years, or within a period which does not extend back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers -the Jeffreys and Broughams-are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes up the physician's art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow. This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of" poetical poetry," to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the English language-one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become too exquisite and our poetry too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet's mind is an impertinence in his art. I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a "poetical poet;" but he is, at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel's opinion, and treating one of his "translations" from the Arabic as an original poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here the lines of which I am now speaking: THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES. I. "My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey, For back to the past, though the thought brings woe, My memory ever glides— To the old, old time, long, long ago, The time of the Barmecides ! To the old, old time, long, long ago, The time of the Barmecides. II. "Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will, And an iron arm in war, And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar's hill, III. "One golden goblet illumed my board, At hand my tried Karamanian sword For those were the days when the angry blow In the time of the Barmecides. IV. "Through city and desert my mates and I Were free to rove and roam, Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky, Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro, "I see rich Bagdad once again, With its turrets of Moorish mould, Which the Pall of Oblivion hides— All passed like snow, long, long ago, VI. "But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey, And I bend with the weight of years— May I soon go down to the House of Clay, Where slumber my Youth's compeers! |