LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 135 



THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES 

 PERCIVAL. 



THIS is an interesting and in many respects instructive 

 book. Mr. Ward has done his work, as is fitting, in a 

 loving spirit; and if he over-estimates both what Percival was 

 and what he did, he enables us to form our own judgment by 

 letting him so far as possible speak for himself. The book 

 gives a rather curious picture of what the life of a man of letters 

 is likely to be in a country not yet ripe for literary production, 

 especially if he be not endowed with the higher qualities which 

 command and can wait for that best of all successes which 

 comes slowly. In a generation where everybody can write 

 verses, and where certain modes of thought and turns of phrase 

 have become so tyrannous that it is as hard to distinguish 

 between the productions of one minor poet and another as 

 among those of so many Minnesingers or Troubadours, there is 

 a demand for only two things for what chimes with the mo 

 ment s whim of popular sentiment and is forgotten when that 

 has changed, or for what is never an anachronism, because it 

 slakes or seems to slake the eternal thirst of our nature for 

 those ideal waters that glimmer before us and still before us 

 in ever-renewing mirage. Percival met neither of these con 

 ditions. With a nature singularly unplastic, unsympathetic, and 

 self- involved, he was incapable of receiving into his own mind the 

 ordinary emotions of men and giving them back in music ; and 

 with a lofty conception of the object and purposes of poesy, he 

 had neither the resolution nor the power which might have 

 enabled him to realise it. He offers as striking an example as 

 could be found of the poetic temperament unballasted with those 

 less obvious qualities which make the poetic faculty. His verse 

 carries every inch of canvas that diction and sentiment can 

 crowd, but the craft is cranky, and we miss that deep-grasping 

 keel of reason which alone can steady and give direction. His 

 mind drifts, too waterlogged to answer the helm, and in his 

 longer poems, like Prometheus/ half the voyage is spent in try 

 ing to make upfor a lee-way which becomes at last irretrievable. 

 If he had a port in view when he set out, he seems soon to give 

 up all hope of ever reaching it ; and wherever we open the log 

 book, we find him running for nowhere in particular, as the wind 

 happens to lead, or lying-to in the merest gale of verbiage. The 

 truth is, that Percival was led to the writing of verse by a sen- 



