And there are other instances also.
But it is waste of argument to go on giving illustrations of Mr. De Vere's power to depict the external world; it is like proving Anacreon a love-poet. What we wish to call attention to is the nature, not the existence, of his talent for description. It seems to us that, throughout his works, the faculty of delineation is not the ordinary sensuous susceptibility of poets, but rather a clear, tender truthfulness in reproducing impressions alike of thought and sense. The somewhat unusual result from which we deduce this opinion is, that he describes quite as happily in the moral order as the physical. This has not been adequately noticed by his critics, His beautiful genre pictures appear to have absorbed almost all of the public attention. We think this is more than their due. Indeed, whenever he sets out to paint traits, Mr. De Vere is quite as sure to make a hit as in his landscape sketches. This volume chances to afford us one striking set of examples of this. There are in it three several summaries of the characteristics of different nations. One—the remarkable epitome of England in the sonnets on colonization—has been published in this magazine before, (Vol. iv. No. 19, p. 77.) The next we take from the "Farewell to Naples," (p. 70.) We think it will bear quoting, though it has been in print since 1855, and was written as long ago as 1844.
'From her whom genius never yet inspired,
Nor virtue raised, nor pulse heroic fired;
From her who, in the grand historic page,
Maintains one barren blank from age to age;
From her, with insect life and insect buzz,
Who, evermore unresting, nothing does;
From her who, with the future and the past
No commerce holds, no structure rears to last;
From streets where spies and jesters, side by side,
Range the rank markets, and their gains divide;
Where faith in art, and art in sense is lost,
And toys and gewgaws form a nation's boast;
Where Passion, from Affection's bond cut loose,
Revels in orgies of its own abuse;
And Appetite, from Passion's portals thrust,
Creeps on its belly to its grave in dust;
Where Vice her mask disdains, where Fraud is loud,
And naught but Wisdom dumb and Justice cowed;
Lastly, from her who, planted here unawed,
'Mid heaven-topped hills, and waters bright and broad,
From these but nerves more swift to err hath gained,
And the dread stamp of sanctities profaned,
And gilt not less with ruin, lives to show
That worse than wasted weal is wasted woe—
We part, forth issuing through her closing gate
With unreverting faces not ingrate."
Is this not stingingly true? If only the critics found it in Byron, would it not be inevitable in all the select readers and speakers, and rampant in the "Notes on France," "Letters from Italy," "Thoughts while Abroad," etc., which ministers are so sure to write, and which we hope congregations buy?
The other is a still stronger, and, coming from Mr. De Vere, a very bold as well as trenchant portraiture—no less than the English idea of Ireland. True, Mr. De Vere does not even pretend to agree with it, but that, an Irishman himself, and a devoted patriot, he can see her so exactly as others see her, makes it wonderfully good, and raises what would otherwise have been a mere success of exact expression, to the rank of a high imaginative effort.
"How strange a race, more apt to fly than walk;
Soaring yet slight; missing the good things round them,
Yet ever out of ashes raking gems;
In instincts loyal, yet respecting law
Far less than usage: changeful yet unchanged:
Timid yet enterprising: frank yet secret:
Untruthful oft in speech, yet living truth,
And truth in things divine to life preferring:
Scarce men; yet possible angels!—'Isle of Saints!'
Such doubtless was your land—again it might be—
Strong, prosperous, manly never! ye are Greeks
In intellect, and Hebrews in the soul:
The solid Roman heart, the corporate strength
Is England's dower!"
We cannot devise an addition that could complete this picture of the Sassenach's view of the Gael. It is to the life—the "absolute exemplar of the time." Only we fear that Mr. De Vere has furnished those who do not particularly love his country with rather an ugly citation against her, and Irishmen may perhaps complain of him for giving to such a powerful delineation the sanction of an Irish name. If so, it will be the highest compliment in the world; yet it has ever been a dangerous gift to be able to see both sides of the shield.
We have only suggested our belief, not asserted it as a fact, that Mr. De Vere's fullest power is in description; but the idea grows on us every year, and we wish he would set the question finally at rest in some future work. Let him for once in his life make this great gift of his the essential, instead of the incident, and write something purely descriptive.
There is another thing—rather a curious thing, perhaps—that we note in the choice of the old poems. In a former review, some little time since, we took occasion to speak of the chameleon-like way in which Mr. De Vere's style—always in its essence his own—unconsciously reflects his reading of certain of our best authors. There are poems that recall Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, and Landor, and Tennyson, and Shelley. But there are also others—many of them among his best—which are all himself. Consciously or unconsciously, Mr. De Vere has come back to these at the last, and they constitute a notable majority of those he has picked out for this volume. The ode on the ascent of the Apennines, the "Wanderer's Musings at Rome," the "Lines written under Delphi," the beautiful "Year of Sorrow," "The Irish Gael (alias Irish Celt) to the Irish Norman"—all these are of this class. Perhaps the poet has come to love the best those of his poems which hold the purest solution of his own nature, or perhaps it may be mere chance; only certain it is that the most characteristic of his pieces predominate very largely throughout.