27 APRIL 1867, Page 16

BOOKS.

DEAN ALEXANDER'S POEMS AND ESSAYS.o.

THESE poems and essays, like other poems we have reviewed in these columns, are collected and published evidently as pieces justificatives of the wish of the author's friends to secure his election for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, so soon to be vacated by the expiration of the term allotted to the accom- plished critic and poet who now fills it, Mr. Matthew Arnold. Of Mr. Alexander's powers we perhaps shall be scarcely trusted to write with perfect impartiality. Many of the smaller pieces in this volume have appeared in our own columns, and we cannot pretend that our judgment either of his critical insight or of his poetical imagination has now to be formed for the first time. Nevertheless, the present writer is not aware of any circumstance that could have originally biassed his judgment upon Mr. Alex- ander's writings. Nor does he think himself in any degree blind to the faults of the Dean of Emly's somewhat too luxuriant and occasionally too ornate poetry. Probably long familiarity and a certain amount of hearty admiration, are better conditions for critical appreciation of defects than that absence of prepossession which necessarily implies the absence of all previous knowledge of an author's writings.

The Dean of Emly has done well to add the three thoughtful and powerful critical essays which conclude this little volume to the poems which form the greater part of it. They indicate powers which no one would guess from the verses alone. From these indeed any one might infer that Mr. Alexander has a rich and glittering fancy, a store of warm and lively sentiment, and now and then a glimpse of the calm unclouded beauty of a world of form and light above the prismatic region of mere brilliant colour. But no one would gather from the poems alone that Mr. Alexander has so much of broad masculine sagacity, of wide sym- pathy with very different forms of literary power, so much restrained humour, and even severe taste, as the essays on Victor Hugo and Mr. Matthew Arnold display. The latter, which is new to us, has some flashes of very fine and quite original criticism, and the former, to which we called attention some years ago, when it ap- peared in a volume of Dublin lectures, is not only a very firm and juht estimate of a poet who, being even more of a literary magician than of a poet, is apt to cast a spell over the faculties of those who appreciate his great but spasmodic genius, but also contains some of the finest poetic translations known to us. Take from the lecture on Arnold the following little bits of incidental criticism on Dryden, a poet whom the Dean of Emly is specially fitted, — better fitted, we believe, than Mr. Arnold himself,—to understand and criticize, and on whose genius we should hope to tempt him into lecturing, if the University of Oxford should decide to place him in the vacant chair :—

"I could wish that Mr. Arnold would devote himself to a special criticism upon Dryden, a subject which Scott and Macaulay have not exhausted. Wanting in tenderness, in natural description, in sugges- tiveness, in the higher imagination, he is the orator among our poets. He is haunted by no unwearied pursuit of unattainable excellence; yet, at an age when the fire of genius has generally died out, his grandest thought rises before his soul, and shapes itself out in one of the first of English lyrical productions. The finer features of external nature and of the human heart elude his coarse but powerful grasp. His birds are always painted ; his summer always fries ; his disappointed lovers invariably howl. Perspiration is with him the inseparable adjunct of sunlight and of passion. Yet reason never spoke in language which is clearer, more masculine, or more sonorous, wit never flashed off more cutting antitheses. Compare his best passages with those of Pope; trace the development of an idea in their hands. Pope's mask is more accurate, but it is thinner. In Pope the intellectual process is addition ; in Dryden, evolution. Pope strings beads ; Dryden fuses metal But when we read Dryden's Flower and Leaf,' do we complain that its writer was not penetrated by his subject ? Is our pleasure arrested by the 'thought that Dryden is, after all, only translating Chaucer ? When we compare the original and the reproduction, we can trace the peculiarities of each master. Chancer's strong picturesque touches are marred in the transfer. For instance,— ' The leaves were seen Some very redde, and some gladde lighte greene,' are watered into I know not what pale common-place. On the other hand, how the old poet's stiff and narrow rhetoric is brightened and made

• Specimens, Poetical and Ceilkai. By the Very Rev. William Alexander, M.A., of Braseuose College, Oxford. Doan of Emly. Printed for private circulation only by Bradbury and Evans. 1S1/7.

flexible, how the thin metallic tinkling of his lines swells out into a sonorous and majestic music, under Dryden's hand."

This comparison with Chaucer indicates an insight into both the artificiality of the power of Dryden, his want of natural truthful- ness of heart and eye, and yet the mighty volume of that sonorous

character, such as stamps a writer of very considerable critical gifts. Not leas happy is the Dean of Emly in some of his criticisms on Mr. Arnold himself. When he calls Mr. Arnold "pre-eminently the poet of English flowers," and quotes the exquisite lines from the verses on Mr. Clough (" Thyrsis ") descriptive of the fair river meadows of the neighbourhood of Oxford, and happily says of him that "the names which bring before us the finest scents and most subtle colours of our woods and meadows come to him at his will," he shows that he can single out with delicate hand one of the most vital points in a genius very different from his own. No doubt, too, he shows his art as a critic in contrasting this element in Mr. Arnold's poetry with Tennyson's Flower Garden in Maud, for the breath of the fresh river meadows has a double charm when it comes to us after the odour of those double, heavy-scented, deep-flushed musk roses, which Mr. Tennyson, one of the most artistic and laborious of poetic gardeners, made to flower for us in their natural place, in that garden of double-blossomed, heavy-scented, deep-

