Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 407, September, 1849

The Strayed Reveller is rather a curious compound of imitation. He claims to be a classical scholar of no mean acquirements, and a good deal of his inspiration is traceable to the Greek dramatists. In certain of his poems he tries to think like Sophocles, and has so far succeeded as to have constructed certain choric passages, which might be taken by an unlettered person for translations from the antique. The language, though hard, is rather stately; and many of the individual images are by no means destitute of grace. The epithets which he employs bear the stamp of the Greek coinage; but, upon the whole, we must pronounce these specimens failures. The images are not bound together or grouped artistically, and the rhythm which the author has selected is, to an English ear, utterly destitute of melody. It is strange that people cannot be brought to understand that the genius and capabilities of one language differ essentially from those of another: and that the measures of antiquity are altogether unsuitable for modern verse. It is no doubt possible, by a Procrustean operation, to force words into almost any kind of mould; a chorus may be constructed, which, so far as scanning goes, might satisfy the requirements of a pedagogue, but the result of the experiment will inevitably show that melody has been sacrified in the attempt. Now melody is a charm without which poetry is of little worth; we are not quite sure whether it would not be more correct to say, that without melody poetry has no existence. Our author does not seem to have the slightest idea of this, and accordingly he treats us to such passages as the following: —

"No, no, old men, Creon I curse not.
I weep, Thebans,
One than Creon crueller far,
For he, he, at least by slaying her,
August laws doth mightily vindicate:
But thou, too bold, headstrong, pitiless,
Ah me! honourest more than thy lover,
O Antigone,
A dead, ignorant, thankless corpse."

"Nor was the love untrue
Which the Dawn-Goddess bore
To that fair youth she erst,
Leaving the salt-sea beds
And coming flush'd over the stormy frith
Of loud Euripus, saw:
Saw and snatch'd, wild with love,
From the pine-dotted spurs
Of Parnes, where thy waves,
Asopus, gleam rock-hemm'd;
The Hunter of the Tanagrœan Field.
But him, in his sweet prime,
By severance immature,
By Artemis' soft shafts,
She, though a goddess born,
Saw in the rocky isle of Delos die.
Such end o'ertook that love,
For she desired to make
Immortal mortal man,
And blend his happy life,
Far from the gods, with hers:
To him postponing an eternal law."

We are sincerely sorry to find the lessons of a good classical education applied to so pitiable a use; for if, out of courtesy, the above should be denominated verses, they are nevertheless as far removed from poetry as the Indus is from the pole. It is one thing to know the classics, and another to write classically. Indeed, if this be classical writing, it would furnish the best argument ever yet advanced against the study of the works of antiquity. Mr Tennyson, to whom, as we shall presently have occasion to observe, this author is indebted for another phase of his inspiration, has handled classical subjects with fine taste and singular delicacy; and his "Ulysses" and "Œnone" show how beautifully the Hellenic idea may be wrought out in mellifluous English verse. But Tennyson knows his craft too well to adopt either the Greek phraseology or the Greek rhythm. Even in the choric hymns which he has once or twice attempted, he has spurned halt and ungainly metres, and given full freedom and scope to the cadence of his mother tongue. These antique scraps of the Reveller are farther open to a still more serious objection, which indeed is applicable to most of his poetry. We read them, marking every here and there some image of considerable beauty; but, when we have laid down the book, we are unable for the life of us to tell what it is all about. The poem from which the volume takes its name is a confused kind of chaunt about Circe, Ulysses, and the Gods, from which no exercise of ingenuity can extract the vestige of a meaning. It has pictures which, were they introduced for any conceivable purpose, might fairly deserve some admiration; but, thrust in as they are, without method or reason, they utterly lose their effect, and only serve to augment our dissatisfaction at the perversion of a taste which, with so much culture, should have been capable of better things.

The adoption of the Greek choric metres, in some of the poems, appears to us the more inexplicable, because in others, when he descends from his classic altitudes, our author shows that he is by no means insensible to the power of melody. True, he wants that peculiar characteristic of a good poet – a melody of his own; for no poet is master of his craft unless his music is self-inspired: but, in default of that gift, he not unfrequently borrows a few notes or a tune from some of his contemporaries, and exhibits a fair command and mastery of his instrument. Here, for example, are a few stanzas, the origin of which nobody can mistake. They are an exact echo of the lyrics of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: —

"Are the accents of your luring
More melodious than of yore?
Are those frail forms more enduring
Than the charms Ulysses bore?
That we sought you with rejoicings,
Till at evening we descry,
At a pause of siren voicings,
These vext branches and this howling sky?

