PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLXXXIV. FEBRUARY, 1856. Vol. LXXIX.
MODERN LIGHT LITERATURE—POETRY.
“Poets,” said the ancient wisdom, “are not made, but born.” We have made miraculous progress in all the arts of manufacture since the time of this saying, but we have not been able to controvert the judgment of our forefathers. Education, refinement, taste, and talent, are great things in their way, and men do wonders with them; but we have not fallen yet upon a successful method of bringing down the divine spark into the marble, let us work it ever so curiously. The celestial gift in these new times, as in the old, comes down with divine impartiality, yet seldom into the tenement most specially built and garnished for its reception. We can make critics, connoisseurs, “an enlightened audience,” but, let us labour at it as we will, we cannot make a poet.
And indeed, to tell the truth, it is but small help we can give, with all our arts and ingenuities, even to the perfecting of the poet born. Science discusses the subject gravely—at one time troubled with apprehensions lest her severe shadow should kill the singer outright, as Reason killed Love—at another, elate with the happier thought of increasing all his conquests, and sending forth as her own esquire, bearing her ponderous lance and helmet, the glorious boy in his perennial youth. It is a vain speculation. The poet glances past this important figure with a calm eye and a far-shining smile. His vocation is beyond and beyond the range of all the sciences. The heart and soul that were in the first home, ere ever even spade and distaff were invented, when two forlorn hopeful creatures, wistfully looking back to the sunset of Eden, wistfully looking forward to the solemn nightfall of the drear world without, with all its starry promises of another morning and a higher heaven, were all the human race—are world and scope enough for the humanest and most divine of arts. That God has made of one blood all the nations and all the generations of this many-peopled earth, is the argument on which he speaks; that heart answers unto heart all the world over, is the secret of his power. The petulant passion of a child, the heroisms and exultations and agonies of that fantastical sweet youth, over whose unconscious mockery of our real conflict we graver people smile and weep, are of more import to the poet than all the secrets of the earth, and all the wonders of the sky; and he turns—it is his vocation—from the discovery of a planet, forgetting all about it, to make the whole world ring with joy over a cottage cradle, or weigh down the very wings of the winds with wailing over some uncommemorated grave.
Yes, it is a humiliating confession—but in reality we are quite as like to injure as to elevate our poet by all our educations. Perhaps the heavenly glamour in his eyne had best be left entirely unobscured by any laws save those of nature; but at all events it seems tolerably sure, that the more we labour at his training, the less satisfactory is the result of it. A school of poets is the most hopeless affair in existence; and whether it dwindle into those smallest of small rhymsters, leaden echoes of the silver chimes of Pope, in whom the eighteenth century delighted, or to the present makers of dislocated verses, whose glory it is to break stones upon the road where the Laureate’s gilded coach flashes by, we wait with equal weariness and equal impatience for the Coming Man, who knows neither school nor education—whose business it is to rout the superannuated spinsters, and make the world ring once more with the involuntary outburst of song and youth.
But we who are but the unhappy victims of the mania, why do we blame ourselves? Alas! it is not we, but our poets, foolish fraternity, who have set about this fatal task of making a school and perfecting themselves in their art. How do you suppose they are to do it, kindest reader? In other arts and professions the self-love of the student in most instances suffers a woeful downfall at his very outset. Tutors and books, dire conspirators against his innocence, startle the hapless neophyte out of all his young complacency; professors set him down calmly as a know-nothing; chums, with storms of laughter, drive him out of his last stronghold. He has to shut himself out from his college doors; seal himself up, poor boy, in his home letters, and so sit down and study other people’s wisdom, till he comes by that far away and roundabout process to some true estimate of his own.
But the poet, say the poets, needs other training. For him it is safest that we shut him up with himself. Himself, a separated creature, garlanded and crowned for the sacrifice, is, in one noble concentration, all the ethics, the humanity, and the religion with which he has to do; significances, occult and mysterious, are in every breath of wind that whispers about his dedicated head; his smallest actions are note-worthy, his sport is a mystery, his very bread and cheese symbolical. He is a poet—everywhere, and in all places, it is the destiny of this unfortunate to reverence himself, to contemplate himself, to expound and study the growth of a poet’s mind, the impulses of a poet’s affections; he is not to be permitted to be unconscious of the sweet stirrings within him of the unspoken song; he is not to be allowed to believe with that sweetest simplicity of genius that every other youthful eye beholds “the light that never was on sea or land,” as well as his own. Unhappy genius! ill-fated poet! for him alone of all men must the heavens and the earth be blurred over with a miserable I,—and so he wanders, a woeful Narcissus, seeing his own image only, and nothing better, in all the lakes and fountains; and, bound by all the canons of his art, falls at last desperately either in love or in hate with the persistent double, which, go where he will, still looks him in the face.