ART. VI.- Philip Van Artevelde; a Dramatic Romance, in Two Parts. By HENRY TAYLOR, Esq. Two Volumes, 16mo. Cambridge and Boston. James Munroe & Co. 1835.

THE publication of this poem in this country was preceded by such high encomiums from the leading Reviews of Great Britain, that it was impossible that its reception amongst us should be unprejudiced and impartial; and if, notwithstanding the first feeling of disappointment from this cause and the detection of some faults in the work which we were not prepared to see, we have yet risen from its perusal with a conviction that it is a work of rare beauty and power, there can be no doubt that it well deserves this character. It is a very daring work, and risks failure in every way by attempting to unite every variety of composition in one piece. It passes from the stern to the tender, from the lofty to the pathetic, and strikes all the changes of the heroic, the lyric, the dramatic, and the descriptive, the didactic, and the familiar. No young author ever made his beginning in a bolder and more venturesome enterprise, or by his first attempt secured a more dicided claim to be esteemed a writer of high and diversified talents, whose fame is already sure. We are glad to see it republished here, and in a style more worthy of an elegant author than it is sometimes our lot to witness. We shall be yet more glad to learn, that our countrymen can find leisure, amid the distracting bustle of over-active prosperity, to buy and read it.

Until this work appeared, it seemed to have become a settled opinion with many, that the age of poetry, like that of chivalry, was gone; that the world had outgrown its love of sweet song, or, as some would say, had put it away with its other childish things; and it was soberly argued, that not only had the inspiration departed with the departure of the few great bards, but that the taste had become extinct. Yet we suppose that what was taken as proof of decay, was in fact nothing more than a symptom of exhaustion. How should we expect the world to appear after the vehement and maddening poetical excitements of the last twenty-five years? The history of the world can probably furnish no parallel to the poetical glory of that distinguished period; and nothing was more natural than that, at its passing away, it should leave all the con

sequences of an over-stimulated and jaded feeling. The people who had been for a quarter of a century accustomed to the daily exhibitions of passion, eloquence, truth, and philosophy, displayed in all their most attractive and fanciful forms by such masters of human nature and the English tongue as then filled the world with their discourse, could not readily listen to their imitators and successors. Many of these brought forward works, which, as Southey said of Ebenezer Elliott, the cornlaw poet, would have made them famous, if not immortal, half a century ago; * but they came upon the stage like some fine though inferior singers, when the ear has been ravished and the soul filled to its utmost capacity of enjoyment by the almost supernatural exertions of voice and expressions of passion from some master genius. They could gain no hearing. They sunk for want of an audience. Thus it was that every body began to talk of "the decline of poetry"; as if, because the appetite was satisfied, no more food could be prepared. It was even alleged that the art could never be restored to its former place of reputation. But they who asserted this forgot, that poetry is one of the natural expressions of human feeling. There is a native want of the soul to which it is addressed; and it can no more become unpopular or extinct, than oratory or song. Certain forms of it may languish; of its temporary fashions the world may grow weary; but, let the fashion change (it will be changed to a certain extent by every truly great poet), and the taste will revive. What astonishing differences between Pope and Cowper, or between Cowper and Byron; and again, in the great constellation which is just going out, how totally unlike to each other are every two that

* How often have we occasion to remark, that it is not genius or excellence alone which can secure fame; accidental circumstances have much to do with a man's celebrity. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; time and chance happen to all. In the notes to the present work, after citing some striking passages from a "speech against political unions," the writer remarks, "It is a singular trait of the times, that a speech containing so much of sagacity and mature reflection as is to be found in this exercitation, should have been delivered in an academical debating club, and should have passed away in a pamphlet, which, as far as I am aware, attracted no notice. Time and place consenting, a brilliant Parliamentary reputation might be built upon a tithe of the merit." (Vol. 11. p. 228.) A very curious work was a few years since published in France, on the idea of detecting the false foundations of the reputation which the world has awarded to many famous persons.

shall be named together;-Scott, Southey, Byron, Moore, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Hemans, Campbell, Joanna Baillie; one thinks of these diversities of magnificent genius with inexpressible amazement. It was the infinite variety in which these wonderful persons displayed the poetic enthusiasm, much more than its intensity, that created the lassitude which followed. Had they been all of the same school, had they exercised their art in the same way, they would but have prepared the public the more eagerly to receive some new-invented method. But they left no method untried. They had

Through each mode of the lyre, and were masters of all;" and nothing remained but to settle down into vacancy and silence. But it were folly to esteem it a state of death. A season of extreme and long-continued excitement may bring on a season of lethargy and indifference; but this will pass away like the effects of opium on the body, and the desires of a healthy appetite will return. It is therefore in the nature of things impossible, that the depression of the last few years should be permanent. The only uncertainty would be as to the quarter from which the revival would spring, and the character which the new school would assume. These points could be decided only by the experiment of that successful genius, who should break the dull enchantment, and make himself the leader of the revolution or restoration.

