"Wherever there is any kind of true genius, we have no right to drive it mad by ridicule or invective; we must deal with it wisely, justly, fairly. Some of the passages which have been selected as evidence of (the poet's) plain speaking, have been wantonly misunderstood. The volume, as a whole, is neither profane nor indecent. A little more clothing in our uncertain climate might perhaps have been attended with advantage. . . . To us this volume, for the first time, conclusively settles that Mr. Swinburne is not a mere brillian rhetorician or melodious twanger of another man's lyre, but authentically a poet."—FRASER'S MAGAZINE, Nov. 1866.
"There is enough in the volume to have made the fortune of most members of his craft."—THE SCOTSMAN.
"The outcry that has been made over his last published volume of 'Poems and Ballads' is not very creditable to this critics. . . . Old Testament Poetry has fastened upon his imagination quite as strongly as the sublime fatalism of the old Greek dramatists. . . . There is a terrible earnestness about these books. . . . That a book thus dealing with the desire of the flesh should have been denounced as profligate because it does not paint the outside of the Sodom's apple of like colour of the ashes that it shows within, says little indeed for the thoroughness of current criticism."—EXAMINER.
"Coarse animalism, draped with the most seductive hues of art and romance. We will not analyze the poems; we will not even pretend to give the reasons upon which our opinion is based." For sale by Newcomb & Co., Broadway.—ALBANY JOURNAL.
ppp.00750.006.jpg"The critics seem to be agreed in seizing upon what deserves reprobation without noticing what deserves respect. In this way he has been either very blindly or very unfairly dealt with."—PALL MALL GAZETTE.
"The theatre of Mr. Swinburne is co-extensive with this knowledge and experience. It will expand, and there is no fear of his being denied an audience, or crushed by a critique. He is more likely to realize the boast of Nelson, who, finding himself unmentioned in the 'Gazette,' declared a day would come when he should have one for himself. We are not in the secret of his own defence, or his reappearance. He may or may not withdraw poems which have been impregnated by designing criticism with a pruriency which was not their own."—READER.
"In every page of these poems we meet with evidence of the fire, the fulness, and the licence of youth. Swinburne is a genuine bard: he sneers at proprieties, he never splits hairs; but gives full vent to his love and hate—his contempt and scorn. He laughs at what other people revere. He would dance in a cathedral."—STIRLING JOURNAL.
"It will be a sad day for English poetry when such volumes as this get read and praised by the better critics, yet the merit of some of the pieces—though by no means high—is greater than of anything heretofore published by this admiring friend of Mr. Jones, Mr. Whistler, and poor old Landor." For sale by Nichols & Noyes.—BOSTON COMMONWEALTH.
"This is a collection of miscellaneous pieces of poetry, &c., by that young and promising writer, Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne. The work, originally brought out by Moxon & Co., has been reprinted by Carleton of this city in a very superior and tasteful style. Of the poems themselves, they are written in all the ardency of youth, but many of the pieces breathe forth a love of freedom, truth and justice in strong but truly poetic language."—NEW YORK WATCHMAN.
"This is a famous book. The critics are not by any means unanimous in their estimate of Swinburne. Some laud him for 'outspoken honesty, earnestness, poetic insight, truth and beauty of expression,' while others regard his poems as even of doubtful morality. That he is a true poet, a master of nervous English, and very bold, no one ought to deny. Whether his poetry is likely to do harm is another question. The ballad commencing
"If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf,"which has lately gone the rounds of the papers, is in this volume, and many others of extraordinary merit as compositions."—RICHMOND DISPATCH, VA.
"Swinburne is unddoubtedly a true poet, having a fine power of expression, which is felicitous and ever appropriate. His muse is fired with the stirring fantasies of youth, and his warm desires are told in language which by beauty of expression veils somewhat their grossness."—PHILADELPHIA DISPATCH.
ppp.00750.007.jpg"No writer of modern times has excited so much interest as Algernon Charles Swinburne. Although a very young man, he has exhibited a maturity of intellect that has almost entirely disarmed the critics. The striking originality of his productions has astonished the literary world, and placed him unquestionably in the front rank of English poets. A recent edition of his poems, entitled 'Laus Veneris, and other Poems and Ballads," however has subjected him to a more severe ordeal than he has yet met with, and has called forth from his own pen a defence which will be published in the second edition of his new volume.
"There is a music of strength in these poems, outspoken honesty, a sturdy love of freedom, earnestness, poetic insight, truth and beauty of expression, beyond anything attained to by other of the young poets of the day. In some of the poems are the passions of youth fearlessly expressed, and stirring depths that have been stirred hitherto by no poet in his youth."—PHILADELPHIA AGE.
"As our modern critics are very sensitive, the volume of poems was rather warmly denounced. The Moxons were alarmed, and copies were called in as fast as possible. Fortunately one fell in our way, and we read it through, with the light which the virtuous reviewers had flashed upon the book. We found scarcely a poem deserving the censures of the hyper-prudish press. Much was in the manly style in which Landor would write about old Greek stories, much in the bold and nervous style in which any but an emasculated laureate would write about some of the middle age legends and romances. The poems seemed to be bold, manly, vigorous—with none of the effeminacies of Moore, the profanities of Shelley, or the suggestive pruriencies of many modern novelists. We could not help exclaiming, 'Where's the harm?' 'Why decry such poems?' They may have the faults of fulness, the errors of youth, the warmth of passion, but are in no way worse than scores of the poems of half a century ago, and not half so bad as many of the novels to-day. However, the censors prevailed, and the volume was withdrawn—only to be republished by Mr. J. Camden Hotten, who, as he—unlike Messrs. Moxon—does not sell Shelley's Works, has undertaken to give the present volume to the world."—BIRMINGHAM JOURNAL.
"All his poems are remarkable for their rhythmic beauty and wondrous wealth of language and exquisite imagery. Even when he has but little to say, his manner of saying that little is so musical, that the melody charms us and lingers in the memory like some sweet strain of music."—NEW HAVEN PALLADIUM.
"Any father who finds it in his household, should at once consigh it to the flames. For sale by Newcomb & Co., Broadway."—ALBANY JOURNAL.
"It is difficult to imagine what could have been the impelling motive of Mr. Swinburne in offering this collection of his writings to the public. He ought to have been aware that it could in no way enhance his reputation as a writer worthy of his age and time. But indeed it may very safely be said that if he had stopped short after the publication of the 'Atalanta in Calydon,' he would have stood much higher as a poet than he now does. Everything which he has since given us
ppp.00750.008.jpg'Chastelard,' 'Rosamond,' and now the volume before us, has been a step downward. This, it is true, is a literary history not sufficiently uncommon to excite our surprise, but it is none the less a matter of regret. Unfortunately he possesses an extraordinary grace and power of expression, and a melodious felicity in the use of language and of poetic imagery, which sometimes invests his worst verses with a charm that half veils their vileness." For sale by Davis and Brothers.—PORTLAND PRESS.
"Let us hope that the kingdom on earth which the poets help advance, and which already owns the constant service of such men as Tennyson, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, may not miss the brilliant and subtle power of Swinburne's verse."—BROOKLYN UNION.
"Probably no poet has brought to the simply sensous delights of love, to the subtle relation by which passion is kindled in heart of man and woman, by which the soul is subdued and disgraced and overwhelmed in intervals of fierce, untamable joy, to its unutterable anguish following, more of the graces and allurements and bold, unconcealed delineation of passion, than Mr. Swinburne. Byron is coarse and cold beside him. Tom Moore is a wayward, superficial chatterer compared to Swinburne. . . . We have no sympathy with the criticism which denounces Mr. Swinburne and his poetry as hopelessly bad."—BROOKLYN UNION.
"It is time that such works should cease to be palmed off on the public under the names of authors of good repute, and with the imprint of respectable publishers on their title-pages." "In our review of 'Chastelard' we formed so low an estimate of his ability as to deem him an utterly over-estimated young man."—WASHINGTON TELEGRAPH.
"The poems are all strongly characteristic, musical, and gracefully versified. The fatal fault in the eyes of the English critics is the sensual tone of some of the poems, which they exaggerate beyond reason and common sense."—HARTFORD COURANT.
"The book seems to be written, like Charles Reade's 'Griffith Gaunt' and Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass,' in a spirit of protest to what Reade terms the 'prurient prudishness' of the age."—WASHINGTON STAR.
(Translation.)
"There is no form of verse which Swinburne does not handle with mastery. Many of his poems are the most lovely melodies in words. The English language can hardly boast greater triumphs than in some of Swinburne's lyrics. We should like to see whether he will overcome the present pouting of criticism and the public: it is to be hoped that he will overcome it, and as soon as possible."—BEILAGE ZUR ZUKUNFT, 14 February, 1867 (Berlin.)
That Angels are human forms, or men, I have seen a thousand times. I have also frequently told them that men in the Christian world are in such gross ignorance respecting Angels and Spirits as to suppose them to be minds without a form, or mere thoughts, of which they have no other idea than as something ethereal possessing a vital principle. To the first or ultimate heaven also correspond the forms of man's body, called its members, organs, and viscera. Thus the corporeal part of man is that in which heaven ultimately closes, and upon which, as on its base, it rests.
SWEDENBORG.
Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a nation that it get an articulate voice—that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means.
CARLYLE.
Les efforts de vos ennemis contre vous, leurs cris, leur rage impuissante, et leurs petits succès, ne doivent pas vous effrayer; ce ne sont que des égratignures sur les épaules d'Hercule.
ROBESPIERRE.
OUR Portrait of Whitman is (as stated in the Prefatory Notice) re-engraved from the excellent Portrait, after a daguerreotype, given in the original "LEAVES OF GRASS," edition of 1855. We are not aware that any other engraved likeness of Whitman is extant; and have considered it on the whole more safe and satisfactory to take this fine record of the poet in his earlier prime than to risk the chances of engraving at first hand from a photograph of his present more matured aspect.
DEAR SCOTT,—Among various gifts which I have received from you, tangible and intangible, was a copy of the original quarto edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which you presented to me soon after its first appearance in 1855. At a time when few people on this side of the Atlantic had looked into the book, and still fewer had found in it anything save matter for ridicule, you had appraised it, and seen that its value was real and great. A true poet and a strong thinker like yourself was indeed likely to see that. I read the book eagerly, and perceived that its substantiality and power were still ahead of any eulogium with which it might have come commended to me—and, in fact, ahead of most attempts that could be made at verbal definition of them.
Some years afterwards, getting to know our friend Swinburne, I found with much satisfaction that he also was an ardent (not of course a blind) admirer of Whitman. Satisfaction, and a degree almost of surprise; for his intense sense of poetic refinement of form in his own ppp.00750.018.jpg works, and his exacting acuteness as a critic, might have seemed likely to carry him away from Whitman in sympathy at least, if not in actual latitude of perception. Those who find the American poet "utterly formless," "intolerably rough and floundering," "destitute of the A B C of art," and the like, might not unprofitably ponder this very different estimate of him by the author of Atalanta in Calydon.
May we hope that now, twelve years after the first appearance of Leaves of Grass, the English reading public may be prepared for a selection of Whitman's poems, and soon hereafter for a complete edition of them? I trust this may prove to be the case. At any rate, it has been a great gratification to me to be concerned in the experiment; and this is enhanced by my being enabled to associate with it your name, as that of an early and well-qualified appreciator of Whitman, and no less as that of a dear friend.
Yours affectionately,DURING the summer of 1867 I had the opportunity (which I had often wished for) of expressing in print my estimate and admiration of the works of the American poet Walt Whitman.∗(1) Like a stone dropped into a pond, an article of that sort may spread out its concentric circles of consequences. One of these is the invitation which I have received to edit a selection from Whitman's writings: virtually the first sample of his work ever published in England, and offering the first tolerably fair chance he has had of making his way with English readers on his own showing. Hitherto, such readers—except the small percentage of them to whom it has happened to come across the poems in some one of their American editions—have picked acquaintance with them only through the medium of newspaper extracts and criticisms, mostly short-sighted, sneering, and depreciatory, and rather intercepting than forwarding the candid ppp.00750.024.jpg construction which people might be willing to put upon the poems, alike in their beauties and their aberrations. Some English critics, no doubt, have been more discerning—as W. J. Fox, of old, in the Dispatch, the writer of the notice in the Leader, and of late two in the Pall Mall Gazette and the London Review;∗(2) but these have been the exceptions among us, the great majority of the reviewers presenting that happy and familiar critical combination— scurrility and superciliousness.
As it was my lot to set down so recently several of the considerations which seem to me most essential and most obvious in regard to Whitman's writings, I can scarcely now recur to the subject without either repeating something of what I then said, or else leaving unstated some points of principal importance. I shall therefore adopt the simplest course—that of summarizing the critical remarks in my former article; after which, I shall leave without further development (ample as is the amount of development most of them would claim) the particular topics there glanced at, and shall proceed to some other phases of the subject.
Whitman republished in 1867 his complete poetical works in one moderate-sized volume, consisting of the whole Leaves of Grass, with a sort of supplement thereto ppp.00750.025.jpg named Songs before Parting,∗(3) and of the Drum Taps, with its Sequel. It has been intimated that he does not exepect to write any more poems, unless it might be in expression of the religious side of man?s nature. However, one poem on the last American harvest, sown and reaped by those who had been soldiers in the great war, has already appeared since the volume in question, and has been republished in England.
Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry, such as Shakspeare furnishes the precedent for in drama. Still there is a very powerful and majestic rhythmical sense throughout.
Lavish and persistent has been the abuse poured forth upon Whitman by his own countrymen; the tricklings of the British press give but a moderate idea of it. The poet is known to repay scorn with scorn. Emerson can, however, from the first be claimed as on Whitman's side; nor, it is understood after some enquiry, has that great thinker since then retreated from this position in fundamentals, although his admiration may have entailed some worry upon him, and reports of his recantation have been rife. Of other writers on Whitman's side, expressing themselves with no measured enthusiasm, one may cite ppp.00750.026.jpg Mr. M. D. Conway; Mr. W. D. O'Connor, who wrote a pamphlet named The Good Grey Poet; and Mr. John Burroughs, author of Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, published quite recently in New York. His thorough-paced admirers declare Whitman to be beyond rivalry the poet of the epoch; an estimate which, startling as it will sound at the first, may nevertheless be upheld, on the grounds that Whitman is beyond all his competitors a man of the period, one of audacious personal ascendant, incapable of all compromise, and an initiator in the scheme and form of his works.
Certain faults are charged against him, and, as far as they are true, shall frankly stand confessed—some of them as very serious faults. Firstly, he speaks on occasion of gross things in gross, crude, and plain terms. Secondly, he uses some words absurd or ill-constructed, others which produce a jarring effect in poetry, or indeed in any lofty literature. Thirdly, he sins from time to time by being obscure, fragmentary, and agglomerative—giving long strings of successive and detached items, not, however, devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness. Fourthly, his self-assertion is boundless; yet not always to be understood as strictly or merely personal to himself, but sometimes as vicarious, the poet speaking on behalf of all men, and every man and woman. These and any other faults appear most harshly on a cursory reading; Whitman is a poet who bears and needs to be read as a whole, and then ppp.00750.027.jpg the volume and torrent of his power carry the disfigurements along with it, and away.
