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    " •"^ SSas ^ WU& ^ S ^

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    Fraser begins tLe new year with a number of more than average excellence , most of the articles being equally valuable and interesting . The first , by a literary veteran , Mr . Thomas Keightmsy , 'On the Life and Writings of Henry Fielding / is a contribution towards what is still wanting in our literature—a good biography of the great novelist who founded the realistic school of English fiction . Our great novelists have been unfortunate in their biographers , none of them , with the exception of Scott , and perhaps Goldsmith , having found one worthy of his fame . In some cases , no doubt , the materials are scanty ; but even where they are tolerably full they have never been turned to good account . Sir Walter Scott ' s own short sketches of his brother novelists are even now the best lives of them we possess , being replete with broad views ,

    masculine sense , and " a quiet insight at once critical and sympathetic . Mr . Laurence ' s Life of Fielding , published two years ago , though certainly a great advance on Murphy , was still only a step in the right direction . The life of Fieldestg has yet to be written , and Mr . Keightley ' s papers ( a second is to follow ) will furnish useful hints to the future biographer whenever he shall appear . The most striking and attractive article in the January number of Fraser , is , however , one entitled ' Northern Lights—City Poems , and City Sermons , ' by Shirley . It is as readable as it is well worth reading , being written in Shirley ' s pleasantest vein , and Shirley is generally most instructive when he is most amusing . Manly earnestness speaks in the playful irony of his words , and there is a delicate and sterling criticism in the genial flow of his familiar talk . With the rich and various observation of life and

    manners , the keen but kindly insight , the easy , brilliant writing which mark the papers under this signature , the readers of Fraser are already familiar . We are tempted , however , to extract a specimen or two . How good , for example , is the following sketch of a marked feature iu Scottish character : — Scotchmen arc not merely prolific when looked at from the Registrar-General ' s point of view : they are prolific in most things . They are prolific speakers . The amount of palaver that takes place in a Scotch Kirk Session or a Scotch Town-Council passes knowledge . It is a luxury that can be had cheap . It costs them nothing ; and certainly they don ' t grudge it . I once attended a Town-Council meeting where the subject under discussion was , whether an additional six-and-eightpence should be given to the parish beadle . The wut , wisdom , eloquence , and loquacity of that meeting will haunt us to our dying day . They sat six mortal hours , abused each other like pickpockets , and then , on the motion of a corpulent bailie , adjourned the discussion till the following month . So the unlucky beadle did uot get his increase of salary for another month at least ; probably he has not got it yet . For anything I know to the contrary , they may have talked on till this very day .

    The Kirk Session is a great ally of the Town-Council . The man who can t get into the one goes into the other ; and between the two , the whole male population ( that part of it , at least , which belongs to the lower grades of the middle class ) become civic or ecclesiastical orators . There is no remote corner in the North which does not boast its burgh Demosthenes , its village Chatham . They are plentiful as blackberries . One knows the man at a glance . He is very seedy around the gills ; his mouth is large and hungry , like the wolf ' lied Rlding-Hood ; he has a permanent soreness about the lower part of the bronchial tube which communicates a solemn acerbity to his speech . Your Conservative of this class is a tine specimen of the order . He declaims in the Town-Council against the poor-rates ; his soul is bitter within him when ho denounces Mr . Moncricff and his ' indegeested legislawcion . ' The county paper reports him ; so he speaks like a man who is aware of the responsibility that lies upon him , and who—accepts it .

    The City Sermons arc those recently published by the most eloquent of living Scottish preachers , Dr . Guthrie , which were reviewed last week in the columns of the Times . The writer in the Times signalizes the weakness , not to say absurdity , of the preacher ' s practical suggestions as to the best means for correcting the ' evils incident to great cities , which he so eloquently deplores ; and the writer in Fraser traces this weakness to the severe Calvinism of Scottish theology . " Dr . Gutjirib , " lie says , " is a good man , in practice , and apart from his creed ; but when he begins to write or reason , behold how vague and irrelevant he becomes ! We do not blame him ; it is the system , not the man , that is to blame . A benevolent Calvinist must regard our ' sins and sorrows ' with blank bewilderment ; do good by stealth , and blush to find it fame—for

