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suffering and distress cannot affect self alone; when the selfishness which turns honest industry to greed and noble ambition to egotistical lust of power is exorcised; when life becomes a perpetual exercise of duties which are delights, and delights which are duties. Once romance meant chivalry; and the hero of romance was the man who did his knightly devoirs, and was true and loyal to God and his lady-love. If with us it has come to mean the sensual fancies of nerveless boys, and the sickly reveries of girls for whose higher faculties society can find no employment, it is only another instance in which the present is not so much wiser and grander than the past, as its flatterers are fond of imagining. To us it appears that where the capacity for generous devotion, for manly courage, for steadfast faith and love, exists, there exists the main element of romance; and that where the circumstances of life are most favourable for the development of these qualities in action, they are romantic circumstances, whether the person displaying them be, like Alton Locke, a tailor; or, like King Arthur, a man of stalwart arm and lordly presence. Nor do we see that the giants, dragons, and other monsters of the old romance, are in themselves one whit more interesting than the obstacles that beset the true modern knight in his struggles to perform manfully the duties of his life, and to carry out the noble spirit of that vow which he has solemnly taken at the altar, to love, comfort, honour, and keep in sickness and in health, the woman who has put her youth, her beauty, her life, and happiness into his. hands.

It may, however, be said that married life, when it is not utterly corrupted into crime and wretchedness; when, that is, it in any degree answers to its ideal-is necessarily monotonous; and that, though to the husband and wife it may be a perpetual source of discipline and delight, it offers no scope to the poet, whose story must march, his characters develop, and their pas sions and affections exhibit change, gradation, and culmination. We have already admitted so much of

this objection, as to concede to the period before marriage greater facilities for marked gradations of interest depending on changes in the outward relations of the persons whose fortunes and feelings are being narrated. We have said that those outward relations once fixed by marriage, the action of the poem which is to depict married love must lie within narrow limits, and that its interest must depend on more subtile delineation of shades of character and feeling, on a perception, in a word, of those effects which spring from the conduct of the affections in married life, and those influences which circumstance and character combine to work in the affections, and which, slight and commonplace as some persons may choose to think them, are important enough to make human beings happy or miserable, and varied enough to account for all the differences that an observant eye can find in modern family life. And the fact, which few persons will dispute, that in our actual family life there is found, quite irrespective of distinctions of class and differences of wealth, every possible gradation of happiness and misery, of vulgarity and refinement, of folly and wisdom, of genial sense and fantastic absurdity, is a sufficient answer to those who talk of the monotony of married life as an objection to its fitness for yielding materials for poetry. In real truth, there is much more monotony in courtship than in marriage. A sort of spasmodic and, to spectators well acquainted with the parties, a somewhat comical amiability is the general mask under which the genuine features of the character are hidden. Moreover, the ordinary interests of life become throughout that period comparatively insipid; and lovers are proverbially stupid and tiresome to every one but themselves. No doubt this has its compensating advantage for the poet, who transforms his readers into the lovers for the time being; but it certainly gives monotony to all manifestations of the passion in this its spring-time, which is not found in the same pas sion when the character has recovered from the first shock, and life, with all its interests, again enters into the heart, but invested with

1856.]

Sanctity of Married Life.

new charms and higher responsibilities, and with the deeper, fuller affections swelling in a steady current through the pulses.

So much for those more obvious objections that may in great measure account for the almost universal rejection of married love as a theme for poetry. We do not care to argue against any one who says, much less any one who thinks, that it is only young men and women who are interesting. Even with respect to mere sensuous beauty, it is a great absurdity to suppose that its splendour and charm are confined to two or three years of early womanhood. Beaucoup de femmes de trente ans,' says a shrewd French writer, after enumerating the supposed attractions of youth in women,

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ont conservé ces avantages; beaucoup de femmes de dix-huit ans ne les ont plus ou ne les ont jamais eu.' Certainly no Englishman who uses his eyes needs this assurance; and no one who delights in the society of women can doubt that they continue to grow in all that charms the heart and intellect, in all the materials of poetry, after they become wives and mothers.

There is, however, one solid objection to the tenour of our remarks to which we are inclined to give great weight. We can fancy many persons, for whose opinions we have the highest respect, protesting against the intrusion of the poet into the recesses of married life, against the analysis of feelings that were not given us to amuse ourselves with, against

Those who, setting wide the doors that bar

The secret bridal chambers of the heart, Let in the day.'

Literature was made for man, and not man for literature. There are, unquestionably, scenes which the imagination had better leave alone, thoughts which should find no utterance in printed speech, feelings upon which the light and air cannot dwell without tainting them. But without in the slightest degree trenching upon ground that should be sacred to silence, we conceive married life, as one of the most powerful influences at work upon the character and happiness of individuals and of nations; to present

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capabilities of noble and beautiful poetry, that, so far from weakening the strength or vulgarizing the delicacy of domestic affection, would exalt and refine it. We see no reason for supposing that the conjugal relation would suffer in purity or spontaneous power by being passed through the alembic of a great poet's imagination. If it became the subject of morbid poetry or of weak maudlin poetry-supposing such a combination of terms allowable-the same result would follow as from the morbid or weak treatment of any other powerful human emotion-the poet would influence only weak and morbid people. Nor do we see that the danger is really so great of getting morbid, trashy, unhealthy poetry on this subject as on the more familiar subject of love before marriage. It would demand qualities of genius which in themselves are a strong guarantee the power and the taste of delineating subtile shades of character and feeling, a perception of the action of character upon fortune, an insight into the working of practical life upon the affections, and their reaction upon it. Such topics are not to the taste, or within the capacity, of melodramatic or sensualized minds; and whatever good poetry was produced on the subject would, as all good poetry does, abide and work upon the highest class of minds, and go on ever spreading its wholesome influence, and giving the tares less and less room to grow. Our domestic life is not so uniformly beautiful as that it may not be profited by having its faults, its shortcomings, its miseries brought into the full light of consciousness, as only poets can bring them; and bright pictures of what that life might be, what it sometimes is in actual experience, may surely do good as well as give pleasure. But we are not so much concerned to vindicate a large field of strictly ethical teaching for poetry as to open to her almost untried and certainly unhacknied regions of beauty, pathos, and varied human interest; to bid her cease to stop at the threshold, and boldly, fearlessly, and reverently penetrate into the inner shrine of love-cease to sing

for ever of the spring-green and the promise, and remember that love has its flush of summer, and its glow of autumn, and its winter's lonely desolation. Happily, we have not to advocate a theory without being able to produce recent cases of successful practice. Mr. Kingsley's Saint's Tragedy, those poems by Mr. Tennyson of which we have already spoken, and some of the most beautiful of Mr. Browning's lyrical poems, as well as his narrative poem of The Flight of the Duchess, and such a character-piece as his Andrea del Sarto, will indicate sufficiently how rich a field lies waiting for observation and delineation in poetry of the highest order. Some of the pieces introduced upon our stage within the last few years, principally of French origin-such as, for instance, Still Waters Run Deep-in spite of the coarse tendency to make adultery too constant a feature of the action, point to the capabilities of the subject for lighter treatment.

One word before we close upon two special advantages to be anticipated from the habitual extension of poetical representation to married love. The subject, in the first place, interests mature men and women, who must feel, at the perpetual iteration of the first stage of passion in literature, much as if their bodily diet were confined to syllabub and sweetmeats. Poetry is comparatively little read by grown people who do not pretend to cultivate literature as a special studymainly, we apprehend, because it confines itself to repeating, with a variety of circumstance, experiences which they have passed through, and of the partial and one-sided truth of which they have long ago been convinced by their more mature experience. A poetry which interpreted to them their own lives, which made them see in those lives elements of beauty and greatness, of pathos and peril, would win their attention, stimulate their interest, and refine their feelings, just as much as the same effects are produced by ordinary love-poetry on the young. We shall not argue the question whether the latter effect has been upon the whole for good or not; such an assumption lies at

the root of all discussions upon particular extensions of the poetic range. To us it appears indisputable that, along with some perils, the representation of any phase of human life by a man of genuine poetic power is a step towards improving that phase practically, as well as an enlargement of the range of that life which forms so important a part of a modern man's cultivation, the life he partakes by imaginative sympathy.

A second advantage which we should anticipate from the proposed extension would be the creation of a literature which would, in some important respects, rival and outweigh any real attraction which the properly styled literature of prostitution' may have for any but mauvais sujets. It may shock some good and innocent people to be told that such literature is attractive to any but abandoned men and women. A statistical account of the perusal of the worst class of French novels by the educated classes of this Christian and highly moral country would probably be a startling revelation. One can only say off-hand, that a familiar acquaintance with this class of works is commonly displayed in society; and the reasons are not very recondite. These novels depict a certain kind of real life without reserve; there is flesh and blood in them; and though some of the attraction is due to the mere fact that they trench on forbidden ground, some to the fact that they stimulate tendencies strong enough in most men, and some to their revelations of scenes invested with the charm of a licence happily not familiar to the actual experiences of the majority of their readers, there can be little question that one strong attraction they possess is due to their being neither simply sentimental nor simply ascetic. In accordance with an established maxim, which tells us that, corruptio optimi pessima est, these books are almost inconceivably worthless, even from an artistic point of view, but the passions of these novels are those of grown people, and not of babies or cherubim. We can conceive a pure poetry which should deal with the men and women of society in as fearless and unabashed a spirit, and

1856.]

The Angel in the House.

which should beat this demon of the stews at his own magic,-should snatch the wand from the hand of Comus, and reverse all his mightiest spells; though, doubtless, this task belongs more to prose fiction, as the objectionable works are themselves

prose fictions. In the poems we have already mentioned, this has been done. There is no reason why literature, or poetry in particular, should be dedicated virginibus puerisque; men and women want men's and women's poetry; the affections and the passions make up the poetical element of life, and no poetry will commend itself to men and women so strongly as that which deals with their own passions and affections. Again we say, we are not careful to guard our language against wilful misconstruc

tion.

The volume published last year, with the title of The Angel in the House, Part I., inspired us with the hope that a poet of no ordinary promise was about to lay down the leading lines of this great subject, in a composition half narrative and half reflective, which should at least show, as in a chart, what its rich capabilities were, and give some indication of the treasures that future workers in the same mine might have gathered in one by one. But two Parts have been already published, and he has only got as far as the threshold of his subject; while the age is no longer able to bear poems of epic length, even with, and much less without, epic action. He has encumbered himself besides with the most awkward plan that the brain of poet ever conceived. The narrative is carried on by short cantos-idyls he calls them-in which, however, the reflective clement largely prevails; and between each of these are introduced, first, a poem wholly reflective, and as long as the corresponding narrative canto, upon some phase of passion not very strictly connected with the narrative, and then a set of independent aphorisms, which are often striking in sentiment and sense, and frequently expressed with admirable terseness

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and force, but which convey the impression that the writer is resolved not to lose any of his fine things, whether he can find an appropriate place for them or not. We doubt whether any excellence of execution would have won great success for a poem written on such a plan, and threatening to extend to such a formidable length. But had the writer really set about singing his professed theme, and not wasted his strength and the patience of his readers in this twofold introduction, he possesses many of the qualities requisite for success. His concep

tion of feminine character is that of a high-minded, pure-hearted, and impassioned man, who worships and respects as well as loves a woman. His delineation of the growth of love in the woman's heart is delicate and subtile, and the lofty aspirations and unselfish enthusiasm he associates with the passion of his hero no less true to the type he has chosen. And as we conceive him not so much to intend to relate the story of any individual man and woman, as to embody in a narrative form a typical representation of what love between man and woman should be, he cannot be censured for selecting two persons of a nature higher-toned and circumstances richer in happy influences than fall to the lot of most of us in this world. Had it been the purpose of our paper to review The Angel in the House, we could have found many admirable passages in which sentiments of sterling worth and beauty are expressed with great force and felicity of language. Perhaps the only very prominent fault of execution lies in the writer's tendency to run into logical puzzles by way of expounding the paradoxical character of love, which, like wisdom, is yet justified of her children. This tendency betrays him not only into prosaic and even scholastic phraseology, that gives frequently a ludicrous turn to his sentiments, but tempts him too often into the smartness of epigram, varied by the obscurity of transcendental metaphysics. To the same feature of his mind, as shown in the fondness for

