The Press. — London, England, 1855-06-23 00:00:00

JUNE 23, 1855. We will not have this lofty look : Thou shalt fall down, and recognise Thy kings: we will write in thy book, Command thee with our eyes— Cut the world thoroughly to the heart— You, who do profess to see In the face the written mind, Look in that face, and tell me In what part of it you find, Sc.— The wild woman is uttering strange things— As if to show you could smile, tho' in fear — But these metrical lapses are venial faults in comparison with the straining after singu larity in diction and imagery which is visible throughout. The effect is to overload the meaning with expletives, sometimes making it ludicrous, and sometimes mean, and not un frequently obscure. Take the following ex ample from the dramatic poem of " Clytem nestra ": Hope, that will often fawn upon despair And flatter desperate chances, when the event Falls at our feet, soon takes a querulous tone, And jealous of that perfect joy she guards (Lest the ambrosial fruit by some rude hand Be stol'n away from her, and never tasted) Barks like a lean watch-dog at all who come. Apart from the oversight of giving Hope any function at all after the event has taken place, a less appropriate employment could scarcely be assigned to her than that of barking like a watch•dog. Why the particular «-atch•dog should be lean suggests an additional per plexity. Another example of familiar treat ment, so often mistaken for the sublime, occurs immediately after the murder of Agamemnon, when "sad Electra" sits brood ing over her great sorrow: — CHORUS. See how she gathers round her all her robe, And sits apart with grief. Oh, can it be Great Agamemnon is among the shades? ELECTRA. Would I had grasp'd his skirts, and followed him! A speculation as to the costume of Agamemnon might be raised on this line, for which we know of no parallel except that in The Hypocrite, where Mairicorni, afraid of a similar liberty being taken with him, declares that when he is going to heaven he will " wear a " spenser, and disappoint them ! " Close to this passage we have the following image, which partakes much of the same character : Alas! there is an eminence of joy, Where Fate grows dizzy, being mounted there, And so tilts over on the other side ! When /Egisthus makes his appearance after the murder, staggering, as the Chorus describes him, " drunk with rage and crazy mischief," Electra calls him a " blundering blood shedder," and tells him that there is enough left of Agamemnon's blood to drown him in. This passage may be paired off with the question of Clytemnestra to the Herald who comes to announce the return of Agamemnon, and who is so stunned by her majesty, which, he says, fills " the whole of space," that he cannot deliver his tidings : Llsa.u.D. O Queen— CIATEmsEsTaA. Speak, if thou haat a voice ! I listen. HattALD. 0 Queen— CLYTZMNESTRA. Hath as ox trodden on thy tongue ? Speak then ! Very intelligible this in the Greek, but to the mere English reader it would have beenjust as well to have put it into the original language. Extravagant metaphors, and a heaping up of epithets and images, by which simple and common things are presented in a masquerade that gives them an air of burlesque, may be found in every page. We have collected a few examples, which require no commentary. Here is a description of flowers in a garden, which may be usefully compared with any of Thomson's or Cowper's descriptions of the same objects, for the sake of showing the difference between real flowers and artificial flowers : The lilies crouch'd, rocking their white heads like mourners, And hurn'd off the heads of the flowers that were Pining and pale in their comfortless bowers, Dry-bnsh'd with the sharp stubborn lavender, And pavan with discs of the torn sunflowers, Which, (lay by day, were strangled. and stripp'a Of tneir ravelling fringes and brazen bosses, And the hardy mary-buds nipp'd and ripp'd Into shreds for the beetles that lurk'd In the mosses. THE PRESS. In the next page we have fringes and shreds in the sky. The " pearl-lighted mores " draw the tinges Of the oold sun-rise up to their amber fringes, and five young moons grnw old, And dwindle away to a luminous shred. The beetle reappears in another place, under somewhat altered circumstances : The drunken beetle, roused ere night, Breaks blundering from the rotting rose, Flits thro' blue spidery aconite, And hums, and comes, and goes. A description of a blackthorn tree in a high wind : —the forked tree as the bleak blast took it, Howl'd thro' it, and beat it, and bit it, and shook it, Seem'd to visibly waste and wither and wizen. To which account of the wasting of the tree we have the following addition in a subsequent passage : Like a living thing bewitch'd and bedevil'd, Visibly shrunk, and shudder'd and shrivel'd. Picture of a seashore in the heat of summer, crawling over with life : And all things that fasten, or float at ease In the silvery light of the leprous seas With the pulse of a hideous life were quicken'd, Fell loose from the rocks, and crawl'd crosswise away. Slippery sidelong crabs, half strangled By the white sea grasses in which they were tangled, And those half-living creatures, orli'd, ray'd, and sharp angled,. Fan-fish, and star-fish, and polypous lumps, llneless and boneless, that languidly thicken'd, Or flat-faced, or spiked, or ridged with humps, Melting off from their clotted clusters and clumps, Sprawl'd over the shore in the heat of the day. There is certainly nothing parallel to this ex traordinary passage in the most bewildering flights of Brooke or Darwin, who, whatever else may be said of them, were at least faithful to nature. The return of an earl to his castle is thus announced : There same a trample of horses - and men ; And a blowing of horns at the Castle-gate ; Then a clattering noise; then a pause; and then, With the sudden jerk of a heavy weight, And a wrangling and jangling and choking and clanking, The sound of the falling of cable and chain ; And a grumbling over the dewy plankirg That shriek'd and sung with the weight and strain. And the rough Seneschal bawl'd oat in the