Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes Part 37

Alexander Smith (1830-1867) was a poet and essayist of some distinction; though A. H. Clough also criticises his exclusive devotion to the "writers of his own immediate time"; and calls him "the latest disciple of the school of Keats." The volume of essays ent.i.tled _Dreamthorp_ "ent.i.tles him to a place among the best writers of English prose."

ANONYMOUS

There is a similarity, and a difference, between this summary of Christmas literature and Thackeray's. The personal criticism lacks his special geniality, revealing rather a tone which would have perfectly suited Blackwood or the _Quarterly_. Lytton was a favourite subject of abuse to his contemporaries.

THACKERAY ON d.i.c.kENS

[From "A Box of Novels," _Fraser's Magazine_, February, 1844]

MR. t.i.tMARSH, in Switzerland, to MR. YORKE

...This introduction, then, will have prepared you for an exceedingly humane and laudatory notice of the packet of works which you were good enough to send me, and which, though they doubtless contain a great deal that the critic would not write (from the extreme delicacy of his taste and the vast range of his learning) also contain, between ourselves, a great deal that the critic _could_ not write if he would ever so; and this is a truth which critics are sometimes apt to forget in their judgments of works of fiction. As a rustical boy, hired at twopence a week, may fling stones at the blackbirds and drive them off and possibly hit one or two, yet if he get into the hedge and begin to sing, he will make a wretched business of the music, and Labin and Colin and the dullest swains of the village will laugh egregiously at his folly; so the critic employed to a.s.sault the poet.... But the rest of the simile is obvious, and will be apprehended at once by a person of your experience.

The fact is, that the blackbirds of letters--the harmless, kind singing creatures who line the hedge-sides and chirp and twitter as nature bade them (they can no more help singing, these poets, than a flower can help smelling sweet), have been treated much too ruthlessly by the watch-boys of the press, who have a love for flinging stones at the little innocents, and pretend that it is their duty, and that every wren or sparrow is likely to destroy a whole field of wheat, or to turn out a monstrous bird of prey. Leave we these vain sports and savage pastimes of youth, and turn we to the benevolent philosophy of maturer age.

And now there is but one book left in the box, the smallest one, but oh!

how much the best of all. It is the work of the master of all the English humourists now alive; the young man who came and took his place calmly at the head of the whole tribe, and who has kept it. Think of all we owe Mr. d.i.c.kens since these half-dozen years, the store of happy hours that he has made us pa.s.s, the kindly and pleasant companions whom he has introduced to us, the harmless laughter, the generous wit, the frank, manly, human love which he has taught us to feel! Every month of these years has brought us some kind token from this delightful genius.

His books may have lost in art, perhaps, but could we afford to wait?

Since the days when the _Spectator_ was produced by a man of kindred mind and temper, what books have appeared that have taken so affectionate a hold of the English public as these? They have made millions of rich and poor happy; they might have been locked up for nine years, doubtless, and pruned here and there, and improved (which I doubt) but where would have been the reader's benefit all this time, while the author was elaborating his performance? Would the communication between the writer and the public have been what it is now--something continual, confidential, something like personal affection? I do not know whether these stories are written for future ages; many sage critics doubt on this head. There are always such conjurors to tell literary fortunes; and, to my certain knowledge, Boz, according to them, has been sinking regularly these six years. I doubt about that mysterious writing for futurity which certain big wigs prescribe. Snarl has a chance, certainly. His works, which have not been read in this age, _may_ be read in future; but the receipt for that sort of writing has never as yet been clearly ascertained. Shakespeare did not write for futurity, he wrote his plays for the same purpose which inspires the pen of Alfred Bunn, Esquire, viz., to fill his Theatre Royal. And yet we read Shakespeare now. Le Sage and Fielding wrote for their public; and through the great Dr. Johnson put his peevish protest against the fame of the latter, and voted him "a dull dog, sir,--a low fellow," yet somehow Harry Fielding has survived in spite of the critic, and Parson Adams is at this minute as real a character, as much loved by us as the old doctor himself. What a n.o.ble, divine power of genius this is, which, pa.s.sing from the poet into his reader's soul, mingles with it, and there engenders, as it were, real creatures; which is as strong as history, which creates beings that take their place besides nature's own. All that we know of Don Quixote or Louis XIV we got to know in the same way--out of a book. I declare I love Sir Roger de Coverley quite as much as Izaak Walton, and have just as clear a consciousness of the looks, voice, habit, and manner of being of the one as of the other.

