BOOKS.

MR. ALEXANDER SMITH'S NEW POEM.*

A BEVIEWT.R of Mr. Alexander Smith's earlier poems passed upon him that crushing sentence of the French critic's which applies so much more widely to all our modern literature than we are generally willing to admit : "II dit lost cc veid, mai* malheureusemest ii tea ries a dire." Since then Alexander Smith has curbed much of the empty extravagance of his earlier moods, and in this new volume he has succeeded in reducing his really luxuriant fancy within the bounds of a coherent narrative. But still his own description of his own tendencies is only too graphic ; his main effort appears still to be, "—to draw images from everything; And images lay thick upon our talk

As shells on ocean sands."

He shows the most astonishing fecundity in this respect, but still the images are far more important than the thing imaged. He has the richest powers of expression, but, too like the loquacious age itself, has nothing of any significance to express. This is unquestionably his most temperate and healthy work. It contains nothing of the enervating worship of the grandeur of passion which inspired his former poems. His appreciation of the transient aspects of external nature is as quick and vivid as ever. His fer- tility in multiplying the isolated beauties of analogy is not less re- markable. And it is something that he has perceived the necessity of imposing upon himself a principle of external unity, since he cannot evolve it from within. In the attempt before us he does at least con- fess that a poem ought to be a natural whole, and not a mere string of glittering metaphorical beads.

And yet the result is not a poem, though it has as usual many detailed beauties of a rare order. Notwithstanding all the mar- vellous productiveness of his fancy, Mr. Alexander Smith shows no trace of an imagination. There is nothing within him which moulds and stamps with a distinct meaning or drift the countless images of his analogical eye. His poetry is a perpetual flux. He sees by far too many subtle resemblances, instead of too few, because there is no- thing in him which determines the direction of his search ; he is tempted like a butterfly from flower to flower without any guiding instinct or purpose in his flight. If fancy be the faculty which catches at fleeting analogies, and imagination that which keeps one haunting conviction, emotion, or moral picture constantly before the mind, then we fear that Mr. Smith's faculty is fancy only—the kaleidoscopic power of ringing an infinite variety of changes on every momentary impression, but discovering no trace of that per- vading undercurrent of moral unity which constitutes the very heart and soul of poetry. It was one of Coleridge's deep critical dicta that overexcited fancy tends to delirium, overexcited imagination to monomania. We are perpetually reminded of this in reading Mr. Alexander Smith's brilliant succession of similes and metaphors, which often recal to us a delirious dream. There is seldom, indeed, even that amount of binding thought or of intensity of feeling which is sufficient centre for the shortest of lyrical poems—for ex- ample, the sonnet. Were the historical or legendary thread of the production before us withdrawn, all the fragmentary beauties which are strung upon it might be restrung on almost any other string. Like a necklace, all the beauty is in the beads, and one thread is quite as good as another. The connecting cord is useful, because it unites what would otherwise roll apart, but it has no necessary relation with the elements which it connects, and they have no necessary re,- lation with each other. The story which Mr. Alexander Smith has chosen for his present theme has great poetic capabilities, but he is quite blind to them. He uses it for precisely the same purpose for which, on some parts of the coast of Ireland, the people plant a kind of bind-weed among the sand : it gives a certain coherence and. consistency to the sandy grains which could not otherwise resist the tides at all ; but though the bind-weed thus makes a rope out of the sand, the cohesion is mechauical, not organic. And so it is with Mr. Smith's story in the present instance. It gathers up his pic- tures, and similes, and metaphors into a certain mechanical unity, and that is all. It is transplanted for that purpose from the old Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and it loses everything—though Mr. Smith's fancies gain—by the transplantation. Mr. Smith is quite unable to penetrate to the heart of the legendary history, and to reproduce it from within.

Incited apparently to emulation by the delight with which Tenny- son's "Idylls of the King" were received, Mr. Alexander Smith has taken the field with an Anglo-Saxon legend concerning the first in- troduction of the Christian faith into Northumbria, which, if it calls up less romantic associations than the old Breton legends. of King Arthur, shows an outline of quite as grand and expressive form. Edwin of Deira, in Northumbria, had been, in his childhood, dispos- sessed of his inherited kingdom by Adelfrid (whom Mr. Alexander Smith transforms, we know not why, into Ethelbert), his brother-in- law. He wandered about an exile for twenty-seven years of his life, until at last he found refuge with a friend of his father's, Redowald, the King of the East Angles. This prince was of a hesitating and timid turn of mind, and when Adelfrid demanded the extradition of his guest under threats of instant war in case of refusal, Redowald balanced the claims of expediency and justice so long in his mind that Edwin, in spite of the favour of Queen Bertha, the wife of Redowald, had given himself up for lost. Indeed, for a time, in One of the oscillations of his wavering mind, Redowald had resolved to • Boisol. of Beira. By Alexander Smith. atacmIlltui.

