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Title: Reviews

Author: Oscar Wilde

Editor: Robert Baldwin Ross

Release date: December 2, 2004 [eBook #14240]
                Most recently updated: December 18, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1908 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REVIEWS ***



Transcribed from the 1908 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





REVIEWS


To Mrs. CAREW

The apparently endless difficulties against which I have contended, and
am contending, in the management of Oscar Wilde's literary and dramatic
property have brought me many valued friends; but only one friendship
which seemed as endless; one friend's kindness which seemed to annul the
disappointments of eight years.  That is why I venture to place your name
on this volume with the assurance of the author himself who bequeathed to
me his works and something of his indiscretion.

ROBERT ROSS

May 12th, 1908.




INTRODUCTION


The editor of writings by any author not long deceased is censured sooner
or later for his errors of omission or commission.  I have decided to err
on the side of commission and to include in the uniform edition of
Wilde's works everything that could be identified as genuine.  Wilde's
literary reputation has survived so much that I think it proof against
any exhumation of articles which he or his admirers would have preferred
to forget.  As a matter of fact, I believe this volume will prove of
unusual interest; some of the reviews are curiously prophetic; some are,
of course, biassed by prejudice hostile or friendly; others are conceived
in the author's wittiest and happiest vein; only a few are colourless.
And if, according to Lord Beaconsfield, the verdict of a continental
nation may be regarded as that of posterity, Wilde is a much greater
force in our literature than even friendly contemporaries ever supposed
he would become.

It should be remembered, however, that at the time when most of these
reviews were written Wilde had published scarcely any of the works by
which his name has become famous in Europe, though the protagonist of the
aesthetic movement was a well-known figure in Paris and London.  Later he
was recognised--it would be truer to say he was ignored--as a young man
who had never fulfilled the high promise of a distinguished university
career although his volume of Poems had reached its fifth edition, an
unusual event in those days.  He had alienated a great many of his Oxford
contemporaries by his extravagant manner of dress and his methods of
courting publicity.  The great men of the previous generation, Wilde's
intellectual peers, with whom he was in artistic sympathy, looked on him
askance.  Ruskin was disappointed with his former pupil, and Pater did
not hesitate to express disapprobation to private friends; while he
accepted incense from a disciple, he distrusted the thurifer.

From a large private correspondence in my possession I gather that it
was, oddly enough, in political and social centres that Wilde's amazing
powers were rightly appreciated and where he was welcomed as the most
brilliant of living talkers.  Before he had published anything except his
Poems, the literary dovecots regarded him with dislike, and when he began
to publish essays and fairy stories, the attitude was not changed; it was
merely emphasised in the public press.  His first dramatic success at the
St. James's Theatre gave Wilde, of course, a different position, and the
dislike became qualified with envy.  Some of the younger men indeed were
dazzled, but with few exceptions their appreciation was expressed in an
unfortunate manner.  It is a consolation or a misfortune that the wrong
kind of people are too often correct in their prognostications of the
future; the far-seeing are also the foolish.

From these reviews which illustrate the middle period of Wilde's meteoric
career, between the aesthetic period and the production of Lady
Windermere's Fan, we learn _his_ opinion of the contemporaries who
thought little enough of him.  That he revised many of these opinions,
notably those that are harsh, I need scarcely say; and after his release
from prison he lost much of his admiration for certain writers.  I would
draw special attention to those reviews of Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Wilfrid
Blunt, Mr. Alfred Austin, the Hon. John Collier, Mr. Brander Matthews and
Sir Edwin Arnold, Rossetti, Pater, Henley and Morris; they have more
permanent value than the others, and are in accord with the wiser
critical judgments of to-day.

For leave to republish the articles from the Pall Mall Gazette I am
indebted to Mr. William Waldorf Astor, the owner of the copyrights, by
arrangement with whom they are here reprinted.  I have to thank most
cordially Messrs. Cassell and Company for permitting me to reproduce the
editorial articles and reviews contributed by Wilde to the Woman's World;
the editor and proprietor of the Nation for leave to include the two
articles from the Speaker; and the editor of the Saturday Review for a
similar courtesy.  For identifying many of the anonymous articles I am
indebted to Mr. Arthur Humphreys, not the least of his kindnesses in
assisting the publication of this edition; for the trouble of editing,
arrangement, and collecting of material I am under obligations to Mr.
Stuart Mason for which this acknowledgment is totally inadequate.

ROBERT ROSS
REFORM CLUB,
May 12th, 1908




DINNERS AND DISHES


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 7, 1885.)

A man can live for three days without bread, but no man can live for one
day without poetry, was an aphorism of Baudelaire.  You can live without
pictures and music but you cannot live without eating, says the author of
Dinners and Dishes; and this latter view is, no doubt, the more popular.
Who, indeed, in these degenerate days would hesitate between an ode and
an omelette, a sonnet and a salmis?  Yet the position is not entirely
Philistine; cookery is an art; are not its principles the subject of
South Kensington lectures, and does not the Royal Academy give a banquet
once a year?  Besides, as the coming democracy will, no doubt, insist on
feeding us all on penny dinners, it is well that the laws of cookery
should be explained: for were the national meal burned, or badly
seasoned, or served up with the wrong sauce a dreadful revolution might
follow.

Under these circumstances we strongly recommend Dinners and Dishes to
every one: it is brief and concise and makes no attempt at eloquence,
which is extremely fortunate.  For even on ortolans who could endure
oratory?  It also has the advantage of not being illustrated.  The
subject of a work of art has, of course, nothing to do with its beauty,
but still there is always something depressing about the coloured
lithograph of a leg of mutton.

As regards the author's particular views, we entirely agree with him on
the important question of macaroni.  'Never,' he says, 'ask me to back a
bill for a man who has given me a macaroni pudding.'  Macaroni is
essentially a savoury dish and may be served with cheese or tomatoes but
never with sugar and milk.  There is also a useful description of how to
cook risotto--a delightful dish too rarely seen in England; an excellent
chapter on the different kinds of salads, which should be carefully
studied by those many hostesses whose imaginations never pass beyond
lettuce and beetroot; and actually a recipe for making Brussels sprouts
eatable.  The last is, of course, a masterpiece.

The real difficulty that we all have to face in life is not so much the
science of cookery as the stupidity of cooks.  And in this little
handbook to practical Epicureanism the tyrant of the English kitchen is
shown in her proper light.  Her entire ignorance of herbs, her passion
for extracts and essences, her total inability to make a soup which is
anything more than a combination of pepper and gravy, her inveterate
habit of sending up bread poultices with pheasants,--all these sins and
many others are ruthlessly unmasked by the author.  Ruthlessly and
rightly.  For the British cook is a foolish woman who should be turned
for her iniquities into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to
use.

But our author is not local merely.  He has been in many lands; he has
eaten back-hendl at Vienna and kulibatsch at St. Petersburg; he has had
the courage to face the buffalo veal of Roumania and to dine with a
German family at one o'clock; he has serious views on the right method of
cooking those famous white truffles of Turin of which Alexandre Dumas was
so fond; and, in the face of the Oriental Club, declares that Bombay
curry is better than the curry of Bengal.  In fact he seems to have had
experience of almost every kind of meal except the 'square meal' of the
Americans.  This he should study at once; there is a great field for the
philosophic epicure in the United States.  Boston beans may be dismissed
at once as delusions, but soft-shell crabs, terrapin, canvas-back ducks,
blue fish and the pompono of New Orleans are all wonderful delicacies,
particularly when one gets them at Delmonico's.  Indeed, the two most
remarkable bits of scenery in the States are undoubtedly Delmonico's and
the Yosemite Valley; and the former place has done more to promote a good
feeling between England and America than anything else has in this
century.

We hope the 'Wanderer' will go there soon and add a chapter to Dinners
and Dishes, and that his book will have in England the influence it
deserves.  There are twenty ways of cooking a potato and three hundred
and sixty-five ways of cooking an egg, yet the British cook, up to the
present moment, knows only three methods of sending up either one or the
other.

Dinners and Dishes.  By 'Wanderer.'  (Simpkin and Marshall.)




A MODERN EPIC


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 13, 1885.)

In an age of hurry like ours the appearance of an epic poem more than
five thousand lines in length cannot but be regarded as remarkable.
Whether such a form of art is the one most suited to our century is a
question.  Edgar Allan Poe insisted that no poem should take more than an
hour to read, the essence of a work of art being its unity of impression
and of effect.  Still, it would be difficult to accept absolutely a canon
of art which would place the Divine Comedy on the shelf and deprive us of
the Bothwell of Mr. Swinburne.  A work of art is to be estimated by its
beauty not by its size, and in Mr. Wills's Melchior there is beauty of a
rich and lofty character.

Remembering the various arts which have yielded up their secrets to Mr.
Wills, it is interesting to note in his poems, here the picturesque
vision of the painter, here the psychology of the novelist, and here the
playwright's sense of dramatic situation.  Yet these things, which are
the elements of his work of art though we arbitrarily separate them in
criticism, are in the work itself blended and made one by the true
imaginative and informing power.  For Melchior is not a piece of poetic
writing merely; it is that very rare thing, a poem.

It is dedicated to Mr. Robert Browning, not inappropriately, as it deals
with that problem of the possible expression of life through music, the
value of which as a motive in poetry Mr. Browning was the first to see.
The story is this.  In one of the little Gothic towns of Northern Germany
lives Melchior, a dreamer and a musician.  One night he rescues by chance
a girl from drowning and lodges her in a convent of holy women.  He grows
to love her and to see in her the incarnation of that St. Cecily whom,
with mystic and almost mediaeval passion, he had before adored.  But a
priest separates them, and Melchior goes mad.  An old doctor, who makes a
study of insanity, determines to try and cure him, and induces the girl
to appear to him, disguised as St. Cecily herself, while he sits brooding
at the organ.  Thinking her at first to be indeed the Saint he had
worshipped, Melchior falls in ecstasy at her feet, but soon discovering
the trick kills her in a sudden paroxysm of madness.  The horror of the
act restores his reason; but, with the return of sanity, the dreams and
visions of the artist's nature begin to vanish; the musician sees the
world not through a glass but face to face, and he dies just as the world
is awakening to his music.

The character of Melchior, who inherits his music from his father, and
from his mother his mysticism, is extremely fascinating as a
psychological study.  Mr. Wills has made a most artistic use of that
scientific law of heredity which has already strongly influenced the
literature of this century, and to which we owe Dr. Holmes's fantastic
Elsie Venner, Daniel Deronda--that dullest of masterpieces--and the
dreadful Rougon-Macquart family with whose misdeeds M. Zola is never
weary of troubling us.

Blanca, the girl, is a somewhat slight sketch, but then, like Ophelia,
she is merely the occasion of a tragedy and not its heroine.  The rest of
the characters are most powerfully drawn and create themselves simply and
swiftly before us as the story proceeds, the method of the practised
dramatist being here of great value.

As regards the style, we notice some accidental assonances of rhyme which
in an unrhymed poem are never pleasing; and the unfinished short line of
five or six syllables, however legitimate on the stage where the actor
himself can make the requisite musical pause, is not a beauty in a blank
verse poem, and is employed by Mr. Wills far too frequently.  Still,
taken as a whole, the style has the distinction of noble melody.

There are many passages which, did space permit us, we would like to
quote, but we must content ourselves with saying that in Melchior we find
not merely pretty gems of rich imagery and delicate fancy, but a fine
imaginative treatment of many of the most important modern problems,
notably of the relation of life to art.  It is a pleasure to herald a
poem which combines so many elements of strength and beauty.

Melchior.  By W. G. Wills, author of Charles I., Olivia, etc., and writer
of Claudian.  (Macmillan and Co.)




SHAKESPEARE ON SCENERY


(Dramatic Review, March 14, 1885.)

I have often heard people wonder what Shakespeare would say, could he see
Mr. Irving's production of his Much Ado About Nothing, or Mr. Wilson
Barrett's setting of his Hamlet.  Would he take pleasure in the glory of
the scenery and the marvel of the colour?  Would he be interested in the
Cathedral of Messina, and the battlements of Elsinore?  Or would he be
indifferent, and say the play, and the play only, is the thing?

Speculations like these are always pleasurable, and in the present case
happen to be profitable also.  For it is not difficult to see what
Shakespeare's attitude would be; not difficult, that is to say, if one
reads Shakespeare himself, instead of reading merely what is written
about him.

Speaking, for instance, directly, as the manager of a London theatre,
through the lips of the chorus in Henry V., he complains of the smallness
of the stage on which he has to produce the pageant of a big historical
play, and of the want of scenery which obliges him to cut out many of its
most picturesque incidents, apologises for the scanty number of supers
who had to play the soldiers, and for the shabbiness of the properties,
and, finally, expresses his regret at being unable to bring on real
horses.

In the Midsummer Night's Dream, again, he gives us a most amusing picture
of the straits to which theatrical managers of his day were reduced by
the want of proper scenery.  In fact, it is impossible to read him
without seeing that he is constantly protesting against the two special
limitations of the Elizabethan stage--the lack of suitable scenery, and
the fashion of men playing women's parts, just as he protests against
other difficulties with which managers of theatres have still to contend,
such as actors who do not understand their words; actors who miss their
cues; actors who overact their parts; actors who mouth; actors who gag;
actors who play to the gallery, and amateur actors.

And, indeed, a great dramatist, as he was, could not but have felt very
much hampered at being obliged continually to interrupt the progress of a
play in order to send on some one to explain to the audience that the
scene was to be changed to a particular place on the entrance of a
particular character, and after his exit to somewhere else; that the
stage was to represent the deck of a ship in a storm, or the interior of
a Greek temple, or the streets of a certain town, to all of which
inartistic devices Shakespeare is reduced, and for which he always amply
apologises.  Besides this clumsy method, Shakespeare had two other
substitutes for scenery--the hanging out of a placard, and his
descriptions.  The first of these could hardly have satisfied his passion
for picturesqueness and his feeling for beauty, and certainly did not
satisfy the dramatic critic of his day.  But as regards the description,
to those of us who look on Shakespeare not merely as a playwright but as
a poet, and who enjoy reading him at home just as much as we enjoy seeing
him acted, it may be a matter of congratulation that he had not at his
command such skilled machinists as are in use now at the Princess's and
at the Lyceum.  For had Cleopatra's barge, for instance, been a structure
of canvas and Dutch metal, it would probably have been painted over or
broken up after the withdrawal of the piece, and, even had it survived to
our own day, would, I am afraid, have become extremely shabby by this
time.  Whereas now the beaten gold of its poop is still bright, and the
purple of its sails still beautiful; its silver oars are not tired of
keeping time to the music of the flutes they follow, nor the Nereid's
flower-soft hands of touching its silken tackle; the mermaid still lies
at its helm, and still on its deck stand the boys with their coloured
fans.  Yet lovely as all Shakespeare's descriptive passages are, a
description is in its essence undramatic.  Theatrical audiences are far
more impressed by what they look at than by what they listen to; and the
modern dramatist, in having the surroundings of his play visibly
presented to the audience when the curtain rises, enjoys an advantage for
which Shakespeare often expresses his desire.  It is true that
Shakespeare's descriptions are not what descriptions are in modern
plays--accounts of what the audience can observe for themselves; they are
the imaginative method by which he creates in the mind of the spectators
the image of that which he desires them to see.  Still, the quality of
the drama is action.  It is always dangerous to pause for
picturesqueness.  And the introduction of self-explanatory scenery
enables the modern method to be far more direct, while the loveliness of
form and colour which it gives us, seems to me often to create an
artistic temperament in the audience, and to produce that joy in beauty
for beauty's sake, without which the great masterpieces of art can never
be understood, to which, and to which only, are they ever revealed.

To talk of the passion of a play being hidden by the paint, and of
sentiment being killed by scenery, is mere emptiness and folly of words.
A noble play, nobly mounted, gives us double artistic pleasure.  The eye
as well as the ear is gratified, and the whole nature is made exquisitely
receptive of the influence of imaginative work.  And as regards a bad
play, have we not all seen large audiences lured by the loveliness of
scenic effect into listening to rhetoric posing as poetry, and to
vulgarity doing duty for realism?  Whether this be good or evil for the
public I will not here discuss, but it is evident that the playwright, at
any rate, never suffers.

Indeed, the artist who really has suffered through the modern mounting of
plays is not the dramatist at all, but the scene-painter proper.  He is
rapidly being displaced by the stage-carpenter.  Now and then, at Drury
Lane, I have seen beautiful old front cloths let down, as perfect as
pictures some of them, and pure painter's work, and there are many which
we all remember at other theatres, in front of which some dialogue was
reduced to graceful dumb-show through the hammer and tin-tacks behind.
But as a rule the stage is overcrowded with enormous properties, which
are not merely far more expensive and cumbersome than scene-paintings,
but far less beautiful, and far less true.  Properties kill perspective.
A painted door is more like a real door than a real door is itself, for
the proper conditions of light and shade can be given to it; and the
excessive use of built up structures always makes the stage too glaring,
for as they have to be lit from behind, as well as from the front, the
gas-jets become the absolute light of the scene instead of the means
merely by which we perceive the conditions of light and shadow which the
painter has desired to show us.

So, instead of bemoaning the position of the playwright, it were better
for the critics to exert whatever influence they may possess towards
restoring the scene-painter to his proper position as an artist, and not
allowing him to be built over by the property man, or hammered to death
by the carpenter.  I have never seen any reason myself why such artists
as Mr. Beverley, Mr. Walter Hann, and Mr. Telbin should not be entitled
to become Academicians.  They have certainly as good a claim as have many
of those R.A.'s whose total inability to paint we can see every May for a
shilling.

And lastly, let those critics who hold up for our admiration the
simplicity of the Elizabethan Stage, remember that they are lauding a
condition of things against which Shakespeare himself, in the spirit of a
true artist, always strongly protested.




A BEVY OF POETS


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 27, 1885.)

