by Henry Fothergill Chorley (uncredited).
Originally published in Household Words (Bradbury & Evans) vol.1 #7 (11 May 1850).
Every book-hunter, whose connection with paper and print has more of individuality than of fashion in it—must in his time have met with scores of small volumes of rhyme forced out with a care and pains of which the heart aches to think, prefaced with the bad taste of immoderate deprecation on the part of the author,—or with the worse appeal of extravagant commendation on the part of the patron—none of which shall merit a place on the shelf by the side of Crabbe, or Wordsworth, or Burns—none of which can be denied the possession of some sparks and breathings of true poetry.
Sometimes, however, it must be owned, that the difficulties under which the rhymester has laboured, are the best—nay the sole—evidences of his genius. In the verses of Phillis Wheatly, the negro girl, for instance, there is not a line that is not the stalest of the stale—not an image that is not the most second-hand of the second-hand. Yet, that sixty years since, a woman of her condemned colour and oppressed race—in America, too,—should find spirits to sing, and power to attract an audience,—in that fact was a poem of no common order.
Years ago, there passed through the writer's hand a small collection of verse—if verse it might be called—in quality, the most dreary and antipathetic, possible—sectarian hymns, full of phrases, the intimate sense of which can never have pierced to the mind of their maker. This was a poor creature in a hospital, who had been found on a harsh January night, frozen into the kennel where she had fallen, and who paid for that night's lodging with a lingering death of cruelly long duration. Her vital powers gradually retired one by one. For many years she was unable to move a limb; latterly could scarcely speak audibly, or take barely sufficient food to keep life in the half-dead body. But these dismal hymns were her receipt for occupation and cheerfulness. 'When I cannot sleep,' she would say, in a dialect of her own peculiar pattern, 'I mew.'—There was poetry in the origin of these 'mewings,' though none in the dark and narrow stanzas themselves.
From the above illustrations it may be gathered that much of the bye-way poetry with which we shall deal, has never been promoted to the honours and heartaches of paper and print—nor even taken the manuscript forms of 'longs and shorts' as decidedly as did the imaginative instincts of Black Phillis, or the long-tried patience of the sufferer in the — Ward. We may—and shall—have to do with authorship in humble life,—but less, perchance, than those will expect, who have considered our subject merely from the outside of the bookseller's window, or from the sum total of a rhymester's subscription list—drawing thence the charming inference that A. B. or C. is a poet, because he has found a publisher and extorted a public!—Too seldom has a Capel Lofft, or a Southey, or a More, while trying to bring forward a Bloomfield, or a Mary Colling, or an ungrateful Bristol Milkwoman, whose facility in versifying has arrested them,—considered how wide is the distance betwixt what may be called the unconscious Poetry of the People—and that meagre and second-hand manufacture, produced with a desire for fame, or under hopes of gain, which challenges competition with the efforts of men more favourably circumstanced, and which goes forth as virtually a solicitation for alms.—On the one side (to take the first instance which occurs) we shall find something like the Gondolier songs of Venice, patched up—St. Mark and the Moon know how!—out of bits of plays and bits of verses and bits of opera-tunes, by old men and girls and boys, while a sprightly people ply their picturesque trade under an Italian sky, every image round them to inspire and encourage a sense of tune,—and which, after a while, get so rubbed into shape—so rounded and changed,—so decked with canal-wit,—so filled with local names and local words,—that a College of Anatomists should be puzzled to 'resolve them into their primary elements.'—On the other side, we may cite as example any of the myriad verses anxiously strung together by the hectic and over-wrought operative, by the light of his candle, whose very burning would be reprehensible as an extravagance, could not the ware fabricated at midnight find an immediate market. The first is an utterance—the second a manufacture. The first speaks with the breath of a peculiar life, and weans the colour of a peculiar scenery—the second is an exercise produced under circumstances, which, however stimulating to energy, are but discouraging to Fancy. We may be told, it is true, that many of our dearest 'household words' have been wrung from our greatest men, by the pressure of the cruellest exigency.
