E470900A. General Review Essay.
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, September 1847, pp. 620–625.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 14, 380–385.
In selecting Mrs. Hemans as our first specimen of Female Authors, we did so avowedly, because she seemed to us the most feminine writer of the day. We now select Mrs. Browning for the opposite reason, that she is, or at least is said by many to be, the most masculine of our female writers.
To settle the respective spheres and calibres of the male and the female mind is one of the most difficult of philosophical problems. To argue, merely, that because the mind of woman has never hitherto produced a “Paradise Lost,” or a “Principia,” it is therefore for ever incapable of producing similar masterpieces, seems to us unfair, for various reasons. In the first place, how many ages elapsed e’er the male mind realised such prodigies of intellectual achievement? And do not they still stand unparalleled and almost unapproached? And were it not as reasonable to assert that man as that woman can renew them no more? Secondly, because the premise is granted—that woman has not—does the conclusion follow, that woman cannot excogitate an argument as great as the “Principia,” or build up a rhyme as lofty as the “Paradise Lost?” Would it not have been as wise for one who knew Milton only as the Milton of “Lycidas” and “Arcades,” to have contended that he was incapable of a great epic poem? And is there nothing in Madame De Stael, in Rahel the Germaness, in Mary Somerville, and even in Mary Wollstonecraft, to suggest the idea of heights, fronting the very peaks of the Principia and the Paradise, to which woman may yet attain? Thirdly, has not woman understood and appreciated the greatest works of genius as fully as man? Then may she in time equal them; for what is true appreciation but the sowing of a germ in the mind, which shall ultimately bear similar fruit? There is nothing, says Godwin, which the human mind can conceive, which it cannot execute; we may add, there is nothing the human mind can understand which it cannot equal. Fourthly, let us never forget that women, as to intellectual progress, is in a state of infancy. Changed as by malignant magic, now into an article of furniture, and now into the toy of pleasure, she is only as yet undergoing a better transmigration, and “timidly expanding into life.”
Almost all that is valuable in Female Authorship has been produced within the last half-century, that is, since the female was generally recognised to be an intellectual creature; and if she has, in such a short period, so progressed, what demi-Mahometan shall venture to set bounds to her future advancement? Even though we should grant that woman, more from her bodily constitution than her mental, is inferior to man, and that man, having got, shall probably keep, his start of centuries, we see nothing to prevent woman overtaking, and outstripping with ease, his present farthest point of intellectual progress. We do not look on such productions as “Lear,” and the “Prometheus Vinctus,” with the despair wherewith the boy who has leaped up in vain to seize, regards ever after the moon and the stars; they are, after all, the masonry of men, and not the architecture of the gods; and if man may surpass, why may not woman, “taken out of his side,” his gentle alias, equal them?
Of woman, we may say, at least, that there are already provinces where her power is incontested and supreme. And in proportion as civilization advances, and as the darker and fiercer passions which constitute the fera natura subside, in the lull of that milder day, the voice of woman will become more audible, exert a wider magic, and be as the voice of spring to the opening year. We stay not to prove that the sex of genius is feminine, and that those poets who are most profoundly impressing our young British minds, are those who, in tenderness and sensibility—in peculiar power, and in peculiar weakness, are all but females. And whatever may be said of [p. 621→] the effects of culture, in deadening the genius of man, we are mistaken if it has not always had the contrary effect upon that of woman (where do we find a female Bloomfield or Burns?) so that, on entering on the far more highly civilised periods which are manifestly approaching, she will but be breathing the atmosphere calculated to nourish and invigorate, instead of weakening and chilling her mental life. Our admirable friend, Mr. De Quincey, has, we think, conceded even more than we require, in granting (see his paper on Joan of Arc) that woman can die more nobly than man. For whether is the writing or the doing of a great tragedy the higher achievement? Poor the attitude even of Shakespere, penning the fire-syllables of Macbeth, to that of Joan of Arc, entering into the flames as into her wedding suit. What comparison between the face inflamed of a Mirabeau or a Chalmers, as they thundered; and the blush on the cheek of Charlotte Corday, still extant, as her head was presented to the people? And who shall name the depicter of the death of Beatrice Cenci; or with Madame Roland, whose conduct on the scaffold might make one in “love with death?” If to die nobly demand the highest concentration of the moral, intellectual, and even artistic powers—and if woman has par excellence exemplified such a concentration, there follows a conclusion to which we should be irresistibly led, were it not that we question the minor proposition in the argument—we hold that man has often as fully as woman risen to the dignity of death, and met him, not as a vassal, but as a superior.