The subject-matter of Whitman's poems, taken individually, is absolutely miscellaneous: he touches upon any and every subject. But he has prefixed to his last edition an "Inscription" in the following terms, showing that the key-words of the whole book are two—"One's-self" and "En Masse:"—
Small is the theme of the following chant, yet the greatest—namely, ONE'S-SELF; that wondrous thing, a simple separate person. That, for the use of the New World, I sing. Man's physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing. Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the Muse: I say the form complete is worthier far. The female equally with the male I sing. Nor cease at the theme of One's-self. I speak the word of the modern, the word EN MASSE. My days I sing, and the lands—with interstice I knew of hapless war. O friend, whoe'er you are, at last arriving hither to commence, I feel through every leaf the pressure of your hand, which I return. And thus upon our journey linked together let us go.The book, then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of Personality and of Democracy; and, it may be added, of American nationalism. It is par excellence the modern poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity—that in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into the most rhapsodic or passionately abstract. Pic- ppp.00750.028.jpg turesqueness it has, but mostly of a somewhat patriarchal kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of the littérateur; a certain echo of the old Hebrew poetry may even be caught in it, extra-modern though it is. Another most prominent and pervading quality of the book is the exuberant physique of the author. The conceptions are throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter much under different conditions.
Further, there is a strong tone of paradox in Whitman's writings. He is both a realist and an optimist in extreme measure: he contemplates evil as in some sense not existing, or, if existing, then as being of as much importance as anything else. Not that he is a materialist; on the contrary, he is a most strenuous assertor of the soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its infallible associate and vehicle in the present frame of things. Neither does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy of his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national and other developments, being an effectual bar to this. The paradoxical element of the poems is such that one may sometimes find them in conflict with what has preceded, and would not be much surprised if they said at any moment the reverse of whatever they do say. This is mainly due to the multiplicity of the aspects of things, and to the immense width of relation in which Whitman stands to all sorts and all aspects of them.
But the greatest of this poet's distinctions is his absolute ppp.00750.029.jpg and entire originality. He may be termed formless by those who, not without much reason to show for themselves, are wedded to the established forms and ratified refinements of poetic art; but it seems reasonable to enlarge the canon till it includes so great and startling a genius, rather than to draw it close and exclude him. His work is practically certain to stand as archetypal for many future poetic efforts—so great is his power as an originator, so fervid his initiative. It forms incomparably the largest performance of our period in poetry. Victor Hugo's Légende des Siècles alone might be named with it for largeness, and even that with much less of a new starting-point in conception and treatment. Whitman breaks with all precedent. To what he himself perceives and knows he has a personal relation of the intensest kind; to anything in the way of prescription, no relation at all. But he is saved from isolation by the depth of his Americanism; with the movement of his predominant nation he is moved. His comprehension, energy, and tenderness, are all extreme, and all inspired by actualities. And, as for poetic genius, those who, without being ready to concede that faculty to Whitman, confess his iconoclastic boldness and his Titanic power of temperament, working in the sphere of poetry, do in effect confess his genius as well.
Such, still further condensed, was the critical summary which I gave of Whitman's position among poets. It ppp.00750.030.jpg remains to say something a little more precise of the particular qualities of his works. And first, not to slur over defects, I shall extract some sentences from a letter which a friend, most highly entitled to form and express an opinion on any poetic question—one, too, who abundantly upholds the greatness of Whitman as a poet—has addressed to me with regard to the criticism above condensed. His observations, though severe on this individual point, appear to me not other than correct. "I don't think that you quite put strength enough into your blame on one side, while you make at least enough of minor faults or eccentricities. To me it seems always that Whitman's great flaw is a fault of debility, not an excess of strength —I mean his bluster. His own personal and national self-reliance and arrogance, I need not tell you, I applaud, and sympathize and rejoice in; but the blatant ebullience of feeling and speech, at times, is feeble for so great a poet of so great a people. He is in part certainly the poet of democracy; but not wholly, because he tries so openly to be, and asserts so violently that he is—always as if he was fighting the case out on a platform. This is the only thing I really or greatly dislike or revolt from. On the whole" (adds my correspondent) "my admiration and enjoyment of his greatness grow keener and warmer every time I think of him"—a feeling, I may be permitted to observe, which is fully shared by myself, and, I suppose, by all who consent in any adequate measure to re-
ppp.00750.031.jpgcognise Whitman, and to yield themselves to his influence.
To continue. Besides originality and daring, which have been already insisted upon, width and intensity are leading characteristics of his writings—width both of subject-matter and of comprehension, intensity of self-absorption into what the poet contemplates and expresses. He scans and presents an enormous panorama, unrolled before him as from a mountain-top; and yet whatever most large or most minute or casual thing his eye glances upon, that he enters into with a depth of affection which identifies him with it for the time, be the object what it may. There is a singular interchange also of actuality and of ideal substratum and suggestion. While he sees men, with even abnormal exactness and sympathy, as men, he sees them also "as trees walking," and admits us to perceive that the whole show is in a measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask of a larger and profounder reality beneath it, of which it is giving perpetual intimations and auguries. He is the poet indeed of literality, but of passionate and significant literality, full of indirections as well as directness, and of readings between the lines. If he is the 'cutest of Yankees, he is also as truly an enthusiast as any the most typical poet. All his faculties and performance glow into a white heat of brotherliness; and there is a poignancy both of tenderness and of beauty about his finer works which ppp.00750.032.jpg discriminates them quite as much as their modernness, audacity, or any other exceptional point. If the reader wishes to see the great and more intimate powers of Whitman in their fullest expression, he may consult the Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln; than which it would be difficult to find anywhere a purer, more elevated, more poetic, more ideally abstract, or at the same time more pathetically personal, threnody—uniting the thrilling chords of grief, of beauty, of triumph, and of final unfathomed satisfaction. With all his singularities, Whitman is a master of words and of sounds: he has them at his command—made for, and instinct with, his purpose— messengers of unsurpassable sympathy and intelligence between himself and his readers. The entire book may be called the pæan of the natural man—not of the merely physical, still less of the disjunctively intellectual or spiritual man, but of him who, being a man first and foremost, is therein also a spirit and an intellect.
There is a singular and impressive intuition or revelation of Swedenborg's: that the whole of heaven is in the form of one man, and the separate societies of heaven in the forms of the several parts of man. In a large sense, the general drift of Whitman's writings, even down to the passages which read as most bluntly physical, bear a striking correspondence or analogy to this dogma. He takes man, and every organism and faculty of man, as the unit—the datum—from which all that we know, discern, ppp.00750.033.jpg and speculate, of abstract and supersensual, as well as of concrete and sensual, has to be computed. He knows of nothing nobler than that unit man; but, knowing that, he can use it for any multiple, and for any dynamical extension or recast.
Let us next obtain some idea of what this most remarkable poet—the founder of American poetry rightly to be so called, and the most sonorous poetic voice of the tangibilities of actual and prospective democracy—is in his proper life and person.
Walt Whitman (we infer that he was in fact baptized Walter, like his father, but he always uses the name Walt) was born at the farm-village of West Hills, Long Island, in the State of New York, and about thirty miles distant from the capital, on the 31st of May 1819. His father's family, English by origin, had already been settled in this locality for five generations. His mother, named Louisa van Velsor, was of Dutch extraction, and came from Cold Spring, Queen's County, about three miles from West Hills. "A fine-looking old lady" she has been termed in her advanced age. A large family ensued from the marriage. The father was a farmer, and afterwards a carpenter and builder: both parents adhered in religion to "the great Quaker iconoclast, Elias Hicks." Walt was schooled at Brooklyn, a suburb of New York, and began life at the age of thirteen, working as a printer, later on as a country teacher, and then as a miscellaneous press-writer in ppp.00750.034.jpg New York. From 1837 to 1848 he had, as Mr. Burroughs too promiscuously expresses it, "sounded all experiences of life, with all their passions, pleasures, and abandonments." In 1849 he began travelling; and became at New Orleans a newspaper editor, and at Brooklyn, two years afterwards, a printer. He next followed his father's business of carpenter and builder. In 1862, after the breaking-out of the great Civil War, in which his enthusiastic unionism and also his anti-slavery feelings attached him inseparably though not rancorously to the good cause of the North, he undertook the nursing of the sick and wounded in the field, writing also a correspondence in the New York Times. I am informed that it was through Emerson's intervention that he obtained the sanction of President Lincoln for this purpose of charity, with authority to draw the ordinary army rations; Whitman stipulating at the same time that he would not receive any remuneration for his services. The first immediate occasion of his going down to camp was on behalf of his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel George W. Whitman, of the 51st New York Veterans, who had been struck in the face by a piece of shell at Fredericksburg. From the spring of 1863, this nursing, both in the field and more especially in hospital at Washington, became his "one daily and nightly occupation;" and the strongest testimony is borne to his measureless self-devotion and kindliness in the work, and to the unbounded fascination, a kind of magnetic ppp.00750.035.jpg attraction and ascendency, which he exercised over the patients, often with the happiest sanitary results. Northerner or Southerner, the belligerents received the same tending from him. It is said that by the end of the war he had personally ministered to upwards of 100,000 sick and wounded. In a Washington hospital he caught, in the summer of 1864, the first illness he had ever known, caused by poison absorbed into the system in attending some of the worst cases of gangrene. It disabled him for six months. He returned to the hospitals towards the beginning of 1865, and obtained also a clerkship in the Department of the Interior. It should be added that, though he never actually joined the army as a combatant, he made a point of putting down his name on the enrollment-lists for the draft, to take his chance as it might happen for serving the country in arms. The reward of his devotedness came at the end of June 1865, in the form of dismissal from his clerkship by the minister, Mr. Harlan, who learned that Whitman was the author of the Leaves of Grass; a book whose outspokenness, or (as the official chief considered it) immorality, raised a holy horror in the ministerial breast. The poet, however, soon obtained another modest but creditable post in the office of the Attorney-General. He still visits the hospitals on Sundays, and often on other days as well.
The portrait of Mr. Whitman reproduced in the present ppp.00750.036.jpg volume is taken from an engraving after a daguerreotype given in the original Leaves of Grass. He is much above the average size, and noticeably well-proportioned—a model of physique and of health, and, by natural consequence, as fully and finely related to all physical facts by his bodily constitution as to all mental and spiritual facts by his mind and his consciousness. He is now, however, old-looking for his years, and might even (according to the statement of one of his enthusiasts, Mr. O'Connor) have passed for being beyond the age for the draft when the war was going on. The same gentleman, in confutation of any inferences which might be drawn from the Leaves of Grass by a Harlan or other Holy Willie, affirms that "one more irreproachable in his relations to the other sex lives not upon this earth"—an assertion which one must take as one finds it, having neither confirmatory nor traversing evidence at hand. Whitman has light blue eyes, a florid complexion, a fleecy beard now grey, and a quite peculiar sort of magnetism about him in relation to those with whom he comes in contact. His ordinary appearance is masculine and cheerful: he never shows depression of spirits, and is sufficiently undemonstrative, and even somewhat silent in company. He has always been carried by predilection towards the society of the common people; but is not the less for that open to refined and artistic impressions—fond of operatic and other good music, and discerning in works of art. As to ppp.00750.037.jpg either praise or blame of what he writes, he is totally indifferent, not to say scornful—having in fact a very decisive opinion of his own concerning its calibre and destinies. Thoreau, a very congenial spirit, said of Whitman "He is Democracy;" and again, "After all, he suggests something a little more than human." Lincoln broke out into the exclamation "Well, he looks like a man!" Whitman responded to the instinctive appreciation of the President, considering him (it is said by Mr. Burroughs) "by far the noblest and purest of the political characters of the time;" and, if anything can cast, in the eyes of posterity, an added halo of brightness round the unsullied personal qualities and the great doings of Lincoln, it will assuredly be the written monument reared to him by Whitman.
The best sketch that I know of Whitman as an accessible human individual is that given by Mr. Conway.∗(4) I borrow from it the following few details. "Having occasion to visit New York soon after the appearance of Walt Whitman's book, I was urged by some friends to search him out. . . The day was excessively hot, the thermometer at nearly 100º, and the sun blazed down as only on sandy Long Island can the sun blaze. . . I saw stretched upon his back, and gazing up straight at the terrible sun, the man I was seeking. With his grey ppp.00750.038.jpg clothing, his blue-grey shirt, his iron-grey hair, his swart sunburnt face and bare neck, he lay upon the brown-and-white grass—for the sun had burnt away its greenness— and was so like the earth upon which he rested that he seemed almost enough a part of it for one to pass by without recognition. I approached him, gave my name and reason for searching him out, and asked him if he did not find the sun rather hot. 'Not at all too hot,' was his reply; and he confided to me that this was one of his favourite places and attitudes for composing 'poems.' He then walked with me to his home, and took me along its narrow ways to his room. A small room of about fifteen feet square, with a single window looking out on the barren solitudes of the island; a small cot, a wash-stand with a little looking-glass hung over it from a tack in the wall, a pine table with pen, ink, and paper, on it; an old line-engraving representing Bacchus, hung on the wall, and opposite a similar one of Silenus; these constituted the visible environments of Walt Whitman. There was not, apparently, a single book in the room. . . The books he seemed to know and love best were the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare: these he owned, and probably had in his pockets while we were talking. He had two studies where he read; one was the top of an omnibus, and the other a small mass of sand, then entirely uninhabited, far out in the ocean, called Coney Island. . . The only distinguished contemporary he had ever met was the Rev. ppp.00750.039.jpg Henry Ward Beecher, of Brooklyn, who had visited him. . . He confessed to having no talent for industry, and that his forte was 'loafing and writing poems:' he was poor, but had discovered that he could, on the whole, live magnificently on bread and water. . . On no occasion did he laugh, nor indeed did I ever see him smile."
The first trace of Whitman as a writer is in the pages of the Democratic Review in or about 1841. Here he wrote some prose tales and sketches—poor stuff mostly, so far as I have seen of them, yet not to be wholly confounded with the commonplace. One of them is a tragic school-incident, which may be surmised to have fallen under his personal observation in his early experience as a teacher. His first poem of any sort was named Blood Money, in denunciation of the Fugitive Slave Law, which severed him from the Democratic party. His first considerable work was the Leaves of Grass. He began it in 1853, and it underwent two or three complete re-writings prior to its publication at Brooklyn in 1855, in a quarto volume—peculiar-looking, but with something perceptibly artistic about it. The type of that edition was set up entirely by himself. He was moved to undertake this formidable poetic work (as indicated in a private letter of Whitman's, from which Mr. Conway has given a sentence or two) by his sense of the great materials which America could offer for a really American poetry, and by his contempt for the current work of his compatriots—"either ppp.00750.040.jpg the poetry of an elegantly weak sentimentalism, at bottom nothing but maudlin puerilities or more or less musical verbiage, arising out of a life of depression and enervation as their result; or else that class of poetry, plays, &c., of which the foundation is feudalism, with its ideas of lords and ladies, its imported standard of gentility, and the manners of European high-life-below-stairs in every line and verse." Thus incited to poetic self-expression, Whitman (adds Mr. Conway) "wrote on a sheet of paper, in large letters, these words 'Make the Work,' and fixed it above his table, where he could always see it whilst writing. Thenceforth every cloud that flitted over him, every distant sail, every face and form encountered, wrote a line in his book."
