The Press. — London, England, 1854-09-02 00:00:00

834 i... ,0..—...—• INIIIIIIMOM And waves of wildest strife and storm Were frozen fast iu frenzied form— Wide•staring gulph, and cave, and chasm, Of wrench, and thrust, and split, and spasm, And pinnacle with deep abyss, — And cliffs of crythal precipice That shut the way, as with a wall, And closed the curtains of the vale. There are many other single passages nearly as good. " The Alpine Eagle " (though occa sionally too spasmodic in its diction) shows the highest power of any piece in the volume. The eagle is thus described in a thunderstorm in the Alps : All reckless where he wheels, Now stemming sturdily the torrent gales That bend the boisterous pines against the rocks, And now engulpheil within the whirling wind That hurls him headlong through the sultry fight,— With orbs that still flash fierce defiance back, And feathers bristling like the shaken spears ; Or, resting balanced o'er the black abyss, His tawny neck low curving carelessly, And listing listlessly to shattered rocks, Or to the hissing flash on crimson snow, Or to the bursting words that shake all seats But his on ocean air, or to the rains That beat upon the brows like breaking waves, — And marks immoveably the stroke that slays The forest with one swing of flaming sword, — but the poet then gives us some forced lines, reminding us of the Keats school, and he interposes passages of mere verbiage. The following description, however, of the eagle in his summer wanderings is really very fine, and reminds us of those few but vigorous pieces of blank verse left by the late Thomas Camp bell Invisible to mariner that marks The darchange, or as shifting speck of sky, — Winging his way through ether's shoreless sea, With blue abyss above and blank below, — A wandering waif through all.surrounding space,— And voyaging by night through vacuous dome By lamps illumined to the deep dim floor, — Fearing nor Cross nor fierce Orion's sword ; On, ever ou, until his hungry eye • Descries afar the snowy Andes' crests, — Tracking the wide streams to their Alpine springs, O'er Orinoco's moonlight revelry Of birds and beasts in forest's corded cage, Until he rests upon the Incas' seat, Another bold usurper of their throne. Free, when he wills, to circumnavigate The sphere,—make royal progress o'er the earth, — Now hovering o'er the city's silver strand, Now o'er the cell that spouts its sulphurous fires, — Earth's great discoverer,—he only knows All springs of Nile and Niger, and the wastes Of torrid zones, and Australasian sands, — And land or waves about the spinning poles,— And all unmeasured Himalaya heights, — Forgotten islets of Pacific Sea. In spite 3f the inequality and want of finish in these "Alpine Lyrics," we have read them with much pleasure, on account of their fresh ness, and with more labour in polishing his compositions the author may succeed in dis tinguishing himself as a poet. Hard Times. For these Times. By Charles Dickens. London : Bradbury and Evans. Ma. DICKENS has very appropriately inscribed his new story to Thomas Carlyle. In it he has developed a fragment of the Carlylian philosophy, which he advocates and enforces with even more than Carlylian onesidedness. Carlyle believes that the age is given over to materialism—that the present generation are wrapped up in material luxuries, proud of material virtues, labouring only for material successes. He accordingly insists upon our cultivating a spiritual life, and what (for wan of a better term) we must call the senti mental virtues, with an earnestness which does not allow him to perceive that, by over straining his definitions, he has counted as "material" everything that is certain, defi nite, exact, or practical, leaving for " spiri tuality " only what is vague, visionary, and unrealisable. To take a homely illustration, and carefully omitting all reference to the deca logue, Mr. Carlyle drowns in floods of disdain the adage that " honesty is the best policy." But, if we inquire how our gaols are to be kept empty, he gives us no other precepts than such as can be drawn from a man's relationship with the Spheres and the Eternities. Still there was a half-truth in these utterances, and the world owes much to the sage whose pre scriptions—though poisonous (like all medica ments) when taken alone—are wholesome and tonic if used us an alterative. The author of " Hard Times," however, THE PRESS. takes the half-truth and cuts it up into frac tions. His theory is, that the world is too matter-of-fact. His remedy is to make it as fanciful as possible. When we inquire more particularly into his meaning we find that " fact," in his acceptance of the term, includes every conclusion and every occurrence which we can look upon as veritable, and " fancy " everything else. Mr. Dickens evidently does not believe that " truth is stranger than fic tion." For him there is no Romance of His tory. Sufficeth that an event is real to ensure its expurgation from his children's books. If you offer such to the young pupils of some " model school," immediately they become " little pitchers to be filled full of facts." " Facts," indeed, are so dangerous and indi gestible that, if administered at all, they should be made into a sandwich with two slices of fancy. History, astronomy, or geo logy, may perhaps. be swallowed with impunity between layers of " Jack the Giant-killer" and "Little Red Riding Hood." We wonder, by the way, whether ho accepts any of the disco veries of modern historical research—whether, for example, Niebuhr can persuade him to lethis scholars read about Romulus, Remus, and the wolf, as belonging to the domain of fancy rather than of fact? Or does he believe in Walpole sufficiently to tell them the story of Crook-back Richard? We do Mr. Dickens no injustice by treating his story-book as the exponent of a creed. His condemnation of " facts," his persuasion that the world is deluged, that the minds of men, women, and children are stunted and stifled by " facts," are impressed upon every page of the.volume as recurringly, not to say as wearyingly, as the Q. E. D.'s of that detestable work, " Euclid's Elements." His plot, his scenes, his characters, are designed, of set purpose, to enforce this conclusion. His " puppets' dally ings " are susceptible of no other interpretation. There is not much story in " Hard Times." " Ever