To say that Mrs. Browning has more of the man than any female writer of the period, may appear rather an equivocal compliment; and its truth even may be questioned. We may, however, be permitted to say, that she has more of the heroine than her compeers. Hers is a high heroic nature, which adopts for the motto at once of its life and of its poetry, “Perfect through suffering.” Shelley says:—
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
But wrong is not always the stern school-mistress of song. There are sufferings springing from other sources—from intense sensibility—from bodily ailment—from the loss of cherished objects, which also find in poetry their natural vent. And we do think that such poetry, if not so powerful, is infinitely more pleasing and more instructive than that which is inspired by real or imaginary grievance. The turbid torrent is not the proper mirror for reflecting the face of nature; and none but the moody and the discontented will seek to see in it an aggravated and distorted edition of their own gloomy brows. The poetry of wrong is not the best and most permanent. It was not wrong alone that excited, though it unquestionably directed, the course of Dante’s and Milton’s vein. The poetry of Shakespere’s wrong is condensed in his sonnets—the poetry of his forbearance and forgiveness, of his gratitude and his happiness, is in his dramas. The poetry of Pope’s wrong (a scratch from a thorn hedge!) is in his “Dunciad,” not in his “Rape of the Lock.” The poetry of Wordsworth’s wrong is in his “Prefaces,” not in his “Excursion.” The poetry of Byron’s wrong is in those deep curses which sometimes disturb the harmony of his poems; and that of Shelley’s in the maniacal scream which occasionally interrupts the pæans of his song. But all these had probably been as great, or greater poets, had no wrong befallen them, or had it taught them another lesson, than either peevishly to proclaim, or furiously to resent it.
Mrs. Browning has suffered, so far as we are aware, no wrong from the age. She might, indeed, for some time have spoken of neglect. But people of genius should now learn the truth, that neglect is not wrong; or if it be, it is a wrong in which they often set the example. Neglecting the tastes of the majority, the majority avenges itself by neglecting them. Standing and singing in a congregation of the deaf, they are senseless enough to complain that they are not heard. Or should they address the multitude, and should the multitude not listen, it never strikes them that the fault is their own; they ought to have compelled attention. Orpheus was listened to: the thunder is: even the gentlest spring shower commands its audience. If neglect means wilful winking at claims which are felt, it is indeed a wrong; but a wrong seldom if ever committed, and which complaint will not cure—if it means, merely, ignorance of claims which have never been presented or enforced, where and whose is the criminality?
To do Mrs. Browning justice, she has not complained of neglect nor of injury at all. But she has acknowledged herself inspired by the genius of suffering. And this seems to have exerted divers influences upon her poetry. It has, in the first place, taught her to rear for herself a spot of transcendental retreat, a city of refuge in the clouds. Scared away from her own heart, she has soared upwards, and found a rest elsewhere. To those flights of idealism in which she indulges, to those distant and daring themes which she selects, she is urged less, we think, through native tendency of mind, than to fill the vast vacuity of a sick and craving spirit. This is not peculiar to her. It may be called, indeed, the Retreat of the Ten Thousand; though strong and daring must be those that can successfully accomplish it. Only the steps of sorrow—we had almost said only the steps of despair—can climb such dizzy heights. The healthy and the happy mind selects subjects of a healthy and a happy sort, and which lie within the sphere of every-day life and every-day thought. But for minds which have been wrung and riven, there is a similar attraction in gloomy themes, as that which leads them to the side of dark rivers, to the heart of deep forests, or into the centre of waste glens. Step forth, ye giant children of Sorrow and Genius, that we may tell your names, and compute your multitudes. First, there is the proud thundershod Æschylean family, all conceived in the “eclipse” of that most powerful [p. 622→] of Grecian spirits. Then follows the vast skeleton of “De Rerum natura,” the massive product of the grief of Lucretius—
Who cast his plummet down the broad
Deep universe, and said, No God;
Finding no bottom, he denied
Divinely the divine, and died,
Chief poet upon Tiber side.