The Angel in the House. Part I., The Betrothal. Part II., The Espousals. London: John W. Parker and Son,

this way of expressing his subject, we are inclined to attribute the jerkiness of the verse, which often reads like a bit of Hudibras slightly altered, and is very dissonant from the innermost spirit of the poem. If we might venture to offer a bit of advice by way of conclusion, we should say to him, forget what you have done; treat these two parts as an experiment that has partially failed; begin at the real subject married love-on a different plan and in a different key. Let the narrative, the drama, occupy a more prominent position; reject every

phrase, every turn of thought, that appears to you to be particularly smart and clever, and adopt a measure that cannot run into jingle, but will flow with a calm delicious melody through the pleasant lands along which its course will lie. And if we add one exhortation more, it would be to guard against overrefinement; not to be afraid of the warm blood and beating pulse of humanity; to remember that the angel in the house is, as the least sensuous of poets reminds us— 'An angel, but a woman too.'

M

to

THE TWO TUPPERS.

name is Tupper-Tupper of Tuppleton, in Shropshire. To prevent mistakes, I may as well mention that I am in no way related the celebrated Mr. Martin Tupper, a gentleman who is not only a Doctor of Law, but also a Professor of Proverbial Philosophy. I know very little about Law, and not much about Proverbial Philosophy. But, as I said before, I am one of the Tuppers of Tuppleton, in Shropshire. When, at the age of twelve, I quitted the preparatory institution of Mr. Squeers, in order to complete my education at Eton, this was the advice of my maternal parent: 'My darling Phil,' she said, ‘be a good boy, and write home once a week, and take care of your new hat, and don't run into debt, and above all, never forget that you belong to the Tuppers of Tuppleton.' I didn't forget it. I wasn't likely to forget it. I have never forgotten it since.

The first morning after my arrival at Eton, as I was wandering about, lost in admiration at the manners and customs of that noble institution, I was stopped by a big, stout youth, who inquired, in a peremptory tone of voice, 'Are you a new fellow ? what's your name?' I meekly replied that I was a new fellow, and that my name was Tupper. Tupper,' I said, of Tuppleton, in Shropshire.' Tupper of what?' shouted my examiner. I repeated the answer. 'Oh indeed,'

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said Smith - this I afterwards learnt was his name, Steady Smith his friends called him-'oh indeed; then there's one kick for Tupper, and another for Tuppleton, and a third for Shropshire." Suiting the action to the word, the ruffian sent me howling away with a severe pain in my inexpressibles, and from that time forward I was known in the school as Tupper of Tuppleton, in Shropshire. And only last week, at a friend's house in the country, a stout, jolly-looking person came up to me, saluted me as Tupper, and shook me warmly by the hand. I bowed politely, and professed that he had the advantage of me; I could not remember his name. 'Ah,' he said, but I know yours; you are Tupper of Tuppleton, in Shropshire.' It was Steady Smith. I had not seen him since he left Eton. He is a clergyman in Somersetshire, and looks steadier than ever. But to return: It was only a few hours after the incident recorded above, and the kicks of Smith were still fresh in my memory, when the question, 'What's your name?' was put to a boy who was standing near me. Mindful of the sad consequences of my own answer, I listened anxiously for his. What was my amazement to hear him reply Tupper.' My own name! I could hardly believe my ears. I forgot all about Smith, and burst out with But you're not a Tupper of Tuppleton, are you?' Tupper of Tuppleton,' he said; what the

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