66 From The Spectator. THE RELATIVE MAGNITUDE OF POETS. 66 * We may Clifford," poems of action? was "Alastor" or the lines "In the 66 Adonais," MR. ALFRED AUSTIN, a critic of some cleverness who has expressed in unmeasured terms a profound contempt for the present writer, terming him "an ignorant and presumptuous scribbler, wholly unentitled to give an opinion on poetry at all," has just published a book, the object of which appears to be to demonstrate that there neither are nor can be any stars of the first magnitude in the sky of modern poetry, a rash thesis, which appears to commit its author to shut his eyes even if any that should seem to him great should Euganean Hills," or "Julian and Maddalo," or suddenly flash upon us. As he gives for this asserted incapacity the most inconsist- full of action? We fear that if the only ent and mutually destructive reasons, we excuse for what Mr. Austin thinks the dedo not care to follow him far into this haz-generacy of modern poetry is the deficiency ardous region of speculation. But as it of the present age in action, — is it thus will help to illustrate the subject we want deficient, by the way? was the Crimean to discuss, whether or not we have the war, or the American war, or the Sepoy materials for classifying the relative magni- the history of poetry shows it to be a very war in India, so very deficient in action?tude of poets with the slightest success, we will mention a few of them. One of bad excuse indeed. But Mr. Austin has them is, that this is not an age of action. another reason, which he evidently thinks a We may say of great poetry," says Mr. still better one, why the age can't produce Austin, what Demosthenes said of great great poets. It is an age of divided counortaory, that the soul of it is, action, sels; and M. Comte has said, with that action, action. The Iliad is all action, superficial brilliancy which has earned him so almost all is the Eneid.' at once so much admiration and so much The poetry of the Eneid" due to its action! Mr. contempt, "that art, in its highest and most Austin might almost as well assert the same satisfactory form, cannot possibly be exof the "Prometheus" of Eschylus, or the pected from an epoch and a people whose • Excursion of Wordsworth. Dr. New-best and most vivid intellects are not man knows Virgil better than Mr. Austin, and he incidentally touches the secret of his charm in one or two fine lines of his new book, which might almost have referred to some poet of our own day, when he speaks of the endearing and enduring elements of Virgil's poetry as his single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines giving utterance to the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the expression of her Well, in the face of the Book children in every time." Mr. Austin will hardly gain the critical reputation of which of Job and the Psalms, and the many wonhe is evidently ambitious, if he dashes off derful poems of Isaiah, which, whatever they a criticism of the "Eneid," as a stirring in the highest sense of the term, to say are more than poems, are certainly poems poem of the "Iliad" sort, in order to sustain a theory which has hardly a plausible nothing of the many grand Latin hymns, side to it. Mr. Austin puts Wordsworth that is a rather absurd assertion. But not very high, — and it does him credit that he to dwell on this somewhat parenthetical, and among the poets of the last gen- we think we may say demonstrably false eration. Was he a poet of action? Were canon of Mr. Austin's, but to keep purely the lines on Tintern Abbey," or the lines to his more deliberate Comtist principle on "Lucy," or those on The Solitary that the highest art cannot be expected from 66 Reaper," or those even on "the good Lord an epoch and a people whose best and most vivid intellects are not substanti 66 does so, - • The Poetry of the Period. By Alfred Austin. London: Bentley. 1870. substantially agreed." And Mr. Austin parades the intellectual distraction of the age, especially on theology and the aim of life, at great length, in order to fortify himself in his own satisfied conclusion that there are not and cannot be great poets in such a time. He even urges expressly that when theology or scepticism, or, as we may say, atheology, enters into the substance of the poet's thought, he is off his proper beat, and his poem cannot be in any true sense a great one. ally agreed," how are we to interpret this canon of Mr. Austin's own favourite poets, intellects of the time far as the poles asunder instead of uniting them, do undoubtedly develop the conditions under which genius works with the greatest fire. the standards by which he measures our puny | undulations of feeling, great hopes, while modern lights? Were Byron and Shelley they almost invariably drive the most vivid substantially agreed either with each other or the most vivid intellects of their age, with Scott, with Wordsworth, with Coleridge, with Keats, on any conceivable subject that stirred the vividest thought of And this leads us naturally to the question that vivid time? Did Wordsworth go up we proposed to discuss, as to the materials into the mountains because the most vivid we may have for estimating the relative intellects of the age, · Lord Jeffrey's, for magnitude of the great poetic stars,— which instance, — urged him on to his poetic we take to be in any case one of the least work, or because he wished to separate him- satisfactory and most absolutely conjectural self from the world, and give his heart to tasks to which any sane critic can set himenjoy "the lonely rapture of lonely minds"? self. Even with regard to the material Nay, so far is M. Comte's canon from stars, astronomers have done nothing that is accounting for the highest successes in more questionable and more probably erpoetry, that we doubt if there is a single roneous than the classification of them into great poet in the whole history of the world stars of various degrees of magnitude. One who can be shown to have had his intellect of the ablest of our modern astronomers has vivified by the intellectual sympathy and shown how likely it is that all the work of support of the most vivid minds of his con- this kind which has been done will have to temporaries. From Eschylus's grand pic- be done over again on very different printure of the perfect loneliness of Prometheus ciples. But the attempt, we think, rashly to Wordsworth's mountain musings and and unwisely made by Mr. Austin, is infiShelley's solitary wails, (we do not come nitely more hazardous. All our estimates nearer to our own day because Mr. Austin of poets depend on a full capacity for symdenies that we have any great poet amongst pathy with their poetical aims and for inus now), it is hard to find a single great sight into their poetical world. Directly poet who did not write in an age of deep in- we catch ourselves ridiculing and depreciattellectual questioning and severe intellectual ing poetry which has made a profound imcollisions. Was the age of Elizabeth, when pression on minds clearly broader, or Roman Catholicism was fighting its great deeper, or even fuller of minor chords than battle with Lutheranism and Calvinism, and our own, we may be quite sure that for estiwhen the new philosophy of Bacon was mating the relative magnitude of that poetic fighting its great battle with the old scho- star in the firmament, we are utterly inlastic system, a day when the most vivid competent. Of specific faults and deficienintellects were substantially agreed"? Wås cies in a poet whose full power we feel, we Horace, was Lucretius, was Dante, was may judge. But of the relative worth of Goethe, or Schiller, the poet of an age poetry which evidently has an infinitely when the most vivid intellects were sub- higher attraction for other, and equally imstantially agreed"? To our minds, it would pressible, or more impressible, intellects be far more plausible to say that almost than it has for us, we cannot possibly be every great poet has arisen under the stimu- respectable judges. That such a critic as lus of some great wave of change which has Mr. Alfred Austen,- clever as he often is, kindled high hopes and stormy passions, and so set the most vivid intellects" at hopeless variance. It was certainly under the stimulus of such influences that the great Attic poets, the great mediæval poets, the great Elizabethan poets, and the great poets who were contemporary with the French Revolution, wrote. Wordsworth has described, in a poem which ought to have the more weight that he himself was the very opposite of a poet of action, the kindling effect of the French Revolution upon his imagination, and how its failure drove him into the wilderness to seek the calm of healing meditations. Action is not of the essence of poetry, as far as possible from the essence of much of the very highest poetry, but great events, great 66 should erect himself into a common measure of these great incommensurables, strikes us with wonder at the audacity of what Mr. Disraeli calls "superior persons." It is not the great poets who depreciate the less, but the hard critics. To any mind of true poetic sympathy each poet in turn will seem the highest while it is immersed in his influence, and the attempt to grade genius of orders so different will seem almost like the attempt to compare the relative claims of heat and light, or to determine which of the colours of the rainbow is intrinsically the most beautiful. Think how Shelley wrote of poets, some of whom Mr. Austin would probably hardly recognize as poets at all, when describing the entrance of Keats among the immortals: "The inheritors of unfulfilled renown Rose from their thrones built beyond mortal Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton "And many more whose names on earth are But whose transmitted offluence cannot die Thou art become as one of us,' they cry, It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long which head Dryden and Pope would probably rise above any English poets, ancient or modern. All these are mere illustrations, and very imperfect illustrations, of the innumerable heads under which poets may be compared; but they are meant merely to show the folly of trying to class poets in absolute ranks at all. There is no difficulty in determining that Shakespeare far outshines in general volume of light and heat and life of all sorts, all poets known to us, but directly you descend to any lower level, it is by no means profitable, even if it is possible, to balance one sort of claim against another. The only conceivable common measure would be the mind of a self. Perhaps if we could have him with us poet as universal as that of Shakespeare himnow and know his scale of value, we might concede that we had got something like a standard. But no narrower mind can possibly furnish one of the smallest worth. No doubt you might compare poets under For men like Mr. Austin, who are conscious one head or another,- under the head of of a certain amount of talent and a still vital force, for instance, the volume of greater amount of grudge against the praises mental shock, so to speak, which any one they hear of poets whom they deem no poets poet is capable of delivering,- a