ART. IV.-King Alfred, a Poem. By JOHN FITCHETT. Edited by ROBERT ROSCOE. 6 vols. London, 1841-2. WHEN the fisherman, the friend of our childhood in the Arabian Nights, caught in his nets the little sealed envelope, out of which, on its being opened, slipped noiselessly he could not see and we cannot tell how many roods of apparently bodiless smoke, then deep as his was our amazement. When the smoke, after stretching far along the shore, and high into the sky, began to condense itself, without the pressure of any air-pump, into an intelligible shape, and finally towered over him in the gigantic form of one of the many genii familiar to the creed of his clime, then speechless as his was our terror. But when the genius, thus evaporated and consolidated, addressed him in articulate language, explaining how such volume could be so compressed, then our wits, like his, retaining wonder but casting off fear, gradually resettled. The like sympathy, so raised and so modified, we would have expected and must have received from any one near us, when we took up King Alfred, a poem, and beheld it swelling into six volumes, assuming the guise of a veritable epic, and speaking to us in "the tongue that Shakspeare spake." Many centuries ago Horace dropped a prescient caution: "Nec sic incipies, ut scriptor cyclicus olim ; Fortunam Priami cantabo, et nobile bellum.” With a gallant contempt for the admonition, Mr. Fitchett begins: "Alfred, whose battles and successive toils Freed from the Conquest of the Danish foe His ravaged country, claims the grateful Muse." Now, without knowing all the grounds upon which such an exordium appeared objectionable to the Roman critic, we can easily gather that he disliked a big promise, which might end in a meagre performance. Living, or, at least, notorious delinquents, were probably in his eye when he wrote. But the utmost stretch of his lively fancy could not have reached the appalling results which have followed the neglect of his advice by the native of an island, where, when Flaccus expounded the principles of correct composition, literature was as scanty as clothing. He could scarcely have imagined-what we only credit from "the true avouch" of our own eyes-the ceaseless torrent of a poem deluging eight and forty books with one hundred and thirty-one thousand lines. We may, perhaps, render more intelligible the enormous dimensions of this edifice of human labour, by observing, that its first twelve books exceed, by six thousand lines, the Iliad and Odyssey, and that the first sixteen books, being exactly a third part of the entire mass, outnumber by seven more nearly than six thousand lines, the Iliad, Odyssey, and Eneid, while Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, and Paradise Lost, making together seventy-two books, are in an arrear of almost a thousand verses in a settlement between them and the first eighteen books of "King Alfred." Is not this storming Parnassus like a Titan? King Alfred plunges the mind into the consideration of two impossibilities, from one of which it is very difficult to find any means of escape. The impossibility of writing it is no longer predicable, in the face of the six closely-printed octavo volumes before us. But how shall we deal with the impossibility of reading it? This demon, conjured up by authors with terrible facility, is hard to be exorcised. And, in the present instance, we fear that the enthusiastic Mr. Fitchett, unconscious that as his epic grew taller, so the malignant spirit-the dread Impossibilitywas waxing more potent, has ended by delivering himself into the hands of a fiend, who will blast his fondest hopes, by scaring all desire of access to the treasures, which were accumulated for the ultimate purpose of general distribution. The wonder which the work itself must excite, would be small in comparison with the astonishment created by knowing that half a dozen people had achieved a perusal of it. The vantage ground, therefore, which we occupy, instils a serene confidence in our own opinions unknown to critics who discuss subjects with which their readers may be as much at home as themselves. But we do not mean arrogantly to abuse the security of our position. In the few pages at our disposal, it would be hopeless to try to raise others to the level of our knowledge, while a commentary upon King Alfred, commensurate with, or composed after the model of, the text would indeed be, what the laws of Rome were alleged once to have been, "a load for many camels." The labour of forty years we must endeavour, with an agility beyond the nimble Puck, to "put a girdle round about" in less than "forty minutes.” poem But the greatest marvel after all is, that Mr. Fitchett's is a short poem. If he had lived ten years longer, we are at a loss to comprehend why the epopée should not have been ten books longer. The principle on which it is constructed, and which is adhered to through every part of it with unswerving fidelity, confers a capability of expansion illimitable, except by the volition, or the decease of the writer. We are, therefore, surprised, not at the extent of the actual performance, but at the boldness which conceived the possibility of confining within any computable cycle of books or verses the boundless space, in which exuberant genius was to be permitted, and to be encouraged to revel. King Alfred, accordingly, disappoints us by its brevity, and provokes a wish that before the publication of any second edition, it may undergo the revision of old Mrs. Nickleby, whose centrifugal redundancies alone afford a parallel to the desultory amplitude of Mr. Fitchett. An epic poem, according to the Fitchett school, seems to us to resemble very closely one of those roomy stage coaches started now-a-days for the purpose of accommodating certain districts of country, which, being felicitously insulated between two railways, are in danger of reverting to a condition of primitive pedestrianism. This convenient vehicle, starting perhaps with a fair complement of passengers for a particular destination, is at the same time remarkably attentive to all wayfarers, who may desire to be conveyed short intermediate distances, and from whom, in fact, it derives a large proportion of revenue. Its politeness, now and then, induces it to drive a country squire and his family a mile or two up the avenue to the very door of their mansionhouse, and may occasionally tempt it, at the request of an ardent tourist, to deviate altogether from the highway, and seek the shady woodlands or sunny slopes of a baronial park. Its complaisant good-nature will not refuse half-an-hour's inspection of a picturesque ruin, or ascent of a panoramic hill-side, and has once