Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes Part 38

With a keen eye, a very sharp tongue, a firm belief, doubtless, in the high church doctrines, and a decent reputation from the authors.h.i.+p of half-a-dozen novels, or other light works, Mrs. Trollope determined on no less an undertaking than to be the champion of oppressed Orthodoxy.

These are feeble arms for one who would engage in such a contest, but our fair Mrs. Trollope trusted entirely in her own skill, and the weapon with which she proposed to combat a strong party is no more nor less than this novel of _The Vicar of Wrexhill_. It is a great pity that the heroine ever set forth on such a foolish errand; she has only harmed herself and her cause (as a bad advocate always will), and had much better have remained home, pudding-making or stocking-mending, than have meddled with matters which she understands so ill.

In the first place (we speak it with due respect for the s.e.x), she is guilty of a fault which is somewhat too common among them; and having very little, except prejudice, on which to found an opinion, she makes up for want of argument by a wonderful fluency of abuse. A woman's religion is chiefly that of the heart, and not of the head. She goes through, for the most part, no tedious process of reasoning, no dreadful stages of doubt, no changes of faith: she loves G.o.d as she loves her husband--by a kind of instinctive devotion. Faith is a pa.s.sion with her, not a calculation; so that, in the faculty of believing, though they far exceed the other s.e.x, in the power of convincing they fall far short of them.

Oh! we repeat once more, that ladies would make puddings and mend stockings! that they would not meddle with religion (what is styled religion, we mean), except to pray to G.o.d, to live quietly among their families, and move lovingly among their neighbours! Mrs. Trollope, for instance, who sees so keenly the follies of the other party--how much vanity there is in Bible Meetings--how much sin even at Missionary Societies--how much cant and hypocrisy there is among those who desecrate the awful name of G.o.d, by mixing it with their mean interests and petty projects--Mrs. Trollope cannot see that there is any hypocrisy or bigotry on her part. She, who designates the rival party as false, and wicked, and vain--tracing all their actions to the basest motives, declaring their wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d to be only one general hypocrisy, their conduct at home one fearful scene of crime, is blind to the faults on her own side. Always bitter against the Pharisees, she does as the Pharisees do. It is vanity, very likely, which leads these people to use G.o.d's name so often, and to devote all to perdition who do not coincide in their peculiar notions. Is Mrs. Trollope less vain than they when she declares, and merely _declares_, her own to be the real creed, and stigmatises its rival so fiercely? Is Mrs. Trollope serving G.o.d, in making abusive licencious pictures of those who serve Him in a different way? Once, as Mrs. Trollope has read--it was a long time ago!--there was a woman taken in sin; the people brought her before a great Teacher of Truth, who lived in those days. Shall we not kill her? said they; the laws command that all adulteresses be killed. We can fancy a Mrs.

Trollope in the crowd, shouting, "oh, the wretch! oh, the abominable harlot! kill her, by all means--stoning is really too good for her!" But what did the Divine Teacher say? He was quite as anxious to prevent the crime as any Mrs. Trollope of them all; but he did not even make an allusion to it--he did not describe the manner in which the poor creature was caught--He made no speech to detail the indecencies which she committed, or to raise the fury of the mob against her--He said "let the man who is without sin himself throw the first stone!" Whereupon the Pharisees and Mrs. Trollope slunk away, for they knew they were no better than she. There was as great a sin in His eyes as that of the poor erring woman--it was the sin of pride.

Mrs. Trollope may make a licentious book, of which the heroes and heroines are all of the evangelical party; and it may be true, that there are scoundrels belonging to that party as to every other; but her shameful error has been in fixing upon the evangelical _cla.s.s_ as an object of satire, making them necessarily licentious and hypocritical, and charging everyone of them with the vices which belong to only a very few of all sects....

There are some books, we are told, in the libraries of Roman Catholic theologians, which, though written for the most devout purposes, are so ingeniously obscene as to render them quite dangerous for common eyes.

The groom, in the old story, had never learned the art of greasing horses' teeth, to prevent their eating oats, until the confessor, in interrogating him as to his sins, asked him the question. The next time the groom came to confess, he _had_ greased the horses' teeth. It was the holy father who taught him, by the very fact of warning him against it. By which we mean, that there are some scenes of which it is better not to speak at all.