One poet, to pay for his mother's funeral, must needs write a 'Rasselas'—another, under constraint less instant, but perhaps not less harassing, shall gladden England for ever, by calling up Olivia and Sophia in the hayfield, and Farmer Flamborough's Christmas party, and the Vicar slyly making an end of 'the wash for the face,' which his innocently-worldly daughters were brewing. But evidence, like this does nothing to contradict our wisdom. Had Goldsmith possessed no treasury of adventure and experience to draw upon, no power to handle the pen already learned—neither Imlac nor Mrs. Primrose would have been alive at this day. Without preparation, training, craftsmanship, there is little literature—there is no art. Ballads may grow up—but not epics be produced, nor five-act plays be constructed, nor tales be woven, nor even a complete lyric be finished. It has fallen to the lot of every one of us too often and again, to see hearts fevered, hopes wrecked, life embittered, and Death (or Madness) courted, because men cannot—and their friends will not— sufficiently fix their minds on this plain truth; because inclinations are perpetually mistaken for powers; because, bewildered by some faëry dream that the world in which a Scott is king or a Siddons is queen, is paved with gold—every boy who can cut paragraphs into lengths fancies that he is a Scott—and every girl with a strong voice who loves play-going, that she is a Lady Macbeth, a Cleopatra, a Queen Constance, who can shake 'the play-house down.'
At all events, in such mistakes as the above, followed by their sure consequence of misery, lives not the Poetry which we are seeking. In its place we too often encounter a dismal wax-work show—a creature with glassy eyes and hot red cheeks, and a stiff arm, in a noble attitude perhaps, but always beckoning in one and the same direction,—not the living, breathing, hoping, fearing being, human like ourselves, yet better than ourselves, with whom we can sit down at meat, and kneel down at prayer—not the fragment of Heaven upon Earth to encounter and make acquaintance with, which redeems us from utter heartlessness or discomfort. The Poetry of appreciation when creation is impossible—the Poetry of daily life, as sung in deeds of unselfishness, delicacy, triumph over temptations—consideration of the weak (let the brute-force theorists 'sound their trumpets and beat their drums' as loudly as if upon themselves devolved the whole orchestral and choral noise of 'Judas Maccabeus') and companionship with the humble—the Poetry of a healthy, not a maudlin love for Nature—these are to be sought out and gathered up. In turn we may sit on the bleak hill-sides of Scotland with the shepherd-rhymesters of the north—or wander down the alleys of English manufacturing towns, to see what fairly-patterned verse may have been woven there. Or in a green lane we may open such a book as good Mr. Barnes has published in the Dorsetshire dialect, to show how ingeniously music may be got out of a corrupt local English phraseology. Or we may cross the Channel to hear Jasmin, the Provençal hairdresser, recite; or to see Reboul, the Nismes baker, bring out an ode hot from his oven.—But our business will be more with deeds than with words, more with genuine thoughts and impulses in action, than with second-hand fancies, faded as the coarse artificial flowers of a milliner's shop in Leicester Square, when the season is over, which no passer-by, 'gentle or simple,' can think of taking home.
We may have to do, moreover, with the poetry of association as conveyed in those festivals of joy or of sorrow which mark the progress of life and the peculiarity of manners. The nasal, droning burial psalm that may still be heard in remote places of England, winding up a hollow lane or across the corner of a moor,—as some little congregation of friends or neighbours bears a dead body home,—the twilight vesper service (intrinsically tuneless and unmusical) of the Sisters of Charity, who come back to their Beguinage after a long day of hard work, hard prayers, hard consolation, and hard gossip among the poor;—do these things say nothing to us? Is nothing told us by the cry of sailors as they warp the ship into dock at the close of a wild and wintry voyage? by the serenade-music with which the impulsive people of a German town welcome some favourite poet or artist?—Are these not all, more or less, poems conveying to us something of feeling, and life, and youth, be we ever so soured, ever so seared by perpetual contact with coarser and harsher contemplations and employments? May we not call up such pictures,—may we not soothe ourselves with such harmonies,—may we not lay them to our souls as evidences? We must not use them by way of unction flattering us into the sentimental Waiting Gentlewoman's notion that crime is to disappear like a scene in a pantomime, and thieves all of a sudden to grow as orderly as beadles; but we may apply them as alteratives when we are in danger of being wearied into doggedness, by the man who enacts fits at the street corner—or by the begging-letter Impostor who wrings crowns out of kind-hearted and economical souls, who must for their credulity's sake forego their holiday—or by the Pole with his anti-Russian pamphlet, who makes his way in, to abase himself by fawning and genteel mendicity, under pretext of being a friend's friend—or by the sight of such a pillar of stone as the woman who went into the confectioner's shop to buy gingerbread, 'because they were going to see our Sally hanged, and should be hungry!'
Yes:if sights and provocations and discouragements like these—of the earth, earthy—force themselves into our highways, all the more need is it that all celestial appearances and sounds in our bye-ways, be they over so few, faint, and far, should be collected, and set down. Be they ever so rich, they will not be rich enough to justify an over-complacent or supine spirit—still less to tempt the healthily-minded to confound dross with pure gold: be they ever so meagre, they ought to keep alive in us the faith, that no portion of the earth is so barren, that Truth or Beauty, and Love, and Patience, and Honour, cannot grow therein.