The Press.
London, England, 1858-11-27 00:00:00

THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 27, 1858.

Cecil and Mary ; or, Phases of Life and Love.
By Joseph Edward Jackson. London : J. W.
Parker and Son.
rATneric talc, pathetically told, though sadly
overwrought with quaint conceits and exag-
nerated metaphors. The poet himself appears
to have had some misgivings on this point, and
in a perfectly irrelevant soliloquy expresses a
doubt whether "unmetaphoric phrase" may not
ho best. There can be but one opinion as to the
too frequent indulgence in forced imagery which
pervades every page of this poem, otherwise, in
manv respects, entitled to praise. At times, the
metaphors arc not only far-fetched but positively
ludicrous. For instance, when Mary is endea-
vourin* to obtain her mother's consent to her
immediate union with Cecil, in order that she
may accompany him on his missionary adventure,
she piteously exclaims :

Love is strong,
But its best ancherehain will snap like tow
When duty blows, and I shall then be left
An ugly niud•benk, with the rusted fluke
Driven right through me.
Alu, forlorn mud-turtle in truth thou wouidst
be in a sorry plight, with the rusty fluke of the
beta bower anchor driven right through thee,
nor deem we that Prometheus Vinetus would
care to -schange his lot for thine ! The excessive
use of this inflatel and unnatural style is, indeed,
a grievous blot. A tale of woe cannot be told
with too much simplicity. Our tears refuse to
flow when summoned forth in big, swelling phrase.
IVe le:.y overlook the absurdity of a heroine in
an I.alian opera dying in a bras ara, but we do
not weep over her untimely bier or sicken at the
:a ht of the cold fowl and ham which the wife
of our bosom has caused to be set out for us.
In a poem that s2eks to express the extremest
anguish that can wring the brow of mortals,
turgid phraseology is a profound and inexcusable
defect. We here look in ve;n for a simple senti-
ment or ordinary expression. Even the " College
Tutor" cannot escape tl-"s all-pervading blemish.
When he would warn Cecil against the extremes
of cold and heat he might expect to encounter in
the career of a missionary, lie strikes an attitude
and thus declaims :

The fierce game-hreatlaing sun of tropic lands

Would eat your life out., u it would a fire's ;
The icy cold of snow o'er-rinded climes
Wvii.d stiffen all your heart-strings till they snapped.
Yon hare not granite atrangth enough for heat or cold.

He then suddenly sketches the outline of "a
aselm hull," such as poor Cecil will become when
his life has been burnt out and his heart-strings
Willy
snapped. 'Twere better, he patheti-
callY

'Twere better far
To be a mu I barge here, and cony dirt.

But not only does Mr. Jackson—though in-
ternal evidence would lead us to ascribe this poem
t.) female inspiration, were it possible that a
pot,:test could choose such a 740111 de plume—not
Hy does he sin against taste, but at times be
approaches the profane. Not consciously, perhaps,
or intentionally, but nevertheless he painfully
!hocks an ear not accustomed to the sensuous

Imagery of evangelical sectarianism. After
refusing the many-acred squire, Mary has a
"quiet talk to herself" about the worthlessness
of gold, and asks if she could possibly be so base
as to betray a noble heart that trusted in her.
No, she indignantly exclaims,
No, not if all the squires
To tbie broad country came and flung their gold,
Coin after coin, before me as a bribe;
-114 God smiles grandly as I speak thew word,.
Ilcr prayer to the Deity is likewise most
Oiertionable. Throu*hout she racks her imagi-
nation to say smart things, and gives free course
to all sorts of fantastic fancies. But infinitely
wurs2 are Cecil's pantheistic aspirations at
',awttpore. Meditating over the tomb of Henry
dart n, be laments that we do not " ope our eyes
a little wider," for—

We should then see God
In everything—in sand-grain and in sun ;
In fhwer, tree, insect, bird, and beast, and in tn.
It is a new world, we are told, when the eye
Kts God in everything :
When the loud booming, of the battling seas •
Are echoes of the awful voice of God ;
1% lieu the heaven-pointing mountain is a mound
Raised with one spadeful by the arm of God ;
1, hen the quick darting lightning's blinding flash
.5 the clear glitter of His golden spear ;
When the dread city-razing earthquake-shock
Is the globe shuddering in His mighty grasp—

~[''

The enormous sun a tiny lamp slung down
From the great floor of heaven to give us light;
When the tossed branches of the waving trees
Are seen but to be swayed by His pure breath.