Our fair moralist, however, has no such squeamishness. She will show up these odious evangelicals; she will expose them and chastise them, wherever they be. So have we seen, in that beautiful market in Thames Street, whither the mariners of England bring the glittering produce of their nets--so have we seen, we say, in Billingsgate, a nymph attacking another of her sisterhood. How keenly she detects and proclaims the number and enormity of her rival's faults! How eloquently she enlarges upon the gin she has drunk, the children she has confided to the parish, the watchmen whose noses she has broken, and the bridewells which she has visited in succession! No one can but admire the lady's eloquence and talent in conducting the case for the prosecution; no one will, perhaps, doubt the guilt of the hapless object on whom her wrath is vented. But, with all her rage for morality, had not that fair accused have better left the matter alone? That torrent of slang and oath, O nymph! falls ill from thy lips, which should never open but for a soft word or a smile; that accurate description of vice, sweet orator [-tress or-trix]! only shows that thou thyself art but too well acquainted with scenes which thy pure eyes should never have beheld. And when we come to the matter in dispute--a simple question of mackerel--O, Mrs. Trollope!

Why, why should you abuse other people's fish, and not content yourself with selling your _own_....

There can be little doubt as to the cleverness of this novel, but, coming from a women's pen, it is most odiously and disgustingly indecent. As a party attack, it is an entire failure; and as a representation of a very large portion of English Christians, a shameful and wicked slander.

BULWER'S "ERNEST MALTRAVERS"

To talk of _Ernest Maltravers_ now, is to rake up a dead man's ashes.

The poor creature came into the world almost still-born, and, though he has hardly been before the public for a month, is forgotten as much as _Rienzi_ or the _Disowned_. What a pity that Mr. Bulwer will not learn wisdom with age, and confine his attention to subjects at once more grateful to the public and more suitable to his own powers! He excels in the _genre_ of Paul de k.o.c.k, and is always striving after the style of Plato; he has a keen perception of the ridiculous and, like Liston or Cruikshank, and other comic artists, persists that his real vein is the sublime. What a number of sparkling magazine-papers, what an outpouring of fun and satire, might we have had from Neddy Bulwer, had he not thought fit to turn moralist, metaphysician, politician, poet, and be Edward Lytton, Heaven--knows--what Bulwer, Esquire and M.P., a dandy, a philosopher, a spouter at Radical meetings. We speak feelingly, for we knew the youth at Trinity Hall, and have a tenderness even for his tomfooleries. He has thrown away the better part of himself--his great inclination for the LOW, namely; if he would but leave off scents for his handkerchief, and oil for his hair; if he would but confine himself to three clean s.h.i.+rts a week, a couple of coats in a year, a beefsteak and onions for dinner, his beaker a pewter-pot, his carpet a sanded floor, how much might be made of him even yet! An occasional pot of porter too much--a black eye, in a tap-room fight with a carman--a night in the watch-house--or a surfeit produced by Welsh-rabbit and gin and beer, might, perhaps, redden his fair face and swell his slim waist; but the _mental_ improvement which he would acquire under such treatment-- the intellectual pluck and vigour which he would attain by the stout diet--the manly sports and conversation in which he would join at the Coal-Hole, or the Widow's, are far better for him than the feeble fribble of the Reform Club (not inaptly called "The Hole in the Wall"); the windy French dinners, which, as we take it, are his usual fare; and, above all, the unwholesome Radical garbage which form the political food of himself and his clique in the House of Commons.

For here is the evil of his present artificial courses--the humbug required to keep up his position as dandy, politician, and philosopher (in neither of which latter characters the man is in earnest), must get into _his heart_ at last; and then his trade is ruined. A little more politics and Plato, and the natural disappears altogether from Mr.

Bulwer's writings: the individual man becomes as undistinguishable amidst the farrago of philosophy in which he has chosen to envelope himself, as a cutlet in the sauces of a French cook. The idiosyncracy of the mutton perishes under the effects of the adjuncts: even so the moralising, which may be compared to the mushrooms, of Mr. Bulwer's style; the poetising, which may be likened unto the flatulent turnips and carrots; and the politics, which are as the gravy, reeking of filthy garlic, greasy with rancid oil;--even so, we say, pursuing this savoury simile to its fullest extent, the natural qualities of young Pelham--the wholesome and juicy _mutton of the mind_, is shrunk and stewed away.

Or, to continue in this charming vein of parable, the author of _Pelham_ may be likened to Beau Tibbs. Tibbs, as we all remember, would pa.s.s for a pink of fas.h.i.+on, and had a wife whom he presented to the world as a paragon of virtue and _ton_, and who was but the cast-off mistress of a lord. Mr. Bulwer's philosophy is his Mrs. Tibbs; he thrusts her forward into the company of her betters, as if her rank and reputation never admitted of a question. To all his literary undertakings this G.o.ddess of his accompanies him; what a cracked, battered truly she is! with a person and morals that would suit Vinegar yard, and a chast.i.ty that would be hooted in Drury Lane.

The morality which Mr. Bulwer has acquired in his researches, political and metaphysical, is of the most extraordinary nature. For one who is always preaching of Truth of Beauty, the dulness of his moral sense is perfectly ludicrous. He cannot see that the hero into whose mouth he places his favourite metaphysical gabble--his dissertations about the stars, the pa.s.sions, the Greek plays, and what not--his eternal whine about what he calls the good and the beautiful--is a fellow as mean and paltry as can be well imagined; a man of rant, and not of action; foolishly infirm of purpose, and strong only in desire; whose beautiful is a tawdry strumpet, and whose good would be crime in the eyes of an honest man. So much for the portrait of Ernest Maltravers: as for the artist, we cannot conceive a man to have failed more completely. He wishes to paint an amiable man, and he succeeds in drawing a scoundrel: he says he will give us the likeness of a genius, and it is only the picture of a _humbug_.

Ernest Maltravers is an eccentric and enthusiastic young man, to whom we are introduced upon his return from a German university. Fond of wild adventure and solitary rambles, we find him upon a heath, wandering alone, tired, and benighted. The two first chapters of the book are in Mr. Bulwer's very best manner; the description of the lone hut to which the lad comes--the ruffian who inhabits it--the designs which he has upon the life of his new guest, and the manner in which his daughter defeats them, are told with admirable liveliness and effect. The young man escapes, and with him the girl who had prevented his murder. Both are young, interesting, and tender hearted; she loves but him, and would die of starvation without him. Ernest Maltravers cannot resist the claim of so unprotected a creature; he hires a cottage for her, and a writing-master. He is a young man of genius, and generous dispositions; he is a Christian, and instructs the ignorant Alice in the awful truth of his religion; moreover he is deep in poetry, philosophy, and the German metaphysics. How should such a Christian instruct an innocent and beautiful child, his pupil? What should such a philosopher do? Why seduce her, to be sure! After a deal of namby-pamby Platonism, the girl, as Mr. Bulwer says, "goes to the deuce." The expression is as charming as the morality, and appears amidst a quant.i.ty of the very finest writing about the good and the beautiful, youth, love, pa.s.sion, nature and so forth. It is curious how rapidly one turns from good to bad in this book. How clever the descriptions are! how neatly some of the minor events and personalities are hit off! and yet, how astonis.h.i.+ngly vile and contemptible the chief part of it is!--that part, we mean, which contains the adventures of the hero, and, of course, the choice reflections of the author.

The declamations about virtue are endless, as soon as Maltravers appears upon the scene; and yet we find him committing the agreeable little _faux pas_ of which we have just spoken. In one place, we have him making violent love to another man's wife; in another place, raging for blood like a tiger and swearing for revenge....

It is curious and painful to read Mr. Bulwer's [philosophy], and to mark the easy vanity with which virtue is a.s.sumed here, self-knowledge arrogated, and a number of windy sentences, which really possess no meaning, are gravely delivered with all the emphasis of truth and the air of profound conviction.

