A Poetical Lot

A COLLECTION of California verse, a scriptural tragedy, a melodrama inspired by the abolition of slavery, two tales in rhyme, a book of comical ballads, two volumes of miscellaneous ditties, — here are variety and abundance enough to have made the mouth water in the inhuman critic of other days, who would have leaped upon the succulent heap before us como asino en centeno verde. But, as we have often taught, both by precept and example, this sort of critic no longer exists ; or, if he still survives, he is not permitted to exhibit his hideous butcheries in these pages. If a gentler spirit does not reign, at least there is a more refined taste, and nothing is allowed to appear that would shock the nerves of the most delicate female. It is understood, of course, that a rhymester, now and then, has to die ; but the reader shall see nothing but what is perfectly decorous and kind. At the most he shall hear a confused shuffling behind the scenes, a blow perhaps, and a faint cry; but the critic will immediately come forward again with a pleasant, reassuring smile, and go on with his general remarks upon the science of æsthetics. And how much better is this than the old manner in which he visibly rioted in an office, beneficial to the public, indeed, but involving horrible anguish to the victim, whose bones were crunched and whose struggles were derided before a sickened or brutalized audience! The time will yet come, believe us, when even the smothered noises behind the scenes will not be heard ; when some master of a finer art than ours shall know how to distil from his irony a potent and subtle acquetta, which, secretly applied to the doomed poetaster, shall extinguish life instantly, and leave the spectator absolutely ignorant of the transaction. This acquetta will of course have no power upon your true poet, whom one cannot always recognize at first glance, and who may sometimes be subjected to the test; but the critic shall be spared the mortification of a conspicuous failure, whereas in the old days it was not uncommon to see this public friend put to public shame through such a mistake.

We should have no mind, even if we were not adversely principled, to try an open struggle with the seventy-five versifiers represented in Miss May Wentworth’s collection of California rhyme,¹ who have numbers in their favor, to say the least. We must explain, though, that we do not accept Miss Wentworth’s compilation as representative of California poetry ; for the editor frankly owns that “ one or two writers, whose names are familiar to the public, are omitted at their own request,” — Mr. Bret Harte, we observe, is one of these, — and even the better sort of California writers who appear here do not appear at their best. If a collection could be held to be quite worthless which contained pieces by Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Miss Coolbrith, Miss Lawson, and Mr. Webb, we should say that this was so. It is not nearly so good as a volume of California poetry entitled “ Outcroppings,” which appeared some years ago, — and not altogether because it is not nearly so small. It witnesses to an uncommon talent for rhythmical expression among the heterogeneous population of the Pacific States ; and there are both artistic feeling and effect in some of the pieces, with an occasional honesty or reality in choice of subjects and treatment, which promises well for the future ; though perhaps all these seventy-five poets — think of the many hindering vicissitudes of bustness, of marriage, and of growing families ! — may not unite in fulfilling the promise. A Mr. E. P. Hingston, of whom we have not heard before, is the author of what is, on the whole, the best poem. It is called “ Pictures in Silverland,”and was written In response to a request “from shores Atlantic,”that he should paint Washoe as he saw it. We give one of his three pictures : —

This, even if a little over-bold and tumid, seems to us good and natural ; It is at least an undeniable picture: but there is not enough of this sort of local feeling to give tone to the volume, while there is too much of another sort ol feeling “that never was on sea or land,” except in “ sectional ” collections of poetry.

We have praised Mr. Kingston’s lines for naturalness, and we will thank the reader to observe that, with the characteristic acuteness of our school of criticism, we did not say simplicity, which is about the most unnatural thing in the world nowadays, as Mr. Abbey² shall testify for us with some verses from his poem “Blanche,” so called because it is a faded copy of “ Maud.” Blanche is a flower-girl with whom the hero falls in love, and who afterward proves to be the daughter of the errinouncle who has kept the hero out of his property. The young people undergo a good deal of woe before they are finally united by a chance which melts the uncle’s heart, and which is thus alluded to : —

But simplicity is not the only unnatural thing in Mr. Abbey’s verse. He has a turn for fanciful and complicated metaphor, which is almost as unlike poetical expression ; and he can say of a Circassian maid,—

and of the States lately in rebellion,—

The different “ Stories in Verse ” abound in such kaleidoscopic effects as this, —

and this, —

and many others equally discouraging,. with the same preposterously unmeaning color and glitter.

