Kitabı oku: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 32, June, 1860», sayfa 17
But whatever deductions are to be made on the score of want of picturesqueness in style, of generalizing power, and of that imagination which sets before us dramatically the mutual interaction of men and events, Dr. Vaughan's history will be found a useful and enlightened compendium of the facts with which it deals.
Fresh Hearts that failed Three Thousand Years Ago; with Other Things. By the Author of "The New Priest in Conception Bay." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. pp. 121.
In noticing the "New Priest," in a former number of the "ATLANTIC," we had occasion to speak of the author's remarkable beauty and vigor of style, his keen sense of the picturesque and imaginative aspects of outward Nature, his comic power, and his original conception of character. At the same time we could not but feel that a certain tendency to multiplicity of detail, and a neglect of form or insensibility to it, hindered the book of that direct and vigorous effect which its power and variety of resource would otherwise have produced. Something of the same impression is made by the present volume. There are glimpses in it of real genius, but it shows itself generally here and there only, as the natural outcrop, seldom in the bars and ingots which give proof of patient mining and smelting at furnace-heat, still more seldom in the beautiful shapes of artistic elaboration. Here, again, we find the same unborrowed feeling for outward Nature and familiarity with her moods, the same poetic beauty of expression, and in many of the pieces the same overcrowdedness, as if the author would fain say all he could, instead of saying only what he could not help.
There are some of the poems that do more justice to the abilities of the author. In "The Year is Gone" there is great tenderness of sentiment and grace of expression; "Love Disposed of" is a pretty fancy embodied with true lyric feeling; but the poem which over crests all the others like a decuman wave is "The Brave Old Ship, the Orient." It is a truly masculine poem, full of vigor and imagination, and giving evidence of true original power in the author. There is scarce a weak verse in it, and the measure has a swing, at once easy and stately, like that of the sea itself. We know not if we are right in conjecturing some hint of deeper meaning in the name "Orient," but, taking it merely as a descriptive poem, it is one of the finest of its kind. The writer's heart seems more in the work here than in the devotional verses. We quote a single passage from it, which seems to us particularly fine:—
"We scanned her well, as we drifted by:
A strange old ship, with her poop built high,
And with quarter-galleries wide,
And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are builded now,
And carvings all strange, beside:
A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and mark
Long years and generations ago;
Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing hard
With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow.
* * * * *
"Down her old black side poured the water in a tide,
As they toiled to get the better of a leak.
We had got a signal set in the shrouds,
And our men through the storm looked on in crowds:
But for wind, we were near enough to speak.
It seemed her sea and sky were in times long, long gone by,
That we read in winter-evens about;
As if to other stars
She had reared her old-world spars,
And her hull had kept an old-time ocean out."
Hester, the Bride of the Islands. A Poem. By SYLVESTER B. BECKETT. Portland: Bailey & Noyes.
Mr. Beckett is evidently an admirer of Walter Scott; and it is not the least remarkable fact in connection with "Hester," that an author with the good sense to propose to himself such a model, disregarding the more elaborate poets of a later date, should have proved himself so utterly unable to follow that model, except in a few phrases, which were quite appropriate as Scott used them, but are ludicrously out of place in his own verse. In adopting the brief lines and irregularly recurring rhymes of Scott, he has taken a hazardous step. The curt lines are excellent with Sir Walter's liveliness and dash; but when dull commonplaces are to be written, their feebleness would be more decorously concealed by a longer and more conventional dress. The cutty sark, so appropriate when displaying the free, vigorous stops of Maggie Lauder, is not to be worn by every lackadaisical lady's-maid of a muse. In the moral reflections, with which "Hester" abounds, there is a most comical imitation of Scott,—as if the poem were written as a parody of "The Lady of the Lake," by Mrs. Southworth, or Sylvanus Cobb, Junior.
Mr. Beckett closes some very singular stanzas, entitled an Introduction, with the following lines:—
"Give it praise, or blame,
Or pass it without comment, as may seem
To you most meet; with me 'tis all the same.
I hymn because I must, and not for greed of fame."