This spring the little singers are out before the little sparrows and
have already begun chirruping.  Here are four volumes already, and who
knows how many more will be given to us before the laburnums blossom?  The
best-bound volume must, of course, have precedence.  It is called Echoes
of Memory, by Atherton Furlong, and is cased in creamy vellum and tied
with ribbons of yellow silk.  Mr. Furlong's charm is the unsullied
sweetness of his simplicity.  Indeed, we can strongly recommend to the
School-Board the Lines on the Old Town Pump as eminently suitable for
recitation by children.  Such a verse, for instance, as:

   I hear the little children say
      (For the tale will never die)
   How the old pump flowed both night and day
      When the brooks and the wells ran dry,

has all the ring of Macaulay in it, and is a form of poetry which cannot
possibly harm anybody, even if translated into French.  Any inaccurate
ideas of the laws of nature which the children might get from the passage
in question could easily be corrected afterwards by a lecture on
Hydrostatics.  The poem, however, which gives us most pleasure is the one
called The Dear Old Knocker on the Door.  It is appropriately illustrated
by Mr. Tristram Ellis.  We quote the concluding verses of the first and
last stanzas:

   Blithe voices then so dear
      Send up their shouts once more,
   Then sounds again on mem'ry's ear
      The dear old knocker on the door.
      . . . . .
   When mem'ry turns the key
   Where time has placed my score,
   Encased 'mid treasured thoughts must be
   The dear old knocker on the door.

The cynic may mock at the subject of these verses, but we do not.  Why
not an ode on a knocker?  Does not Victor Hugo's tragedy of Lucrece
Borgia turn on the defacement of a doorplate?  Mr. Furlong must not be
discouraged.  Perhaps he will write poetry some day.  If he does we would
earnestly appeal to him to give up calling a cock 'proud chanticleer.'
Few synonyms are so depressing.

Having been lured by the Circe of a white vellum binding into the region
of the pump and doormat, we turn to a modest little volume by Mr. Bowling
of St. John's College, Cambridge, entitled Sagittulae.  And they are
indeed delicate little arrows, for they are winged with the lightness of
the lyric and barbed daintily with satire.  AEsthesis and Athletes is a
sweet idyll, and nothing can be more pathetic than the Tragedy of the
XIX. Century, which tells of a luckless examiner condemned in his public
capacity to pluck for her Little-go the girl graduate whom he privately
adores.  Girton seems to be having an important influence on the
Cambridge school of poetry.  We are not surprised.  The Graces are the
Graces always, even when they wear spectacles.

Then comes Tuberose and Meadowsweet, by Mr. Mark Andre Raffalovich.  This
is really a remarkable little volume, and contains many strange and
beautiful poems.  To say of these poems that they are unhealthy and bring
with them the heavy odours of the hothouse is to point out neither their
defect nor their merit, but their quality merely.  And though Mr.
Raffalovich is not a wonderful poet, still he is a subtle artist in
poetry.  Indeed, in his way he is a boyish master of curious music and of
fantastic rhyme, and can strike on the lute of language so many lovely
chords that it seems a pity he does not know how to pronounce the title
of his book and the theme of his songs.  For he insists on making
'tuberose' a trisyllable always, as if it were a potato blossom and not a
flower shaped like a tiny trumpet of ivory.  However, for the sake of his
meadowsweet and his spring-green binding this must be forgiven him.  And
though he cannot pronounce 'tuberose' aright, at least he can sing of it
exquisitely.

Finally we come to Sturm und Drang, the work of an anonymous writer.
Opening the volume at hazard we come across these graceful lines:

   How sweet to spend in this blue bay
   The close of life's disastrous day,
   To watch the morn break faintly free
   Across the greyness of the sea,
   What time Memnonian music fills
   The shadows of the dewy hills.

Well, here is the touch of a poet, and we pluck up heart and read on.  The
book is a curious but not inartistic combination of the mental attitude
of Mr. Matthew Arnold with the style of Lord Tennyson.  Sometimes, as in
The Sicilian Hermit, we get merely the metre of Locksley Hall without its
music, merely its fine madness and not its fine magic.  Still, elsewhere
there is good work, and Caliban in East London has a great deal of power
in it, though we do not like the adjective 'knockery' even in a poem on
Whitechapel.

On the whole, to those who watch the culture of the age, the most
interesting thing in young poets is not so much what they invent as what
masters they follow.  A few years ago it was all Mr. Swinburne.  That era
has happily passed away.  The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable
of all poses.  Now, it is all Lord Tennyson, and that is better.  For a
young writer can gain more from the study of a literary poet than from
the study of a lyrist.  He may become the pupil of the one, but he can
never be anything but the slave of the other.  And so we are glad to see
in this volume direct and noble praise of him

* * * * *

   Who plucked in English meadows flowers fair
   As any that in unforgotten stave
   Vied with the orient gold of Venus' hair
   Or fringed the murmur of the AEgean wave,

which are the fine words in which this anonymous poet pays his tribute to
the Laureate.

(1) Echoes of Memory.  By Atherton Furlong.  (Field and Tuer.)

(2) Sagittulae.  By E. W. Bowling.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(3) Tuberose and Meadowsweet.  By Mark Andre Raffalovich.  (David Bogue.)

(4) Sturm und Drang.  (Elliot Stock.)

In reply to the review A Bevy of Poets the following letter was published
in the Pall Mall Gazette on March 30, 1885, under the title of

THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

SIR,--I am sorry not to be able to accept the graceful etymology of your
reviewer who calls me to task for not knowing how to pronounce the title
of my book Tuberose and Meadowsweet.  I insist, he fancifully says, 'on
making "tuberose" a trisyllable always, as if it were a potato blossom
and not a flower shaped like a tiny trumpet of ivory.'  Alas! tuberose is
a trisyllable if properly derived from the Latin tuberosus, the lumpy
flower, having nothing to do with roses or with trumpets of ivory in name
any more than in nature.  I am reminded by a great living poet that
another correctly wrote:

   Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
   Struggling with darkness--as a tuberose
   Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie

   Like clouds above the flower from which they rose.

In justice to Shelley, whose lines I quote, your readers will admit that
I have good authority for making a trisyllable of tuberose.--I am, Sir,
your obedient servant,

ANDRE RAFFALOVICH.
March 28.




PARNASSUS VERSUS PHILOLOGY


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 1, 1885.)

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

SIR,--I am deeply distressed to hear that tuberose is so called from its
being a 'lumpy flower.'  It is not at all lumpy, and, even if it were, no
poet should be heartless enough to say so.  Henceforth, there really must
be two derivations for every word, one for the poet and one for the
scientist.  And in the present case the poet will dwell on the tiny
trumpets of ivory into which the white flower breaks, and leave to the
man of science horrid allusions to its supposed lumpiness and indiscreet
revelations of its private life below ground.  In fact, 'tuber' as a
derivation is disgraceful.  On the roots of verbs Philology may be
allowed to speak, but on the roots of flowers she must keep silence.  We
cannot allow her to dig up Parnassus.  And, as regards the word being a
trisyllable, I am reminded by a great living poet that another correctly
wrote:

   And the jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose,
   The sweetest flower for scent that blows;
   And all rare blossoms from every clime
   Grew in that garden in perfect prime.

In justice to Shelley, whose lines I quote, your readers will admit that
I have good authority for making a dissyllable of tuberose.--I am, Sir,
your obedient servant,

THE CRITIC,
WHO HAD TO READ FOUR VOLUMES OF MODERN POETRY.
March 30.




HAMLET AT THE LYCEUM


(Dramatic Review, May 9, 1885.)

It sometimes happens that at a premiere in London the least enjoyable
part of the performance is the play.  I have seen many audiences more
interesting than the actors, and have often heard better dialogue in the
foyer than I have on the stage.  At the Lyceum, however, this is rarely
the case, and when the play is a play of Shakespeare's, and among its
exponents are Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry, we turn from the gods in
the gallery and from the goddesses in the stalls, to enjoy the charm of
the production, and to take delight in the art.  The lions are behind the
footlights and not in front of them when we have a noble tragedy nobly
acted.  And I have rarely witnessed such enthusiasm as that which greeted
on last Saturday night the two artists I have mentioned.  I would like,
in fact, to use the word ovation, but a pedantic professor has recently
informed us, with the Batavian buoyancy of misapplied learning, that this
expression is not to be employed except when a sheep has been sacrificed.
At the Lyceum last week I need hardly say nothing so dreadful occurred.
The only inartistic incident of the evening was the hurling of a bouquet
from a box at Mr. Irving while he was engaged in pourtraying the agony of
Hamlet's death, and the pathos of his parting with Horatio.  The Dramatic
College might take up the education of spectators as well as that of
players, and teach people that there is a proper moment for the throwing
of flowers as well as a proper method.

As regards Mr. Irving's own performance, it has been already so
elaborately criticised and described, from his business with the supposed
pictures in the closet scene down to his use of 'peacock' for 'paddock,'
that little remains to be said; nor, indeed, does a Lyceum audience
require the interposition of the dramatic critic in order to understand
or to appreciate the Hamlet of this great actor.  I call him a great
actor because he brings to the interpretation of a work of art the two
qualities which we in this century so much desire, the qualities of
personality and of perfection.  A few years ago it seemed to many, and
perhaps rightly, that the personality overshadowed the art.  No such
criticism would be fair now.  The somewhat harsh angularity of movement
and faulty pronunciation have been replaced by exquisite grace of gesture
and clear precision of word, where such precision is necessary.  For
delightful as good elocution is, few things are so depressing as to hear
a passionate passage recited instead of being acted.  The quality of a
fine performance is its life more than its learning, and every word in a
play has a musical as well as an intellectual value, and must be made
expressive of a certain emotion.  So it does not seem to me that in all
parts of a play perfect pronunciation is necessarily dramatic.  When the
words are 'wild and whirling,' the expression of them must be wild and
whirling also.  Mr. Irving, I think, manages his voice with singular art;
it was impossible to discern a false note or wrong intonation in his
dialogue or his soliloquies, and his strong dramatic power, his realistic
power as an actor, is as effective as ever.  A great critic at the
beginning of this century said that Hamlet is the most difficult part to
personate on the stage, that it is like the attempt to 'embody a shadow.'
I cannot say that I agree with this idea.  Hamlet seems to me essentially
a good acting part, and in Mr. Irving's performance of it there is that
combination of poetic grace with absolute reality which is so eternally
delightful.  Indeed, if the words easy and difficult have any meaning at
all in matters of art, I would be inclined to say that Ophelia is the
more difficult part.  She has, I mean, less material by which to produce
her effects.  She is the occasion of the tragedy, but she is neither its
heroine nor its chief victim.  She is swept away by circumstances, and
gives the opportunity for situation, of which she is not herself the
climax, and which she does not herself command.  And of all the parts
which Miss Terry has acted in her brilliant career, there is none in
which her infinite powers of pathos and her imaginative and creative
faculty are more shown than in her Ophelia.  Miss Terry is one of those
rare artists who needs for her dramatic effect no elaborate dialogue, and
for whom the simplest words are sufficient.  'I love you not,' says
Hamlet, and all that Ophelia answers is, 'I was the more deceived.'  These
are not very grand words to read, but as Miss Terry gave them in acting
they seemed to be the highest possible expression of Ophelia's character.
Beautiful, too, was the quick remorse she conveyed by her face and
gesture the moment she had lied to Hamlet and told him her father was at
home.  This I thought a masterpiece of good acting, and her mad scene was
wonderful beyond all description.  The secrets of Melpomene are known to
Miss Terry as well as the secrets of Thalia.  As regards the rest of the
company there is always a high standard at the Lyceum, but some
particular mention should be made of Mr. Alexander's brilliant
performance of Laertes.  Mr. Alexander has a most effective presence, a
charming voice, and a capacity for wearing lovely costumes with ease and
elegance.  Indeed, in the latter respect his only rival was Mr. Norman
Forbes, who played either Guildenstern or Rosencrantz very gracefully.  I
believe one of our budding Hazlitts is preparing a volume to be entitled
'Great Guildensterns and Remarkable Rosencrantzes,' but I have never been
able myself to discern any difference between these two characters.  They
are, I think, the only characters Shakespeare has not cared to
individualise.  Whichever of the two, however, Mr. Forbes acted, he acted
it well.  Only one point in Mr. Alexander's performance seemed to me open
to question, that was his kneeling during the whole of Polonius's speech.
For this I see no necessity at all, and it makes the scene look less
natural than it should--gives it, I mean, too formal an air.  However,
the performance was most spirited and gave great pleasure to every one.
Mr. Alexander is an artist from whom much will be expected, and I have no
doubt he will give us much that is fine and noble.  He seems to have all
the qualifications for a good actor.

There is just one other character I should like to notice.  The First
Player seemed to me to act far too well.  He should act very badly.  The
First Player, besides his position in the dramatic evolution of the
tragedy, is Shakespeare's caricature of the ranting actor of his day,
just as the passage he recites is Shakespeare's own parody on the dull
plays of some of his rivals.  The whole point of Hamlet's advice to the
players seems to me to be lost unless the Player himself has been guilty
of the fault which Hamlet reprehends, unless he has sawn the air with his
hand, mouthed his lines, torn his passion to tatters, and out-Heroded
Herod.  The very sensibility which Hamlet notices in the actor, such as
his real tears and the like, is not the quality of a good artist.  The
part should be played after the manner of a provincial tragedian.  It is
meant to be a satire, and to play it well is to play it badly.  The
scenery and costumes were excellent with the exception of the King's
dress, which was coarse in colour and tawdry in effect.  And the Player
Queen should have come in boy's attire to Elsinore.

However, last Saturday night was not a night for criticism.  The theatre
was filled with those who desired to welcome Mr. Irving back to his own
theatre, and we were all delighted at his re-appearance among us.  I hope
that some time will elapse before he and Miss Terry cross again that
disappointing Atlantic Ocean.




TWO NEW NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 15, 1885.)

The clever authoress of In the Golden Days has chosen for the scene of
her story the England of two centuries ago, as a relief, she tells us in
her preface, 'from perpetual nineteenth-centuryism.'  Upon the other
hand, she makes a pathetic appeal to her readers not to regard her book
as an 'historical novel,' on the ground that such a title strikes terror
into the public.  This seems to us rather a curious position to take up.
Esmond and Notre Dame are historical novels, both of them, and both of
them popular successes.  John Inglesant and Romola have gone through many
editions, and even Salammbo has its enthusiasts.  We think that the
public is very fond of historical novels, and as for perpetual
'nineteenth-centuryism'--a vile phrase, by the way--we only wish that
more of our English novelists studied our age and its society than do so
at present.  However, In the Golden Days must not be judged by its
foolish preface.  It is really a very charming book, and though Dryden,
Betterton, and Wills's Coffee-House are dragged in rather a propos de
bottes, still the picture of the time is well painted.  Joyce, the little
Puritan maiden, is an exquisite creation, and Hugo Wharncliffe, her
lover, makes a fine hero.  The sketch of Algernon Sidney is rather
colourless, but Charles II. is well drawn.  It seems to be a novel with a
high purpose and a noble meaning.  Yet it is never dull.

Mrs. Macquoid's Louisa is modern and the scene is in Italy.  Italy, we
fear, has been a good deal overdone in fiction.  A little more Piccadilly
and a little less Perugia would be a relief.  However, the story is
interesting.  A young English girl marries an Italian nobleman and, after
some time, being bored with picturesqueness, falls in love with an
Englishman.  The story is told with a great deal of power and ends
properly and pleasantly.  It can safely be recommended to young persons.

(1) In the Golden Days.  By Edna Lyall, Author of We Two, Donovan, etc.
(Hurst and Blackett.)

(2) Louisa.  By Katherine S. Macquoid.  (Bentley and Son.)




HENRY THE FOURTH AT OXFORD


(Dramatic Review, May 23, 1885.)

I have been told that the ambition of every Dramatic Club is to act Henry
IV.  I am not surprised.  The spirit of comedy is as fervent in this play
as is the spirit of chivalry; it is an heroic pageant as well as an
heroic poem, and like most of Shakespeare's historical dramas it contains
an extraordinary number of thoroughly good acting parts, each of which is
absolutely individual in character, and each of which contributes to the
evolution of the plot.

Rumour, from time to time, has brought in tidings of a proposed
production by the banks of the Cam, but it seems at the last moment Box
and Cox has always had to be substituted in the bill.

To Oxford belongs the honour of having been the first to present on the
stage this noble play, and the production which I saw last week was in
every way worthy of that lovely town, that mother of sweetness and of
light.  For, in spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and
the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisector, in spite of
Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still
remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life
and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.  Indeed, in most
other towns art has often to present herself in the form of a reaction
against the sordid ugliness of ignoble lives, but at Oxford she comes to
us as an exquisite flower born of the beauty of life and expressive of
life's joy.  She finds her home by the Isis as once she did by the
Ilissus; the Magdalen walks and the Magdalen cloisters are as dear to her
as were ever the silver olives of Colonus and the golden gateway of the
house of Pallas: she covers with fanlike tracery the vaulted entrance to
Christ Church Hall, and looks out from the windows of Merton; her feet
have stirred the Cumnor cowslips, and she gathers fritillaries in the
river-fields.  To her the clamour of the schools and the dulness of the
lecture-room are a weariness and a vexation of spirit; she seeks not to
define virtue, and cares little for the categories; she smiles on the
swift athlete whose plastic grace has pleased her, and rejoices in the
young Barbarians at their games; she watches the rowers from the reedy
bank and gives myrtle to her lovers, and laurel to her poets, and rue to
those who talk wisely in the street; she makes the earth lovely to all
who dream with Keats; she opens high heaven to all who soar with Shelley;
and turning away her head from pedant, proctor and Philistine, she has
welcomed to her shrine a band of youthful actors, knowing that they have
sought with much ardour for the stern secret of Melpomene, and caught
with much gladness the sweet laughter of Thalia.  And to me this ardour
and this gladness were the two most fascinating qualities of the Oxford
performance, as indeed they are qualities which are necessary to any fine
dramatic production.  For without quick and imaginative observation of
life the most beautiful play becomes dull in presentation, and what is
not conceived in delight by the actor can give no delight at all to
others.