Mrs. Browning.
There stalk forward, next in the procession, the kings, priests, popes, prelates, and the yet guiltier and mightier shapes of Dante’s Hell. Next, the Satan of Milton advances, champing the curb, and regarding even Prometheus as no mate for his proud and lonely misery. Then comes, cowering and shivering on, the timid Castaway of Cowper. He is followed by Byron’s heroes, a haughty yet melancholy troop, with conscious madness animating their gestures and glaring in their eyes. The Anciente Marenere succeeds, now fearfully reverting his looks, and now fixing his glittering eye forward on a peopled and terrible vacancy. And, lastly, a frail shadowy and shifting shape, looking now Laon, now like Lionel, and now like Prometheus, proclaims that Alastor himself is here, the Benjamin in this family of tears.
“Whither shall I wander,” seems Mrs. Browning to have said to herself, “to-day to escape from my own sad thoughts, and to lose, to noble purpose, the sense of my own identity? I will go eastward to Eden, where perfection and happiness once dwelt. I will pass, secure in virtue, the far flashing sword of the cherubim; I will knock at the door and enter. I will lie down in the forsaken garden; I will pillow my head where Milton pillowed his, on the grass cool with the shadow of the Tree of Life; and I will dream a vision of my own, of what this place once was, and of what it was to leave it for the wilderness.” And she has passed the waving sword, and she has entered the awful garden, and she has dreamed a dream, and she has, awaking, told it as a “Drama of Exile.” It were vain to deny that the dream is one full of genius—that it is entirely original; and that it never once, except by antithesis, suggests a thought of Milton’s more massive and palpable vision. Her paradise is not a garden, it is a flush on a summer evening sky. Her Adam is not the fair large-fronted man, with all manlike qualities meeting unconsciously in his full clear nature—he is a German metaphysician. Her Eve is herself, an amiable and gifted blue-stocking, not the mere meek motherly woman, with what Aird beautifully calls the “broad, ripe, serene, and gracious composure of love about her.” Her spirits are neither cherubim nor seraphim—neither knowing nor burning ones—they are fairies, not, however, of the Puck or Ariel species, but of a new metaphysical breed; they do not ride on, but split hairs; they do not dance, but reason; or if they dance, it is on the point of a needle, in cycles and epicycles of mystic and mazy motion. There is much beauty and power in passages of the poem, and a sweet inarticulate infinite melody, like the fabled cry of mandrakes in the lyrics. Still we do not see the taste of turning the sweet open garden of Eden into a maze—we do not approve of the daring precedent of trying conclusions with Milton on his own high field of victory—and we are, we must say, jealous of all encroachments upon that fair Paradise which has so long painted itself upon our imaginations—where all the luxuries of earth mingled in the feast with all the dainties of the heavens—where celestial plants grew under the same sun with terrestrial blossoms, and where the cadences of seraphic music filled up the pauses in the voice of God. Far different, indeed, is Mrs. Browning’s from Dryden’s disgusting inroad into Eden—as different, almost, as the advent of Raphael from the encroachment of Satan. But the poem professed to stand in the lustre of the fiery sword, and this should have burnt up some of its conceits, and silenced some of its meaner minstrelsies. And all such attempts we regard precisely as we do the beauties of the Apocrypha, when compared to the beauties of the Bible. They are as certainly beauties, but beauties of an inferior order—they are flowers, but not the roses which grew along the banks of the Four Rivers, “or caught in their crimson cups the first sad drops wept at committing of the mortal sin.”