These lines incline us at first to let Mr. Beckett "pass without comment," considering, that, as he says, he cannot help writing; but we are finally decided to observe him more closely, inasmuch as he says it makes no difference to him, thus relieving us of the dreadful fear of wantonly crushing some delicate John Keats (always supposing we had him) by our severe censure.
Instead of entering into a philosophical examination of "Hester," we shall present some specimen pearls, making our first extract from the 21st page:—
"The very desert would have smiled
In such a presence! yet despite
Her dimpled cheek, her soft blue eye,
Her voice so fraught with music's thrill,
The shrewd observer might espy
The traces therein of a will
That scorned restraint, the soul of fire
That slumbered in her tacit sire."
"The traces therein." Wherein? Not in the cheek, eye, or voice, clearly; for it was "despite" all these that he would make the discovery,—they are obstacles, entirely outside of the success. It is necessarily, then, in the "presence," in which the unthinking desert would have smiled unsuspecting, but in which "the shrewd observer might espy" a good deal that was ominous of trouble. Now it is obvious that the writer intended to refer "therein" to the cheek, eye, and voice, a reference from which he barred himself by the word "despite." As it happens, luckily for him, there is a word to refer to, so that his grammatical salvation is secured; but the result is sad nonsense.
Page 23,—
"Indeed, it was their chief delight,
When combed the far seas feather-white,
To steer out on the roughening bay
With leaning prow and flying spray,
And gunnel ready to submerge
Itself beneath the flaming surge!"
Page 28,—
"nor gave
He heed to aught on land or wave;
As if some kyanized regret
Were in his heart," etc., etc.
"Kyanized regret" is good, as Polonius would say; but we would humbly suggest that Mr. Beckett substitute, in his next edition, "Burnettized," as even better, if that be possible.
Page 72,—
"in hope, perchance
(Like arrant knight of old romance),
That some complacent circumstance
Would end her curiosity."
Page 94,—
"Thereafter, she but knew the charm
Of resting on her lover's arm,
And listening to his voice elate,
As he betimes went on to state
The phases in his own strange fate,
Since last they met."
Page 100.—Speaking of "those of thoughtful mood," he says,—
"With whom I oft have whiled away
The dusky hour upon the deep,
Which most men wisely give to sleep."
There is in this last line a dark, grim, sardonic appreciation of the advantages which common minds have over those that, like the poet's own, have to endure the splendid miseries of genius,—a dark moodiness, like that of a tame Byron remorsefully recalling a wild debauch upon green tea,—that is deliciously funny.
Page 230.—The heroine, who is less poetical by far than her rough servitor, says,—
"Carl! not for all the golden sand
Of famed Pactolus, would I hurt
Thy feelings; 'tis my wont to blurt
My humour thus."
Page 298.—The hero, who is hardly more romantic than the heroine, has married his own sister:—
"Lord Hubart gazed with steady eye
And arms still folded, on old Carl—
'Here is, i' faith, a pretty snarl
To be unwound'—but his reply
Was cut short," etc., etc.
In fact, the great objection to Lord Hubart, as may be inferred from the above-quoted passage, is, that he is hopelessly vulgar. We are loath to say so, because of our respect for English aristocracy; but English aristocracy, truth compels us to observe, cuts no great figure on our American stage or in our American literature.
In short, this is a very silly book. It abounds in trite moralizing, for instances of which we will merely refer the reader to pp. 65, 131, and 299. The author remarks exultingly, in his Introduction, that his is comparatively an uncultivated mind, We can only say, we should think so! Ignorance is plentiful everywhere, but it really seems as if it were reserved for some of our American writers to display in its finest specimens ignorance vaunting its own deficiencies. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about "uncultivated minds": some men are eminent in spite of being uncultivated; but no man was ever eminent because he was uncultivated. Some instances of a lamentable misuse of language in "Hester" we give below.
Page 16,—
"They would have won implicit sway."
Page 53,—
"By the nonce!"
Evidently thinking of the phrase, "for the nonce,"—meaning, for the occasion. In the text, "by the nonce" is an oath!
