Sir Rohan's Ghost

A Romance. Boston : J. E. Tilton & Company. 1800. pp. 352.

IT is very plain that we have got a new poet,—a tremendous responsibility both for him who will have to learn how to carry the brimming vase of Art from the Pierian spring without squandering a drop, and for us critics who are to reconcile ourselves to what is new in him, and to hold him strictly to that apprenticeship to the old which is the condition of mastery at last.

Criticism in America has reached something like the state of the old Continental currency. There is no honest relation between the promises we make and the specie basis of meaning they profess to represent. “ The most extraordinary book of the age ” is published every week ; “ genius” springs up like mullein, wherever the soil is thin enough ; the yearly catch of “weird imagination,” “thrilling pathos,” “splendid description,” and “sublime imagery ” does not fall short of an ordinary mackerel-crop; and “profound originality ” is so plenty that one not in the secret would be apt to take it for commonplace. Now Tithonus, whom, as the oldest inhabitant, we have engaged to oversee the criticism of the “ Atlantic,” has a prodigiously long memory,— almost as long as one of Dickens’s descriptive passages,— he remembers perfectly well all the promising young fellows from Orpheus down, and has made a notch on the stalk of a devil’sapron for every one who ever came to anything that was of more consequence to the world than to himself. His tally has not yet mounted to a baker’s dozen. Accordingly, when a young enthusiast rushes to tell Tithonus that a surprising genius has turned up, that venerable and cautious being either puts his hand behind his ear and absconds into an extemporary deafness, or says dryly, “ American kind, I suppose ? ” This coolness of our wary senior is infectious, and we confess ourselves so far disenchanted by it, that, when we go into a library, the lettering on the backs of nine-tenths of the volumes contrives to shape itself into a laconic Hic jacet.

It is of prime necessity to bring back the currency of criticism to the old hardmoney basis. We have been gradually losing all sense of the true relation between words and things,—the surest symptom of intellectual decline. And this looseness of criticism reacts in the most damaging way upon literature by continually debasing the standard, and by confounding all distinction between fame and notoriety. Ought it to be gratifying to the author of “ Popular Sovereignty, a Poem in Twelve Cantos,” to he called the most remarkable man of the age, when he knows that he shares that preëminence with Mr. Tupper, nay, with half the names in the Directory ? Indiscriminate eulogy is the subtlest form of depreciation, for it makes all praise suspicious.

We look upon artistic genius as the rarest and most wayward apparition among mankind. It cannot be predicated upon any of Mr. Buckle’s averages. Given the census, you may, perhaps, say so many murders, so many suicides, so many misdirected letters (and men of letters), but not so many geniuses. In this one thing old Mother Nature will be whimsical and womanish. This is a gift that John Bull, or Johnny Crapaud, or Brother Jonathan does not find in his stocking every Christmas. Crude imagination is common enough, — every hypochondriac has a more than Shakspearian allowance of it; fancy is cheap, or nobody would dream ; eloquence sits ten deep on every platform. But genius in Art is that supreme organizing and idealizing faculty which, by combining, arranging, modulating, by suppressing the abnormal and perpetuating the essential, apes creation,—which from the shapeless terror or tipsy fancy of the benighted ploughman can conjure the sisters of Fores heath and the court of Titania,—which can make language thunder or coo at will, — which, in short, is the ruler of those qualities any one of which in excess is sure to overmaster the ordinary mind, and which can crystallize helpless vagary into the clearly outlined and imperishable forms of Art.

It is not, therefore, from any grudging incapacity to appreciate new authors, but from a strong feeling that we are to guard the graves of the dead from encroachment, and their fames from vulgarization, that the “Atlantic” has been and will be sparing in its use of the word genius. One may safely predicate power, nicety of thought and language, a clear eye for scenery and character, and grace of poetic conception of a book, without being willing to say that it gives proof of genius. For genius is the shaping faculty, the power of using material in the best way, and may not work itself clear of the besetting temptation of personal gifts and of circumstances in a first or even second work. It is something capable of education and accomplishment, and the patience with which it submits itself to this needful schooling and self-abnegation is one of the surest tests of its actual possession. Could even Shakspeare’s poems and earlier plays come before us for judgment, we could only say of them, as of Keats’s “ Endymion,” that they showed affluence, but made no sure prophecy of that artistic self-possession without which plenty is but confusion and incumbrance.

