Critical Notices [pp. 326-340]

SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.
As an instance of what may be termed the sublimely
ridiculous we quote the following lines from page 17.
With sweeping tail and quivering fin,
Through the wave the sturgeon flew,
And like the heaven-shot javelin,
He sprung above the waters blue.
Instant as the star-fall light,
He plunged into the deep again,
But left an arch of silver bright
The rainbow of the moony main.
It was a strange and lovely sight
To see the puiny goblin there
He seemed an angel form of light
With azure iving and sunny hair,
Throned on a cloud of purple fair
Circled with blue and edged with white
tnd sitting at the fall of even
Beneath the bow of sumimer heaven.
The verses here italicized, if considered without their
context, have a certain air of dignity, elegance, and chastity of thought. If however we apply the context, we
are immediately overwhelmed with the grotesque. It
is impossible to read without laughing, such expressions
as "It was a strange and lovely sight"-" He seemed
an angel form of light"-" And sitting at the fall of
even, beneath the bow of summer heaven" to a Fairya goblin-an Ouphe-half an inch high, dressed in an
acorn helmet and butterfly-cloak, and sitting on the
water in a muscle-shell, with a "brown-backed sturgeon" turning somersets over his head.
In a world where evil is a mere consequence of good,
and good a mere consequence of evil-in short where
all of which we have any conception is good or bad only
by comparison-we have never yet been fully able to
appreciate the validity of that decision which would
debar the critic from enforcing upon his readers the merits or demerits of a work by placing it in juxta-position with another. It seems to us that an adage based
in the purest ignorance has had more to do with this
popular feeling than anyjust reason founded upon common sense. Thinking thus, we shall have no scruple in
illustrating our opinion in regard to what is not Ideality
or the Poetic Power, by an example of what is.* We
have already given the description of the Sylphid Queen
in the Culprit Fay. In the Quteen Mab of Shelley a Fairy
is thus introduced
Those who had looked upon the sight,
Passing all human glory,
Saw not the yellow moon,
Saw not the mortal scene
Heard not the night wind's rush,
Heard not an earthly sound,
Saw but the fairy pageant,
Heard but the heavenly strains
That filled the lonely dwelling
and thus described
we have ever met with, sustaining in each incident a most bewitching interest. Its very title is enough," &c. &c. We quote these
expressions as a fair specimen of the general unphilosophical
and adulatory tenor of our criticism.
* As examples of entire poems of the purest ideality, we
would cite the Prometheus Vinctus of Eschylus, the Infe/no of
Dante, Cervantes' Destruction of Numantia, the Comus of Milton, Pope's Rape of the Lock, Burns' Tam O'Shanter, the duncienr.t Mariner, the Christabel, and the Kubla Khan of Coleridge;
and most especially the Sensitive Plant of Shelley, and the
Nightingale of Keats. We have seen American poems evincing
the faculty in the highest degree.
The Fairy's frame was slight; yon fibrous cloud
That catches but the palest tinge of even,
And which the straining eye can hardly seize
When melting into eastern twilight's shadow,
Were scarce so thin, so slight; but the fair star
That gems the glittering coronet of morn,
Sheds not a light so mild, so powerful,
.ds that which, bursting from the Fairy's form,
Spread a purpureal halo round the scene,
Yet with an undulating motion,
Swayed to her outline gracefully.
In these exquisite lines the Faculty of mere Comparison is but little exercised-that of Ideality in a wonderful degree. It is probable that in a similar case the poet
we are now reviewing would have formed the face of
the Fairy of the "fibrous cloud," her arms of the "pale
tinge of even," her eyes of the " fair stars," and her
body of the "twilight shadow." Having so done, his
admirers would have congratulated him upon his imagination, not taking the trouble to think that they themselves could at any moment imagine a Fairy of materials
equally as good, and conveying an equally distinct idea.
Their mistake would be precisely analogous to that of
many a schoolboy who admires the imagination displayed in Jack the Giant-Killer, and is finally rejoiced
at discovering his own imagination to surpass that of
the author, since the monsters destroyed by Jack are
only about forty feet in height, and he himself has no
trouble in imagining some of one hundred and forty. It
will be seen that the Fairy of SShelley is not a mere compound of incongruous natural objects, inartificially put
together, and unaccompanied by any moral sentimentbut a being, in the illustration of whose nature some
physical elements are used collaterally as adjuncts, while
the main conception springs immediately or thus apparently springs, f-rom the brain of the poet, enveloped in
the moral sentiments of grace, of color, of motion-of
the beautiful, of the mystical, of the august-in short
of the ideal.*
It is by no means our intention to deny that in the Culprit Fay are passages of a different order from those to
which we have objected-passages evincing a degree of
imagination not to be discovered in the plot, conception,
or general execution of the poem. The opening stanza
will afford us a tolerable example.
'Tis the middle watch of a summer's night The earth is dark, but the heavens are bright
Naught is seen in the vault on high
But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue
A river of light on the welkin blue.
The moon looks down on old Cronest,
She mellows the shades of his shaggy breast,
And seems his huge grey form to throw
In a silver cone on the wave below;
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bough and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark Like starry twinkles that momently break
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest rack.
There is Ideality in these lines-but except in the
case of the words italicized-it is Ideality not of a high
order. We have it is true, a collection of natural ob
* Among things, which not only in our opinion, but in the opinion of far wiser and better men, are to be ranked with the mere
prettinesses of the Muse, are the positive similes so abundant in
the writings of antiquity, and so much insisted upon by the critics
of the reign of Queen Anne.
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