We have imagined, however, in glancing at Mr. Abbey’s pretty little book, — call it the defect of judgment or the freak of a mind perturbed by this injurious business of tasting every sort of raw, unfermented rhyme, — that he was hot quite just to himself, and that he could do better than he has done here. We are not sure that we expected him to produce anything finer ; perhaps, from some absurd contusion of ideas, we had formed hopes of him in the line of “ expressive silence.” Or, perhaps, it may have been Mr. Michell,³ and not Mr. Abbey, — we looked over their books simultaneously, as it were,— of whom we “ predicated ” a successful reticence ; but at any rate we will say now that we believe either of them could achieve something quite pleasing in this vein, which is too little wrought by young poets. Will it be believed that we have hazarded this opinion without reading through “ Sybil of Cornwall,” or The Land’s End,” or even “St. Michael’s Mount”? We must confess that we came to our conclusion concerning Mr. Michell after the perusal of the opening stanza of his “ Sybil,” —

A mind like Mr. Michell’s offers a very curious study, and the appearance of such books as his is a phenomenon that can never fail to interest and surprise. We suppose that this handsome volume is not the publishers’ venture, and that its sale, even in the British Isles, cannot be such as to remunerate the author. It must be printed entirely for the author’s pleasure; but when you have arrived at this fact, you have not begun to solve the mystery. Why should Mr. Michell take a pleasure in printing it ? There is, of course, a comprehensible satisfaction in publishing to the world, through the dedication, that one is the relative of the late Sir Humphrey Davy ; but it seems hardly necessary to write three hundred pages of verse in order to make this fact known. There is no doubt, however, that Mr. Michell, and many like him, actually find a joy in the production of the material which composes such a book as the present one. Upon the face of things, it would hardly appear probable that any well-educated man in easy circumstances would care to make a Dying Flower-Girl say, —

Or that he should really like to teach, concerning the future, —

Or should find it at all amusing thus to apostrophize Love, —

It is conceivable that an unhappy person lost upon a desert island should go almost to such extremes as these in consuming his intolerable leisure, or that a prisoner for life might thus beguile the tedium of solitary confinement; but that a man not shut out from books or society should delight in an exercise of the kind is one of the marvels of the poetaster’s nature, which is, after all, one of the most inscrutable things in life. What is its secret spring ? What should move Mr. Michell to write ? What mysterious impulse drives him along that smooth, dead level of rhyme, the course of which is fairly indicated in the passages we have quoted? How does it happen that he has no better or worse, — whatever his attitude or mood, whether didactic or amorous, gay or pathetic, epic or lyrical ? It is really a very pretty problem, and its solution is quite worthy the attention of science. What causes produce the poetaster; and are they ever to be reached and rendered ineffectual ? Is his characteristic a disorder inherited and transmissible, or is it an accident of circumstance and association ? In what does he differ from the social bore ? It is quite time that some one addressed himself to the serious study ot the phenomenon. Criticism has shown itself helpless in dealing with poetastry ; and, as a result, men must now concern themselves with prevention.

