Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes Part 19

Far o'er the long backs of the bushless downs.

[1] We use the word in what we conceive to be its only legitimate meaning; namely, after the manner and with the effect of painting.

It signifies the _quid_, not the _quale_.

How becoming is the appearance of what we familiarly term the "clod" in the "Princess"! (p. 37)--

Nor those horn-handled breakers of the glebe.

Of all imaginable subjects, mathematics might seem the most hopeless to make mention of in verse; but they are with him

The hard-grained Muses of the cube and square.

Thus at a single stroke he gives an image alike simple, true, and poetical to boot, because suited to its place and object in his verse, like the heavy Caryatides well placed in architecture. After this, we may less esteem the feat by which in "G.o.diva" he describes the clock striking mid-day:--

All at once, With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers.

But even the contents of a pigeon-pie are not beneath his notice, nor yet beyond his powers of embellishment, in "Audley Court":--

A pasty, costly made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied.

What excites more surprise is that he can, without any offence against good taste, venture to deal with these contents even after they have entered the mouth of the eater ("Enid," p. 79):--

The brawny spearman let his cheek Bulge with the unswallowed piece, and turning, stared.

The delicate insight of fine taste appears to show him with wonderful precision up to what point his art can control and compel his materials, and from what point the materials are in hopeless rebellion and must be let alone. So in the "Princess" (p. 89) we are introduced to--

Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men, Huge women _blowzed_ with health, and wind, and rain, And labour.

It was absolutely necessary for him to heighten, nay, to coa.r.s.en, the description of these ma.s.ses of animated beef, who formed the standing army of the woman-commonwealth. Few would have obeyed this law without violating another; but Mr. Tennyson saw that the verb was admissible, while the adjective would have been intolerable.

In 1842 his purging process made it evident that he did not mean to allow his faults or weaknesses to stint the growth and mar the exhibition of his genius. When he published "In Memoriam" in 1850, all readers were conscious of the progressive widening and strengthening, but, above all, deepening of his mind. We cannot hesitate to mark the present volume as exhibiting another forward and upward stride, and that by perhaps the greatest of all, in his career. If we are required to show cause for this opinion under any special head, we would at once point to that which is, after all, the first among the poet's gifts--the gift of conceiving and representing human character.

Mr. Tennyson's Arthurian essays continually suggest to us comparisons not so much with any one poet as a whole, but rather with many or most of the highest poets. The music and the just and pure modulation of his verse carry us back not only to the fine ear of Sh.e.l.ley, but to Milton and to Shakespeare: and his powers of fancy and of expression have produced pa.s.sages which, if they are excelled by that one transcendent and ethereal poet of our nation whom we have last named, yet could have been produced by no other English minstrel. Our author has a right to regard his own blank verse as highly characteristic and original: but yet Milton has contributed to its formation, and occasionally there is a striking resemblance in turn and diction, while Mr. Tennyson is the more idiomatic of the two. The chast.i.ty and moral elevation of this volume, its essential and profound though not didactic Christianity, are such as perhaps cannot be matched throughout the circle of English literature in conjunction with an equal power: and such as to recall a pattern which we know not whether Mr. Tennyson has studied, the celestial strain of Dante.[1] This is the more remarkable, because he has had to tread upon the ground which must have been slippery for any foot but his. We are far from knowing that either Lancelot or Guinevere would have been safe even for mature readers, were it not for the instinctive purity of his mind and the high skill of his management. We do not know that in other times they have had their n.o.ble victims, whose names have become immortal as their own.

Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto Di Lancilotto, e come amor lo strinse.

Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse.[2]

[1] It is no reproach to say that neither Dante nor Homer could have been studied by Mr. Tennyson at the time--a very early period of his life--when he wrote the lines which are allotted to them respectively in "The Palace of Art."

[2] "Inferno," c. V, v. 127.

How difficult it is to sustain the elevation of such a subject, may be seen in the well-meant and long popular "Jane Sh.o.r.e" of Rowe. How easily this very theme may be vulgarised, is shown in the _"Chevaliers de la Table Ronde"_ of M. Creuze de Lesser, who nevertheless has aimed at a peculiar delicacy of treatment.