The Leaves of Grass excited no sort of notice until a letter from Emerson∗(5) appeared, expressing a deep sense of its power and magnitude. He termed it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." The edition of about a thousand copies sold off in less than a year. Towards the end of 1856 a second edition in 16mo appeared, printed in New York, also of about a ppp.00750.041.jpg thousand copies. Its chief feature was an additional poem beginning "A Woman waits for me." It excited a considerable storm. Another edition, of about four to five thousand copies, duodecimo, came out at Boston in 1860-61, including a number of new pieces. The Drum Taps, consequent upon the war, with their Sequel which comprises the poem on Lincoln, followed in 1865; and in 1867, as I have already noted, a complete edition of all the poems, including a supplement named Songs before Parting. The first of all the Leaves of Grass, in point of date, was the long and powerful composition, entitled, Walt Whitman—perhaps the most typical and memorable of all of his productions, but shut out from the present selection for reasons given further on. The final edition shows numerous and considerable variations from all its precursors; evidencing once again that Whitman is by no means the rough-and-ready writer, panoplied in rude art and egotistic self-sufficiency, that many people suppose him to be. Even since this issue, the book has been slightly revised by its author's own hand, with a special view to possible English circulation. The copy so revised has reached me (through the liberal and friendly hands of Mr. Conway) after my selection had already been decided on; and the few departures from the last printed text which might on comparison be found in the present volume are due to my having had the advantage of following this revised copy. In all other respects I have felt bound to ppp.00750.042.jpg reproduce the last edition, without so much as considering whether here and there I might personally prefer the readings of the earlier issues.
The selection here offered to the English reader contains a little less than half the entire bulk of Whitman's poetry. My choice has proceeded upon two simple rules: first, to omit entirely every poem which could with any tolerable fairness be deemed offensive to the feelings of morals or propriety in this peculiarly nervous age; and, second, to include every remaining poem which appeared to me of conspicuous beauty or interest. I have also inserted the very remarkable prose preface which Whitman printed in the original edition of Leaves of Grass, an edition that has become a literary rarity. This preface has not been reproduced in any later publication, although its materials have to some extent been worked up into poems of a subsequent date.∗(6) From this prose composition, contrary to what has been my rule with any of the poems, it has appeared to me permissible to omit two or three short phrases which would have shocked ordinary readers, and the retention of which, had I held it obligatory, would have entailed the exclusion of the preface itself as a whole.
A few words must be added as to the indecencies scattered through Whitman's writings. Indecencies or improprieties—or, still better, deforming crudities—they may rightly ppp.00750.043.jpg be termed; to call them immoralities would be going too far. Whitman finds himself, and other men and women, to be a compound of soul and body; he finds that body plays an extremely prominent and determining part in whatever he and other mundane dwellers have cognizance of; he perceives this to be the necessary condition of things, and therefore, as he fully and openly accepts it, the right condition; and he knows of no reason why what is universally seen and known, necessary and right, should not also be allowed and proclaimed in speech. That such a view of the matter is entitled to a great deal of weight, and at any rate to candid consideration and construction, appears to me not to admit of a doubt; neither is it dubious that the contrary view, the only view which a mealy-mouthed British nineteenth century admits as endurable, amounts to the condemnation of nearly every great or eminent literary work of past time, whatever the century it belongs to, the country it comes from, the department of writing it illustrates, or the degree or sort of merit it possesses. Tenth, second, or first century before Christ, —first, eighth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, or even eighteenth century A.D.—it is still the same: no book whose subject-matter admits as possible of an impropriety according to current notions can be depended upon to fail of containing such impropriety,—can, if those notions are accepted as the canon, be placed with a sense of security in the hands of girls and youths, or read aloud to ppp.00750.044.jpg women; and this holds good just as much of severely moral or plainly descriptive as of avowedly playful, knowing, or licentious books. For my part, I am far from thinking that earlier state of literature, and the public feeling from which it sprang, the wrong ones—and our present condition the only right one. Equally far therefore am I from indignantly condemning Whitman for every startling allusion or expression which he has admitted into his book, and which I, from motives of policy, have excluded from this selection; except, indeed, that I think many of his tabooed passages are extremely raw and ugly on the ground of poetic or literary art, whatever aspect they may bear in morals. I have been rigid in exclusion, because it appears to me highly desirable that a fair verdict on Whitman should now be pronounced in England on poetic grounds alone; and because it was clearly impossible that the book, with its audacities of topic and of expression included, should run the same chance of justice, and of circulation through refined minds and hands, which may possibly be accorded to it after the rejection of all such peccant poems. As already intimated, I have not in a single instance excised any parts of poems: to do so would have been, I conceive, no less wrongful towards the illustrious American than repugnant, and indeed unendurable, to myself, who aspire to no Bowdlerian honours. The consequence is that the reader loses in toto several important poems, and some extremely ppp.00750.045.jpg fine ones—notably the one previously alluded to, of quite exceptional value and excellence, entitled Walt Whitman. I sacrifice them grudgingly; and yet willingly, because I believe this to be the only thing to do with due regard to the one reasonable object which a selection can subserve—that of paving the way towards the issue and unprejudiced reception of a complete edition of the poems in England. For the benefit of misconstructionists, let me add in distinct terms that, in respect of morals and propriety, I neither admire nor approve the incriminated passages in Whitman's poems, but on the contrary consider that most of them would be much better away; and, in respect of art, I doubt whether even one of them deserves to be retained in the exact phraseology it at present exhibits. This, however, does not amount to saying that Whitman is a vile man, or a corrupt or corrupting writer: he is none of these.
The only division of his poems into sections, made by Whitman himself, has been noted above: Leaves of Grass, Songs before Parting, supplementary to the preceding, and Drum Taps, with their Sequel. The peculiar title, Leaves of Grass, has become almost inseparable from the name of Whitman; it seems to express with some aptness the simplicity, universality, and spontaneity, of the poems to which it is applied. Songs before Parting may indicate that these compositions close Whitman's poetic roll. Drum Taps are, of course, ppp.00750.046.jpg songs of the Civil War, and their Sequel is mainly on the same theme: the chief poem in this last section being the one on the death of Lincoln. These titles all apply to fully arranged series of compositions. The present volume is not in the same sense a fully arranged series, but a selection; and the relation of the poems inter se appears to me to depend on altered conditions, which, however narrowed they are, it may be as well frankly to recognise in practice. I have therefore redistributed the poems (a latitude of action which I trust the author may not object to), bringing together those whose subject-matter seems to warrant it, however far separated they may possibly be in the original volume. At the same time, I have retained some characteristic terms used by Whitman himself, and have named my sections respectively—
1. Chants Democratic (poems of democracy).
2. Drum Taps (war songs).
3. Walt
Whitman (personal poems).
4. Leaves of Grass (unclassified poems).
5. Songs of
Parting (missives).
The first three designations explain themselves. The fourth, Leaves of Grass, is not so specially applicable to the particular poems of that section here as I should have liked it to be; but I could not consent to drop this typical name. The Songs of Parting, my fifth section, are compositions in which the poet expresses his own ppp.00750.047.jpg sentiment regarding his works, in which he forecasts their future, or consigns them to the reader's consideration. It deserves mention that, in the copy of Whitman's last American edition revised by his own hand as previously noticed, the series termed Songs of Parting has been recast, and made to consist of poems of the same character as those included in my section No. 5.
Comparatively few of Whitman's poems have been endowed by himself with titles properly so called. Most of them are merely headed with the opening words of the poems themselves—as "I was looking a long while;" "To get betimes in Boston Town;" "When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed;" and so on. It seems to me that in a selection such a lengthy and circuitous method of identifying the poems is not desirable: I should wish them to be remembered by brief, repeatable, and significant titles. I have therefore supplied titles of my own to such pieces as bear none in the original edition: wherever a real title appears in that edition, I have retained it.
With these remarks I commend to the English reader the ensuing selection from a writer whom I sincerely believe to be, whatever his faults, of the order of great poets, and by no means of pretty good ones. I would urge the reader not to ask himself, and not to return any answer to the questions, whether or not this poet is like other poets—whether or not the particular application of rules of art which is found to hold good in the works ppp.00750.048.jpg of those others, and to constitute a part of their excellence, can be traced also in Whitman. Let the questions rather be—Is he powerful? Is he American? Is he new? Is he rousing? Does he feel and make me feel? I entertain no doubt as to the response which in due course of time will be returned to these questions and such as these, in America, in England, and elsewhere—or to the further question, "Is Whitman then indeed a true and a great poet?" Lincoln's verdict bespeaks the ultimate decision upon him, in his books as in his habit as he lives— "Well, he looks like a man."
Walt Whitman occupies at the present moment a unique position on the globe, and one which, even in past time, can have been occupied by only an infinitesimally small number of men. He is the one man who entertains and professes respecting himself the grave conviction that he is the actual and prospective founder of a new poetic literature, and a great one—a literature proportional to the material vastness and the unmeasured destinies of America: he believes that the Columbus of the continent or the Washington of the States was not more truly than himself in the future a founder and upbuilder of this America. Surely a sublime conviction, and expressed more than once in magnificent words—none more so than the lines beginning
Come, I will make this continent indissoluble.∗(7) ppp.00750.049.jpgWere the idea untrue, it would still be a glorious dream, which a man of genius might be content to live in and die for: but is it untrue? Is it not, on the contrary, true, if not absolutely, yet with a most genuine and substantial approximation? I believe it is thus true. I believe that Whitman is one of the huge, as yet mainly unrecognised, forces of our time; privileged to evoke, in a country hitherto still asking for its poet, a fresh, athletic, and American poetry, and predestined to be traced up to by generation after generation of believing and ardent— let us hope not servile—disciples.
"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Shelley, who knew what he was talking about when poetry was the subject, has said it, and with a profundity of truth. Whitman seems in a peculiar degree marked out for "legislation" of the kind referred to. His voice will one day be potential or magisterial wherever the English language is spoken—that is to say, in the four corners of the earth; and, in his own American hemisphere, the uttermost avatars of democracy will confess him not more their announcer than their inspirer.
W. M. ROSSETTIAMERICA does not repel the past, or what it has produced under its forms, or amid other politics, or the idea of castes, or the old religions; accepts the lesson with calmness; is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms; perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house; perceives that it waits a little while in the door, that it was fittest for its days, that its action has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches, and that he shall be fittest for his days.
The Americans, of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical Nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ppp.00750.052.jpg ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in vast masses. Here is the hospitality which for ever indicates heroes. Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves. Here the performance, disdaining the trivial, unapproached in the tremendous audacity of its crowds and groupings and the push of its perspective, spreads with crampless and flowing breadth, and showers its prolific and splendid extravagance. One sees it must indeed own the riches of the summer and winter, and need never be bankrupt while corn grows from the ground, or the orchards drop apples, or the bays contain fish, or men beget children.
Other states indicate themselves in their deputies: but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlours, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people. Their manners, speech, dress, friendships, —the freshness and candour of their physiognomy—the picturesque looseness of their carriage—their deathless attachment to freedom—their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean—the practical acknowledgment ppp.00750.053.jpg of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states—the fierceness of their roused resentment—their curiosity and welcome of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy—their susceptibility to a slight—the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors—the fluency of their speech—their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul—their good temper and open-handedness—the terrible significance of their elections, the President's taking off his hat to them not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.
The largeness of nature or the nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen. Not nature, nor swarming states, nor streets and steamships, nor prosperous business, nor farms nor capital nor learning, may suffice for the ideal of man, nor suffice the poet. No reminiscences may suffice either. A live nation can always cut a deep mark, and can have the best authority the cheapest—namely from its own soul. This is the sum of the profitable uses of individuals or states, and of present action and grandeur, and of the subjects of poets.—As if it were necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if ppp.00750.054.jpg the opening of the western continent by discovery, and what has transpired since in North and South America, were less than the small theatre of the antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of the middle ages! The pride of the United States leaves the wealth and finesse of the cities, and all returns of commerce and agriculture, and all the magnitude of geography or shows of exterior victory, to enjoy the breed of full-sized men, or one full-sized man unconquerable and simple.
The American poets are to enclose old and new; for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions: he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country's spirit: he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the Falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him. The blue breadth over the inland sea of Virginia and Maryland, and the sea off Massachusetts and Maine, and over Manhattan Bay and over Champlain and Erie, and over Ontario and Huron and Michigan and Superior, and over the Texan and Mexican and Floridian and Cuban seas, and over the seas off California and Oregon, is not tallied by the blue breadth of the waters ppp.00750.055.jpg below more than the breadth of above and below is tallied by him. When the long Atlantic coast stretches longer, and the Pacific coast stretches longer, he easily stretches with them north or south. He spans between them also from east to west, and reflects what is between them. On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock and live-oak and locust and chestnut and cypress and hickory and limetree and cottonwood and tulip-tree and cactus and wild-vine and tamarind and persimmon, and tangles as tangled as any cane-brake or swamp, and forests coated with transparent ice and icicles, hanging from the boughs and crackling in the wind, and sides and peaks of mountains, and pasturage sweet and free as savannah or upland or prairie,—with flights and songs and screams that answer those of the wild-pigeon and high-hold and orchard-oriole and coot and surf-duck and redshouldered-hawk and fish-hawk and white-ibis and Indian-hen and cat-owl and water-pheasant and qua-bird and pied-sheldrake and blackbird and mocking-bird and buzzard and condor and night-heron and eagle. To him the hereditary countenance descends, both mother's and father's. To him enter the essences of the real things and past and present events—of the enormous diversity of temperature and agriculture and mines—the tribes of red aborigines—the weather-beaten vessels entering new ports, or making landings on rocky coasts—the first settlements north or south—the rapid stature and muscle—the ppp.00750.056.jpg haughty defiance of '76, and the war and peace and formation of the constitution—the union always surrounded by blatherers, and always calm and impregnable—the perpetual coming of immigrants—the wharf-hemmed cities and superior marine—the unsurveyed interior—the loghouses and clearings and wild animals and hunters and trappers—the free commerce—the fisheries and whaling and gold-digging—the endless gestations of new states—the convening of Congress every December, the members duly coming up from all climates and the uttermost parts—the noble character of the young mechanics and of all free American workmen and workwomen—the general ardour and friendliness and enterprise—the perfect equality of the female with the male—the large amativeness—the fluid movement of the population—the factories and mercantile life and labour-saving machinery—the Yankee swap—the New York firemen and the target excursion—the southern plantation life—the character of the northeast and of the northwest and southwest—slavery and the tremulous spreading of hands to protect it, and the stern opposition to it which shall never cease till it ceases, or the speaking of tongues and the moving of lips cease. For such the expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect, and not direct or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes through these to ppp.00750.057.jpg much more. Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted, and their eras and characters be illustrated, and that finish the verse. Not so the great psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative, and has vista. Here comes one among the well-beloved stone-cutters, and plans with decision and science, and sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid forms.