And so with regard to this question of futurity; if any benevolent being of the present age is imbued with a desire to know what his great-great-grandchild will think of this or that author--of Mr. d.i.c.kens especially, whose claims to fame have raised the question--the only way to settle it is by the ordinary historic method. Did not your great-great-grandfather love and delight in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?

Have they lost their vitality by their age? Don't they move laughter and awaken affection now as three hundred years ago? And so with Don Pickwick and Sancho Weller, if their gentle humours and kindly wit, and hearty benevolent natures, touch us and convince us, as it were, now, why should they not exist for our children as well as for us, and make the twenty-fifth century happy, as they have the nineteenth? Let Snarl console himself, then, as to the future.

As for the _Christmas Carol_, or any other book of a like nature which the public takes upon itself to criticise, the individual critic had quite best hold his peace. One remembers what Buonaparte replied to some Austrian critics, of much correctness and ac.u.men, who doubted about acknowledging the French republic. I do not mean that the _Christmas Carol_ is quite as brilliant or self-evident as the sun at noonday; but it is so spread over England by this time, that no sceptic, no _Fraser's Magazine_,--no, not even the G.o.dlike and ancient _Quarterly_ itself (venerable, Saturnian, big-wigged dynasty!) could review it down.

"Unhappy people! deluded race!" One hears the cauliflowered G.o.d exclaim, mournfully shaking the powder out of his ambrosial curls, "What strange new folly is this? What new deity do you wors.h.i.+p? Know ye what ye do?

Know ye that your new idol hath little Latin and less Greek? Know ye that he has never tasted the birch at Eton, nor trodden the flags of Carfax, nor paced the academic flats of Trumpington? Know ye that in mathematics, or logic, this wretched ignoramus is not fit to hold a candle to a wooden spoon? See ye not how, from describing law humours, he now, forsooth, will attempt the sublime? Discern ye not his faults of taste, his deplorable propensity to write blank verse? Come back to your ancient, venerable, and natural instructors. Leave this new, low and intoxicating draught at which ye rush, and let us lead you back to the old wells of cla.s.sic lore. Come and repose with us there. We are your G.o.ds; we are the ancient oracles, and no mistake. Come listen to us once more, and we will sing to you the mystic numbers of _as in presenti_ under the arches of the _Pons asinorum_." But the children of the present generation hear not; for they reply, "Rush to the Strand, and purchase five thousand more copies of the _Christmas Carol_."

In fact, one might as well detail the plot of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ or _Robinson Crusoe_, as recapitulate here the adventures of Scrooge the miser, and his Christmas conversion. I am not sure that the allegory is a very complete one, and protest, with the cla.s.sics, against the use of blank verse in prose; but here all objections stop. Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this? It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness. The last two people I heard speak of it were women; neither knew the other, or the author, and both said, by way of criticism, "G.o.d bless him!" A Scotch philosopher, who nationally does not keep Christmas, on reading the book, sent out for a turkey, and asked two friends to dine--this is a fact! Many men were known to sit down after perusing it, and write off letters to their friends, not about business, but out of their fulness of heart, and to wish old acquaintances a happy Christmas. Had the book appeared a fortnight earlier, all the prize cattle would have been gobbled up in pure love and friends.h.i.+p, Epping denuded of sausages, and not a turkey left in Norfolk. His royal highness's fat stock would have fetched unheard of prices, and Alderman Bannister would have been tired of slaying. But there is a Christmas for 1844 too; the book will be as early then as now, and so let speculators look out.

As for TINY TIM, there is a certain pa.s.sage in the book regarding that young gentleman, about which a man should hardly venture to speak in print or in public, any more than he would of any other affections of his private heart. There is not a reader in England but that little creature will be a bond of union between the author and him; and he will say of Charles d.i.c.kens, as the woman just now, "G.o.d BLESS HIM!" What a feeling is this for a writer to be able to inspire, and what a reward to reap.

M. A. T.

CHARLES KINGSLEY ON ALEXANDER SMITH AND ALEXANDER POPE

[From _Fraser's Magazine_, October, 1853]

_Poems_, by ALEXANDER SMITH. London, Bogue. 1853

On reading this little book, and considering all the exaggerated praise and exaggerated blame which have been lavished on it, we could not help falling into many thoughts about the history of English poetry for the last forty years, and about its future destiny. Great poets, even true poets, are becoming more and more rare among us. There are those even who say that we have none; an a.s.sertion which, as long as Mr. Tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty of denying. But, were he, which Heaven forbid, taken from us, whom have we to succeed him? And he, too, is rather a poet of the sunset than of the dawn--of the autumn than of the spring. His gorgeousness is that of the solemn and fading year; not of its youth, full of hope, freshness, gay and unconscious life. Like some stately hollyhock or dahlia of this month's gardens, he endures while all other flowers are dying; but all around is winter--a mild one, perhaps, wherein a few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on; but, like all mild winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, too, are not without their gaudiness, even their beauty, although bred only from the decay of higher organisms, the plagiarists of the vegetable world....

