Very well! So be it! We did not ask Mr Smith for a poem, neither did our importunity besiege the tower of Balder; but if they were not written for us, why tantalise us with these mysterious revelations? For two souls the Life Drama might have answered exceeding well in manuscript, and within the bounds of a private circulation the exceptional men who possibly could comprehend him might have studied Balder. How does it happen that Shakespeare’s wonderful people, with all their great individualities, are never exceptional men? It is a singular evidence of the vast and wide difference between great genius and “poetic talent.” For Shakespeare, you perceive, can afford to let us all understand; thanks to his commentators, there are a great many obscure phrases in the Prince of Poets—but all the commentators in the world cannot make one character unintelligible, or throw confusion into a single scene.
Balder, we presume, has not yet been hanged, indisputable as are his claims to that apotheosis; for this is only part the first, and our dangerous hero has yet to progress through sundry other “experiences,” and to come at last “from a doubtful mind to a faithful mind,”—how about his conscience and the law, meanwhile, Mr Dobell does not say. But we have no objections to make to the story of Balder. That such a being should exist at all, or, existing, should, of all places in the world, manage to thrust himself into a poem, is the head and front of the offending, to our thought. The author of this poetic Frankenstein mentions Haydon, Keats, and David Scott as instances of the “much-observed and well-recorded characters of men,” in which “the elements of his hero exist uncombined and undeveloped.” Poor Keats’s passionate poet-vanity seems out of place beside the marvellous and unexampled egotism of the two painters; but we do not see how the poet improves his position by this reference; nay, had we demonstration that Balder himself was a living man, we do not see what better it would be. He is a monster, were he twenty people; and, worse than a monster, he is a bore; and, worse than a bore, he is an unbearable prig! One longs to thrust the man out of the window, as he sits mouthing over his long-meditated epic, and anticipating his empire of the world. Yet it really is a satisfaction to be told that this incarnate vanity represents “the predominant intellectual misfortune of the day.” Is this then the Doubt of which Mr Maurice is respectful, which Mr Kingsley admires, and Isaac Taylor lifts his lance to demolish? Alas, poor gentlemen, how they are all deceived! It is like the story we all believed till truth-telling war found out the difference for us, of the painted ramparts and wooden bullets of the Russian fortresses. If Mr Dobell is right, we want no artillery against the doubter—he will make few proselytes, and we may safely leave him to any elaborate processes he chooses for the killing of himself.
“Many things go to the making of all things,” says a quaint proverb—and we require more than a shower of similes, pelting upon us like the bonbons of a carnival—more than a peculiar measure, a characteristic cadence, to make poetry. There is our Transatlantic cousin rhyming forth his chant to all the winds. Well!—we thought we knew poetry once upon a time—once in the former days our heart leaped at sight of a poetry-book, and the flutter of the new white pages was a delight to our soul. But alas, and alas! our interest fails us as much for the Song of Hiawatha as for the musings of Balder; there is no getting through the confused crowd of Mr Browning’s Men and Women, and with reverential awe we withdraw us from The Mystic, not even daring a venturesome glance upon that globe of darkness. What are we to do with these books? They suppose a state of leisure, of ease, of quietness, unknown to us for many a day. It pleases the poet to sing of a distempered vanity brooding by itself over fictitious misfortunes, and what is it to us whether a Maud or a Balder be the issue?—or he treats of manners and customs, names and civilisations, and what care we whether it be an Indian village or a May fair? We have strayed by mistake into a delicate manufactory—an atelier of the beaux arts—and even while we look at the workmen and admire the exquisite manipulation of the precious toys before us, our minds stray away out of doors with a sigh of weariness to the labours of this fighting world of ours and the storms of our own life. There is no charm here to hold us, none to cheat us into a momentary forgetfulness of either our languors or our labours. If it is all poetry, it has lost the first heritage and birthright of the Muse: it speaks to the ear—it does not speak to the heart.
