Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 369, July 1846

NEW SCOTTISH PLAYS AND POEMS. 53

We suspect that in this railway age poetry is at a greater discount than ever. The reason is obvious. Not only the public, who are the readers, but even the poets themselves, have been largely infected by the current mania of speculation. Had the possession of capital been requisite for a participation in any of the thousand defunct schemes which have caused so unprecedented an emigration to the breezy shores of Boulogne, our poetical friends might have claimed for their vocation the credit of a rare morality. But unfortunately, the national gaming-table was open to men of every class. Peer and peasant, count and costermonger, millionaire and bankrupt, were alike entitled to figure as allottees, or even as committee-men, for the simple subscription of their signatures; and amidst the rush and squeeze of the crowd, who thronged towards the portal of Plutus, we were less surprised than pained to observe some of the most venerated votaries of Apollo. We shall not affect to disguise the purpose for which we were there ourselves. But much may be permitted to the prosaic writer which is forbidden to the canonized bard. Ours is a pen of all work – equally ready to concoct a prospectus, or to expose a literary charlatan. We are intensely fond of lucre, and expect, some day or another, to be in possession of the moiety of a plum. We have therefore no vain scruples regarding the sanctity of our calling, but carry our genius like a hooded falcon upon our wrist, ready to let it fly at any manner of game which may arise. We, however, deny in absolute terms the right of a poet to any such general license. He has no business whatever to trespass one foot beyond the limits his own domain. He ought to be thoroughly ignorant of the existence of bulls and bears, stags and ducks, and the rest of the zoology of the Exchange. Consols should be to him a mystery more impenetrable than the Sibylline verses, and the state of the stocks as unaccountable as the policy of Sir Robert Peel. The mischief, however, is done, and we fear it is irremediable. The example of the Poet-Laureate may indeed serve as a kind of excuse for the minor professors of the art. His well-known attempt to bear the Kendal and Windermere line, by a series of ferocious sonnets, is still fresh in the memory of the public, and we trust the veteran has, long ere this, realized a handsome profit. We ourselves made a little money out of the Perth and Inverness, by means of an indignant tirade against the desecration of the Pass of Killiecrankie; and we should, to a certainty, have made more, had not the Parliamentary Committee been weak enough to believe us, and, in consequence, to reject the bill. Yet it may be long before the literary market can recover its healthy tone – ere sonnets once more resume their ancient ascendency, and circulate from hand to hand in the character of intellectual scrip.

We suspect that very few of the poets backed out of the scrape in time. Their sanguine and enthusiastic temperament led them to hold, at all risks and hazards; and they did not, as a body, take warning from the symptoms of a declining market. An amiable friend of ours who belongs to the Young England party, and who has issued a couple of duodecimos in laudation of Bishop Bonner, found himself at the period of the crash in possession of two thousand Caithness and Land's End scrip, utterly unsaleable at any discount, though a fortnight before they were quoted at fifteen premium. He meditates, as we are informed, a speedy retirement to the penal solitudes of La Trappe, as there now seems to be little hope that Louis Philippe will provide a proper refuge for chivalrous misfortune by resuscitating the Order of Malta. The weaver-poet of Camlachie has gone into the Gazette in consequence of an unfortunate speculation in Caledonians. His lyre is as silent as his shuttle; and we fear that in his hours of despondency he is becoming by far too much addicted to drink. A clever young dramatist confessed to us some time ago that he found himself utterly "goosed;" and the last hope of the school of Byron has been forced to deny himself the luxury of inverted collars, as his uncompromising laundress peremptorily refused to accept of payment in characteristic Cemetery shares.

In the gross, this state of things seems deplorable enough; and yet, when we analyse it, there is still some room for comfort. Never, since we first had the honour of wielding the critical lash – for the Crutch is a sacred instrument – in the broad amphitheatre of letters, do we recollect a year less fertile in the product of verse than the present. Our young friends are not possessed with the same supreme and sublime contempt of gold which formed so disinterested a feature of the poets of the by-gone age. They have become corrupted by the manufacturing and utilitarian tenets of the day; and – we shudder to record it – divers of them are violent free-traders. They have all fallen into the snare of the man Broker; and at the very outset of life, in the heyday and spring of their existence, they can count both sides of a shilling with the acuteness of a born Pennsylvanian. Hence it is, we presume, that they have attained to a knowledge of the fact – long ago notorious among the Trade – that poetry will not pay. They look upon genius through the glasses of Adam Smith, weigh the probability of an adequate demand before they venture on the production of a supply, and cut short the inchoate canto upon principles of Political Economy. In a few years, we fear, poetry will be no longer extant, save for the commercial purposes of the advertisements of Messrs Moses and Hyam; unless, indeed, some Welsh or Highland railway company should take the matter up, and double their dividends by bribing a first-rate poet to produce another Lady of the Lake. Hence the sparseness of our library table, which renders our old vocation comparatively a sinecure, and leaves us, without the necessity of immolation, to the undisturbed enjoyment of our chair.

