Part 11 (2/2)
”Dashes at Life,” by N. P. Willis. The life of Mr. Willis is too European for him to have a general or permanent fame in America. We need a life of our own, and a literature of our own. Those writers who are dearest to us, and really most interesting, are those who are at least rooted to the soil. If they are not great enough to be the prophets of the new era, they at least exhibit the features of their native clime, and the complexion given by its native air. But Mr. Willis is a son of Europe, and his writings can interest only the fas.h.i.+onable world of this country, which, by imitating Europe, fails entirely of a genius, grace, and invention of its own. Still, in their way, they are excellent. They are most lively pictures, showing the fine natural organization of the writer, on whom none, the slightest symptom of what he is looking for, is thrown away; sparkling with bold, light wit, succinct, and colored with glow, and for a full light. Some of them were new to us, and we read them through, missing none of the words, and laughed with a full heart, and without one grain of complaisance, which is much, very much, to say in these days. We said these sketches would not have a permanent fame, and yet we may be wrong. The new, full, original, radiant, American life may receive them as an heirloom from this transition state we are in now, and future generations may stare at the mongrel products of Saratoga, and maidens still laugh till they cry at the ”Letter of Jane S. to her Spirit-Bridegroom.”
All these story-books show, even to the languor of the hottest day, the solemn signs of revolution. Life has become too fact.i.tious; it has no longer a leg left to stand upon, and cannot be carried much farther in this way. England--ah! who can resist visions of phalansteries in every park, and the treasures of art turned into public galleries for the use of the artificers who will no longer be unwashed, but raised and educated by the refinements of sufficient leisure, and the instructions of genius. England must glide, or totter, or fall into revolution; there is not room for such selfish elves, and unique young dukes, in a country so crowded with men, and with those who ought to be women, and are turned into work-tools. There are very impressive hints on this last topic in ”Sybil, or the Two Worlds,” (of the rich and poor.) G.o.d has time to remember the design with which he made this world also.
Sh.e.l.lEY'S POEMS[18]
We are very glad to see this handsome copy of Sh.e.l.ley ready for those who have long been vainly inquiring at all the bookstores for such a one.
In Europe the fame of Sh.e.l.ley has risen superior to the clouds that darkened its earlier days, hiding his true image from his fellow-men, and from his own sad eyes oftentimes the common light of day. As a thinker, men have learned to pardon what they consider errors in opinion for the sake of singular n.o.bleness, purity, and love in his main tendency or spirit. As a poet, the many faults of his works having been acknowledged, there are room and place to admire his far more numerous and exquisite beauties.
The heart of the man, few, who have hearts of their own, refuse to reverence, and many, even of devoutest Christians, would not refuse the book which contains Queen Mab as a Christmas gift. For it has been recognized that the founder of the Christian church would have suffered one to come unto him, who was in faith and love so truly what he sought in a disciple, without regard to the form his doctrine a.s.sumed.
The qualities of his poetry have often been a.n.a.lyzed, and the severer critics, impatient of his exuberance, or unable to use their accustomed spectacles in the golden mist that broods over all he has done, deny him high honors; but the soul of aspiring youth, untrammelled by the canons of taste, and untamed by scholarly discipline, swells into rapture at his lyric sweetness, finds ambrosial refreshment from his plenteous fancies, catches fire at his daring thought, and melts into boundless weeping at his tender sadness--the sadness of a soul betrothed to an ideal unattainable in this present sphere.
For ourselves, we dispute not with the _doctrinaires_ or the critics. We cannot speak dispa.s.sionately of an influence that has been so dear to us. Nearer than the nearest companions of life actual has Sh.e.l.ley been to us. Many other great ones have shone upon us, and all who ever did so s.h.i.+ne are still resplendent in our firmament, for our mental life has not been broken and contradictory, but thus far we ”see what we foresaw.” But Sh.e.l.ley seemed to us an incarnation of what was sought in the sympathies and desires of instinctive life, a light of dawn, and a foreshowing of the weather of this day.
When still in childish years, the ”Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” fell in our way. In a green meadow, skirted by a rich wood, watered by a lovely rivulet, made picturesque by a mill a little farther down, sat a party of young persons gayer than, and almost as inventive, as those that told the tales recorded by Boccaccio. They were pa.s.sing a few days in a scene of deep seclusion, there uncared for by tutor or duenna, and with no bar of routine to check the pranks of their gay, childish fancies. Every day they a.s.sumed parts which through the waking hours must be acted out. One day it was the characters in one of Richardson's novels; and most solemnly we ”my deared” each other with richest brocade of affability, and interchanged in long, stiff phrase our sentimental secrets and prim opinions. But to-day we sought relief in personating birds or insects; and now it was the Libellula who, tired of wild flitting and darting, rested on the gra.s.sy bank and read aloud the ”Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” torn by chance from the leaf of a foreign magazine.
It was one of those chances which we ever remember as the interposition of some good angel in our fate. Solemn tears marked the change of mood in our little party and with the words
”Have I not kept my vow?”
began a chain of thoughts whose golden links still bind the years together.
Two or three years pa.s.sed. The frosty Christmas season came; the trees cracked with their splendid burden of ice, the old wooden country house was banked up with high drifts of the beautiful snow, and the Libellula became the owner of Sh.e.l.ley's Poems. It was her Christmas gift, and for three days and three nights she ceased not to extract its sweets; and how familiar still in memory every object seen from the chair in which she sat enchanted during those three days, memorable to her as those of July to the French nation! The fire, the position of the lamp, the variegated shadows of that alcoved room, the bright stars up to which she looked with such a feeling of congeniality from the contemplation of this starry soul,--O, could but a De Quincey describe those days in which the bridge between the real and ideal rose unbroken! He would not do it, though, as _Suspiria de Profundis_, but as sighs of joy upon the mountain height.
The poems we read then are what every one still reads, the ”Julian and Maddalo,” with its profound revelations of the inward life; ”Alastor,”
the soul sweeping like a breeze through nature; and some of the minor poems. ”Queen Mab,” the ”Prometheus,” and other more formal works we have not been able to read much. It was not when he tried to express opinions which the wrongs of the world had put into his head, but when he abandoned himself to the feelings which nature had implanted in his own breast, that Sh.e.l.ley seemed to us so full of inspiration, and it is so still.
In reply to all that can be urged against him by people of whom we do not wish to speak ill,--for surely ”they know not what they do,”--we are wont simply to refer to the fact that he was the only man who redeemed the human race from suspicion to the embittered soul of Byron. ”Why,”
said Byron, ”he is a man who would willingly die for others. _I am sure of it._”
Yes! balance that against all the ill you can think of him that he was a man able to live wretched for the sake of speaking sincerely what he supposed to be truth, willing to die for the good of his fellows!
Mr. Foster has spoken well of him as a man: ”Of Sh.e.l.ley's personal character it is enough to say that it was wholly pervaded by the same unbounded and unquestioning love for his fellow-men--the same holy and fervid hope in their ultimate virtue and happiness--the same scorn of baseness and hatred of oppression--which beam forth in all his writings with a pure and constant light. The theory which he wrote was the practice which his whole life exemplified. n.o.ble, kind, generous, pa.s.sionate, tender, with a courage greater than the courage of the chief of warriors, for it could _endure_--these were the qualities in which his life was embalmed.”
FESTUS.[19]
We are right glad to see this beloved stranger domesticated among us.
Yet there are queer little circ.u.mstances that herald the introduction.
The poet is a barrister at law!--well! it is always worthy of note when a man is not hindered by study of human law from knowledge of divine; which last is all that concerns the poet. Then the preface to the American edition closes with this discreet remark: ”It is perfectly SAFE to p.r.o.nounce it (the poem) one of the most powerful and splendid productions of the age.” Dear New England! how purely that was worthy thee, region where the tyranny of public opinion is carried to a perfection of minute scrutiny beyond what it ever was before in any age or place, though the ostracism be administered with the mildness and refinement fit for this age. Dear New England! yes! it is _safe_ to say that the poem is good; whatever Mrs. Grundy may think, she will not have it burned by the hangman if it is not. But it may not be _discreet_, because she can, if she sees fit, exile its presence from bookstores, libraries, centre tables, and all mention of its existence from lips polite, and of thine also, who hast dared to praise it, on peril of turning all surrounding eyes to lead by its utterance. This kind of gentle excommunication thou mayst not be prepared to endure, O preface-writer! And we should greatly fear that thou wert deceived in thy fond security, for ”Festus” is a bold book--in respect of freedom of words, a boldest book--also it reveals the solitudes of hearts with unexampled sincerity, and remorselessly lays bare human nature in its naked truth--but for the theology of the book. That may save it, and none the less for all it shows of the depravity of human nature. It is through many pages and leaves what is technically praised as ”a serious book.” A friend went into a bookstore to select presents for persons with whom she was about to part, and among other things requested the shopman to ”show her some serious books in handsome binding.” He looked into several, and then, struck by pa.s.sages here and there, offered her the ”Letters of Lady M. W. Montague.” She a.s.suring him that it would not be safe to make use of this work, he offered her a miniature edition of Shakspeare, as ”a book containing many excellent things, though you had to wade through a great deal of rubbish to get at them.”
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