an intellectual character, prosecuted for its own sake, to the intellect of the journalist. It is 213 the necessity imposed upon him of taking up subject after subject in the desultory, disconnected form in which they chance to arise, and then, after throwing together a few hastily collected thoughts upon each, of dismissing them from his mind, that induces first a habit of superficiality, and finally leaves him exhausted; and the counteractive course open to him is just to take up some subject on which the thinking of to-day may assist him in the thinking of to-morrow, and on which he may be as well informed and profound as his native capacity permits. All our really superior newspaper editors have pursued this course––more, however, we are disposed to think, from the bent of their nature than from the necessities of their profession; and the poetical volume of Mr. Smibert shows that he too has his engrossing pursuit. We recommend his little work to our readers, as one in which they will find much to interest and amuse. We have left ourselves little room for quotation; but the following stanzas, striking, both from their beauty and from the curious fact which they embody, may be regarded as no unfair specimen of the whole:––
| THE VOICE OF WOE. |
‘The language of passion, and more peculiarly that of grief, is ever nearly the same.’
July 26, 1851.