We might indeed, were we savagely inclined, discover some Volscians worth our fluttering in the ranks of Young England, or the more sombre group of poetical Oxonian divines. But we look with a kindly eye upon the eccentricities of the one school, and we listen to the drowsy strains of the other with no more active demonstration of disapproval than a yawn. We have high hope of George Sydney Smythe, Lord John Manners, and others, who have already produced some things of evident promise – not mere beaten tinsel, such as the resuscitated Cockneys are again beginning to vend in the literary market – but verses of true and genuine originality. Could we but ensure them against the vitiating effects of politics, it were a light hazard to predict for either of the above gentlemen a far higher reputation than has been achieved by the united efforts of the whole canorous crew which constituted the Melbourne administration. We must indeed except Mr Macaulay, a better poet than a politician, but – the brilliant ballad-writer being removed – what soul could have been contented to fatten upon the spongy lyrics of a Spring Rice, or the intolerable tragedies of a Russell! What food to sweeten the tedium of a solitary imprisonment for life!

As for the Oxford school, we fairly confess that its votaries are beyond our comprehension. Amiable they are, no doubt, although ascetic in principle; but they are likewise insufferably tedious. We have attempted at various times, and during different states of the barometer, to make ourselves master of the compositions of Mr Williams and his principal followers. We failed. After skimming over a page or two of mellifluous blank verse, we began to experience a strange sensation, as if a bee were humming through the room. At each evolution of the imaginary insect, our eyes felt heavier and heavier. We made a strong effort to rally ourselves at the description of a crystalline stream, meandering, as we rather think, somewhere through the confines of Paradise; but the hue of the water gradually changed. It became dark and treacly, purled with a somniferous sound, as though the channel had been filled with living laudanum; and in three minutes more we were unconscious of the existence of the income-tax, and as relieved from the load of worldly cares as though we had joined company with the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.

Surely we have a right to expect something better from Oxford than this. The old nurse of learning must bestir herself once more, forswear morphia, and teach her pupils to strike a manlier chord, else men will cease to believe in the ancient magic of her name. What we want is, power, energy, pathos – not mere vapid sentiment, so diligently distilled that scarce a flavour of the original material is left to enable us to discover its origin. If poetry be a copy or a reflex of life, let it show out lifelike and true; if it be the representation of a dream, at all events let us have the vision, as in the mirror of Agrippa, well defined, though around its edges rest the clouds of impenetrable mystery. Above all things, let us have meaning, not vague allegorical phrases – power if not passion – sense if not sublimity. If the classics cannot teach us these, let us go back to the earlier ballads, and see how our fathers wrote without the aid of metaphysical jargon.

Our present purpose is to deal with Scottish writers, and fortunately we have material at hand. Last month we were in London, engaged in divers matters connected with the state of the nation and our own private emolument, which latter pursuit we as seldom as possible neglect. The cares of a railway witness, in which capacity we had the honour to act, are but few. A bountiful table was spread for us, not in the wilderness, but in an excellent hotel in St James's; breakfast, luncheon, dinner, and supper, followed one another with praiseworthy regularity; the matutinal soda-water was only succeeded by the iced hock and champagne of the vespers, and a beneficent Fairy of seventeen stone, in the guise of a Writer to Her Majesty's Signet, was courteous enough not only to defray the whole of the attending expenses, but to furnish us with certain sums of gold, which we disseminated at our own proper pleasure. In return for the attentions of our legal Barmecide, we submitted to ensconce ourselves for a couple of days in a hot room somewhere about the Cloisters, in the course of which sederunt we held an animated conversation with several gentlemen in wigs, for the edification – as we were given to understand – of five other gentlemen in hats, who sat yawning behind a green table. We take this opportunity of tendering our acknowledgments to the eminent and raucous Queen's Counsel who was kind enough to conduct our cross-examination, and who so delicately insinuated his doubts as to the veracity and candour of our replies. As his knowledge of the localities about Braemar – the district then under question – was about equal to his cognizance of the natural history of Kamschatka, we felt the compliment deeply; and should we ever have the pleasure of encountering our beetle-browed acquaintance during a vacation ramble on the skirts of Schehallion, we pledge ourselves that he shall carry back with him to Lincoln's Inn some lasting tokens of our regard. In the mean time we sincerely hope he has recovered from that distressing fit of huskiness which rendered his immediate vicinity by no means a seat of comfort to his solicitor.

