The Press. — London, England, 1855-05-19 00:00:00

MAY 19, 1855. Sittraturt. CONTEMPORARY POETRY. Wz are not out of the War Department yet. The military poets bear a striking resemblance to the military executive in one particular— the genius they exhibit for spilling a great deal of ink, just as the others have spilled a great deal of blood, to no purpose. The bards are well suited by the fortunate acci dents of nature to the epoch and the authorities they celebrate; and show as con spicuous a faculty for prolonging the campaign in verse, as Ministers have developed for pro longing it in the field. While sitting in judg ment upon their productions, however, we must not emulate the example of Mr. Roe buck's committee, but hasten at once to lay our report before the reader. The first witness we shall call to testify to the present condition of the poetical mind on the subject of the war is a gentleman who signs himself Melanter. The title of his volume is The Bugle of the Black Sea ; or, the British in the East (1). We know there are British in the East; but we are not so sure about the bugles in the Black Sea. If there be any bugles to spare they ought to be at Sebastopol. The bugle is generally under stood to be one of the musical accompani ments of the land service ; and it looks like a diversion of its legitimate functions to send it amongst the sailors. But stranger incon gruities have happened of late in those waters, and Melanter may fairly plead a hundred illustrious precedents. There are many blasts on his bugle, each of which carries its own special theme—such as " The Battle of the Alma," " The Trenches," " The Sea Attack," &c., and few bugles have displayed such a variety of style as that of Melanter. Some times the verse is as dreary as a requiem; sometimes as uproarious and perplexing as one of those stunning variations on a familiar air, in the thunder of which you cannot connect two successive notes ; and sometimes as quaint and merry under circumstances of peculiar horror as Mephistophiles would probably be if he undertook to play the character of Puck. We cannot exemplify all the varieties by specimens; but we may in dicate generally that singular mixture of the lurid and the humorous which specially distinguish these fantasias. The following is the opening of a descriptive piece called " The Fleet in the Black Sea " We lay upon a torpid sea, Was like a deadened foil, A water-Quaker, or, may be, A cup of castor-oil. It had a bleary undercast, A sort of slimy blue ; I have seen the same in old mens' eyes, When light cannot get through. No smile was on the ocean face, No more than on a corpse ; But something like the spasm grimace Whereto a ranter warps His face as slimy and as flat as where the slow worms race. This disguised leaf out of the " Ancient Mariner" is preparatory to the approach of scurvy, and a certain state of the atmosphere in which the sky is " neither blue nor grey, " nor yet a mix between." The captain of the vessel is indignant at being kept idly out at sea under such pestilential influences, and he spins a " bitter yarn" on the subject to the sailors, who look at him as there he stood, So straight, and lithe, and manly, Six feet without his stockings, and His swelling breast so swanly. Presently a " stagnant cloud, with spongy " brink, " leaps on board," and the three decker is " wrapped ere she can reel"; a nautical catastrophe which appears to have been attended by some remarkable pheno mena. From that moment the sailors saw the moon and stars no more, nor even the sea, while the light in the binnacle turned the colour of sulphur, the pipe of the narrator burned blue, the shrouds took a ghostly ap pearance, the union-jack ran down, the deck (1) The Bugk of the Black Sea; or, the British in the Last. By blots:nor. London: liardwicke. THE PRESS. " grouted," and the eyes of the seamen began to leer The upshot was that six of the men became " soil," and the mizentopman dropped into a "writhing coil"; after which the narrator fell into a swoon, and when he awoke he found the ship close to a bright shore very much resembling the Undercliff of the Isle of Wight. 4 Having shown the quality of the marine music, we will now follow the summons of the bugle on land ; for the discursive instrument carries us over the sea into the battles of the Alma and Inkermann, the charge at Balaklava, and the trenches at Sebastopol. Here is part of a description, given by a wounded English soldier, of the scenes in the trenches : We have tried all we could do, We have met the Russian tricks With solid English thew ; Each man would fain be six, But was only cut in two. This playful observation, in the manner of the pleasant humour interspersed through the grand military spectacles at the amphitheatre, is intended to show how lively an English soldier can be under the worst circumstances. We venture to submit, however, that the point would have told more effectively if the joke had been directed against the enemy : We have set us back to back, Like props that hold a mark ; We have met the fierce attack, Through daylight and through dark, 'Till the ground itself was stark. How the ground became " stark"—that is, stiff—does not appear. A man is said to be stark when he is dead. Thus Shakspeare, piling up the idea, says " Many a nobleman " lies stark and stiff." We have stood so long to arms, Through true and false alarms, Or squatted in the trench, With heavy rain to quench The fire of Glory's charms ; We have had such eyelid•ache, In the weary, weary keep, That drowsiness so deep Forgot the way to sleep, And yawned itself awake. As this is a function—yawning itself awake — which drowsiness seldom performs, it is properly reserved for the uncommon situation described in the stanzas. One specimen more—a picture of the on slaught at Inkermann—the Russians coming up in such multitudes as, apparently, to render all resistance useless. The reader is requested to pay attention to the images : They come, they throng with numbers packed As close as figs in a grocer's drum ; They reel, they