Oh! your pardon. The uncouthness
Of that primal age is gone,
And the kind of dazzling smoothness
Screens not now a heart of stone.
Love has flushed those cruel faces;
And your slackened arms forego
The delight of fierce embraces;
And those whitening bone-mounds do not grow.

'Come,' you say; 'the large appearance
Of man's labour is but vain;
And we plead as firm adherence
Due to pleasure as to pain.'
Pointing to some world-worn creatures,
'Come,' you murmur with a sigh:
'Ah! we own diviner features,
Loftier bearing, and a prouder eye.'"

High and commanding genius is able to win our attention even in its most eccentric moods. Such genius belongs to Mrs Browning in a very remarkable degree, and on that account we readily forgive her for some forced rhyming, intricate diction, and even occasional obscurity of thought. But what shall we say of the man who seeks to reproduce her marvellous effects by copying her blemishes? Read the above lines, and you will find that, in so far as sound and mannerism go, they are an exact transcript from Mrs Browning. Apply your intellect to the discovery of their meaning, and you will rise from the task thoroughly convinced of its hopelessness. The poem in which they occur is entitled The New Sirens, but it might with equal felicity and point have been called The New Harpies, or The Lay of the Hurdy-Gurdy. It seems to us a mere experiment, for the purpose of showing that words placed together in certain juxtaposition, without any regard to their significance or propriety, can be made to produce a peculiar phonetic effect. The phenomenon is by no means a new one – it occurs whenever the manufacture of nonsense-verses is attempted; and it needed not the staining of innocent wire-wove to convince us of its practicability. Read the following stanza – divorce the sound from the sense, and then tell us what you can make of it: —

"With a sad majestic motion —
With a stately slow surprise —
From their earthward-bound devotion
Lifting up your languid eyes:
Would you freeze my louder boldness,
Humbly smiling as you go?
One faint frown of distant coldness
Flitting fast across each marble brow?"

What say you, Parson Sir Hugh Evans? "The tevil with his tam; what phrase is this —freeze my louder boldness? Why, it is affectations."

If any one, in possession of a good ear, and with a certain facility for composing verse, though destitute of the inventive faculty, will persevere in imitating the style of different poets, he is almost certain at last to discover some writer whose peculiar manner he can assume with far greater facility than that of others. The Strayed Reveller fails altogether with Mrs Browning; because it is beyond his power, whilst following her, to make any kind of agreement between sound and sense. He is indeed very far from being a metaphysician, for his perception is abundantly hazy: and if he be wise, he will abstain from any future attempts at profundity. But he has a fair share of the painter's gift; and were he to cultivate that on his own account, we believe that he might produce something far superior to any of his present efforts. As it is, we can merely accord him the praise of sketching an occasional landscape, very like one which we might expect from Alfred Tennyson. He has not only caught the trick of Tennyson's handling, but he can use his colours with considerable dexterity. He is like one of those second-rate artists, who, with Danby in their eye, crowd our exhibitions with fiery sunsets and oceans radiant in carmine; sometimes their pictures are a little overlaid, but, on the whole, they give a fair idea of the manner of their undoubted master.

The following extract will, we think, illustrate our meaning. It is from a poem entitled Mycerinus, which, though it does not possess the interest of any tale, is correctly and pleasingly written: —

"So spake he, half in anger, half in scorn,
And one loud cry of grief and of amaze
Broke from his sorrowing people; so he spake,
And turning, left them there; and with brief pause,
Girt with a throng of revellers, bent his way
To the cool regions of the grove he loved.
There by the river banks he wandered on,
From palm-grove on to palm-grove; happy trees,
Their smooth tops shining sunwards, and beneath
Burying their unsunn'd stems in grass and flowers;
Where in one dream the feverish time of youth
Might fade in slumber, and the feet of Joy
Might wander all day long and never tire:
Here came the king, holding high feast, at morn
Rose-crown'd; and ever, when the sun went down,
A hundred lamps beam'd in the tranquil gloom