betray him, and was bent on preventing his escape. Edwin, walking in the palace garden during the night in the depths of his de- spondency, was encountered, it was said, by a being in the form of a man, who told him his fears and anxieties, and asked him what he would promise to any one who should deliver him from them. Edwin promised much, but the stranger said he desired nothing but a pledge to embrace the doctrine and follow the pre- cepts of his deliverer. He then laid his hand on the head of the prince, and enjoined that when any one should, with that symbol, claim his obedience, he should at once perform the promise he had made; then the figure vanished. This had scarcely happened when a messenger came from the queen to tell Edwin that the internal conflict which bad so long raged in Redowald's mind was at length definitively settled in his favour. He rejected the demand of Adelfrid, and declared war; and he determined, moreover, to be beforehand with his enemy. Redowald raised three columns of troops, the first of which lie placed under the command of his eldest son (Regner), the second he commanded himself, the third be entrusted to the exiled prince. Regner, too forward and rash, fell upon the enemy without waiting for support, was routed, and slain. But the columns under Redowahl and Edwin uniting,, retrieved the defeat, destroyed Adelfrid and his army, and reinstated Edwin on the throne. Edwin then asked in marriage and obtained Ethelburga of Kent, a Chris- tian princess, who brought with her Paulinus, the Christian mis- sionary, into Northumbria. Paulinas, however, made little way in converting the Northumbrians, until Edwin's life having been at- tempted by an assassin, the illness, or the danger, induced him seriously to ponder the Christian faith. It was then that Paulinus, laying his hand on Edwin's head, demanded from him the fulfilment of his mysterious vow ; and the king, no longer hesitating, soli- cited the assent of his heathen priests to the deposition of the old idolatry and the substitution of the new faith. The two priests who were consulted were neither of them disinclined to the change. Coifi, the high-priest, said that he had kneeled and prayed for years to deaf, inexorable gods; the other replied that for anything the heathen rites had taught him, "it is with our soul as with the little bird that came in the other day at one of the windows of the room where you sat at dinner, and flew out imme- diately at the other. Whilst it was in the room we knew something about it, but as soon as it was gone we could not say whence it came or whither it was flown. Thus, whilst our soul is in the body we know something of it, but when once departed we know not whither it goes nor whence it came." Both the priests, therefore, advised that the Christian message should be, at least, heard; and when heard, they were again the first to urge the destruction of the idols, Coifi himself claiming the right to strike the mock deity from his shrine. Edwin's administration, always strong and just, gained from this time the powerful alliance of the new faith.

Such is an outline of the legendary story which Mr. Alexander Smith has taken for the substance of his poem. Edwin was to be his "Arthur"—only, a king groping for new roots of civil order, conscious that the old idolatrous sanctions were giving way, rather than one attempting, like Arthur, to realize in practical life the clearly understood creed of Christian chivalry. Edwin had been a wanderer through many lands, but this Mr. Smith has omitted to tell, perhaps thinking it unimportant ; whereas it was probably the key to that breadth of experience which enabled him to see that the evening of the old idolatry was drawing to its close. The whole poem, if it were to have its full significance, should be a delineation of the failing power of heathen visions, and the transition of a rude but hardy people led by their monarch from the shadow into the dawn of new light. In the hesitating Redowald there was room to sketch the moral chaos which a decaying idolatry produces even in a naturally noble mind. And in the despairing priests of the old idolatry there was room for something more; Bede's words suggesting the two types of disappointed devotees—the practical devotee, who tests truth by governing power, and scorns a deity who does not actually rule; and the contemplative devotee, who wants to have a revela- tion extending beyond the field of his own experience before he can believe that it is a divine revelation at all. And both these doubting priests might have been delineated in their direct relations with the king when dimly groping after some new guarantee of political and social order.