fall, thrust through and hacked, They yell, they die, but still they come, Thousands by thousands backed ; The dead weight bends our bayonet points, The onslaught strains our agued joints, 'Tis harder work to stand than kill— But more sacks still upon the mill! The images come crushing upon us almost as overwhelmingly as the Russians. It is a canon of high poetical art that when a writer desires to degrade the subject of a description he compares it to mean and trivial objects ; as, on the other hand, when he intends to exalt it, he institutes a comparison with objects more elevated than itself. Melanter is master of his craft; and nothing can be more in accordance with the demands of English patriotic poetry than to represent the hosts of Russians at Inkermann as resembling figs packed in a grocer's drum, and coming to be thrust through and hacked like more sacks upon a mill By this time, the peculiar merits of Me lanter's verse must be tolerably obvious. Its predominant characteristic is bold and original fancy pervading the diction and the images, and bringing home the calamities of war to men's business and bosoms by the use of surprising forms of expression. There is a stock of astonishing metaphors and words presented under new aspects in this little book that would set up half a dozen ordinary poets. The wealth of Melanter's fancy may be in some degree estimated from a few isolated specimens. Thus, we have daisies on the lip of a river represented telling their beads ; the moon is said to come lolling, like a man's tongue white and bitten through, and a pair of planets are compared to " two dead eyes " gone askew " ; the English at Eupatoria are 475 like stranded fish, in pursuance of which metaphor they appropriately " shake their fins " and rise " ; when a prize is made of Russian stores, it is compared to the Lowther or Bur lington arcades poured into the streets, for everybody to take what they please, and " nothing to pay " ; then we have " crenelled edges" and " hurtled Alps," the " swirl of boiling lava " and " spouts from thunder's sluice," the " enchancelled sky," the " gar dened moon." " fillip'd flies," and " flaky faces." If this be not a " well of English un " defiled," it is, at least, a well of very pecu liar English. Next appears Mr. George Small, a gunner in the Royal Artillery, who publishes a poem on Inkermann (2). This pieco is in blank verse, very regular in its ebb and flow, and not only free from meretricious conceits in the treatment, but marked by good sense and sobriety of taste. There are passages in this poem that rise superior to the highest flights of Mr. Small's brother minstrels. Passing over the preliminary matter, we come to the following picture of the allies on the heights on that dismal Sabbath morning appointed by the Russians for the surprise at Inkermann : Now look we on the face of bloody war. Deep down the vale they watch the wary foe, Lest negligence should bring the peril nigh. The morning opens like a sullen grave, And seems almost as gloomy as the night. But hark ! some rushing murmur rings below. They listen ; all is still again ; 'twas but The sentries' challenge, as they pus their rounds, That woke an echo from those rocks beneath. The incidents of the description are judi ciously selected, and clearly stated. In the next extract Mr. Small's power is shown in a graver point of view : The ship may founder, but its name is known E'en by the wreck that's scattered on the shore : The pieces of our fame way float above When life hath sunk below the sea of death ! Wars make the soldier brace; struggles, the man. A checquered fate has yielded more renown Than the fixed fortunes of nobility. Greatness comes not by mere inheritance, But builds itself. True heroes are like statues Of the antique world—eternal mysteries Of Genius, and of high, creative Art. There is evidence of reflection and earnest ness in this passage, and the lines we have marked in italics have pith and purpose in them ; but the poem is not sustained through• out at an equal elevation. The measure is not always filled out with sufficient force, and sometimes drops into feebleness, and falls in flat prose on the ear. Here is an example . They hear the sharp salute of angry foes, And grow alarmed at its continuance. This is mere drivel. Mr. Small errs in the op posit° extreme to Melanter. Preferring, with excellent judgment, his own natural strength to that false spasmodic energy which may he described as " great cry and little wool," he is not energetic enough in the employment of such power as he possesses. He does not care to overtax his capacity, and sets about his work with a certain air of indulgent languor, out of which, we know, great verse never was, and never can be, built up. Blank verse de mands a picturesque and vigorous diction ; it should not sink into commonplace, nor be frittered away by prettiness; and the materials of which it is composed should be as solid as the structure itself is lofty and imposing. Under the title of War Waits (3), Gerald Massey contributes a sheaf of lyrics to the li terature of battle. Their• character is cor rectly described in an introductory note. " These rough-and-ready war rhymes," says the writer, " cau scarcely be looked upon as " poetic fruit maturely ripened, but rather as " windfalls, shook down in this wild blast of " war." As it happens amongst windfalls that you find one here and there nearly ripe, and others that had come out of the bud in a con dition to defy the ripening process, so it is with these rhymes. You could hardly suppose, so striking ar•e the difl'er•ent degrees of maturity amongst them, and so unlike each other are they in complexion, that they were shaken down at the same time, or from the same tree. They were all apparently written in a hurry, and the best of them are slurred with traces of haste and negligence. We take a couple of (V) Inkermann. A Poem. Py George Pins)), Gunner, }loyal Artillery. London: Hope and Co. (3) War Watt.. Tly Gerald If assay. London i Bops. ss il mmffiIIMIIMIMMIIMIIIMiI