classifica-or small poets, to attempt it, seems to us tion under which Byron might probably almost silly. Many of his severest judgstand even above Shakespeare, and certain-ments are pure confessions of narrowness, ly above every other poet known to us. dark lines in the poetical spectrum cryOr you might compare them under the head ing out against the light. The very violent of variety and breadth of range, a head criticism passed upon this journal, for inunder which Byron would come compara- stance, to which we have alluded, was nomtively low, and Shakespeare, of course, inally grounded on the admiration we had would be beyond the highest of all other expressed of Mr. Clough's wonderful poem poets, Goethe possibly standing second. on Easter Day,- a poem containing one of Or you might compare them under the head the most marvellous expressions of intellectof what we ordinarily call poetic inspira- ual pain combined with true spiritual pastion, that is, in relation to the evidence of sion which Doubt ever drew from the huthe rapid, spontaneous, and unlaboured man breast. We cannot convince Mr. flow of lyrical feeling, a classification which Austin that this is a fine poem if he does not would put Shelley, perhaps, at the very feel it, any more than we can convince a head of the list, at least of English poets, blind man that the sun is shining; but then and Keats not far off him; or you might he should try and rectify the pitiable narcompare them under the head of painting-rowness of his judgment by taking a good power, a classification which would probably opinion or two. Let him ask Mr. Arnold, put Tennyson second to none but Shakes- for instance, what he thinks of it, and not peare, alike in the grandeur and the realistic cry out against a great poem because he force of his painting; or you might compare personally has no taste for it. He gives a them under the head of meditative rapture, curious indication, by the way, of this pita classification which would put Words-iable narrowness in the very same context. worth far above all poets known to the present writer, and give no mean place to Buchanan and David Gray; or you might compare them for their imaginative treatment of the intellectual life, under which head Browning and Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold and Clough and Dr. Newman, would all of them probably stand above some of the greatest masters of the drama and song. Or again, you might compare them as epigrammatists and satirists, under To illustrate our ignorance and folly, he ket. But such a command can only with difficulty be obtained for a moment. Rare art is needful to gain it at all. But it never lasts over many months. The gold ring fell as soon as the Federal Government became a seller unexpectedly, and destroyed their monopoly of the supply. No clique of speculators wishing to raise the gold premium, or wishing to depress it, could ever command the supply of so costly an article for six months. Mr. Boutwell, too, the having called it a "remarkable soliloquy," energy. Their essence consists in securing and thereupon proceeds to apply to us the for a moment, and by singular devices, the courteous epithets we have before men- command of the entire supply on the martioned. Now, we do not suppose Mr. Austin was consciously dishonest in garbling this extract (though asterisks are usual to indicate great elisions, especially when a man is somewhat vulgarly running down a poet, and running down his critics for admiring him), and in pitying us for thinking it was remarkable, after he had carefully left out all that we thought remarkable, and the reasons for which we thought so. We feel very little doubt that he did not see any difference between the grossly garbled and short-present Secretary of the Treasury, sells the ened extract and the complete one, and that his mind was incapable of seeing any such difference; but then we think that conduct of this sort does show that the man who is guilty of it is utterly blind to all the simplest conditions of true criticism. For such a man to attempt to assign the relative places of our modern English poets in the poetic scale, is like a man who is colourblind proposing himself as a judge on the relative beauty of various colours. Still, if he serves to illustrate the intrinsic difficulty of his attempt, and to show the public how utterly incommensurable the merits of almost all great poets are, he will not have been clever and scoffing and narrow in vain. From The Economist, Mar. 26. THE GREAT FALL IN THE GOLD PREMIUM AT NEW YORK. SOME of the Americans have said that it is the mission of their country to give the world lessons in a new political economy; but the truth is that it is their mission to give most wonderful and surprising illustrations of old political economy. The size of their country makes all phenomena so large that everybody can see them, and that everybody is interested about them. In the last six months there has been a rise of about 16 per cent. in the value of their inconvertible paper currency as compared with gold. So large and so quick a change is unexampled, so far as we know, in similar phenomena. What, then, is the cause of it? It has been ascribed by some to the breaking down of the “ gold ring" and the ruin of the gold exchange bank of New York. And no doubt for a time last autumn the effect of that wonderful speculation was greatly to raise the price of gold at New York. The gold speculators sent up the price in a few days from 135 to 160. But such violent causes soon expend their gold in uncertain amounts, and this tends to hinder speculation, because the Government is the largest of all gold dealers, is always ready to counteract any artificial price by diminishing its sales if that price is too low, or by increasing its sales if that price is too high. Again, the fall in the gold premium is ascribed to the diminished exportation of gold. And there is no doubt that the export of gold has largely diminished. We received in England from the United States: In 1866 "1868 "1869 £ 10,245,588 6,498,006 8,892,394 2,938,433 was a In part this is to be accounted for by a di- operate to whatever extent the diminished exportation has not been compensated by a diminished production-there must have been an additional supply of gold in the market at New York; and unless there has been a corresponding augmentation of the demand, the price of gold would fall. To some unknown extent there is an increase in the demand for gold yearly for the arts, and in Texas and some other distant parts of the Union where greenbacks have not reached and where gold is the sole current money, there is an augmentation of demand for currency purposes especially when those districts are as now particularly prosperous. But still on the whole and after all these allowances, there must have been an accumulation of gold in America, and that accumulation must have tended to reduce its value as compared with the inconvertible paper currency. But this cannot be the permanent cause of so large a reduction in the value of gold. The more gold falls in value because of the diminished exportations in the past the more gold will tend to be exported in the future. If all other commodities remained of the same value and gold fell 16 per cent., it is almost certain that gold would be one of the best articles to export. In the whole list of articles of export some would quite certainly not yield 16 per cent. on exportation, even if any did so, and gold would be substituted for those which yielded a less percentage. The profits made in the commerce of the precious metal are commonly smaller, because more certain, than in most other trades, and therefore in practice gold would probably be exported sooner than a theorist would from a mere inspection of price-lists expect that it would be. Gold is an unusually transferable article, which moves as soon as there is the least profit, not an article which waits to move till all other articles have gone before it. In general it is true appreciations and depreciations of an inconvertible currency produce no effect on the export trade. But that is only because they are general. When they extend to all articles alike, they are no bounty on exporting any one article. But if they extend to any one-be it gold or be it tallow - they are sure to be bounties on its export, in case of the particular depreciation and bounties on its import, if the fact be that its value has individually appreciated. The real cause is different. The fall in the gold premium is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a much larger phenomenon. Paper prices are falling generally in the United States; gold has fallen as measured in greenbacks, but other things have fallen too. We give at the foot of this article a very careful table of prices six months ago and now, and the result is very remarkable.* The table includes 121 articles, excluding the quotations in gold; in only 11 has there been an increase in value; in all other cases has there been a decrease. In the majority of cases the fall has been above 12 per cent., or not much less than the fall in the gold premium; and in 34 cases it has been over 16 per cent., or greater than that fall. We can see, therefore, why gold is not exported from New York, though its value has fallen so much, for the value of other articles fitted for export to Europe has fallen as much or more. What we have to explain is not a fall in the paper value of gold only, but a fall in the paper value of commodities taken generally. But what is the cause of this general fall? To account for it we must consider carefully the exact case of America. We may describe it (subject to a correction which we shall give directly) as a country with an unaugmented paper currency, but with a largely augmented amount of business. The number of greenbacks issued by the Government is the same, but the uses of these greenbacks, the bargains for which they are wanted, the commodities which they have (as Americans say) to "move," have increased very rapidly. The South is now again beginning to be prosperous. The whole country, which at the end of the war was a desert, is now again in part thriving, not everywhere or with equal vigour, but still in most places to a considerable extent, and in some places to a remarkable extent. The same greenback currency which at the end of the war only circulated in and had to do only the work of the victorious country, now circulates in and must meet the needs of the defeated half too. The business of the South is new, and as it has to be transacted in the old money, there is a fresh demand for that money, and the value of it rises. It may indeed be replied that the Government paper currency is not the only paper currency of the United States. That there is also a National Bank currency; but in the first place the amount of this is limited by law. In the next place, the value of it must be the same as that of greenbacks, for it is payable in greenbacks; and a fixed proportion of greenbacks must be held as a reserve against it by every issuing bank; and thirdly, the South never got its due proportion of this Bank currency. It was * THE LIVING AGE does not copy the long table referred to. |