"What matter, after all?" one says to oneself in despair, re-echoing Mr.

Carlyle. "Man was not sent into this world to write poetry. What we want is truth--what we want is activity. Of the latter we have enough in all conscience just now. Let the former need be provided for by honest and righteous history, and as for poets, let the dead bury their dead." ...

And yet, after all, man will write poetry, in spite of Mr. Carlyle: nay, beings who are not men, but mere forked radishes, will write it. Man is a poetry-writing animal. Perhaps he was meant to be one. At all events, he can no more be kept from it than from eating. It is better, with Mr.

Carlyle's leave, to believe that the existence of poetry indicates some universal human hunger, whether after "the beautiful," or after "fame,"

or after the means of paying butchers' bills, and accepting it as a necessary evil which must be committed, to see that it be committed as well, or at least a little ill, as possible. In excuse of which we may quote Mr. Carlyle against himself, reminding him of a saying in Goethe once bepraised by him in print,--"we must take care of the beautiful for the useful will take care of itself."

And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his _Dunciad_, did the beautiful require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care of itself, and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care of it evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this present time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith's poem is to be taken as a fair expression of "the public taste."

Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander Smith is not the object of our reproaches: but Mr. Smith's models and flatterers. Against him we have nothing whatever to say; for him, very much indeed....

What if he has often copied.... He does not more than all schools have done, copy their own masters.... We by no means agree in the modern outcry for "originality." ...

As for manner, he does sometimes, in imitating his models, out-Herod Herod. But why not? If Herod be a worthy king, let him be by all means out-Heroded, if any man can do it. One cannot have too much of a good thing. If it be right to bedizen verses with metaphors and similes which have no reference, either in tone or in subject, to the matter in hand, let there be as many of them as possible. If a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's harness maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin and severe simplicity--not to say utility, and comfort. If poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, as unlike English: as ungrammatical, abrupt, insolved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphyric, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti; which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to ill.u.s.trate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. If Marino and Cowley be greater poets than Ariosto and Milton, let young poets imitate the former with might and main, and avoid spoiling their style by any perusal of the too-intelligible common sense of the latter. If Byron's moral (which used to be thought execrable) be really his great excellence, his style (which used to be thought almost perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us have his moral without his style, his matter without his form; or--that we may be sure of never falling for a moment into his besetting sin of terseness, grace, and completeness--without any form at all. If poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, Virgil or Horace, Shakespeare or Spenser, Dante or Ta.s.so, let those too idolised names be rased henceforth from the calendar; let the _Ars Poetica_, be consigned to flames by Mr. Calcraft, and Bartinus Scriblerus's _Art of Sinking_ placed forthwith on the list of the Committee of the Council for Education, that not a working man in England may be ignorant that, whatsoever superst.i.tions about art may have haunted the benighted heathens who built the Parthenon, _nous avons changes tout cela_. In one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style in which almost everyone has been trying to write it since Pope and plain sense went out, and Sh.e.l.ley and the seventh heaven came in; let it be so written: and let him who most perfectly so "sets the age to music," be presented by the a.s.sembled guild of critics, not with the obsolete and too cla.s.sical laurel, but with an electro-plated bra.s.s medal, bearing the due inscription, _Ars est nescire artem_. And when, in twelve months' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps descried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.

In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded; naturalness produced by studious art; daring sublimity by strict self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue among poetasters, by honest faith in G.o.d....

Yes, Pope knew, as well as Wordsworth and our "Naturalisti," that no physical fact was so mean or coa.r.s.e as to be below the dignity of poetry--when in its right place. He could draw a pathos and sublimity out of the dirty inn-chamber, such as Wordsworth never elicited from tubs and daffodils--because he could use them according to the rules of art, which are the rules of sound reason and of true taste....

