The Sun.
London, England, 1856-02-19 00:00:00

L ITER ATUR E.

The Myshic : and other Poems. By Philip James
Bailey. Second Edition. Ckipman and Hall.
Mr. Bailey is evidently a very wonderful man—
bestriding the world of letters like a colossus, and
talking over our heads, far away—in nitbibics! His
" Festus " was a mystery of mysteries floating
across the blue empyrian of literature like
a magic car drawn by fiery dragons, but drop-
ping down among us, as it passed by up
aloft, fragments of delicious melody, and pearls
and jewels of as rare price as ever fell from
the lips of the Arabian Princess. Then came his
" Angel World"—a mistier mystery of mysteries 1
And last of all " The Mystic"—the very name of
which is a confession ! It cannot possibly be that
Mr. Bailey's excuse for his incomprehensibility is
in any way explicable by an avowal like that of
the inscrutable versemaker in Horace—brevis esse
laboro, obscurus fig—the Pegasus of our author
being, of all the ambling nags within the range of
our acquaintance, decidedly about the most long-
winded, and one having, moreover, the largest
scope imaginable in which to show off its
paces to perfection. The field traversed by that
steed—shod with thunder and maned with light-
ning—being, in point of fact, Universal Space,
"Heaven," " Hell," the "Surface," " Any-
where," " Everywhere !" What says The Devil,
as he is riding by his side ?

" See what a long long track
Of dust and fire behind,
For miles and miles aback !
And shrill and strong,
As we shoot along,
Whistles and whirls,
Like a forest of firs
Falling, the cold north wind."
Whereto, Festus :
" Look ! my way I can only read
By the sparks from the hoof of my giant steed."
Presently (Pegasus galloping like mad along the
edge of a stupendous precipice by the sea-shore)
what saith Festus
FESTUB--" Wilt take the sea t"
"Think of that, Master Brook !" To which, not to
be outdone in pluck—

LIICIFER—" Ay, that will we !
And swim as we ride,
Our steeds astride ;
Como leap, le-l') off with me !"
FESTUS [half disposed to draw back at a pinch with sud-
den qualms comprehensible enough is poor
mortality]—
" What ? shall we leap
Sheer off this steep
A mile above the sea ?"
_

"Surely," thinks theDe;il,-;nd the Davil says
plainly enough what he thinks, and—away they
go !

FESTUS.--

" There is a rapture in the headlong leap,
The wedgelike cleaving of the closing deep!
&n., &c."
LIICIFBA [adding]—" By Chaos ! this is gallant sport ;
A league at every breath ;
Methinks if ever I have to die
I'll ride this rate to death."

Such is the Pegasus, Mr: Bailey bestrides, riding
(these are his own words, remember ! vide " Fes-
tits." 2cl Ed. 1815. p. 91.)—
"Right onward ! till we feel the whirling brain
Ring with the maddening music of the main ;
Till the fixed eyebal: strives and strains to ken,
Yet loathes to ken the shore and haunts of men ;
And the blood, half starting through each ridgy veto,
In the unwieldy hand sets black with pain."
Precisely. He describes it to a nicety. Carried
away with him in his wild career, hither and
thither, here, there, and everywhere, we are soon,
be sure of that, stark, staring, raging, ravaging
mad ! The poet's eye (Mr. Bailey's)—like that of
the true bard described by Shakspere, "in a fine
frenzy rolling, glancing from earth to heaven, from
heaven to earth." Everybody is infected. The
cleverest mon of our time sing the Feaus of his
praise. The bluff; sturdy, honest, Corn Law
Rhymer, tells us of Festics—" It contains poetry
enough to set up fifty poets !" Sir Edward Lytton
calls it a production "most remarkable and mag,ni-
fieent." (We are quoting from the puffs-supple-
mentary given at the end of Mr. Bailey's master-
piece.) Mr. Marston says, " I know no poem in
the language that can be compared with its copi-
ousness and variety of imagery." Mr. Charles
Hooton—(who the deuce is Mr. Charles Hooton ?)
—says, " this book is in a modern library, what
the garden of Eden was in the old world,—a glory
and perfection, in the midst of comparative
sterility." Gum cceteri.s paribus—usque ad nauseant.
Well—we suppose it is all this. And we suppose,
too, that the drivellings of the late Mr. Wordsworth
about idiots, and Betty Foys, and Peter
Bells, and the like vulgar numskulls, are the
sublimest outpourings of poetical philoso-
phy. We will suppose all this—we will
take it for granted. But, for God's sake, don't let
us hear after this that there was ever anybody of any
note at all, ever burn in Holles-street, London, or
in Henley-street, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick-
shire. The two classes of events are incompatible.
Accept the one as proven, and the other must in-
evitably be at once repudiated. However, this
may be—certainly it does so appear—that Words-
worth has his worshippers, and so too has Mr.
Bailey: Off with your caps to them, greasy mob !
and fling them into the air ! But when such is done
be sure the " fixed eyeballs" strain and strive,
and the blood starts in the " ridgy veins" till the
hands grow black, and the brain whirls to the
" maddening music" after the very natural fashion
described by Mr. Bailey in his festits, when h@
flies off at a tangent on the back of his bedlarnite
Pegasus !

