Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

quite a novelty; but indeed, according to, Chambers, it was not much before 1756 that the knocker supplanted the aboriginal rasp and pin in Auld Reekie.

The bricks of which the houses are built are vastly hard: Mr. Crawford had forgot to bore a hole for a bell (which, in every house, is put so as the handle is at the side of the outer door, that, instead of knocking, you ring), and in peircing that hole through the brick, it was as hard to do as if it had been marble.'-p. 140.

We conclude with a paragraph which, more than any other in this book, must have delighted the members of the Maitland Club of Glasgow:'

Most of the reproaches our country meets with can only be the effect of want of enquiry or reflection. I once thought that Scotland might carry on a greater trade than it does, from its advantageous situation for the sea; but if they should import, who is to take it off their hands? there is no country behind them to supply, who has not the advantages of the seaports, which is the case of Holland, who has all Germany to supply; neither have they a great demand at home, like England, which is a great country, and most part of it inland, that must be supplied from the trading towns on the coast. Or, to what country can they transport their merchandise, which they have imported more than serves themselves, that cannot be as cheap served by nearer neighbours? They have no East India goods, which are almost the only goods that are demanded by all the world, so that no country, which has not one or more of these advantages, can ever become a country of great trade.'-p. 144.

Could this good lady of 1756 have had second-sight enough to catch a glimpse of her native Clyde as it is in 1842, what could have persuaded her that she had her own dearly beloved and judiciously-admonished Scotland before her vision!

We are tempted to conclude our review of a book which perhaps few will ever handle, with an extract from one which is, or ought to be, as well thumbed as any production of the present year- The Mirza' of the wise humourist, and gentle satirist, who more lightly and happily than any other writer conveys lessons to his own countrymen, in the shape of mirthful delineations of the absurdities of outlandish faith and practice. Mr. Morier represents himself as listening to one of the brilliant tales of wonder with which his friend-and indeed hero-the professional story-teller in chief was accustomed to cheer the evening hours of the late Shah of Persia. On its conclusion he joined the royal circle in extolling the merit of the narrative, but incautiously signified his suspicion of its marvellous incidents. There was a burst of

indignation at such Pyrrhonism; but the Frank rejoins:

'Perhaps I, too, may assert some facts relating to my own country, to which you may not be willing to give credence, but to the truth of which I in my turn am ready to take my oath.”

"Ohi-oh, well said and well done," said the prince, his words echoed by the poet, and repeated by the rest of the company. "Speak on-let us hear-our ears are open. We have given up our souls to you.”

"I then said:"Perhaps every one present sailed in one, have remarked how it is impelled has seen a ship, and though they may not have by wind; perhaps, too, some may have been caught in a tempest, or observed its effects on the sea. Now, we have ships in my country, which, in defiance of storms and tempests, will make their way in the teeth of the wind, and thus perform voyages from one end of the world to the other."

'I paused awhile, after having made this assertion, to hear the remarks of the company. I could perceive incredulity in every face: a little scorn and contempt, perhaps, was associated with that feeling, but it was plain no one bemy words.

lieved

"Sahib ekhtiar. You are at liberty, of course, to affirm what you please," said the prince, "but to me it appears that what you have advanced is wholly impossible."

666

'What words are these?" said another.

"You might as well say that I can thrust a spear through my enemy's body and he not bleed, as to say a ship will go ahead against

wind."

'I heard the word derough, derough-lie! lie! whispered about from mouth to mouth throughout the assembly, and I became convinced that I was totally disbelieved.

'I then tried them on another subject.

truth of which I am ready to take my oath. In "There is another thing," said I, "to the my country our cities are lighted at night by the means of lanterns suspended on iron pillars. A subterranean vapour is made to circulate through our streets, which is led to the summit of the said pillars, and at a given hour men run hands, which they merely present to a small about the city carrying a lighted taper in their spiral tube, whence a flame is seen to issue, which, keeping alive the night through, illumin ates the city like day, the inhabitants meanwhile sleeping soundly, unapprehensive of evil consequences."

"Where in the name of Allah," said the prince, "have you found words to affirm such things? A subterranean fire running underafraid! ground all through your streets, and nobody Yours must be a world different from ours, inhabited by men of a different formation to Persians. I cannot believe what you say."