Whether Mr. Taylor is to be this fortunate champion, must be allowed to be quite uncertain; though some voices have hailed him as such. The warm welcome which his adventurous undertaking has met with, in certain high quarters, is ample proof that the world is by no means dead to the beautiful art it has in all ages idolized, but has been only reposing, and is ready enough to arouse itself at the first strain that shall be heard from a true minstrel's touch. If the criticism contained in his own sensible Preface be just, then the attention excited to his poem is one of the auspicious signs of the times; for it may be taken as an indication, that the public mind is returning to a healthier tone, is throwing off its infatuated attachment to the vicious peculiarities which have been mingled with the powerful works of recent days, and is resuming its submission to the calm and dignified laws of the elder literature of England and the world. We should be glad to see this restoration taking place in the prose literature as well as the poetry of

the times. It is too soon however to expect this. The madness of the magazines, and the crazy competition of hungry and ambitious authors, who care not how they trample on English and common sense if they can but extort a stare and gain their bread, will urge the evil to a higher pitch of extravagance before it will be ripe for destruction. In Great Britain, to be sure, it can hardly be carried further. "The force of folly can no farther go." But in this country we have been hitherto congratulating ourselves that the purity of our writers had not been soiled by the affectations and conceits and flippancies and intensities and mock inspirations of the Blackwoods and Frazers, and what has been well styled the "affected, overstrained, feverish, convulsionary literature" of the times. But our turn appears to be coming, and we are doomed to receive over again in our native journals the miserable tinsel, and disgusting smartness, which have become but too fashionable with the proud islanders. Let us hope that the friends of orderly letters will do what they may to limit the progress of this evil. If it may not be wholly shunned, let them at least strenuously check it. So vicious a school is too unnatural to be long-lived; and it will be much to the credit of the country, if its scholars shall successfully exert themselves to abridge its natural term of life and cut it short in the midst. If it live it will be a year of mischief too much.

but a year,

It is one cause of the interest belonging to the appearance of this volume, that it is likely to have an influence upon the point to which we are referring. And this, not only from the decided marks of attractive and skilful talent which it exhibits, but from the very judicious piece of criticism by which it is prefaced; a criticism, which, without any arrogance in its tone, speaks of the late school, of which Byron was the example and the head, as too merely imaginative, sensitive, and fantastic, to be reputed poetry of the highest order, and too slight and evanescent in its beautiful structure, to satisfy the understanding and take permanent possession of the strongholds of fame.

"It consists of little more than a poetical diction, an arrangement of words implying a sensitive state of mind, and therefore more or less calculated to excite corresponding associations, though, for the most part, not pertinently to any matter in hand; a diction which addresses itself to the sentient, not the percipient, properties of the mind, and displays merely symbols or types of feelings, which

might exist with equal force in a being the most barren of understanding."-p. xvi.

"I would by no means wish to be understood as saying that a poet can be too imaginative, provided that his other faculties be exercised in due proportion to his imagination. I would have no man depress his imagination, but I would have him raise his reason to be its equipoise. What I would be understood to oppugn, is the strange opinion which seems to prevail amongst certain of our writers and readers of poetry, that good sense stands in a species of antagonism to poetical genius, instead of being one of its most essential constituents. The maxim that a poet should be "of imagination all compact," is not, I think, to be adopted thus literally. That predominance of the imaginative faculty, or of impassioned temperament, which is incompatible with the attributes of a sound understanding and a just judgment, may make a rhapsodist, a melodist, or a visionary, each of whom may produce what may be admired for the particular talent and beauty belonging to it but imagination and passion, thus unsupported, will never make a poet, in the largest and highest sense of the appellation."

"Mr. Shelley and his disciples, however, the followers (if I may so call them) of the PHANTASTIC SCHOOL, labor to effect a revolution in this order of things. They would transfer the domicile of poetry to regions where reason, far from having any supremacy or rule, is all but unknown, an alien and an outcast; to seats of anarchy and abstraction, where imagination exercises the shadow of an authority, over a people of phantoms, in a land of dreams." - Vol. 1. pp. xix. — xx.

The poem which follows is constructed on a wholly different idea. It is founded on reality, common sense, and philosophy, appealing to the imagination for illustration and ornament, but building up the main body of sterner materials. It is a picture, in dramatic form, of the men and manners of turbulent Flanders, in the fourteenth century. The scene lies in a besieged city and a camp; the time is a time of rebellion and war; the action is a representation of that strange union and contrast of public distress and prosperity with the under-current of private trial and change, love and hate, sorrow and joy, generosity and selfishness, which must always go to make up the reality of a state of warfare, as well as of the common condition of life. What is private and individual is far more affectingly displayed, as it is more interesting in itself, than what pertains to the public movements and the fortunes of the state. Indeed it is wonderful, how, into the midst of tumult VOL. XIX. -3D S. VOL. I. NO. II.

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