flushed, moral musk-roses, Maud. Still, we think it is scarcely fair to call Mr. Arnold "pre-eminently the poet of English flowers," and then prove him by contrast with a rich garden-flower poet to be the true poet of the flowers of our woods and meadows. There is a difference in genius between the two. Mr. Arnold's nature loves the single-petaled, (so-called) wild flowers of our woods and

meadows, not that his genius has anything wild in it, but that it prefers the less richly inlaid beauty which comes, with- out conscious preparation for it, to grace the loveliness of our hills and meadows, to the thicker-folded luxuriance and more gorgeously shaded tints which it is the object of a special art to produce. There is something wide and simple, rather than

detailed and complex, about Mr. Arnold's genius. But the passage in Maud which Mr. Alexander finds too oppressive for him is the perfection of garden-flower poetry, and it is garden-flower poetry which best suits that richly coloured, morbidly self-conscious poem. The whole lecture on Mr. Arnold's poetry is full of sound, thought- ful, and original criticism ; nor is it easy to sum up on his poetic genius better than in the following lines :— "I conclude this lecture by saying, with all sincerity, that I com- mend to you a poet whose writings have been to myself a real source of pleasure. A hundred times over, in hours of lassitude and fatigue, I have taken down these volumes, all too slender as they are. The calm pathos of the Church of Brou ;' the sorrowful and wavelike melody of the 'Forsaken Merman ;' the tragic unity of Sohrab and Rust= ;' have never palled upon me. There are pages which seem to bathe one's mind in the cool breath that blows from English meadows, or in the scent that exhales from the pines of Switzerland. Rarely has love found a tenderer interpreter, or separation breathed a sweeter sorrow. I admit, indeed, that the poet's growth has been stunted by his own theory. He knows so much analytically of his art that his creative powers have been prematurely exhausted. He has studied effect so thoroughly that he has, perhaps, become unable to produce it. His intellect is with the ancients, his heart and talent with the moderns. Yet we find in him qualifications rare at all times, especially rare at present—finish of detail, music of versification, purity of style. Above all, we find a conscientious abstinence from that sensationalism which begins by corrupting the taste, and ends by corrupting the principles of a nation. I must regret, even upon critical, as well as upon other grounds, that we do not trace in the informing spirit of these volumes, a flame which I think might have been grander if it had been kindled at a different altar."

When we pass from Mr. Alexander's criticism to his poetry, we pass to what seems to us, with signs of true power and noble sentiment, to have many more noticeable faults. The term De Quincey applied to some too luxuriant writer, a " jewelly haemorrhage" of language, has struck us more than once in reading these poems. For example, take the following from a poem

which it is impossible not to admire, and against the floridness of which it is impossible not to rebel, "The Ice-Bound Ship and the Dead Admiral." The passage describes the return of the sun to the polar ice after the long months of midnight, and the short midsummer period of the midnight sun :—

" At last an orange band, Set in a dawn of ashen grey,

To things that winter in that dreadful land Told, like a prophet, of the sun at hand ; And the light flickered, like an angel's sword, This way and that across the dark fiord : And strangely coloured fires Played round magnificent cathedral spires Grandly by winter of the glacier built With fretted shafts, by summer glory-tipped, And darkness was unmuffied and was ripped Like crape from heaven's jewelled hilt. Oh, those grand depths on depths that look like Fate, Awfully calm and uncompassionate; Those nights that are but clasps, or rather say, Bridges of silver flung from day to day ; That vault which deepens up, and endeth never, That sea of starlit sky, Broadening and brightening to infinity, Where nothing trembles, suffers, weeps for ever.

But still the ships were fast in the ice-field, And while the midnight Arctic sun outwheeled, Thicker and thicker did Death's shadows fall On the calm forehead of the Admiral."

Accept the florid style, and nothing said of the midnight sun can be more vivid than,—

" Those nights that are but clasps, or rather say Bridges of silver flung from day to day."

But even accepting the florid style, it is impossible not to fret

under,—

"And darkness was unmuffled and was ripped Like crape from heaven's jewelled hilt."

The double suggestion of artificial costume, — millinery and jewellery both,—in the " crape " and the "jewelled hilt" in con- nection with a scene of such cold and severe beauty as the eternal ice, brings images jostling together in the mind which set us off on false tracks of association, and destroy the outline and unity of the poem. This is surely that style of description which is called in architecture "debased and flamboyant," if not even "the modern florid." And this tendency to bring before us a great pageant of rich miscellaneous associations with relation to every thought and conception he wishes to vivify, is Mr. Alex- ander's besetting sin as a poet. Sometimes it is not to the eye only he appeals, but to the sentiment, when he starts us off on a false track of associations. In the lines on the dead Admiral of the Arctic Seas he says, with a certain distraction for the visual imagination, but in true keeping with his subject :— "How he hath wrought, and sought, and found—found what ?