Of all nations, the United States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most needs poets, and will doubtless have the greatest, and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind, the great poet is the equable man. Not in him, but off from him, things are grotesque or eccentric, or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good, and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions, neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse, and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land: he supplies what wants supplying, and checks what wants checking. If peace is the routine, out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building vast and populous cities, encouraging agriculture and the arts and commerce—lighting the study of man, the soul, immortality—federal, state or municipal government, marriage, health, free-trade, intertravel by land and sea— ppp.00750.058.jpg nothing too close, nothing too far off,—the stars not too far off. In war, he is the most deadly force of the war. Who recruits him recruits horse and foot: he fetches parks of artillery, the best that engineer ever knew. If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he knows how to arouse it: he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it. High up out of reach, he stands turning a concentrated light; he turns the pivot with his finger; he baffles the swiftest runners as he stands, and easily overtakes and envelops them. The time straying toward infidelity and confections and persiflage he withholds by his steady faith; he spreads out his dishes; he offers the sweet firm-fibred meat that grows men and women. His brain is the ultimate brain. He is no arguer, he is judgment. He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling around a helpless thing. As he sees the farthest, he has the most faith. His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things. In the talk on the soul and eternity and God, off of his equal plane, he is silent. He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement: he sees eternity in men and women,—he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. Faith is the antiseptic of the soul,—it pervades the common people and preserves them: they never give up believing and expecting ppp.00750.059.jpg and trusting. There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius. The poet sees for a certainty how one not a great artist may be just as sacred and perfect as the greatest artist. The power to destroy or remould is freely used by him, but never the power of attack. What is past is past. If he does not expose superior models, and prove himself by every step he takes, he is not what is wanted. The presence of the greatest poet conquers; not parleying or struggling or any prepared attempts. Now he has passed that way, see! after him! there is not left any vestige of despair or misanthropy or cunning or exclusiveness, or the ignominy of a nativity or colour, or delusion of hell or the necessity of hell; and no man thenceforward shall be degraded for ignorance or weakness or sin.
The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer—he is individual—he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not. He is not one of the chorus—he does not stop for any regulation—he is the President of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but ppp.00750.060.jpg this is removed from any proof but its own, and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man, and all the instruments and books of the earth, and all reasoning. What is marvellous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or vague? after you have once just opened the space of a peachpit, and given audience to far and near and to the sunset, and had all things enter with electric swiftness, softly and duly, without confusion or jostling or jam.
The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes: but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects,—they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well enough—probably as well as he. The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a residence of the poetic, in outdoor people. They can never be assisted by poets to perceive: some may, but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, ppp.00750.061.jpg and is in the soul. The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme; and, of uniformity, that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight. The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form. The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent, but dependent. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman, it is enough—the fact will prevail through the universe: but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church ppp.00750.062.jpg or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured: others may not know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches, and shall master all attachment.
The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion, and is indifferent which chance happens, and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune, and persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What balks or breaks others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy. Other proportions of the reception of pleasure dwindle to nothing to his proportions. All expected from heaven or from the highest he is rapport with in the sight of the daybreak, or a scene of the winter woods, or the presence of children playing, or with his arm round the neck of a man or woman. His love, above all love, has leisure and expanse—he leaves room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover—he is sure—he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and thrills ppp.00750.063.jpg are not for nothing. Nothing can jar him: suffering and darkness cannot—death and fear cannot. To him complaint and jealousy and envy are corpses buried and rotten in the earth—he saw them buried. The sea is not surer of the shore, or the shore of the sea, than he is of the fruition of his love, and of all perfection and beauty.
The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss—it is inevitable as life—it is exact and plumb as gravitation. From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight, and from the hearing proceeds another hearing, and from the voice proceeds another voice, eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. To these respond perfections, not only in the committees that were supposed to stand for the rest, but in the rest themselves just the same. These understand the law of perfection in masses and floods—that its finish is to each for itself and onward from itself—that it is profuse and impartial—that there is not a minute of the light or dark, nor an acre of the earth or sea, without it—nor any direction of the sky, nor any trade or employment, nor any turn of events. This is the reason that about the proper expression of beauty there is precision and balance,—one part does not need to be thrust above another. The best singer is not the one who has the most lithe and powerful organ: the pleasure of poems is not in them that take the handsomest measure and similes and sound.
ppp.00750.064.jpgWithout effort, and without exposing in the least how it is done, the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons, some more and some less, to bear on your individual character, as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time. What is the purpose must surely be there, and the clue of it must be there; and the faintest indication is the indication of the best, and then becomes the clearest indication. Past and present and future are not disjoined but joined. The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins, and stands them again on their feet: he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you. He learns the lesson—he places himself where the future becomes present. The greatest poet does not only dazzle his rays over character and scenes and passions,—he finally ascends and finishes all: he exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell what they are for or what is beyond—he glows a moment on the extremest verge. He is most wonderful in his last half-hidden smile or frown: by that flash of the moment of parting the one that sees it shall be encouraged or terrified afterward for many years. The greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals,—he knows the soul. The soul has that measureless pride ppp.00750.065.jpg which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride, and the one balances the other, and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep with the twain. The greatest poet has lain close betwixt both, and they are vital in his style and thoughts.
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. Nothing is better than simplicity,—nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness. To carry on the heave of impulse, and pierce intellectual depths, and give all subjects their articulations, are powers neither common nor very uncommon. But to speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insousiance of the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it, you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. You shall not contemplate the flight of the grey-gull over the bay, or the mettlesome action of the blood horse, or the tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk, or the appearance of the sun journeying through heaven, or the appearance of the moon afterward, with any more satisfaction than you shall contemplate him. The greatest poet has less a marked style, and is more the channel of thoughts and ppp.00750.066.jpg things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art,—I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may exalt or startle or fascinate or sooth, I will have purposes as health or heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or pourtray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side, and look in the mirror with me.
The old red blood and stainless gentility of great poets will be proved by their unconstraint. A heroic person walks at his ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not. Of the traits of the brotherhood of writers, savans, musicians, inventors, and artists, nothing is finer than silent defiance advancing from new free forms. In the need of poems, philosophy, politics, mechanism, science, behaviour, the craft of art, an appropriate native grand opera, shipcraft or any craft, he is greatest forever and forever who contributes the greatest original practical example. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself, and makes one.
The messages of great poets to each man and woman are,—Come to us on equal terms, only then can you ppp.00750.067.jpg understand us. We are no better than you; what we enclose you enclose, what we enjoy you may enjoy. Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme? We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes, and that one does not countervail another any more than one eyesight countervails another—and that men can be good or grand only of the consciousness of their supremacy within them. What do you think is the grandeur of storms and dismemberments, and the deadliest battles and wrecks, and the wildest fury of the elements, and the power of the sea, and the motion of nature, and of the throes of human desires, and dignity and hate and love? It is that something in the soul which says,—Rage on, whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of all terror and all pain.
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors: they shall be kosmos—without monopoly or secrecy—glad to pass any thing to any one—hungry for equals night and day. They shall not be careful of riches and privilege,—they shall be riches and privilege: they shall perceive who the most affluent man is. The most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself. The American bard shall delineate no class of persons, nor one or two out of the strata of interests, nor love most nor ppp.00750.068.jpg truth most, nor the soul most nor the body most; and not be for the eastern states more than the western, or the northern states more than the southern.
Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support. The outset and remembrance are there— there the arms that lifted him first and brace him best— there he returns after all his goings and comings. The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian, and lexicographer, are not poets; but they are the lawgivers of poets, and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem. No matter what rises or is uttered, they send the seed of the conception of it: of them and by them stand the visible proofs of souls. If there shall be love and content between the father and the son, and if the greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the father, there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.
Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge, and of the investigation of the depths of qualities and things. Cleaving and circling here swells the soul of the poet: yet is president of itself always. The depths are fathomless and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed—they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the special and supernatural, and all that ppp.00750.069.jpg was twined with it or educed out of it, departs as a dream. What has ever happened, what happens, and whatever may or shall happen, the vital laws enclose all: they are sufficient for any case and for all cases—none to be hurried or retarded—any miracle of affairs or persons inadmissible in the vast clear scheme where every motion, and every spear of grass, and the frames and spirits of men and women, and all that concerns them, are unspeakably perfect miracles, all referring to all, and each distinct and in its place. It is also not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women.
Men and women, and the earth and all upon it, are simply to be taken as they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be unintermitted, and shall be done with perfect candour. Upon this basis philosophy speculates, ever looking toward the poet, ever regarding the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness, never inconsistent with what is clear to the senses and to the soul. For the eternal tendencies of all toward happiness make the only point of sane philosophy. Whatever comprehends less than that—whatever is less than the laws of light and of astronomical motion—or less than the laws that follow the thief, the liar, the glutton, and the drunkard, through this life, and doubtless afterward—or less than vast stretches of time, or the slow ppp.00750.070.jpg formation of density, or the patient upheaving of strata— is of no account. Whatever would put God in a poem or system of philosophy as contending against some being or influence is also of no account. Sanity and ensemble characterize the great master:—spoilt in one principle, all is spoilt. The great master has nothing to do with miracles. He sees health for himself in being one of the mass—he sees the hiatus in singular eminence. To the perfect shape comes common ground. To be under the general law is great, for that is to correspond with it. The master knows that he is unspeakably great, and that all are unspeakably great—that nothing for instance is greater than to conceive children, and bring them up well—that to be is just as great as to perceive or tell.
In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes wherever men and women exist; but never takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of liberty. They out of ages are worthy the grand idea,—to them it is confided, and they must sustain it. Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade it. The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves, and horrify despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other. Come nigh them awhile, and, though they neither speak nor advise, you ppp.00750.071.jpg shall learn the faithful American lesson. Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat—the enemy triumphs—the prison, the handcuffs, the iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote, and lead-balls, do their work—the cause is asleep—the strong throats are choked with their own blood—the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass each other . . . . and is liberty gone out of that place? No, never. When liberty goes, it is not the first to go, nor the second or third to go: it waits for all the rest to go—it is the last. When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away—when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators—when the boys are no more christened after the same, but christened after tyrants and traitors instead—when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted, and laws for informers and blood-money are sweet to the taste of the people—when I and you walk abroad upon the earth, stung ppp.00750.072.jpg with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship, and calling no man master—and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves—when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night, and surveys its experience, and has much ecstasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority—when those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character, but do not yet∗(8)—when the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or Congress or the Presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people, whether they get the offices or no—when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer, with his hat unmoved from his head, and firm eyes, and a candid and generous heart—and when servility by town or state or the federal government, or any oppression on a large scale or small scale, can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion, against the smallest chance of escape—or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth— ppp.00750.073.jpg then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.
As the attributes of the poets of the kosmos concentre in the real body and soul and in the pleasure of things, they possess the superiority of genuineness over all fiction and romance. As they emit themselves, facts are showered over with light—the daylight is lit with more volatile light—also the deep between the setting and rising sun goes deeper many-fold. Each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty: the multiplication-table its—old age its—the carpenter's trade its—the grand opera its: the huge-hulled clean-shaped New York clipper at sea under steam or full sail gleams with unmatched beauty—the American circles and large harmonies of government gleam with theirs, and the commonest definite intentions and actions with theirs. The poets of the kosmos advance through all interpositions and coverings and turmoils and stratagems to first principles. They are of use—they dissolve poverty from its need and riches from its conceit. You large proprietor, they say, shall not realize or perceive more than any one else. The owner of the library is not he who holds a legal title to it, having bought and paid for it. Any one and every one is owner of the library who can read the same through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom they enter with ease, and take residence and force toward paternity ppp.00750.074.jpg and maternity, and make supple and powerful and rich and large. These American states, strong and healthy and accomplished, shall receive no pleasure from violations of natural models, and must not permit them. In paintings or mouldings or carvings in mineral or wood, or in the illustrations of books or newspapers, or in any comic or tragic prints, or in the patterns of woven stuffs, or anything to beautify rooms or furniture or costumes, or to put upon cornices or monuments or on the prows or sterns of ships, or to put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which distorts honest shapes, or which creates unearthly beings or places or contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt. Of the human form especially, it is so great it must never be made ridiculous. Of ornaments to a work, nothing outré can be allowed; but those ornaments can be allowed that conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the nature of the work, and come irrepressibly from it, and are necessary to the completion of the work. Most works are most beautiful without ornament. Exaggerations will be revenged in human physiology. Clean and vigorous children are conceived only in those communities where the models of natural forms are public every day. Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are properly told, there is no more need of romances.
The great poets are also to be known by the absence in ppp.00750.075.jpg them of tricks, and by the justification of perfect personal candour. Then folks echo a new cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their brains: How beautiful is candour! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candour. Henceforth let no man of us lie, for we have seen that openness wins the inner and outer world, and that there is no single exception, and that never since our earth gathered itself in a mass has deceit or subterfuge or prevarication attracted its smallest particle or the faintest tinge of a shade—and that through the enveloping wealth and rank of a state or the whole republic of states a sneak or sly person shall be discovered and despised —and that the soul has never been once fooled and never can be fooled—and thrift without the loving nod of the soul is only a ftid puff—and there never grew up in any of the continents of the globe, nor upon any planet or satellite or star, nor upon the asteroids, nor in any part of ethereal space, nor in the midst of density, nor under the fluid wet of the sea, nor in that condition which precedes the birth of babes, nor at any time during the changes of life, nor in that condition that follows what we term death, nor in any stretch of abeyance or action afterward of vitality, nor in any process of formation or reformation anywhere, a being whose instinct hated the truth.
Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructive- ppp.00750.076.jpg ness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature, and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs—these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of the greatest poet from his birth. Caution seldom goes far enough. It has been thought that the prudent citizen was the citizen who applied himself to solid gains, and did well for himself and his family, and completed a lawful life without debt or crime. The greatest poet sees and admits these economies as he sees the economies of food and sleep, but has higher notions of prudence than to think he gives much when he gives a few slight attentions at the latch of the gate. The premises of the prudence of life are not the hospitality of it, or the ripeness and harvest of it. Beyond the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned, and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of moneymaking, with all their scorching days and icy nights, and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others starve,—and all the loss of the bloom and odour of the earth, and of the flowers and atmosphere, and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you pass or have to do with ppp.00750.077.jpg in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naïveté, and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty,—is the great fraud upon modern civilization and forethought; blotching the surface and system which civilization undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the reached kisses of the soul. Still the right explanation remains to be made about prudence. The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality. What is wisdom that fills the thinness of a year or seventy or eighty years, to wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents and the clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look in every direction running gaily toward you? Only the soul is of itself—all else has reference to what ensues. All that a person does or thinks is of consequence. Not a move can a man or woman make that affects him or her in a day or a month, or any part of the direct lifetime or the hour of death, but the same affects him or her onward afterward through the indirect lifetime. The indirect is always as great and real as the direct. The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives ppp.00750.078.jpg to the body. Not one name of word or deed— not of the putrid veins of gluttons or rum-drinkers— not peculation or cunning or betrayal or murder—no serpentine poison of those that seduce women—not the foolish yielding of women—not of the attainment of gain by discreditable means—not any nastiness of appetite— not any harshness of officers to men, or judges to prisoners, or fathers to sons, or sons to fathers, or of husbands to wives, or bosses to their boys—not of greedy looks or malignant wishes—nor any of the wiles practised by people upon themselves—ever is or ever can be stamped on the programme, but it is duly realized and returned, and that returned in further performances, and they returned again. Nor can the push of charity or personal force ever be anything else than the profoundest reason, whether it bring arguments to hand or no. No specification is necessary—to add or subtract or divide is in vain. Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it forever. If the savage or felon is wise, it is well—if the greatest poet or savant is wise, it is simply the same—if the President or chief justice is wise, it is the same—if the young mechanic or farmer is wise, it is no more or less. ppp.00750.079.jpg The interest will come round—all will come round. All the best actions of war and peace—all help given to relatives and strangers, and the poor and old and sorrowful, and young children and widows and the sick, and to all shunned persons—all furtherance of fugitives and of the escape of slaves—all the self-denial that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw others take the seats of the boats—all offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a friend's sake or opinion's sake—all pains of enthusiasts scoffed at by their neighbours—all the vast sweet love and precious suffering of mothers— all honest men baffled in strifes recorded or unrecorded— all the grandeur and good of the few ancient nations whose fragments of annals we inherit—and all the good of the hundreds of far mightier and more ancient nations unknown to us by name or date or location—all that was ever manfully begun, whether it succeeded or no— all that has at any time been well suggested out of the divine heart of man, or by the divinity of his mouth, or by the shaping of his great hands—and all that is well thought or done this day on any part of the surface of the globe, or on any of the wandering stars or fixed stars by those there as we are here —or that is henceforth to be well thought or done by you, whoever you are, or by any one—these singly and wholly inured at their time, and inure now, and will inure always, to the identities from which they sprung ppp.00750.080.jpg or shall spring. Did you guess any of them lived only its moment? The world does not so exist—no parts, palpable or impalpable, so exist—no result exists now without being from its long antecedent result, and that from its antecedent, and so backward without the farthest mentionable spot coming a bit nearer the beginning than any other spot. . . . . Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. The prudence of the greatest poet answers at last the craving and glut of the soul, is not contemptuous of less ways of prudence if they conform to its ways, puts off nothing, permits no let-up for its own case or any case, has no particular Sabbath or judgment-day, divides not the living from the dead or the righteous from the unrighteous, is satisfied with the present, matches every thought or act by its correlative, knows no possible forgiveness or deputed atonement—knows that the young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it has done exceeding well for himself, while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches and ease, has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning—and that only that person has no great prudence to learn who has learnt to prefer real long-lived things, and favours body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect assuredly following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and waiting to meet him again—and who in his spirit in any emergency whatever neither hurries or avoids death.
ppp.00750.081.jpgThe direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is to-day. If he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides—and if he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang on its neck with incomparable love—and if he be not himself the age transfigured—and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits itself to the representation of this wave of an hour, and this one of the sixty beautiful children of the wave—let him merge in the general run and wait his development. . . . . . Still, the final test of poems or any character or work remains. The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead, and judges performer or performance after the changes of time. Does it live through them? Does it still hold on untired? Will the same style, and the direction of genius to similar points, be satisfactory now? Has no new discovery in science, or arrival at superior planes of thought and judgment and behaviour, fixed him or his so that either can be looked down upon? Have the marches of tens and hundreds and thousands of years made willing detours to the right hand and the left hand for his sake? Is he ppp.00750.082.jpg beloved long and long after he is buried? Does the young man think often of him? and the young woman think often of him? and do the middle-aged and the old think of him?
A great poem is for ages and ages, in common, and for all degrees and complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a man, and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or woman, but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last under some due authority, and rest satisfied with explanations, and realize and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring—he brings neither cessation nor sheltered fatness and ease. The touch of him tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live regions previously unattained. Thenceforward is no rest: they see the space and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums. The companion of him beholds the birth and progress of stars, and learns one of the meanings. Now there shall be a man cohered out of tumult and chaos. The elder encourages the younger, and shows him how: they two shall launch off fearlessly together till the new world fits an orbit for itself, and looks unabashed on the lesser orbits of the stars, and sweeps through the ceaseless rings, and shall never be quiet again.
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is ppp.00750.083.jpg done. They may wait awhile—perhaps a generation or two,—dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place—the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise; and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects to-day, symptoms of the past and future. They shall not deign to defend immortality, or God, or the perfection of things, or liberty, or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America, and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.
The English language befriends the grand American expression—it is brawny enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who, through all change of circumstance, was never without the idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful language of resistance—it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech of the proud and melancholy races, and of all who aspire. It is the chosen tongue to express growth, faith, self-esteem, freedom, justice, equality, friendliness, ppp.00750.084.jpg amplitude, prudence, decision, and courage. It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.
No great literature, nor any like style of behaviour or oratory or social intercourse or household arrangements or public institutions, or the treatment by bosses of employed people, nor executive detail, or detail of the army or navy, nor spirit of legislation, or courts or police, or tuition or architecture, or songs or amusements, or the costumes of young men, can long elude the jealous and passionate instinct of American standards. Whether or no the sign appears from the mouths of the people, it throbs a live interrogation in every freeman's and freewoman's heart after that which passes by, or this built to remain. Is it uniform with my country? Are its disposals without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the evergrowing communes of brothers and lovers, large, well-united, proud beyond the old models, generous beyond all models? Is it something grown fresh out of the fields, or drawn from the sea, for use to me, to-day, here? I know that what answers for me, an American, must answer for any individual or nation that serves for a part of my materials. Does this answer? or is it without reference to universal needs? or sprung of the needs of the less developed society of special ranks? or old needs of pleasure overlaid by modern science and forms? Does this acknowledge liberty with audible and absolute acknowledgment, and set slavery at nought for life and ppp.00750.085.jpg death? Will it help breed one good shaped man, and a woman to be his perfect and independent mate? Does it improve manners? Is it for the nursing of the young of the republic? Does it solve readily with the sweet milk of the breasts of the mother of many children? Has it too the old ever-fresh forbearance and impartiality? Does it look with the same love on the last born and on those hardening toward stature, and on the errant, and on those who disdain all strength of assault outside of their own?
The poems distilled from other poems will probably pass away. The coward will surely pass away. The expectation of the vital and great can only be satisfied by the demeanour of the vital and great. The swarms of the polished, deprecating, and reflectors, and the polite, float off and leave no remembrance. America prepares with composure and goodwill for the visitors that have sent word. It is not intellect that is to be their warrant and welcome. The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite—they are not unappreciated —they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No disguise can pass on it—no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none, it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward the like of itself will it advance half- way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of ppp.00750.086.jpg the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is true, the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
Meantime, dear friend,WHILE this Selection was passing through the press, it has been my privilege to receive two letters from Mr. Whitman, besides another communicated to me through a friend. I find my experience to be the same as that of some previous writers: that, if one admires Whitman in reading his books, one loves him on coming into any personal relation with him—even the comparatively distant relation of letter-writing.
The more I have to thank the poet for the substance and tone of his letters, and some particular expressions in them, the more does it become incumbent upon me to guard against any misapprehension. He has had nothing whatever to do with this Selection, as to either prompting, guiding, or even ratifying it: except only that he did not prohibit my making two or three verbal omissions in the Prose Preface to the Leaves of Grass, and he has supplied his own title, President Lincoln's Funeral Hymn, to a poem which, in my Prefatory Notice, is named (by myself) Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln. All admirers of his ppp.00750.425.jpg poetry will rejoice to learn that there is no longer any doubt of his adding to his next edition "a brief cluster of pieces born of thoughts on the deep themes of Death and Immortality." A new American edition will be dear to many: a complete English edition ought to be an early demand of English poetic readers, and would be the right and crowning result of the present Selection.
W. M. R.Opinions of the Press.
"Mr. Swinburne here speaks for himself without personality of any kind, but with much general expression of scorn, which the small critics have fairly brought down on themselves. It is to be regretted that a young poet, from whom much is to be hoped, should be thus forced into explanations than can only humiliate those by whom they were required."—EXAMINER.
"We have no space to dwell any further upon Mr. Swinburne's defects and excellences. They are both very great and remarkable."—PALL MALL GAZETTE.
"He writes ably and eloquently, in prose worthy of the pen which wrote the lines in 'Atalanta' and 'Chastelard'—earnest, graphic, musical. He asserts with singular force that a poet is not bound to write even for reviewers, that he has his own thoughts to utter, his own taste to please, and while he admits the right of the critic to complain, he only demands that the standard of judgment shall be sound and true. He takes his questioned poems, and shows from what point of view they were written, and how they should be looked at—a point of view that of a thorough English poet, trained in the classics, and unable to see why the grand old stories learned at school and colleges should be mere dry and dusty myths."—BIRMINGHAM JOURNAL.
"He pens some doggrel lines, of which we give a verse, addressed to the reviewers who have condemned his blasphemy and obscenity—
Lie still in kennel, sleek in stable, Good creatures of the stall or sty; Shove snouts for crumbs below the table; Lie still, and rise not up to lie.It is a degradation to dissect such trash as this. Messrs. Moxon and Co. have been blamed for the part they have played in relation to the 'Poems and Ballads,
ppp.00750.428.jpgThe Examiner falls foul of these gentlemen, and declares that they are only fit to keep 'a milk-walk for the use of babes.'"—SUNDAY GAZETTE.
"We highly approve of the defence made by Mr. Swinburne of the liberty of writers, and willingly indorse his sentiments:—'Literature, to be worthy of men, must be large, liberal, sincere, and cannot be chaste if she be prudish. Purity and prudishness cannot keept house together. Where free speech and fair play are interdicted, foul hints and evil suggestions are hatched into fœtid life.'"—STIRLING ADVERTISER.
"Terrified by the clamour of a literary clique, Mr. Swinburne's publishers have withdrawn their name from the title-page of his book. . . . We cannot blame a tradesman for declining to carry on the sale of certain goods which may not be to the taste of his best customers or supporters. . . . What we find fault with is that the public are not allowed to form an opinion for themselves on the matter. The function of journalism is to sift the wheat, but not to burn what it conceives to be chaff with unquenchable fire."—THE READER.
"In France, as in Germany, such a misrepresentation as even the foremost journals have given of Mr. Swinburne's Poems would have been impossible. With such abundance of imagination, such plethora of language, such substance of passion, as these volumes contain, there is ample food for literary and philosophical criticism, without resorting to the methods that strove to crush Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, and Shelley and Keats, that found profligacy in 'Rimini' and blasphemy in 'Adonais.'"—EXAMINER.
"Under the title of 'Notes on Poems and Reviews,' Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne has just published, with Mr. Hotten, of Piccadilly, what he apparently designs to be a crushing reply to the whole body of his critics, and a triumphant vindication of his own poetic reputation. We, the Sun, however, think the task thus undertaken with so much audacity, was in itself too flagrantly outrageous to prove otherwise than an inevitable fiasco.'"—THE SUN.
"That his genius is dramatic—finely dramatic—we have taken the liberty to observe on other occasions; it is certain, too, that whatever this dramatic genius writes, is dramatically written; and it is past all dispute, that what a man writes in that way is not to be taken as 'the assertion of its author's own feeling and faith.'"—PALL MALL GAZETTE.
"Swinburne—like Byron—has replied to his critics, not in a poem, but in a prose pamphlet, entitled 'Notes on Poems and Reviews.' He takes up his poems one by one, tells why he wrote them and what he meant, defends himself from the charge of vulgarity, and cites classical authority without stint. Mr. Swinburne declares he has never written for the purblind or the prurient."—WM. CULLEN BRYANT'S N.Y. EVENING POST.
"Mr. Swinburne's defence of his poems is well tinted. Attacks so intemperate as those to which his recent volume of Poems and Ballads was subjected lead almost of necessity to a reaction . . . Gradually this reaction has set in with strong and ppp.00750.429.jpg what might easily become dangerous force. Men whose opinions carry the highest weight in England have pronounced in favour of the victim of so brutal an attack, and the most respected organs of public opinion are attempting the rehabilitation of the clever—if too daring young poet. Like all Mr. Swinburne's prose compositions, it has the advantage of a splendid style . . . a specimen of English prose. We have a high worship of morality, but have no respect whatever for philistinism, and English prudery is the worst and least worthy form of philistinism in existence. Mr. Swinburne's merits are so great that when, indignant at the pitifulness of English society, and the littleness of English art, he kicks over the traces, he should obtain indulgence rather than misrepresentation."—SUNDAY TIMES.
"These [just quoted] passages contain Mr. Swinburne's answer to his detractors. The rest of the pamphlet has in it the scorn that a warm-blooded young poet must feel for that which produced the need of such an explanation."—EXAMINER.
"He is known to have in the press an elaborate study upon the poet and painter Blake—a subject than which none requires more delicate or sharp manipulation, more keenness or specialty of sympathy, or more boldness of estimate and statement. To judge from his own powers in the poetic art, and from his Essay on Byron, Mr. Swinburne will supply all these requisites in a measure hardly to be rivalled."—ROSSETTI'S "CRITICISM."
["Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of popular breath. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets."—SHELLEY.]
"For a criticism friendly by bias, as the author freely admits, as well as by the force of sincere critical admiration, this essay of Mr. Rossetti's on Mr. Swinburne's recent volume is a very candid one, and also one of true critical insight . . . On the whole the criticism of this essay is true criticism and good criticism, however inadequately it estimates some of Mr. Swinburne's greatest faults."—SPECTATOR.
"Subtle criticism, gracefully and temperately expressed. This volume is an exhaustive essay on all Mr. Swinburne's published works."—THE GLOBE.
"An accomplished and gifted critic has undertaken the defence . . . A more difficult thing has seldom been better done . . . He writes about poets and poetry with a subtle apprehensiveness and discrimination which gives to his remarks a real critical value. The poems of Mr. Swinburne are a fact in English literature. As an able and well-weighed effort to assist and hasten the calm judgment of the future, we think Mr. Rossetti's criticism deserves praise. Mr. Swinburne is a remarkable and original poet . . . his position as an artist is beyond dispute or even attack."—SATURDAY REVIEW, 17th November, 1866.
"Mr. Rossetti has had a difficult task to perform, but he has performed it in the very best spirit. The critic writes with candour and fairness; he has not written in the manner of a partisan. We cordially agree with all the author says, on literary grounds, of the power of Mr. Swinburne's genius."—LONDON REVIEW, 1st December, 1866.
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Why did Du chaillu get so angry when he was chaffed about the Gorilla? Why" we
ask. Why is a chrysalis like a hot roll? You will doubtless remark, "Because it's the grub that
makes the butter fly!" But see "Puniana." Why is a wide-awake hat so called? Because it never
had a nap, and never wants one.
A Reproduction in Exact Facsimile Letter for Letter, of the Excessively Rare Original of
Shakespeare's Famous Play,
Much Adoe about Nothing. As it hath been sundrie times
publikely acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants. Written by William
Shakespeare, 1600.
Small quarto, on fine toned paper, half bound morocco, Roxburghe style,
4s. 6d. (Original price 10s. 6d.)
Immediately, in Crown 4to., exquisitely printed, £3. 10s.
Saint Ursula, and the
Story of the 11,000 Virgins, now newly told by Thomas Wright, F.S.A. With Twenty-five Full-page
4to. Illuminated Miniatures from the Pictures of Cologne.
The finest book-paintings of the
kind ever published. The artist has just obtained the gold prize at the Paris Exposition.
New Edition, with large Additions, 15th Thousand, Crown 8vo., cloth, 6s. 6d.
Slang
Dictionary. With Further Particulars of Beggars' Marks.