I know that there are many who consider that Shakespeare is more for the
study than for the stage.  With this view I do not for a moment agree.
Shakespeare wrote the plays to be acted, and we have no right to alter
the form which he himself selected for the full expression of his work.
Indeed, many of the beauties of that work can be adequately conveyed to
us only through the actor's art.  As I sat in the Town Hall of Oxford the
other night, the majesty of the mighty lines of the play seemed to me to
gain new music from the clear young voices that uttered them, and the
ideal grandeur of the heroism to be made more real to the spectators by
the chivalrous bearing, the noble gesture and the fine passion of its
exponents.  Even the dresses had their dramatic value.  Their
archaeological accuracy gave us, immediately on the rise of the curtain,
a perfect picture of the time.  As the knights and nobles moved across
the stage in the flowing robes of peace and in the burnished steel of
battle, we needed no dreary chorus to tell us in what age or land the
play's action was passing, for the fifteenth century in all the dignity
and grace of its apparel was living actually before us, and the delicate
harmonies of colour struck from the first a dominant note of beauty which
added to the intellectual realism of archaeology the sensuous charm of
art.

As for individual actors, Mr. Mackinnon's Prince Hal was a most gay and
graceful performance, lit here and there with charming touches of
princely dignity and of noble feeling.  Mr. Coleridge's Falstaff was full
of delightful humour, though perhaps at times he did not take us
sufficiently into his confidence.  An audience looks at a tragedian, but
a comedian looks at his audience.  However, he gave much pleasure to
every one, and Mr. Bourchier's Hotspur was really most remarkable.  Mr.
Bourchier has a fine stage presence, a beautiful voice, and produces his
effects by a method as dramatically impressive as it is artistically
right.  Once or twice he seemed to me to spoil his last line by walking
through it.  The part of Harry Percy is one full of climaxes which must
not be let slip.  But still there was always a freedom and spirit in his
style which was very pleasing, and his delivery of the colloquial
passages I thought excellent, notably of that in the first act:

      What d' ye call the place?
   A plague upon't--it is in Gloucestershire;
   'Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept,
   His uncle York;

lines by the way in which Kemble made a great effect.  Mr. Bourchier has
the opportunity of a fine career on the English stage, and I hope he will
take advantage of it.  Among the minor parts in the play Glendower,
Mortimer and Sir Richard Vernon were capitally acted, Worcester was a
performance of some subtlety, Mrs. Woods was a charming Lady Percy, and
Lady Edward Spencer Churchill, as Mortimer's wife, made us all believe
that we understood Welsh.  Her dialogue and her song were most pleasing
bits of artistic realism which fully accounted for the Celtic chair at
Oxford.

But though I have mentioned particular actors, the real value of the
whole representation was to be found in its absolute unity, in its
delicate sense of proportion, and in that breadth of effect which is to
be got only by the most careful elaboration of detail.  I have rarely
seen a production better stage-managed.  Indeed, I hope that the
University will take some official notice of this delightful work of art.
Why should not degrees be granted for good acting?  Are they not given to
those who misunderstand Plato and who mistranslate Aristotle?  And should
the artist be passed over?  No.  To Prince Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff,
D.C.L.'s should be gracefully offered.  I feel sure they would be
gracefully accepted.  To the rest of the company the crimson or the sheep-
skin hood might be assigned honoris causa to the eternal confusion of the
Philistine, and the rage of the industrious and the dull.  Thus would
Oxford confer honour on herself, and the artist be placed in his proper
position.  However, whether or not Convocation recognises the claims of
culture, I hope that the Oxford Dramatic Society will produce every
summer for us some noble play like Henry IV.  For, in plays of this kind,
plays which deal with bygone times, there is always this peculiar charm,
that they combine in one exquisite presentation the passions that are
living with the picturesqueness that is dead.  And when we have the
modern spirit given to us in an antique form, the very remoteness of that
form can be made a method of increased realism.  This was Shakespeare's
own attitude towards the ancient world, this is the attitude we in this
century should adopt towards his plays, and with a feeling akin to this
it seemed to me that these brilliant young Oxonians were working.  If it
was so, their aim is the right one.  For while we look to the dramatist
to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to
romance.




MODERN GREEK POETRY


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 27, 1885.)

Odysseus, not Achilles, is the type of the modern Greek.  Merchandise has
taken precedence of the Muses and politics are preferred to Parnassus.
Yet by the Illissus there are sweet singers; the nightingales are not
silent in Colonus; and from the garden of Greek nineteenth-century poetry
Miss Edmonds has made a very pleasing anthology; and in pouring the wine
from the golden into the silver cup she has still kept much of the beauty
of the original.  Even when translated into English, modern Greek lyrics
are preferable to modern Greek loans.

As regards the quality of this poetry, if the old Greek spirit can be
traced at all, it is the spirit of Tyrtaeus and of Theocritus.  The
warlike ballads of Rhigas and Aristotle Valaorites have a fine ring of
music and of passion in them, and the folk-songs of George Drosines are
full of charming pictures of rustic life and delicate idylls of
shepherds' courtships.  These we acknowledge that we prefer.  The flutes
of the sheepfold are more delightful than the clarions of battle.  Still,
poetry played such a noble part in the Greek War of Independence that it
is impossible not to look with reverence on the spirited war-songs that
meant so much to those who were righting for liberty and mean so much
even now to their children.

Other poets besides Drosines have taken the legends that linger among the
peasants and given to them an artistic form.  The song of The Seasons is
full of beauty, and there is a delightful poem on The Building of St.
Sophia, which tells how the design of that noble building was suggested
by the golden honeycomb of a bee which had flown from the king's palace
with a crumb of blessed bread that had fallen from the king's hands.  The
story is still to be found in Thrace.

One of the ballads, also, has a good deal of spirit.  It is by Kostes
Palamas and was suggested by an interesting incident which occurred some
years ago in Athens.  In the summer of 1881 there was borne through the
streets the remains of an aged woman in the complete costume of a
Pallikar, which dress she had worn at the siege of Missolonghi and in it
had requested to be buried.  The life of this real Greek heroine should
be studied by those who are investigating the question of wherein
womanliness consists.  The view the poet takes of her is, we need hardly
say, very different from that which Canon Liddon would entertain.  Yet it
is none the less fine on this account, and we are glad that this old lady
has been given a place in art.  The volume is, on the whole, delightful
reading, and though not much can be said for lines like these:

   There _cometh_ from the West
   The timid starry _bands_,

still, the translations are in many instances most felicitous and their
style most pleasing.

Greek Lays, Idylls, Legends, etc.  Translated by E. M. Edmonds.  (Trubner
and Co.)




OLIVIA AT THE LYCEUM


(Dramatic Review, May 30, 1885.)

Whether or not it is an advantage for a novel to be produced in a
dramatic form is, I think, open to question.  The psychological analysis
of such work as that of Mr. George Meredith, for instance, would probably
lose by being transmuted into the passionate action of the stage, nor
does M. Zola's formule scientifique gain anything at all by theatrical
presentation.  With Goldsmith it is somewhat different.  In The Vicar of
Wakefield he seeks simply to please his readers, and desires not to prove
a theory; he looks on life rather as a picture to be painted than as a
problem to be solved; his aim is to create men and women more than to
vivisect them; his dialogue is essentially dramatic, and his novel seems
to pass naturally into the dramatic form.  And to me there is something
very pleasurable in seeing and studying the same subject under different
conditions of art.  For life remains eternally unchanged; it is art
which, by presenting it to us under various forms, enables us to realise
its many-sided mysteries, and to catch the quality of its most
fiery-coloured moments.  The originality, I mean, which we ask from the
artist, is originality of treatment, not of subject.  It is only the
unimaginative who ever invents.  The true artist is known by the use he
makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.

Looking in this light at Mr. Wills's Olivia, it seems to me a very
exquisite work of art.  Indeed, I know no other dramatist who could have
re-told this beautiful English tale with such tenderness and such power,
neither losing the charm of the old story nor forgetting the conditions
of the new form.  The sentiment of the poet and the science of the
playwright are exquisitely balanced in it.  For though in prose it is a
poem, and while a poem it is also a play.

But fortunate as Mr. Wills has been in the selection of his subject and
in his treatment of it, he is no less fortunate in the actors who
interpret his work.  To whatever character Miss Terry plays she brings
the infinite charm of her beauty, and the marvellous grace of her
movements and gestures.  It is impossible to escape from the sweet
tyranny of her personality.  She dominates her audience by the secret of
Cleopatra.  In her Olivia, however, it is not merely her personality that
fascinates us but her power also, her power over pathos, and her command
of situation.  The scene in which she bade goodbye to her family was
touching beyond any scene I remember in any modern play, yet no harsh or
violent note was sounded; and when in the succeeding act she struck, in
natural and noble indignation, the libertine who had betrayed her, there
was, I think, no one in the theatre who did not recognise that in Miss
Terry our stage possesses a really great artist, who can thrill an
audience without harrowing it, and by means that seem simple and easy can
produce the finest dramatic effect.  Mr. Irving, as Dr. Primrose,
intensified the beautiful and blind idolatry of the old pastor for his
daughter till his own tragedy seems almost greater than hers; the scene
in the third act, where he breaks down in his attempt to reprove the lamb
that has strayed from the fold, was a masterpiece of fine acting; and the
whole performance, while carefully elaborate in detail, was full of
breadth and dignity.  I acknowledge that I liked him least at the close
of the second act.  It seems to me that here we should be made to feel
not merely the passionate rage of the father, but the powerlessness of
the old man.  The taking down of the pistols, and the attempt to follow
the young duellist, are pathetic because they are useless, and I hardly
think that Mr. Irving conveyed this idea.  As regards the rest of the
characters, Mr. Terriss's Squire Thornhill was an admirable picture of a
fascinating young rake.  Indeed, it was so fascinating that the moral
equilibrium of the audience was quite disturbed, and nobody seemed to
care very much for the virtuous Mr. Burchell.  I was not sorry to see
this triumph of the artistic over the ethical sympathy.  Perfect heroes
are the monsters of melodramas, and have no place in dramatic art.  Life
possibly contains them, but Parnassus often rejects what Peckham may
welcome.  I look forward to a reaction in favour of the cultured
criminal.  Mr. Norman Forbes was a very pleasing Moses, and gave his
Latin quotations charmingly, Miss Emery's Sophy was most winning, and,
indeed, every part seemed to me well acted except that of the virtuous
Mr. Burchell.  This fact, however, rather pleased me than otherwise, as
it increased the charm of his attractive nephew.

The scenery and costumes were excellent, as indeed they always are at the
Lyceum when the piece is produced under Mr. Irving's direction.  The
first scene was really very beautiful, and quite as good as the famous
cherry orchard of the Theatre Francais.  A critic who posed as an
authority on field sports assured me that no one ever went out hunting
when roses were in full bloom.  Personally, that is exactly the season I
would select for the chase, but then I know more about flowers than I do
about foxes, and like them much better.  If the critic was right, either
the roses must wither or Squire Thornhill must change his coat.  A more
serious objection may be brought against the division of the last act
into three scenes.  There, I think, there was a distinct dramatic loss.
The room to which Olivia returns should have been exactly the same room
she had left.  As a picture of the eighteenth century, however, the whole
production was admirable, and the details, both of acting and of mise-en-
scene, wonderfully perfect.  I wish Olivia would take off her pretty
mittens when her fortune is being told.  Cheiromancy is a science which
deals almost entirely with the lines on the palm of the hand, and mittens
would seriously interfere with its mysticism.  Still, when all is said,
how easily does this lovely play, this artistic presentation, survive
criticisms founded on cheiromancy and cub-hunting!  The Lyceum under Mr.
Irving's management has become a centre of art.  We are all of us in his
debt.  I trust that we may see some more plays by living dramatists
produced at his theatre, for Olivia has been exquisitely mounted and
exquisitely played.




AS YOU LIKE IT AT COOMBE HOUSE


(Dramatic Review, June 6, 1885.)

In Theophile Gautier's first novel, that golden book of spirit and sense,
that holy writ of beauty, there is a most fascinating account of an
amateur performance of As You Like It in the large orangery of a French
country house.  Yet, lovely as Gautier's description is, the real
presentation of the play last week at Coombe seemed to me lovelier still,
for not merely were there present in it all those elements of poetry and
picturesqueness which le maitre impeccable so desired, but to them was
added also the exquisite charm of the open woodland and the delightful
freedom of the open air.  Nor indeed could the Pastoral Players have made
a more fortunate selection of a play.  A tragedy under the same
conditions would have been impossible.  For tragedy is the exaggeration
of the individual, and nature thinks nothing of dwarfing a hero by a
holly bush, and reducing a heroine to a mere effect of colour.  The
subtleties also of facial expression are in the open air almost entirely
lost; and while this would be a serious defect in the presentation of a
play which deals immediately with psychology, in the case of a comedy,
where the situations predominate over the characters, we do not feel it
nearly so much; and Shakespeare himself seems to have clearly recognised
this difference, for while he had Hamlet and Macbeth always played by
artificial light he acted As You Like It and the rest of his comedies en
plein jour.

The condition then under which this comedy was produced by Lady Archibald
Campbell and Mr. Godwin did not place any great limitations on the
actor's art, and increased tenfold the value of the play as a picture.
Through an alley of white hawthorn and gold laburnum we passed into the
green pavilion that served as the theatre, the air sweet with odour of
the lilac and with the blackbird's song; and when the curtain fell into
its trench of flowers, and the play commenced, we saw before us a real
forest, and we knew it to be Arden.  For with whoop and shout, up through
the rustling fern came the foresters trooping, the banished Duke took his
seat beneath the tall elm, and as his lords lay around him on the grass,
the rich melody of Shakespeare's blank verse began to reach our ears.  And
all through the performance this delightful sense of joyous woodland life
was sustained, and even when the scene was left empty for the shepherd to
drive his flock across the sward, or for Rosalind to school Orlando in
love-making, far away we could hear the shrill halloo of the hunter, and
catch now and then the faint music of some distant horn.  One distinct
dramatic advantage was gained by the mise en scene.

The abrupt exits and entrances, which are necessitated on the real stage
by the inevitable limitations of space, were in many cases done away
with, and we saw the characters coming gradually towards us through brake
and underwood, or passing away down the slope till they were lost in some
deep recess of the forest; the effect of distance thus gained being
largely increased by the faint wreaths of blue mist that floated at times
across the background.  Indeed I never saw an illustration at once so
perfect and so practical of the aesthetic value of smoke.

As for the players themselves, the pleasing naturalness of their method
harmonised delightfully with their natural surroundings.  Those of them
who were amateurs were too artistic to be stagey, and those who were
actors too experienced to be artificial.  The humorous sadness of Jaques,
that philosopher in search of sensation, found a perfect exponent in Mr.
Hermann Vezin.  Touchstone has been so often acted as a low comedy part
that Mr. Elliott's rendering of the swift sententious fool was a welcome
change, and a more graceful and winning Phebe than Mrs. Plowden, a more
tender Celia than Miss Schletter, a more realistic Audrey than Miss
Fulton, I have never seen.  Rosalind suffered a good deal through the
omission of the first act; we saw, I mean, more of the saucy boy than we
did of the noble girl; and though the persiflage always told, the poetry
was often lost; still Miss Calhoun gave much pleasure; and Lady Archibald
Campbell's Orlando was a really remarkable performance.  Too melancholy
some seemed to think it.  Yet is not Orlando lovesick?  Too dreamy, I
heard it said.  Yet Orlando is a poet.  And even admitting that the
vigour of the lad who tripped up the Duke's wrestler was hardly
sufficiently emphasised, still in the low music of Lady Archibald
Campbell's voice, and in the strange beauty of her movements and
gestures, there was a wonderful fascination, and the visible presence of
romance quite consoled me for the possible absence of robustness.  Among
the other characters should be mentioned Mr. Claude Ponsonby's First
Lord, Mr. De Cordova's Corin (a bit of excellent acting), and the Silvius
of Mr. Webster.

As regards the costumes the colour scheme was very perfect.  Brown and
green were the dominant notes, and yellow was most artistically used.
There were, however, two distinct discords.  Touchstone's motley was far
too glaring, and the crude white of Rosalind's bridal raiment in the last
act was absolutely displeasing.  A contrast may be striking but should
never be harsh.  And lovely in colour as Mrs. Plowden's dress was, a sort
of panegyric on a pansy, I am afraid that in Shakespeare's Arden there
were no Chelsea China Shepherdesses, and I am sure that the romance of
Phebe does not need to be intensified by any reminiscences of porcelain.
Still, As You Like It has probably never been so well mounted, nor
costumes worn with more ease and simplicity.  Not the least charming part
of the whole production was the music, which was under the direction of
the Rev. Arthur Batson.  The boys' voices were quite exquisite, and Mr.
Walsham sang with much spirit.

On the whole the Pastoral Players are to be warmly congratulated on the
success of their representation, and to the artistic sympathies of Lady
Archibald Campbell, and the artistic knowledge of Mr. Godwin, I am
indebted for a most delightful afternoon.  Few things are so pleasurable
as to be able by an hour's drive to exchange Piccadilly for Parnassus.




A HANDBOOK TO MARRIAGE


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 18, 1885.)

In spite of its somewhat alarming title this book may be highly
recommended to every one.  As for the authorities the author quotes, they
are almost numberless, and range from Socrates down to Artemus Ward.  He
tells us of the wicked bachelor who spoke of marriage as 'a very harmless
amusement' and advised a young friend of his to 'marry early and marry
often'; of Dr. Johnson who proposed that marriage should be arranged by
the Lord Chancellor, without the parties concerned having any choice in
the matter; of the Sussex labourer who asked, 'Why should I give a woman
half my victuals for cooking the other half?' and of Lord Verulam who
thought that unmarried men did the best public work.  And, indeed,
marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men
disagree.  Our author, however, is clearly of the same opinion as the
Scotch lassie who, on her father warning her what a solemn thing it was
to get married, answered, 'I ken that, father, but it's a great deal
solemner to be single.'  He may be regarded as the champion of the
married life.  Indeed, he has a most interesting chapter on marriage-made
men, and though he dissents, and we think rightly, from the view recently
put forward by a lady or two on the Women's Rights platform that Solomon
owed all his wisdom to the number of his wives, still he appeals to
Bismarck, John Stuart Mill, Mahommed and Lord Beaconsfield, as instances
of men whose success can be traced to the influence of the women they
married.  Archbishop Whately once defined woman as 'a creature that does
not reason and pokes the fire from the top,' but since his day the higher
education of women has considerably altered their position.  Women have
always had an emotional sympathy with those they love; Girton and Newnham
have rendered intellectual sympathy also possible.  In our day it is best
for a man to be married, and men must give up the tyranny in married life
which was once so dear to them, and which, we are afraid, lingers still,
here and there.

