| <The Saturday Review Sept. 12, 1857>
| <Reader's Poems>
| <Lord Robert Cecil>
| <pb n="249">
| Under ordinary circumstances, we should not have thought 
| it worth while to review four volumes of such unmitigated 
| dullness as these poems of Mr. Reade.  But the fact that 
| many of them have attained such a sale as to make a new 
| edition possible, gives the author a title at least to notice, if 
| not to praise.  He is not a poet by nature, and has none of 
| the gifts which go to make a poet; but he has qualities 
| which, in these days, their possessors often imagine to be 
| poetical.  He is deeply infected with that passion for 
| self-analysis which Mr. Kingsley is so fond of telling us is
| the disease of the age, and the results of which, for some 
| inscrutable reason, are nowadays invariably versified.  
| From the number of poems that are published, a foreigner 
| might imagine that England was never so rich in poets as 
| she is now; but, on a closer examination, he would perceive 
| that we are rich, not in poets, but in metaphysicians, who 
| are distinguished less for the novelty of their discoveries 
| than for their marvelous mania for putting them into metre.  
| Of this school Mr. Reade is a shining luminary.  All kinds 
| of persons from Adam and Eve down to a hypothetical 
| fatalist, are made to come forward and dissect themselves 
| for the instruction of this generation.  They make long 
| prosy speeches, in which a few most orthodox sentiments 
| struggle dimly through a tangle of halting metre and 
| inextricable grammar.  The following is a fair specimen of 
| the sort of metre in which these <p> "spiritual revealments" 
| </p> are generally clothed:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| If there are any connoisseurs of dullness who would like to 
| explore further the beauties of Mr. Reade, we especially 
| commend to their notice a poem entitled "Man in Paradise," 
| which he appears to have modestly intended as a 
| continuation of <hi rend="italic"> Paradise Lost. </hi>  
| The burden of it is, that Adam and Eve, as soon as the 
| autumn begins to set in, discover that it is getting cold:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| <pb n="250">
| In this difficulty, he and his wife, after an unsatisfactory 
| interview with the devil, apply for counsel to an angel.  The 
| angel is remarkably sensible, and advises him to take 
| exercise; but like many sensible people, he does not convey 
| his advice in the most lucid language: ~~
| <q> </q>
| <p> "Caparisons are odorous."  </p> We should 
| recommend Mr. Reade to steer clear of Milton's subjects 
| and Milton's metre.
| It seems to us that this age is peculiarly cursed in its 
| poetasters.  The poetasters of former ages were generally 
| dull and milk-and-water; but still their humble efforts were 
| far too carefully elaborated not to be perfectly intelligible.  
| But the poetaster of the present day not only cannot write 
| poetry ~~ he cannot write English, or sense, or grammar.  
| At first sight, it is hard to conceive a reason why a set of 
| educated men should take so much trouble to imitate the 
| style of an Irvingite speaker of tongues.  Probably they are 
| the victims of a blind obedience to two prevalent popular 
| ideas.  The guiding star of the poetical taste of the present 
| generation is a renewed adoration of Shakspeare, and a 
| reaction against the idolatry of Pope.  Our unhappy 
| poetasters seem to have imagined that by formulating these 
| feelings ~~ by shunning all that Pope did, and aping all that 
| Shakspeare did ~~ they would obtain the true recipe for the 
| manufacture of poetry.  Unluckily it happens that 
| Shakspeare, though the greatest of poets, is the worst of 
| models.  His illustrious qualities, his exact knowledge of 
| nature, his noble conceptions of character, are 
| unapproachable; but he lived in an age rude and half 
| polished, and he wrote for the age in which he lived.  It was 
| an age which, though great in many ways, was by no means 
| free from affectations; and one of them was the taste for 
| quaint conceits and far-fetched similes.  They are no 
| peculiarity of Shakspeare's ~~ they were the constant form 
| of the witticisms of Court wits, and of the compliments of 
| Court poets.  They are just as strong in Spenser or in Bacon 
| ~~ they were the fashion with all the writers of the 
| Jacobean age ~~ they culminated in Cowley and Andrews, 
| and only finally disappeared after the Restoration.  But they 
| tincture strongly the writings of the great dramatist, among 
| others, and so far as they do so undoubtedly deform them; 
| and, being deformities, they are precisely the only parts 
| which our own metrical metaphysicians are competent to 
| copy.  But the copyists have met with the usual fate of their 
| breed ~~ their imitation has become caricature.  Their 
| conceits are not quaint, but uncouth ~~ their similes are not 
| merely far-fetched, but simply unintelligible.  Still more 
| unfortunate has been their abhorrence of Pope; for nearly 
| all Pope's defects are negative.  Though undoubtedly 
| wanting in many of the native qualities of a poet, few ever 
| equaled him in the mere knack and trick of his craft; and 
| whatever Pope excelled in, the spasmodic school abhor as a 
| blemish.  Pope's meaning was as clear as crystal ~~ they 
| are therefore consistently unintelligible.  Pope's lines were 
| flowing to a fault ~~ their verses never scan by accident.  