The bourne whence traveller returneth not !— Ah, no ! 'tie only that his spirit high Hath gone upon a new discovery, A marvellous passage on a sea unbounded, Blown by God's gentle breath ; But that the white sail of his soul hath rounded The promontory—Death !"

But when he applies the same image in the powerful but too rich lines on Archbishop Whately, the train of association is itself a false one, and distracts the feeling besides taking the eye a long excursion from the natural field of vision :— "Yes, there be saints, who are not like the painted And haloed figures fixed upon the pane,

Not outwardly and visibly ensainted, But hiding deep the light which they contain.

"The rugged gentleness, the wit whose glory Flash'd like a sword because its edge was keen, The fine antithesis, the flowing story, Beneath such things the sainthood is not seen ; "Till in the hours when the wan hand is lifted To take the bread and wine, through all the mist Of mortal weariness our eyes are gifted To see a quiet radiance caught from Christ ;

"Till from the pillow of the thinker, lying

In weakness, comes the teaching then best taught, That the true crown for any soul in dying Is Christ, not genius ; and is faith, not thought.

"Oh, wondrous lights of Death, the great unveiler, Lights that C01210 out above the shadowy place, Just as the night that makes our small world paler, Shows us the star-sown amplitudes of space!

"Oh, strange discovery, land that knows no bounding, Isles far off hailed, bright seas without a breath, What time the white sail of the soul is rounding The misty cape—the promontory Death !"

With all these faults, however, there are some noble verses in this little volume. For example, the lines called "His Name," and suggested by Isaiah's "And His Name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace," contain some verses which a great poet might have been proud to write. We extract a few :— " 0 Wonderful! round whose birth-hour Prophetic song, miraculous power, Cluster and burn, like star and flower,

"Those marvellous rays that at Thy will, From the closed Heaven which is so chill, So passionless, stream'd round Thee still, • "Are but as broken gleams that start, 0 Light of Lights ! from Thy deep heart, Thyself, Thyself, the Wonder art!

"0 Counsellor ! four thousand year; One question tremulous with tears, One awful question, vem'd our peers. "They ask'd the vault, but no one spoke ; They ask'd the depth, no answer woke ; They ask'd their hearts, Mat only broke.

"They look'd and sometimes on the height Far off they saw a haze of white, That was a storm, but look'd like light.

The secret of the years is read, The enigma of the quick and dead By the Child voice interpreted.

"0 everlasting Father, God !

Sun after sun went down, and trod Race after race the green earth's sod, "Till generations seem'd to be But dead waves of an endless sea, But dead leaves from a deathless tree.

"But Thou bast come, and now we know Each wave hath an eternal flow, Each leaf a lifetime after snow."

The two verses we have printed in italics seem to us to have a touch of rare genius in them, and a simplicity of both metre and diction rare in Mr. Alexander's poems. The following, too, though in a lower key, besides their melody, have a large and catholic feeling which it is a delight to recognize in a High-Churctr Dean. They were written apparently in a volume of posthumous sermons by some worthy man of very narrow theology :— "As a child in a quiet place

Which earth's wild whirl hath hardly stired

Grows shy as some fair forest bird, And feareth every stranger's face—

"And wets not what a world there is Of love beyond his little isle, Half jealous of his father's smile, Half jealous of his mother's kiss ; "But when he leaves that strip of strand, Life's larger continent to explore, He findeth friends on the far shore, And graspeth many a brother's hand :

"So may I deem it fares with thee—

So may I think that thou hest found, 0 man of God! who standest crown'd With glory on the crystal sea!

"Where all the harps are heavenly sweet, Where all the palms are passing green ; Where on all faces falls the sheen From the Temple of the golden street, "Are bands thou never thought'st would fold The heavenly harp, the fadeless palm ; And faces most divinely calm Thou never thoughtest to behold.

"Forgive, if in thy textual art I see thee what thou art not now, With something of a narrow brow And something of a narrow heart ; "If any buds that thou hest strewn To me look dry for lack of showers, And scentless as Platonic flowers, Pale white beneath the pale white moon.

"For still I think in worlds above The narrow brow grows bright and broad With the great purposes of God, And the heart widens with His love."

What we have given will be enough to show Mr. Alexander's power and faults. As a critic he is keen, large, sagacious, of catholic feeling, of a certain weight of judgment and mass of thought that make themselves felt. As a poet he is ornate, luxuri- ant, rhetorical, almost Celtic in the cast of his metaphor, but with a warmth of fancy and a range of sentiment which give real force to his verse, in spite of the trailing foliage of similes and distracting associations in which he clothes it. And as a trans- lator, if not very close, which in the translation from Virgil he certainly is not, he seems to us to have few superiors in fresh- ness, and to convey the effect of an original without unfaithfulness. to the true original.