To return to Mr Smith’s idea of setting the age to music. The first requisite clearly is, that the musician shall be pre-eminently a man of the age. It is at once evident that oldfashioned people, with any lingering remnants of the heroic or dark ages about their ideas, would be quite out of place here. None but liberals and progressionists need apply. These are so plentiful that there will be no difficulty in finding a great number who embody the most prominent characteristics of the time. Having got the man of the age, a tremendous difficulty occurs. We are very much afraid there will not only be nothing poetical in the cast of his ideas, but that he will be the embodiment of everything that is prosaic. Call to mind, O Alexander! the qualities essential to a poet—at the same time, picture to yourself a Man of the Age—and then fancy what kind of music you will extract from him. Set the age to music, quotha! Set the Stocks to music.
Having thus signally failed to point out how the thing is to be done, we will tell Alexander how it will not be done. Not by uttering unmeaning complaints against Fate and Heaven, and other names of similar purport which we will not set down here, like a dog baying the moon. Not by uttering profane rant, which, as it would not have been justified by the mad despair of a Lear or an Othello, is horribly nonsensical in the mouth of a young gentleman who ought to have taken a blue pill because his liver was out of order. Not by pouring forth floods of images and conceits which afford no perception of the idea their author would convey. Not by making the moon and the sea appear in such a variety of ridiculous characters that we shall never again stroll by moonlight on the shore without seeing something comical in the aspect of the deep and the heavenly bodies. Not by——But we have just lighted on a passage which proves that Mr Smith knows what is right as well as anybody can tell him:—
“Yet one word more—
Strive for the poet’s crown, but ne’er forget
How poor are fancy’s blooms to thoughtful fruits.”
And again—
“Poet he was not in the larger sense—
He could write pearls, but he could never write
A poem round and perfect as a star.”
That is the point. Not to dismiss images unprotected on the world, like Mr Winkle’s shots—which, we are informed, were “unfortunate foundlings cast loose upon society, and billeted nowhere”—but to mature a worthy leading idea, waiting, watching, fostering it till it is full-grown and symmetrical in its growth; and from which the lesser ideas and images shall spring as naturally, necessarily, and with as excellent effect of adornment, as leaves from the tree.