William Blackwood

“ The indignant passions of his unrequited lover are, indeed, passions of the most ignoble clay—not one touch of elevated feeling lifts him for a moment out of the mire. The whole train of circumstances which engender his emotions, prove the lover, in this case, to have been the silliest of mortal men, and his mistress, from the very beginning of his intercourse with her, to have been one of the most abandoned of her sex. “Lilian” is a burlesque on disappointed love, and a travestie of the passions which such a disappointment entails. ”

“ Would not Miss Barrett's hair have stood on end if Virgil had written "Arma virumque canto?" Yet surely that false quantity would have been not more repugnant to the genius of Latin verse than her transposition of accent in the word lament is at variance with the plainest proprieties of the English tongue. The "earth-spirits" deliver themselves thus:—
⁠Earth Spirits.
" And we scorn you! There's no pardon
Which can lean to you aright!
When your bodies take the guerdon
Of the death-curse in our sight,
Then the bee that hummeth lowest shall transcend you. ”

“ Had Mr Patmore’s injudicious friends not thought proper to announce him to the world as the brightest rising star in the poetical firmament of Young England, we would probably have allowed his effusions to die of their own utter insignificance. But since they have acted as they have done, we too must be permitted to express our opinion of their merits; and our deliberate judgment is, that the weakest inanity ever perpetrated in rhyme by the vilest poetaster of any former generation, becomes masculine verse when contrasted with the nauseous pulings of Mr Patmore’s muse. ”

“ In the hands of common-place, they are simply revolting. In the hands of folly and affectation, their repulsiveness is aggravated by the simpering conceits which usurp the place of the strongest passions of our nature. He only is privileged to unveil these gloomy depths of erring humanity, who can subdue their repulsiveness by touches of ethereal feeling; and whose imagination, buoyant above the waves of passion, bears the heart of the reader into havens of calm beauty, even when following the most deplorable aberrations of a child of sin. ”

“ Such a man is not Mr Patmore. He has no imagination at all—or, what is the same thing, an imagination which welters in impotence, far below the level of the emotions which it ought to overrule. The pitfalls of his tale of misery are covered over with thin sprinklings of asterisks—the poorest subterfuge of an impoverished imagination; and besotted indeed is the senselessness with which he disports himself around their margin. Maud, the victim, is the daughter of Gerald, the woodman; and Merton, the seducer, is the son of a rich squire in the neighbourhood. ”

“ We cannot read it, however, without appreciating the fervour which stirs the soul of the authoress through all its depths, when she declares and upholds the sacred mission of the poet, and teaches him that he must embrace his destiny with gratitude amid pride, even though the crown which encircles his living brows be one in which the thorns far outnumber the laurel leaves. We shall grace our pages with a series of portraits in which Miss Barrett sketches off first the true poets and then the pretenders. ”

“ Unless lyrical emotion be expressed in language as clear as a mountain rill and as well defined as the rocks over which it runs, it is much better left unsung. The merit of all lyrical poetry consists in the clearness and cleanness with which it is cut; no tags or loose ends can any where be permitted. But Miss Barrett's lyrical compositions are frequently so inarticulate, so slovenly, and so defective, both in rhythm and rhyme, that we are really surprised how a person of her powers could have written them and how a person of any judgment could have published them. ”

“ Let it not be thought that we would counsel Miss Barrett, or any one else, to propose these works to themselves as direct objects of imitation. Far from it. Such directions would be very vague and unmeaning, and might lead to the commission of the very errors which they aimed at preventing. The words "purity and propriety of diction" are themselves very vague words. Let us say, then, that a style which goes at once to the point, which is felt to get through business, and which carries with it no affectation, either real or apparent, is always a good style; and that no other style is good. ”

“ It is plain that Miss Barrett would always write well if she wrote simply from her own heart, and without thinking of the compositions of any other author—at least let her think of them only in so far as she is sure that they embody great thoughts in pure and appropriate language and in forms of construction which will endure the most rigid scrutiny of common sense and unperverted taste. ”

“ If we might venture to divine this lady's moral and intellectual character from the general tone of her writings, we should say, that never did woman's mind dwell more habitually among the thoughts of a solemn experience—never was woman's genius impressed more profoundly with the earnestness of life, or sanctified more purely by the overshadowing awfulness of death. She aspires to write as she has lived ”

“ Yet Milton's Satan and Miss Barrett's Lucifer are the very antipodes of each other. Milton's Satan is a thoroughly practical character, and, if he had been human, he would have made a first-rate man of business in any department of life. Miss Barrett's Lucifer, on the contrary, is the poorest prater that ever made a point of saying nothing to the purpose, and we feel assured that he could have put his hand to nothing in heaven, on earth, or in hell. He has nothing to do, he does nothing, and he could do nothing. ”

“ Winton, according to the account of the false Lilian, having a love in France, could not, of course be supposed to be paying court to her. Thus the lover is thrown off the scent, and his doubts are entirely laid asleep. He is again in the seventh heavens of assured love, and continues thus:— ⁠"Another calm so perfect I should think is only shed
⁠On good men dying gently, who recall a life well led,
⁠Till they cannot tell, for sweetness, if they be alive or dead. ”

“ The lady proffers her petition for the hawk; and discovers from Sir Hubert’s answer, and to her own consternation, that she has eaten the very article she came in quest of, and which she had expected to carry home alive; as the only means of saving the life of her son. The young gentleman dies on finding that he cannot obtain what he wants; and Mabel marries Sir Hubert, and settles upon him all her possessions, as a reward for his magnanimity in sacrificing that which (next to herself) he held dearest in the whole world, rather than that she should go without a dinner. ”

“ In Spite of many blemishes in point of execution, this lady's poems have left a very favourable impression on our mind. If the poetess does not always command our unqualified approbation, we are at all times disposed to bend in reverence before the deep-hearted and highly accomplished woman—a woman, whose powers appear to us to extend over a wider and profounder range of thought and feeling, than ever before fell within the intellectual compass of any of the softer sex. ”

“ If she will but wash her hands completely of Æschylus and Milton and all other poets, either great, or whom she takes for such, and come before the public in the graces of her own feminine sensibilities, and in the strength of her own profound perceptions, her sway over human hearts will be more irresistible than ever, and she will have nothing to fear from a comparison with the most gifted and illustrious of her sex. ”

“ Those among our readers who may have attended principally to the selections which we made from these volumes before we animadverted on the "Drama of Exile," may perhaps be of opinion that we have treated Miss Barrett with undue severity, and have not done justice to the vigour and rare originality of her powers; while others, who may have attended chiefly to the blemishes of style and execution which we have thought it our duty to point out in our later quotations, may possibly think that we have ranked her higher than she deserves. ”

“ Yes; we fear it is too true that the voice of God never speaks so articulately to man, as when it speaks in the desperate calm of a soul to which life or death has done its worst. The same solemn thought with which the sonnet concludes, forms the moral of her ballad entitled the "Lay of the Brown Rosary." It is thus that the heroine of that poem speaks—
⁠" Then breaking into tears—' Dear God,' she cried, 'and must we see
⁠All blissful things depart from us, or ere we go to Thee? ”

“ We fear not to say that Milton himself owes much of his reputation to the peremptory and businesslike vigour of his style. He never beats about the bush—he never employs language which a plain man would not have employed—if he could. The sublimity of "Paradise Lost" is supported throughout by the direct force of its language—language the most elaborate, but also the most to the point, and the least fantastical, that ever fell from human lips. There are difficulties to encounter in the abstract conception of the poem. The naked argument does not at first recommend itself to our understanding. ”

“ The common practice of writers who deal with stories of love, whose “course never did run smooth,” is to make their heroes commit suicide, on finding that the ladies whom they had wooed in vain were married to other people. But in the poem before us, Mr Patmore improves upon this method; he drowns his lover, Witchaire, because the lady, whom he had never wooed at all, does not marry him, but gives her hand (why should she not?) to the man who sues for it. Did Witchaire expect that the lady was to propose to him? ”

“ It is “Locksley Hall” stripped of all its beauty, and debased by a thousand vulgarities, both of sentiment and style. The burden of both poems consists of bitter denunciations poured forth by disappointed and deserted love; with this difference, that the passion which Mr Tennyson gives utterance to, Mr Patmore reverberates in rant. A small poet, indeed, could not have worked after a more unsafe model. ”

“ We verily believe that Miss Barrett herself does not talk of "Laurar" and "Matildar" we verily believe that she would consider any one who does so no fit associate for herself in point of manners or education:—yet she scruples not to make "Aceldama" (r) rhyme to "tamer," and "Onora" (r) rhyme to "o'er her." When we think of these things, we turn to the following "stage-direction" with which her "Drama of Exile" concludes—There is a sound through the silence as of the falling tears of an angel." That angel must have been a distressed critic like ourselves. ”

“ We have said that the lyrical effusions interspersed throughout the "Drama of Exile," are very slovenly and defective in point of rhyme. What can be worse than "Godhead" and "wooded,"' "treading" and "Eden," "glories" and "floorwise," "calmly" and "palm-tree," "atoms" and "fathoms," "accompted" and "trumpet," and a hundred others? What can be worse, do we ask? We answer that there is one species of rhyme which Miss Barrett is sometimes, though we are happy to say, very rarely, guilty of, which is infinitely more reprehensible than any of these inaccuracies. ”

“ On a fine day in the following summer, the poet brings the lady to the banks of this river. His evident intention is, to raise in the reader's mind the expectation that she shall discover her lover's body, or some other circumstance indicative of the fatal catastrophe. This expectation, however, he disappoints. The only remarkable occurrence which takes place is, that the lady does not find the corpse, nor does any evidence transpire which can lead her to suppose that the suicide had ever been committed; and with this senseless and inconclusive conclusion the reader is befooled. ”

“ In the writings of such a woman, there must be much which is calculated to be a blessing and a benefit to mankind. If her genius always found a suitable exponent in her style, she would stand unrivaled, we think, among the poetesses of England. ”

“ We allude to the practice of affixing an r to the end of certain words, in order to make them rhyme with other words which terminate in that letter. Writers who are guilty of this atrocity are not merely to be condemned as bad rhymester they are to be blamed on the far more serious ground that they give the sanction and authority of print to one of the vilest vulgarisms which pollutes the oral language of certain provincial societies. ”

“ The spirit of her poetry appears to us to be eminently religious; not because we think her very successful when she deals directly with the mysteries of divine truth, but because she makes us feel, even when handling the least sacred subjects, that we are in the presence of a heart which, in its purity, sees God. ”