Yet in this contention of cadences, where every man’s ambition is for a new rhythm, Hiawatha has a strong claim upon the popular fancy. Possibly it is not new; but if Mr Longfellow is the first to make it popular, it matters very little who invented it; and to talk of plagiarism is absurd. But, unhappily for the poet, this is the very measure to attract the parodist. Punch has opened the assault, and we will not attempt to predict how many gleeful voices may echo his good-humoured mockery before the year is out. The jingle of this measure is irresistible, and with a good vocabulary of any savage language at one’s elbow, one feels a pleasing confidence that the strain might spin on for ever, and almost make itself. But for all that, though the trick of the weaving is admirable—though we are roused into pleasant excitement now and then by a hairbreadth escape from a rhyme, and applaud the dexterity with which this one peril is evaded, we are sadly at a loss to find any marks of a great or note-worthy poem in this chant, which is fatally “illustrative of” a certain kind of life, but contains very little in itself of any life at all. The greatest works of art,—and we say it at risk of repeating ourselves—are those which appeal to the primitive emotions of nature; and in gradual descent, as you address the secondary and less universal emotions, you fail in interest, in influence, and in greatness. Hiawatha contains a morsel of a love-story, and a glimpse of a grief; but these do not occupy more than a few pages, and are by no means important in the song. The consequence is, of course, that we listen to it entirely unmoved. It was not meant to move us. The poet intends only that we should admire him, and be attracted by the novelty of his subject; and so we do admire him—and so we are amused by the novel syllables—attracted by the chime of the rhythm, and the quaint conventionalities of the savage life. But we cannot conceal from ourselves that it is conventional, though it is savage; and that in reality we see rather less of the actual human life and nature under the war-paint of the Indian than is to be beheld every day under the English broadcloth. The Muse is absolute in her conditions; we cannot restrain her actual footsteps; from the highest ideal to the plainest matter of fact there is no forbidden ground to the wandering minstrel; but it is the very secret of her individuality, that wherever she goes she sounds upon the chords of her especial harp, the heart;—vibrations of human feeling ring about her in her wayfaring—the appeal of the broken heart and the shout of the glad one thrust in to the very pathway where her loftiest abstraction walks in profounder calm; and though it may please her to amuse herself among social vanities now and then, we are always reminded of her identity by a deeper touch, a sudden glance aside into the soul of things—a glimpse of that nature which makes the whole world kin. It is this perpetual returning, suddenly, involuntarily, and almost unawares, to the closest emotions of the human life, which distinguishes among his fellows the true poet. It is the charm of his art that he startles us in an instant, and when we least expected it, out of mere admiration into tears; but such an effect unfortunately can never be produced by customs, or improvements, or social reforms. The greatest powers of the external world are as inadequate to this as are the vanities of a village; and even a combination of both is a fruitless expedient. No, Mr Longfellow has not shot his arrow this time into the heart of the oak—the dart has glanced aside, and fallen idly among the brushwood. His Song is a quaint chant, a happy illustration of manners, but it lacks all the important elements which go to the making of a poem. We are interested, pleased, attracted, yet perfectly indifferent; the measure haunts our ear, but not the matter—and we care no more for Hiawatha, and are still as little concerned for the land of the Objibbeways, as if America’s best minstrel had never made a song. The poet was more successful in the wistfulness of his Evangeline, to which even these lengthened, desolate, inquiring hexameters lent a charm of appropriate symphony; but it is a peculiarity of this sweet singer that his best strains are always wistful, longing, true voices of the night.
It is odd to remark the entire family aspect and resemblance which our English poets bear to one another. Mr Tennyson is the eldest of the group, and they all take after him; but they are true brothers, and have quite a family standard of merit by which to judge themselves. Mr Dobell is the sulky boy—Mr Browning the boisterous one—Mr Smith the younger brother, desperately bent on being even with the firstborn, and owning no claim of birthright. There is but one sister in the melodious household, and she is quite what the one sister generally is in such a family—not untouched by even the schoolboy pranks of the surrounding brothers—falling into their ways of speaking—moved by their commotions—very feminine, yet more acquainted with masculine fancies than with the common ways of women. Another sister or two to share her womanly moderatorship in this noisy household might have made a considerable difference in Mrs Browning: but her position has a charm of its own;—she never lags behind the fraternal band, nay, sometimes stimulated by a sudden impulse, glides on first, and calls “the boys” to follow her: nor does she quite refuse now and then to join a wild expedition to the woods or the sea-shore. If she has sometimes a feminine perception that the language of the brothers is somewhat too rugged or too obscure for common comprehension, she partly adopts the same, with a graceful feminine artifice, to show how, blended with her sweeter words, this careless diction can be musical after all; and you feel quite confident that she will stand up stoutly for all the brotherhood, even when she does not quite approve of their vagaries. She has songs of her own, sweet and characteristic, such as “Little Ellie,” and leaps into the heart of a great subject once in that Lay of the Children, which everybody knows and quotes, and which has just poetic exaggeration sufficient to express the vehement indignation with which the song compelled the singer’s utterance. Altogether, Mrs Browning’s poems, rank them how you will in intellectual power, have more of the native mettle of poetry than most modern verses. She is less artificial than her brotherhood—and there is something of the spring and freedom of things born in her two earlier volumes; she is not so assiduously busy over the things which have to be made.