'Do you wish to be my wife, Mabel?' said a little boy.

'Yes,' incautiously answered Mabel.

'Then pull off my boots.'

On marriage vows our author has, too, very sensible views and very
amusing stories.  He tells of a nervous bridegroom who, confusing the
baptismal and marriage ceremonies, replied when asked if he consented to
take the bride for his wife: 'I renounce them all'; of a Hampshire rustic
who, when giving the ring, said solemnly to the bride: 'With my body I
thee wash up, and with all my hurdle goods I thee and thou'; of another
who, when asked whether he would take his partner to be his wedded wife,
replied with shameful indecision: 'Yes, I'm willin'; but I'd a sight
rather have her sister'; and of a Scotch lady who, on the occasion of her
daughter's wedding, was asked by an old friend whether she might
congratulate her on the event, and answered: 'Yes, yes, upon the whole it
is very satisfactory; it is true Jeannie hates her gudeman, but then
there's always a something!'  Indeed, the good stories contained in this
book are quite endless and make it very pleasant reading, while the good
advice is on all points admirable.

Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful
collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a
perfect museum of salt-cellars.  We strongly recommend this book as one
of the best of wedding presents.  It is a complete handbook to an earthly
Paradise, and its author may be regarded as the Murray of matrimony and
the Baedeker of bliss.

How to be Happy though Married: Being a Handbook to Marriage.  By a
Graduate in the University of Matrimony.  (T. Fisher Unwin.)




HALF-HOURS WITH THE WORST AUTHORS


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 15, 1886.)

I am very much pleased to see that you are beginning to call attention to
the extremely slipshod and careless style of our ordinary
magazine-writers.  Will you allow me to refer your readers to an article
on Borrow, in the current number of Macmillan, which exemplifies very
clearly the truth of your remarks?  The author of the article is Mr.
George Saintsbury, a gentleman who has recently written a book on Prose
Style, and here are some specimens of the prose of the future according
to the systeme Saintsbury:

1.  He saw the rise, and, _in some instances, the death, of Tennyson_,
Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens.

2.  _See a place_ which Kingsley, _or_ Mr. Ruskin, _or_ some other master
of our decorative school, _have_ described--_much more_ one which has
fallen into the hands of the small fry of their imitators--and you are
almost sure to find that _it has been overdone_.

3.  The great mass of his translations, published and unpublished, and
the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no doubt _deserves_ judicious
excerption.

4.  'The Romany Rye' _did not appear_ for six years, _that is to say, in_
1857.

5.  The elaborate apparatus which most prose tellers of fantastic tales
_use_, and generally _fail in using_.

6.  The great writers, whether they try to be like other people or try
not to be like them (_and sometimes in the first case most of all_),
succeed _only_ in being themselves.

7.  If he had a slight _overdose_ of Celtic blood and Celtic-peculiarity,
it was _more than made up_ by the readiness of literary expression which
it gave him.  He, if any one, bore an English heart, though, _as there
often has been_, there was something perhaps more than English as well as
less than it in his fashion of expression.

8.  His flashes of ethical reflection, which, though like _all_ ethical
reflections _often_ one-sided.

9.  He certainly was an _unfriend_ to Whiggery.

10.  _That it contains_ a great deal of quaint and piquant writing _is
only to say_ that its writer wrote it.

11.  'Wild Wales,' too, because of _its_ easy and direct _opportunity_ of
comparing its description with the originals.

12.  The capital _and_ full-length portraits.

13.  Whose attraction is _one_ neither mainly nor in any very great
degree one of pure form.

14.  _Constantly right in general_.

These are merely a few examples of the style of Mr. Saintsbury, a writer
who seems quite ignorant of the commonest laws both of grammar and of
literary expression, who has apparently no idea of the difference between
the pronouns 'this' and 'that,' and has as little hesitation in ending
the clause of a sentence with a preposition, as he has in inserting a
parenthesis between a preposition and its object, a mistake of which the
most ordinary schoolboy would be ashamed.  And why can not our magazine-
writers use plain, simple English?  _Unfriend_, quoted above, is a quite
unnecessary archaism, and so is such a phrase as _With this Borrow could
not away_, in the sense of 'this Borrow could not endure.'  'Borrow's
_abstraction_ from general society' may, I suppose, pass muster.  Pope
talks somewhere of a hermit's 'abstraction,' but what is the meaning of
saying that the author of Lavengro _quartered_ Castile and Leon 'in the
most interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant'?  And what
defence can be made for such an expression as 'Scott, and other _black
beasts_ of Borrow's'?  Black beast for bete noire is really abominable.

The object of my letter, however, is not to point out the deficiencies of
Mr. Saintsbury's style, but to express my surprise that his article
should have been admitted into the pages of a magazine like Macmillan's.
Surely it does not require much experience to know that such an article
is a disgrace even to magazine literature.

George Borrow.  By George Saintsbury.  (Macmillan's Magazine, January
1886.)




ONE OF MR. CONWAY'S REMAINDERS


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1886.)

Most people know that in the concoction of a modern novel crime is a more
important ingredient than culture.  Mr. Hugh Conway certainly knew it,
and though for cleverness of invention and ingenuity of construction he
cannot be compared to M. Gaboriau, that master of murder and its
mysteries, still he fully recognised the artistic value of villainy.  His
last novel, A Cardinal Sin, opens very well.  Mr. Philip Bourchier, M.P.
for Westshire and owner of Redhills, is travelling home from London in a
first-class railway carriage when, suddenly, through the window enters a
rough-looking middle-aged man brandishing a long-lost marriage
certificate, the effect of which is to deprive the right honourable
member of his property and estate.  However, Mr. Bourchier, M.P., is
quite equal to the emergency.  On the arrival of the train at its
destination, he invites the unwelcome intruder to drive home with him
and, reaching a lonely road, shoots him through the head and gives
information to the nearest magistrate that he has rid society of a
dangerous highwayman.

Mr. Bourchier is brought to trial and triumphantly acquitted.  So far,
everything goes well with him.  Unfortunately, however, the murdered man,
with that superhuman strength which on the stage and in novels always
accompanies the agony of death, had managed in falling from the dog-cart
to throw the marriage certificate up a fir tree!  There it is found by a
worthy farmer who talks that conventional rustic dialect which, though
unknown in the provinces, is such a popular element in every Adelphi
melodrama; and it ultimately falls into the hands of an unscrupulous
young man who succeeds in blackmailing Mr. Bourchier and in marrying his
daughter.  Mr. Bourchier suffers tortures from excess of chloral and of
remorse; and there is psychology of a weird and wonderful kind, that kind
which Mr. Conway may justly be said to have invented and the result of
which is not to be underrated.  For, if to raise a goose skin on the
reader be the aim of art, Mr. Conway must be regarded as a real artist.
So harrowing is his psychology that the ordinary methods of punctuation
are quite inadequate to convey it.  Agony and asterisks follow each other
on every page and, as the murderer's conscience sinks deeper into chaos,
the chaos of commas increases.

Finally, Mr. Bourchier dies, splendide mendax to the end.  A confession,
he rightly argued, would break up the harmony of the family circle,
particularly as his eldest son had married the daughter of his luckless
victim.  Few criminals are so thoughtful for others as Mr. Bourchier is,
and we are not without admiration for the unselfishness of one who can
give up the luxury of a death-bed repentance.

A Cardinal Sin, then, on the whole, may be regarded as a crude novel of a
common melodramatic type.  What is painful about it is its style, which
is slipshod and careless.  To describe a honeymoon as a _rare occurrence
in any one person's life_ is rather amusing.  There is an American story
of a young couple who had to be married by telephone, as the bridegroom
lived in Nebraska and the bride in New York, and they had to go on
separate honeymoons; though, perhaps, this is not what Mr. Conway meant.
But what can be said for a sentence like this?--'The established
favourites in the musical world are never quite sure but the _new comer_
may not be _one among the many they have seen fail_'; or this?--'As it is
the fate of such a very small number of men to marry a prima donna, I
shall be doing little harm, _or be likely to change plans of life_, by
enumerating some of the disadvantages.'  The nineteenth century may be a
prosaic age, but we fear that, if we are to judge by the general run of
novels, it is not an age of prose.

A Cardinal Sin.  By Hugh Conway.  (Remington and Co.)




TO READ OR NOT TO READ


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 8, 1886.)

Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes:--

1.  Books to read, such as Cicero's Letters, Suetonius, Vasari's Lives of
the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John
Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon's Memoirs, Mommsen, and (till we get a
better one) Grote's History of Greece.

2.  Books to re-read, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry,
the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not
the savants.

3.  Books not to read at all, such as Thomson's Seasons, Rogers's Italy,
Paley's Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart
Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire's plays without any
exception, Butler's Analogy, Grant's Aristotle, Hume's England, Lewes's
History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to
prove anything.

The third class is by far the most important.  To tell people what to
read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of
literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus
there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning.
But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I
venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.

Indeed, it is one that is eminently needed in this age of ours, an age
that reads so much, that it has no time to admire, and writes so much,
that it has no time to think.  Whoever will select out of the chaos of
our modern curricula 'The Worst Hundred Books,' and publish a list of
them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.

After expressing these views I suppose I should not offer any suggestions
at all with regard to 'The Best Hundred Books,' but I hope you will allow
me the pleasure of being inconsistent, as I am anxious to put in a claim
for a book that has been strangely omitted by most of the excellent
judges who have contributed to your columns.  I mean the Greek Anthology.
The beautiful poems contained in this collection seem to me to hold the
same position with regard to Greek dramatic literature as do the delicate
little figurines of Tanagra to the Phidian marbles, and to be quite as
necessary for the complete understanding of the Greek spirit.

I am also amazed to find that Edgar Allan Poe has been passed over.
Surely this marvellous lord of rhythmic expression deserves a place?  If,
in order to make room for him, it be necessary to elbow out some one
else, I should elbow out Southey, and I think that Baudelaire might be
most advantageously substituted for Keble.

No doubt, both in the Curse of Kehama and in the Christian Year there are
poetic qualities of a certain kind, but absolute catholicity of taste is
not without its dangers.  It is only an auctioneer who should admire all
schools of art.




TWELFTH NIGHT AT OXFORD


(Dramatic Review, February 20, 1886.)

On Saturday last the new theatre at Oxford was opened by the University
Dramatic Society.  The play selected was Shakespeare's delightful comedy
of Twelfth Night, a play eminently suitable for performance by a club, as
it contains so many good acting parts.  Shakespeare's tragedies may be
made for a single star, but his comedies are made for a galaxy of
constellations.  In the first he deals with the pathos of the individual,
in the second he gives us a picture of life.  The Oxford undergraduates,
then, are to be congratulated on the selection of the play, and the
result fully justified their choice.  Mr. Bourchier as Festa the clown
was easy, graceful and joyous, as fanciful as his dress and as funny as
his bauble.  The beautiful songs which Shakespeare has assigned to this
character were rendered by him as charmingly as they were dramatically.
To act singing is quite as great an art as to sing.  Mr. Letchmere Stuart
was a delightful Sir Andrew, and gave much pleasure to the audience.  One
may hate the villains of Shakespeare, but one cannot help loving his
fools.  Mr. Macpherson was, perhaps, hardly equal to such an immortal
part as that of Sir Toby Belch, though there was much that was clever in
his performance.  Mr. Lindsay threw new and unexpected light on the
character of Fabian, and Mr. Clark's Malvolio was a most remarkable piece
of acting.  What a difficult part Malvolio is!  Shakespeare undoubtedly
meant us to laugh all through at the pompous steward, and to join in the
practical joke upon him, and yet how impossible not to feel a good deal
of sympathy with him!  Perhaps in this century we are too altruistic to
be really artistic.  Hazlitt says somewhere that poetical justice is done
him in the uneasiness which Olivia suffers on account of her mistaken
attachment to Orsino, as her insensibility to the violence of the Duke's
passion is atoned for by the discovery of Viola's concealed love for him;
but it is difficult not to feel Malvolio's treatment is unnecessarily
harsh.  Mr. Clark, however, gave a very clever rendering, full of subtle
touches.  If I ventured on a bit of advice, which I feel most reluctant
to do, it would be to the effect that while one should always study the
method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner.  The
manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is
absolutely universal.  The first is personality, which no one should
copy; the second is perfection, which all should aim at.  Miss Arnold was
a most sprightly Maria, and Miss Farmer a dignified Olivia; but as Viola
Mrs. Bewicke was hardly successful.  Her manner was too boisterous and
her method too modern.  Where there is violence there is no Viola, where
there is no illusion there is no Illyria, and where there is no style
there is no Shakespeare.  Mr. Higgins looked the part of Sebastian to
perfection, and some of the minor characters were excellently played by
Mr. Adderley, Mr. King-Harman, Mr. Coningsby Disraeli and Lord Albert
Osborne.  On the whole, the performance reflected much credit on the
Dramatic Society; indeed, its excellence was such that I am led to hope
that the University will some day have a theatre of its own, and that
proficiency in scene-painting will be regarded as a necessary
qualification for the Slade Professorship.  On the stage, literature
returns to life and archaeology becomes art.  A fine theatre is a temple
where all the muses may meet, a second Parnassus, and the dramatic
spirit, though she has long tarried at Cambridge, seems now to be
migrating to Oxford.

   Thebes did her green unknowing youth engage;
   She chooses Athens in her riper age.




THE LETTERS OF A GREAT WOMAN


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 6, 1886.)

Of the many collections of letters that have appeared in this century
few, if any, can rival for fascination of style and variety of incident
the letters of George Sand which have recently been translated into
English by M. Ledos de Beaufort.  They extend over a space of more than
sixty years, from 1812 to 1876, in fact, and comprise the first letters
of Aurore Dupin, a child of eight years old, as well as the last letters
of George Sand, a woman of seventy-two.  The very early letters, those of
the child and of the young married woman, possess, of course, merely a
psychological interest; but from 1831, the date of Madame Dudevant's
separation from her husband and her first entry into Paris life, the
interest becomes universal, and the literary and political history of
France is mirrored in every page.

For George Sand was an indefatigable correspondent; she longs in one of
her letters, it is true, for 'a planet where reading and writing are
absolutely unknown,' but still she had a real pleasure in letter-writing.
Her greatest delight was the communication of ideas, and she is always in
the heart of the battle.  She discusses pauperism with Louis Napoleon in
his prison at Ham, and liberty with Armand Barbes in his dungeon at
Vincennes; she writes to Lamennais on philosophy, to Mazzini on
socialism, to Lamartine on democracy, and to Ledru-Rollin on justice.  Her
letters reveal to us not merely the life of a great novelist but the soul
of a great woman, of a woman who was one with all the noblest movements
of her day and whose sympathy with humanity was boundless absolutely.  For
the aristocracy of intellect she had always the deepest veneration, but
the democracy of suffering touched her more.  She preached the
regeneration of mankind, not with the noisy ardour of the paid advocate,
but with the enthusiasm of the true evangelist.  Of all the artists of
this century she was the most altruistic; she felt every one's
misfortunes except her own.  Her faith never left her; to the end of her
life, as she tells us, she was able to believe without illusions.  But
the people disappointed her a little.  She saw that they followed persons
not principles, and for 'the great man theory' George Sand had no
respect.  'Proper names are the enemies of principles' is one of her
aphorisms.

So from 1850 her letters are more distinctly literary.  She discusses
modern realism with Flaubert, and play-writing with Dumas fils; and
protests with passionate vehemence against the doctrine of L'art pour
l'art.  'Art for the sake of itself is an idle sentence,' she writes;
'art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good,
that is the creed I seek.'  And in a delightful letter to M. Charles
Poncy she repeats the same idea very charmingly.  'People say that birds
sing for the sake of singing, but I doubt it.  They sing their loves and
happiness, and in that they are in keeping with nature.  But man must do
something more, and poets only sing in order to move people and to make
them think.'  She wanted M. Poncy to be the poet of the people and, if
good advice were all that had been needed, he would certainly have been
the Burns of the workshop.  She drew out a delightful scheme for a volume
to be called Songs of all Trades and saw the possibilities of making
handicrafts poetic.  Perhaps she valued good intentions in art a little
too much, and she hardly understood that art for art's sake is not meant
to express the final cause of art but is merely a formula of creation;
but, as she herself had scaled Parnassus, we must not quarrel at her
bringing Proletarianism with her.  For George Sand must be ranked among
our poetic geniuses.  She regarded the novel as still within the domain
of poetry.  Her heroes are not dead photographs; they are great
possibilities.  Modern novels are dissections; hers are dreams.  'I make
popular types,' she writes, 'such as I do no longer see, but such as they
should and might be.'  For realism, in M. Zola's acceptation of the word,
she had no admiration.  Art to her was a mirror that transfigured truths
but did not represent realities.  Hence she could not understand art
without personality.  'I am aware,' she writes to Flaubert, 'that you are
opposed to the exposition of personal doctrine in literature.  Are you
right?  Does not your opposition proceed rather from a want of conviction
than from a principle of aesthetics?  If we have any philosophy in our
brain it must needs break forth in our writings.  But you, as soon as you
handle literature, you seem anxious, I know not why, to be another man,
the one who must disappear, who annihilates himself and is no more.  What
a singular mania!  What a deficient taste!  The worth of our productions
depends entirely on our own.  Besides, if we withhold our own opinions
respecting the personages we create, we naturally leave the reader in
uncertainty as to the opinion he should himself form of them.  That
amounts to wishing not to be understood, and the result of this is that
the reader gets weary of us and leaves us.'