hall " The Earl and the Devil are come back again !" The subsequent conduct of the earl fully justi fies this singular remark of the seneschal : Then quoth the grim Earl, "fetch me a stoop!" And they brought him a great bowl that dripp'd from the brim, Which he seiz'd upon with a satisfied whoop, Drain'd, and flung at the head of him That brought it ; then, with a laugh like a howl, Strok'd his beard ; and strode in thro' the door with a growl. A lady who, for some inexplicable reason , has long been watching for the return of the earl, grows " white and whiter" at this ; but the extent of the whiteness can be shown only in the language of the original : Meanwhile the pale lady grew white and whiter, As the poplar pales when the keen winds smite her : And, as the tree sways to the gust, and heaves Quick ripples of white alarm np the leaves, So did she seem to shrink and reel From the casement—one quiver from head to heel Of white3t fear. As this kind of writing is obviously not drawn from actual observation, but is rather a sort of fever of the brain, or a contagion caught from bad examples, it is to be expected that it should teem with imitations in tropes and phrases, which, if not always palpable or direct, may be traced floating through it, in the same way as you trace reminiscences of popular composers in superficial music. It is unnecessary to touch upon this part of the investigation at any length, as it must be already sufficiently evident without going into examples. One or two passages will abun dantly indicate the kind of echoes that reverberate through the verse. Thus Electra to jEgisthus:— tho' thou boast thyself As huge as Ossa piled on Felion, &c. The readers of Tennyson will be at no loss for the original of what follows : Here she lived alone, and from year to year She saw the black belt of the ocean appear At her casement each morn as she rose ; and each mom Her eye fell first on the bare bleak thorn. Again : " He will not come back till the spring's green and And 1 would that 1 with the leaves were dead, Quiet somewhere with them in the moss and the When he and the summer come this way," she . Or such bits of landscape as the following The stagnant levels, one and all, are burning distant marsh — Hark! 'twas the bittern's parting call. The frogs with murmurs harsh The low reeds vibrate. See !]the sun catches ' pools one by one. We should not have bestowed all this upon Mr. Meredith's faults, if we believe that he has also merits which him to a patient audience. But whether will hereafter acquire any solid distinct a poet cannot be determined by the ev' before us. It will entirely depend ul exercise of a purer taste and a sound ment than he displays in the present That he is capable of thinking for although he does not always think very foundly, or even correctly, and that he - times look into the heart of things as on their outsides, is intimated in passages ; but unfortunately the ge, whatever is good and hopeful in hil buried so deeply under irrational that it is doubtful whether they will ever up to maturity. There is not a single • the collection quite free from some other of the objections we have pointed and unless Mr. Meredith can onco ever make up his mind to abandon the , habit of word-painting and exaggeration, instead of presenting objects through and distorting medium, endeavour to them as they are, Parnassus is not the _ in which he is likely to obtain distinction. Mixed up with much that is obscure - foolish, he gives some excellent advice artist which he would do well to follow self. He tells him not to attempt too to go to nature, to write his own assert himself, and not to be misled by This is very sensible advice ; like eve else, however, in the volume (and hen the grand obstruction to Mr. Meredith'' gress, that whenever he says anything saying he is sure to spoil it in , terance) it is overlaid by paradoxes glitter of fine words without any intelligible meaning. He advises his artist, for to be strong—which is plain common and to trust instincts more than which may, or may not, be good advice, as we know ; and then goes on The world of Thought is psck'd so tight, If thou stand up another tumbles: Heed it not, tho' thou have to fight With giants: whoso follows stumbles. The operation of standing up and under such circumstances of tight not clear. But the purpose of the altogether too dark to speculate History, rules, laws, catalogues, and guides to knowledge, and systems of urgently recommends the artist to Here we have a terrible confusion and a specimen of reasoning after the of a maze, so artfully coutnved that, once got in, it will be no easy matter to find your way out again : Next, as to laws. What's beautiful We recognise in form and face : And judge it thus, and thus, by rule, As perfect law brings perfect grace. If thro' the effect we drag the cense, T►issect, divide, anatomise, Resnits are lost in loathsome laws, And all the ancient beauty dies: Till we, instead of bloom and light, See only sinews, nerves, and veins: Nor will the effect and cause unite, For one is lost if one remains: But from some higher point behold This dense, perplexing combination ; And laws involved in laws unfold, And orb into thy contemplation. If this be not what Butler calls " learned nonsense," it is much the same, and has a deeper sound Than easy sense, and goes for more profoand. Mr. Meredith is wrong in throwing all rules overboard. There is one, at least, he ought to try to follow—that is, to think clearly. 597 nd gold. mould, said. iug n in the p are out: the living its space did not entitle ather he lethal as evidence ipon the ler judg- , volume. himself, very pro- le can at s well as n many germs of him are conceits ever grow 3 poem in le one or nted out; and for he vicious .tion, and, gh a false • exhibit he region istinction. cure and ice to an Row him- PO much ) books, to by praise. very thing fern in lies ith's pro. ng worth the ut- -3s and a atelligible example, n sense— creeds — 'ice, as far It, tumbling packing is le lines is ate upon. ,d all Other f study, he to eschew. n of terms, ,he manner .at, having ter for you a. e: