Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

has not some strangeness in its proportion." But whether obscure, original, or quaint, he was at all times sincere.

affectations.

He had no

From the ruins of Shelley there sprang into existence, affronting the Heavens, a tottering and fantastic pagoda, in which the salient angles, tipped with mad jangling bells, were the idiosyncratic faults of the great original—faults which cannot be called such in view of his purposes, but which are monstrous when we regard his works as addressed to mankind. A "school" arose— if that absurd term must still be employed—a school—a system of rules—upon the basis of the Shelley who had none. Young men innumerable, dazzled with the glare and bewildered with the bizarrerie of the divine lightning that flickered through the clouds of the Prometheus, had no trouble whatever in heaping up imitative vapors, but, for the lightning, were content, perforce, with its spectrum, in which the bizarrerie appeared without the fire. Nor were great and mature minds unimpressed by the contemplation of a greater and more mature; and thus gradually were interwoven into this school of all Lawlessness—of obscurity, quaintness, exaggeration—the misplaced didacticism of Wordsworth, and the even more preposterously anomalous metaphysicianism of Coleridge. Matters were now fast verging to their worst, and at length, in Tennyson, poetic inconsistency attained its extreme. But it was precisely this extreme (for the greatest error and the greatest truth are scarcely two points in a circle)—it was this extreme which, following the law of all extremes, wrought in him—in Tennyson—a natural and inevitable revulsion, leading him first to contemn and secondly to investigate his early manner, and, finally, to winnow from its magnificent elements the truest and purest of all poetical styles. But not even yet is the process complete; and for this reason in part, but chiefly on account of the mere fortuitousness of that mental and moral combination which shall unite in one person (if ever it shall) the Shelleyan abandon, the Tennysonian poetic sense, the most profound instinct of Art, and the sternest Will properly to blend and vigorously to control all;—chiefly, we say, because such combination of antagonisms must be purely fortuitous, has the world never

yet seen the noblest of the poems of which it is possible that it may be put in possession.

[ocr errors]

And yet Miss Barrett has narrowly missed the fulfilment of these conditions. Her poetic inspiration is the highest—we can conceive nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure in itself, but has been contaminated by pedantic study of false models —a study which has the more easily led her astray, because she placed an undue value upon it as rare—as alien to her character of woman. The accident of having been long secluded by ill health from the world has affected, moreover, in her behalf, what an innate recklessness did for Shelley—has imparted to her, if not precisely that abandon to which I have referred, at least a something that stands well in its stead--a comparative independence of men and opinions with which she did not come personally in contact a happy audacity of thought and expression never before known in one of her sex. It is, however, this same accident of ill health, perhaps, which has invalidated her original Will—diverted her from proper individuality of purpose—and seduced her into the sin of imitation. Thus, what she might have done, we cannot altogether determine. What she has actually accomplished is before us. With Tennyson's works beside' her, and a keen appreciation of them in her soul—appreciation too keen to be discriminative ;—with an imagination even more vigorous than his, although somewhat less ethereally delicate; with inferior art and more feeble volition; she has written poems such as he could not write, but such as he, under her conditions of ill health and seclusion, would have written during the epoch of his pupildom in that school which arose out of Shelley, and from which, over a disgustful gulf of utter incongruity and absurdity, lit only by miasmatic flashes, into the broad open meadows of Natural Art and Divine Genius, he—Tennyson—is at once the bridge and the transition.

!

R. H. HORNE.*

Mr. R. H. Horne, the author of the "Orion," has, of late years, acquired a high and extensive home reputation, although, as yet, he is only partially known in America. He will be remembered, however, as the author of a very well-written Introduction to Black's Translation of Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," and as a contributor with Wordsworth, Hunt, Miss Barrett, and others, to “ Chaucer Modernized." He is the author, also, of "Cosmo de Medici," of "The Death of Marlowe," and, especially, of "Gregory the Seventh," a fine tragedy, prefaced with an "Essay on Tragic Influence." "Orion" was originally advertised to be sold for a farthing; and, at this price, three large editions were actually sold. The fourth edition (a specimen of which now lies before us) was issued at a shilling, and also sold. A fifth is promised at half a crown; this likewise, with even a sixth at a crown, may be disposed of—partly through the intrinsic merit of the work itself—but chiefly through the ingenious novelty of the original price.