She herself, however, may be said to have suffered from too dominant a
personality, and this was the reason of the failure of most of her plays.

Of the drama in the sense of disinterested presentation she had no idea,
and what is the strength and life-blood of her novels is the weakness of
her dramatic works.  But in the main she was right.  Art without
personality is impossible.  And yet the aim of art is not to reveal
personality, but to please.  This she hardly recognised in her aesthetics,
though she realised it in her work.  On literary style she has some
excellent remarks.  She dislikes the extravagances of the romantic school
and sees the beauty of simplicity.  'Simplicity,' she writes, 'is the
most difficult thing to secure in this world: it is the last limit of
experience and the last effort of genius.'  She hated the slang and argot
of Paris life, and loved the words used by the peasants in the provinces.
'The provinces,' she remarks, 'preserve the tradition of the original
tongue and create but few new words.  I feel much respect for the
language of the peasantry; in my estimation it is the more correct.'

She thought Flaubert too much preoccupied with the sense of form, and
makes these excellent observations to him--perhaps her best piece of
literary criticism.  'You consider the form as the aim, whereas it is but
the effect.  Happy expressions are only the outcome of emotion and
emotion itself proceeds from a conviction.  We are only moved by that
which we ardently believe in.'  Literary schools she distrusted.
Individualism was to her the keystone of art as well as of life.  'Do not
belong to any school: do not imitate any model,' is her advice.  Yet she
never encouraged eccentricity.  'Be correct,' she writes to Eugene
Pelletan, 'that is rarer than being eccentric, as the time goes.  It is
much more common to please by bad taste than to receive the cross of
honour.'

On the whole, her literary advice is sound and healthy.  She never
shrieks and she never sneers.  She is the incarnation of good sense.  And
the whole collection of her letters is a perfect treasure-house of
suggestions both on art and on politics.  The manner of the translation
is often rather clumsy, but the matter is always so intensely interesting
that we can afford to be charitable.

Letters of George Sand.  Translated and edited by Raphael Ledos de
Beaufort.  (Ward and Downey.)




NEWS FROM PARNASSUS


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1886.)

That most delightful of all French critics, M. Edmond Scherer, has
recently stated in an article on Wordsworth that the English read far
more poetry than any other European nation.  We sincerely hope this may
be true, not merely for the sake of the public but for the sake of the
poets also.  It would be sad indeed if the many volumes of poems that are
every year published in London found no readers but the authors
themselves and the authors' relations; and the real philanthropist should
recognise it as part of his duties to buy every new book of verse that
appears.  Sometimes, we acknowledge, he will be disappointed, often he
will be bored; still now and then he will be amply rewarded for his
reckless benevolence.

Mr. George Francis Armstrong's Stories of Wicklow, for instance, is most
pleasant reading.  Mr. Armstrong is already well known as the author of
Ugone, King Saul and other dramas, and his latest volume shows that the
power and passion of his early work has not deserted him.  Most modern
Irish poetry is purely political and deals with the wickedness of the
landlords and the Tories; but Mr. Armstrong sings of the picturesqueness
of Erin, not of its politics.  He tells us very charmingly of the magic
of its mists and the melody of its colour, and draws a most captivating
picture of the peasants of the county Wicklow, whom he describes as

   A kindly folk in vale and moor,
      Unvexed with rancours, frank and free
   In mood and manners--rich with poor
      Attuned in happiest amity:
   Where still the cottage door is wide,
      The stranger welcomed at the hearth,
   And pleased the humbler hearts confide
      Still in the friend of gentler birth.

The most ambitious poem in the volume is De Verdun of Darragh.  It is at
once lyrical and dramatic, and though its manner reminds us of Browning
and its method of Maud, still all through it there is a personal and
individual note.  Mr. Armstrong also carefully observes the rules of
decorum, and, as he promises his readers in a preface, keeps quite clear
of 'the seas of sensual art.'  In fact, an elderly maiden lady could read
this volume without a blush, a thrill, or even an emotion.

Dr. Goodchild does not possess Mr. Armstrong's literary touch, but his
Somnia Medici is distinguished by a remarkable quality of forcible and
direct expression.  The poem that opens his volume, Myrrha, or A Dialogue
on Creeds, is quite as readable as a metrical dialogue on creeds could
possibly be; and The Organ Builder is a most romantic story charmingly
told.  Dr. Goodchild seems to be an ardent disciple of Mr. Browning, and
though he may not be able to reproduce the virtues of his master, at
least he can echo his defects very cleverly.  Such a verse as--

   'Tis the subtle essayal
      Of the Jews and Judas,
   Such lying lisp
   Might hail a will-o'-the-wisp,
      A thin somebody--Theudas--

is an excellent example of low comedy in poetry.  One of the best poems
in the book is The Ballad of Three Kingdoms.  Indeed, if the form were
equal to the conception, it would be a delightful work of art; but Dr.
Goodchild, though he may be a master of metres, is not a master of music
yet.  His verse is often harsh and rugged.  On the whole, however, his
volume is clever and interesting.

Mr. Keene has not, we believe, a great reputation in England as yet, but
in India he seems to be well known.  From a collection of criticisms
appended to his volume it appears that the Overland Mail has christened
him the Laureate of Hindostan and that the Allahabad Pioneer once
compared him to Keats.  He is a pleasant rhymer, as rhymers go, and,
though we strongly object to his putting the Song of Solomon into bad
blank verse, still we are quite ready to admire his translations of the
Pervigilium Veneris and of Omar Khayyam.  We wish he would not write
sonnets with fifteen lines.  A fifteen-line sonnet is as bad a
monstrosity as a sonnet in dialogue.  The volume has the merit of being
very small, and contains many stanzas quite suitable for valentines.

Finally we come to Procris and Other Poems, by Mr. W. G. Hole.  Mr. Hole
is apparently a very young writer.  His work, at least, is full of
crudities, his syntax is defective, and his grammar is questionable.  And
yet, when all is said, in the one poem of Procris it is easy to recognise
the true poetic ring.  Elsewhere the volume is amateurish and weak.  The
Spanish Main was suggested by a leader in the Daily Telegraph, and bears
all the traces of its lurid origin.  Sir Jocellyn's Trust is a sort of
pseudo-Tennysonian idyll in which the damozel says to her gallant
rescuer, 'Come, come, Sir Knight, I catch my death of cold,' and
recompenses him with

      What noble minds
   Regard the first reward,--an orphan's thanks.

Nunc Dimittis is dull and The Wandering Jew dreadful; but Procris is a
beautiful poem.  The richness and variety of its metaphors, the music of
its lines, the fine opulence of its imagery, all seem to point to a new
poet.  Faults, it is true, there are in abundance; but they are faults
that come from want of trouble, not from want of taste.  Mr. Hole shows
often a rare and exquisite sense of beauty and a marvellous power of
poetic vision, and if he will cultivate the technique of his craft a
little more we have no doubt but that he will some day give us work
worthy to endure.  It is true that there is more promise than perfection
in his verse at present, yet it is a promise that seems likely to be
fulfilled.

(1) Stories of Wicklow.  By George Francis Armstrong, M.A.  (Longmans,
Green and Co.)

(2) Somnia Medici.  By John A. Goodchild.  Second Series.  (Kegan Paul.)

(3) Verses: Translated and Original.  By H. E. Keene.  (W. H. Allen and
Co.)

(4) Procris and Other Poems.  By W. G. Hole.  (Kegan Paul.)




SOME NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1886.)

After a careful perusal of 'Twixt Love and Duty, by Mr. Tighe Hopkins, we
confess ourselves unable to inform anxious inquirers who it is that is
thus sandwiched, and how he (or she) got into so unpleasant a
predicament.  The curious reader with a taste for enigmas may be advised
to find out for himself--if he can.  Even if he be unsuccessful, his
trouble will be repaid by the pleasant writing and clever character
drawing of Mr. Hopkins's tale.  The plot is less praiseworthy.  The whole
Madeira episode seems to lead up to this dilemma, and after all it comes
to nothing.  We brace up our nerves for a tragedy and are treated instead
to the mildest of marivaudage--which is disappointing.  In conclusion,
one word of advice to Mr. Hopkins: let him refrain from apostrophising
his characters after this fashion: 'Oh, Gilbert Reade, what are you about
that you dally with this golden chance?' and so forth.  This is one of
the worst mannerisms of a bygone generation of story tellers.

Mr. Gallenga has written, as he says, 'a tale without a murder,' but
having put a pistol-ball through his hero's chest and left him alive and
hearty notwithstanding, he cannot be said to have produced a tale without
a miracle.  His heroine, too, if we may judge by his descriptions of her,
is 'all a wonder and a wild desire.'  At the age of seventeen she 'was
one of the Great Maker's masterpieces . . . a living likeness of the
Dresden Madonna.'  One rather shudders to think of what she may become at
forty, but this is an impertinent prying into futurity.  She hails from
'Maryland, my Maryland!' and has 'received a careful, if not a superior,
education.'  Need we add that she marries the heir to an earldom who, as
aforesaid, has had himself perforated by a pistol-bullet on her behalf?
Mr. Gallenga's division of this book into acts and scenes is not
justified by anything specially dramatic either in its structure or its
method.  The dialogue, in truth, is somewhat stilted.  Nevertheless, its
first-hand sketches of Roman society are not without interest, and one or
two characters seem to be drawn from nature.

The Life's Mistake which forms the theme of Mrs. Lovett Cameron's two
volumes is not a mistake after all, but results in unmixed felicity; and
as it is brought about by fraud on the part of the hero, this conclusion
is not as moral as it might be.  For the rest, the tale is a very
familiar one.  Its personages are the embarrassed squire with his
charming daughter, the wealthy and amorous mortgagee, and the sailor
lover who is either supposed to be drowned or falsely represented to be
fickle--in Mrs. Cameron's tale he is both in succession.  When we add
that there is a stanza from Byron on the title-page and a poetical
quotation at the beginning of each chapter, we have possessed the
discerning reader of all necessary information both as to the matter and
the manner of Mrs. Cameron's performance.

Mr. E. O. Pleydell-Bouverie has endowed the novel-writing fraternity with
a new formula for the composition of titles.  After J. S.; or,
Trivialities there is no reason why we should not have A. B.; or,
Platitudes, M.N.; or, Sentimentalisms, Y.Z.; or, Inanities.  There are
many books which these simple titles would characterise much more aptly
than any high-flown phrases--as aptly, in fact, as Mr. Bouverie's title
characterises the volume before us.  It sets forth the uninteresting
fortunes of an insignificant person, one John Stiles, a briefless
barrister.  The said John falls in love with a young lady, inherits a
competence, omits to tell his love, and is killed by the bursting of a
fowling-piece--that is all.  The only point of interest presented by the
book is the problem as to how it ever came to be written.  We can
scarcely find the solution in Mr. Bouverie's elaborately smart style
which cannot be said to transmute his 'trivialities' into 'flies in
amber.'

Mr. Swinburne once proposed that it should be a penal offence against
literature for any writer to affix a proverb, a phrase or a quotation to
a novel, by way of tag or title.  We wonder what he would say to the
title of 'Pen Oliver's' last book!  Probably he would empty on it the
bitter vial of his scorn and satire.  All But is certainly an intolerable
name to give to any literary production.  The story, however, is quite an
interesting one.  At Laxenford Hall live Lord and Lady Arthur Winstanley.
Lady Arthur has two children by her first marriage, the elder of whom,
Walter Hope-Kennedy by name, is heir to the broad acres.  Walter is a
pleasant English boy, fonder of cricket than of culture, healthy, happy
and susceptible.  He falls in love with Fanny Taylor, a pretty village
girl; is thrown out of his dog-cart one night through the machinations of
a jealous rival, breaks one of his ribs and gets a violent fever.  His
stepfather tries to murder him by subcutaneous injections of morphia but
is detected by the local doctor, and Walter recovers.  However, he does
not marry Fanny after all, and the story ends ineffectually.  To say of a
dress that 'it was rather under than over adorned' is not very pleasing
English, and such a phrase as 'almost always, but by no means
invariably,' is quite detestable.  Still we must not expect the master of
the scalpel to be the master of the stilus as well.  All But is a very
charming tale, and the sketches of village life are quite admirable.  We
recommend it to all who are tired of the productions of Mr. Hugh Conway's
dreadful disciples.

(1) 'Twixt Love and Duty: A Novel.  By Tighe Hopkins.  (Chatto and
Windus.)

(2) Jenny Jennet: A Tale Without a Murder.  By A. Gallenga.  (Chapman and
Hall.)

(3) A Life's Mistake: A Novel.  By Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron.  (Ward and
Downey.)

(4) J. S.; or, Trivialities: A Novel.  By Edward Oliver
Pleydell-Bouverie.  (Griffith, Farren and Co.)

(5) All But: A Chronicle of Laxenford Life.  By Pen Oliver, F.R.C.S.
(Kegan Paul.)




A LITERARY PILGRIM


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 17, 1886.)

Antiquarian books, as a rule, are extremely dull reading.  They give us
facts without form, science without style, and learning without life.  An
exception, however, must be made for M. Gaston Boissier's Promenades
Archeologiques.  M. Boissier is a most pleasant and picturesque writer,
and is really able to give his readers useful information without ever
boring them, an accomplishment which is entirely unknown in Germany, and
in England is extremely rare.

The first essay in his book is on the probable site of Horace's country-
house, a subject that has interested many scholars from the Renaissance
down to our own day.  M. Boissier, following the investigations of Signor
Rosa, places it on a little hill over-looking the Licenza, and his theory
has a great deal to recommend it.  The plough still turns up on the spot
the bricks and tiles of an old Roman villa; a spring of clear water, like
that of which the poet so often sang, 'breaks babbling from the hollow
rock,' and is still called by the peasants Fonte dell' Oratini, some
faint echo possibly of the singer's name; the view from the hill is just
what is described in the epistles, 'Continui montes nisi dissocientur
opaca valle'; hard by is the site of the ruined temple of Vacuna, where
Horace tells us he wrote one of his poems, and the local rustics still go
to Varia (Vicovaro) on market days as they used to do when the graceful
Roman lyrist sauntered through his vines and played at being a country
gentleman.

M. Boissier, however, is not content merely with identifying the poet's
house; he also warmly defends him from the charge that has been brought
against him of servility in accepting it.  He points out that it was only
after the invention of printing that literature became a money-making
profession, and that, as there was no copyright law at Rome to prevent
books being pirated, patrons had to take the place that publishers hold,
or should hold, nowadays.  The Roman patron, in fact, kept the Roman poet
alive, and we fancy that many of our modern bards rather regret the old
system.  Better, surely, the humiliation of the sportula than the
indignity of a bill for printing!  Better to accept a country-house as a
gift than to be in debt to one's landlady!  On the whole, the patron was
an excellent institution, if not for poetry at least for the poets; and
though he had to be propitiated by panegyrics, still are we not told by
our most shining lights that the subject is of no importance in a work of
art?  M. Boissier need not apologise for Horace: every poet longs for a
Maecenas.

An essay on the Etruscan tombs at Corneto follows, and the remainder of
the volume is taken up by a most fascinating article called Le Pays de
l'Eneide.  M. Boissier claims for Virgil's descriptions of scenery an
absolute fidelity of detail.  'Les poetes anciens,' he says, 'ont le gout
de la precision et de la fidelite: ils n'imaginent guere de paysages en
l'air,' and with this view he visited every place in Italy and Sicily
that Virgil has mentioned.  Sometimes, it is true, modern civilisation,
or modern barbarism, has completely altered the aspect of the scene; the
'desolate shore of Drepanum,' for instance ('Drepani illaetabilis ora')
is now covered with thriving manufactories and stucco villas, and the
'bird-haunted forest' through which the Tiber flowed into the sea has
long ago disappeared.  Still, on the whole, the general character of the
Italian landscape is unchanged, and M. Boissier's researches show very
clearly how personal and how vivid were Virgil's impressions of nature.
The subject is, of course, a most interesting one, and those who love to
make pilgrimages without stirring from home cannot do better than spend
three shillings on the French Academician's Promenades Archeologiques.

Nouvelles Promenades Archeologiques, Horace et Virgile.  By Gaston
Boissier.  (Hachette.)




BERANGER IN ENGLAND


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 21, 1886.)

A philosophic politician once remarked that the best possible form of
government is an absolute monarchy tempered by street ballads.  Without
at all agreeing with this aphorism we still cannot but regret that the
new democracy does not use poetry as a means for the expression of
political opinion.  The Socialists, it is true, have been heard singing
the later poems of Mr. William Morris, but the street ballad is really
dead in England.  The fact is that most modern poetry is so artificial in
its form, so individual in its essence and so literary in its style, that
the people as a body are little moved by it, and when they have
grievances against the capitalist or the aristocrat they prefer strikes
to sonnets and rioting to rondels.

Possibly, Mr. William Toynbee's pleasant little volume of translations
from Beranger may be the herald of a new school.  Beranger had all the
qualifications for a popular poet.  He wrote to be sung more than to be
read; he preferred the Pont Neuf to Parnassus; he was patriotic as well
as romantic, and humorous as well as humane.  Translations of poetry as a
rule are merely misrepresentations, but the muse of Beranger is so simple
and naive that she can wear our English dress with ease and grace, and
Mr. Toynbee has kept much of the mirth and music of the original.  Here
and there, undoubtedly, the translation could be improved upon; 'rapiers'
for instance is an abominable rhyme to 'forefathers'; 'the hated arms of
Albion' in the same poem is a very feeble rendering of 'le leopard de
l'Anglais,' and such a verse as

   'Mid France's miracles of art,
      Rare trophies won from art's own land,
   I've lived to see with burning heart
      The fog-bred poor triumphant stand,

reproduces very inadequately the charm of the original:

   Dans nos palais, ou, pres de la victoire,
   Brillaient les arts, doux fruits des beaux climats,
   J'ai vu du Nord les peuplades sans gloire,
   De leurs manteaux secouer les frimas.