[ocr errors]

"People may talk of Persians being liars," said one of the company, "but as there is but one Allah, and Mahomet is his prophet and Ali the future. Wonderful assertions have we heard his lieutenant, let them go to the Franks for to-day."

"Now I begin to understand," said a man of

conceive that the time, among us at least, It is hard in this state of things not to is an essentially unpoetic one-one which, whatever may be the worth of its feelings, finds no utterance for them in melodious words.

the law who was present, "why Franks are un- | richer, clearer language than they can learn believers of our faith, the ever-blessed and only to speak. true faith of Islam-why they reject our prophet and despise his sayings, while they adhere with so much pertinacity to their own. See this Sahib-he tells us of things which cannot be true, and believes in them, whilst events which may occur every day, which so many people here present, men of respectability and worthy of confidence, have seen and heard of, he rejects. Is it not plain that the reputation which Persia has acquired for the sagacity and acuteness of her sons, has been well acquired, whilst all the rest of mankind are kept in a state of total blindness? Let the Sahib forgive my words," said the speaker, turning himself to me, "but in truth our holy prophet legislated with all wisdom, when he said, "As for the unbeliever, all that is left for him is kall, katl, slay, slay.'

[ocr errors]

"May your shadow never be less," said I, addressing the man of the law; "may your house flourish-we are grateful-we kiss the dust of your slippers!"-The Mirza, vol. ii., pp. 23-27.

ART. IV.-Poems by Alfred Tennyson. 2 vols.

12mo. London. 1842.

WHAT poetry might be in our time and land, if a man of the highest powers and most complete cultivation exercised the art among us, will be hard to say until after the fact of such a man's existence. Waiting for this desirable event, we may at least see that poetry, to be for us what it has sometimes been among mankind, must wear a new form, and probably comprise elements hardly found in our recent writings, and impossible in former ones.

Yet our age is not asleep. Great movements, various activities, are heard and seen on all sides. In the lowest department, that of mere mechanics, consider what fifteen years have done. It was only in the autumn of 1830, following close on the French three memorable days of July, that the Duke of Wellington opened the Manchester and Liverpool Railroad. The population of the busiest region on this earth were assembled round him, whom all acknowledged as the greatest man in England, at the inauguration of a new physical power, then felt to double the strength and swiftness of human beings. While, among myriads of gravely joyous faces, the new machines travelled at a speed matching that of eagles, the life of a great statesman shot off on a darker and more distant journey; and the thrill of fear and pain at his destruction gave the last human tragic touch to an event which would at any rate have retained for ever an historic importance. The death of Mr. Huskisson startled the fixed bosom of the veteran soldier, and those who were near perceived a quiver of the lip, a movement of the eye, such as had hardly been caused by the most unlookedfor and dreadful chances of his mighty wars. To a calm observer, the emotion of the whole multitude, great and small, might strangely have recalled far-distant ages and the feelings with which ancient peoples held every great event as incomplete, wanting the blood of a victim-too often human In the most prosperous and peaceful of national triumphs the dark powers again claimed a share, and would not be forgotten.

Of verses, indeed, of every sort but the excellent there is no want; almost all, however, so helpless in skill, so faint in meaning, that one might almost fancy the-solemnly shed. authors wrote metre from mere incapacity of expressing themselves at all in prose as boys at school sometimes make nonsenseverses before they can construct a rational sentence. Yet it is plain that even our magazine stanzas, album sonnets, and rhymes in corners of newspapers, aim at the forms of emotion, and use some of the words in which men of genius have symbolized profound thought. The whole, indeed, is generally a lump of blunder and imbecility, but in the midst there is often some turn of cadence, some attempt at an epithet of more significance and beauty than perhaps a much finer mind would have hit on a hundred years ago. The crowds of stammering children are yet the offspring of an age that would fain teach them-if it knew how-a

