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"O the vice within the blood!

And the sin within the sense;
And the fallen angelhood

With its yearnings too immense
To be understood!"

-a form of apology the last lines of which Mr. Owen Meredith might fairly adopt in his character of poet; but whether the immensity of his yearnings is sufficient excuse for the curiously torso character of his art, we are not quite sure.

But "Misanthropos" is, as we said, not only not the worst, but one of the least tricky of these sensational minor poems; for it does attempt to expound the intellectual attitude of the Misanthrope, though not to explain it. The real climax of poetical vice is reached in such pieces as "The Vampyre" or "The Portrait." In the latter poem a gentleman is introduced listening on a gusty night to the "wind at his prayers," whatever that meteorological phenomenon may be, and thinking by the dying fire of "the dear dead woman up-stairs." He explains to us that only two persons know any thing about his trouble, -one "the friend of his bosom, the man I love," whom grief has "sent fast asleep" in the chamber up above; the other is the Raphael-faced young priest who confessed her when she died, a man "of gentle nerve," whom this grief of another man had moved beyond measure, for his lip had grown white as he speeded "her parting soul." In this desolate situation he recalls to mind that he has left a portrait of himself on the bosom of the corpse:

"On her cold dead bosom my portrait lies

Which next to her heart she used to wear;
Haunting it o'er with her tender eyes
When my own face was not there.

It is set all round with rubies red,

And pearls which a Peri might have kept.
For each ruby there my heart hath bled;
For each pearl my eyes have wept !"

What this last statement may amount to as a measure of tenderness is not apparent; but he decides to reclaim his portrait before it is buried with her: and on going up-stairs to feel for it in the moonlight, he encounters another hand on the breast of the corpse, which turns out to be that of the "friend of my bosom, the man I loved," on the same errand; and a dispute very like that about the colour of the chameleon occurs:

"Sald the friend of my bosom, 'Yours, no doubt,

The portrait was, till a month ago,

When this suffering angel took that out,

And placed mine there, I know.'

"This woman, she loved me well,' said I.

'A month ago,' said my friend to me:
And in your throat,' I groan'd, 'you lie !'
He answer'd... 'let us see.'

'Enough!' I return'd, let the dead decide:
And whose soever the portrait prove,
His shall it be, when the cause is tried,
Where Death is arraign'd by Love.'
We found the portrait there, in its place:
We open'd it by the tapers' shine:
The gems were all unchanged: the face
Was-neither his nor mine.

'One nail drives out another, at least!
The face of the portrait there,' I cried,
'Is our friend's, the Raphael-faced young Priest,
Who confess'd her when she died.'

The setting is all of rubies red,

And pearls which a Peri might have kept.
For each ruby there my heart hath bled;
For each pearl my eyes have wept !"—

with which the poem concludes, without any speech from the dead woman, like that addressed by the chameleon to the positive travellers, concerning the folly of judging by so limited an experience. The cold comment that one nail drives out another, at least," with which the discovery of this harlot's elaborate double prostitution in the very face of death is received, is scarcely any addition to the very obscure testimony to the hero's tenderness, which appears to be typically set forth by the setting of the portrait in rubies and pearls. You are left with the raw horror on your mind of this frightful network of sensuality, duplicity, and death, and without any touch, however slight, which can serve to mitigate this horror by throwing the fine light of art over the scene. It is like an exceedingly detestable police-case thrown into rhyme. Owen Meredith may say, with great justice, that the plot of Shelley's Cenci is infinitely more frightful, and so it is; but, as we have said, Shelley has cast so bright an artistic beauty over the conception, has taken it up so completely into his imagination, that we can see nothing beyond the terrible intellectual and moral problem under which Beatrice Cenci's mind laboured, and by which it was so fearfully warped. But Mr. Owen Meredith does not throw this horror into any intellectual form at all. He does not even delineate it, if he is fully aware of it,-he only tells us what he expects will make us shudder, and imagines that that shudder is due to his poetry. Why, if you were to translate the thing into prose, you would lend it a much stronger effect. The only influence of the verse is to give a certain dilettante

sort of ornament to the story, without once rousing the imagination. You wonder what the rubies and pearls mean, and what sort of troubles he alludes to in the many bleedings of the heart to which he has been subject, and the tears he has shed, -whether they were all for this woman or not, and so forth. But the only intellectual kernel of the piece, if the incident be possible at all,-the state of mind of this dying prostitute,is not even touched. The story is pitched down before us in naked loathsomeness, a kind of monstrous nut to crack; and not a particle of artistic assistance is rendered towards solving the mystery of evil which the poet has indicated. No artistic crime could be more heinous.