On the whole, however, Mr. Toynbee's work is good; Les Champs, for
example, is very well translated, and so are the two delightful poems
Rosette and Ma Republique; and there is a good deal of spirit in Le
Marquis de Carabas:

   Whom have we here in conqueror's role?
   Our grand old Marquis, bless his soul!
   Whose grand old charger (mark his bone!)
   Has borne him back to claim his own.
   Note, if you please, the grand old style
   In which he nears his grand old pile;
   With what an air of grand old state
   He waves that blade immaculate!
      Hats off, hats off, for my lord to pass,
      The grand old Marquis of Carabas!--

though 'that blade immaculate' has hardly got the sting of 'un sabre
innocent'; and in the fourth verse of the same poem, 'Marquise, you'll
have the bed-chamber' does not very clearly convey the sense of the line
'La Marquise a le tabouret.'  The best translation in the book is The
Court Suit (L'Habit de Cour), and if Mr. Toynbee will give us some more
work as clever as this we shall be glad to see a second volume from his
pen.  Beranger is not nearly well enough known in England, and though it
is always better to read a poet in the original, still translations have
their value as echoes have their music.

A Selection from the Songs of De Beranger in English Verse.  By William
Toynbee.  (Kegan Paul.)




THE POETRY OF THE PEOPLE


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 13, 1886.)

The Countess Martinengo deserves well of all poets, peasants and
publishers.  Folklore is so often treated nowadays merely from the point
of view of the comparative mythologist, that it is really delightful to
come across a book that deals with the subject simply as literature.  For
the Folk-tale is the father of all fiction as the Folk-song is the mother
of all poetry; and in the games, the tales and the ballads of primitive
people it is easy to see the germs of such perfected forms of art as the
drama, the novel and the epic.  It is, of course, true that the highest
expression of life is to be found not in the popular songs, however
poetical, of any nation, but in the great masterpieces of self-conscious
Art; yet it is pleasant sometimes to leave the summit of Parnassus to
look at the wild-flowers in the valley, and to turn from the lyre of
Apollo to listen to the reed of Pan.  We can still listen to it.  To this
day, the vineyard dressers of Calabria will mock the passer-by with
satirical verses as they used to do in the old pagan days, and the
peasants of the olive woods of Provence answer each other in amoebaean
strains.  The Sicilian shepherd has not yet thrown his pipe aside, and
the children of modern Greece sing the swallow-song through the villages
in spring-time, though Theognis is more than two thousand years dead.  Nor
is this popular poetry merely the rhythmic expression of joy and sorrow;
it is in the highest degree imaginative; and taking its inspiration
directly from nature it abounds in realistic metaphor and in picturesque
and fantastic imagery.  It must, of course, be admitted that there is a
conventionality of nature as there is a conventionality of art, and that
certain forms of utterance are apt to become stereotyped by too constant
use; yet, on the whole, it is impossible not to recognise in the Folk-
songs that the Countess Martinengo has brought together one strong
dominant note of fervent and flawless sincerity.  Indeed, it is only in
the more terrible dramas of the Elizabethan age that we can find any
parallel to the Corsican voceri with their shrill intensity of passion,
their awful frenzies of grief and hate.  And yet, ardent as the feeling
is, the form is nearly always beautiful.  Now and then, in the poems of
the extreme South one meets with a curious crudity of realism, but, as a
rule, the sense of beauty prevails.

Some of the Folk-poems in this book have all the lightness and loveliness
of lyrics, all of them have that sweet simplicity of pure song by which
mirth finds its own melody and mourning its own music, and even where
there are conceits of thought and expression they are conceits born of
fancy not of affectation.  Herrick himself might have envied that
wonderful love-song of Provence:

   If thou wilt be the falling dew
      And fall on me alway,
   Then I will be the white, white rose
      On yonder thorny spray.
   If thou wilt be the white, white rose
      On yonder thorny spray,
   Then I will be the honey-bee
      And kiss thee all the day.

   If thou wilt be the honey-bee
      And kiss me all the day,
   Then I will be in yonder heaven
      The star of brightest ray.
   If thou wilt be in yonder heaven
      The star of brightest ray,
   Then I will be the dawn, and we
      Shall meet at break of day.

How charming also is this lullaby by which the Corsican mother sings her
babe to sleep!

   Gold and pearls my vessel lade,
      Silk and cloth the cargo be,
   All the sails are of brocade
      Coming from beyond the sea;
   And the helm of finest gold,
   Made a wonder to behold.
      Fast awhile in slumber lie;
      Sleep, my child, and hushaby.

   After you were born full soon,
      You were christened all aright;
   Godmother she was the moon,
      Godfather the sun so bright.
   All the stars in heaven told
   Wore their necklaces of gold.
      Fast awhile in slumber lie;
      Sleep, my child, and hushaby.

Or this from Roumania:

   Sleep, my daughter, sleep an hour;
   Mother's darling gilliflower.
   Mother rocks thee, standing near,
   She will wash thee in the clear
   Waters that from fountains run,
   To protect thee from the sun.

   Sleep, my darling, sleep an hour,
   Grow thou as the gilliflower.
   As a tear-drop be thou white,
   As a willow tall and slight;
   Gentle as the ring-doves are,
   And be lovely as a star!

We hardly know what poems are sung to English babies, but we hope they
are as beautiful as these two.  Blake might have written them.

The Countess Martinengo has certainly given us a most fascinating book.
In a volume of moderate dimensions, not too long to be tiresome nor too
brief to be disappointing, she has collected together the best examples
of modern Folk-songs, and with her as a guide the lazy reader lounging in
his armchair may wander from the melancholy pine-forests of the North to
Sicily's orange-groves and the pomegranate gardens of Armenia, and listen
to the singing of those to whom poetry is a passion, not a profession,
and whose art, coming from inspiration and not from schools, if it has
the limitations, at least has also the loveliness of its origin, and is
one with blowing grasses and the flowers of the field.

Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs.  By the Countess Evelyn Martinengo
Cesaresco.  (Redway.)




THE CENCI


(Dramatic Review, May 15, 1886.)

The production of The Cenci last week at the Grand Theatre, Islington,
may be said to have been an era in the literary history of this century,
and the Shelley Society deserves the highest praise and warmest thanks of
all for having given us an opportunity of seeing Shelley's play under the
conditions he himself desired for it.  For The Cenci was written
absolutely with a view to theatric presentation, and had Shelley's own
wishes been carried out it would have been produced during his lifetime
at Covent Garden, with Edmund Kean and Miss O'Neill in the principal
parts.  In working out his conception, Shelley had studied very carefully
the aesthetics of dramatic art.  He saw that the essence of the drama is
disinterested presentation, and that the characters must not be merely
mouthpieces for splendid poetry but must be living subjects for terror
and for pity.  'I have endeavoured,' he says, 'as nearly as possible to
represent the characters as they probably were, and have sought to avoid
the error of making them actuated by my own conception of right or wrong,
false or true: thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the
sixteenth century into cold impersonations of my own mind. . . .

'I have avoided with great care the introduction of what is commonly
called mere poetry, and I imagine there will scarcely be found a detached
simile or a single isolated description, unless Beatrice's description of
the chasm appointed for her father's murder should be judged to be of
that nature.'

He recognised that a dramatist must be allowed far greater freedom of
expression than what is conceded to a poet.  'In a dramatic composition,'
to use his own words, 'the imagery and the passion should interpenetrate
one another, the former being reserved simply for the full development
and illustration of the latter.  Imagination is as the immortal God which
should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion.  It is thus
that the most remote and the most familiar imagery may alike be fit for
dramatic purposes when employed in the illustration of strong feeling,
which raises what is low, and levels to the apprehension that which is
lofty, casting over all the shadow of its own greatness.  In other
respects I have written more carelessly, that is, without an
over-fastidious and learned choice of words.  In this respect I entirely
agree with those modern critics who assert that in order to move men to
true sympathy we must use the familiar language of men.'

He knew that if the dramatist is to teach at all it must be by example,
not by precept.

'The highest moral purpose,' he remarks, 'aimed at in the highest species
of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and
antipathies, the knowledge of itself; in proportion to the possession of
which knowledge every human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and
kind.  If dogmas can do more it is well: but a drama is no fit place for
the enforcement of them.'  He fully realises that it is by a conflict
between our artistic sympathies and our moral judgment that the greatest
dramatic effects are produced.  'It is in the restless and anatomising
casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel
that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious
horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge,
that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered consists.'

In fact no one has more clearly understood than Shelley the mission of
the dramatist and the meaning of the drama.

And yet I hardly think that the production of The Cenci, its absolute
presentation on the stage, can be said to have added anything to its
beauty, its pathos, or even its realism.  Not that the principal actors
were at all unworthy of the work of art they interpreted; Mr. Hermann
Vezin's Cenci was a noble and magnificent performance; Miss Alma Murray
stands now in the very first rank of our English actresses as a mistress
of power and pathos; and Mr. Leonard Outram's Orsino was most subtle and
artistic; but that The Cenci needs for the production of its perfect
effect no interpretation at all.  It is, as we read it, a complete work
of art--capable, indeed, of being acted, but not dependent on theatric
presentation; and the impression produced by its exhibition on the stage
seemed to me to be merely one of pleasure at the gratification of an
intellectual curiosity of seeing how far Melpomene could survive the
wagon of Thespis.

In producing the play, however, the members of the Shelley Society were
merely carrying out the poet's own wishes, and they are to be
congratulated on the success of their experiment--a success due not to
any gorgeous scenery or splendid pageant, but to the excellence of the
actors who aided them.




HELENA IN TROAS


(Dramatic Review, May 22, 1880.)

One might have thought that to have produced As You Like It in an English
forest would have satisfied the most ambitious spirit; but Mr. Godwin has
not contented himself with his sylvan triumphs.  From Shakespeare he has
passed to Sophocles, and has given us the most perfect exhibition of a
Greek dramatic performance that has as yet been seen in this country.
For, beautiful as were the productions of the Agamemnon at Oxford and the
Eumenides at Cambridge, their effects were marred in no small or
unimportant degree by the want of a proper orchestra for the chorus with
its dance and song, a want that was fully supplied in Mr. Godwin's
presentation by the use of the arena of a circus.

In the centre of this circle, which was paved with the semblance of
tesselated marble, stood the altar of Dionysios, and beyond it rose the
long, shallow stage, faced with casts from the temple of Bassae; and
bearing the huge portal of the house of Paris and the gleaming
battlements of Troy.  Over the portal hung a great curtain, painted with
crimson lions, which, when drawn aside, disclosed two massive gates of
bronze; in front of the house was placed a golden image of Aphrodite, and
across the ramparts on either hand could be seen a stretch of blue waters
and faint purple hills.  The scene was lovely, not merely in the harmony
of its colour but in the exquisite delicacy of its architectural
proportions.  No nation has ever felt the pure beauty of mere
construction so strongly as the Greeks, and in this respect Mr. Godwin
has fully caught the Greek feeling.

The play opened by the entrance of the chorus, white vestured and gold
filleted, under the leadership of Miss Kinnaird, whose fine gestures and
rhythmic movements were quite admirable.  In answer to their appeal the
stage curtains slowly divided, and from the house of Paris came forth
Helen herself, in a robe woven with all the wonders of war, and broidered
with the pageant of battle.  With her were her two handmaidens--one in
white and yellow and one in green; Hecuba followed in sombre grey of
mourning, and Priam in kingly garb of gold and purple, and Paris in
Phrygian cap and light archer's dress; and when at sunset the lover of
Helen was borne back wounded from the field, down from the oaks of Ida
stole OEnone in the flowing drapery of the daughter of a river-god, every
fold of her garments rippling like dim water as she moved.

As regards the acting, the two things the Greeks valued most in actors
were grace of gesture and music of voice.  Indeed, to gain these virtues
their actors used to subject themselves to a regular course of gymnastics
and a particular regime of diet, health being to the Greeks not merely a
quality of art, but a condition of its production.  Whether or not our
English actors hold the same view may be doubted; but Mr. Vezin certainly
has always recognised the importance of a physical as well as of an
intellectual training for the stage, and his performance of King Priam
was distinguished by stately dignity and most musical enunciation.  With
Mr. Vezin, grace of gesture is an unconscious result--not a conscious
effort.  It has become nature, because it was once art.  Mr. Beerbohm
Tree also is deserving of very high praise for his Paris.  Ease and
elegance characterised every movement he made, and his voice was
extremely effective.  Mr. Tree is the perfect Proteus of actors.  He can
wear the dress of any century and the appearance of any age, and has a
marvellous capacity of absorbing his personality into the character he is
creating.  To have method without mannerism is given only to a few, but
among the few is Mr. Tree.  Miss Alma Murray does not possess the
physique requisite for our conception of Helen, but the beauty of her
movements and the extremely sympathetic quality of her voice gave an
indefinable charm to her performance.  Mrs. Jopling looked like a poem
from the Pantheon, and indeed the personae mutae were not the least
effective figures in the play.  Hecuba was hardly a success.  In acting,
the impression of sincerity is conveyed by tone, not by mere volume of
voice, and whatever influence emotion has on utterance it is certainly
not in the direction of false emphasis.  Mrs. Beerbohm Tree's OEnone was
much better, and had some fine moments of passion; but the harsh
realistic shriek with which the nymph flung herself from the battlements,
however effective it might have been in a comedy of Sardou, or in one of
Mr. Burnand's farces, was quite out of place in the representation of a
Greek tragedy.  The classical drama is an imaginative, poetic art, which
requires the grand style for its interpretation, and produces its effects
by the most ideal means.  It is in the operas of Wagner, not in popular
melodrama, that any approximation to the Greek method can be found.
Better to wear mask and buskin than to mar by any modernity of expression
the calm majesty of Melpomene.

As an artistic whole, however, the performance was undoubtedly a great
success.  It has been much praised for its archaeology, but Mr. Godwin is
something more than a mere antiquarian.  He takes the facts of
archaeology, but he converts them into artistic and dramatic effects, and
the historical accuracy that underlies the visible shapes of beauty that
he presents to us, is not by any means the distinguishing quality of the
complete work of art.  This quality is the absolute unity and harmony of
the entire presentation, the presence of one mind controlling the most
minute details, and revealing itself only in that true perfection which
hides personality.  On more than one occasion it seemed to me that the
stage was kept a little too dark, and that a purely picturesque effect of
light and shade was substituted for the plastic clearness of outline that
the Greeks so desired; some objection, too, might be made to the late
character of the statue of Aphrodite, which was decidedly post-Periclean;
these, however, are unimportant points.  The performance was not intended
to be an absolute reproduction of the Greek stage in the fifth century
before Christ: it was simply the presentation in Greek form of a poem
conceived in the Greek spirit; and the secret of its beauty was the
perfect correspondence of form and matter, the delicate equilibrium of
spirit and sense.

As for the play, it had, of course, to throw away many sweet superfluous
graces of expression before it could adapt itself to the conditions of
theatrical presentation, but much that is good was retained; and the
choruses, which really possess some pure notes of lyric loveliness, were
sung in their entirety.  Here and there, it is true, occur such lines as--

   What wilt thou do?  What can the handful still left?--

lines that owe their blank verse character more to the courtesy of the
printer than to the genius of the poet, for without rhythm and melody
there is no verse at all; and the attempt to fit Greek forms of
construction to our English language often gives the work the air of an
awkward translation; however, there is a great deal that is pleasing in
Helena in Troas and, on the whole, the play was worthy of its pageant and
the poem deserved the peplums.

It is much to be regretted that Mr. Godwin's beautiful theatre cannot be
made a permanent institution.  Even looked at from the low standpoint of
educational value, such a performance as that given last Monday might be
of the greatest service to modern culture; and who knows but a series of
these productions might civilise South Kensington and give tone to
Brompton?

Still it is something to have shown our artists 'a dream of form in days
of thought,' and to have allowed the Philistines to peer into Paradise.
And this is what Mr. Godwin has done.




PLEASING AND PRATTLING


(Pall Mall Gazette, August 4, 1880.)

Sixty years ago, when Sir Walter Scott was inaugurating an era of
historical romance, The Wolfe of Badenoch was a very popular book.  To us
its interest is more archaeological than artistic, and its characters
seem merely puppets parading in fourteenth-century costume.  It is true
our grandfathers thought differently.  They liked novels in which the
heroine exclaims, 'Peace with thine impudence, sir knave.  Dost thou dare
to speak thus in presence of the Lady Eleanore de Selby? . . .  A
greybeard's ire shall never--,' while the hero remarks that 'the welkin
reddenes i' the west.'  In fact, they considered that language like this
is exceedingly picturesque and gives the necessary historical
perspective.  Nowadays, however, few people have the time to read a novel
that requires a glossary to explain it, and we fear that without a
glossary the general reader will hardly appreciate the value of such
expressions as 'gnoffe,' 'bowke,' 'herborow,' 'papelarde,' 'couepe,'
'rethes,' 'pankers,' 'agroted lorrel,' and 'horrow tallow-catch,' all of
which occur in the first few pages of The Wolfe of Badenoch.  In a novel
we want life, not learning; and, unfortunately, Sir Thomas Lauder lays
himself open to the criticism Jonson made on Spenser, that 'in affecting
the ancients he writ no language.'  Still, there is a healthy spirit of
adventure in the book, and no doubt many people will be interested to see
the kind of novel the public liked in 1825.

Keep My Secret, by Miss G. M. Robins, is very different.  It is quite
modern both in manner and in matter.  The heroine, Miss Olga Damien, when
she is a little girl tries to murder Mr. Victor Burnside.  Mr. Burnside,
who is tall, blue-eyed and amber-haired, makes her promise never to
mention the subject to any one; this, in fact, is the secret that gives
the title to the book.  The result is that Miss Damien is blackmailed by
a fascinating and unscrupulous uncle and is nearly burnt to death in the
secret chamber of an old castle.  The novel at the end gets too
melodramatic in character and the plot becomes a chaos of incoherent
incidents, but the writing is clever and bright.  It is just the book, in
fact, for a summer holiday, as it is never dull and yet makes no demands
at all upon the intellect.

