America is undoubtedly the literary promise-land of the future. It has done nothing up to this. Its condition has forbidden it to achieve anything, but great triumphs may be anticipated from it. Crossing the Atlantic, what do we find in the other great branch of the English-speaking race? Religious publications head the list by a long way. They have nothing to do with this subject save in so far as they are in the line of the sublime. All forms of the Christian and Jewish creeds are sublime. Looking at the other walks of literature, we find the death sentence of the sublime written everywhere. With the exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poet or dramatist who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel’s best admired distillations. We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson; but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere. It is true you cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration. Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.
Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is, I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they hear. They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the effect these preluding passages have upon them, “Such harmonious madness from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are listening now.”
Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as Night and Morning, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of Night and Morning were placed at the head of the staircase of Burlington House, no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.
Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your Times and the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the sublime so completely vanished as the orator’s. Take those two speakers above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of interest to man. The statistician and the poltroon and the verbatim reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House and make a speech in the manner of the ancients, the honourable members would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied; and the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of the speaker’s cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in which he had pleaded it.
To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult, and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated. Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties. Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half understood—not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance, if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the top of the Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words, “This is Rome.” By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur, influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been traversed. The source of the Nile has been found. We can read the hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the grave for the sublime with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my throat, I must, I daresay, cry, “God speed the plough!”
A BORROWED POET.
Twenty years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the steamboat hard by.
The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.
This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not enterprising in the matter of books—rarely buy and rarely borrow, and have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life. The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of publications at the back I find “The Poems of James Clarence Mangan. Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper. Nearly 500 pages. $1.” Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.
As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but one other edition of Mangan’s poems—the German Anthology, published in Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been published in this country.