Since then, about twelve years have passed, and behold what they have brought forth. Some seventy millions of money have been expended-more, at the lowest estimate, than four times as much as the Papacy was able to raise in a century and a half for the construction of its greatest monument, the costliest the world has ever seen. These seventy millions of pounds have been subscribed by private persons at their own choice in one small country, and have created nearly fifteen hundred miles of railroad-structures that surpass all pyramids and Cyclopean walls, and machines that would puzzle Archimedes, by which

myriads of men are perpetually travelling the member gains the triumph of his party; like the heroes of fairy tales. It is proba- and the success of his party decides on ble that the roads of the Roman empire, every question of war or peace over the the work of many centuries, did not cost globe, makes commercial treaties with so much of human labour, and they certain- Abyssinia, creates a white commonwealth ly did not exhibit so much greatness of among the savages of the Pacific Ocean, thought, as those that we have built in less sends armaments to Pekin, and raises or than twenty years.—In the state of society lowers the prices of silk grown among the that has produced such results there may Druses of Lebanon, and of opium sold on be, we know there is, enough torpor, even the frontiers of Tartary. Within a year rottenness. But it cannot be, on the whole, after the election in an English village, its an insignificant stage of human existence, result is felt in the more or less cost of food one barren for imaginative eyes. aud clothes in Kaffer huts, and in the value

Or look at one of our general elections. of the copper sauce-pan trafficked at TimThe absurdities are plain, no doubt-has buctoo for palm-oil and black babies. This not the ocean froth and bubbles? But is not a vapid, insubstantial political existtake the thing altogether, and observe the ence for the mass of men, not one devoid mixture and spread of interests and facul- of topics and emotions, however little they ties brought into action-above all, the open may hitherto have been used in any books boldness with which a nation throws itself but those of statistics and trade.

into the streets and markets, casting off, in Or glance at the matter in another of its the faith that it can reproduce, its company phases. In the midmost rush of London of rulers, and letting the fools clamour, the business, and all the clatter of its vehicles, poor groan, the rich humble themselves, turn aside through an open door, and what and all men bring all to judgment, without do we see? A large and lofty room, every a moment's fear but that quiet will spring yard of its floor and galleries crammed with out of the tumult, and a government be born human, chiefly female life-a prodigious from a mob. From the castle of the high- sea of bonnets, and under each of these a est peer to the clay-stained tipplers in the separate sentient sea of notions, and feelalehouse, from the bench of bishops to the ings, and passions, all in some measure ranters in the moor-side smithy, all are stir- stirred by the same tides and gales-every red and fluttered, feverish with the same anx- one of them, however narrow at the surieties, debating in their different dialects the face, in depth unfathomable. same questions, and all alike dependent on Altogether irrespectively of our present the omnipotence of an event which no man purpose, and on the most general grounds, can absolutely control. Most of what they it may be safely said that in one of these say is folly-most of their objects of hope great Exeter Hall meetings there is more and fear chimeras: but how full of throb- to strike us than almost anywhere else we bing business is the whole land, how braced know. The room is said to hold 4000 perare all the wishes and devices of all! sons, and from its form they are all clearly Among so much of make-believe and sound, visible at once-all of the middle or upper it is a great thing that the whole country classes, well dressed, though often many of must at least be willingly deceived if it is to them in Quaker uniform, and at these be gained over-must seem to itself ration- times probably three-fourths of them woally persuaded; and that the most futile men. Such assemblages are in truth, for a pretender can only cheat by aping, and so large part of the members, by far the most strengthening in others, the qualities in exciting outward events of life. The faces which he is most deficient. At the blast themselves are alone quite enough to prove of the newsmen's tin trumpets all shadows no small share of moral culture in the mass. must walk out of their darkness into sun- The delicately-curved mouths and nostrils, shine, and there be tried; when if many of the open yet quiet and observant eyes, and the umbratile fraudulently pass muster, a look of serious yet pleasurable elevation, there is at least a public recognition of the mark very clearly a chosen class of our laws of light. country. The men are of course less pure Not merely is there a debate and seem- and single in their stamp of feeling-busiing adjudication in every country-town on ness has marked on them its contractedness all matters over the whole globe which any with its strength. Yet these also have an tailor or brazier may choose to argue, but appearance of thought, although with some at last the tailor's and the brazier's voice coxcombical importance and complacent does really influence the course of human theological primness. Take, however, the affairs. The vote of a cobbler in an alley whole assemblage, all it is and all it repreturns the poll for a candidate; the vote of sents, we know not where anything like it

