Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/354

 "a question has arisen which suspends all united action among Radicals. . . . On this most grievous subject we shall, in the course of this article, declare our whole opinion." He yet, however, finds it necessary first to denounce in fitting terms Lord John Russell's declaration of hostility to all reform on the first night of the session. The discussion of the Canadian problem is in his very best style, and is as well worth reading even now as any of his reprinted papers.

The number for April, this year, opens with one of his literary articles, reproduced in the "Dissertations—" "Alfred de Vigny." This article is his latest and most highly elaborated attempt to philosophize upon literature and poetry. The "Thoughts on Poetry" is his only other paper that he has thought worth preserving. The reviews of Tennyson and Carlyle's "French Revolution" are replete with just criticism, but do not reach the height of philosophical explanation. In his philosophy of style, there are many good points, but, as I conceive, some serious omissions. I doubt if he gave enough thought to the subject. The earlier part of the "De Vigny" article on the influence exerted on poetry by political changes, such as the French Revolution, is, I think, very happily expressed, and is quite equal to any other similar dissertations by our best historians and critics. It is when he comes to state the essential quality of the poetic genius or temperament that I think his view defective. In the first place, he puts too much stress on the emotional quality, and too little on the intellectual. In the second place, he is wrong in identifying the poet intellectually with the philosopher or thinker: he regards genius, whether in poetry or in philosophy, as the gift of seeing truths at a greater depth than the world can penetrate. On the former of these two heads he accepts De Vigny's emotional delineation—"the thrill from beauty, grandeur, and harmony, the infinite pity for mankind"—as the tests, or some of the tests, of the poetic nature; but he takes no direct notice of the genius of expression, the constructive or creative faculty, without which emotion will never make a poet, and with which the grandest poetry may be' produced on a very slight emotional basis. To criticise Shelley without adducing his purely intellectual force, displayed in endless resources of language, is to place the superstructure of poetry on a false foundation. Shakespeare, in any view of him, was ten parts intellect for one of emotion; and his intellect did not, so far as I am aware, see truths at a greater depth than the world could penetrate. Mill inherited his father's disposition to think Shakespeare overrated; which, to say the least, was unfortunate when he came to theorize on poetry at large.

In August, appeared the review of Bentham, which I will advert to presently.

The next number is December, 1838. It closes with Mill's second article on Canada—"Lord Durham's Return"—vindicating his policy point by point, in a way that only Mill could have done. It concludes: