THE BOY-POET.

TV-HEN people talk of a boy-poet, they talk as specs. latively as some of the mining companies do when they issue a flaming prospectus on the strength of clear traces of silver or lead. A great deal goes to the making of a poet, and it is no more possible to infer from an early power of putting together more or less creditable verses that we have a poet in germ, than it is to infer from the lead or silver found in any stratum of the earth that it will repay the cost of the machinery necessary to extract the ore and take it to market. More fortunes have been lost in that way than have ever been gained by the richer mines, and we should think it quite as likely that we shall spoil careers by attempting to foster genius where there is no solid substance of genius, as it is that we shall develop it where there ie. We are far from saying that the factory-boy in Silvertown, fifteen years of age, who has written at least one set of verses of some merit and promise, will not turn out to be a true poet in the end. But we are sure that at present no man can possibly tell whether he will ultimately make a poet or not, on the strength of anything that he has as yet done or written. What we know, and all that we know, is that he has a real love of verse-writing and a vein of idealist sentiment in him, and that, so far as that goes, he has one of the many notes of a poet, but it is very far, indeed, from evidence of poetic genius in the only sense in which it would justify the expectation of a poetical career. There is in- deed often, we think, a fatal facility of versification,—and it is one of the most common of the misleading omens of early promise. And that is just one of the indications which we should have been very much disposed to find in Edmund Curtis's verses, if they had not been produced under cir- cumstances so very discouraging that even tolerable success under such conditions seems to imply much more innate and indomitable energy of the poetic type than the same verses, at the same age, would imply in any middle-class or cultivated youth. And just as an electric current does not show its full characteristic energy till it meets with some non-conducting medium which furnishes a resistance to its passage, so we may fairly say that the ardour which has overcome all the squalid elements in a factory boy's career, must be of a more dominant kind even if the result be, as yet, of a decidedly bumble order of merit, than we should venture to infer if it bad been achieved without so many and such great obstacles in its way. " The Factory Bell " is sufficiently good, looking to the difficulties in Edmund Curtis's way, to give fair ground of hope for the future; but fair hope for the future is very different indeed from anything like confidence. For we have to look not only to evidence of a great delight in the cadences of verse and the sweetness of recurring rhyme, but still more to evidence of something like originality of mind, and something like buoyancy of imagination, and no one can tell in what shape these will show themselves in the very young. Originality will often take the form of what seems to the ordinary critic affectation, as it did in Tennyson's Claiibel," "Airy, fairy Lilian," dye., or even in his much more promising " Owl" :— " I would mock thy cbannt stew,

But I cannot mimick it, Not a whit of thy towhoo, Thee to woo to thy towhit, With a lengthened loud halloo, Towhoo, towhit, towhit, towhoo-o-o."

Or, again, in Wordsworth it may take the form of pedantic abstracions, as in his schoolboy's exercise :—

" When superstition left the golden light, And fled indignant to the shades of night ; When pure Iteligiou reared the peaceful breast, And lullei the roaring passions into rest; Drove far away the savage thoughts that roll In the dark mansions of the bigot's soul," &c.

Now, if an ordinary critic had to choose between these two, he would probably say that Tennyson's" Owl" showed mach more originality than Wordsworth's pedantic triumph over superstition and bigotry. Yet that inference would be mis- leading. Wordsworth's was the more massive and original genius, though Tennyson's was the more delicate and sensi- tive. Nothing is more difficult than the detection of early genius. There is so much of confusion in all inchoate power that one is apt quite to overvalue any distinct note which anticipates something unique, yet the genius which is latest in growth is often the strongest when at length it shapes itself to its own peculiar line and movement. We might hazard the guess, for instance, that Edmund Curtis's early poems are too fluent, catch too easily at unmeaning rhymes, and run on with an eagerness even too diffuse to take a broad and unique line of their own. And if we drew that inference, we might easily be quite wrong. Delight in verbal affluence shows itself long before the budding of character, and yet when character begins to shape itself, it may be all the richer for these earlier exercises in the combinations of sound. On the other hand, it is quite possible that these variations on the charm of sound may exhaust the little poetical faculty there is in a man, and grow ever poorer and fainter till they die away in weak raptures of commonplace. No critic however keen can discern in the seed the true form of the

plant. And it may be that the very thing in which we trace the most distinctive promise is really the germ of that

which overgrows and suffocates anything approaching to true genius. By far the best promise in the poems of the Silvertown factory-boy is the contrast he presents between the morning and evening chime of the factory-bell :—

" And all in a moment the streets are alive, As the toilers pour out, like bees from a hive.