The real cause of the modern vagueness is rather to be found in shallow and unsound culture, and in that inability, or carelessness about seeing any object clearly, which besets our poets just now; as the cause of antique clearness lies in the n.o.bler and healthier manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of thought, the sounder philosophic and critical training which enabled Spenser and Milton to draw up a state paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics, with the same manful possession of their subject which gives grace and completeness to the _Penseroso_ or the _Epithalmion_. And if our poets have their doubts, they should remember, that those to whom doubt and enquiry are real and stern, are not inclined to sing about them till they can sing poems of triumph over them. There has no temptation taken our modern poets save that which is common to man--the temptation of wis.h.i.+ng to make the laws of the universe and of art fit them, as they do not feel inclined to make themselves fit the laws, or care to find them out....

The "poetry of doubt," however pretty, would stand us in little stead if we were threatened with a second Armada. It will conduce little to the valour, "virtues," manhood of any Englishman to be informed by any poet, even in the most melodious verse, ill.u.s.trated by the most startling and pan-cosmic metaphors, "See what a highly organised and peculiar stomach-ache I have had! Does it not prove indisputably that I am not as other men are?" What gospel there can be in such a message to any honest man who has either to till the earth, plan a railroad, colonise Australia, or fight the despots, is hard to discover. Hard indeed to discover how this most practical, and therefore most epical of ages, is to be "set to music," when all those who talk about so doing persist obstinately in poring, with introverted eyes, over the state of their own digestion, or creed.

What man wants, what art wants, perhaps what the maker of the both wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other men are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language which all men can understand. This is the only road to that gift of prophecy which most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to arrogate to themselves....

There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the commonsense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge. Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether fragmentary-- _disjecta membra poetarum_; they need some uniting idea. And what idea?

Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. Nevertheless we answer simply. What our poets want is faith. There is little or no faith nowadays. And without faith there can be no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm, coherent belief....

In the meanwhile, poets write about poets, and poetry, and guiding the age, and curbing the world, and waking it, and thrilling it, and making it start, and weep, and tremble, and self-conceit only knows what else; and yet the age is not guided, or the world curbed, or thrilled, or waked, or anything else, by them. Why should it be? Curb and thrill the world? The world is just now a most practical world; and these men are utterly unpractical. The age is given up to physical science: these men disregard and outrage it in every page by their false a.n.a.logies....

Let the poets of the new school consider carefully Wolfe's "Sir John Moore," Campbell's "Hohenlinden," "Mariners of England," and "Rule Britannia," Hood's "Song of the s.h.i.+rt" and "Bridge of Sighs," and then ask themselves, as men who would be poets, were it not better to have written any one of these glorious lyrics than all which John Keats has left behind him; and let them be sure that, howsoever they may answer the question to themselves, the sound heart of the English people has already made its choice, and that when that beautiful "Hero and Leander," in which Hood has outrivalled the conceit-mongers at their own weapons, by virtue of that very terseness, clearness, and manliness which they neglect, has been gathered to the limbo of the Crashawes and Marines, his "Song of the s.h.i.+rt" and his "Bridge of Sighs," will be esteemed by great new English nations far beyond the seas, for what they are--two of the most n.o.ble lyric poems ever written by an English pen.

If our poetasters talk with Wordsworth of the dignity and pathos of the commonest human things, they will find them there in perfection; if they talk about the cravings of the new time, they will find them there. If they want the truly sublime and awful, they will find them there also.

But they will find none of their own favourite concetti; hardly even a metaphor; no taint of this new poetic diction into which we have now fallen, after all our abuse of the far more manly and sincere "poetic diction" of the eighteenth century; they will find no loitering by the way to argue and moralise, and grumble at Providence, and show off the author's own genius and sensibility; they will find, in short, two real works of art, earnest, melodious, self-forgetful, knowing clearly what they want to say, saying it in the shortest, the simplest, the calmest, the most finished words. Saying it--rather taught to say it. For if that "divine inspiration of poets," of which the poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have, indeed, as all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from an unrighteous man to a righteous G.o.d, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems to be that mere pa.s.sionate sensibility, which our modern Draco once described when speaking of poor John Keats, as "an infinite hunger after all manner of pleasant things, crying to the universe, 'oh, that thou wert one great lump of sugar, that I might suck thee!'"

ANONYMOUS

NOVELS FOR CHRISTMAS, 1837

[From _Fraser's Magazine_, January, 1838]

If[1] against the inroads of the evangelical party the orthodox church has need of a defender, it hardly would wish, we should think, to be a.s.sisted _tali auxilio_. Mrs. Trollope has not exactly the genius which is best calculated to support the Church of England, or to argue upon so grave a subject as that on which she has thought proper to write.

[1] _The Vicar of Wrexhill_. By Mrs. Trollope. London, 1837.