So much by way of preface, lest we might seem cold to the very remarkable merits of “ Sir Rohan’s Ghost,” if we treated it as a book worth finding fault with, instead of condemning it to the indifferent limbo of general eulogy. It is our deliberate judgment that no first volume by any author has ever been published in America showing more undoubtful symptoms of genuine poetic power than this. There are passages in it where imagination and language combine in the most artistic completeness, and the first quatrain of the song which Sir Rohan fancies he hears,—

Till my love should come to shore,”— seems to us absolutely perfect in its simplicity and suggestiveness. It has that wayward and seemingly accidental justright-ness that is so delightful in old ballads. The hesitating cadence of the third line is impregnated with the very mood of the singer, and lingers like the action it pictures. All those passages in the book, too, where the symptoms of Sir Rohan’s possession by his diseased memory are handled, where we see all outward nature but as wax to the plastic will of imagination, are to the utmost well-conceived and carried out. It was part of the necessity of the case that the book should be conjectural and metaphysical, for it is plain that the author is young and has little experience of the actual. Accordingly, with a true instinct, she (for the newspapers ascribe the authorship of the book to Miss Prescott) calls her story a Romance, thus absolving it from any cumbersome allegiance to fact, and lays the scene of it in England, where she can have old castles, old traditions, old families, old servants, and all the other olds so essential to the young writer, ready to her hand.

We like the book better for being in the main subjective (to use the convenient word Mr. Ruskin is so angry with); for a young writer can only follow the German plan of conjuring things up “from the depths of his inward consciousness.” The moment our author quits this sure ground, her touch becomes uncertain and her colors inharmonious. Character-painting is unessential to a romance, belonging as it does properly to the novel of actual life, in which the romantic element is equally out of place. Fielding, accordingly, the greatest artist in character since Shakspeare, hardly admits sentiment, and never romance, into his master-pieces. Hawthorne, again, another great master, feeling instinctively the poverty and want of sharp contrast in the externals of our New England life, always shades off the edges of the actual, till, at some indefinable line, they meet and mingle with the supersensual and imaginative.

The author of “Sir Rohan” attempts character in Redruth the butler, and in the villain and heroine of her story. We are inclined to think the villain the best hit of the three, because he is downright scoundrel without a redeeming point, as the Nemesis of the story required him to be, and because he is so far a purely ideal character. But there is no such thing possible as an ideal butler, at least in the sense our author assumes in the cellar-scene. The better poet, the worse butler; and so we are made impatient by his more than Redi-isms about wine, full of fancy as they are in themselves, because they are an impertinence. For the same reason, we forgive the heroine her rhapsodies about the figures of the Arthur-romances, but cannot pardon her descents into real life and her incursions on what should be the sanctuary of the breakfast-table. The author attributes to her a dash of gypsy blood ; and if her style of humorous conversation be a fair type of that of the race in general, we no longer wonder that they are homeless exiles irons human society. When will men learn the true nature of a pun,— that it is a play upon ideas, and not upon sounds,— and that a perfect one is as rare as a perfect poem ?

In the prose “ Edda,” the dwarfs tell a monstrous fib, when they pretend that Kvasir, the inventor of poetry, has been suffocated by his own wisdom. Nevertheless, the little fellows showed thereby that they were not short of intelligence ; for it is almost always in their own overflow that young poets are drowned. This superabundance seems to us the chief defect in “ Sir Rohan’s Ghost.” The superabundance is all very fine, of the costliest kind ; but was Clarence any the better for being done to death in Malmsey instead of water ?

This fault we look on as a fault of promise. There is always a chance that luxuriance may be pruned, but none short of a miracle that a broomstick may be made to blossom. There is, however, one absolute, and not relative fault in the book, which we find it harder to forgive, since it is one of instinct rather than of Art. The author seems to us prone to confound the terrible, (the only true subject of Art) with the horrible. The one rouses moral terror or aversion, the other only physical disgust. This is one of the worst effects of the modern French school upon literature, the inevitable result of its degrading the sensuous into the sensual.

We have found all the fault we could with this volume, because we sincerely think that the author of it is destined for great things, and that she owes it to the rare gift she has been endowed with to do nothing inconsiderately, and by honest self-culture to raise natural qualities to conscious and beneficent powers.