been known to permit a dead halt for a most uncertain lapse of time, in order to mingle with the festivities of a marriage-party at an adjoining hamlet, thereafter resuming its journey with exhilarated energy. In short, before the day's travel is over, it has shaken hands with a great variety of people-generated a vast deal of pleasant conversation-visited many uncommon localities -and patched up a curious Mosaic work of company and incidents. Mr. Fitchett yokes Pegasus precisely to such an omnibus, with a licence besides to carry every body it can pick up, and an unrestricted liberty to go wherever the caprice of any one who patronizes the conveyance may direct. We shall endeavour, by and bye, to give our readers a faint notion of the success of so philanthropic a scheme, by following its progress, premising generally, to those who may join us in the expedition, that they will thus permeate every climate and region not merely of the terrestrial planet, but of the universe, and be brought into contact not exclusively with the whole human population of our globe, but with such multitudinous motley throngs of incorporeal comrades "Black spirits and white, as never were begotten or congregated by the complex fecundity of a nightmare. Nor would it be fair to suppress the fact, that all the companions, without a single exception, introduced to us by Mr. Fitchett, possess those rare virtues in a fellow-traveller, the faculty and the passion for interminable talk, in a degree which justifies a suspicion that Nestor must have had an impediment in his speech, and a very imperfect memory. But, first of all, we are obliged to doubt whether Mr. Fitchett was happy in the selection of his theme. It is observable, that while the exploits of Arthur so fired the imagination both of Milton and Dryden, as to lead each to meditate an epic poem of which he should be the hero, and actually warmed the beautiful fancy of Spenser into melodious utterance, the more really grand and patriotically valuable career of Alfred kindled no such flames. This is explicable, it seems to us, on sufficiently obvious grounds. The glory of the reign of Alfred is associated in the hearts of Englishmen much more with the victories of peace than of war -with the paternal government of the prince-with the wisdom of the judge and lawgiver-with the large humanity of the friend of all generous and useful arts-with the sagacious magnanimity of the founder of some of the dearest privileges of the commonwealth, rather than with the triumphs of the conqueror of the Danes. And then the truth of his life, in its great characteristic features, stands on this side of the mists of tradition, or the twilight of legendary reputation, as a solid part of the incontrovertible history of the growth of England's independence and power, as the first chapter, perhaps, in her serious annals as an organized state among the polities of Europe. Within such confines there is naturally little to attract or excite the epic muse, for either, on the one hand, her strains must be heavily imbued with didactic monotony, or, on the other hand, her song can rise with difficulty above the metrical narrative of a chronicler. A name so dear, and a renown so ineffaceable, might well have inspired the masters of British poesy long before the time of Mr. Fitchett, were it not, we believe, that the name has, to English ears, a sound so household, and that the renown is, in English eyes, so blended with the every-day working of our noble constitution, that any attempt by fictitious lustre to hallow more deeply the one, or heighten the splendour of the other, has been felt to be idle, intrusive, and impossible. But the oblivion of these feelings, into which, from very idolatry of Alfred, Mr. Fitchett sunk, and the preposterous extravagances to which he was driven in order to extricate himself from the obstacles which, as we have stated, inevitably, in our opinion, encumbered the path he took, it is now our intention to exhibit. We know, historically, that when the Danes broke through VOL. II. NO. IV. 2 c the Saxon line of defence at Chippenham, England, almost naked from desolation, and exhausted by the slaughter or exile of its champions, lay for the time, subdued in spirit as in strength, at the foot of the ravager. "All," says the chronicler, "but Alfred the king." In these five words, there is more poetrymore of the trumpet-note which stirred Sir Philip Sydney, than in the forty-eight books and the hundred and thirty thousand lines of Mr. Fitchett. "Audire magnos jam videor duces Et cuncta terrarum subacta Præter atrocem animum Catonis." The mammoth epic opens, about the period to which we have just referred, with the last rout of the Saxons and, as modern melo-dramas are wont to end, with a storm of blue fire, and a chorus of devils. We are thus betimes familiarized with a supernatural machinery, which eventually, in one shape or another, engrosses many thousand lines, and sometimes monopolizes complete books, of the poem. And thus early is the poet compelled to invoke dangerous auxiliaries, that he may quicken a faulty subject with a factitious liveliness, which is not stirring within itself. Nothing can be more unfortunate than the aid which Mr. Fitchett thought proper to summon to his rescue. On two conditions, we do not quarrel with any flight of imagination, however ambitious, which poetry may dare. But its soarings, especially when they shoot beyond the actions and beings of this sublunary sphere, must be seasonable and sustained. For many reasons we emphatically object to finding in a composition like King Alfred, be it an epic proper, or an epic romance, the archangel Michael and the hosts of heaven, warring in personal conflict with Satan and the infernal powers, and maintaining, by word and deed, a participation in the whole conduct and vicissitudes of the poem, more intimate, positive, and frequent than is represented to have `been taken by the Olympian or Stygian Pantheon in the fate of Troy, or the fortunes of Eneas. Is there any conceivable association, short of the universal magnetism which must have been regarded by Mr. Fitchett as inherent in an epic poem, that will justify to a rational mind, a whole book being devoted to the minute description of an embassy to heaven by the archangel, in which he solicits from the Supreme Deity assistance for the Saxon King, and of the earthward return of an angelic legion, which passes through the various spheres of the created universe, while a previous book is occupied with the voyage of Satan to Pandemonium, the debates of his council there, his departure with a fresh army of demons, and their journey over chaos, and likewise through |