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.