    it is at the oxpenso of its logic , at the peril of its consistency ; and he must retreat from its speculative and praoticnl dilemmas into vague metaphor and windy palaver . " It is certainly rather characteristic of Calvinism that it should call in the strong arm of the law to suppress moral evil , as it emphatically asserts in its fundamental principles tho utter impotence of all moral means to change the individual or reform the race . Iu it a eyes no man is in a more hopeless stato than tho merely niornl man , and no instrumentality is predestined to more certain failure than ono which depends for its success on moral influence . A consistent Culvinist , therefore , is necessarily a physical-force reformer . The City Poems aro those recently published by Mr . Alkxandkr Smith . Shirle y r , —^ Wy-dorondsJfa ~ SMMiU ) Qti ^ himself ho offers the following sound udvicc : —

    So far for Mr . Smith ' s assailants : will you , Mr . Smith , allow ua to say a few words to yourself ? If you cannot work out tho suggestions wo aro going to offer , then wo counsel you in perfect sincerity to oeaao from writing dramatic , and to write didactic poems iu their place . If you had thrown tho various rouoctioiiH upon nature and human lifo which occupy the pagoa of City Poems into a poetical form resembling Thomson ^ Seasons or Wordaworth ' H Emcurmm , wo have no homtatlon in saying that you would havo produced an effective poom . Your thoughts are quite aa original as tholra , your language much more torso and pregnant . And yot your volume ia eminently unsatisfactory and ineffective . Why V Because you have tried to be a

    dramatist- —that ia , yon have tried to make us believe that you vrere not speaking in your own person : that some one you had imagined and created was speaking * in your place . You challenge us to estimate you as a dramatist ; and when we read through your book as a drama , and find that it is not a drama , we are unavoidably disappointed ; and the apt epigram and the striking reflection , instead of being relished as they would have been had they found an appropriate setting , are read at a fatal disadvantage . A sense of incongruity between the form and the material quite destroys the enjoyment of the reader . We do not say to you , as yet , that you must at once abandon the drama , for there are lyrical bursts here and there in your volume , where , under the pressure of a strong emotion , you lose the sense of your own personality , that are , we think , essentially dramatic ; but to produce a consistent and continuous dramatic poem there are many requisites to which you must attend in toe

    meantime . Why do your Idyls of English life , for instance , differ so much from Mr . Tennyson ' s ? There are many points of resemblance—the rich colouring of feminine loveliness , the vivid descriptions of natural scenery , for instance : and yet , -while Mr . Tennyson ' s are complete and satisfying to the mind , yours are not . Why ? Because Mr . Tennyson has gained a clear insight into the characters of the men and women he introduces , and you have not . He gets a firm hold of them in the first place , and , having entered as it were into their hearts , then , and not till then , he writes , and with this result—that they are perfectly natural , perfectly consistent throughout . They are not pieces of brilliant patchwork . They never say anything merely because it is ornamental . When the laureate portrays a boy in a Glasgow factory , for instance , he does not think of putting into his mouth the beautiful descriptions and

    reflections which make your ' Boy ' s Poem' in a certain sense the best that you have yet written . And why ? Because he wants to bring the peculiar feelings of a boy vividly before us , and he has no wish whatever to unrol a picturesque panorama of the Clyde—no doubt a very good thing in itself , and on a fitting occasion , but quite irrelevant and incongruous to the main work he is then engaged on . Now you do not attend to this law . It is the Clyde , and not the boy , that you care about . There is barely an expression in the mouth of any of your heroes which is eharcceterutic ; which identifies him ; which that man , and that man only , would use . And the result is , that not a single human being stands out clearly or articulately before us in your poetry : we get a dim and confused notion of a throng . of somewhat blackened and dirty faces : as far as we can see , all very much alike , and bearing an unmistakable resemblance to the Dents ex machind who stands in the background and pulls the

    strings of the puppet-show . The absence of vital energy is fatal to a dramatist . His actors must stand on their own feet , and not be indebted to any one else for support . And to the true dramatist this is congenial work . He has no satisfaction in describing—he must embody It is a necessity of his nature . Now , our Scotch poet always seems thankful to get back to description . There he feels that he is on terraJirma . He can describe a passion in two lines ; he cannot embody one in forty pages . We say to Mr . Smith , Select your subject , and then force your characters to work out their story , without a single word of description or explanation . Embody , do not describe . The result will be , no brilliant poetic mirage certainly , but , if you have the dramatic power in you at all , genuine smiles , genuine tears . And this brings us to speak of the selection of a subject . There are , it appears to us two or three fundamental mistakes in Mr . Smith ' s principle of choice . Before leaving the Magazine we ought to say that it contains an excellent translation of Goethe ' s Helena , by Mr . Theodore Mabtiht .