The streets are awake with the tramp and the noise Of the workers—the men, the women, the boys.

Onward they pour to the factory gates,

Behind which the meagre-paid labour awaits—

The labour that stifles the mind and the soul ;

And, just as they reach them, there sounds the last toll—

Of the factory bell, the morning bell, Harsh are the notes of its tuneless knell,

Calling them back from the dreamland fair— Calling them hack to the world of care—

The loud-clanging factory bell.

But when the great engine is labouring slow, And the last few sunbeams with gold are aglow; When the heart is content and the brows become dry, And evening is drawing her veil o'er the sky.

The work is all over, the tools laid away, All bright for the use of the soon-coming day.

Hark ! all of a sudden, a rush and a bound, For sweet to the ear comes the now-welcome sound—

Of the factory bell—but the evening bell : Welcome its tones in the evening swell; Calling them back to the fireside bright, And a pleasant meal in the grey twilight - The welcome factory bell."

That shows a keen sense of contrast and a clear power of fl sing on association as the key to the pain or pleasure which the very same sound can convey. But no one can tell whether that

singleness of insight will grow more steadily than the delight in rhythm and rhyme, or whether the delight in rhythm and rhyme will overgrow the clear intelligence of the lad and end by suffocating it. The other rhymes that have been published are for the most part sentimental and vague, as indeed one .ought to expect from a lad of fifteen, whether he is to grow into a genuine poet or not. There is a fatal facility in accepting the " evening swell," which has no meaning, as a rhyme to the "evening bell," but such fatal facility may either be of evil omen or good, according as it represents what is destined to increase, or what indicates only the impatience of boyish waywardness and ardour. Impatience may be a very good. sign in the very young, whereas easy acquiescence in unmeaning rhyme is certainly a bad one. But no one without a gift for prophecy can say which of the two it means in a lad of fifteen.

And again, no one can say with any confidence whether it is wise or unwise to remove the difficulties in a promising lad's career, and introduce him at once to the surround- ings which he seems to crave. There can be no doubt that there are some characters and intellects which grow stronger in the struggle with difficulties, while there are others which are exhausted in a fierce struggle of that kind. And there, again, no one has the foresight to discern which of the two any one character or intellect may happen to be. Fur one thing, it depends very mach on the physical constitution, and for another thing, it depends greatly on the moral earnestness. And it is nearly as impoe. Bible to distinguish between the physique which will be all the sturdier for a brush with unfavourable conditions and the physique which will succumb to them, as it is to distinguish between the energy which grows stronger in an encounter with a resisting medium, and the energy which will be exhausted and played out in the fray. It may easily be that to introduce Edmund Curtis into the conditions of literary culture, will give him wings ; and again, it may easily be that it will deprive him of the very resisting medium which would best educate his imagination. It is possible to satisfy an eager taste for literature too completely, by reducing or planing away the frictions that drive a man to take refuge in the reveries of his own fancy or imagination. If Edmund Curtis's personal gift is not a very tenacious and dominant one, the mere enjoyments of a literary life may extinguish in him all the buoyancy with which he creates for himself a place of refuge from the repulsive aspects of a factory life. On the other hand, if the creative ardour is inextinguish- able, the removal of the obstacles from his path may treble his power, and furnish him with a whole world of new materials for song. Bat at present no one can tell which of these two effects the benevolent eagerness to snatch him from what is supposed to be a benumbing industry, may produce. It may either produce a literary taste which will be perfectly satisfied with enjoying the fruits of other men's genius, or it may produce a new enthusiasm which is never satisfied till it has shaped for itself new conceptions or embodied new music in old conceptions, or it may do some- thing between the two, and give the world a man of ranch taste and a little originality, though not enough to procure him more than a very secondary place in English literature. But as Dr. Johnson said, "perhaps no man shall ever know" whether Edmund Curtis would have done more if he had been let alone, than he will do if he is transplanted into a literary sphere. It is all conjecture, and not at all easy conjecture, whether his friends will save him or spoil him for the career he deserves. Burns would certainly not have produced better poetry if he had been early transplanted into the academic world, while David Gray would probably have lived longer and written even more exquisitely delicate verse, if he had been rescued earlier from a life of indigence and hardship.