We have said little about the deep godliness, the spiritual Christianity, with which every poem is penetrated and quickened. Those who can detect and relish this best, will not be the worse pleased at our saying little about it. Vaughan’s religion is deep, lively, personal, tender, kindly, impassioned, temperate, central. His religion grows up, effloresces into the ideas and forms of poetry as naturally, as noiselessly, as beautifully as the life of the unseen seed finds its way up into the “bright consummate flower.”
Of “IX. Poems by V.,” we would say with the Quarterly, βαιὰ μὲν ἀλλὰ ῬΟΔΑ. They combine rare excellences; the concentration, the finish, the gravity of a man’s thought, with the tenderness, the insight, the constitutional sorrowfulness of a woman’s—her purity, her passionateness, her delicate and keen sense and expression. We confess we would rather have been the author of any one of the nine poems in this little volume, than of the somewhat tremendous, absurd, raw, loud, and fuliginous “Festus,” with his many thousands of lines and his amazing reputation, his bad English, bad religion, bad philosophy, and very bad jokes—his “buttered thunder” (this is his own phrase), and his poor devil of a Lucifer—we would, we repeat (having in this our subita ac sæva indignatio run ourselves a little out of breath), as much rather keep company with “V.” than with Mr. Bailey, as we would prefer going to sea for pleasure, in a trim little yacht, with its free motions, its quiet, its cleanliness, to taking a state berth in some Fire-King steamer of one thousand horse-power, with his mighty and troublous throb, his smoke, his exasperated steam, his clangor, and fire and fury, his oils and smells.
Had we time, and were this the fit place, we could, we think, make something out of this comparison of the boat with its sail and its rudder, and the unseen, wayward, serviceable winds playing about it, inspiring it, and swaying its course,—and the iron steamer, with its machinery, its coarse energy, its noises and philosophy, its ungainly build and gait, its perilousness from within; and we think we could show how much of what Aristotle, Lord Jeffrey, Charles Lamb, or Edmund Burke would have called genuine poetry there is in the slender “V.,” and how little in the big “Festus.” We have made repeated attempts, but we cannot get through this poem. It beats us. We must want the Festus sense. Some of our best friends, with whom we generally agree on such matters, are distressed for us, and repeat long passages with great energy and apparent intelligence and satisfaction. Meanwhile, having read the six pages of public opinion at the end of the third and People’s edition, we take it for granted that it is a great performance, that, to use one of the author’s own words, there is a mighty “somethingness” about it—and we can entirely acquiesce in the quotation from The Sunday Times, that they “read it with astonishment, and closed it with bewilderment.” It would appear from these opinions, which from their intensity, variety, and number (upwards of 50), are curious signs of the times, that Mr. Bailey has not so much improved on, as happily superseded the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes, of the Divine Comedy, of Paradise Lost and Regained, of Dr. Faustus, Hamlet, and Faust, of Don Juan, the Course of Time, St. Leon, the Jolly Beggars, and the Loves of the Angels.
He is more sublime and simple than Job—more royally witty and wise, more to the quick and the point than Solomon—more picturesque, more intense, more pathetic than Dante—more Miltonic (we have no other word) than Milton—more dreadful, more curiously blasphemous, more sonorous than Marlowe—more worldly-wise and clever, and intellectually svelt than Goethe. More passionate, more eloquent, more impudent than Byron—more orthodox, more edifying, more precocious than Pollok—more absorptive and inveterate than Godwin; and more hearty and tender, more of love and manhood all compact than Burns—more gay than Moore—more μυριάνους than Shakspeare.
It may be so. We have made repeated and resolute incursions in various directions into his torrid zone, but have always come out greatly scorched and stunned and affronted. Never before did we come across such an amount of energetic and tremendous words, going “sounding on their dim and perilous way,” like a cataract at midnight—not flowing like a stream, nor leaping like a clear waterfall, but always among breakers—roaring and tearing and tempesting with a sort of transcendental din; and then what power of energizing and speaking, and philosophizing and preaching, and laughing and joking and love-making, in vacuo! As far as we can judge, and as far as we can keep our senses in such a region, it seems to us not a poem at all, hardly even poetical—but rather the materials for a poem, made up of science, religion, and love, the (very raw) materials of a structure—as if the bricks and mortar, and lath and plaster, and furniture, and fire and fuel and meat and drink, and inhabitants male and female, of a house were all mixed “through other” in one enormous imbroglio. It is a sort of fire-mist, out of which poetry, like a star, might by curdling, condensation, crystallization, have been developed, after much purging, refining, and cooling, much time and pains. Mr. Bailey is, we believe, still a young man full of energy—full, we doubt not, of great and good aims; let him read over a passage, we dare say he knows it well, in the second book of Milton on Church Government, he will there, among many other things worthy of his regard, find that “the wily subtleties and refluxes of man’s thoughts from within,” which is the haunt and main region of his song, may be “painted out and described” with “a solid and treatable smoothness.” If he paint out and describe after this manner, he may yet more than make up for this sin of his youth; and let him take our word for it and fling away nine tenths of his adjectives, and in the words of Old Shirley—
“Compose his poem clean without ’em.
A row of stately Substantives would march
Like Switzers, and bear all the fields before ’em;
Carry their weight; show fair, like Deeds enroll’d;