As a matter of course, we relieved the monotony of our duties by divers modes of relaxation. Greenwich – in the glory of its whitebait, its undeniable Thames flounders, its dear little ducklings enshrined in their asparagus nest, and its flagons, wherein the cider cup shows sparklingly through the light blue Borage– was not unfrequented by us in the course of the sultry afternoon. At Richmond, likewise, we battened sybaritically; and more than once essayed to resuscitate our appetite, and awake within us the dormant sense of poetry, by a stroll along the breezy heath of Hampstead, preparatory to a dive into the Saracen, where, doubtless, in the days of yore, Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Hazlitt used to make wild work among the eggs and spinach. Our attendance at the theatres, however, was a matter of rarity. We have no fancy to undergo martyrdom by means of a slow stewing, when the sole palm we can win, in exchange for the sudorific pangs, is the enjoyment of some such shabby-genteel comedy as The Beggar on Horseback, or a travestie like that of the Birds of Aristophanes, the only peculiarity of which is its utter want of meaning. As a general rule, we prefer the spectacles on the Surrey side, to those exhibited in the Metropolitan or Westminster districts. There, the nautical drama still flourishes in its pristine force. The old British tar, in ringlets, pumps, and oil-skin castor, still hitches up his trousers with appropriate oath; revolves the unfailing bolus of pigtail in his cheek – swims to shore across a tempestuous sea of canvass, with a pistol in each hand and a cutlass in his teeth, from the wreck of the foundering frigate – and sets foot once more on the British soil, just in time to deliver Pretty Poll of Portsmouth, his affianced bride, (who has a passion for short petticoats and crimson stockings,) from the persecutions of that bebuttoned pirate with the whiskers, who carries more pistols in his girdle than the scalps of an Indian chief, and whose fall, after a terrific combat with basket-hilts and shower of fiery sparkles, brings down the curtain at the close of the third act amidst roars of unmitigated joy. Also we delight to see, at never-failing Astley's, the revived glories of British prowess – Wellington, in the midst of his staff, smiling benignantly upon the facetious pleasantries of a Fitzroy Somerset – Sergeant M'Craw of the Forty-Second, delighting the élite of Brussels by his performance of the reel of Tullochgorum at the Duchess of Richmond's ball – the charge of the Scots Greys – the single combat between Marshal Ney and the infuriated Life-guardsman Shaw – and the final retreat of Napoleon amidst a volley of Roman candles, and the flames of an arseniated Hougomont. Nor is our gratification less to discern, after the subsiding of the shower of saw-dust so gracefully scattered by that groom in the doeskin integuments, the stately form of Widdicomb, cased in martial apparel, advancing towards the centre of the wing, and commanding – with imperious gestures, and some slight flagellation in return for dubious compliment – the double-jointed clown to assist the Signora Cavalcanti to her seat upon the celebrated Arabian. How lovely looks the lady, as she vaults to her feet upon the breadth of the yielding saddle! With what inimitable grace does she whirl these tiny banners around her head, as winningly as a Titania performing the sword exercise! How coyly does she dispose her garments and floating drapery to hide the too maddening symmetry of her limbs! Gods! – She is transformed all at once into an Amazon – the fawn-like timidity of her first demeanour is gone. Bold and beautiful flushes her cheek with animated crimson – her full voluptuous lip is more compressed and firm – the deep passion of the huntress sparkles in her lustrous eye! Widdicomb becomes excited – he moves with quicker step around the periphery of his central circle – incessant is the smacking of his whip – not this time directed against Mr Merryman, who at his ease is enjoying a swim upon the saw-dust – and lo! the grooms rush in, six bars are elevated in a trice, and over them all bounds the volatile Signora like a panther, nor pauses until, with airy somersets, she has passed twice through the purgatory of the blazing hoop, and then, drooping and exhausted, sinks like a Sabine into the arms of the herculean Master, who – a second Romulus – bears away his lovely burden to the stables, amidst such a whirlwind of applause as Kemble might have been proud to earn!