'turning, however, for a moment from " Festus"
and the " Angel World," and. " The Mystic," and
the select little excited group of Mr. Bailey's ad-
mirers, what is the advice we finti hinted to his
fellow-scribes by .141 rd Byron ?
" Dear authors ! suit your topics to your strength,
And ponder well your subject', and its length ;
Nor lift your load before you're quite aware
What weight your shoulders will, or will not, bear:
But lucid Older, and Wit's siren voice,
Await the poet skilful in his choice ;
With native eloquence he soars along—
Grace in his thoughts, and music in his song."

Alas ! advice such as this appears to bo either in-
audible or wholly unpersuasive among many of the
leading rbymsters of our generation. An age of
poetry strangely prefigured, it seems to us, in those
lines of Dr. Johnson, written by the great critic
years upon years lago, in ridicule of certain poems
published in 1777

" Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
All is strange and nothing new;
Endless labour all along,
Endless labour to be wrong ;
Phrase that time has flung away,
Uncouth words in disarray,
Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and elegy, and sonnet."
Unhappily for his honour, not merely odo and
elegy, and sonnet, but epic, and dramatic, and di
dactic performances of most portentous magnitude-
Latest manifestation of which " Endlesi labour to be
wrong" comes tohand this amazing Riddle•me-riddle-
me-ree of " The Mystic." We suppose it is all very
fine. Turning it over—with our eyes gradually
starting, and our hair slowly bristling up, and our
veins imperceptibly s .yelling, and our brain ra-
pidly churned into a whirl, under the maddening
influence of poet and poetry—we read a great
deal about the Earth being " reboant," and about
a god (with a small g) of " psychopornpous func-
tion," and about planets which are " plenipotent,"
and mirrors that are " smaragdine, ' and pearls
" enringed with natural nimbus," about " mediates
linked and interlapped," and " terraqueous em-
bouchures," and " demiurgic hosts," and ceviter-
nal causes," and all that sort of thing—
abundantly, prolifically, multitudinously. Pelion
—as we turn the pages gets piled upon
Ossa, and Olympus shrivels down into a wart, and
from the top of Pelion perched on the shoulders of
Ossa, high up among the clouds, there comes bab-
bling down to us, faintly, the ghost of a voice maun-
dering monotonously about something or other—
what must remain, we presume, for ever and ever
a mystery alike to Gods and men. Altogether—
the thing is as much like a nightmare brought to
0
book, set up by the compositors, carefullyhcorrecdted,
as far as the typography is concerned, by t e. rea ers
if the
of the Messrs. Chapman and Hall's establishment,
and in due course of time issued from the press
—nowmhoOre to pass through edition after edition amidst
the plaudits awuedriet so on fl
el Bailey s admirers—who, dm
coursei rers
un-
derstand what on earth, or in heaven, or in hell, he
yMcornfßes.asi
means, than he can by any sort of possibility do,
himself. However, here the book is actually be-
fore us to the number of 165 octavo pages,
with " second edition" already stamped upon its
title-page. It raves at one moment about
64 Heaven's azure world-hive, celled with stars"
(p. 8), and a little further on (p. 12) tells us all
about somebody (" The Mystic," of course) sail-
ing—

" The sky's abysmal sea of suns
In ark crystalline, manned by beaming gods,
To drag the deeps of space and net the stars,
Where in their nebulous shoals they shore the void,
And through old night's Typhonian blindness shine,
Then, solarized, &e."

And so on—and so on. Very wonderful—isn't it ?
Amazing ! In fact so wonderful as to be altogether
miles and miles out of the reach of any sane man's
comprehension. Finally—let ushere say foronce and
for all, that to get rid of " The Mystic," and Mr.
Bailey, and his worshippers all together, we are
ready to agree with them about its splendour, aud
his pre-eminence, and their sagacity, in
fact—
(there ! if they will only let us have done with it)
—about everything ! We accept " Festus "as the
poemsof poems dwarfing by the force of _ COLL.