since he began to write with " a purpo se Mr. Dickens has allowed his old propensity for caricature to run into absolute riot. The end evidently justifies the means. He has a doctrine, a wrong, or an anomaly to elucidate or to crush; and the ideal operators to whom he entrusts the work must be made of steel or wood, if ordinary flesh and blood will not serve the turn. In the present volume his characters are not men or women, but indi vidualities. They are lay-figures, made to " strike an attitude" in the first chapter and preserve it rigidly to the last—or, at all events, the last but oue. His localities are not scenes from nature, but something between Laputa and a Chinese perspective. In all persons and places he selects some feature which he exaggerates beyond measure, and obtrudes at all times and angles, whether in or out of drawing, and presents the result as a picture that may be studied with pleasure and profit. Previous works have shown this tenden"y in prograis, but " Hard Times" has given it a full deveropment. The book is filled with figures of one attitude and one characteristic, with incidents to match, being all designed to establish one moral. There is Torn Gradgrind incessantly demanding " facts," and recog nising nothing else, who will not let his children read poetry, or see playacting, or wonder at anything. There is Mr. Bounderby, who never opens his lips without telling us that he was educated in the kennel, and has become a millionaire. There is Mrs. Gradgrind, who is nothing but an invalid. There are Tom Gradgrind's children—the girl, with her " fanciful ' propensities crushed, becoming an automaton wife, and narrowly escaping the abyss opened before her by a gay seducer; the boy, hating "facts " from a surfeit, taking refuge in low dissipation, and robbing a hank. Lastly, there is Bitzer, the model boy of the model school, who has digested innu merable " facts," and grown up naturally into a spy and hypocrite. On the other side we have " Sissy " Jupe, daughter of a circus-rider, and the only one of the characters who comes to a happy end, because she can never understand " facts ;" and a whole corps of equestrian performers, male and female, whose lives, being vagabond and spent in " fanciful " exercises, are of course everything that is simple, honest, and affectionate. It is the old story with a slight SATURDAY, difference. " Fact" is the bad boy who comes to a bad end. Fancy, or such distant relation thereto as can be contrived by the clowns and tumblers in a circus, lives well and dies happily. The locality where these figures perform is consistently unreal, a town of " one idea" such as England never saw yet : It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it : but, as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of ma chinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable ser pents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that rau purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day lung, and where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It con tained several large streets, all very like one another, and many small streets, still more like one another, in habited by pe-Tle equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. This town, which he calls Coketown, living by its manufactures, contains a population dependent upon the men of " fact " like Grad grind, or the men who have raised themselves like Bounderby. Very miserable, accordingly, they must be. In the first place, they are lumped up in the term " Hands," which of course implies that " they would have found " more favour with some people if Providence " had seen fit to make them only hands ; or, " like the lower creatures of the sea-shore, " only hands and stomachs." Then the em ployers never dream of considering them in any other character than that of hands, never attempt to know, improve, or elevate them. They are something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended ; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand ; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty ; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and over-ate itself when wheat was cheap ; something that increased at such a rate of percentage, and yielded such another per centage of crime, and such another percentage of pail. perism ; something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were made ; something that occasionally rose like a sea, ' and did some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again. Accepting this description as the rule — which it is not—rather than the exception, let us inquire what practical steps Mr. Dickens can suggest to the best•intentioned or most " fanciful' employers for the benefit of the employed. Clearly it is worse than useless to build schools or engage schoolmasters for them, as schools present only an inclined plane of little vessels arranged in order ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim. The schoolmaster, together with some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same fac tory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general costme ° naphy, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-sumeying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his teu•chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world ( whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the, names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two-and-thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, Mr. M'Clioakuinchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more ! He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in " The Forty Thieves :" looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Clioakunichild. When from thy boiling store thou shalt fill each jar brim full by and by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him ! Places of worship are no better : If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel in Coketown—as the members of eighteen religious persua sions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (lint this only in highly-ornamente d examples) a bell in a bird cage on the top of it. The soli tary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating M four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. • • • • • The eighteen denominations incessantly ierstched env 1'