Nothing can be plainer than that our position, as a literary colony of Great Britain, leads us into wronging, indirectly, our own authors by exaggerating the merits of those across the water. Our most reliable critics extol—and extol without discrimination—such English compositions as, if written in America, would be either passed over without notice or unscrupulously condemned. Mr. Whipple, for example, whom I have mentioned in this connection with Mr. Jones is decidedly one of our most “reliable” critics. His honesty I dispute as little as I doubt his courage or his talents—but here is an instance of the want of common discrimination into which he is occasionally hurried, by undue reverence for British intellect and British opinion. In a review of “The Drama of Exile and Other Poems” by Miss Barrett, (now Mrs. Browning,) he speaks of the following passage as “in every respect faultless—sublime:”
Hear the steep generations how they fall
Adown the visionary stairs of Time,
Like supernatural thunders—far yet near,
Sowing their fiery echoes through the hills!
Now here, saying nothing of the affectation in “adown;” not alluding to the insoluble paradox of “far yet near;” not mentioning the inconsistent metaphor involved in the sowing of fiery echoes; adverting but slightly to the misusage of “like” in place of “as;” and to the impropriety of making any thing fall like thunder, which has never been known to fall at all; merely hinting, too, at the misapplication of “steep” to the “generations” instead of to the “stairs”—(a perversion in no degree justified by the fact that so preposterous a figure as synecdoche exists in the school-books:)—letting these things pass, we shall still find it difficult to understand how Mrs. Browning should have been led to think the principal idea itself—the abstract idea—the idea of tumbling down stairs, in any shape, or under any circumstances—either a poetical or a decorous conception. And yet Mr. Whipple speaks of it as “sublime.” That the lines narrowly missed sublimity, I grant:—that they came within a step of it, I admit; but, unhappily, the step is that one step which, time out of mind, has intervened between the sublime and the ridiculous. So true is this that any person—that even I—with a very partial modification of the imagery—a modification that shall not interfere with its richly spiritual tone—may elevate the passage into unexceptionability. For example:
Hear the far generations—how they crash
From crag to crag down the precipitous Time,
In multitudinous thunders that upstartle
Aghast, the echoes from their cavernous lairs