The subject was a deep and noble one, but it has been utterly wasted on the present author. The poem is almost wholly taken up with descriptions of external nature. Not a single character is delineated with any attempt at care or vigour ; not a single inward want of the people who were sitting in the darkness and waiting for the coming light. Paulinus's proclamation of the gospel might be versified from a modern missionary tract. This first Christian king is a very common-place young man, who is wholly occupied with falling into a passion, and falling in love with a damsel imported by Mr. Alexander Smith into the Venerable Bede's story—both on slight occasion. There is nothing in him that prepares us in any way for the mysterious vision which cheers him at the crisis of his fate. So far from groping after a new principle of political order and tranqui- lity, this very feeble exile is vibrating in his own mind between the most tumultuous hate to his old enemy, and the most tumultuous Jove to the young lady referred to. Indeed, that which should be the substance of the poem—the decay of order and faith, and the rise of a new faith as the germ of a new order—is limited entirely to the few lines in which Bede's report of the Pagan priests' views is versi- fied. We cannot help asking in wonder why Mr. Alexander Smith chose such a subject at all? Hills, and mists, and "billowing woods" —which last are great favourites with Mr. Smith—admit of ample "Next morning, from the sandy hills he saw The bare blue desert of the sea flow out In glittering wrinkles 'neath a cloudy dawn; And when the sun burned through the mists, and grew A mass of blinding splendour that out-rayed, He dipped into the valleys. On through woods, And roadlesa meads he passed, till at the hour When fiercest is the light, he weary came To a ravine that broke down from the hill With many a tumbled crag: a streamlet leapt From stony shelf to shelf: the rocks were touched By purple foxgloves, plumed by many a fern; And all the soft green bottom of the gorge Was strewn with hermit stones that sideways leaned,

Smooth-cheek'd with emerald moss."

To prove how striking the fragmentary similes sometimes are, if they were really the natural vesture, instead of mere spangles, to the thought, take the following :

"Something of this I heard, AB one immersed

In boundless woods, the falling of a tree: Who hears a sound, but cannot tell from whence, Nor whether nibbling centuries of time Or woodman's axe bath sapped it." Or this : "Ye look the same; thou soond'st the same,

Thou ever falling, falling stream—

Ye are the changeless dial-face, And I the passing beam."

Or the following : " For she was coy as is a backward spring That will not take possession of delight Nor all its buds disclose."

On the other hand, here are specimens of the worst extravagances

of the metaphor-maker :

"Most gladly, Prince,

When time hath tried thy steadfastness of heart, And when the wayward fowl, Prosperity, Roosts in thy boughs, I'll see her wife of thine, Wearing with thee the crown."

"The Prince rehearsed How Ethelbert, tolled on by plunder's bell, Wasted his borders for these many years." "The lordliest game of forest and of hill Made that board paradise, within whose smell The phcenix appetite divinely stied Into a rarer lite."

"And spacious horns of mead—the blessed mead That can unpack the laden heart of care— That climbs a heated reveller to the brain, And sits there singing songs."

These sentences, which are by no means exaggerated specimens of the poetry on stilts with which Mr. Alexander Smith furnishes us, seem to prove that the slightest and most superficial analogy has as great a charm for him as the deepest and subtlest; indeed, that he does not see the difference. There must be something very eccentric about that man's fancy who has any more graphic conception of the coming of prosperity suggested to him by turning King Edwin into a branch- ing tree, and his good fortune into "a wayward fowl at roost" there. Or, again, can the temptation to plunder be more vividly realized by any human being by the aid of the metaphor of a tolling-bell? We have heard of alarm-bells, but they are intended to frighten away plunderers, or to bring assistance against them; but the notion of ringing for your thief is, surely, quite new? Again, it is certainly original, but is it any imaginative aid, to make Appetite die like a plicenix in the smell of roasted game, in order to rise again from its ashes when the eating begins ?—a conception which, surely, must be intended to make game of the phcenix. Perhaps, however, the most elaborate of all these grandiloquences is the mead metaphor. Here we have ale presented as a servant "unpacking" the laden heart of care, finding this usually menial function at once so warm, and so amusing, that it (the mead) becomes a heated reveller in the process, and then mounts up-stairs to the brain, to sing comic songs in the attic. Surely not a very instructive or explanatory way of conveying the common experience that ale or wine often "drives dull care away." This kind of blatant metaphor appears to be scarcely worth the manufacture. Mr. Smith's notion of rehabilitating ancient tradition seems to be to deal with it as housekeepers preserve their fruit—to smother it in the saccharine matter of his fancy, and then " boildown, stirring carefully." The result is a product to which the terra "luscious" would seem to be more appropriate than it was as applied the other day by Lord Shaftesbury to Dr. Watts. Edwin of Deira 15 very luscious, but the sugar is not so coarse and disagreeable as that employed in Mr. Alexander Smith's former poems. Still it is quite as predominant over the substance. It professes to be an Anglo- Saxon preserve; but we should not know it by the flavour were there not the historic label to guide us.

description without a framework of Anglo-Saxon history ; even men with "stormy beards" and golden-headed maidens are not unknown in these latter days; and why, therefore, a poem which lays all its stress on the external beauties of nature and young women should revert to these ancient times, it is impossible to understand. When the only natural significance of the story is smothered in physical descrip- tion, we are inclined to quarrel even with the narrative thread that saves those descriptions from utter incoherence. But such as it is, description of scenery, when it is quiet, is by far the best element in the poem, of which the following is a fair sample :