And so on. By the way, this Cecil is an intolerable
kill-joy. lie is, besides, a sort of pious cynic,
and talks of " the loveliest mouth on earth " being
"still a vent for poisoned air," and much more to
the same effect, forgetful that such nice ideas
betoken a nasty mind. Once, and once only,
he is grimly humorous in writing to his
betrothed about his future mother-in law, whose
disinclination to himself he prettily describes as
" the rusty hinge of that unyielding door " upon
which he begs his darling Mary to drop " a lucid
speck." .

But, notwithstanding these many and serious
imperfections, there is much to admire in this
poem. It would be no arduous task to select
many passages of considerable beauty and of still
greater promise. The flow of the verse is
throughout easy, not unfrequently musical, and
at times almost majestic. If not a poet of the
first water, Mr.(?) Jackson possesses no common
brilliancy of thought and diction, though it much
needs to be softened and subdued. It is in no
unkindly spirit that we have pointed out his
most glaring faults, but we believe hint to be
capable of better things if not spoilt by injudicious
flattery. He must first learn, however, to be
more natural, and be content to express ordinary
ideas in ordinary language; for poetry is not
mere periphrasis, nor is spdsmodic and tortuous
diction the fittest exponent of pathos.

Two Years in Syria. By J. Lew:s Farley.
London : Saunders and Otley.
WIIILE the blue sky of the Levant continues
undimmed by the smoke of factory chimneys,
or by any vapour more commonplace than the
fumes of a cool nari,rileh, the precipitous hills of
Palestine unseamed by gradients, and her nar-
row ravines unspanned by tubular bridges—while
Arab hordes stilt s%eep over the plain of Zebulon,
and travellers "from .Jerusalem to Jericho" still
meet with the fate recorded in the parable—while
soft Orontes, unpolluted by the refuse of mines
or mills, still continues to murmur beneath his
laurel shades—while Abana and Pharphar still
irrigate, after their ancient fashion, the garden of
Damascus, and the cry of Lock ! Lock !" is
still unheard upon the reaches of the Jordan—
while the maidens of Nazareth still draw water
from the Virgin's well, and the hermit still bur-
rows in the caverns of Tabor—while, in short,
any halo of romance or veneration, not unen-
hanced by danger and difficulty, still hangs over
the whole land from Dan to Beersheba,—so long,
we suppose, will books of Eastern travel continue '
to be written, and so long will it be the task of
critics to review them. After all, the Dead Sea
and Lebanon are not quite so hackneyed as Mont
Blanc and the Rhine, and even when such men
as Kinglake, Warburton, and Robinson (whom
Mr. Farley mentions), Mr. Stanley (whom he
forgets to mention), and the author of Murray's
admirable handbook, have appeared to exhaust
the country, there is still something left to fill
two or three chapters, if not a whole volume.
In such cases we must take what we can get, and
accept the merely adipose matter about the way
there and the way back, the regular traveller's
sights and emotions, the well-known occasions of
pleasure, discomfort, or astonishment, for the sake
of the few grains of novelty here and there oc-
curring.
Mr. Farley was for two years chief accountant
to the Ottoman Bank at Beyrout. At the end
of that time, iu consequence of a dispute with his
employers, he seems to have resigned his post.
The rights and wrongs of the question may be
seen in his appendix, but it need scarcely be said
that we have no intention of troubling our readers
with them. During his stay he seems to have
made himself pretty thoroughly acquainted with
the immediate vicinity of Beyrout, and in the
ample descriptions of its beauty and warm recom-
mendations of it as a place of residence consists
the speciality of his book. The accounts of his
other excursions, however, do not afford any
very perceptible addition to the stock of infor-
mation which may be gained from preceding
travellers. The book is chiefly made up from
letters addressed to friends at home, which Mr.
Farley tells us he has not " had leisure to revise."
but in which he does not think " there is
anything of importance to alter"—an opinion

Y _.