Mrs. Chetwynd gives us a new type of widow.  As a rule, in fiction widows
are delightful, designing and deceitful; but Mrs. Dorriman is not by any
means a Cleopatra in crape.  She is a weak, retiring woman, very feeble
and very feminine, and with the simplicity that is characteristic of such
sweet and shallow natures she allows her brother to defraud her of all
her property.  The widow is rather a bore and the brother is quite a
bear, but Margaret Rivers who, to save her sister from poverty, marries a
man she does not love, is a cleverly conceived character, and Lady Lyons
is an admirable old dowager.  The book can be read without any trouble
and was probably written without any trouble also.  The style is
prattling and pleasing.

The plot of Delamere is not very new.  On the death of her husband, Mrs.
De Ruthven discovers that the estates belong by right not to her son
Raymond but to her niece Fleurette.  As she keeps her knowledge to
herself, a series of complications follows, but the cousins are
ultimately united in marriage and the story ends happily.  Mr. Curzon
writes in a clever style, and though its construction is rather clumsy
the novel is a thoroughly interesting one.

A Daughter of Fife tells us of the love of a young artist for a Scotch
fisher-girl.  The character sketches are exceptionally good, especially
that of David Promoter, a fisherman who leaves his nets to preach the
gospel, and the heroine is quite charming till she becomes civilised.  The
book is a most artistic combination of romantic feeling with realistic
form, and it is pleasant to read descriptions of Scotch scenery that do
not represent the land of mist and mountain as a sort of chromolithograph
from the Brompton Road.

In Mr. Speight's novel, A Barren Title, we have an impoverished earl who
receives an allowance from his relations on condition of his remaining
single, being all the time secretly married and the father of a grown-up
son.  The story is improbable and amusing.

On the whole, there is a great deal to be said for our ordinary English
novelists.  They have all some story to tell, and most of them tell it in
an interesting manner.  Where they fail is in concentration of style.
Their characters are far too eloquent and talk themselves to tatters.
What we want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric.  We are
most grateful to them that they have not as yet accepted any frigid
formula, nor stereotyped themselves into a school, but we wish that they
would talk less and think more.  They lead us through a barren desert of
verbiage to a mirage that they call life; we wander aimlessly through a
very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature.  However, one
should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation
of the intellectually unemployed.

(1) The Wolfe of Badenoch: A Historical Romance of the Fourteenth
Century.  By Sir Thomas Lauder.  (Hamilton, Adams and Co.)

(2) Keep My Secret.  By G. M. Robins.  (Bentley and Son.)

(3) Mrs. Dorriman.  By the Hon. Mrs. Henry Chetwynd.  (Chapman and Hall.)

(4) Delamere.  By G. Curzon.  (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)

(5) A Daughter of Fife.  By Amelia Barr.  (James Clarke and Co.)

(6) A Barren Title.  By T. W. Speight.  (Chatto and Windus.)




BALZAC IN ENGLISH


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 13, 1886.)

Many years ago, in a number of All the Year Round, Charles Dickens
complained that Balzac was very little read in England, and although
since then the public has become more familiar with the great
masterpieces of French fiction, still it may be doubted whether the
Comedie Humaine is at all appreciated or understood by the general run of
novel readers.  It is really the greatest monument that literature has
produced in our century, and M. Taine hardly exaggerates when he says
that, after Shakespeare, Balzac is our most important magazine of
documents on human nature.  Balzac's aim, in fact, was to do for humanity
what Buffon had done for the animal creation.  As the naturalist studied
lions and tigers, so the novelist studied men and women.  Yet he was no
mere reporter.  Photography and proces-verbal were not the essentials of
his method.  Observation gave him the facts of life, but his genius
converted facts into truths, and truths into truth.  He was, in a word, a
marvellous combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific
spirit.  The latter he bequeathed to his disciples; the former was
entirely his own.  The distinction between such a book as M. Zola's
L'Assommoir and such a book as Balzac's Illusions Perdues is the
distinction between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.  'All
Balzac's characters,' said Baudelaire, 'are gifted with the same ardour
of life that animated himself.  All his fictions are as deeply coloured
as dreams.  Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will.  The
very scullions have genius.'  He was, of course, accused of being
immoral.  Few writers who deal directly with life escape that charge.  His
answer to the accusation was characteristic and conclusive.  'Whoever
contributes his stone to the edifice of ideas,' he wrote, 'whoever
proclaims an abuse, whoever sets his mark upon an evil to be abolished,
always passes for immoral.  If you are true in your portraits, if, by
dint of daily and nightly toil, you succeed in writing the most difficult
language in the world, the word immoral is thrown in your face.'  The
morals of the personages of the Comedie Humaine are simply the morals of
the world around us.  They are part of the artist's subject-matter; they
are not part of his method.  If there be any need of censure it is to
life, not to literature, that it should be given.  Balzac, besides, is
essentially universal.  He sees life from every point of view.  He has no
preferences and no prejudices.  He does not try to prove anything.  He
feels that the spectacle of life contains its own secret.  'II cree un
monde et se tait.'

And what a world it is!  What a panorama of passions!  What a pell-mell
of men and women!  It was said of Trollope that he increased the number
of our acquaintances without adding to our visiting list; but after the
Comedie Humaine one begins to believe that the only real people are the
people who have never existed.  Lucien de Rubempre, le Pere Goriot,
Ursule Mirouet, Marguerite Claes, the Baron Hulot, Madame Marneffe, le
Cousin Pons, De Marsay--all bring with them a kind of contagious illusion
of life.  They have a fierce vitality about them: their existence is
fervent and fiery-coloured; we not merely feel for them but we see
them--they dominate our fancy and defy scepticism.  A steady course of
Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to
the shadows of shades.  Who would care to go out to an evening party to
meet Tomkins, the friend of one's boyhood, when one can sit at home with
Lucien de Rubempre?  It is pleasanter to have the entree to Balzac's
society than to receive cards from all the duchesses in May fair.

In spite of this, there are many people who have declared the Comedie
Humaine to be indigestible.  Perhaps it is: but then what about truffles?
Balzac's publisher refused to be disturbed by any such criticism as that.
'Indigestible, is it?' he exclaimed with what, for a publisher, was rare
good sense.  'Well, I should hope so; who ever thinks of a dinner that
isn't?'  And our English publisher, Mr. Routledge, clearly agrees with M.
Poulet-Malassis, as he is occupied in producing a complete translation of
the Comedie Humaine.  The two volumes that at present lie before us
contain Cesar Birotteau, that terrible tragedy of finance, and L'lllustre
Gaudissart, the apotheosis of the commercial traveller, the Duchesse de
Langeais, most marvellous of modern love stories, Le Chef d'OEuvre
Inconnu, from which Mr. Henry James took his Madonna of the Future, and
that extraordinary romance Une Passion dans le Desert.  The choice of
stories is quite excellent, but the translations are very unequal, and
some of them are positively bad.  L'lllustre Gaudissart, for instance, is
full of the most grotesque mistakes, mistakes that would disgrace a
schoolboy.  'Bon conseil vaut un oeil dans la main' is translated 'Good
advice is an egg in the hand'!  'Ecus rebelles' is rendered 'rebellious
lucre,' and such common expressions as 'faire la barbe,' 'attendre la
vente,' 'n'entendre rien,' palir sur une affaire,' are all mistranslated.
'Des bois de quoi se faire un cure-dent' is not 'a few trees to slice
into toothpicks,' but 'as much timber as would make a toothpick'; 'son
horloge enfermee dans une grande armoire oblongue' is not 'a clock which
he kept shut up in a large oblong closet' but simply a clock in a tall
clock-case; 'journal viager' is not 'an annuity,' 'garce' is not the same
as 'farce,' and 'dessins des Indes' are not 'drawings of the Indies.'  On
the whole, nothing can be worse than this translation, and if Mr.
Routledge wishes the public to read his version of the Comedie Humaine,
he should engage translators who have some slight knowledge of French.

Cesar Birotteau is better, though it is not by any means free from
mistakes.  'To suffer under the Maximum' is an absurd rendering of 'subir
le maximum'; 'perse' is 'chintz,' not 'Persian chintz'; 'rendre le pain
benit' is not 'to take the wafer'; 'riviere' is hardly a 'fillet of
diamonds'; and to translate 'son coeur avait un calus a l'endroit du
loyer' by 'his heart was a callus in the direction of a lease' is an
insult to two languages.  On the whole, the best version is that of the
Duchesse de Langeais, though even this leaves much to be desired.  Such a
sentence as 'to imitate the rough logician who marched before the
Pyrrhonians while denying his own movement' entirely misses the point of
Balzac's 'imiter le rude logicien qui marchait devant les pyrrhoniens,
qui niaient le mouvement.'

We fear Mr. Routledge's edition will not do.  It is well printed and
nicely bound; but his translators do not understand French.  It is a
great pity, for La Comedie Humaine is one of the masterpieces of the age.

Balzac's Novels in English.  The Duchesse de Langeais and Other Stories;
Cesar Birotteau.  (Routledge and Sons.)




TWO NEW NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 16, 1880.)

Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their
culture, and Mr. G. Manville Fenn's last venture is no exception to the
general rule.  The Master of the Ceremonies is turbid, terrifying and
thrilling.  It contains, besides many 'moving accidents by flood and
field,' an elopement, an abduction, a bigamous marriage, an attempted
assassination, a duel, a suicide, and a murder.  The murder, we must
acknowledge, is a masterpiece.  It would do credit to Gaboriau, and
should make Miss Braddon jealous.  The Newgate Calendar itself contains
nothing more fascinating, and what higher praise than this can be given
to a sensational novel?  Not that Lady Teigne, the hapless victim, is
killed in any very new or subtle manner.  She is merely strangled in bed,
like Desdemona; but the circumstances of the murder are so peculiar that
Claire Denville, in common with the reader, suspects her own father of
being guilty, while the father is convinced that the real criminal is his
eldest son.  Stuart Denville himself, the Master of the Ceremonies, is
most powerfully drawn.  He is a penniless, padded dandy who, by a careful
study of the 'grand style' in deportment, has succeeded in making himself
the Brummel of the promenade and the autocrat of the Assembly Rooms.  A
light comedian by profession, he is suddenly compelled to play the
principal part in a tragedy.  His shallow, trivial nature is forced into
the loftiest heroism, the noblest self-sacrifice.  He becomes a hero
against his will.  The butterfly goes to martyrdom, the fop has to become
fine.  Round this character centres, or rather should centre, the
psychological interest of the book, but unfortunately Mr. Fenn has
insisted on crowding his story with unnecessary incident.  He might have
made of his novel 'A Soul's Tragedy,' but he has produced merely a
melodrama in three volumes.  The Master of the Ceremonies is a melancholy
example of the fatal influence of Drury Lane on literature.  Still, it
should be read, for though Mr. Fenn has offered up his genius as a
holocaust to Mr. Harris, he is never dull, and his style is on the whole
very good.  We wish, however, that he would not try to give articulate
form to inarticulate exclamations.  Such a passage as this is quite
dreadful and fails, besides, in producing the effect it aims at:

   'He--he--he, hi--hi--hi, hec--hec--hec, ha--ha--ha! ho--ho!  Bless
   my--hey--ha! hey--ha! hugh--hugh--hugh!  Oh dear me!  Oh--why don't
   you--heck--heck--heck--heck--heck! shut
   the--ho--ho--ho--ho--hugh--hugh--window before I--ho--ho--ho--ho!'

This horrible jargon is supposed to convey the impression of a lady
coughing.  It is, of course, a mere meaningless monstrosity on a par with
spelling a sneeze.  We hope that Mr. Fenn will not again try these
theatrical tricks with language, for he possesses a rare art--the art of
telling a story well.

A Statesman's Love, the author tells us in a rather mystical preface, was
written 'to show that the alchemist-like transfiguration supposed to be
wrought in our whole nature by that passion has no existence in fact,'
but it cannot be said to prove this remarkable doctrine.

It is an exaggerated psychological study of a modern woman, a sort of
picture by limelight, full of coarse colours and violent contrasts, not
by any means devoid of cleverness but essentially false and
over-emphasised.  The heroine, Helen Rohan by name, tells her own story
and, as she takes three volumes to do it in, we weary of the one point of
view.  Life to be intelligible should be approached from many sides, and
valuable though the permanent ego may be in philosophy, the permanent ego
in fiction soon becomes a bore.  There are, however, some interesting
scenes in the novel, and a good portrait of the Young Pretender, for
though the heroine is absolutely a creation of the nineteenth century,
the background of the story is historical and deals with the Rebellion of
'45.  As for the style, it is often original and picturesque; here and
there are strong individual touches and brilliant passages; but there is
also a good deal of pretence and a good deal of carelessness.

What can be said, for instance, about such expressions as these, taken at
random from the second volume,--'evanishing,' 'solitary loneness,' 'in my
_then_ mood,' 'the bees _might advantage_ by to-day,' 'I would not listen
reverently as _did the other some_ who went,' 'entangling myself in the
net of this retiari,' and why should Bassanio's beautiful speech in the
trial scene be deliberately attributed to Shylock?  On the whole, A
Statesman's Love cannot be said to be an artistic success; but still it
shows promise and, some day, the author who, to judge by the style, is
probably a woman, may do good work.  This, however, will require pruning,
prudence and patience.  We shall see.

(1) The Master of the Ceremonies.  By G. Manville Fenn.  (Ward and
Downey.)

(2) A Statesman's Love.  By Emile Bauche.  (Blackwood and Co.)




BEN JONSON


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 20, 1886.)

In selecting Mr. John Addington Symonds to write the life of Ben Jonson
for his series of 'English Worthies,' Mr. Lang, no doubt, exercised a
wise judgment.  Mr. Symonds, like the author of Volpone, is a scholar and
a man of letters; his book on Shakspeare's Predecessors showed a
marvellous knowledge of the Elizabethan period, and he is a recognised
authority on the Italian Renaissance.  The last is not the least of his
qualifications.  Without a full appreciation of the meaning of the
Humanistic movement it is impossible to understand the great struggle
between the Classical form and the Romantic spirit which is the chief
critical characteristic of the golden age of the English drama, an age
when Shakespeare found his chief adversary, not among his contemporaries,
but in Seneca, and when Jonson armed himself with Aristotle to win the
suffrages of a London audience.  Mr. Symonds' book, consequently, will be
opened with interest.  It does not, of course, contain much that is new
about Jonson's life.  But the facts of Jonson's life are already well
known, and in books of this kind what is true is of more importance than
what is new, appreciation more valuable than discovery.  Scotchmen,
however, will, no doubt, be interested to find that Mr. Symonds has
succeeded in identifying Jonson's crest with that of the Johnstones of
Annandale, and the story of the way the literary Titan escaped from
hanging, by proving that he could read, is graphically told.

On the whole, we have a vivid picture of the man as he lived.  Where
picturesqueness is required, Mr. Symonds is always good.  The usual
comparison with Dr. Johnson is, of course, brought out.  Few of 'Rare
Ben's' biographers spare us that, and the point is possibly a natural one
to make.  But when Mr. Symonds calls upon us to notice that both men made
a journey to Scotland, and that 'each found in a Scotchman his
biographer,' the parallel loses all value.  There is an M in Monmouth and
an M in Macedon, and Drummond of Hawthornden and Boswell of Auchinleck
were both born the other side of the Tweed; but from such analogies
nothing is to be learned.  There is no surer way of destroying a
similarity than to strain it.

As for Mr. Symonds' estimate of Jonson's genius, it is in many points
quite excellent.  He ranks him with the giants rather than with the gods,
with those who compel our admiration by their untiring energy and huge
strength of intellectual muscle, not with those 'who share the divine
gifts of creative imagination and inevitable instinct.'  Here he is
right.  Pelion more than Parnassus was Jonson's home.  His art has too
much effort about it, too much definite intention.  His style lacks the
charm of chance.  Mr. Symonds is right also in the stress he lays on the
extraordinary combination in Jonson's work of the most concentrated
realism with encyclopaedic erudition.  In Jonson's comedies London slang
and learned scholarship go hand in hand.  Literature was as living a
thing to him as life itself.  He used his classical lore not merely to
give form to his verse, but to give flesh and blood to the persons of his
plays.  He could build up a breathing creature out of quotations.  He
made the poets of Greece and Rome terribly modern, and introduced them to
the oddest company.  His very culture is an element in his coarseness.
There are moments when one is tempted to liken him to a beast that has
fed off books.

We cannot, however, agree with Mr. Symonds when he says that Jonson
'rarely touched more than the outside of character,' that his men and
women are 'the incarnations of abstract properties rather than living
human beings,' that they are in fact mere 'masqueraders and mechanical
puppets.'  Eloquence is a beautiful thing but rhetoric ruins many a
critic, and Mr. Symonds is essentially rhetorical.  When, for instance,
he tells us that 'Jonson made masks,' while 'Dekker and Heywood created
souls,' we feel that he is asking us to accept a crude judgment for the
sake of a smart antithesis.  It is, of course, true that we do not find
in Jonson the same growth of character that we find in Shakespeare, and
we may admit that most of the characters in Jonson's plays are, so to
speak, ready-made.  But a ready-made character is not necessarily either
mechanical or wooden, two epithets Mr. Symonds uses constantly in his
criticism.

We cannot tell, and Shakespeare himself does not tell us, why Iago is
evil, why Regan and Goneril have hard hearts, or why Sir Andrew Aguecheek
is a fool.  It is sufficient that they are what they are, and that nature
gives warrant for their existence.  If a character in a play is lifelike,
if we recognise it as true to nature, we have no right to insist on the
author explaining its genesis to us.  We must accept it as it is: and in
the hands of a good dramatist mere presentation can take the place of
analysis, and indeed is often a more dramatic method, because a more
direct one.  And Jonson's characters are true to nature.  They are in no
sense abstractions; they are types.  Captain Bobadil and Captain Tucca,
Sir John Daw and Sir Amorous La Foole, Volpone and Mosca, Subtle and Sir
Epicure Mammon, Mrs. Purecraft and the Rabbi Busy are all creatures of
flesh and blood, none the less lifelike because they are labelled.  In
this point Mr. Symonds seems to us unjust towards Jonson.

