Stay, stay, stay!
This way—this way—
There’s a pit before, and a pit behind,
And the seeing man walks in the path of the blind!
[Firmilian falls into the quarry. The Ignes Fatui dance as the curtain descends.
And so ends the tragedy of Firmilian.
It is rather difficult to give a serious opinion upon the merits of such a production as this. It is, of course, utterly extravagant; but so are the whole of the writings of the poets of the Spasmodic school; and, in the eyes of a considerable body of modern critics, extravagance is regarded as a proof of extraordinary genius. It is, here and there, highly coloured; but that also is looked upon as a symptom of the divine afflatus, and rather prized than otherwise. In one point of proclaimed spasmodic excellence, perhaps it fails. You can always tell what Percy Jones is after, even when he is dealing with “shuddering stars,” “gibbous moons,” “imposthumes of hell,” and the like; whereas you may read through twenty pages of the more ordinary stuff without being able to discern what the writers mean—and no wonder, for they really mean nothing. They are simply writing nonsense-verses; but they contrive, by blazing away whole rounds of metaphor, to mask their absolute poverty of thought, and to convey the impression that there must be something stupendous under so heavy a canopy of smoke. If, therefore, intelligibility, which is the highest degree of obscurity, is to be considered a poetic excellence, we are afraid that Jones must yield the palm to several of his contemporaries; if, on the contrary, perspicuity is to be regarded as a virtue, we do not hesitate in assigning the spasmodic prize to the author of Firmilian. To him the old lines on Marlowe, with the alteration of the name, might be applied—
“Next Percy Jones, bathed in the Thespian Springs,
Had in him those brave sublunary Things
That your first Poets had; his Raptures were