But the grand poetical quality in which this volume gives to its author a new rank and standing is the dramatic power: the power of drawing character and of representing action. These faculties have not been precocious in Mr. Tennyson: but what is more material, they have come out in great force. He has always been fond of personal delineations, from Claribel and Lilian down to his Ida, his Psyche, and his Maud; but they have been of shadowy quality, doubtful as to flesh and blood, and with eyes having little or no speculation in them. But he is far greater and far better when he has, as he now has, a good raw material ready to his hand, than when he draws only on the airy or chaotic regions of what Carlyle calls unconditioned possibility. He is made not so much to convert the moor into the field, as the field into the rich and gorgeous garden. The imperfect _nisus_ which might be remarked in some former works has at length reached the fulness of dramatic energy: in the Idylls we have nothing vague or dreamy to complain of: everything lives and moves, in the royal strength of nature: the fire of Prometheus has fairly caught the clay: every figure stands clear, broad, and sharp before us, as if it had sky for its background: and this of small as well as great, for even the "little novice" is projected on the canvas with the utmost truth and vigour, and with that admirable effect in heightening the great figure of Guinevere, which Patroclus produces for the character of Achilles, and (as some will have it) the modest structure of Saint Margaret's for the giant proportions of Westminster Abbey. And this, we repeat, is the crowning gift of the poet: the power of conceiving and representing man.

We do not believe that a Milton--or, in other words, the writer of a "Paradise Lost"--could ever be so great as a Shakespeare or a Homer, because (setting aside all other questions) his chief characters are neither human, nor can they be legitimately founded upon humanity; and, moreover, what he has to represent of man is, by the very law of its being, limited in scale and development. Here at least the saying is a true one: _Antiquitas saeculi, juventus mundi;_ rendered by our poet in "The Day-dream,"

For we are ancients of the earth, And in the morning of the times.

The Adam and Eve of Paradise exhibit to us the first inception of our race; and neither then, nor after their first sad lesson, could they furnish those materials for representation, which their descendants have acc.u.mulated in the school of their incessant and many-coloured, but on the whole too gloomy, experience. To the long chapters of that experience every generation of man makes its own addition. Again we ask the aid of Mr. Tennyson in "Locksley Hall":--

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

The subst.i.tution of law for force has indeed altered the relations of the strong and the weak; the hardening or cooling down of political inst.i.tutions and social traditions, the fixed and legal track instead of the open pathless field, have removed or neutralised many of those occasions and pa.s.sages of life, which were formerly the schools of individual character. The genius of mechanism has vied, in the arts of both peace and war, with the strong hand, and has well-nigh robbed it of its place. But let us not be deceived by that smoothness of superficies, which the social prospect offers to the distant eye. Nearness dispels the illusion; life is still as full of deep, of ecstatic, of harrowing interests as it ever was. The heart of man still beats and bounds, exults and suffers, from causes which are only less salient and conspicuous because they are more mixed and diversified. It still undergoes every phase of emotion, and even, as seems probable, with a susceptibility which has increased and is increasing, and which has its index and outer form in the growing delicacy and complexities of the nervous system. Does any one believe that ever at any time there was a greater number of deaths referable to that comprehensive cause a broken heart? Let none fear that this age, or any coming one, will extinguish the material of poetry. The more reasonable apprehension might be lest it should sap the vital force necessary to handle that material, and mould it into appropriate forms. To those especially, who cherish any such apprehension, we recommend the perusal of this volume. Of it we will say without fear, what we would not dare to say of any other recent work; that of itself it raises the character and the hopes of the age and the country which have produced it, and that its author, by his own single strength, has made a sensible addition to the permanent wealth of mankind.

CANON WILBERFORCE ON DARWIN

[From _The Quarterly Review_, July, 1860]

_On the Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection; or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life._ By CHARLES DARWIN, M.A., F.R.S. London, 1860.

Any contribution to our Natural History literature from the pen of Mr.

C. Darwin is certain to command attention. His scientific attainments, his insight and carefulness as an observer, blended with no scanty measure of imaginative sagacity, and his clear and lively style, make all his writings unusually attractive. His present volume on the _Origin of Species_ is the result of many years of observation, thought, and speculation; and is manifestly regarded by him as the "opus" upon which his future fame is to rest. It is true that he announces it modestly enough as the mere precursor of a mightier volume. But that volume is only intended to supply the facts which are to support the completed argument of the present essay. In this we have a specimen-collection of the vast acc.u.mulation; and, working from these as the high a.n.a.lytical mathematician may work from the admitted results of his conic sections, he proceeds to deduce all the conclusions to which he wishes to conduct his readers.