From Mr. Michell’s work we turn to another effort of the British muse,—a work which we can praise with real enthusiasm,— a work of imagination and dramatic force. “ Colour ” ⁴ is a play, of which the object is to “ make the popular attractiveness of sensational and romantic incidents subservient to a moral end,” though the author will not be dissatisfied if the story should also be found “full of interest for the hour to all who read it or witness its action.” Certain slavers and slaveholders are wrecked upon an island inhabited by negroes escaped from bondage, who enslave their former oppressors, and convert them to the emancipation cause by the practical application of proslavery principles to their cases. The whipping, fettering, separation of families, and hunting of fugitives are horrible, and the reader is inexpressibly relieved when, on the arrival of a ship with the news that slavery is abolished in the United States, the blacks liberate their captives, and fraternize with them in one of the noble lyrics interspersing the drama. The persons are all Americans, and of course the national character is painted with those fortunate and discriminating touches which all English writers bestow, and in which Mr. Anthony Trollope has lately so much distinguished himself that we might almost suspect him of the authorship of this anonymous drama. But it is the surprising lyrical power of the author of “ Colour ” which most commends him to our admiration, and at once signalizes him amid the crowd of Englishmen inspired by American affairs. Listen for a moment to the “ Kidnapper’s Song,” with the poet’s explanation of the inarticulate passages: —

The solicitude of friends, who commonly urge a poet to the publication of his verses and then shamefully abandon him to unloving critics, has apparently not forsaken the Rev. Professor John M. Leavitt, even after his emergence in print. Of a little book, here, one half the pages are given to the tragedy of “The Siege of Babylon,”* and the other half to “ notices,” by various kindly hands, of the author’s former efforts, “Afranius,” “The Idumean,” “ The Roman Martyrs,” “ Faith,” and “The Periods.” From these we inform ourselves that what would otherwise have made a contrary impression upon us is tragedy “ in the highest degree picturesque,” “ noble,” “ classic,” “ strong, stately, and effective ” ; “pleasingly versified” and “bearing the marks of poetic art.” The author “has fairly won his spurs in the field of poetry”; has “ decided merit and genius”; “deserves a place among the sacred poets of America” (whoever they are); Iras not “the subtle and often exquisite imagination of Longfellow, but seems to possess a truer appreciation of character, and to afford a better portraiture of the age into which he endeavors to conduct his readers ’ ; and “ inspires not merely admiration, but profound respect, approaching to reverence.” These agreeable sentiments are really taken from reviews of the poet by clerical and secular journals which have a good repute for literary taste; and we must not suffer any less person than the Rev. Professor Leavitt himself to prove them too fond, as he can easily do in a very few passages from “The Siege of Babylon ” : —

The criticism which praises this kind of thing may not be very dangerous to literature ; but bow disastrous it is for Rev. Professor Leavitt !

Mr. Calvert’s “ Ellen ” ¹² deserves to be read (if for no other reason) in proof of the fact that real feeling may be evoked by a rather sentimentalistic theme. The rescue of a young girl from the social evil is one of those plots which must be so very ethereally treated, not to affect the reader unpleasantly, that it may be questioned whether it were not best to let what poetry there is in them alone. The poet, however, is the judge in this case, and if he decides to take up such a theme we have only to do with his treatment of it. There is no doubt Mr. Calvert handles it delicately, though at times so obscurely that the reader does not feel certain of the slender thread of story. The author is very unequal, and his diction fully shares the good fortune and the poverty of his fancy; but his work has after all a flavor and perfume of its own,—a poetry not to be mistaken for the graces within the reach of art. This is not to be very readily shown by single passages from the poem, whereas some defects of it are quotable enough ; and we are not so confident that it will be perceptible to all readers — even all tasteful readers — that we shall offer Mr. Calvert a very loud acclaim.

