It is so long a time since a poem of any serious pretensions has made its appearance before the British or American public, that we have almost ceased to look for new metrical productions, divided into books or cantos. We have been contented with the light, fugitive strains of the periodicals, and have not asked for grand overtures—such as used to absorb the whole interest of the reading public, twenty, thirty, fifty and more years ago. In the middle of the last century, a man, to be recognised as a poet, was required to issue some single work of a thousand lines. Quantity was more considered than quality; intellectual labor was judged of rather by the amount of its achievements than by their kind.
Poetry has at times been criticised by a different rule than Painting. That age never was, when an artist acquired a reputation in consequence of the number of his pictures: one gem of art has always been more highly esteemed than a million crystals. In all days past, as in the day present, it might be said of a single head by a master, small, faded, stained, yet beautiful through the rust of age,—“that little bit of canvass is worth more than a whole gallery of fresh portraits, though after living models, as beautiful as Aspasia, or as stately as Alcibiades.” But a solitary brief poem was never so valued in comparison with a voluminous production. Even now, formed and polished as the public taste pretends itself to be, there lurks with us that prejudice which more highly ranks the author of a book of verses than the author of a sonnet. Though the book may be as negative in merit as the correct hand of gentle dullness could make it, and the sonnet as perfect as the best that Petrarch wrote, in the intensest glow of his love and his genius—except by the few, the former would be regarded as the more arduous, the more commendable performance.
The philosophy of this prejudice, is a sort of respect mankind entertains for a constant fulfilment of the original curse. We love to see hard work done or indicated. We look at a mass of printed leaves and exclaim, “Goodness! what an industrious individual the writer must have been! How much he has accomplished!” It may be that, upon examination, his work may have added nothing to the available stock of literature; it may be that it will prove useless lumber, destined to dust and obscurity in men’s garrets, and not worth the corners it will encumber. “What of that? the author had to work hard to do it—didn’t he?” Yes! such is the question put by people who seem to love labor for its own sake. They look upon men of talent very much in the same light that old Girard of Philadelphia considered poor people who existed by the employment of their arms and legs.
At a season of distress, some day-laborers applied to Girard for assistance. There was a huge pile of bricks lying in the vicinity of the house of Dives. “Take up those bricks,” said he, “and place them yonder, and then I will pay you for the task.” The men obeyed; the bricks—to use a verb for which we are indebted to Dr. Noah Webster and the Georgia negroes—were toted from one position to another, and the stipulated price demanded. Girard paid it cheerfully. “But,” said the laborers, “what are we to do now? Must we be idle while we spend this money, and starve by and by? We shall come to you again in a week. Keep us employed—bid us perform another task.” “Yes,” said Girard. “Take up those bricks from the place where you have put them, and carry them back to the place whence you removed them.” Pretty much as Girard used the poor operatives does the public treat the man of genius. Let him write the immortal sonnet, bright and beautiful, to be fixed hereafter, a star in the firmament of fame, and his contemporaries, in reply to his demand for praise, will say, “What has he done? What book has he written? What is he the author of?”—They want to see work—honest labor, and plenty of it, though that labor be as useless as the toting of the bricks.
Not without some qualifications must these remarks be considered strictly true, with regard to the present age, or to our own country. There are facts to the contrary, though not sufficient to disprove the general truth of what we say. We have no poet, who is more generally, or more highly esteemed, than Halleck; and yet his truly great reputation has been built up on some four or six short pieces of verse. On the other hand, Mr. Sumner Lincoln Fairfield, has lumbered the bookseller’s lofts with ream after ream of printed paper, and nobody but an occasional crazy reviewer, calls such a dunce, a poet. Nevertheless, we maintain the verity of the general observation, that those poets have heretofore been most esteemed, who have done the most work. It is downright astonishing, how much some of them did do. We look over their long poems, with a sentiment of wonder, and reverence, and we are awfully perplexed to determine, how vast a length of time it must have taken these modern Cheopses, to build their pyramids. Hamlet’s account to Polonius, of the graybeard’s book he was reading, appears to us a pretty comprehensive description of many of these vast metrical diffusions—“words, words, words.” It exceeds our powers of conjecture, how the writers could have completed their whole task, so labors the line and so slow runs the verse. We have seen a sturdy blacksmith pound a piece of iron, for hours and hours, till it became as malleable as lead; we have seen a woodsawyer saw, and saw, and saw, up and down, down and up, till the very sight of him made us ready to drop with imaginary fatigue; thy still-beginning, never ending whirl, oh weary knife-grinder, have we also contemplated with feverish melancholy—still for the endurance of all these, have we been able satisfactorily to account; drilled by habit, ruled by habit, habit is to them a second nature. But for the perpetration of a long, tedious poem for the manufacture of verse after verse, the last drier and duller than the preceding, there is no possible manner of accounting. It is an infliction, which can be borne by neither gods, men nor columns. Your médiocre man may be forgiven for talking one into a paralysis, or writing prose, till every word acts like a mesmerist and puts you to sleep; but for his writing verses, there can be, there ought to be no forgiveness; he should be consigned to the cave of perpetual oblivion, and over its entrance should be inscribed, “Hope never enters here.”
