We observe also at intervals a kind of baldness of expression--a ruggedness and disregard of beauty in uttering ideas--that is unpleasant. We think, with a learned friend who first drew our attention to it, that this comes of the authors anxiety and determination to be clear. The lines seem like men trained down to fighting-weight--all strength and no contour. No doubt the high and difficult ideas to be rendered (for it is never seen in the descriptive interludes) constitute ample cause for this fault; but yet, in noticing the whole, we are constrained to note it as a blemish.
It remains to speak of the author's poems on Ireland. Here it is evident that he feels warmly as the chief organizer himself; and yet nothing can be further from to-day's Fenianism than the tone of his writings. Irish they are to the core--as animated as the best in proclaiming the wrongs of Ireland and the misrule of the invaders--but from the same premises somehow he seems to draw a different conclusion. This is to our author one of those near and dear subjects which are elements in a man's inner life: he has published another volume [Footnote 21] upon it, and a large portion of his poems turn on it. Most of the best among his single poems--The Irish Celt to the Irish Norman, the Ode to Ireland, the beautiful Year of Sorrow, and others--are either too long or too close-woven for quotation. Another able one is The Sisters, which is full of beautiful thoughts, independent of the Irish bearing.
[Footnote 21: English Misrule and Irish Misdeeds. London, 1848.]
But the most prominent and elaborate of these poems is Inisfail, or Ireland in the Olden Time--a chronological series of odes, songs, and all manner of remarks in rhyme, illustrative of Ireland's history and the feeling of her people, through the various epochs of her national and denationalized life. There is more historical research, more talent, and more time buried to waste in this poem, than would make ten ordinary shallow reputations. The author shows a thorough and a _vitalized_ knowledge of Irish history, and he penetrates well and nobly the { 84} succession of popular sentiment; nay, he has done a more difficult thing still--he has caught much of the spirit of bardic verse. Only our very decided and deliberate opinion is, that the spirit of bardic verse is extremely like the gorilla--very hard to catch, and not particularly beautiful when caught. We have read, we are fairly sure, the better part of the English-Irish poetry that has attained any note--that class of which Clarence Mangan stands at the head, and are very much grieved and dissatisfied with it. Wherever the Gaelic ode-form is adopted, or the Gaelic symbolism--the Roisin Dhu, Silk of the Kine, etc.--we cannot help wishing it absent. Whatever has pleased us in poems of this sort would have pleased as well or better in another guise; whatever has fatigued or offended, has generally done so on account of its Gaelic form. From weary experience, we have reached the firm conclusion that the Gaelic style is peculiarly adapted to the Erse tongue, and we earnestly hope that future twangings of the harp that hung in Tara's halls may be either in the aforesaid dialect, or else, like Moore's Irish Melodies (and does any one wish for anything more nobly Irish?), consonant in style with the spirit of the language they are written in. The best talent devoted to grafting Gaelic blossoms on English stems has only served to show them essentially uncongenial. Every attempt of this kind reads like a translation from Erse into English, and, like all translations, hints in every turn of the superiority of the original. And, speaking disinterestedly (we are, as it happens, neither Gael nor Sassenach), we scarcely think any translator likely to swim in waters where Clarence Mangan barely floated.