LATER CRITICISM.

THE DRAMA OF EXILE, AND OTHER POEMS: BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BARRETT, AUTHOR of "THE SERAPHIM," AND OTHER POEMS.

[Text: Broadway Journal, January 4 and 11, 1845; cf. The Evening Mirror, Autumn of 1844.]

I.

"A WELL-BRED man," says Sir James Puckle, in his "Gray Cap for a Green Head,' will never give himself the liberty to speak ill of women." We emphasize the man." Setting aside, for the present, certain rare commentators and compilers of the species

creatures neither precisely men, women, nor Mary Wollstonecrafts setting these aside as unclassifiable, we may observe that the race of critics are masculine - men. With the exception, perhaps, of Mrs. Anne Royal, we can call to mind no female who has occupied, even temporarily, the Zoilus throne. And this, the Salic law, is an evil; for the inherent chivalry of the critical man renders it not only an unpleasant task to him "to speak ill of a woman," (and a woman and her book are identical,) but an almost impossible task not to laud her ad nauseam. In general, therefore, it is the unhappy lot of the authoress to be subjected, time after time, to the downright degradation of mere puffery. On her own side of

the Atlantic, Miss Barrett has indeed, in one instance at least, escaped the infliction of this lamentable contumely and wrong; but if she had been really solicitous of its infliction in America she could not have adopted a more effectual plan than that of saying a few words about "the great American people, in an American edition of her work, published under the superintendence of an American author.1 Of the innumerable " native," notices of The Drama of Exile," which have come under our observation, we can call to mind not one in which there is anything more remarkable than the critic's dogged determination to find nothing barren, from Beersheba to Dan. Another in the Democratic Review," has proceeded so far, it is true, as to venture a very delicate insinuation to the effect that the poetess will not fail to speak her mind though it bring upon her a bad rhyme;" beyond this, nobody has proceeded: and as for the elaborate paper in the new Whig Monthly, all that anybody can say or think, and all that Miss Barrett can feel respecting it is, that it is an eulogy as well written as it is an insult well intended. Now of all the friends of

the fair author, we doubt whether one exists, with more profound with more enthusiastic reverence and ad

We are sorry to notice, in the American edition, a multitude of typographical errors, many of which affect the sense, and should therefore be corrected in a second impression, if called for. How far they are chargeable to the London copy, we are not prepared to say. "Froze," for instance, is printed "frore." "Foregone,' throughout, is printed forgone." "Wordless" is printed "worldless "worldly," 66 wordly "spilt," "split," etc., etc. while transpositions, false accents, and mis-punctuations abound. We indicate a few pages on which such inadvertences are to be discovered. Vol. 1- — 23, 26, 37, 45, 53, 56, 80, - 109, 114, 240, 247, 253,

166, 174, 180, 185, 251. 272.- Poe's Note.

Vol. 2

miration of her genius, than the writer of these words. And it is for this very reason, beyond all others, that he intends to speak of her the truth. Our chief regret is, nevertheless, that the limits of this "Journal" will preclude the possibility of our speaking this truth so fully, and so much in detail, as we could wish. By far the most valuable criticism that we, or that any one could give, of the volumes now lying before us, would be the quotation of three-fourths of their contents. But we have this advantage, that the work has been long published, and almost universally read, and thus, in some measure, we may proceed, concisely, as if the text of our context were an understood thing. In her preface to this, the "American edition "of her late poems, Miss Barrett, speaking of the Drama of Exile, says: "I decided on publishing it, after considerable hesitation and doubt. Its subject rather fastened on me than was chosen; and the form, approaching the model of the Greek tragedy, shaped itself under my hand rather by force of pleasure than of design. But when the compositional excitement had subsided, I felt afraid of my position. My own object was the new and strange experiment of the fallen Humanity, as it went forth from Paradise into the Wilderness, with a peculiar reference to Eve's allotted grief, which, considering that self-sacrifice belonged to her womanhood, and the consciousness of being the organ of the Fall to her offence, appeared to me imperfectly apprehended hitherto, and more expressible by a woman than by a man.” In this abstract announcement of the theme, it is difficult to understand the ground of the poet's hesitation to publish; for the theme in itself seems admirably adapted to the purposes of the closet drama. The poet, nevertheless, is,

very properly, conscious of failure a failure which occurs not in the general, but in the particular conception, and which must be placed to the account of "the model of the Greek tragedies." The Greek tragedies had and even have high merits; but we act wisely in now substituting for the external and typified human sympathy of the antique Chorus, a direct, internal, living and moving sympathy itself; and although Eschylus might have done service as "a model," to either Euripides or Sophocles, yet were Sophocles and Euripides in London to-day, they would, perhaps, while granting a certain formless and shadowy grandeur, indulge a quiet smile at the shallowness and uncouthness of that Art, which, in the old amphitheatres, had beguiled them into applause of the Edipus at Colonos.

It would have been better for Miss Barrett if, throwing herself independently upon her own very extraordinary resources, and forgetting that a Greek had ever lived, she had involved her Eve in a series of adventures merely natural, or if not this, of adventures preternatural within the limits of at least a conceivable relation a relation of matter to spirit and spirit to matter, that should have left room for something like palpable action and comprehensible emotion that should not have utterly precluded the development of that womanly character which is admitted as the principal object of the poem. As the case actually stands, it is only in a few snatches of verbal intercommunication with Adam and Lucifer, that we behold her as a woman at all. For the rest, she is a mystical something or nothing, enwrapped in a fog of rhapsody about Transfiguration, and the Seed, and the Bruising of the Heel, and other talk of a nature that no man