And Robert Browning is the wild boy of the household—the boisterous noisy shouting voice which the elder people shake their heads to hear. It is very hard to make out what he would be at with those marvellous convolutions of words; but, after all, he really seems to mean something, which is a comfort in its way. Then there is an unmistakable enjoyment in this wild sport of his—he likes it, though we are puzzled; and sometimes he works like the old primitive painters, with little command of his tools, but something genuine in his mind, which comes out in spite of the stubborn brushes and pigments, marvellous ugly, yet somehow true. Only very few of his Men and Women is it possible to make out: indeed, we fear that the Andrea and the Bishop Blougram are about the only intelligible sketches, to our poor apprehension, in the volumes; but there is a pleasant glimmer of the author himself through the rent and tortured fabric of his poetry, which commends him to a kindly judgment; and, unlike those brothers of his who use the dramatic form with an entire contravention of its principles, this writer of rugged verses has a dramatic gift, the power of contrasting character, and expressing its distinctions.
But altogether, not to go further into these characteristic differences, they are a united and affectionate family this band of poets, and chorus each other with admirable amiability; yet we confess, for poetry’s sake, we are jealous of the Laureate’s indisputable pre-eminence. It is not well for any man—unless he chance to be a man like Shakespeare, a happy chance, which has never happened but once in our race or country—to have so great a monopoly; and it is a sad misfortune for Tennyson himself, that he has no one to try his mettle, but is troubled with a shadowy crowd of competitors eagerly contending which shall reflect his peculiarities best.
For the manfuller voices are all busy with serious prose or that craft of novel-writing which is more manageable for common uses than the loftier vehicle of verse. True, there are such names as Aytoun and Macaulay, and we all know the ringing martial ballad-notes which belong to these distinguished writers; but Macaulay and Aytoun have taken to other courses, and strike the harp no more. And while the higher places stand vacant, the lower ones fill with a crowd of choral people, who only serve to show us the superiority of the reigning family, such as it is. It is a sad fact, yet we cannot dispute it—poetry is fast becoming an accomplishment, and the number of people in “polite society” who write verses is appalling. Only the other day, two happy samples of Young England came by chance across our path—one a young clergyman, high, high, unspeakably high, riding upon the very rigging of the highest roof of Anglican churchmanship, bland, smooth, and gracious, a bishop in the bud; the other, his antipodes and perfect opposite, gone far astray after the Warringtons and Pendennises—a man of mirth and daring, ready for everything. They had but one feature of resemblance—an odd illustration of what we have just been saying. Both of them had modestly ventured into print; both of them were poets.
And yet that stream of smooth and facile verse which surrounded us in former days has suffered visible diminution. It is a different kind of fare which our minor minstrels shower down upon that wonderful appetite of youth, which doubtless cracks those rough-husked nuts of words with delighted eagerness, as we once drank in the sugared milk-and-water of a less pretending Helicon. After all, we suspect it is the youthful people who are the poets’ best audience. These heirs of Time, coming leisurely to their inheritance, have space for song by the way; but in the din and contest of life we want a more potent influence. If the poet has anything to say to us, he must even seize us by the strong hand, and compel our listening; for we are very unlike to pause of our own will, or take time to hear his music on any weaker argument than this.
And he too at last has gone away to join his old long-departed contemporaries, that old old man, with his classic rose-garland, from the classic table, where generations of men and poets have come and gone, a world of changing guests. He was not a great poet certainly, and his festive, and prosperous, and lengthened life called for no particular exercise of our sympathies; yet honour and gentle recollection be with the last survivor of the last race of Anakim, though he himself was not among the giants. The day has changed since that meridian flush which left a certain splendour of reflection upon Samuel Rogers, the last of that great family of song. Ours is only a twilight kind of radiance, however much we may make of it. It differs sadly from the full unclouded shining of that Day of the Poets which is past.