A MODERN DUNCIA.D.*

MR. CRAWLEY seems to be a clever man, and to have taken pains; yet his satire on our modern poets will not be much read, and will yet, probably, be more read than it deserves. He has attempted to write a modern Dunciad in a day when a Dunciad, even if written by a Pope born out of due season, would be a laborious mistake; and, moreover, he has written of poets whose power and feeling any man as capable of understanding our age as Pope was of understanding his, would fully appreciate, with the industri- ously incisive invective of a censor rather than a critic. Mr. Crawley begins in due form with a forced and rather coarse joke on the Malthusian doctrine of population, the connection of which with his invective against the poets is extremely obscure, and seems imagined at all only in order to drag Mr. J. S. Mill's name into a satire into which it could not otherwise be made to fit. And then, having taken this awkward little run through what he considers the jocose part of political economy, Mr. Crawley springs thus into the substance of his satire. We quote for the most part both notes and satire, as the notes are evidently intended to eke out the text, and the text certainly needs the notes :- "There was a time, ere Trollope* learned to spell, When S. G. 0.t wrote seldom or wrote well,

When Swinburne: only lusted after tarts, When Beales§ was yet a Bachelor of Arts: Ere Broad Church rose to make logicians stare, That medley of St. Paul and St. Voltaire ; When Alma Mater still young Genius fed, Nor suckled slaves" and editors instead ;

Ere Quaker,' Wordsworth fettered English song,

Though oft his practice proved his preaching wrong ; When poets poetry in nature sought, When nature was, and pedantry was not ;

When every reader knew the rules of art,

For nought was needed but a feeling heart, And hearts still blossomed in our English ground, And life and motion in our veins were found.

But now, alas ! a heavy change has come!

Far wanders Genius from his ancient home, And mute, or exiled on a foreign shore, Still wafts his madness and his music o'er, Her singer still, her citizen no more."

• Mr. Thomas Anthony Trollope.

Horse and Foot; or, Pilgrims to Parnassus. By Richard Crawley. London: John Camden Rotten. t S. G. 0., the irrepressible correspondent of the fines. For the sake of his parishioners I hope his doctrine is more orthodox than his grannuar, and his ser- mons shorter than his letters.

j Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne, author of ...Atalanta in Calydon," "Chaste- lard," Poems and Ballads," Sc.

§ Mr. Edmond Beales, Master of Arts and Oratory. But it is superfluous to describe him. As was said, gentle reader, of his great predecessor, if he will pardon me the comparison, "not to know him argues thyself unknown."

g I here allude to the debasing system of competitive examination, which, as far as its influence extends, is fast extinguishing all freedom of study and true love of the arts in the Universities and elsewhere.

41 Part of Wordsworth's poetry no one can admire more than myself; but I cannot help thinking that his critical opinions have exercised a most degrading influence over our literature. He is seldom mean or vulgar himself, but his poetical descendants are both, but it was he who taught them to be so. He has been called the poet of nature, but without much justice; his view of her was exceedingly narrow; and while professing to free poetry front the artificial trammels imposed upon it by Pope, ho tried to confine it to the mountains of Westmoreland. and the petty though simple existences of the boors that inhabit them. There is little melody or life in his compositions; he is often undoubtedly dull, and to me there has always been something effeminate and unmanly both in the man and his works. As far as I have been able to observe, he is most popular with the critics : the public read him rather as a duty than a pleasure, and though he occasionally extorts their admiration, ho is scarcely ever a favourite. Those who like hint best, are usually by nature more addicted to prose than poetry ; the sort of people who are not too strict to go out, but who think dramatic readings both safer and more improving than the theatre.

(We suppose, by the way, that Mr. Crawley means Mr. Anthony Trollope, the novelist, who is so well known, and not his brother, Mr. Thomas Adolphus Trollope, but that he has got into some confusion between their names.) This extract shows fairly what Mr. Crawley can do in the way of smartness, and also how labori- ously he does it. The notion of a long forgotten past, when " Bealee was yet a Bachelor of Arts," is not wanting in smartness of the kind Mr. Crawley aims at, and the satire on the Broad Church as a medley of St. Paul and St. Voltaire is just as amusing, just as false, and just as true as these sorts of literary censures usually are. We give the note on Wordsworth in full, because it; gauges the critical power of our modern satirist. If there are any phrases in the English language ridiculously inapplicable to. Wordsworth, they are the phrases " effeminate and unmanly." That he was narrow, any true critic would grant. That he was apt to be " goody" with his moralities, and was imprisoned in the narrow though lofty range of his own wonderful genius,—" true," as he himself said, " to the kindred ties of heaven and home,"—is undeniable ; but as for effeminacy or unmanliness, the very oppo- site characteristic, a rugged and almost rude Cumbrian hardiness of nature marks the whole genius of the poet and the character of the man. Mr. Crawley, in his artificial search for smart things to say, would not have gone further astray if he had called Shakespeare dull and narrow, and Milton ignoble. The truth is, that satire, of this kind at least,—satire that strains to make hits at the expense of various poets,—is so contrary to the genius of the time, that when even clever men try it, they only make themselves ludicrous.. It must be admitted, however, that Mr. Crawley now and then shows how much better a critic he could be if he did not attempt to be a satirist. After trying to scourge Mr. Swinburne anew for his ballads, without any particular success, he gives us this spirited and true panegyric on Mr. Swinburne's noble poem, Atalanta in Ca lydon "Yet though your lips are red with Circe's wine,

And, scorning fools, you stoop to herd with swine ; Not this the field for Atalanta's knight, The glorious son of Phmbus and of light : Far other queen, and other wreaths are duo, Yours are your ballads, but they are not you: Again I ponder till the lamp burns low, Althea's crime, and Meleager's woe ; Althea, by her hate, her love undone, The mourner, mother, slayer of her son ; And you I single from the nameless dead, And claim the fadeless laurel for your head.