“One blossom of Eden outblooms them all.”
Having accepted from Mrs. Browning’s own hand sadness, or at least seriousness, as the key to her nature and genius, let us continue to apply it in our future remarks. This at once impels her to, and fits her for, the high position she has assumed, uttering the “Cry of the Human.” And whom would the human race prefer as their earthly advocate, to a high-souled and gifted woman? What voice but the female voice could so softly and strongly, so eloquently and meltingly, interpret to the ear of him whose name is Love, the deep woes, and deeper wants of “poor humanity’s afflicted will, struggling in vain with ruthless destiny?” Some may quarrel with the title, “The Human,” as an affectation; but, in the first place, if it be, it is a very small one, and a small affectation can never furnish matter for a great quarrel. Secondly, we are not disposed to make a man, and still less a woman, an offender for a word, and thirdly, we fancy we can discern a good reason for her use of the term. What is it that is crying aloud through her voice to Heaven? It is not the feral or fiendish element in human nature? That has found an organ in Byron—an echo in his bellowing verse. It is the human element in man—bruised, bleeding, all but dead under the pressure of evil—circumstances, under the ten thousand tyrannies, mistakes, and delusions of the world, that has here ceased any longer to be silent, and is speaking in a sister’s voice to Time and to Eternity—to Earth and Heaven. The poem may truly be called a prayer for the times, and no collect in the English liturgy surpasses it in truth and tenderness, though some may think its tone daring to the brink of blasphemy, and piercing almost to anguish.
Gracefully from this proud and giddy pinnacle, where she had stood as the conscious and com- [p. 623→] missioned representative of the human race, she descends to the door of the factory, and pleads for the children inclosed in that crowded and busy hell. The “cry of the factory children” moves you, because it is no poem at all—it is just a long sob, veiled and stifled as it ascends through the hoarse voices of the poor beings themselves. Since we read it we can scarcely pass a factory without seeming to hear this psalm issuing from the machinery, as if it were protesting against its own abused powers. But, to use the language of a writer quoted a little before, “The Fairy Queen is dead, shrouded in a yard of cotton stuff made by the spinning-jenny, and by that other piece of new improved machinery, the souls and bodies of British children, for which death alone holds the patent.” From Mrs. Browning, perhaps the most imaginative and intellectual of British females, down to a pale-faced, thick-voiced, degraded, hardly human, factory girl, what a long and precipitous descent. But though hardly, she is human; and availing herself of the small, trembling, but eternally indestructible link of connexion implied in a common nature, our authoress can identify herself with the cause, and incarnate her genius in the person of the poor perishing child. How unspeakably more affecting is a pleading in behalf of a particular portion of the race, than in behalf of the entire family! Mrs. Browning might have uttered a hundred “cries of the human,” and proved herself only a sentimental artist, and awakened little save an echo dying away in distant elfin laughter; but the cry of a factory child, coming through a woman’s, has gone to a nation’s heart of hearts.
Although occupied thus with the sterner wants and sorrows of society, she is not devoid of interest in its minor miseries and disappointments. She can sit down beside little Ella (the miniature of Alnaschar) and watch the history of her day-dream beside the swan’s nest among the reeds, and see in her disappointment a type of human hopes in general, even when towering and radiant as summer clouds. Ella’s dream among the reeds! What else was Godwin’s Political Justice? What else was St. Simonianism? What else is Young Englandism? And what else are the hopes built by many now upon certain perfected schemes of education, which, freely translated, just mean the farther sharpening and furnishing of knaves and fools; and now upon a “Coming Man,” who is to supply every deficiency, reconcile every contradiction, and right every wrong. Yes, he will come mounted on the red-roan horse of sweet Ella’s vision!