"Beggars' Marks Upon House
Corners.—On our doorways, and on our house corners and gate-posts, curious chalk marks
may occasionally be observed, which, although meaningless to us, are full of suggestion to
tramps, beggars, and pedlars. Mr. Hotten intends giving, in the new edition of his 'Slang
Dictionary'—the fourth—some extra illustrations descriptive of this curious and, it
is believed, ancient method of communicating the charitable or ill-natured intentions of house
occupants; and he would be obliged by the receipt, at 74, Piccadilly, London, of any facts
which might assist his inquiry."—Notes and Queries.
Uniform with Essays Written in the "Intervals of Business."
This day, a Choice Book, on
toned paper, 6s.
The Collector. Essays on Books, Authors, Newspapers, Pictures, Inns,
Doctors, Holidays, &c. Introduction by Dr. Doran.
A charming volume of delightful
Essays, with exquisitely-engraved Vignette of an Old-Book Collector busily engaged at his
favourite pursuit of book-hunting. The work is a companion volume to Disraeli's "Curiousities
of Literature," and to the more recently published "Book-Hunter," by Mr. John Hill Burton.
"A Perfect Marvel of Cheapness."
Give of Scott's Novels, complete, for 3s., well
bound.
Waverley Novels. "Toned Paper." Five Choice Novels Complete for 3s., cloth extra,
850 pp. This very handsome Volume contains unmutilated and Author's Editions of IVANHOE, OLD MORTALITY, FORTUNES OF NIGEL, GUY MANNERING, BRIDE
OF LAMMERMOOR.
Also, First Series, Fifth Thousand,
containing Waverley, The Monastery, Rob Roy, Kenilworth, The Pirate. All complete in 1 vol.,
cloth neat, 3s.
A Guide to Reading Old Manuscripts, Records, &c.
Wright's Court Hand Restored; or,
Student's Assistant in Reading Old Deeds, Charters, Records, &c. It contains a Series of
Facsimiles of old MSS. from the time of the Conqueror, Tables of Contractions and
Abbreviations, Ancient Surnames, &c.
Old English Religious Ballads and Carols.
This day, in small 4to., with very beautiful
floriated borders, in the Renaissance style.
Songs of the Nativity. An entirely New
Collection of Old Carols, including some never before given in any collection. With Music to
the more popular. Edited by W. H. Husk, Librarian to the Sacred Harmonic Society. In charmingly
appropriate cloth, gilt, and admirably adapted for binding in antique calf or morocco, 12s.
6d.
A volume which will not be without peculiar interest to lovers of ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY, and to admirers of our National Sacred Music. The work
forms a handsome square 8vo., and has been printed with beautiful floriated borders by
Whittingham & Wilkins. The Carols embrace the joyous and festive songs of the olden time,
as well as those sacred melodies which have maintained their popularity from a period long
before the Reformation.
"Does for Winchester what "Tom Brown" did for Rugby."
This day, Crown 8vo., handsomely
printed, 7s. 6d.,
School Life at Winchester; or, the Reminiscences of a Winchester Junior.
By the Author of the "Log of the Water Lily." With numerous illustrations, exquisitely coloured
after the original drawings.
Anglican Church Ornaments.
This day, thick 8vo., with illustrations, price 15s.
English Church Furniture, Ornaments, and Decorations, at the Period of the Reformation. Edited
by Ed. Peacock, F.S.A.
"Very curious as showing what articles of church furniture were in
those days considered to be idolatrous or unnecessary. The work, of which only a limited number
has been printed, is of the highest interest to those who take part in the present Ritual
discussion."—See Reviews in the Religious Journals.
New Book by the "English Gustave Doré."—Companion to the "Hatchet-Throwers."
This day, 4to., Illustrations, coloured, 7s. 6d.; plain, 5s.
Legends of Savage Life. By
James Greenwood, the famous Author of "A Night in a Workhouse." With 36 inimitably droll
Illustrations drawn and coloured by Ernest Griset, the "English Gustave Doré."
Readers who found amusement in the "Hatchet-Throwers" will not regret any acquaintance they may
form with this comical work. The pictures are among the most surprising which have come fro
this artist's pencil.
Companion Volume to "Leech's Pictures."
This day, oblong 4to., a handsome volume, half
morocco, price 12s.
Seymour's Sketches. The Book of Cockney Sports, Whims, and Oddities.
Nearly 200 highly amusing Illustrations.
A reissue of the famous pictorial comicalities
which were so popular thirty years ago. The volume is admirably adapted for a table-book, and
the pictures will doubtless again meet with that popularity which was extended towards them
when the artist projected with Mr. Dickens the famous "Pickwick Papers."
Mr. Swinburne's New Work.
This day, in Demy 8vo., pp. 350, price 16s.
William
Blake; Artist and Poet. A Critical Essay. By Algernon Charles Swinburne.
The coloured
illustrations to this book have all been prepared, by a careful hand, from the original
drawings painted by Blake and his wife, and are very different from ordinary book
illustrations.
Recent Poetry
Mr. Swinburne's New Poem.
This day, facp. 8vo. toned paper, cloth, 3s. 6d.
A Song
of Italy. By Algernon Charles Swinburne.
The Athenæum remarks
of this poem:—"Seldom has such a chant been heard, so full of glow, strength, and
colour."
Mr. Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads."
Notice.—The Publisher begs to inform the very many persons who have
inquired after this remarkable Work that copies may now be obtained at all Booksellers, price
9s.
Mr. Swinburne's Notes on his Poems and on the Reviews which have appeared upon them, is now ready, price 1s.
Also New and Revised Editions.
Atalanta in Calydon. By Algernon Charles Swinburne.
6s.
Chastelard: a Tragedy. By A. C. Swinburne. 7s.
Rossetti's Criticism on Swinburne's "Poems." 3s. 6d.
Uniform with Mr. Swinburne's Poems.
In fcap. 8vo., price 5s.
Walt Whitman's Poems.
(Leaves of Grass, Drum-taps, &c.)
Selected and Edited by William Michael
Rossetti.
For twelve years the American poet Whitman has been the object of wide-spread
detraction and of concentrated admiration. The admiration continues to gain ground, as
evidenced of late by papers in the American Round Table, in the London Review, in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. M.
D. Conway, in the Broadway by Mr. Robert Buchanan, and in the Chronicle by the editor of the selection announced above, as also by the
recent publication of Whitman's last poem, from advance sheets, in Tinsleys'
Magazine.
In preparation, small 4to. elegant.
Carols of Cockayne. By Henry S. Leigh. [Vers de
Société and humorous pieces descriptive of London life.] With numerous exquisite
little designs, by ALFRED CONCANNEN.
Now ready, price 3s. 6d.
The Prometheus Bound of Æschylus. Translated in the
Original Metres. By C. B. CAYLEY, B.A.
Now ready, 4to. 10s. 6d., on toned paper, very elegant.
Bianca: Poems and Ballads. By
Edward Brennan.
Now ready, cloth, price 5s.
Poems from the Greek Mythology: and Miscellaneous Poems. By
EDMUND OLLIER.
In crown 8vo. toned paper. Poems. By P.F. Roe.
In crown 8vo. handsomely printed.
The Idolatress, and other Poems. By Dr. Wills, Author
of "Dramatic Scenes," "The Disembodied," and of various Poetical contributions to Blackwood's Magazine.
Hotten's Authorized Only Complete Editions.
This day, on toned paper, price 6d.; by
post, 7d.
Hotten's New Book of Humour. "Artemus Ward Among the Fenians."
This day, 4th edition, on tinted paper, bound in cloth, neat, price 3s. 6d.; by post, 3s.
10d.
Hotten's "Artemus Ward: His Book." The Author's Enlarged Edition; containing, in
addition to the following edition, two extra chapters, entitled "The Draft in Baldinsville,
with Mr. Ward's Private Opinion concerning Old Bachelors," and "Mr. W.'s Visit to a Graffick"
(Soirée).
"We never, not even in the pages of our best humorists, read anything so
laughable and so shrewd as we have seen in this book by the mirthful Artemus."—Public Opinion.
New edition, this day, price 1s.; by post, 1s. 2d.
Hotten's "Artemus Ward: His Book." A
Cheap Edition, without extra chapters, with portrait of author on paper cover, 1s.
NOTICE.—Mr. Hotten's Edition is the only one published in this
country with the sanction of the author. Every copy contains A. Ward's signature. The Saturday Review of October 21st says of Mr. Hotten's edition: "The author
combines the powers of Thackeray with those of Albert Smith. The salt is rubbed in by a native
hand—one which has the gift of tickling."
This day, crown 8vo., toned paper, cloth, price 3s. 6d.; by post, 3s. 10d.
Hotten's
"Artemus Ward: His Travels Among the Mormons and on the Rampage." Edited by E.P. Hingston, the
Agent and Companion of A. Ward whilst "on the Rampage."
NOTICE.—Readers of Artemus Ward's droll books are informed that an Illustrated
Edition of His Travels is now ready, containing numerous Comic Pictures, representing the
different scenes and events in Artemus Ward's Adventures.
This day, cheap edition, in neat wrapper, price 1s.
Hotten's "Artemus Ward: His Travels
Among the Mormons." The New Shilling Edition, with Ticket of Admission to Mormon Lecture.
The Choicest Humorous Poetry of the Age.
Hotten's "Biglow Papers." By James Russell
Lowell. Price 1s.
This Edition has been edited, with additional Notes explanatory of the
persons and subjects mentioned therein, and is the only complete and correct edition published
in this country.
"The celebrated 'Biglow Papers.'"—Times.
Biglow Papers. Another Edition, with Coloured Plates by GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, bound in cloth, neat, price 3s. 6d.
Handsomely printed, square 12mo.,
Advice to Parties About to Marry. A Series of
Instructions in Jest and Earnest. By the Hon. Hugh Rowley, and illustrated with numerous comic
designs from his pencil.
An Extraordinary Book.
Beautifully printed, thick 8vo., new, half morocco, Roxburghe,
12s. 6d.
Hotten's Edition of "Contes Drolatiques" (Droll Tales collected from the Abbeys
of Loraine). Par Balzac. With Four Hundred and Twenty-five Marvellous, Extravagant, and
Fantastic Woodcuts by Gustave Doré. The most singular designs ever attempted by any
artist. This book is a fund of amusement. So crammed is it with pictures that even the contents
are adorned with thirty-three illustrations. Direct application must be made
to Mr. Hotten for this work.
The Original Edition of Joe Miller's Jests. 1739. Price 9s. 6d.
Joe Miller's Jests: or,
the Wit's Vade-Mecum; a Collection of the most brilliant Jests, politest Repartees, most
elegant Bons Mots, and most pleasant short Stories in the English Language. An interesting
specimen of remarkable facsimile, 8vo., half morocco, price 9s. 6d. London: printed by T. Read,
1739.
Only a very few copies of this humorous book have been reproduced.
This day, handsomely printed on toned paper, price 3s. 6d.; cheap edition, 1s. Hotten's "Josh
Billings: His Book of Sayings;" with Introduction by E.P. Hingston, companion of Artemus ward
when on his "Travels."
For many years past the savings and comicalities of "Josh Billings"
have been quoted in our newspapers. His humour is of a quieter kind, more aphoristically comic,
than the fun and drollery of the "delicious Artemus," as Charles Reade styles the Showman. If
Artemus Ward may be called the comic story-teller of his time, "Josh" can certainly be dubbed
the comic essayist of his day. Although promised some time ago, Mr. Billings' "Book" has only
just appeared, but it contains all his best and most mirth-provoking articles.
This day, in three vols, crown 8vo., cloth, neat.
Orpheus C. Kerr Papers. The Original
American Edition, in Three Series, complete. Three vols., 8vo., cloth; sells at £1. 2s.
6d., now specially offered at 15s.
A most mirth-provoking work. It was first introduced
into this country by the English officers who were quartered during the late war on the
Canadian frontier. They found it one of the drollest pieces of composition they had ever met
with, and so brought copies over for the delectation of their friends.
Orpheus C. Kerr [Office Seeker] Papers. First Series, Edited by E.P. Hingston. Price 1s.
Thackeray and George Cruikshank.
In small 8vo., cloth, very neat, price 4s. 6d.
Thackeray's Humour. Illustrated by the Pencil of George Cruikshank. Twenty-four Humorous
Designs executed by this inimitable artist in the year 1839-40, as illustrations to "The Fatal
Boots" and "The Diary of Barber Cox," with letterpress descriptions suggested by the late Mr.
Thackeray.
The English Gustave Doré.
This day, in 4to., handsomely printed, cloth gilt, price
7s. 6d.; with plates uncoloured, 5s.
The Hatchet-Throwers; with Thirty-six Illustrations,
coloured after the Inimitably Grotesque Drawings of Ernest Griset.
Comprises the
astonishing adventures of Three Ancient Mariners, the Brothers Brass of Bristol, Mr. Corker,
and Mungo Midge.
"A Munchausen sort of book. The drawings by M. Griset are very powerful
and eccentric."—Saturday Review.
This day, in Crown 8vo., uniform with "Biglow Papers," price 3s. 6d.
Wit and Humour. By
the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." A volume of delightfully humorous Poems, very similar to
the mirthful verses of Tom Hood. Readers will not be disappointed with this work.
Cheap edition, handsomely printed, price 1s.
Vere Vereker: a Comic Story, by Thomas
Hood, with Punning Illustrations. By WILLIAM BRUNTON.
One of the most amusing volumes which have been published for a long time.
For a piece of broad humour, of the highly-sensational kind, it is perhaps the best piece of
literary fun by Tom Hood.
Immediately, at all the Libraries.
Cent. per Cent.: a Story written upon a Bill Stamp.
By Blanchard Jerrold. With numerous coloured illustrations in the style of the late Mr. Leech's
charming designs.
A Story of "The Vampires of London," as they were pithily termed in a
recent notorious case, and one of undoubted interest.
An Entirely New Book of Delightful Fairy Tales.
Now ready, square 12mo., handsomely
printed on toned paper, in cloth, green and gold, price 4s. 6d. plain, 5s. 6d. coloured (by
post 6d. extra).
Family Fairy Tales; or, Glimpses of Elfland at Heatherston Hall. Edited
by Cholmondeley Pennell, Author of "Puck on Pegasus," &c., adorned with beautiful pictures
of "My Lord Lion," "King Uggermugger," and other great folks.
This charming volume of
Original Tales has been universally praised by the critical press.
Pansie: a Child Story, the Last Literary Effort of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 12mo., price 6d.
Rip Van Winkle: and the "Story of Sleepy Hollow." By Washington Irving. Foolscap 8vo., very neatly printed on toned paper, illustrated cover, 6d.
Anecdotes of the Green Room and Stage; or, Leaves from an Actor's Note-Book, at Home and
Abroad. By George Vandenhoff. Post 8vo., pp. 336, price 2s.
Includes original anecdotes of
the Keans (father and son), the two Kembles, Macready, Cooke, Liston, Farren, Elliston, Braham
and his Sons, Phelps, Buckstone, Webster, Charles Matthews, Siddons, Vestris, Helen Faucit,
Mrs. Nisbet, Miss Cushman, Miss O'Neil, Mrs. Glover, Mrs. Charles Kean, Rachel, Ristori, and
many other dramatic celebrities.
Berjeau's (P. C.) Book of Dogs: the Varieties of Dogs as they are found in Old Sculptures,
Pictures, Engravings, and Books. 1865. Half-morocco, the sides richly lettered with gold, 7s.