1171

in which we do not entirely coincide. Few tra-
vellers have genius and brilliancy enough to
make their desultory remarks take permanent
rank, and this is why the majority of diaries are
so confused and uninteresting. A man who is
not conscious of 9ualifications for vividly interest-
ing a reader in his own personal exploits and re-
flections, as, for instance, the author of "Eiithen"
does, may nevertheless produce a very readable
book by presenting his information in some sort of
arrangement, instead of casting it before the
reader in the order in which it happened to be
acquired by himself. Some of the pleasantest
books of travel we know are written on this
plan, which has moreover the inestimable ad-
vantage of allowing a reader to skip the topics
about which he feels no particular interest. Half
the trouble which Mr. Farley must have taken in
compiling two chapters of historical information
about the " decline of Ottoman power," "re-
turn of civilization," and so forth,—for we do
not imagine that he was unkind enough to
inflict this sort of thing on his dear friends at
home,—would have enabled him to treat his sub-
ject in a somewhat more methodical fashion. As
it is, after giving us nine chapters about Beyrout,
its climate, scenery, and society, he begins to
remember that we don't yet know how to get
there; and we then have four chapters devoted
to the various routes;—useful enough, certainly,
as far as a comparison of their different merits is
concerned, but filled with descriptions of Mar-
seilles, Lyons, the Rhone, the Mediterranean, the
voyage and the passengers, &c. &c., all of which
we have read a hundred times before. Who
" Rachel and her sister " may be, who enliven
the voyage to Alexandria by music and flirtation,
is possibly known to Mr. Farley's correspondents,
but cannot, certainly, be discovered by the most
attentive readers of his book ; nor is the " inter.
lude" relative to the mysterious melancholy
his friend "L." likely to interest them much
more, since the sorrows of that individual remain
wrapt in congenial obscurity to the end of the
chapter.

To a description of that not very novel process,
a Turkish bath, Mr. Farley devotes a dozen
pages of rather laborious smartness ; thus be
expresses the fact of being hurried into the next
room, by saying "you undergo a transition into
" the next apartment before you could pronounce
" the name of Mr. John Robinson in its most
" concise and abbreviated fbrm" ; while further
on, apropos of the Cydnus, he indulges in his
sportive vein on the subject of Antony and Cleo-
patra to an extent which does not convey a very
favourable impression of his taste or discrimina-
tion. Readers who should happen to light upon
such passages, or on the very commonplace religious
reflections about the Sea of Galilee, would pro-
bably form not so good an opinion of the book as
many other parts of it lead us to think it
deserves.

The approach to Beyrout from the sea is first
indicated by the snowy peak of Lebanon, with
its middle region perhaps veiled by clouds, and
looking "like an island in the sky." A 3 the
traveller draws nearer, and the form of the coast
displays itself, the clouds, perhaps, break, and
the fiat blue distant cone becomes gradually
stereographic. The patches of darker colour on
its sides turn into deep valleys, which serve to
conduct from the reservoir of snow above the
bright threads of silver, that, emerging from
masses of indistinct foliage, seem to hang on its
lower slopes as they fall step by step to the plain.
The lighter specks here and there, become towns
and villages, while turreted monasteries occupy
each coign of vantage ' above. Below, the white
houses, appearing at intervals through their rich,
dark plantations, catch the sunshine as it streams
across, and, in the distance, the minarets of the
city itself " stand up and take the morning" from
amidst their belt of orange groves. The country
itself retains—to judge from Mr. Parley's glow-
ing pictures—all its ancient fertility and luxu-
riance. The orange with its "flowers of silver
and fruit of gold," the luscious fig, the 'spreading
plane, the pine and palm, the citron, olive, and
apple, unite a hospitable and fruitful sLade, and
the ground is gay with hyacinths, anemones, and
gilliflowers. The city,—with its turreted walls
and spiry mosques, its houses gaily painted on
their outside walls in red and blue, its balconies
filled witb flowers, wafting to the passer-by the
mingled odours of rose, orange, anamine, its
improved cleanliness and comfort, ito cola " with

