THE POEMS OF EBENEZER JONES.*

Tmi names of the men of letters who are directly or indirectly responsible for the resurrection of these poems are a sufficient Justification for the belief that they will excite a greater amount -of attention now than they did when they fell still-born from the press, thirty-six years ago. The publication of this volume has been so elaborately led-up to, first by a letter of Mr. Dante Rossetti's, published in Notes and Ciftteries, then by a pamphlet from the pen of Mr. Shepherd, and lastly, by a number of motices, more or less elaborate, which have appeared in various literary journals, that, as the editor truly remarks, "the interest of students and the curiosity of general readers" are "now everywhere well awakened," and the probability is that these -resuscitated poetical Studies will be much read and more talked about. Should this prove to be the case, the one result which may be safely calculated upon is a revival of the controversy, which raged so fiercely for some months after the publication of Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, concerning the general question of the relation between art and morals, and the special question as to what extent and in what manner a poet is justified in dealing with motifs suggested by what Mr. Matthew Browne has felicitously called the "enclosed facts " of life. Ebenezer Jones was evidently no half-hearted believer in the doctrine that the choice of the artist, both with regard to subject and treatment, should be absolutely unfettered, on the ground that the artistic temperament supplies laws for itself, and must be left to develop itself freely and in all direc- tions from within, not to be confined by a strait-waistcoat of ethical and social conventions from without. Of course, such a doctrine, stated thus,—and we think we have stated it fairly— may be either true or false, wholesome or the reverse, according to the manner in which it is applied. An artist cannot always be thinking of the Ten Commandments and Mrs. Grundy, and if he could, his work would be none the better for it. If he is to accomplish anything of artistic value, he must work spon- taneously and instinctively ; but then it is essential to wholeness and sanity of achievement that the producing instincts should be normal and healthy ; and if they are so, it is hardly likely that they will produce work which will at once strike the majority of ordinarily constituted men and women as an outrage upon -those sacred reserves and delicate decencies which, if originally acquired gifts, have through long generations become a portion of the inborn nature of every civilised child. We can no longer, either in life or in literature, be naked and not ashamed, unless we have either lost the sense of shame, or formed a theory which for a time enables us to suppress it.

Ebenezer Jones may be described as a theoretical advocate of nakedness, a practical pleader for a rending of all veils, and a banishment of all reserves. Lady Ambrose, in Mr. Mallock's New Republic, said of Mr. Rose that he always seemed to talk of people as if they had no clothes on ; and in this respect, Ebenezer Jones's poems and Mr. Rose's conversation bear a atriking resemblance to each other. Even the word " naked " and its compounds seem to have a strange fascination for him ; the first poem in the book is called " The Naked Tinker ;" and the various characters are, for the most part, either wholly nude, half-nude, or attired in a style—see " The Masquerade Dress " (p. 52)—which is much less innocent than the most aggressive nakedness. We must not be understood to object to this kind of work primarily on the moral ground. It is certainly far from being ethically bracing, and a great number of the poems are, of course, quite unfit for the perusal of boys and girls ; but so are many great works of literature which we certainly cannot afford to lose, and we do not suppose that the Studies of Sensation and Event will do much harm, even to the most impressionable young man who has remained uncontaminated by the life of a great city like London, or Liverpool, or Manchester. Still less should we like, to be understood to cast even an oblique reflection upon the poet's

