Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), May 3, 1845, vol. 1, no. 18, p. ??

[page 281, column 2, continued:]

REVIEWS.

ALNWICK CASTLE, with other Poems. By Fitz-Greene Halleck. New York, Harper & Brothers. 1845.

The system of criticism which obtains among us, and which tries the productions of one American mind by those of another, instead of comparing them with some immutable standard, or with the best examples in the same kind with which other countries have supplied us, has done great injury to the [page 282:] cause of true Art in our Republic. It was our misfortune to be in too great a hurry to have a literature of our own. We had built up an army and navy: we must build up a literature. It was further unanimously resolved that we had a national literature; and a score or two of terrified Tompkinses, who might otherwise have remained life-long the contented anchorites of the poet's corner in a village newspaper, were suddenly snatched up and set to bear the pitiless storm of foreign fun and criticism on the bald top of our American Parnassus. Henceforth every new work was measured by the Tompkins yardstick; and the “precision and elegance,” “the refined dignity,” “the exuberant humor” of Tompkins became proverbial. Under these favorable circumstances, the gentlemen thus ostracised from among their fellow citizens for their country's fame, plucked up courage, and by dint of well-directed energy succeeded in founding what we may call the Tompkins dynasty of American literature. A court dress of a certain innocuous drab-color was established, and any author who was detected without this Tompkins uniform was forthwith arrested and thrown into a review, or set in the pillory of the newspapers. The heresy of originality was everywhere industriously hunted out and crushed; and independence of judgment in criticism was declared to be immoral, or, what was far worse, anti-Tompkinsian. If man, woman, or child, was unwilling to receive the opinion of a Tompkins, how great an insensibility did it display to the numerous privileges we enjoy!

The truth is that we shall never have a literature until we become thoroughly persuaded that we have not yet done all that is needful to that end, and that it requires at least as much previous study and preparation to criticise a work of art as a steam engine. We must get over our cant of always speaking of certain of our authors and artists as if they filled up the majestic round of that circle which even Shakspeare did not touch at all points. We must no longer endeavor to measure anything really great by the rushlight criticism of the Tompkinses, but must look on it in the broad frank sunshine of honest desire after Truth. We must get rid also of this unhealthy hankering after a National Literature. The best and most enduring literature is that which has no nationality except of the heart, — that which is the same under all languages and under all skies. A poet's inspiration has no more intimate connection with the country in which he chances to be born, than with the village or the garret in which he may dwell. While yet a sojourner among our mists and shadows, he is made citizen of a higher country, whose language is an interpreter throughout the universe, and which has no words mean enough to express our paltry nationalities, nor indeed any thoughts but such as are primitive and universal.

The office of poet, then, is the highest to which any man. in these latter times, may aspire. The poet has taken the place of the prophet, and, without laying any claim to immediate inspiration, he yet, by force of seeing the heart of those mysteries whose shell only is visible to others, instructs and prophesies with an authority felt if not acknowledged. If his words inculcate no truth directly, yet, by their innate harmony with universal laws, and by the sweet domestic privilege with which they enter the heart without knocking, they clarify the conscience, and inspire us with an eagerness after truth, as would a tender or majestic landscape in outward nature. Let no man then take up the lyre hastily or irreverently, still less let him make its chords answerable for a gross and vulgar music.

In America we have been accustomed to confer the title of poet as if it were of no more value or import than a trumpery [column 2:] “Honorable” or “Excellency.” We have something like a thousand individuals in the country to whom the critics of the newspapers and magazines concede the name. But there are half a dozen who form a kind of inner circle, who already, though in the prime of life, enjoy all the advantages of a posthumous fame, and whose portraits smile with an embarrassed air opposite all the title-pages of selections from American poets. It is to these that our critics periodically challenge England to produce a parallel. It is these who are led out and exhibited when the intelligent foreigner inquires after our poets — honest, matter-of-fact-looking men, as the poets of a business people ought to be.

Mr. Halleck has had the ill fortune to be one of these frontispiecial exemplars. We call it ill fortune, for it is as unhappy a thing for a man to receive more as to receive less than his deserts. But in speaking of Mr. Halleck we shall treat him as if he were a young author now for the first time making his appearance before the world. What his reputation has been is nothing to us: what it ought to be is the only question. To have been always considered and treated as one of Fame's joint-heirs, and then to find that Fame has cut one off with a shilling, is worse than to have known the truth from the beginning.

If the volume before us, then, were the work of a young author, (and we should remember that in this case the real age of Mr. H. renders all faults less inexcusable,) is there anything in it that would lead us to prophesy great things of his future career? To this question we must frankly and readily answer, no. There is none of that exuberance here, that seeming waste of energy, which characterises the spring-tide of a great poet's heart, of whose innumerable blossoms few will ever become anything more useful than an ornament and token of immortal plenty. Here is none of that felicitous sympathy of car and eye which gives every word and image and harmonic invention of his as good a right to be in the world, as any blossom or bird or sigh of the wind can have. Here is none of that fine reverence which overhangs his heart like the broad free sky, now bare, simple, sustaining, now sprinkled thick with starry hopes and aspirations, and always the bestower of dignity, courage, and the calm majesty of entire humbleness. Here is none of that enthusiasm for his art which makes success but an argument for less self-glory, and which turns a whole unbelieving world's scorn into a stepping-stone to a higher peak of inspiration.