| Pope's style was scrupulously grammatical ~~ from their 
| writings the normal relations of verb and nominative case 
| have absolutely disappeared.  The result is, that what passes 
| for poetry in this middle of the nineteenth century is 
| nothing but a mysterious metaphysical jargon, fitfully 
| jerked out in broken sentences, like the gasping of an oracle 
| in hysterics.
| Now, Mr. Reade is not a poet, and therefore it would be 
| idle to expect him to write poetry.  But he evidently has a 
| considerable command of English, and some of his smaller 
| pieces sufficiently show that he can express himself with 
| clearness when he likes.  It is therefore matter of wonder 
| that he should don the livery of Mr. Sidney Dobell, or carol 
| himself in a school which has no other notion of the use of 
| language except that which tradition imputes to Talleyrand.  
| He seems to have forgotten the rudimentary truth that a 
| man must write English before he can write poetry.  It is 
| not merely that we demur to many of his metaphors ~~ 
| such as <q> </q>, or <q> </q>, which rise up <q> </q> ~~ 
| it is not simply that he is generally obscure, or that he 
| makes a liberal use of a poet's license of inversion.  What 
| we complain of is, that many of his passages are as 
| completely unintelligible as one of the corrupt passages of 
| the <hi rend="italic"> Eumenides. </hi>  What will the 
| future Dindorf of New Zealand, if he should be unlucky 
| enough to disinter Mr. John Edmund Reade from the 
| <hi rend="italic"> debris </hi> of a fossil circulating library, 
| make of the following passage?  It is supposed to be a 
| description of the charge at Inkerman:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| How does an ocean splinter?  And when it splinters, how 
| can it burst?  And who hurled whose foremost backward 
| reeling on whose rearward ranks?  We do not venture to 
| object to the poetry.  We do not enter on the difficulty of a 
| rampart being crowned by the fiery zone that girds it, or on 
| the fact that sweeping is not an operation to which 
| whirlwinds are generally subject.  We only ask to 
| understand, not to admire; and in all humility we beg to 
| suggest, that when Mr. Reade next publishes in the 
| spasmodic style, he will be good enough to follow the 
| precedent of the Delphin editions of the classics, and to add 
| a marginal translation in ordinary English.  Possibly, 
| however, he may plead the exigencies of an unmanageable 
| metre.  We will try him, then, in the full liberty of blank 
| verse, in which he soars perfectly unfettered; for his blank 
| verse is nearly as innocent of metre as it is of rhyme.  The 
| following extract is from a metaphysical poem termed 
| "Revelations of Life," written for the confusion of fatalists 
| and fanatics:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| We have never been fortunate enough to see the <p> "rays 
| of twilight;" </p> but, assuming their existence, how do the 
| same rays contrive to fall on the pastor and against the oak?  
| Possibly the pastor was bald and shining, and acted as a 
| mirror.  But the most mysterious question suggested by the 
| passage is whether it is the oak, or the twilight, or the 
| pastor that is <p> "reclining a part of nature and the scene;" 
| </p> for, as far as our observation has gone, twilights and 
| oaks seldom recline at all, and pastors only when they are 
| in bed.  We cannot leave this passage without calling 
| attention to the exquisite touch of nature in the last line.  
| We quite agree with Mr. Reade that it is of very little use 
| for a young lady to <p> "blossom in the beautiful" </p> 
| unless she does it <p> "silently." </p>
| It would be tedious to dwell further on the blunders of a 
| tedious production.  The passages we have noticed are not 
| the carefully culled blemishes of a lengthy work ~~ they all 
| occur in the first hundred and fifty pages of one single 
| volume.  Mr. Reade has mistaken his vocation.  Before he 
| again trusts himself to his Pegasus, we entreat him to lay to 
| heart the elementary truths that blank verse does not mean 
| prose printed in short lines ~~ that eccentric language does 
| not alter the nature of commonplace ideas ~~ and that even 
| the mere art of poetry consists of something more recondite 
| than the simple plan of leaving out all the nominative cases 
| and systematically substituting participles for verbs.