Were we to follow in the track of reviewers in the Quarterlies, who always seem to think it necessary to make a considerable preliminary flourish to the solemn common-places they are about to utter, we should observe that the foregoing remarks had been elicited by a work on our table, entitled “Imagination, a poem in two parts, with other poems, by Louisa Frances Poulter.” But as the work did not call forth the remarks, we shall observe nothing of the kind. The moment we wrote the title of the poem, and saw that it consisted of nearly eleven hundred lines, we began to reflect that very few long poems had been written lately, and our pen scampered over the paper at a rail-road rate, till we reached the dépôt at the end of this paragraph.
Pausing here, we first look back over what we have said; it pleases us—let it stand, therefore, and let us now employ ourselves with reading Miss Poulter’s poem in two cantos. We have not the slightest dread of it—no! it seems a pleasant land, of which we have had delightful glimpses in a transient survey. With these glimpses we mean to entertain the reader, besides giving him an idea of the face of the country.
In limine, we ought to confess ourselves amiable critics, when we are called upon to pronounce on the works of a female writer, and more particularly of one who is a new claimant for distinction. It is our desire to encourage the intellectual efforts of the gentle sex, if for no better purpose, at least for that of inciting women to assert their claims to the honors and the rewards of authorship. These pages are scrutinized by many a brilliant pair of eyes, ready to flash indignation upon the slightest disparagement of female genius. Far be it from us to evoke from those mortal stars any other beams than those of softness and serenity. Lovely readers! smile therefore upon this article as kindly as upon the prettiest story in the Magazine, and think well of him who seeks to win no better guerdon than your approbation.
Miss Poulter has put upon her title-page a striking passage in French from some essay of Bernardin de St. Pierre, which may be thus literally translated. “Tasso, while travelling with a friend, one day ascended a very high mountain. When he had reached the summit, he exclaimed: ‘Seest thou these rugged rocks, these wild forests, this brook bordered with flowers, which winds through the valley, this majestic river, which rolls onward and onward till it bathes the walls of a hundred cities? Well, these rocks, these mountains, these walls, these cities, gods, men—lo! these are my poem!’ ” On the page immediately preceding the principal poem in the volume, “Imagination,” there appears the following from Stewart’s Outlines of Moral Philosophy, “One of the principal effects of a liberal education is to accustom us to withdraw our attention from the objects of our present perceptions, and to dwell at pleasure on the past, the absent and the future. How much it must enlarge in this way the sphere of our enjoyment or suffering is obvious: for (not to mention the recollection of the past) all that part of our happiness or misery, which arises from our hopes or our fears, derives its existence entirely from the power of our imagination.”
We are pleased with these quotations. They augur well for the original words that are to follow. They prepare the mind of the reader for something almost as good as they are. The talent, or rather tact of quoting well is no mean one; it is not possessed by many, scarcely possessed at all by those who say that a quotation should be as strictly appropriate as a title. It is enough that a quotation be one naturally appertaining to or suggestive per se of the subject matter. Mottoes, it should be remembered, are not texts, but simply prefixes, intended rather as ornaments than things of use. They are to books, chapters, and cantos, what jewels are to the clasps of a fair lady’s girdle, not indispensable to the clasps, but decorating them. In the choice of the jewels and the style of their setting the taste of the wearer is manifested.