larger than that of some continental kingdoms, raised by these marvellous addresses to our best feelings? Who can compare, without some admiration mixed in his contempt, the coarse and brainless weakness of the talk on these occasions with the honest virtue, the moral elegance of heart, in those whom it influences? Or who that lives in England can be unaware that very many among the auditors of these brazen mouth-pieces show in the whole course of their private lives, and in hard stern trials of all kinds, a simple self-forgetting nobleness and truth, beautifully contrasted with the ostentatious emptiness of the charitable

could be discovered. No Roman Catholic,
no despotic, no poor, no barbarous, no
thoroughly demoralized, we fear we must
add no very instructed and well-organized
community could ever exhibit such a ga-
thering-voluntary be it remembered,
chiefly female, all with money to spare,
united for such remote and often fantastic
objects: above all, under such leaders.
For in the kind of persons guiding these
bodies, and in their discourse, consists more
than half the wonder. In the House of
Commons, in the Courts of Law, we may
hear nonsense enough. But in these pla-
ces it is not the most vehement, the most
chimerical-in other words, the most out- | melodrama ?
rageous and silly, who bear the chiefest
sway, but much the contrary. Now in such
Strand-Meetings, for the purest and noblest
purposes, it is plain enough that a loud
tongue, combined with a certain unctuous
silkiness of profession, and the most dismal
obscuration of brain, may venture with
success upon
the maddest assertions, the
most desperate appeals: and will draw
sighs and even tears of sympathy, by the
coarsest nonsense, from hundreds of the
amiable and thoughtful persons dieted at
home on Cowper, Fenelon, Wordsworth,
and tuned to Nature's softest melodies.
The carrier's horse (or was it ass?) that
could draw inferences, is but a brute symbol
of the spoken stuff that at religious meet-
ings can draw admiration from the finest
female bosoms. Such is the charm of twi- |
light meanings and monstrous images used
in behalf of some remote and generous ob-
ject, and strengthened by the oneness of
feeling in a multitude of accordant hearts.
Very strange it is to witness the single thrill
of some two thousand bonnets, to hear the
deep long sigh from as many warm and
gentle breasts, all inspired by the raving
folly of some declaimer, or by the gravely
numerical statements of moral facts as to
distant countries proceeding from ill-inform-
ed and well-paid agents, and which those
who know their falsity are sure enough not
to seek the odium of refuting. The sure
tact of goodness leads the greater part of
the hearers right in home-concerns, but has
no measure of probability for new experi-
ments in remote lands. The faith which
lives in the Infinite and Eternal, and is
perpetually baffled in its search among pre-
sent things, adds joyfully its charms, the
transcendent element of all romance, to the
faintest glimpse between distant clouds, and
feels it a duty and delight to believe in the
realised visions of credulous fancy.

Yet who can think without a certain approval of the immense annual revenues,

On the whole, the country in which these varieties of good and evil are found mixed on such a scale can hardly be considered in a state of lifeless inertness. Its want cannot be of themes and interest, but rather of those able to seize what lies before them, and turn it to right imaginative use. For every one indeed knows that all our activities, mechanical, political, missionary, celestial, or diabolical, are the immediate outgrowths of the human beings engaged in such matters, and might be found with much more inside and beneath them in the hearts and lives of the individuals. This is all the poet requires; a busy, vigorous, various existence is the matter sine quâ non of his work. All else comes from within, and from himself alone. Now, strangely as our time is racked and torn, haunted by ghosts, and errant in search of lost realities, poor in genuine culture, incoherent among its own chief elements, untrained to social facility and epicurean quiet, yet unable to unite its means in pursuit of any lofty blessing, half sick, half-dreaming, and whole confused-he would be not only misanthropic, but ignorant, who should maintain it to be a poor, dull, and altogether helpless age, and not rather one full of great though conflicting energies, seething with high feelings, and struggling towards the light with piercing though still hooded eyes. The fierce, too often mad force, that wars itself away among the labouring poor, the manifold skill and talent and unwearied patience of the middle classes, and the still unshaken solidity of domestic life among them-these are facts open to all, though by none perhaps sufficiently estimated. And over and among all society the wealth of our richer people is gathered and diffused as it has never been before anywhere else, shaping itself into a thousand arts of luxury, a million modes of social pleasure, which the moralist may have much to object against, but which the poet, had we

a truly great one now rising among us, would well know how to employ for his own purposes.