Hence, loathly shapes! and nightborn dreams away !

Freed from the rank mints soars the lord of day ;

So Swinburne soars, again attempts the skies,

And other Atalantaa shall arise ; Still shall he soar, transcendent o'er the sphere,

And reign the monarch of our sunless year."

But how hard Mr. Crawley strains at his self-appointed task of picking holes and embroidering his holes, in our modern poetry, his very weak and feebly forcible criticism on Tennyson, in whom he can find nothing to admire but Elaine, will sufficiently show :— " But hush, admire! a Laureate strikes the strings, And praises Albert for begetting kings ; Tells us how Enoch left his home and wife, And came, when least expected, back to life : How Edith, Maud, and fifty maidens more, Whom ladies proud to landed scoundrels bore, Died of their love, or else that love forgot, And straight espoused a sportsman or a sot ; While their bard lived another jilt to woo, Composed a poem, and forgot them too. But that it's wrong for girls to disobey, And poets must be moral now a-day, I wonder why they did not run away I Or how a clerk, but gently born and bred Turned round, and broke a medicine-glass* in bed, Snored, started, groaned, then dreamed a dream of Life,

And told the tedious vision to his wife : Who also dreamed, and piously inclined, Revenged herself upon her spouse in kind : I know not what's the music of the spheres,f

Bat Imes a discord to my carnal ears.

"See next the huge Geraint, Boeotian lord, Great at the fight, but greater at the board ; Whose foes go down whene'er his lance he lowers, Who eats the dinner of a field of mowers4 Who when Earl Doorm had eaten all he would, That is, when Doorm had eaten all he could, Leaps up, though lying on a shield half dead, And sends a fanlchion flashing through his head. Thanks to the bard whose sacred song declares That there were ruffians e'en before Tom Sayers. 0 could Geraint again his feats rehearse, And strike in earnest as he strikes in verse, He'd swell the volume of great Tyrwhitt's cares, And Mace would tremble for the belt ho wears."

1. From the " City Clerk " :—

" Nay," said the kindly wife to comfort him, You raiseawour arm, you tumbled down and broke The glass with little Margaret's medicine in it ; And, breaking that, you made and broke your dream."

t "Sphere-music such as that you dreamed about."

t In the characters in Mr. Tennyson's "Idylls," as in Monsieur Florian's pastorals,

the habits of one class or age are somewhat incongruously joined with the sentiment of another. For instance, Geraint fights and eats like a Homeric champion, but

-talks and thinks like the hero of a modern novel.

—and so on, and so on ; we need quote no more. The smartnesses are all of a piece, and so are the immense deficiencies in sympathy which the smartnesses hide.

We must say that we think Mr. Crawley too good for the work be has undertaken. One or two bits of appreciative criticism, 'his admiration for Mr. Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis, and Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta, seem to us to show that if he had not -devoted himself to snappish taunts at modern poetry, he might have seen a little more of the beauties of poets at whom (as for -example, Mr. Buchanan) he can only sneer. This sort of satire seems to us entirely obsolete. There is a satire which men of great genius in the present day have used with great success, men like Mr. Browning and Mr. Thackeray, and even now and then a woman like George Eliot. But their satire is not the satire of frantic stabs at small defects, and wilful blind- ness to great merits. It consists in the art of delineating the whole man, powers and weaknesses, virtues and failings alike, but with a strong light on the weaknesses and the failings ; .and a strong light of the kind which makes the reader at once smile and sigh, which kindles his sense of humour at the poverty and feebleness of our ambitious humanity, and yet pierces us also with a sense of pity that it is so. When Mr. Thackeray says of his hero, "Do we wish to apologize for Pen because he has .got a white hat, and because his mourning for his mother is fainter ? All the lapse of years, all the career of fortune, all the events of life, however strongly they may move or eagerly excite him, never .can remove that sainted image from his heart, or banish that blessed love from its sanctuary,"—we feel the touch of the true satirist, the satirist who enters with large comprehensive- ness into the human nature of his day, and yet keeps the lights strongest on its weaknesses. It should be the same with intellectual satire, if it is to be read and worth reading. It should show large sympathy, while keeping the blots of incapacity fairly in -view. Intellectual satire of this highest kind has been written by Mr. Clough, though scarcely ever, as one might expect, on individuals. Still Mr. Clough showed the power to write it, showed that he might have written even satire on individuals, had it suited his temper to write it, and that it would have been satire of the large appreciative kind, but with the melancholy revelation of the shortcomings of his subject in the foreground of his picture. In his " Dipsychus" he showed ample satiric power of this description ; and if satire is to be written at all in our day, it is only in this 'way that it will succeed, and deserve to live.

Mr. Crawley shows an ability which it would be well indeed to devote to a better task than this miserable aiming of Lilliputian _arrows at the vulnerable points only in contemporary poets,—a task which strikes us as very laborious and rather vulgarizing for him who undertakes it, and still more laborious and profoundly depressing to him who studies the results.