--~"=-~"`r~

THE PRESS, NOVEMBER 27, 1858,
1171
......----
The enormous sun a tiny lamp slung down
call and Mary ; or, Phases of Life and Love. From the great floor of heaven to give us light • lin which we do not entirely coincide. Few tra-
By Joseph Edward Jackson. London :J. W. When the tossed branches of the waving trees ' yellers have genius and brilliancy enough to
Are seen but to be swayed by His pure breath. make their desultory remarks take permanent
Parker and Son.
And so on. By the way, this Cecil is an intolerable rank, and this is why the majority of diaries arc
A rsTneric tale, pathetically told, though sadly
kill-Jtoorics Ile is, besides, a sort of pious cynic, so confused and uninteresting. A man who is
overwrought with quaint conceits and exag-
of " the loveliest mouth on earth "b • not conscious of gualifications for vividly interest-
Ile poet himself appears and mug
gusted metaphors. "still a vent for poisoned air," and much more to ing a reader in his own personal exploits and re-
have had some misgivings on this point, and
to the same effect, forgetful that such nice ideas flections, as, for instance, the author of " Eikhen"
perfectly irrelevant soliloquy expresses a
may not . betoken a. nasty mind. Once,
. and once onl,
in adoes, may nevertheless produce a very readable
book by presenting his information in some sort of
doubt whether "unmetaphoric phrase "
he is grimly humorous in writing to his
be best. There can be but. one opinion as to the
betrothed about his future mother-in law, whose arrangement,. instead of casting it before the
too frequent indulgence in forced imagery which
disinclination to himself he prettily describes as reader in the order in which it happened to be
nu. mired by himself. Some of the pleasantest
pervades every page of this poem, otherwise, in
" the rusty hinge of that unyielding door " upon
woks of. travel we know are written on this
wanv respects, entitled to praise. At times, the
which he begs his darling Mary to drop " a lucid
metaphors arc not only far-fetched but positively
spe...ck." plan, which has moreover the inestimable ad-
ludicrous. For instance, when Mary is endea-
But, notwithstanding; these mans, and serious vantage of allowing a reader to skip the topics
vourin* to obtain her mother's consent to her . ~ . • ~-,
imperfections, there is much to admire in this about which he feels no particular interest. Half
immediate union
himwith Cecil, in order that she
may accompany on his missionary adventure, poem. It would be no arduous task to select the trouble which Mr. Farley must have taken in
many passages of considerable beauty and of still compiling two chapters of historical information
she piteously exclaims :
Love is strong, greater promise. The flow of' the verse is about the "decline of Ottoman power," "re-
tie its best anchorehain will snap like tow throughout easy, not unfrequently musical, and turn of civilization," and so forth,—for we do
When duty blows, and I shall then be left at times almost majestic. If not a poet of the not imagine that he was unkind enough to
An ugly niud•bank, with the rusted fluke first water, Mr.(?) Jackson possesses no common inflict this sort of thing on his dear friends at
Driven right through me. brilliancy of thought and diction, though it much home,—would have enabled him to treat his sub-
.l6u, forlorn mud-turtle I in truth thou wouldst needs to be softened and subdued. It is in no jest in a somewhat more methodical fashion. As
be in a sorry plight, with the rusty fluke of the unkindly spirit that we have pointed out his it is, after giving us nine chapters about Beyrout,
lot bower anchor driven right through thee, moat glaring faults, but we believe hint to be its climate, scenery, and society, lie begins to
nor deem we that Prometheus Vinetus would capable of better things if not spoilt by injudicious remember that we don't yet know how to get
care to sachange his lot for thine ! The excessive flattery. He must first learn, however, to be there ; and we then have four chapters devoted
use of this inflates and unnatural style is, indeed, more natural, and be content to express ordinary to the various routes;—useful enough, certainly,
a grievous blot. A tale of woe cannot be told ideas in ordinary language; for poetry is not as far as a comparison of their different merits is
with too much simplicity. Our tears refuse to mere periphrasis, nor is spasmodic and tortuous concerned, but filled with descriptions of Mar-
