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By Root 16893 0

Yet he wearies in having done too little, rather than too much; what is in him the diffuseness of one idea, is the conglomerate concision of many; — and this concision it is which renders obscure. With such a man, to imitate was out of the question; it would have answered no purpose — for he spoke to his own alone , which would have comprehended no alien tongue; — he was, therefore, profoundly original. His quaintness arose from intuitive perception of that truth to which Lord Verulam alone has given distinct voice: — “There is no exquisite beauty which ­has not some strangeness in its proportion.” But whether obscure, original, or quaint, he was at all times sincere. He had no affectations.

From the ruins of Shelley there sprang into existence, affronting the Heavens, a tottering and fantastic pagoda, in which the salient angles, tipped with mad jangling bells, were the idiosyncratic faults of the great original — faults which cannot be called such in view of his purposes, but which are monstrous when we regard his works as addressed to mankind. A “school” arose — if that absurd term must still be employed — a school — a system of rules — upon the basis of the Shelley who had none. Young men innumerable, dazzled with the glare and bewildered with the bizarrerie of the divine lightning that flickered through the clouds of the Prometheus, had no trouble whatever in heaping up imitative vapors, but, for the lightning, were content, perforce, with its spectrum, in which the bizarrerie appeared without the fire. Nor were great and mature minds unimpressed by the contemplation of a greater and more mature; and thus gradually were interwoven into this school of all Lawlessness — of obscurity, quaintness, exaggeration — the misplaced didacticism of Wordsworth, and the even more preposterously anomalous metaphysicianism of Coleridge. Matters were now fast verging to their worst, and at length, in Tennyson, poetic inconsistency attained its extreme. But it was precisely this extreme (for the greatest error and the greatest truth are scarcely two points in a circle) — it was this extreme which, following the law of all extremes, wrought in him — in Tennyson — a natural and inevitable revulsion, leading him first to contemn and secondly to investigate his early manner, and, finally, to win now from its magnificent elements the truest and purest of all poetical styles. But not even yet is the process complete; and for this reason in part, but chiefly on account of the mere fortuitousness of that mental and moral combination which shall unite in one person (if ever it shall) the Shelleyan abandon, the Tennysonian poetic sense, the most profound instinct of Art, and the sternest Will properly to blend and vigorously to control all; — chiefly, we say, because such combination of antagonisms must be purely fortuitous, has the world never ­in the noblest of the poems of which it is possible that it may be put in possession.

And yet Miss Barrett has narrowly missed the fulfilment of these conditions. Her poetic inspiration is the highest — we can conceive nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure itself, but has been contaminated by pedantic study of false models — a study which has the more easily led her astray, because she placed an undue value upon it as rare — as alien to her character of woman. The accident of having been long secluded by ill health from the world has effected, moreover, in her behalf, what an innate recklessness did for Shelley — has imparted to her, if not precisely that abandon to which I have referred, at least a something that stands well in its stead — a comparative independence of men and opinions with which she did not come personally in contact — a happy audacity of thought and expression never before known in one of her sex. It is, however, this same accident of ill health, perhaps, which has invalidated her original Will — diverted her from proper individuality of purpose — and seduced her in the sin of imitation. Thus, what she might have done we cannot altogether determine. What she has actually accomplished