"I have learned," cries our precious philosopher, "to lean on my own soul, and not look eleswhere [Transcriber's note: sic] for the reeds that a wind can break!" And what has he learned by leaning on his own soul? Is it to be happier than others? or to be better? Not he!--he is as wretched and wicked a dog as any unhung. He "leans on his own soul,"

and makes love to the Countess and seduces Alice Darvell. A ploughboy is a better philosopher and moralist than this mouthing Maltravers, with his boasted love of mankind (which reduces itself to a very coa.r.s.e love of _woman_kind), and his scorn of "the false G.o.ds and miserable creeds"

of the world, and his soul "lifting its crest to heaven!" A Catholic whipping himself before a stone-image, a Brahmin dangling on a hook, or standing on one leg for a year, has a higher notion of G.o.d than this ranting fool, who is always prating about his own perfections and his divine nature; the one is humble, at least, though blind; the other is proud of his very imperfections and glories in his folly. What does this creature know of virtue, who finds it _by leaning on his own soul_, forsooth? What does he know of G.o.d, who, in looking for him, can see but himself, steeped in sin, bloated and swollen with monstrous pride, and strutting before the world and the creator as a maker of systems, a layer down of morals, and a preacher of beauty and truth?...

[Some of the] characters are excellently drawn; how much better than "_their lips spake of sentiment, and their eyes applied it_!" How soon these philosophers begin ogling! how charmingly their unceasing gabble about beauty and virtue is exemplified in their actions! Mr. Bulwer's philosophy is like a French palace--it is tawdry, shady, splendid; but, _gare aux nez sensibles_! one is always reminded of the sewer. "Their lips spoke sentiment, and their eyes applied it." O you naughty, naughty Mr. Bulwer!

WILLIAM JOHN FOX

The dedicatory inscription in the volume of _The Monthly Repository_, in which the following review appears, will indicate--in a few words--the motives inspiring the editor, W. J. Fox, in his journalistic career:-- "To the Working People of Great Britain and Ireland; who, whether they produce the means of physical support and enjoyment, or aid the progress of moral, political, and social reform and improvement, are fellow-labourers for the well-being of the entire community."

_Pauline_ was published, when Browning was 21, at his aunt's expense. It secured only _one_ favourable notice, here printed; while the author and his sister deliberately destroyed the unsold copies.

W. J. FOX ON BROWNING

[From _The Monthly Repository_, 1833]

_Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession_. London, Saunders & Otley. 1833

The most deeply interesting adventures, the wildest vicissitudes, the most daring explorations, the mightiest magic, the fiercest conflicts, the brightest triumphs, and the most affecting catastrophes, are those of the spiritual world....

The knowledge of mind is the first of sciences; the records of its formation and workings are the most important of histories; and it is eminently a subject for poetical exhibition. The annals of a poet's mind are poetry. Nor has there ever been a genuine bard, who was not himself more poetical than any of his productions. They are emanations of his essence. He himself is, or has been, all that he truly and touchingly, _i.e._, poetically, describes. Wordsworth, indeed, never carried a pedlar's pack, nor did Byron ever command a pirate s.h.i.+p, or Coleridge shoot an albatross; but there were times and moods in which their thoughts intently realised, and identified themselves with the reflective wanderer, the impetuous Corsair, and the ancient mariner.

They felt _their_ feelings, thought _their_ thoughts, burned with _their_ pa.s.sions, dreamed _their_ dreams, and lived their lives, or died their deaths. In relation to his creations, the poet is the omnific spirit in whom they have their being. All their vitality must exist in his life. He only, in them, displays to us fragments of himself. The poem, in which a great poet should reveal the whole of himself to mankind would be a study, a delight, and a power, for which there is yet no parallel; and around which the n.o.blest creations of the n.o.blest writers would range themselves as subsidiary luminaries.

These thoughts have been suggested by the work before us, which, though evidently a hasty and imperfect sketch, has truth and life in it, which gave us the thrill, and laid hold of us with the power, the sensation of which has never yet failed us as a test of genius. Whoever the anonymous author may be, he is a poet. A pretender to science cannot always be safely judged of by a brief publication, for the knowledge of some facts does not imply the knowledge of other facts; but the claimant of poetic honours may generally be appreciated by a few pages, often by a few lines, for if they be poetry, he is a poet. We cannot judge of the house by the brick, but we can judge of the statue of Hercules by its foot. We felt certain of Tennyson, before we saw the book, by a few verses which had straggled into a newspaper; we are not less certain of the author of Pauline.

