But none of these old poets went to work with the deliberate intention of setting his age to music. Where that, so far as we can see the meaning of the phrase, has been done, it is because the poet lived so much among the characteristic men and scenes of his age, that his mind, more impressionable and more true in its impressions than others, was imbued with its spirit, and moulded to its forms; so that, whatever his mind transmitted was coloured by those hues, and swayed by those outlines. The poet did not hunt about for the characteristics of his age, and then deliberately embody them: he chose a congenial theme when it offered itself, and it, unconsciously to him, became a picture of a phase of the time. When our age, too, is set to music, if ever, it will be in this way.
If ever—For ages of the world, as worthy of note perchance as this, and more rich in materials for poetry, have passed away without being set to music. Every great change of society, and of mankind’s opinions, does not necessarily call for a poet to sing it. It may be more suitably reproduced through some other medium than verse—in newspapers, for instance, or in advertising vans. Of course, no man in his senses would say a word against this age of ours; he could expect nothing less than to be immediately bonneted, like an injudicious elector who has hissed the popular candidate; yet we would have liked Alexander Smith to indicate the direction in which he intends to seek his materials. Does he see anything heroic in an ardent desire to secure ease and comfort at the cost of many old and once respectable superstitions, such as honour and duty? Can he throw over the cotton trade “the light that never was on sea or shore?” Or, is popular oratory distinguished by “thoughts that breathe and words that burn?” Will the railway station and the electric telegraph figure picturesquely in the poet’s dream? Yet, when the age is set to music, these chords will be not the most subdued in the composition. Mr Macaulay said about as much as could be said for the spirit of the age, when he drew a contrast in popular prose between the present and the past. Had he tried the subject in poetry, he would have found the task much less congenial than when he sung so manfully “how well Horatius kept the bridge, in the brave days of old.”
Alexander Smith has one characteristic in common with Tennyson, the author of Festus, and some other poets of the time. All seem to have great power in the regions of the dreary. Their gaiety is spasmodic; when they smile, ’tis like Patience on a monument, as if Grief were sitting opposite. If this is their way of setting the age to music, ’tis, if most musical, yet most melancholy. Tennyson, who possesses the power of conveying the sentiment of dreariness beyond most poets that ever lived, generally selects some suitable subject for the exercise of it, such as Mariana in the Moated Grange; but Mr Smith’s hero, and Festus, are miserable from choice, and revel in their unaccountable woe, like the character in Peacock’s novel, whose notion of making himself agreeable consists in saying, “Let us all be unhappy together.” Not thus, O Alexander! sounds the keynote of the genial soul of a great poet.
Our author’s notion of what constitutes a crushing affliction is altogether peculiar. A particular friend of his hero, after becoming quite blasphemous because he wanted “to let loose some music on the world,” and couldn’t (p. 137), commits suicide on a mountain, though whether by rope, razor, or prussic acid, we are not informed. However, being deranged, he no doubt received Christian burial. And Mr Smith, speaking for himself in the sonnet already quoted, says that—
“Beneath the sun
The chiefest woe is this—When all alone,
And strong as life, a soul’s great currents run
Poesy-ward, like rivers to the sea,
But never reach it.”
The chiefest woe!—the chiefest, Alexander! Neither Job nor Jeremiah have enrolled it among human afflictions. Is there no starvation, nor pain, nor death in the world? Is the income-tax repealed? We appeal from Alexander in travail of a sonnet, with small hope of safe delivery, to Alexander in the toothache, and we are confident he will change his opinion. Let him look at Hogarth’s “Distressed Poet,” and see what it is that moves his sympathy there. Not the perplexity of the poor poet himself—that raises only an irreverent smile—but the poor good pretty wife raising her household eyes meekly and wonderingly to the loud milkwoman, their inexorable creditor—the piece of meat that was to form their scanty dinner, abstracted by the felonious starveling of a cur,—these touch on deeper woes than the head-scratching distress of the unproductive poet.