Kind Death, kiss gently, ease this weary one!”
Alexander Smith is partly right and partly wrong. It is true that, throned in his judicial chair, the critic, more intent on displaying his own powers than on doing justice to his subject, is apt to drop the mild and equal scales, and brandish the trenchant glittering sword. He ought to say in his heart, Peradventure there shall be found ten fine lines in this book—I will not destroy it for ten’s sake.
But, on the other hand, there is a class to which forbearance would be misapplied and criminal. It would too much resemble our prison discipline, where Mr William Sykes, after a long course of outrages on humanity, is shut up in a palace, treated like a prodigal son, and presently converted to Christianity. An absurd monomaniac, who, like Joanna Southcote, mistaking a dropsical disorder for the divine afflatus, and demanding worship on no better grounds than the greatness of his own blown conceit, may, by mere force of impudent pretension, induce a host of ignorant followers to have faith in him, ought to be exposed and ridiculed. Not savagely, perhaps, for the first offence; the pantaloons should be loosed with a paternal hand, and the scourge mildly applied. If he still persists in misdoing, it should be laid on till the blood comes.
But Alexander Smith is far from coming under the latter denomination. A writer, especially a young writer, should be judged by his best; and there is enough excellence in the volume to cover many more sins than it contains, though they are numerous. And while it is a mistake to suppose that a fine poetic soul, however sensitive, will “let itself be snuffed out by an article,” yet there have been instances where undue severity has defrauded a writer of his just fame for many a long year; and though the critic, in the end, has been compelled to render up the mesne profits of applause, yet that is small consolation for the sense of wrong, and the deprivation of merited influence and reputation.
While foreign writers sketch us as the most matter-of-fact and pudding-eating of peoples—while we pique ourselves on sturdy John Bullism, and cheerfully accept the portrait of an absurd old gentleman in a black coat, and a broad-brimmed hat and gaiters, with his hands in his well-filled breeches pockets, as a just impersonation of the genius of the nation, it is an obvious fact that a poet never had such a certainty of being appreciated in England as now. Fit audience is no longer few. Let him sound as high a note as he can for the life of him, he will yet find echoes enough to constitute fame. There are homes in England almost as common as hothouses, where fine criticism is nightly conversation—where appreciators, as true as any who review in newspapers, hail a good and great writer as a personal friend. Here may be found all the elements necessary for the recognition of merit and the detection of imposture. Sturdy good sense refuses to believe in gaudy pretension; keen logic exposes emptiness; enthusiastic youth glows at the high thought, the splendid image; and the soft feminine nature responds, with ready tears and unsuppressed sighings, to all legitimate appeals to the heart.
With such tribunals more plentiful than county courts, a man is no longer justified in decrying fame, or appealing for justice to posterity. It must be an untoward accident, indeed, that cheats an author of his due, when so many are eager to exchange praise for his fine gold. The demand for excellence in authorship exceeds the supply; and there are plenty of keen readers who, having traversed the realms of English poesy, yet thirst for fresh fields and pastures new. Therefore, if an ardent spirit finds the world deaf to his utterances, let him search uncomplainingly for the fault in his own mind, and never rashly conclude that for his fondly believed-in powers of thought and expression there is, as yet, no sympathetic public. Especially in poetry is the appetite of the time unsatisfied; mediocrity, which should be inadmissible, is indulgently received, and the poets of established reputation are on every shelf. Editions of Shakespeare appear in perplexing numbers, and the rusty armour in which a champion for his text appears, is contended for as if it were the heaven-forged panoply of Achilles.
Mr Smith leaves his feelings on the subject of fame open to doubt. One might almost fancy him a poet who, having desired fame too ardently in his hot youth, had discovered its emptiness in riper age. A sonnet is devoted to the depreciation of fame; whereas Walter, in the Life-drama, is more than enthusiastic to achieve it. We have no doubt the ardent wishes which Mr Smith expresses through his hero are genuine, and that the philosophy of the sonnet is a philosophy he only fancies he has acquired. Combativeness may inspire the soldier to achievement, rivalry the statesman; both may be, in some measure, indifferent to other fame than the applause of their contemporaries. But it is in vain for the poet to express indifference to the opinion of the world and of posterity. Why has he written, except that thoughts bearing his impress may sound in the ears of the future, and that the echoes they arouse may convey to him, in his silent resting-place, tidings of the cheerful day, assuring him of a tenure in the earth he loved, and a lasting position among the race who were his brothers? What would not man do to secure remembrance after death? For this Erostratus burnt Diana’s temple; for this the Pyramids were built, and built in vain; for this kings have destroyed nations; for this the care-worn money-getter gives his life to the founding of a wealthy name; and if a man may gain it more effectually by the simple publishing of thoughts, whose conception was to him a pleasure, let him be thankful that what all so ardently desire was granted to him on such easy terms, and that he may continue to be a real presence on this earth, when most of his contemporaries are as though they had never been.
Taking it for granted, then, that when a young poet publishes a work wherein the hero expresses an ardent desire for fame, the poet is himself speaking through the character, it will be interesting to see how he proposes to achieve it. Mr Smith tells us, through his hero, that his plan for immortalising himself is “to set this age to music.” That, he says, is the great work before the poet now.
To set this age to music!—’tis a phrase we have heard before of late years. Never was an age so intent upon self-glorification as this. Like the American nation, it spends half its time looking in the glass; and, like it, always with the same loudly-expressed approbation of what the mirror reveals. It has long been its habit to talk its own praises, and now they must be sung. When polkas were first introduced, many familiar sounds were parodied, to give character to tunes of the new measure. Among these was the Railway-polka, in which the noise of the wheels and the clatter of machinery were admirably imitated; while a startling reality was given to the whole, by the occasional hoarse scream of the engine. Now, we fear that the effort of a poet to set the age to music would result in something resembling the railway polka—something more creditable as a work of ingenuity than of art, and embodying more appeals to the sense than to the heart or the imagination. To him who stands apart from the rush and roar, the many voices of the age convey a mingled sound that would scarcely seem musical even to the dreaming ear of a poet.
We see the spirit of the middle ages—the spirit of religious intolerance and superstitious faith—of deepest earnestness, and of bigotry springing out of that earnestness—reflected in Dante’s page. Spenser shows us the days of the plume and the spear, when the beams of chivalry yet gilded the earth, when the motto of noble youth was—God and my lady. Another phase of the same era—the era of romantic discovery and adventure, when there were yet fairies on the green, and enchanted isles in the ocean—reappears in the works of Shakespeare. Pope has fixed for ever the time of courtliness, of external polish and artificial graces—the time when woman was no more divine—when Una had degenerated into Chloe—when love had given place to intrigue, devotion to foppery, faith to reasoning; yet a pleasant and graceful time. And it is no wonder that the poet, now, feeling that he too possesses “the vision and the faculty divine,” should long to leave his name, not drifting over space, but anchored firmly on the times he lived in.