Pauline is the recipient of the confessions: the hero is as anonymous as the author, and this is no matter, for _poet_ is the t.i.tle both of the one and the other. The confessions have nothing in them which needs names: the external world is only reflected in them in its faintest shades; its influences are only described after they have penetrated into the intellect. We have never read anything more purely confessional. The whole composition is of the spirit, spiritual. The scenery is in the chambers of thought: the agencies are powers and pa.s.sions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another. And yet the composition is not dreamy; there is on it a deep stamp of reality. Still less is it characterised by coldness.

It has visions that we love to look upon, and tones that touch the inmost heart till it responds.

The poet's confessions are introduced with an a.n.a.lysis of his spiritual const.i.tution, in which he is described as having an intense consciousness of individuality, combined with a sense of power, a self-supremacy, and a "principle of restlessness which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all"; of this essential self, imagination is described as the characteristic quality; an imagination, steady and unfailing in its power. A "yearning after G.o.d," or supreme and universal good, unconsciously cherished through the earlier stages of the history, keeps this mind from utterly dissipating itself; and, which seems to us the only point in which the coherence fails, there is added an unaptness for love, a mere perception of the beautiful, the perception being felt more precious than its object....

And now when he has run the whole toilsome yet giddy round and arrived at the goal, there arises, even though that goal be religion, or because it is religion, a yearning after human sympathies and affections, which would not have a.s.sorted with any state or moment of the previous experience; he could not have loved before; at one time it would have been only a fancy, a cold, and yet perhaps extravagant imagining; at another, a low and selfish pa.s.sion. Some souls are purified _by_ love, others are purified _for_ love. Oth.e.l.lo needed not Desdemona to listen to his tale of disastrous chances; they were only external perils, rapid by elevated station; but the mind that has gone through more than his vicissitudes, been in deeper dangers, and deadlier struggles, even when it rests at last in a far higher repose and dignity, yearns for some one who will "seriously incline" to listen to the "strange eventful history," one who will sympathise and soothe, who will receive the confession, and give the absolution of heaven its best earthly ratification, that of a pure and loving heart. The poem is addressed to Pauline; with her it begins, and ends; and her presence is felt throughout, as that of a second conscience, wounded by evil, but never stern, and incorporate in a form of beauty, which blends and softens the strong contrasts of different portions of the poem, so that all might be murmured by the breath of affection.

The author cannot expect such a poem as this to be popular, to make a "hit," to produce a "sensation." The public are but slow in recognising the claims of Tennyson whom in some respects he resembles; and the common eye scarcely yet discerns among the laurel-crowned, the form of Sh.e.l.ley, who seems (how justly, we stop not now to discuss), to have been the G.o.d of his early idolatory. Whatever inspiration may have been upon him from that deity, the mysticism of the original oracles has been happily avoided. And whatever resemblance he may bear to Tennyson (a fellow wors.h.i.+pper probably at the same shrine) he owes nothing of the perhaps inferior melody of his verse to an employment of archaisms which it is difficult to defend from the charge of affectation. But he has not given himself the chance for popularity which Tennyson did, and which it is evident that he easily might have done. His poem stands alone, with none of those light but taking accompaniments, songs that sing themselves, sketches that everybody knows, light little lyrics, floating about like humming birds, around the trunk and foliage of the poem itself; and which would attract so many eyes, and delight so many ears, that will be slow to perceive the higher beauty of that composition, and to whom a sycamore is no sycamore, unless it be "musical with bees."

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

(1785-1859)

De Quincey has been said to have "taken his place in our literature as the author of about 150 magazine articles," and, though chiefly remembered by his _Confessions of an Opium Eater_ and by his wonderful experiments in "impa.s.sioned prose," there can be no question that his critical work occupied much of his attention, and was nearly always original. In many respects his point of view was perverse, and towards his contemporaries occasionally spiteful; while his tendency to dwell upon disputed points was apt to obscure the general impression.

It is interesting to compare his unmeasured condemnation of Pope with Kingsley's eulogy: since both were, more or less, directly inspired by the contrast of eighteenth century correctness to the poetical gospel of the Lake Poets. From the two articles we can obtain a fair and emphatic statement of "both sides of the case."

DE QUINCEY ON POPE

[From _Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_, May, 1851]