We have now attempted to show that in almost all the departments of his art which he has attempted at all, Mr. Owen Meredith, or the gentleman who writes under that name, has substituted, for the genuine poetic art, which tries to reveal through the imaginative world, as fully as possible, the true spirit of human life and nature,-the spurious poetic art, which invents decorative artifices to hide the emptiness of its form. The latter is to the former what dress and ornament are to the culture of perfect beauty. Indeed, Mr. Owen Meredith's skill is mainly, as it seems to us, a branch of literary cosmetics, through which signs of healthy, earnest, and rounded purpose only shine in glimpses here and there. If we have been too severe, it is not at least from any personal motive; for we have never heard any thing of the writer except that his poems are popular, and that he stands socially far above the need of any thing like literary compassion. At a time when poetry has to do, for the cultivated world, much, not only of its own proper work, but of that of faith also,-when the true poets know intimately how infinitely difficult it is to find for their delineations but "one feeling based on truth"-on the absolute solid rock of truth, it is in our mind a serious duty to sound the artifices of the mere decorators of human life, who put a chain round its neck, and earrings in its ears, and fine raiment on its back, and beautify its complexion, and teach it the graceful attitudes of movement and repose, and call the result-poetry. We shall be grieved if we have done this gentleman any injustice. We have anxiously noted almost any sign of imaginative sincerity and vigour that a very careful study of him has discovered; but with every fresh reading we have gained fresh certainty that his models are bad, his method spurious, and his own feeling for nature either dull or blunted. His art is typified by the fair ghost whom he describes in one of his pointlessly thrilling poems. A woman "pale and fair," who seems a monarch's daughter "by the red gold round her hair," comes to him to

wards dawn, lifts up her head "from her white shoulders," and says,

"Look in! you'll find I'm hollow;
Pray do not be afraid."

That must have been Mr. Owen Meredith's Muse. She is a well and even ornately-dressed ghost, who habitually proclaims the gospel of her hollowness to any critic who will allow himself to be haunted by her for a season. We have looked in, we have found her very hollow, and we are not at all afraid; but we are very much fatigued, and, as the beaten soldiers say, "demoralised" by the process. "Earth is sick and heaven is weary" of this tawdry finery affecting the grandeur of an art which of all arts is the most real to the very few to whom has been given the vision and the power to discern, and live by, the truth of life. Mr. Owen Meredith has cleverness, and is not incapable of higher aims. He will one day cast off with a sigh of relief the meretricious and dilettante costume which has so long disguised him from his true self, as well as from the world which has applauded and misled him.

ART. IX.-CHURCH REFORM.

A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London on the State of Subscription in the Church of England and in the University of Oxford. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D., Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford; Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of London. Oxford and London: John Henry and James Parker.

LORD ELDON Would never have understood the present position of the Church of England. He firmly believed that the first effect of the Reform Bill, of Catholic Emancipation, and all the thousand changes which harassed his old age, would be the "demolition" of the Church of England. He had seen a new world of thought arise around the old and sacred fabric. For years he had striven to keep down the new world; for years he succeeded; at length he had been vanquished. He could not doubt what the effect would be. The Church would be attacked "from without," its external enemies would close in upon it day by day: day by day their strength would increase, and its strength would decrease; in no long time it would fall, amid the jeers of its assailants, and in a storm of revolution. Thirty years have

passed on, and we see the reality before us. It is the reverse of the anticipation. The assailants of the Church from without are less powerful, less formidable, less hopeful, than they were thirty years ago. A small section of the orthodox Dissenters excepted, no one attacks the "Establishment" as such. The very phrase has died out of our controversies. The abolition of church-rates seemed a short time since probable; but an injudicious advocate, the authorised agent of an influential society, happened to say that it was only a step towards "further changes,"-towards the destruction of the Church: and then immediately public feeling changed; the English people were alarmed, and church-rates were preserved. Thirty years ago, Liberals were not only wrath but loud at the position of the Bishops in the House of Lords; who is either loud or angry now? Who cares at all about the matter? The Irish Church is as bad as ever; it is, as formerly, the Church of a minority. The Scottish Church, which old reformers hardly ventured to attack, which had cast its roots deep and wide in the whole Scottish people, has become the Church of a minority too. The case of the assailants of ecclesiastical establishments has improved, and yet they assail no longer.

But the existing Church is not safe; it has never felt so unsafe. It is attacked from within. In the old times-in Lord Eldon's times-there was at least a demarcation between friends and foes. The assailants might be eager, but there was no treachery in the interior. Now the clergy attack the formularies of the Church, some one and some another; others attack the Bible itself. Courts of law are harassed with arguments to prove how many heresies beneficed clergymen may safely and consistently hold. Many of the best churchmen write pamphlets in favour of change: they would relax something or they would alter something. Now most educated people are for a Church, though few are satisfied with the Church; thirty years ago the issue was different and simpler,-every one was either for the Church or else for no Church.

The causes of so remarkable a change are well worth a little consideration, though they cannot be fully understood without a little theory.

There are three courses which the State may adopt with religion. First, it may leave it alone altogether; it may affect to say or think, "Religion is of so high a sphere that I decline to have any thing to do with it;" it may really think, "Religion is a thing so intangible, so curious, so affected by the various idiosyncrasies of different minds, so sure to breed quarrels and contention, that I will have nothing to do with it. To do the plain political work of this world is the business of the

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