Athulf. I'll wait.
For a king's ransom would I not cut short
So good a work! I pray you, for how long?
Second Monk. For twice the De Profundis, sung in slow time.
Athulf. Please him to make it ten times, I will wait.
And could I be of use, this knotted trifle,
This dog-whip here has oft been worse employed.'
In his recent play, The Virgin Widow (1850), Mr Taylor declines from the promise of his earlier efforts. The preface suggests great things; but they are not forthcoming. There is much careful finish, much sententious rhetoric, much elegant description; but there is little of racy humour (the play is a 'romantic comedy'), little of poetical freshness, little of lively flesh and blood portraiture, and more of melodramatic expedience than dramatic construction. Neither comedy nor melodrama is our author's forte.
In 1836 Mr Taylor published The Statesman, a book which contained the 'views and maxims respecting the transaction of public business,' which had been suggested to its author by twelve years' experience of official life. He has since then allowed that it was wanting in that general interest which might possibly have been felt in the results of a more extensive and varied conversancy with public life.[9] In 1848 he produced Notes from Life, professedly a kind of supplemental volume to the former, embodying the conclusions of an attentive observation of life at large. The first essay investigates in detail the right measure and manner to be adopted in getting, saving, spending, giving, taking, lending, borrowing, and bequeathing 'money;' and a weighty, valuable essay it is, with no lack of golden grains and eke of diamond-dust in its composition. The thoughts are not given in the bullion lump, but are well refined, and having passed through the engraver's hands, they shine with the true polish, ring with the true sound. In terse, pregnant, and somewhat oracular diction, we are here instructed how to avoid the evils contingent upon bold commercial enterprise—how to guard against excesses of the accumulative instinct—how to exercise a thoroughly conscientious mode of regulating expenditure, eschewing prodigality, that vice of a weak nature, as avarice is of a strong one—how to be generous in giving; 'for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice, waste, on the contrary, comes always by self-indulgence'—how to withstand solicitations for loans, when the loans are to accommodate weak men in sacrificing the future to the present. The essay on Humility and Independence is equally good, and pleasantly demonstrates the proposition, that Humility is the true mother of Independence; and that Pride, which is so often supposed to stand to her in that relation, is in reality the step-mother by whom is wrought the very destruction and ruin of Independence. False humilities are ordered into court, and summarily convicted by this single-eyed judge, whose cross-examination of these 'sham respectabilities' elicits many a suggestive practical truth. There is more of philosophy and prudence than of romance in the excursus on Choice in Marriage; but the philosophy is shrewd and instructive, uttering many a homely hint of value in its way: as where we are reminded that if marrying for money is to be justified only in the case of those unhappy persons who are fit for nothing better, it does not follow that marrying without money is to be justified in others; and again, that the negotiations and transactions connected with marriage-settlements are eminently useful, as searching character and testing affection, before an irrevocable step be taken; and again, that when two very young persons are joined together in matrimony, it is as if one sweet-pea should be put as a prop to another. The essay on Wisdom is elevated and thoughtful, like most of the essayist's papers, but somewhat too heavy for miscellaneous readers. With his wonted clearness he distinguishes Wisdom from understanding, talents, capacity, ability, sagacity, sense, &c. and defines it as that exercise of the reason into which the heart enters—a structure of the understanding rising out of the moral and spiritual nature. Then follows a section on Children, which explodes not a few educational fallacies, and propounds certain articles of faith and practice wholesome for these times, though it will probably wear a prim and quakerish aspect to the admirers of Jean Paul's famous tractate[10] on the same theme. The concluding paper in this series, entitled The Life Poetic, is the liveliest, if not the most valuable of the six: it has, however, been charged, with considerable show of justice, with a tendency to strip genius of all that is individual and spontaneous, or to accredit it only 'when it moves abroad sedately, clad in the uniform of a peculiar college.' Mr Taylor's 'solicitous and premeditated formalism' of poetical doctrine is, it must be confessed, a little too strait-laced. The true poet is born, not made. Still, in their place, our author's dogmas have their use, and might, if duly marked and inwardly digested, annually deter many aspirants who are not poets from proving so incontestably to the careless public that negative fact.
Notes from Books followed within a few months, but met with a less cordial reception. Of the four essays comprised in this volume, three are reprinted contributions to the Quarterly Review, being criticisms on the poetry of Wordsworth and Aubrey de Vere; and worthily do they illustrate—those on Wordsworth at least—Mr Taylor's composite faculty of depth and delicacy in poetical exposition. Of Wordsworth's many and gifted commentators—among them Wilson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Lamb, Moir, Sterling—few have shewn a happier insight into the idiosyncrasy, or done more justice to the beauties of the patriarch of the Lakes. With Wordsworth for a subject, and the Quarterly Review for a 'door of utterance,' Mr Taylor is quite in his element. The fourth essay, on the Ways of the Rich and Great, is enriched with wise saws and modern instances. Its matériel is composed of ripe observation and reflective good sense; but the manner is objected to as marred by conceits of style—a sin not very safely to be committed by so stern a censor of it in others. His authoritative air in laying down the law is also occasionally unpleasing to some readers; and great as his tact in essay-writing is, he wants that easy grace and pervading bonhomie which imparts such a charm to the works of one with whom he has been erroneously identified—the anonymous author of Friends in Council. But, after all, he is one of those writers to whom our current literature is really indebted, and whose sage, sententious, and well-hammered thoughts may be profitably, as well as safely, commended to every thinking soul among us.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Notes from Life.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Literary Remains.