Page 71,—
"And he some squire of low behest."
Page 221,—
"and when is won At last the longed-for rubicon."
Page 256,—the use of the word "denizens."
Page 262,—
"None may their evil doing shirk!
That wrong, in any shape, will bring,
Or soon or late, its meted sting."
Page 313,—
"as gnats, which sometimes sting Their life away when rankled."
Another fault is the senseless use of certain words and phrases, which a good writer uses only when he must, Mr. Beckett always when he can. We give without comment a mere list of these:—maugre, 'sdeath, eke, erst, deft, romaunt, pleasaunce, certes, whilom, distraught, quotha, good lack, well-a-day, vermeil, perchance, hight, wight, lea, wist, list, sheen, anon, gliff, astrolt, what boots it? malfortunes, ween, God wot, I trow, emprise, duress, donjon, puissant, sooth, rock, bruit, ken, eld, o'ersprent, etc. Of course, such a word as "lady" is made to do good service, and "ye" asserts its well-known superiority to "you." All this the author evidently considers highly meritorious, although the words are entirely unsuitable. His notion seems to be, that these are poetical words, and the way to write poetry is to take all the exclusively poetical words you can find. The occasional attempt to make his verses familiar and natural by the use of such abbreviations as "I've" or "can't" is as much a failure as the effort of an awkward man in a ball-room to make everybody think him at his ease by forcing an unhappy smile and a look of preternatural buoyancy.
From the beginning to the end of "Hester," there is one unerring indication of an uncultivated mind and an unpractised pen. This is the writer's fondness for well-worn phrases, which authors of a severer taste have long discarded as suited only to the newspapers, but which Mr. Beckett has picked up with eager delight, and, having distributed them liberally throughout the poem, contemplates with a complacency to be matched only by his satisfaction with the success of his expedients for filling out his rhymes, some of which are certainly ingenious and startling,
The plot is a jumble of improbabilities, to which we would gladly attend, for it passes even the liberal bounds of poetic license, but we have already spent all the time we can upon the New Poem, and we must decline (in Mr. Beckett's own impressive language) any further "to distend the title."
* * * * *
NOTE
TO THE ARTICLE ON "MODEL LODGING-HOUSES IN BOSTON."
Although the proposed act establishing a Sanitary Commission for the City of New York was defeated in the last State Legislature, some of its provisions were engrafted on a bill passed on the nineteenth of April, amending a previous "Act to establish a Metropolitan Police District, and to provide for the Government thereof."
By article 51 of this new act it is made the duty of the Board of Metropolitan Police to set apart a Sanitary Police Company, which by article 52 is empowered "to take all necessary legal measures for promoting the security of life or health," upon or in boats, manufactories, houses, and edifices. Article 53 gives power to the board to cause any tenement-house to be cleansed at any time after three days' notice, and provides means for meeting the expense of this and other similar operations.
These powers may, perhaps, if wisely exercised, secure a great improvement in the health of the city. We trust that the duties imposed by them will be thoroughly and efficiently performed, and we are gratified to see that a good beginning has already been made; but our regret is not diminished that the more complete proposed Sanitary Act failed to pass.
The annual report on "The Sanitary Condition of the City of London" has just been published. By this report it appears, that, during the year ending on the 31st of March, 1860, the rate of mortality in London was 22.4 per thousand of the population, or 1 in 44; in all England, the average rate is 22.3; in country districts it is only 20; in the large towns, 26. "Ten years ago," says Dr. Letheby, the author of the report from which we quote, "the annual mortality of the city was rarely less than 25 in the thousand…..Our present condition is 19 per cent. better than that, and we owe it to the sanitary labors of the last ten years." In another part of the report he says,—"7233 inspections of houses have been made in the course of the year, of which 803 were of the common lodging-houses, and 935 orders have been issued for sanitary improvement in various particulars."
Compare these facts with those given in our article concerning the rate of mortality in our cities. The spirit of emulation, if no other, should force us into energetic measures of reform. Boston with a death-rate of 1 in 41, New York of 1 in 27, and London of 1 in 44!
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