wearing its blazon of the starry cross, but going forth on real adventures for the conquest of our actual earth in east and west; thought blending, though almost unmarked, with all the romance of passion-and fancy, no longer gathering flowers and strewing them in childish sport, but weaving them into garlands for victorious conscience, and using them for the character of knowledge: all this is undeniably there, though unin

Then, too, if we reflect that the empire and the nation seated here as in its centre, and at home so moving and multifarious, spreads its dominions all round the globe, daily sending forth its children to mix in the life of every race of man, seek adventures in every climate, and fit themselves to every form of polity, or it to them-tended, and only because the great mind whereafter they return in body, or at least reflect their mental influences among usit cannot be in point of diversity and meaning that Britain disappoints any one capable of handling what it supplies.

See how Chaucer exhibits to us all that lay around him, the roughness and ignorance, the honour, faith, fancy, joyousness of a strong mind and a strong age, both tranquil within bounds which, as large enough for their uses, neither had tried to pass. How strikingly for us are those grating contrasts of social condition harmonised by the home-bred feeling that men as they then were had the liberty and space they then needed: the king and priest the all-sufficient guides of men's higher life, and all powers and even wishes finding ample room, each within the range marked out by custom! Every figure is struck off by as clear and cutting a stroke as that of a practised mower with his scythe-and of all these peculiarities of character, so blended in that world are strength and unconsciousness, not one ever rises into individuality of principle. In clearness, freedom, fulness, what delineation of our actual life can be at all compared with this? Of this poet how truly may it be said,

'O'er Chaucer's blithe old world, for ever new, In noon's broad sunbeams shines the morning

dew;

And while tired ages float in shade away,
Unwearied glows with joy that clear to-day.'

of that and all time necessarily comprised and reproduced whatever was essential in his age. Ranks were still apart, customs unquestioned, forms holy, and natural truth and wisdom only the uncanonical but inevitable comment by which men undesignedly interpreted the page of prescription. And he who has best shown us all this as it truly was, yet sent forth at every breath a fiery element, of which he was himself scarce conscious, that should some day kindle and burn much still dearer and venerable to him.

A gulf of generations lies between us and him, and the world is all changed around his tomb. But whom have we had to feel and express like this man the secret of our modern England, and to roll all out before him the immense reality of things as his own small embroidered carpet, on which he merely cared to sit down at his ease and smoke his pipe?

There have been but two writers among us whom every Englishman with a tincture of letters has read or heard of, aiming to shape poetically an image of human life. These are of course Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. But see how different their aim has been from such a one as we hint at.

The elder poet, with his wholesome us much of human fact, and this, as it could sense and clear felicity, has indeed given not be otherwise, in the colours of the time that he himself belonged to. But he has swayed the sympathies of the world in a great measure through their curiosity after the past, which he, more than all men in the annals of mankind, has taught us all to regard as alive and still throbbing in spirit, though its bones be turned to dust.

In Shakspeare again, who never meant anything of the kind, that period, with its far deeper wants and more abundant forces, all lies softly, firmly drawn by every random jotting of his pen. For that, with all his unmatched reflectiveness, much was thus lightly done, seems no less certain at the hundredth perusal than obvious at the first. The stately courtesies and consecrated forms of the past, all still untroubled, but a new spirit rising within those antique walls, and as yet professing peaceful reverence, though it must one day shake them down; the heaven-storming imagination We have indeed one of his works, the still toiling and sporting on the ground; only one, which is a splendid attempt at a the aimless bravery of knighthood still' creative survey of modern life, and contains

Byron has sought, through distance of place and foreign costume, the interest which Scott obtained from the strangeness of past ages; and it is but a small though a profound and irrepressible part of our far-spread modern mind that he has so well embodied in his scornful Harolds and despairing Giaours.

« AnteriorContinuar »