6d.
In this very interesting volume are 52 plates, facsimiled from rare old Engravings,
Paintings, Sculptures, &c., in which may be traced over 100 varieties of dogs known to the
ancients.
This day, elegantly printed, pp. 96, wrapper 1s., cloth 2ss, post free.
Carlyle on the
Choice of Books. The Inaugural Address of Thomas Carlyle, with Memoir, Anecdotes, Two
Portraits, and View of his House in Chelsea. The "Address" is reprinted from The Times,"
carefully compared with twelve other reports, and is believed to be the most accurate yet
printed.
The leader in the Daily Telegraph, April 25th, largely
quotes from the above "Memoir"
In Fcap. 8vo., cloth, price 3s. 6d. beautifully printed.
Gog and Magog; or, the History
of the Guildhall Giants.
With some Account of the Giants which guard English and
Continental Cities. By F.W. Fairhoult, F.S.A. With Illustrations on Wood by the author,
coloured and plain.
The critiques which have appeared upon this amusing little work have
been uniformly favourable. The Art Journal says, in a long article, that
it thoroughly explains who these old giants were, the position they occupied in popular
mythology, the origin of their names, and a score of other matters, all of much interest in
throwing a light upon fabulous portions of our history.
Now ready, handsomely printed, price 1s. 6d.
Hints on Hats; adapted to the Heads of the
People. By Henry Melton, of Regent Street. With curious woodcuts of the various style of Hats
worn at different periods.
Anecdotes of eminent and fashionable personages are given, and
a fund of interesting information relative to the History of Costume and change of tastes may
be found scattered through its pages.
This day, handsomely bound, pp. 550, price 7s. 6d.
History of Playing Cards: with
Anecdotes of their Use in Ancient and Modern Games, Conjuring, Fortune-Telling, and
Card-sharping. With Sixty curious illustrations on toned paper. Skill and Sleight-of-Hand;
Gambling and Calculation; Cartomancy and Cheating; Old Games and Gaming-Houses; Card Revels and
Blind Hookey; Piquet and Vingt-et-un; Whist and Cribbage; Old-fashioned Tricks.
"A
highly-interesting volume."—Morning Post.
This day, in 2vols., 8vo., very handsomely printed, price 16s.
The Household Stories of
England.
Popular Romances of the West of England; or, the Drolls of Old Cornwall.
Collected and edited by Robert Hunt, F.R.S.
For an analysis of this important work see
printed description, which may be obtained gratis at the publisher's.
Many of the stories
are remarkable for their wild poetic beauty; others surprise us by their quaintness; whilst
others, again, show forth a tragic force which can only be associated with those rude ages
which existed long before the period of authentic history.
Mr. George Cruikshank has
supplied two wonderful pictures as illustrations to the work. One is a portrait of Giant
Bolster, a personage twelve miles high.
Pp. 336, handsomely printed, cloth extra, price 3s. 6d.
Holidays with Hobgoblins; or,
Talk of Strange Things.
By Dudley Costello. With humorous engravings by George Cruikshank.
Amongst the chapters may be enumerated: Shaving a Ghost; Superstitions and Traditions;
Monsters; the Ghost of Pit Pond; the Watcher of the Dead; the Haunted House near Hampstead;
Dragons, Griffins, and Salamanders; Alchemy and Gunpowder; Mother Shipton; Bird History;
Witchcraft and Old Boguey; Crabs; Lobsters; the Apparition of Monsieur Bodry.
Supplementary Volume to Hone's Works.
In preparation, thick 8vo., uniform with
"Year-Book," pp. 800.
Hone's Scrap Book. A Supplementary Volume to the "Every-Day Book,"
the "Year-Book," and the "Table-Book." From the MSS. of the late William Hone, with upwards of
One Hundred and Fifty engravings of curious or eccentric objects.
Barnum's New Book.
Humbugs of the World. By P. T. Barnum. Pp. 320. crown 8vo., cloth
extra, 4s. 6d.
"A most vivacious book, and a very readable one."—Globe.
"The
history of Old Adams and his grisly bears is inimitable."—Athenæum.
"A History of Humbugs by the Prince of Humbugs! What book can be
more promising?"—Saturday Review.
A Keepsake for Smokers.
This day, 48mo., beautifully printed from silver-faced type,
cloth, very neat, gilt edges, price 2s. 6d.
Smoker's Text Book. By J. Hamer, F.R.S.L. This
exquisite little volume comprises the most important passages from the works of eminent men
written in favour of the much-abused weed. Its compilation was suggested by a remark made by
Sir Bulwer Lytton:—
"A pipe is a great comforter, a pleasant soother. The man who
smokes thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan."
A few copies have been choicely
bound in calf antique and morocco, price 10s. 6d. each.
A New Book by the Late Mr. Thackeray.
The Student's Quarter; or, Paris Life
Five-and-Twenty Years Since. By the late William Makepeace Thackeray. With numerous coloured
illustrations after designs made at the time.
For these interesting sketches of French
literature and art, made immediately after the Revolution of 1830, the reading world is
indebted to a gentlemen in Paris, who has carefully preserved the original papers up to the
present time.
Thackeray: the Humorist and the Man of Letters. The Story of his Life, and Literary Labours.
With some particulars of his Early Career never before made public. By Theodore Taylor, Esq.,
Membre de la Société des gens de Lettres. Price 7s. 6d.
Illustrated with
Photographic Portrait (one of the most characteristic known to have been taken) by Ernest
Edwards, B.A.; view of Mr. Thackeray's House, built after a favourite design of the great
novelist's; facsimile of his Handwriting, long noted in London literary circles for its
exquisite neatness; and a curious life sketch of his Coat of Arms, a pen and pencil humorously
introduced as the crest, the motto, "Nobilitas est sola virtus" (Virtue is the sole
nobility).
This day, neatly printed, price 1s. 6d.; by post 1s. 8d.
Mental Exertion: its Influence
on Health. By Dr. Brigham. Edited, with additional Notes, by Dr. Arthur Leared, Physician to
the Great Northern Hospital. This is a highly important little book, showing how far we may
educate the mind without injuring the body.
The recent untimely deaths of Admiral Fitzroy
and Mr. Prescott, whose minds gave way under excessive mental exertion, fully illustrate the
importance of the subject.
Every Housekeeper Should Possess a Copy.
Now ready, in cloth, price 2s. 6d.; by post 2s.
8d.
The Housekeeper's Assistant; a Collection of the most valuable Recipes, carefully
written down for future use, by Mrs. B—during her forty years' active service. As much as
two guineas has been paid for a copy of this invaluable little work.
How to See Scotland; or, a Fortnight in the Highlands for £6. A plain and practical guide.—Price 1s.
Now ready, 8vo., price 1s.
List of British Plants. compiled and Arranged by Alex More,
F.L.S.
This comparative List of British Plants was drawn up for the
use of the country botanist, to show the differences in opinion which exist between different
authors as to the number of species which ought to be reckoned within the compass of the flora of Great Britain.
Now ready, price 2s. 6d.; by post 2s. 10d.
Dictionary of the Oldest Words in the English
Language, from the Semi-Saxon Period of A.D. 1250 to 1300; consisting of an Alphabetical
Inventory of Every Word found in the Printed English Literature of the 13th Century, by the
late Herbert Coleridge, Secretary to the Philological Society. 8vo., neat half morocco.
An
invaluable work to historical students and those interested in linguistic pursuits.
The School and College Slang of England; or, Glossaries of the Words and Phrases peculiar to the Six great Educational Establishments of the country.—Preparing.
This day, in Crown 8vo., handsomely printed, price 7s. 6d.
Glossary of all the Words,
Phrases, and Customs peculiar to Winchester College.
See "School Life at Winchester
College," recently published.
Robson; a Sketch, by Augustus Sala. An Interesting Biography, with Sketches of his famous characters, "Jem Baggs," "Boots at the Swan," "The Yellow Dwarf," "Daddy Hardacre," &c. Price 6d.
In preparation, Crown 8vo., handsomely printed. The Curiosities of Flagellation: an Anecdotal History of the Birch in Ancient and Modern Times: its Use as a Religious Stimulant, and as a Corrector of Morals in all Ages. With some quaint illustrations. By J. G. Bertrand, Author of "The Harvest of the Sea," &c.
ppp.00750.444.jpgIn 1 vol., with 300 Drawings from Nature, 2s. 6d. plain, 4s. 6d. coloured by hand.
The
Young Botanist: a Popular Guide to Elementary Botany. By T. S. Ralph, of the Linnæan
Society.
An excellent book for the young beginner. The objects selected as illustrations
are either easy of access as specimens of wild plants, or are common in gardens.
Common Prayer. Illustrated by Holbein and Albert Durer. With Wood Engravings of the "Life of
Christ," rich woodcut border on every page of Fruit and Flowers; also the Dance of Death, a
singularly curious series after Holbein, with Scriptural Quotations and Proverbs in the Margin.
Square 8vo., cloth neat, exquisitely printed on tinted paper, price 8s. 6d.; in dark morocco,
very plain and neat, with block in the Elizabethan style impressed on the sides, gilt edges,
16s. 6d.
Apply direct for this exquisite volume.
An Appropriate Book to Illuminate.
The attention of those who practise the beautiful art
of Illuminating is requested to the following sumptuous volume:—
The Presentation
Book of Common Prayer. Illustrated with Elegant Ornamental Borders in red and black, from
"Books of Hours" and Illuminated Missals, by Geoffrey Tory. One of the most tasteful and
beautiful books ever printed. May now be seen at all booksellers.
Although the price is
only a few shillings (7s. 6d. in plain cloth; 8s. 6d. antique do.; 14s. 6d. morocco extra),
this edition is so prized by artists that, at the South Kensington and other important Art
Schools, copies are kept for the use of students.
Now ready, in 8vo., on tinted paper, nearly 350 pages, very neat, price 5s.
Family
History of the English Counties: Descriptive Account of Twenty Thousand most Curious and Rare
Books, Old Tracts, Ancient Manuscripts, Engravings, and Privately-printed Family Papers,
relating to the History of almost every Landed Estate and Old English Family in the Country;
interspersed with nearly Two Thousand Original Anecdotes, Topographical and Antiquarian Notes.
By John Camden Hotten.
By far the largest collection of English and Welsh Topography and
Family History ever formed. Each article has a small price affixed for the convenience of those
who may desire to possess any book or tract that interests them.
An Interesting Volume to Antiquaries.
Now ready, 4to., half morocco, handsomely printed,
price 7s. 6d.
Army Lists of the Roundheads and Cavaliers in the Civil War.
These most
curious Lists show on which side the gentlemen of England were to be found during the great
conflict between the King and the Parliament. Only a very few copies have been most carefully
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Atalanta.
By Algernon C. Swinburne.
Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 6s.
John Camden
Hotten.
Opinions of the Press.
"He has produced a dramatic poem which abounds from the first page to the last in the finest constituents of poetry—in imagination, fancy, feeling, sentiment, passion, and knowledge of the human heart and soul, combined with a dominant mastery over every species of verse, from the stateliest pomp of epic metre to the fluent sweetness of song. . . . He has something of that creative force which all great poets have had, whether they were Greek, Italian, or English—a native and inborn strength, which scholarship may mould, but can never originate. If, as we are given to understand, Mr. Swinburne is a young writer, we do not hesitate to assert that his volume is extraordinary, not simply for strength and vividness of imagination, but (what is far more remarkable with inexperience) for maturity of power, for completeness of self-control, for absolute mastery over the turbulent forces of adolescent genius. . . . That strange, sad, hopeless mood in which the ancient Greek regarded the mysteries of life and death—that austere setting of the soul against the iron will of destiny which is so full of an immense dignity and pathos—that divinely sorrowful despair of things which can suffer to the miserable end, and sees no after compensation, and yet goes down to death in majesty, and beauty, and power—these characteristics of the old Greek faith, or want of faith, or whatsoever we may call it, are reflected by Mr. Swinburne with amazing truth and discrimination. There are passages in his poem which seem to wring from the very roots of human experience the sharpest extract of our griefs."—LONDON REVIEW, 8th April, 1865.
"Mr. Swinburne has judged well in his choice of a subject. The legend of Calydon is one of the most beautiful in the whole compass of the Greek mythology; fresh, simple, romantic, solemn, and pathetic, yet without any of those horrors which shock us in the stories of Thebes or Argos—no Jocasta, no Thyestes, but figures full of heroic truth and nobleness, standing out in the clear bright light of the early morning of Greece. . . . A careful study of the Attic dramatists has enabled him to catch their manner, and to reproduce felicitously many of their turns of expression. The scholar is struck, every few ppp.00750.448.jpg lines, by some phrase which he can fancy a direct translation from the Greek, while yet it is in its place both forcible and unaffected. The matter, although not really Greek in its essence, is thrown with great cleverness into a mould which almost beguiles us into forgetting the author, and imagining that we are listening to one of the contemporaries of Euripides who sought to copy the manner of Aeschylus. . . . He is, indeed, never more happy than in painting nature, knowing and loving her well, and inspired by her beauty into a vivid force and fulness of expression."—SATURDAY REVIEW, 6th May, 1865.
"The passion of Althæa is much the finest part of the play. The naturalism of maternal instinct struggling with the feeling of what is due to the shade of her mother and her brothers, goes far beyond the struggle in Antigone or Orestes. Out of many noble passages depicting this feeling we choose the last and most passionate—passionate beyond the limits of Greek passion, and too little ingrained with the Greek awe,—but still exceedingly fine."—SPECTATOR, April 15th, 1865.
"He is gifted with no small portion of the all-important divine fire, without which no man can hope to achieve poetic success; he possesses considerable powers of description, a keen eye of natural scenery, and a copious vocabulary of rich yet simple English. . . . We must now part from our author with cordial congratulations on the success with which he has achieved so difficult a task."—TIMES, June 6th, 1865.
"'Atalanta in Calydon' is the work of a poet. . . . Let our readers say whether they often meet with pictures lovelier in themselves or more truly Greek than those in the following invocation to Artemis. . . . Many strains equal to the above in force, beauty and rhythmical flow might be cited from the chorus. Those which set forth the brevity of man's life, and the darkness which singularly fine in expression. . . . We yet know not to what poet since Keats we could turn for a representation at once so large in its design and so graphic in its particulars. In the noble hyperbole of description which raises the boar into the veritable scourge of Artemis, there is imagination of the highest kind. . . . A subject for many a painter to come—a grand word-picture, in which the influence of no contemporary can be traced. . . . In the fervour and beauty of his best passages we find no reflection of any modern writer. . . . We must not close without a reference to the Greek lines, plaintive and full of classic grace, which the writer has prefixed to his work in honour of Walter Savage Landor."—ATHENÆUM, April 1st, 1865.
"The choruses are so good, that it is difficult to praise them enough. Were our space unlimited, we would transfer them without abridgment to our columns; as it is not, we can only give a few extracts; but we may fairly assume that every one who cares for poetry of a truly high order will make himself familiar with Mr. Swinburne's drama. . . . As we listen to them they seem to set themselves to a strange but grand music, which lingers long on the ear. . . .Sometimes we are reminded of Shelley in the lyric passages, but it is more the movement of the verse and its wonderful music, than anything else which ppp.00750.449.jpg suggests a resemblance. . . . Mr. Swinburne has lived with the great Athenian dramatists till his tone of thought has somewhat assimilated to theirs, but he has learnt rather to sympathize with them as a contemporary artist, than to copy them as a modern student."—READER, April 22nd, 1865.