    Blackicood opens the year with a dissertation on Hunger and Thirst , which has the merit of being at once popular and scientific , the facts collected being really interesting , and the explanations given lucid and complete . A good review of Debit and Credit , the German novel recently introduced to English readers by Chevalier Bunsen , follows . One of the best articles in the number is that on the Scottish Universities . Judicious , almost judicial , intone , sound in argument , and ex . trem . ely seasonable . The writer takes a middle course between the extreme reformers and their opponents , explaining the true character of the Scotch university system as opposed to tke Euglish , urging , that this character should be retained in its integrity , temperate reforms by which this may be best secured . From the well-written and acute article on B ^ hanger we can only afford space for the following extract , which will , however , probably tempt many readers to seek the article for themselves : —

    There are no abrupt breaks in the songs of Beranger . They are not a succession of verses cut into arbitrary , bits , but dainty little separate existences , timing their periods with an intuitive music , long enough to interest the fancy , and not too long to burden it . And they aro not songs of passion . This extraordinary cJuinsonnier , of all things in tho world , thinks proper to confess that he has never had the luck to know the love of romances and poets , and his verses accordingly lack that charm ; but if they aro not love-songs , they are , what is still better for their purpose , songs about everything sparks struck on the moment from every passing blaze of popular emotion , from every event in ono of the most crowded chapters of history ; and it becomes possible to understand , through tho interpretation of BeVanger , the real weight of that saying , which does not seem to havo much application to our literature and country , though it is perpetually quoted in regard to them , " Let who will make the laws , if I make the songs . "

    This fundamental difference , however , makes it very strange that any one should oall Be > anger the Burns of France . It would be almost as just to call him the Milton . The burning heart of the Ayrshire peasant bears as little resemblance to the lively intellect of the Parisian bourgeois as the lightning does to tho lamp . True , they have both written songs ; but the songs of tho Scot are songs of passion , fiery effusions of an exuberant and overflowing ardour—words that burn . There is an effusion , an abandon ( strange that wo should find names for thin wild ovorflooding exuberance in a language which produces bo few examples of it !) , a plunge of tho entire spirit into the utterance in tho verses of Burns , which does not exist , nor a shadow of it , ra BerangGr . Wild mirth , wild love , wild despair , all the big passions of a giant , glow in tho songs of ' tho ploughman ; but as for tho Parisian , ho has not very much to dowith passions . He is not a Burns , startling tho quiet with his great emotions . Ho i « . notvan , Anaoroon ., rosor ! crowned _ ana ^ Wfth « itjffitb , J ( vinQ . Rich in the power and in-1 eiso ?

    spiration of a poet , ho is , nevertheless , simply a citizen , living as everybody aoesj - thinking as evorybody else thinks , throwing hia sentiments about w **?™™? tro < % from him in lively and melodious verses , in happy refrains , in delightful turns o « expression , which ono loves to take into one ' s lips , as a child does a bonbon . It is not lovora , it in not ploasuro-sookora who Ilnd expression for thoir fancies provided to their hand by tho chansonuiar . Tt is everybody who lives in tho sumo ago , who sees tho same event , who shares with him In tho universal sentiment . Ho is not seeking popularity by a choice of popular thomos ; but , living In tlio midst of the common world , ho sings what ho thinks about what ho sees , and tho people , whom tho samo events havo moved perhaps to similar fancies , crowd round him in delighted surprise ,

    Ra&Gt;*L X.~,~^ ¦* Llttflltire* ^

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    Untitled Article

    TSTo . 407 . January 9 , 1858 . 1 THE LE 1 DEK 39

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Jan. 9, 1858, page 39, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2225/page/15/