We have been among the earliest readers of Mr. Horne—among the most earnest admirers of his high genius ;—for a man of high, of the highest genius, he unquestionably is. With an eager wish to do justice to his "Gregory the Seventh," we have never yet found exactly that opportunity we desired. Meantime, we looked, with curiosity, for what the British critics would say of a work which, in the boldness of its conception, and in the fresh originality of its management, would necessarily fall beyond the routine of their customary verbiage. We saw nothing, however, that either could or should be understood—nothing, certainly, that was worth understanding. The tragedy itself was, unhappily, not devoid of the ruling cant of the day, and its critics (that cant incarnate) took their cue from some of its infected passages, and proceeded forthwith to rhapsody and aesthetics, by way of giving

*Orion: an Epic Poem in Three Books. By R. H. Horne. Fourth Edition. London: Published by J. Miller.

VOL. III.-18.

a common-sense public an intelligible idea of the book. By the "cant of the day" we mean the disgusting practice of putting on the airs of an owl, and endeavoring to look miraculously wise; —the affectation of second sight—of a species of ecstatic prescience of an intensely bathetic penetration into all sorts of mysteries, psychological ones in especial;—an Orphic—an ostrich affectation, which buries its head in balderdash, and, seeing nothing itself, fancies, therefore, that its preposterous carcass is not t visible object of derision for the world at large.

Of "Orion" itself, we have, as yet, seen few notices in the British periodicals, and these few are merely repetitions of the old jargon. All that has been said for example, might be summed up in some such paragraph as this:

"Orion' is the earnest outpouring of the oneness of the psychological Man. It has the individuality of the true Singleness. It is not to be regarded as a Poem, but as a Work—as a multiple THEOGONY- -as a manifestation of the Works and the Days. It is a pinion in the Progress—a wheel in the Movement that moveth ever and goeth always--a mirror of Self-Inspection, held up by the Seer of the Age essential—of the Age in esse— for the Seers of the Ages possible—in posse. We hail a brother in the work."

Of the mere opinions of the donkeys who bray thus—of their mere dogmas and doctrines, literary, asthetical, or what not—we know little, and, upon our honor, we wish to know less. Occupied, Laputically, in their great work of a progress that never progresses, we take it for granted, also, that they care as little about ours. But whatever the opin..ons of these people may be--however portentous the "IDEA" which they have been so long threatening to "evolve "—we still think it clear that they take a very roundabout way of evolving it. The use of Language is in the promulgation of Thought. If a man—if an Orphicist—or a Seer— or whatever else he may choose to call himself, while the rest of the world calls him an ass—if this gentleman have an idea which he does not understand himself, the best thing he can do is to say nothing about it; for, of course, he can entertain no hope that what he, the Seer, cannot comprehend, should be comprehended by the mass of common humanity; but if he have an idea which

is actually intelligible to himself, and if he sincerely wishes to ren der it intelligible to others, we then hold it as indisputable that he should employ those forms of speech which are the best adapted to further his object. He should speak to the people in that people's ordinary tongue. He should arrange words, such as are habitually employed for the several preliminary and introductory ideas to be conveyed--he should arrange them in collocations such as those in which we are accustomed to see those words arranged. But to all this the Orphicist thus replies: "I am a Seer. My Idea—the idea which by providence I am especially commissioned to evolve—is one so vast—so novel—that ordinary words, in ordinary collocations, will be insufficient for its comfortable evolution." Very true. We grant the vastness of the Idea—it is manifested in the sucking of the thumb—but, then, if ordinary language be insufficient—ordinary language which men understand. —a fortiori will be insufficient that inordinate language which no man has ever understood, and which any well-educated baboon would blush in being accused of understanding. The "Seer," therefore, has no resource but to oblige mankind by holding his tongue, and suffering his Idea to remain quietly "unevolved," until some Mesmeric mode of intercommunication shall be invented, whereby the antipodal brains of the Seer and of the man of Common Sense shall be brought into the necessary rapport. Meantime we earnestly ask if bread-and-butter be the vast Idea in question—if bread-and-butter be any portion of this vast Idea; for we have often observed that when a Seer has to speak of even so usual a thing as bread-and-butter, he can never be induced to mention it outright. He will, if you choose, say anything and everything but bread and-butter. He will consent to hint at buckwheat cake. He may even accommodate you so far as to insinuate oatmeal porridge--but, if bread-and-butter be really the matter intended, we never yet met the Orphicist who could get out the three individual words "bread-and-butter."

We have already said that "Gregory the Seventh" was unhappily infected with the customary cant of the day--the cant of the muddle-pates who dishonor a profound and ennobling philosophy by styling themselves transcendentalists. In fact, there are few highly sensitive or imaginative intellects for which

« ZurückWeiter »