Shadowed by the same uniform seriousness are the only two poems of hers which we shall farther at present mention—we mean her “Vision of Poets,” and her “Geraldine’s Courtship.” The aim of the first is to present, in short compass, and almost in single lines, the characteristics of the greater poets of past and present times. This undertaking involved in it very considerable difficulties. For, in the first place, most great poets possess more than one distinguishing peculiarity. To select a single differential point is always hazardous, and often deceptive. 2dly, After you have selected the prominent characteristic of your author, it is no easy task to express it in a word, or in a line. To compress thus an Iliad in a nutshell, to imprison a Giant genie in an iron pot, is more a feat of magic than an act of criticism. 3dly, It is especially difficult to express the differentia of a writer in a manner at once easy and natural, and picturesque, and poetical. In the very terms of such an attempt as Mrs. Browning makes, it is implied that she not only defines, but describes the particular writer. But to curdle up a character into one noble word, to describe Shakespere, for instance, in such compass, what sun-syllable shall suffice; or must we renew Byron’s wish?—
Could I unbosom and embody now
That which is most within me; could I wreak
My thought upon expression!
* * * * * * * * *
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.
Accordingly, this style of portraiture (shall we call it, as generally pursued, the thumb-nail style?) has seldom been prosecuted with much success. Ebenezer Elliott has a copy of verses after this fashion, not quite worthy of him. What, for example, does the following line tell us of Shelly?
“Ill-fated Shelly, vainly great and brave.”
The same words might have been used about Sir John Moore, or Pompey. Mrs. Browning’s verses are far superior. Sometimes, indeed, we see her clipping at a character, in order to fit it better into the place she has prepared for it. Sometimes she crams the half of an author into a verse, and has to leave out the rest for want of room. Sometimes over a familiar face she throws a veil of words and darkness. But often her one glance sees, and her one word shows, the very heart of an author’s genius and character. Our readers may recur to the lines already quoted in reference to Lucretius, as one of her best portraitures. Altogether this style, as generally prosecuted, is a small one, not much better than anagrams and acrostics—ranks, indeed, not much higher than the ingenuity of the persons who transcribe the “Pleasures of Hope” on the breadth of a crown-piece, and should be resigned to such praiseworthy personages. By far the best specimen of it we remember, is the very clever list involving a running commentary of the works of Lord Byron, by Dr. M’Ginn; unless, indeed, it be Gay’s Catalogue Raisonné of the portentous poems of Sir Richard Blackmore. Who shall embalm, in a similar way, the endless writings of James, Cooper, and Dickens?
“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” as a transcript from the “red-leaved tablets of the heart”—as a tale of love, set to the richest music—as a picture of the subtle workings, the stern reasonings, and the terrible bursts of passion—is above praise. How like a volcano does the poet’s heart at length explode! How first all power is given him in the dreadful trance of silence, and then in the loosened tempest of speech! What a wild, fierce [p. 624→] logic flows forth from his lips, in which, as in that of Lear’s madness, the foundations of society seem to quiver like reeds, and every mount of conventionalism is no longer found; and in the lull of that tempest, and in the returning sunshine, how beautiful, how almost super-human, seem the figures of the two lovers, seen now and magnified through the mist of the reader’s fast-flowing tears. It is a tale of successful love, and yet it melts you like a tragedy, and most melts you in the crisis of the triumph. On Geraldine we had gazed as on a star, with dry-eyed and distant admiration; but when that star dissolves in showers at the feet of her poet lover, we weep for very joy. Truly a tear is a sad yet beautiful thing; it constitutes a link connecting us with distant countries, nay, connecting us with distant worlds. Gravitation has, amid all her immensity, wrought no such lovely work as when she rounded a tear.