The essay is full of Mr. Darwin's characteristic excellences. It is a most readable book; full of facts in natural history, old and new, of his collecting and of his observing; and all of these are told in his own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations, and all sparkle with the colours of fancy and the lights of imagination.

It a.s.sumes, too, the grave proportions of a sustained argument upon a matter of the deepest interest, not to naturalists only, or even to men of science exclusively, but to every one who is interested in the history of man and of the relations of nature around him to the history and plan of creation.

With Mr. Darwin's "argument" we may say in the outset that we shall have much and grave fault to find. But this does not make us the less disposed to admire the singular excellences of his work; and we will seek _in limine_ to give our readers a few examples of these. Here, for instance, is a beautiful ill.u.s.tration of the wonderful interdependence of nature--of the golden chain of unsuspected relations which bind together all the mighty web which stretches from end to end of this full and most diversified earth. Who, as he listened to the musical hum of the great humble-bees, or marked their ponderous flight from flower to flower, and watched the unpacking of their trunks for their work of suction, would have supposed that the multiplication or diminution of their race, or the fruitfulness and sterility of the red clover, depend as directly on the vigilance of our cats as do those of our well-guarded game-preserves on the watching of our keepers? Yet this Mr. Darwin has discovered to be literally the case:--

From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found that the visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England." Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Mr. Newman says, "near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence, it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention, first of mice, and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district.--p. 74.

Now, all this is, we think, really charming writing. We feel as we walk abroad with Mr. Darwin very much as the favoured object of the attention of the dervise must have felt when he had rubbed the ointment around his eye, and had it opened to see all the jewels, and diamonds, and emeralds, and topazes, and rubies, which were sparkling unregarded beneath the earth, hidden as yet from all eyes save those which the dervise had enlightened. But here we are bound to say our pleasure terminates; for, when we turn with Mr. Darwin to his "argument," we are almost immediately at variance with him. It is as an "argument" that the essay is put forward; as an argument we will test it.

We can perhaps best convey to our readers a clear view of Mr. Darwin's chain of reasoning, and of our objections to it, if we set before them, first, the conclusion to which he seeks to bring them; next, the leading propositions which he must establish in order to make good his final inference; and then the mode by which he endeavours to support his propositions.

The conclusion, then, to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great Earth-Museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son,--"animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number" (p. 484), as Mr.

Darwin at first somewhat diffidently suggests; or rather, as, growing bolder when he has once p.r.o.nounced his theory, he goes on to suggest to us, from one single head:--

a.n.a.logy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that ALL ANIMALS and PLANTS have descended from some one prototype. But a.n.a.logy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless, all living things have much in common in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction....

Therefore I shall infer from a.n.a.logy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the Creator.--p. 484.

This is the theory which really pervades the whole volume. Man, beast, creeping thing, and plant of the earth, are all the lineal and direct descendants of some one individual _ens_, whose various progeny have been simply modified by the action of natural and ascertainable conditions into the multiform aspect of life which we see around us.

This is undoubtedly at first sight a somewhat startling conclusion to arrive at. To find that mosses, gra.s.ses, turnips, oaks, worms, and flies, mites and elephants, infusoria and whales, tadpoles of to-day and venerable saurians, truffles and men, are all equally the lineal descendants of the same aboriginal common ancestor, perhaps of the nucleated cell of some primaeval fungus, which alone possessed the distinguis.h.i.+ng honour of being the "one primordial form into which life was first breathed by the Creator "--this, to say the least of it, is no common discovery--no very expected conclusion. But we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to start back from any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. Newton's patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses; and if Mr. Darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousins.h.i.+p with the mushrooms,--

Claim kindred there, and have our claim allowed,

--only we shall ask leave to scrutinise carefully every step of the argument which has such an ending, and demur if at any point of it we are invited to subst.i.tute unlimited hypothesis for patient observation, or the spasmodic fluttering flight of fancy for the severe conclusions to which logical accuracy of reasoning has led the way.

Now, the main propositions by which Mr. Darwin's conclusion is attained are these:--

1. That observed and admitted variations spring up in the course of descents from a common progenitor.