The world is indebted to the volume before us for no new thought, for the opening of no new vista into the enchanted forest of imagination, for no new combination of the wondrous melody of words. There is none of that inspiration here, none of that magnetic sympathy of genius which could solve for the young poet the enigma of his soul, and waken the slumbering energies of heart and brain and will, till the grand images and harmonies of the master fade away, and he beholds only the great void future like a silent organ waiting but for the al•pointed touch to breathe divinest music and ravish the reluctant world with love and pity. But even in some of the yet coarser elements of a true poet, Mr. Halleck is deficient. To the simpler and more vivacious kinds of metre, which depend rather on a certain gross and physical excitement of the musical sense, his ear is competent; but he seems to lack comprehension of those whose meaning is more interior, and whose charm is due to remoter and less tangible sympathies. What ingenuity, fur example, could make anything like rhythm of such incorrigible, corduroy jolt ings as these:

“Even of Campbell's pen hath pictured: he. —

Love has been so reverenced by true poets, and woman so worthily praised, that a poet's treatment of either of these hallowed subjects might almost be taken as a test of his power. Andromache and she

give bloom and fragrance to the Iliad. Beatrice hangs like a quiet star over the sulphureous pit of Dante's Hell, glides with a calming sereneness through his Purgatory, and is the heavenliest part of his Paradise. How unequalled are Shakspeace's pictures of women! Playful, whimsical, coquettish, sarcastic, yet never merely ornamental, and rounded of always with tender reverence and a pathos that gives them a noble dignity. And who will ever forget (to name no others) Wordsworth's “Phantom of Delight” and Coleridge's “Genevieve”? Mr. Halleck, with all the experience of fifty years in his head and heart, is content to put forth the following verses as containing his theory of love, but at the same time, to prevent any ill elect upon the mind of a susceptible public, he neutralises his nonsense by an equal amount of incomprehensibility. In the first two stanzas the poet's mind takes a horticultural turn, and beholds love in the original and novel shape of a tree:

Love, it will be seen, makes but an indifferent kind of tree, and puts forth buds of most singular, though convenient fragility.

Where? why?

A statement with regard to arterial circulation that would make Hervey open his eyes. — But “the tree of Love” is cut down in the next stanza to make a fire of.

Flatly contradicted by the experience of every unbreeched philosopher who has exercised his lungs in endeavoring to blow a fire-fly into a flame. Mr. H. seems to think the success of such an experiment possible.

We were rather puzzled at first to think with what particular muscles a “flame” would “smile”, but we had neglected to observe that it had “blazed into a being.” Mr. Espy's theory of rain is hinted at in the third verse, we suppose, or else what has the dew to do with it? We should like also to know which “hour” of a flame is not “warm.” We must not be surprised to find that a flame which has already been a tree and has accomplished the difficult disdain of a “smile in scorn”, should become two things at once in the next stanza.

Our sympathies, then, for Latimer, and Huss, and the rest, have been strangely misplaced. [column 2:]

In the next line a girl's Leghorn bat is said to be

We shall expect to hear shortly of Jupiter being put into some celestial watch-house, or Mars relating his “experience” in a Temperance meeting.

The same young woman's waist, the poet tells us, might he “spanned with your thumb and finger”, and

It is possible that Mr. Halleck may have the hardihood to defend this on the ground of its being humorous. And we suppose that the next poem is humorous also. If it be, we are sincerely glad, for it is surely nothing else. We shall not take the trouble to prove that humorous poetry, even where the humor is genuine, is the lowest kind of poetry, if, indeed, it can be rightly called so at all. In Mr. Halleck's verses the “humor” comes in very incongruously, and gives all our expectations a neck-breaking jolt.

There is a great deal of traditional morality and of entirely false sentiment in Mr. H.'s verses. For example, in “Alnwick Castle’ he says

When “faith and heaven” require to be defended by “sabre blows” and bloodshed, they must have sadly degenerated from what they were in Christ's time.

In the same poem Mr. H. laments that the day of romance has gone by, a statement which he sustains by telling us that the Highlanders of Scotland wear pantaloons, and that

four facts which all the shopkeepers in New York will consider extremely ludicrous, as a matter of course, without thinking for a moment that all these peers are much more creditably employed than any of their ruffian ancestors ever were. Moreover, there is more that is truly poetical in the operations connected with mining, the raising of malt, and the herring fishery, than in all the “chivalry” that ever went about breaking the heads of peaceable neighbours and the hearts of their wives and children. The man who thinks that the age of romance has gone by to-day, would have thought the same in Spenser's time. Poetry is as rife in the world as ever, but the secret of it lies in the heart and eye and ear of the poet, not in any combination of circumstances.