From this beautiful poem alone, we might argue Mrs. Browning’s capacity for producing a great domestic tragedy. We might argue it, also, from the various peculiarities of her genius—her far vision into the springs of human conduct—into those viewless veins of fire, or of poison, which wind within the human heart—her sympathy with dark bosoms—the passion for truth, which pierces often the mist of her dimmer thought, like a flash of irrepressible lightning—her fervid temperament, always glowing round her intellectual sight—and her queen-like dominion over imagery and language. We think, meanwhile, that she has mistaken her sphere. In that rare atmosphere of transcendentalism which she has reached, she respires with difficulty, and with pain. She is not “native and endued” into that element. We would warn her off the giddy region, where tempests may blow, as well as clouds gather. Her recent sonnets in Blackwood are sad failures,—the very light in them is darkness—thoughts, in themselves as untangible as the films upon the window pane, are concealed in a woof of words, till their thin and shadowy meaning fades utterly away. Morbid weakness, she should remember, is not masculine strength. But can she not, through the rents in her cloudy tabernacle, discern, far below in the vale, fields of deep though homely beauty, where she might more gracefully and successfully exercise her exquisite genius? She has only to stoop to conquer. By and bye we may—using unprofanely an expression originally profane—be tempted to say, as we look up the darkened mountain, with its flashes of fire hourly waxing fewer and feebler, “As for this poetess, we wot not what has become of her.”
While we are venturing on accents of warning, we might also remind her that there are in her style and manner peculiarities which a wicked world will persist in calling affectations. On the charge of affectation, generally, we are disposed to lay little stress—it is a charge so easily got up, and which can be so readily swelled into a cuckoo cry; it is often applied with such injustice, and it so generally attaches to singularities in manner, instead of insincerities in spirit and matter. But why should a true man, or a true woman, expose themselves needlessly to such a charge? We think in general, that true taste in this, as in matters of dress and etiquette, dictates conformity to the present mode, provided that does not unduly cramp the freedom and the force of natural motions. There is, indeed, a class of writers who are chartered libertines—who deal with language as they please—who toss it about as the autumn wind leaves; who, in the agony of their earnestness, or in the fury of their excitement, seize on rude and unpolished words, as Titans on rocks and mountains, and gain artistic triumphs in opposition to all the rules of art. Such are Wilson and Carlyle, and such were Burke and Chalmers. These men we must just take as they are, and be thankful for them as they are. We must just give them their own way. And whether such a permission be given or not, it is likely to be taken. “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will the Unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? canst thou bind him with his band in the furrow? will he harrow the valleys after thee? wilt thou believe that he will bring home thy seed, and gather into thy barn?” No: like the tameless creatures of the wilderness—like the chainless elements of the air—such men obey a law, and use a language, and follow a path of their own.
But this rare privilege Mrs. Browning cannot claim. And she owes it to herself and to her admirers to simplify her manner—to sift her diction of whatever is harsh and barbarous—to speak whatever truth is in her, in the clear articulate language of men—and to quicken, as she well can, the dead forms of ordinary verbiage, by the spirit of her own superabundant life. Then, but not till then, shall her voice break fully through the environment of coteries, cliques, and Magazine readers, and fall upon the ear of the general public, like the sound sweet in its sublimity, simple amid its complex elements, earthly in its cause and unearthly in its effect upon the soul, of a multitude of waters.
At present she seems to have seated herself, like a second witch of Endor, in a cave of mystery and vaticination—her “familiar,” her gifted husband, a spirit well worthy of holding high consultation with herself; and who, like the famuli of ancient magicians, is equally adapted for humorous sport, and for serious thought and enterprise. We have in spirit been visiting her cavern, and have come back in the mood of prophesying. She has, if not taught, confirmed on us impressions, in reference to the future progress of Poetry, which we may close this lucubration by expressing.
That Poetry, notwithstanding its present degraded and enfeebled condition, is not extinct, nor ever shall be extinguished, we may at once assume. As long as the sky is blue, and the rainbow beautiful—as long as man’s heart is warm and the face of woman fair—Poetry, like seed-time and harvest, summer and winter, shall not cease. [p. 625→] Nay, may we not apply to it the words of Campbell, applied originally to hope—
Eternal Art, when yonder spheres sublime
Pealed their first notes to sound the march of time,
Thy joyous youth began, but not to fade:
When all the sister planets have decayed,
When wrapt in fire the realms of ether glow,
And heaven’s last thunder shakes the world below,
Thou undismayed shall o’er the ruins smile,
And light thy torch at Nature’s funeral pile.