There is nothing in Miss Evans’s last versified production,¹³ any more than in “The Spanish Gypsy,” to prove her a poet, but we do not seek to resist the impression that she is a verypleasant writer of rhymed prose. The story which she has here taken from Boccaccio is in the last degree romantic, and Miss Evans is too good an artist not to feel that it can only be treated with a certain conventional simplicity ; though here again we do not say that simplicity is at all natural in people of this time. But there are oldestablished forms that stand for a simplicity quite different from Mr. Abbey’s, which is of too recent a pattern ; and these sometimes please better than the real thing, just as the conventional flowers and frondage ofarchitecture — to which they answer in literature —please better than flowers and frondage copied from life. The easy, somewhat monotonous rhythm of our heroic verse, so long used in poetic narration, also represents something agreeably quaint and old ; and Miss Evans has the advantage of its association, in the/ reader’s mind, with poetry. Yet her work here, as in all her rhythmical ventures, is one of poetical sympathy rather than of poetical conception. In “Lisa” we see, not how the strained and extravagant yet charming romance affects a true poet, but how it would have affected the refined and fanciful reader of such a poet: it is in itself a negative and secondary result, and when it reaches a third mind, as it were, the feeling it excites is a sense of no harm done ; it is received with the smiling equanimity with which men listen to a tasteful person’s praises and explanations of an admired book. It is the reverse of a disagreeable emotion, but it is not exactly delight.

It is, after all, however, of no great moment to the mass of this suffering humanity whether one is or is not a poet: it is enough if one pleases ; and so the question whether one is or is not a humorist is to be solved by the feeling of amusement or boredom with which one’s comical intention is received. If a man does not make you smile, it is pretty certain that he is no humorist — for you; and if he does, there is no arguing him down: funny he is, beyond all cavil. The quality of his fun is another matter. Mr. Daniel Rice advertises himself upon the bills which show him in his professional motley and white paint, as The Great American Humorist; and such he is to great numbers of the American people, though some might pretend that this judgment did not so much honor him as it dispraised them. His is not a difficult case to deal with, however. It is the humorist like Artemus Ward, and the humorists of his school, who perplex and mystify the judgmentseat. The rogues make you laugh, in defiance of every good principle of taste and art ; their jokes are exported, and are amazingly relished by the English, who pronounce them true samples of American humor. And now, to add to the troubles of criticism in this particular, behold Mr. Charles G. Leland, in his famous impersonation of Hans Breitmann,¹⁴ setting both hemispheres upon the grin ! Time was when the good opinion of the London press would have settled the matter for us ; but of late — the confession is wrung from us — we are beginning to be very shy of the Englishman “who reads an American book ” and praises it. We suspect — seeing that most American books are praised nowadays in England — that there is a conspiracy among the English critics to lure our authors to their ruin, — to make them write worse and worse, till they become absolutely intolerable and mankind calls aloud for their extinction; when our hereditary enemies will have the whole literary field to themselves.

These remarks are not intended to apply unqualifiedly to Mr. Leland, who has merit enough to have excited the jealousy of at least one of our foes, and provoked him to the open expression of a doubt whether, in spite of his English popularity, Mr. Leland is a humorist. His beer-drinking, blundering, sentimentalizing Dutchman has been turned by this critic into a person with a command of good English, and we are presented with a version of Hans Breitmann’s Party without the erring labials and gutturals. It is not funny in this respectable guise, of course; but neither is the idea of a Hans Breitmann, with a good accent and strict temperance principles, droll; and we can think of few comical figures in literature which could wholly dispense with their educational defects or local peculiarities. But it is not so much in what Hans Breitmann says, — we have expressed on a former occasion a modest estimate of many of his sayings,— as in what he is, that the fun lies ; and it is not surprising that one unfamiliar with the type should doubt its value. A thousand years hence, we suppose, when the genus is extinct in cold water and a universal language, it will be quite incomprehensible that anybody should ever have been amused by such a grotesque and absurd figure as Hans; but in humorous effects ever so much depends upon temporary conditions and circumstances ; and at present we are just in that state when we find such a poem as the following not only very laughable, but excellently artistic in conception and execution : —

“ WEIN-GEIST.

This is laughable, we say ; but is it — will it always be — humor, — Humour with its mystical great H, its archaic small u in the last syllable, its inscrutable difference from Wit, its secret depth of Pathos ? We have reserved till now, in reply to this question, a confession for which the reader will have been prepared by the foregoing observations : —

We don't know.