flow when summoned forth in big, swelling phrase. diction the fittest exponent of pathos. seilles, Lyons, the Rhone, the Mediterranean, the
We nary overlook the absurdity of a heroine in voyage and the passengers, &c. &c., all of which
_
an I.alian opera dying in a bras era, but we do we have read a hundred times before. Who
sot weep over her untimely bier or sicken at the Two Years in Syria. By J. Lets Farley. "Rachel and her sister" may be, who enliven
si,:ht of the cold fowl and ham which the wife London : Saunders and Otley. the voyage to Alexandria by music and flirtation,
of our bosom has caused to be set out for us. is possibly known to Mr. Farley's correspondents,
WHILE the blue sky of the Levant continues but cannot, certainly, be discovered by the most
In a poem that s2eks to express the extremest
undimmed by the smoke of factory chimneys, attentive readers of his book ; nor is the " inter.
anguish that can wring the brow of mortals,
or by any vapour more commonplace than the lude" relative to the mysterious melancholy a
turgid phraseology is a profound and inexcusable
fumes of a cool nari,rileh, the precipitous hills of his friend "1.." likely to interest them much
defect. We here look an ve;n for a simple stunt-
Palestine. unseamed by gradients, and her nar-
mint or ordinary expression. Even the " Collegemore, since the sorrows of that individual remain
row ravines unspanned by tubular bridges—while
Tutor" cannot escape tHs all-pervading blemil. wrapt in congenial obscurity to the end of the
Arab hordes stilt sa eep over the plain of Zebolon,
When he would warn Cecil against the extremes chanter.
and travellers "from .Jerusalem to Jericho" still
of cold and heat he might expct to encounter inTo a description of that not very novel process,
meet with the fate recorded in the parable—while.
the career of a missionary, lie strikes an attitude
soft Orontes, unpolluted by the refuse of mines a Turkish bath, Mr. Farley devotes a dozen
and thus declaims : pages of rather laborious smartness ; thus he
or mills, still continues to murmur beneath his
The fierce flame-breathing son of tropic lands laurel shades—while Abana and Fharphar still expresses the fact of being hurried into the next
Would eat your life out., as it would a fire's ; room, by saying " you undergo a transition into
The icy cold of snow o'er-rinded climes irrigate, after their ancient fashion, the garden of
\V u'l stiffen all your heart-strings till they snapped. Damascus, and the cry of " Lock ! Lock !" is " the next apartment before you could pronounce
Yon hare not granite strength enough for heat or cold. still unheard upon the reaches of the Jordan— " the name of Mr. John Robinson in its most
He then suddenly sketches the outline of "a while the maidens of Nazareth still draw water " concise and abbreviated form" ; while further
useless hull," such as poor Cecil will become when from the Virgin's well, and the hermit still bur- on, apropos of the Cydnus, he indulges in his
his life has been burnt out and his heart-strings rows in the caverns of Tabor—while, in short, sportive vein on the subject of Antony and Cleo-
hare snapped. 'Twere better, he patheti- any halo of romance or veneration, not linen-
patra to an extent which does not convey a very
tally adds, hanced by danger and difficulty, still hangs over favourable impression of his taste or discrimina-
'Twere better far the whole land from Dan to Beersheba,--so long, tion. Readers who should happen to light upon
To be amu I barge here, and carry dirt. we suppose, will books of Eastern travel continue such passages, or on the very conunonplace religious
reflections about the Sea of Galilee, would pro-
Hut not only does Mr. Jackson—though in- to be written, and so long will it be the task of
temal evidence would lead us to ascribe this poem critics to review them. After all, the Dead Sea bably form not so good an opinion of the book as
many other parts of it lead us to think it
to female inspiration, were it possible that a and Lebanon are not quite so hackneyed as Mont
Blanc and the Rhine, and even when such men deserves.
poetess could choose such a nom de plume—not
oil does he sin against taste, but at times be as Kinglake, Warburton, and Robinson (whom The approach to Beyrout from the sea is first
approaches the profane. Not consciously, perhaps, Mr. Farley mentions), Mr. Stanley (whom he indicated by the snowy peak of Lebanon, with
or intentionally, but nevertheless he painfully forgets to mention), and the author of Murray's its middle region perhaps veiled by clouds, and