But in two things especially we perceive a provision being made in the present day, for the sustenance of the Poetic spirit, and for the further development of the Poetic faculty. One is the advancement of scientific truth. This, so far from being, as in the vulgar notion, adverse, is favourable to the progress of Poetry. Poetry, as a true thing, must be furthered by the advance of every other section of truth. Poetry can rule by division as well as by multiplication. Poetry stands ever ready to pour her forces through the smallest breaches which science makes. Nay, all the sciences are already employed, and shall yet be more solemnly enlisted into the service of Poetry. Botany goes forth into the fields and the woods, collects her fairest flowers, and binds with them a chaplet for the brow of Poetry. Conchology from the waters and from the sea shores gathers her loveliest shells, and hark! when uplifted to the ear of Poetry, “pleased, they remember their august abodes, and murmur as the ocean murmurs there.” Anatomy lays bare the human frame—so fearfully and wonderfully made—and Poetry breathes back a portion of the spirit which that cold clay has lost, and its dry bones and withered sinews begin to live. Chemistry leads Poetry to the side of her furnace, and shows her transformations scarcely less marvellous and magical than her own. Geology lifts, with daring yet trembling hand, the “veil that is woven with night and with terror,” from the history of past worlds, of cycles of ruin and renovation of creations and destroyings, and allows the eye of Poetry to look down in wonder, and to look up in fire. And Astronomy conducts Poetry to her observatory, and enjoys her amazement at the spectacle of that storm of suns, for ever blowing in the midnight sky. In the progress of astronomy, indeed, we see opening up the loftiest of conceivable fields for the poet. Who has hitherto adequately sung the wonders of the Newtonian—how much less of the Herschellian heavens? In prose alone (excepting, indeed, some splendid passages of the “Night Thoughts”)—prose often kindling into poetry; the prose of Chalmers and of Nichol have these themes been worthily treated. But who is waiting, with his lyre in his eager hand, to be ready to sing the steep-rising glories of the Rossian heavens? We have the “Night Thoughts,” which are a century behind the present stage of the science; but who shall write us a poem on “Night,” worthy, in some measure, of vieing with that solemn yet spirit-stirring theme? Sooner or later it must be done. The Milton of Midnight must yet arise.
Another security for the future triumphs of Poetry is to be found in the spread of the Earnest Spirit. That such a spirit is coming over the age, men feel as by a general and irresistible intuition. There are, besides, many distinct evidences, and in nothing more so than in the present state of Poetry. Its clouds, long so light and gay, are rapidly charging with thunder, and from that black orchestra, when completely filled, what tones of power and music may be expected. All the leading poets of our later day—Tennyson, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Emerson, and Bayley—are avowing and acting on their belief that Poetry is no child’s pastime, but one of the most serious of all serious things. This fills us with hope and high expectancy. It recalls to us a past period, when the names of prophet and of poet were the same; when bards were the real rulers; when the highest truth came forth in melody; when rhyme and reason had never been divorced. It points us forward, with sunbeam-finger, to a future day, when, in Emerson’s fine language, “Poetry shall lead in a new age, as there is a star in the constellation Harp, which shall yet, astronomers tell us, be the polar star for a thousand years.” We are, however slowly nearing that star! And, when men have become more enlightened, more welded into unity, more penetrated with high principle, more warmed with the emotion of love—when the earth has become more worthy of shining between Orion and the Great Bear—between Mars and Venus—there shall break forth from it a voice of song, holier far than Amphion’s; sweeter than all Orphean measures; comparable to that fabled melody, by which the spheres were said to attune their motions; comparable, say rather, to that nobler song, wherewith, when Earth, a stranger, first appeared in our sky, she was saluted by her kindred orbs—“when the morning stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy.”
[George Gilfillan]
Reviewed:
General Review Essay (EBB).
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