"Our extracts have shown that we much prefer to let Mr. Swinburne present his own marvellous earnestness and rich delivery of manner than to essay in this, our necessarily brief review, a lengthened criticism of analysis of such a remarkable work of promise. Apart from the serious endeavour and high devoir to which he has devoted himself in his first appeal to public attention, we would remark the sensuousness, brilliancy, and fervour of the lyrics, which here and there relieve the more sombre and sterner phases of the poem. . . . Assuredly this is the choicest and most complete effort which has for a long time announced that a scholar and a poet has come amongst us."—MORNING HERALD, April 27th, 1865.
"One grave error, which Mr. Swinburne has almost entirely avoided, is the use of thoughts or expressions which, current now, would be out of place in a tragedy of Greece. He has, with rare artistic feeling, let scarcely a trace appear of modern life. The Poem is all alive with the life of a classic past. . . . The whole play is instinct with power of varied kinds."—EXAMINER, July 15th, 1865.
"We have before said Mr. Swinburne is a subtle analyst of human motive, and possesses great tragic power. The present work shows him to have imagination of the highest order, wonderful play of fancy, and a complete command over every form of versification. . . . He has command of imagery as great as his control of language. He has power which rises to sublimity; passion which deepens into terror; daring which soars beyond reach or control. . . . We have said enough to convince our readers that we regard this poem as a worthy companion to 'Chastelard,' and look upon its author as permanently enrolled among great English poets."—SUNDAY TIMES, December 31st, 1865.
"These lines are marked by that melancholy that always characterizes the poetry in proportion to the absence of faith. . . . Could he have faith, of which there is not a trace throughout the poem, except the miserable vacuum created by its absence, he might do wonders as a poet."—THE TABLET, August 12th, 1865.
"As to the tragedy itself, we find in it everything to praise and nothing to censure. It is one of the few really great poems that have been contributed to English literature since the death of Shelley; and it entitles its author at once to place among the great poets of his country. . . . A tragedy on the Grecian model, which is remarkable for its intense emotional vitality, the richness and reality of its imaginative images, the perfect precision and finish of its construction, and the combined stateliness, severity, and music of its diction."—ALBION, November 11th, 1865.
"Not the least remarkable and interesting pages of this volume are those to ppp.00750.450.jpg which the author has consigned a tribute of veneration to the memory of Walter Savage Landor, in two compositions of Greek elegiac verse. The first is a dedication addressed to Landor while living, in the form of a valediction, on the occasion of his last return to Italy; the second, much the longer of the two, an elegy on his death. No one who has felt how the spirit of the Aeschylean tragedy breathes through the English poem, will have been surprised to find—rather, every such reader would have been disappointed if he had not found—that Mr. Swinburne's thoughts move with scarcely less ease and freedom on a modern theme (if indeed Landor may be properly said to belong to his own age so much as to that of Pericles and Augustus) in the language and measures of Callinus and Mimmerus than in his native speech. Of the Greek we will only say that it is not that of a Cambridge prize ode, but something much better—even if more open to minute criticism—than the best of such; not in the least like cento of dainty classical phrases, but the fresh original gushing of a true poetical vein, nourished by mastery of the foreign language, like that which Landor himself in his Latin poems. . . . It is evidently the produce, not of the tender lyrical faculty which so often waits on sensitive youth and afterwards fades into the light of common day, nor even of the classical culture of which it is itself a signal illustration, but of an affluent and apprehensive genius, which, with ordinary care and fair fortune, will take a foremost place in English literature. . . . His abstinence from all overdrawn conceits is remarkable in a young poet of any time, and his careful avoidance of the shadowy border land of metaphysics and poetry in which so many versifiers of our own day take refuge from the open scrutiny of critical sunlight, deserve full praise and recognition."—Edinburgh Review July, 1865.
Chastelard.
By Algernon C. Swinburne.
Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 7s.
John Camden
Hotten.
Opinions of the Press.
"The portraits of Mary and of Chastelard are exaggerated, but only as Michael Angelo's heroic statues are. The consistent steady madness of Chastelard's passion, which, mad as it is, lies deeper than madness, and, wild as it is, burns always without flame, is displayed in a way which is most masterly. ppp.00750.451.jpg As for the Queen, we are quite of opinion that Mr. Swinburne has brought that woman to light again. It will not do, perhaps, to peer closely into her portrait as it lies in these pages; if we do, we become uneasily conscious of blotchy workmanship, with lights too sudden, and shades too deep, and broken harmonies of colour. But close the book, and look at the portrait reflected from it into the mind, and none was ever painted of her so true. It is a portrait which painters and historians alike have only confused; it awaited a poet's hand to this day, and now we have got it. So think we, at any rate, and in saying so we do not exhaust the praise which is due to the author of 'Chastelard.' The dramatic force of the scenes in the latter half of the poem remains to be applauded, but that, luckily for a critic who has come to the end of his tether, is a thing which can only be applauded and cannot be described; we give it our homage. But it is very much to the purpose of this article, that just when the poem becomes more dramatic its faults begin to disappear; and before we come to the admirable scene between Mary and Chastelard in prison, we are blinded to whatever remains. The fact seems to be that Mr. Swinburne is less a poet than a dramatist; it is certain that he is capable of writing in a way which entitles him to small consideration as the one, and to great consideration as the other. . . . But in any case it can never be denied that he is a true man of genius."—PALL MALL GAZETTE, April 27th, 1866.
"The two principal figures stand out boldly, and on them the poet has bestowed ail the riches of his genius. . . . The scene in which, having sent for Chastelard, she talks to him in a strange wild mood between love and regretfulness, is extremely subtle and fine. . . . It will not be doubted by any one who has the pulse of poetry in his blood that this is noble writing—writing instinct with the highest spirit of the Elizabethan Muse. And in the speech o Chastelard, when waiting for the Queen in her chamber, we have something of the large, imperial style of Shakspeare himself. . . . The scene between Chastelard and the Queen in prison is also pervaded with the highest inspirations of impassioned poetry; and though the love-ravings of Chastelard almost pass the bounds commonly permitted to poets, the shadow of fate, lying dark and heavy over all, seems to cool and moderate the glow. In passages such as these, Mr. Swinburne again proves his right to take a permanent stand among our English poets. . . . Of power, he has abundance; of passion, perhaps more than enough; of poetry, in its fierce, luminous, and fiery shapes, a wonderful and prodigal richness. . . . Whatever his faults, however, he is a man of genius of the most unmistakable mark. We do not know when it has fallen to the lost of any poet to produce within one year two such plays as 'Atalanta in Calydon' and 'Chastelard'—dramas conceived and written in two totally distinct styles, and with marked success in both. . . . He has earned a conspicuous name with singular quickness, and we trust that even greater triumphs lie before him in his onward path."—LONDON REVIEW, December 9th, 1865.
"The choruses in 'Atalanta' were astonishing for their imaginative insight, their richness of imagery, their depth of impassioned thought, the nervous suppleness of their language, and the lyrical flow of their versification; and many of the ppp.00750.452.jpg speeches of the characters were full of poetry and dramatic truth. In 'Chastelard,' again, we have a splendid example of the poetry that lies in vehement and absorbing passion; but there is some reason to fear that Mr. Swinburne is wanting in the higher beauty of moral dignity and sweetness."—LONDON REVIEW, December 30th, 1865.
"We can only say that it abounds in passages of great poetic merit, and the passion of love is described with all that delicacy and vividness that can only be found in the writings of poet endowed with extraordinary genius. Mr. Swinburne has well comprehended the character of Mary Stuart, and she is made to stand before the reader a reality, her nature being wonderfully well exhibited. Other characters are represented with marvellous distinctness, and give to the tragedy interest and vitality."—PUBLIC OPINION, December 16th, 1865.
"The style is so forcible that there is little that would render the play unfit for the stage, were it not for the great amount of amativeness which the parties have to display before they are disposed of."—COURT CIRCULAR, December 23rd, 1865.
"The picture with which this burst concludes, though too much elaborated, has undeniable grandeur. We could point out passages which, in a dramatic point of view, are yet finer. Those given to Mary Beaton—the only touching character in the play—often reach the height of tragic intensity. Nor is it to be disputed that Mr. Swinburne shows at times a keen insight into the subtleties of human motive, but his chief characters are out of the pale or our sympathy; besides being inherently vicious, the language will offend not only those who have reverence, but those who have taste."—ATHENÆUM, December 23rd, 1865.
"A tragedy—in which we think he best develops his genius. Once before we said we thought his genius essentially lyric, but he himself has convinced us, not of the contrary, but of the co-existence in him of the dramatic and lyric power."—COURT JOURNAL, December 19th, 1865.
"The poem, in fact, is morally repulsive, and all its gilding of fancy and feeling only makes the picture more revolting. . . . The dramatic power, the grace of the beauty of the tragedy no one can deny. . . . His insight into hidden human motives if marvellously indicated. Altogether, if the poem fails to please, that must be attributed to the subject and the author's mind of it, not to any lack of workmanship of the very highest and most delicate order."—ATLAS, December 30th, 1865.
"It is an unpleasant book, and one by all means to be kept out of the hands of the young and pure-minded, for the licentiousness of many of the images and profanity of not a few of the sentiments are such as happily are not often found in English poets. . . . We cannot doubt that the less sensuous brotherhood of our Northern poets, would join us in denouncing with indignation and disgust such a lamentable prostitution of the English muse."—JOHN BULL, December 23rd, 1865.
"There are two parts of the play deserving of special praise—the second act, and the closing scenes of the fifth. It is in these, and more particularly in the latter, that Mr. Swinburne displays a combination of dramatic and poetic power beyond what is seen in anything that his pen has yet produced. . . . Were it ppp.00750.453.jpg not for their exquisite elegance of expression, these constant exhibitions of passion would deserve severe reprobation. . . . Regarding the work as a whole, we must thank Mr. Swinburne for a dramatic poem of great power, careful elaboration of plot, artistic disposition of scenes; for admirable descriptions of human emotion and passion; for terse, forcible, yet sweet expression, and a generally scrupulous melody of rhythm."—READER, December 2nd, 1865.
"Mr. Swinburne has written a tragedy, which not only is one of the most remarkable productions of modern days, but which in originality of conception and boldness of treatment has never been surpassed. The triumph which Mr. Swinburne has achieved in 'Chastelard' is the more noteworthy, since the splendid gifts of which its composition proclaims him the possessor are totally distinct from those which in 'Atalanta in 'Calydon' gained him a foremost position among modern poets. In the earlier production, amid all the sublime imagery and lyrical sweetness, the grace truly classic, the boldness of thought and the exquisite charm of versification which constituted it a work of accomplished and all out unrivalled beauty, there was no foreshadowing of the dramatic fire and the weird and almost unholy power which characterize its successor. . . . From this point, where the interest has already reached what appears a climax, each situation is more dramatic and more stirring than the one preceding it. The skill with which—the passions being already at white heat—the action is heightened without anti-climax is absolutely wonderful. . . . The last few words we give in their integrity; no word of ours can add aught to their terrible pathos and dramatic force. With them, and without an added word, we shall conclude our notice of this most remarkable tragedy of modern times."—SUNDAY TIMES, December 3rd, 1865.
"Here, in his new poem of 'Chastelard,' is Mr. Algernon Swinburne writing French chansons of which Chastelard himself or Ronsard might have been proud. So good are they that by many they are imagined to be merely quotations, transcripts from the original French author. But there is no doubt they are Mr. Swinburne's own composition. Here are two which are exquisite in taste, feeling, and spirit."—MORNING STAR, December 25th, 1865.
"Here and there occur passages which we unhesitatingly affirm are not surpassed in the language."—LIVERPOOL ALBION, January 6th, 1866.
"The public to which Mr. Swinburne appeals will consist exclusively of those readers who enjoy a work of art for its own sake, and who care more for the power of the representation than for any worth in what is represented. . . . Mr. Swinburne has produced a poem which many may dislike but which none can contemn, which many will lay down unread but which few will read once only. It cannot be called an advance upon 'Atalanta,' for it is something totally different, except in its disregard of conventional proprieties, and its independence of the poetical habits of the day. There is the same richness without tawdriness of language, the same novelty without strangeness of expression, the same continual sense of the indispensable duty of melody in verse, which some of our most pretentious poets either forget or disown. . . . The scene in the Queen's chamber is very beautiful, but ingeniously wicked as the rest. . . . For dex- ppp.00750.454.jpg terity of fence, both in feeling and language, this scene may rank with the masterpieces of our older drama. . . . The gyrations are so unexpected, and the changes so numerous, that in less masterly hands the effect would be rather that of a psychological puzzle than of a dramatic evolution. . . . It is impossible that this play should not highly raise Mr. Swinburne's reputation. There are artistic defects in it, but not to be mentioned beside the artistic merits. His preface to Moxon's 'Selections from Byrons' is another instance of the fact, too often forgotten, that there is no education for the writig of superior prose like the serious practice of poetry; and with this double power, Mr. Swinburne's future career must be an object of much interest to all who estimate aright the worth and weight of British literature in the intellectual and moral history of mankind."—FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, April 15th, 1866.
"He fills out this bold outline, and supplies missing links in the story, and imparts life and form and colour to the whole picture, and reproduces contemporaneous personages and scenery, and, with deep probing of human nature and fine play of imagination, unveils the pathetic tragedy that has so long slept hidden in the dry and trite historic page. The result is a masterpiece of literary art, whether contemplated as to conception of character, ideals of love and heroism, treatment of a grand and moving theme, majesty, beauty, and purity of style, or lesson to the heart and mind."—THE ALBION, December 23rd, 1865.
"The story is vaguely and ineffectively presented. There is little to relieve the repulsive character of the whole tone of the play. It dwells pertinaciously and too warmly upon scenes which are neither noble, edifying, nor decent."—BOSTON DAILY ADVERTISER, December 14th, 1865.
"We have but re-echoed the judgment of all competent critics, in saying that Swinburne rightfully ranks with the few great poets of this and of other ages. His present work is one of the finest artistic efforts which we have ever chanced to encounter. It has more human interest than his 'Atalanta in Calydon,' while it is couched in the same vigorous and splendid diction and 'is richly dight' with melodious and sweetly magnificent songs. . . . His portraiture is one of the amplest, most thoroughly elaborated, and most gorgeously coloured, in the whole wide range of British poetry."—NEW YORK WEEKLY REVIEW, December 9th, 1865.
"The sustained and elastic strength of the fourth act, in which the turns and windings of Mary's will as Chastelard's death are drawn out—her perplexity, ruthlessness, contempt for a weak man and for a cruel unknightly man, fear of public scorn, remorse for her love, vindictive bitterness against Darnley all chasing one another over her mind, with the subtlest changes—make one of the most superb scenes for which a drama of character gives room. We feel that the writer is rejoicing in his own skill in unravelling the changeful mysteries of a highly complex character. He exults in his mastery over the Queen's rapid passage from one mood to another, and in the magic by which he can produce and control her Protean transformations."—SATURDAY REVIEW, May 26th, 1866.