* Meknes of Sensation and Event. P. elne. By Ebenezer J ones. Edited, prefaced, and annotated by Richard Herne Shepherd, with Memorial Notices of the Author, .by Sumner Jones and William James Linton, London : Pickering and Co. 3879. personal character, with which criticism has nothing to do. When the Studies were first published, in 1843, a copy was sent to Thomas Hood by the author's brother, in acknowledgment of which Hood wrote a letter, described by Mr. Sumner Jones as severe, and indeed savage, in which the author of the " Song of a Shirt " not only expressed himself in strongly condemnatory terms of the poems, but went so far as to speak of the "impure motive " of the author. In so speaking, Hood probably passed the bounds of wise criticism. It is always hazardous to specu- late upon motives, and apart from the very obvious considera- tion that a man who had written with an impure intent would not have cared to submit his work to Thomas Hood, no reader can fail to be impressed by Mr. Sumner Jones's eloquent and affectionate vindication of his brother's unstained mind and blameless life. But all talk about motives is beside the mark : in criticism we have to concern ourselves with results, with known flower and fruitage, not with the unknown soil from which flower and fruit draw their life ; and while of many of these flowers it must be said that their odour is oppressive, and of these fruits that their taste is evil, we need not accuse the gardener in whose little plot they grew of any wilful poisoning of the air of the world. Mr. Sumner Jones does not condescend to an apology for those characteristics of his brother's poems which brought down upon them Hood's censure ; indeed, after consenting to their republication, such an apology would be an inexcusable and unchivalrous weakness ; but he clearly feels that they stand iu need of explanation, if not of excuse. In one portion of his touching " In Memoriam" article, ho speaks of Ebenezer's " lion-like passions "—the words are a quotation from one of the Studies—which he tells us " were lashed by toil and were tameless save by thought ;" and on an earlier page, after extracting from another poem the lines,-

" T shall remember I was pure ; Fearlessly loving, over, the whole,"

Mr. Sumner Jones says,-- "His own words above quoted compass much that I would say. ' Fearlessly loving, over, the whole,' was the ideal life he strove to live, was the instinct of his nature, and was the only way for one who was born to side with the noble Few, ever striving to be brave enough for Truth. It was also the way to incur for early endeavours to embody love of 'the whole' in artistic form, while the conception was as yet immature, the easy scoff of little men, and misconception even by good men, whose feebler passions and less vivid insight lead them consciously or unconsciously, to elect only to love a part."

We suppose we must submit to be classed either among the scoffing little men or the misconceiving good men, for we must avow that this explanation fails altogether to reconcile us to such poems as " Zingalee," " The Crisis," " Two Sufferers," and "The Masquerade Dress," to which reference has already been made. Concerning a matter of fact, we must accept Mr. Sumner Jones's evidence as conclusive, but judging from the poems alone, we should say that their author was not so much a man of strong or lion-like passions, as of excitable sensibilities, with a somewhat morbid love for strong imaginative stimuli, in which he resembled Shelley, to whose memory the Studies of Sensation and Event were enthusiastically dedicated. • Here and there, notably in the poem " Inactivity," there are some delicious Keataia.n touches, which seem to testify that mere beauty had a satisfying power for him, but to Ebenezer Jones the imaginative hyper-Eesthesia which led Keats to exclaim,—

"Hoard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are Sweeter," was an alien mood, and he evidently craved for the strong ex- citements supplied by vivid colours, strident notes, and pungent perfumes. In the poem just mentioned, he complains that though for a time the contemplation of the quieter delights of nature possessed him with content,— " Soon there came, Like a chilled wind, a sense of gloominess.

Tho heavens were blue; yes,' sigh'd I, 'they are blue ;

But what of blue The birds continued singing, But song seem'd nought ; the leaves wore green and golden ; Oh V moaned I, what good in green and golden, Or trees, or birds, or skies, or anything ? ' The unity in the boundlessness of life Gave me no thrill."

It gave him no thrill. The moan is symptomatic, and it is clear from all his work that, to Ebenezer Jones, life reached its climax not in tranquil self-possession, in passive enjoyment, or in unconscious, happy activity, but in a tingling of the nerves and an intoxication of the senses. Nature must be to him not a mere faithful friend or a benignant deity, but a passionate mis- tress, in whose " large embraces " his veins might swell, his blood run quickly, his brain swim round. Here is a sonnet, full of this fiery lusting, and full, too, of a certain tameless beauty, which seems to express with intensity and adequacy the poet's attitude of spirit in the presence of this object of tumultuous desire :— SUMMER.

gr I never wholly feel that summer is high,

However green the trees or loud the birds, However movelessly eye-winking herds Stand in field-ponds, or under largo trees lie, Till I do climb all cultured pastures by,

That hedged by hedgerows, studiously fretted trim,

Smile like a lady's face with lace laced prim, And on some moor or bill that seeks the sky Lonely and nakedly, utterly lie down, And feel the sunshine throbbing on body and limb, My drowsy brain in pleasant drunkenness swim, Each rising thought sink back and dreamily drown, Smiles creep o'er my face, and smother my lips, and cloy, Each muscle sink to itself, and separately enjoy."

-With regard to Mr. Sumner Jones's declaration that his brother's poems are a manifestation of their author's "love of 4 the whole,' " we can only say that it seems to us a very remarkable instance of the strange misconceptions into which most of us are liable to be led by the promptings of an absorb- ing affection. No characteristic of these poems, save their morbid intensity, is more noteworthy than the narrowness of their emotional range. The unwholesome celebrations of physical desires and delights,and the equally unwhole- some outbursts of the impassioned cynicism which is the passing fever of enthusiastic youth, as distinguished from the passionless cynicism which is the organic disease of sceptical old age, are certainly not the utterances of one who "saw life steadily, and saw it whole." Mr. Shepherd expresses what seems to us the obvious truth when, in a note affixed to the poem, "A Crisis," he says that " all through the volume the immaturity and unsettled condition of the author's ideas are very apparent ;" and everywhere we perceive the necessary limitations of chants of aspiration and choruses of -revolt, rather than the impressive adequacy of true songs of experience.

From what has been here said, it will be evident that we

regard the republication of the Studies of Sensation and Event as a grave mistake, and, indeed, We think it highly proba- ble that had Ebenezer Jones been alive to-day, he would have been the first to protest against the disinterMent of his buried firstborn. The man who is capable of real performance shrinks from being judged by even his fairest promise, and that the author of these poems was thus capable will not, we think, be doubted by any careful reader. His deficiencies were many ; his thought often lacks sanity and his verse music ; but he had two supreme gifts,--vision, and the power of render-

ing it Our space is too nearly exhausted to allow of lengthy -quotations, but we should like our readers to notice• the lines we print in italics in the following stanzas, from "The Waits " :—

" Came from a lonely chamber's opening door

A beautiful boy child ; His pale face feared to dare the darkness more, His white feet hesitated o er the floor, And many a prayer he smiled.

'Then tiptoe gliding through the gallery's gloom,

His hands press'd on his heart,

room, Noiselessly enter'd he a

And stealthily Me mellow d moonlight bloc„,

His gliding limbs did part ; Till o'er a conch bathed all in slanting sheen, Where, lapt in splendour, slept

A little girl her childhood s sleep serene,—

His look ( like to her Zook he did lean, And a brief moment kept Affection fixed, a reposing gaze Upon the sleeping light,

Pleasuring beneath her eyes, and like soft haze,

O'er the clueless beauty of her month's sweet maze Glowing mildly bright."

The last stanzais as bad as it can be, and is deformed by rhythmical lapses which are provokingly frequent in Ebenezer Jones's work ; but the fine rendering of the impression of sub- stantiality so often given by moonlight, especially in an enclosed chamber, recalls the magnificent Scripture hyperbole of " dark- ness that might be felt;" while the line describing how the look of the boy-brother grows into the look of the sleeping sister, on whose face his set gaze is fixed, is one of those gleams of insight that are the secret signs by which we recognise poetic power. H. ere, then, was a poet in germ who, as we have said, possessed vision and the power of rendering it, and it may be asked whether

these precious gifts do not justify this resurrection, and guarantee some permanence for the poet's name and fame. To this question a regretful negative must be given. A work of art lives partly in virtue of that sanity of substance which alone can secure universal sympathy, and partly in virtue of that absolute perfection of form which is perennially satisfying. Those two needful things, the poems in this volume, with rare exceptions, do not possess, and we fear that their new life will be but phenomenal and galvanic.

To us, the man is far more attractive than the work, and the records of him which are given by his brother and Mr. Tinton are full of peculiar and pathetic interest. Nor is this all that is to be said of them. They make us feel that Ebenezer Jones was a man to be loved,—that whatever may be thought of the literary outcome of his personality, it was in itself a gracious, beautiful, and admirable thing.