'hocks an ear not accustomed to the sensuous admirable handbook, have appeared to exhaust looking "like an island in the sky." As the
l the country, there is still something left to fill traveller draws nearer, and the form of the coastimagery of evangelical sectarianism. After
refuesing the many-acted squire, Mary has a two or three chapters, if not a whole volume. displays itself; the clouds, perhaps, break, and
"quiet talk to herself" about the worthlessness In such cases we must take what we can get, and the flat blue distant cone becomes gradually
of gold, and asks if she couldpossibly be so base accept the merely adipose matter about the way stereographic. The patches of darker colour on
as to betray a noble heart that trusted in her. there and the way back, the regular traveller's its sides turn into deep valleys, which serve to
sights and emotions, the well-known occasions of conduct from the reservoir of snow above the
No, she indignantly exclaims,
No, not if all the squires pleasure, discomfort, or astonishment, for the sake bright threads of silver, that, emerging from
In this broad country came and flung their gold, of the few grains of novelty here and there oc- masses of indistinct foliage, seem to hang on its
Coin after coin, before me as a bribe; eurr;ng, lower slopes as they fall step by step to the plain.
.Is.l God smiles grandly ad I speak these word,. Mr. Farley was for two years chief accountant The lighter specks here and there, become towns
her prayer to the Deity is likewise most to the Ottoman Bank at Beyrout. At the end and villages, while turreted monasteries occupy
übjectionable. Throughout she racks her imagi- of that time, iu consequence of a dispute with his each ' coign of vantage' above. Below, the white
nation to say smart things, and gives free course employers, he seems to have resigned his post. houses, appearing at intervals through their rich,
Ito all sans of fantastic fancies. But infinitely The rights and wrongs of the question may be dark plantations, catch the sunshine as it streams
y.ors2 arc Cecil's pantheistic aspirations at seen in his appendix, but it need scarcely be said across, and, in the distance, the minarets of the
t'„awapore. Meditating over the tomb of Henry that we have no intention of troubling our readers city itself " stand up and take the morning" from
"artyn, he laments that we do not " ope our eyes with them. During his stay he seems to have amidst their belt of orange groves. The country
a little wider," for— made himself pretty thoroughly acquainted with itself retains—to judge from Mr. Parley's glow-
We should then see God
ln everything—in sand -grain and in son
; the immediate vicinity of Beyrout, and in the ing pictures—all its ancient fertility and luxu-
ample descriptions of its beauty and warm recom- riance. The orange with its "flowers of silver
la fhwer, tree, insect, bird, and beast, and min. mendations of it as a place of residence consists and fruit of gold," the luscious fig, the spreading
It is a new world, we are told, when the eye the speciality of his book. The accounts of his plane, the pine and palm, the citron, olive, and
Kti God in everything:— other excursions, however, do not afford any apple, unite a hospitable and fruitful shade, and
When the loud booming, of the battling seas very perceptible addition to the stock of infor- the.ground is gay with hyacinths, anemones, and
Avr,eeeehoes of the awful voice of God ; mation which may be gained from preceding gilhflowers. The city,—with its turreted walls
~lal?sen.the heaven- pointing mountain is a mound travellers. The book is chiefly made up from and spiry mosques, its houses gaily painted on.
11-hen
the
one spadeful by the arm of God ; letters addressed to friends at home, which Mr. their outside walls in red and blue, its balconies
,',,a, quic.k darting lightning's blinding flash Farley tells us he has not " had leisure to revise." filled witb flowers, wafting to the passer-by the
. the clear glitter of His golden spear ;
When the dread city-razing earthquake-shock but in which he does not think " there is mingled odours of rose, orange, anfaraLaine, its
li the globe shuddering in His mighty grasp— - anything of importance to alter "—an opinion improved cleanliness and comfort, its cafa " with
----.
- _ . ..---717—=-- ...41ww-• .a........-.. . -,....101.04611.0 . -,17 ^ - '-'--- --.- e..e....-srtaimplipz,.....,------7:---420.:11774111teem..--
- - __L____ ~. _ . _llr.? .. ; ..-1 .... —_ vi .._...._.-.11. ---11. -

I