We think, also, that a special chapter might have been devoted to Jonson
as a literary critic.  The creative activity of the English Renaissance
is so great that its achievements in the sphere of criticism are often
overlooked by the student.  Then, for the first time, was language
treated as an art.  The laws of expression and composition were
investigated and formularised.  The importance of words was recognised.
Romanticism, Realism and Classicism fought their first battles.  The
dramatists are full of literary and art criticisms, and amused the public
with slashing articles on one another in the form of plays.

Mr. Symonds, of course, deals with Jonson in his capacity as a critic,
and always with just appreciation, but the whole subject is one that
deserves fuller and more special treatment.

Some small inaccuracies, too, should be corrected in the second edition.
Dryden, for instance, was not 'Jonson's successor on the laureate's
throne,' as Mr. Symonds eloquently puts it, for Sir William Davenant came
between them, and when one remembers the predominance of rhyme in
Shakespeare's early plays, it is too much to say that 'after the
production of the first part of Tamburlaine blank verse became the
regular dramatic metre of the public stage.'  Shakespeare did not accept
blank verse at once as a gift from Marlowe's hand, but himself arrived at
it after a long course of experiments in rhyme.  Indeed, some of Mr.
Symonds' remarks on Marlowe are very curious.  To say of his Edward II.,
for instance, that it 'is not at all inferior to the work of
Shakespeare's younger age,' is very niggardly and inadequate praise, and
comes strangely from one who has elsewhere written with such appreciation
of Marlowe's great genius; while to call Marlowe Jonson's 'master' is to
make for him an impossible claim.  In comedy Marlowe has nothing whatever
to teach Jonson; in tragedy Jonson sought for the classical not the
romantic form.

As for Mr. Symonds' style, it is, as usual, very fluent, very picturesque
and very full of colour.  Here and there, however, it is really
irritating.  Such a sentence as 'the tavern had the defects of its
quality' is an awkward Gallicism; and when Mr. Symonds, after genially
comparing Jonson's blank verse to the front of Whitehall (a comparison,
by the way, that would have enraged the poet beyond measure) proceeds to
play a fantastic aria on the same string, and tells us that 'Massinger
reminds us of the intricacies of Sansovino, Shakespeare of Gothic aisles
or heaven's cathedral . . .  Ford of glittering Corinthian colonnades,
Webster of vaulted crypts, . . .  Marlowe of masoned clouds, and Marston,
in his better moments, of the fragmentary vigour of a Roman ruin,' one
begins to regret that any one ever thought of the unity of the arts.
Similes such as these obscure; they do not illumine.  To say that Ford is
like a glittering Corinthian colonnade adds nothing to our knowledge of
either Ford or Greek architecture.  Mr. Symonds has written some charming
poetry, but his prose, unfortunately, is always poetical prose, never the
prose of a poet.  Still, the volume is worth reading, though decidedly
Mr. Symonds, to use one of his own phrases, has 'the defects of his
quality.'

'English Worthies.'  Edited by Andrew Lang.  Ben Jonson.  By John
Addington Symonds.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)




THE POETS' CORNER--I


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1886.)

Among the social problems of the nineteenth century the tramp has always
held an important position, but his appearance among the
nineteenth-century poets is extremely remarkable.  Not that a tramp's
mode of life is at all unsuited to the development of the poetic faculty.
Far from it!  He, if any one, should possess that freedom of mood which
is so essential to the artist, for he has no taxes to pay and no
relations to worry him.  The man who possesses a permanent address, and
whose name is to be found in the Directory, is necessarily limited and
localised.  Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living.  Was not Homer
himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a caravan?  It is then
with feelings of intense expectation that we open the little volume that
lies before us.  It is entitled Low Down, by Two Tramps, and is
marvellous even to look at.  It is clear that art has at last reached the
criminal classes.  The cover is of brown paper like the covers of Mr.
Whistler's brochures.  The printing exhibits every fantastic variation of
type, and the pages range in colour from blue to brown, from grey to sage
green and from rose pink to chrome yellow.  The Philistines may sneer at
this chromatic chaos, but we do not.  As the painters are always
pilfering from the poets, why should not the poet annex the domain of the
painter and use colour for the expression of his moods and music: blue
for sentiment, and red for passion, grey for cultured melancholy, and
green for descriptions?  The book, then, is a kind of miniature rainbow,
and with all its varied sheets is as lovely as an advertisement hoarding.
As for the peripatetics--alas! they are not nightingales.  Their note is
harsh and rugged, Mr. G. R. Sims is the god of their idolatry, their
style is the style of the Surrey Theatre, and we are sorry to see that
that disregard of the rights of property which always characterises the
able-bodied vagrant is extended by our tramps from the defensible
pilfering from hen-roosts to the indefensible pilfering from poets.  When
we read such lines as:

   And builded him a pyramid, four square,
      Open to all the sky and every wind,

we feel that bad as poultry-snatching is, plagiarism is worse.  Facilis
descensus Averno!  From highway robbery and crimes of violence one sinks
gradually to literary petty larceny.  However, there are coarsely
effective poems in the volume, such as A Super's Philosophy, Dick
Hewlett, a ballad of the Californian school, and Gentleman Bill; and
there is one rather pretty poem called The Return of Spring:

   When robins hop on naked boughs,
      And swell their throats with song,
   When lab'rers trudge behind their ploughs,
      And blithely whistle their teams along;

   When glints of summer sunshine chase
      Park shadows on the distant hills,
   And scented tufts of pansies grace
      Moist grots that 'scape rude Borean chills.

The last line is very disappointing.  No poet, nowadays, should write of
'rude Boreas'; he might just as well call the dawn 'Aurora,' or say that
'Flora decks the enamelled meads.'  But there are some nice touches in
the poem, and it is pleasant to find that tramps have their harmless
moments.  On the whole, the volume, if it is not quite worth reading, is
at least worth looking at.  The fool's motley in which it is arrayed is
extremely curious and extremely characteristic.

Mr. Irwin's muse comes to us more simply clad, and more gracefully.  She
gains her colour-effect from the poet, not from the publisher.  No
cockneyism or colloquialism mars the sweetness of her speech.  She finds
music for every mood, and form for every feeling.  In art as in life the
law of heredity holds good.  On est toujours fits de quelqu'un.  And so
it is easy to see that Mr. Irwin is a fervent admirer of Mr. Matthew
Arnold.  But he is in no sense a plagiarist.  He has succeeded in
studying a fine poet without stealing from him--a very difficult thing to
do--and though many of the reeds through which he blows have been touched
by other lips, yet he is able to draw new music from them.  Like most of
our younger poets, Mr. Irwin is at his best in his sonnets, and those
entitled The Seeker after God and The Pillar of the Empire are really
remarkable.  All through this volume, however, one comes across good
work, and the descriptions of Indian scenery are excellent.  India, in
fact, is the picturesque background to these poems, and her monstrous
beasts, strange flowers and fantastic birds are used with much subtlety
for the production of artistic effect.  Perhaps there is a little too
much about the pipal-tree, but when we have a proper sense of Imperial
unity, no doubt the pipal-tree will be as dear and as familiar to us as
the oaks and elms of our own woodlands.

(1) Low Down: Wayside Thoughts in Ballad and Other Verse.  By Two Tramps.
(Redway.)

(2) Rhymes and Renderings.  By H. C. Irwin.  (David Stott.)




A RIDE THROUGH MOROCCO


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 8, 1886.)

Morocco is a sort of paradox among countries, for though it lies westward
of Piccadilly yet it is purely Oriental in character, and though it is
but three hours' sail from Europe yet it makes you feel (to use the
forcible expression of an American writer) as if you had been 'taken up
by the scruff of the neck and set down in the Old Testament.'  Mr. Hugh
Stutfield has ridden twelve hundred miles through it, penetrated to Fez
and Wazan, seen the lovely gate at Mequinez and the Hassen Tower by
Rabat, feasted with sheikhs and fought with robbers, lived in an
atmosphere of Moors, mosques and mirages, visited the city of the lepers
and the slave-market of Sus, and played loo under the shadow of the Atlas
Mountains.  He is not an Herodotus nor a Sir John Mandeville, but he
tells his stories very pleasantly.  His book, on the whole, is delightful
reading, for though Morocco is picturesque he does not weary us with word-
painting; though it is poor he does not bore us with platitudes.  Now and
then he indulges in a traveller's licence and thrills the simple reader
with statements as amazing as they are amusing.  The Moorish coinage, he
tells us, is so cumbersome that if a man gives you change for
half-a-crown you have to hire a donkey to carry it away; the Moorish
language is so guttural that no one can ever hope to pronounce it aright
who has not been brought up within hearing of the grunting of camels, a
steady course of sneezing being, consequently, the only way by which a
European can acquire anything like the proper accent; the Sultan does not
know how much he is married, but he unquestionably is so to a very large
extent: on the principle that you cannot have too much of a good thing a
woman is valued in proportion to her stoutness, and so far from there
being any reduction made in the marriage-market for taking a quantity,
you must pay so much per pound; the Arabs believe the Shereef of Wazan to
be such a holy man that, if he is guilty of taking champagne, the
forbidden wine is turned into milk as he quaffs it, and if he gets
extremely drunk he is merely in a mystical trance.

Mr. Stutfield, however, has his serious moments, and his account of the
commerce, government and social life of the Moors is extremely
interesting.  It must be confessed that the picture he draws is in many
respects a very tragic one.  The Moors are the masters of a beautiful
country and of many beautiful arts, but they are paralysed by their
fatalism and pillaged by their rulers.  Few races, indeed, have had a
more terrible fall than these Moors.  Of the great intellectual
civilisation of the Arabs no trace remains.  The names of Averroes and
Almaimon, of Al Abbas and Ben Husa are quite unknown.  Fez, once the
Athens of Africa, the cradle of the sciences, is now a mere commercial
caravansary.  Its universities have vanished, its library is almost
empty.  Freedom of thought has been killed by the Koran, freedom of
living by bad government.  But Mr. Stutfield is not without hopes for the
future.  So far from agreeing with Lord Salisbury that 'Morocco may go
her own way,' he strongly supports Captain Warren's proposition that we
should give up Gibraltar to Spain in exchange for Ceuta, and thereby
prevent the Mediterranean from becoming a French lake, and give England a
new granary for corn.  The Moorish Empire, he warns us, is rapidly
breaking up, and if in the 'general scramble for Africa' that has already
begun, the French gain possession of Morocco, he points out that our
supremacy over the Straits will be lost.  Whatever may be thought of Mr.
Stutfield's political views, and his suggestions for 'multiple control'
and 'collective European action,' there is no doubt that in Morocco
England has interests to defend and a mission to pursue, and this part of
the book should be carefully studied.  As for the general reader who, we
fear, is not as a rule interested in the question of 'multiple control,'
if he is a sportsman, he will find in El Magreb a capital account of pig-
sticking; if he is artistic, he will be delighted to know that the
importation of magenta into Morocco is strictly prohibited; if criminal
jurisprudence has any charms for him, he can examine a code that punishes
slander by rubbing cayenne pepper into the lips of the offender; and if
he is merely lazy, he can take a pleasant ride of twelve hundred miles in
Mr. Stutfield's company without stirring out of his armchair.

El Magreb: Twelve Hundred Miles' Ride through Morocco.  By Hugh
Stutfield.  (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)




THE CHILDREN OF THE POETS


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886.)

The idea of this book is exceedingly charming.  As children themselves
are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection of the best poems
written on children should be the most perfect of all anthologies.  Yet,
the book itself is not by any means a success.  Many of the loveliest
child-poems in our literature are excluded and not a few feeble and
trivial poems are inserted.  The editor's work is characterised by sins
of omission and of commission, and the collection, consequently, is very
incomplete and very unsatisfactory.  Andrew Marvell's exquisite poem The
Picture of Little T. C., for instance, does not appear in Mr. Robertson's
volume, nor the Young Love of the same author, nor the beautiful elegy
Ben Jonson wrote on the death of Salathiel Pavy, the little boy-actor of
his plays.  Waller's verses also, To My Young Lady Lucy Sidney, deserve a
place in an anthology of this kind, and so do Mr. Matthew Arnold's lines
To a Gipsy Child, and Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee, a little lyric full
of strange music and strange romance.  There is possibly much to be said
in favour of such a poem as that which ends with

   And I thank my God with falling tears
   For the things in the bottom drawer:

but how different it is from

   _I_ was a child, and _she_ was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea;
   But we loved with a love that was more than love--
      I and my Annabel Lee;
   With a love that the winged Seraphs of Heaven
      Coveted her and me

The selection from Blake, again, is very incomplete, many of the
loveliest poems being excluded, such as those on The Little Girl Lost and
The Little Girl Found, the Cradle Song, Infant Joy, and others; nor can
we find Sir Henry Wotton's Hymn upon the Birth of Prince Charles, Sir
William Jones's dainty four-line epigram on The Babe, or the delightful
lines To T. L. H., A Child, by Charles Lamb.

The gravest omission, however, is certainly that of Herrick.  Not a
single poem of his appears in Mr. Robertson's collection.  And yet no
English poet has written of children with more love and grace and
delicacy.  His Ode on the Birth of Our Saviour, his poem To His Saviour,
A Child: A Present by a Child, his Graces for Children, and his many
lovely epitaphs on children are all of them exquisite works of art,
simple, sweet and sincere.

An English anthology of child-poems that excludes Herrick is as an
English garden without its roses and an English woodland without its
singing birds; and for one verse of Herrick we would gladly give in
exchange even those long poems by Mr. Ashby-Sterry, Miss Menella Smedley,
and Mr. Lewis Morris (of Penrhyn), to which Mr. Robertson has assigned a
place in his collection.  Mr. Robertson, also, should take care when he
publishes a poem to publish it correctly.  Mr. Bret Harte's Dickens in
Camp, for instance, is completely spoiled by two ridiculous misprints.  In
the first line 'dimpling' is substituted for 'drifting' to the entire
ruin of rhyme and reason, and in the ninth verse 'the _pensive glory_
that fills the Kentish hills' appears as 'the Persian glory . . .' with a
large capital P!  Mistakes such as these are quite unpardonable, and make
one feel that, perhaps, after all it was fortunate for Herrick that he
was left out.  A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

As for Mr. Robertson's preface, like most of the prefaces in the
Canterbury Series, it is very carelessly written.  Such a sentence as 'I
. . . believe that Mrs. Piatt's poems, in particular, will come to many
readers, fresh, as well as delightful contributions from across the
ocean,' is painful to read.  Nor is the matter much better than the
manner.  It is fantastic to say that Raphael's pictures of the Madonna
and Child dealt a deadly blow to the monastic life, and to say, with
reference to Greek art, that 'Cupid by the side of Venus enables us to
forget that most of her sighs are wanton' is a very crude bit of art
criticism indeed.  Wordsworth, again, should hardly be spoken of as one
who 'was not, in the general, a man from whom human sympathies welled
profusely,' but this criticism is as nothing compared to the passage
where Mr. Robertson tells us that the scene between Arthur and Hubert in
King John is not true to nature because the child's pleadings for his
life are playful as well as piteous.  Indeed, Mr. Robertson, forgetting
Mamillius as completely as he misunderstands Arthur, states very clearly
that Shakespeare has not given us any deep readings of child nature.
Paradoxes are always charming, but judgments such as these are not
paradoxical; they are merely provincial.

On the whole, Mr. Robertson's book will not do.  It is, we fully admit,
an industrious compilation, but it is not an anthology, it is not a
selection of the best, for it lacks the discrimination and good taste
which is the essence of selection, and for the want of which no amount of
industry can atone.  The child-poems of our literature have still to be
edited.

The Children of the Poets: An Anthology from English and American Writers
of Three Generations.  Edited, with an Introduction, by Eric S.
Robertson.  (Walter Scott.)




NEW NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 28, 1886.)

Astray: A Tale of a Country Town, is a very serious volume.  It has taken
four people to write it, and even to read it requires assistance.  Its
dulness is premeditated and deliberate and comes from a laudable desire
to rescue fiction from flippancy.  It is, in fact, tedious from the
noblest motives and wearisome through its good intentions.  Yet the story
itself is not an uninteresting one.  Quite the contrary.  It deals with
the attempt of a young doctor to build up a noble manhood on the ruins of
a wasted youth.  Burton King, while little more than a reckless lad,
forges the name of a dying man, is arrested and sent to penal servitude
for seven years.  On his discharge he comes to live with his sisters in a
little country town and finds that his real punishment begins when he is
free, for prison has made him a pariah.  Still, through the nobility and
self-sacrifice of his life, he gradually wins himself a position, and
ultimately marries the prettiest girl in the book.  His character is, on
the whole, well drawn, and the authors have almost succeeded in making
him good without making him priggish.  The method, however, by which the
story is told is extremely tiresome.  It consists of an interminable
series of long letters by different people and of extracts from various
diaries.  The book consequently is piecemeal and unsatisfactory.  It
fails in producing any unity of effect.  It contains the rough material
for a story, but is not a completed work of art.  It is, in fact, more of
a notebook than a novel.  We fear that too many collaborators are like
too many cooks and spoil the dinner.  Still, in this tale of a country
town there are certain solid qualities, and it is a book that one can
with perfect safety recommend to other people.

Miss Rhoda Broughton belongs to a very different school.  No one can ever
say of her that she has tried to separate flippancy from fiction, and
whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her
sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes
the whole world kin.  We are sorry, however, to see from a perusal of
Betty's Visions that Miss Broughton has been attending the meetings of
the Psychical Society in search of copy.  Mysticism is not her mission,
and telepathy should be left to Messrs. Myers and Gurney.  In Philistia
lies Miss Broughton's true sphere, and to Philistia she should return.
She knows more about the vanities of this world than about this world's
visions, and a possible garrison town is better than an impossible ghost-
land.

That Other Person, who gives Mrs. Alfred Hunt the title for her three-
volume novel, is a young girl, by name Hester Langdale, who for the sake
of Mr. Godfrey Daylesford sacrifices everything a woman can sacrifice,
and, on his marrying some one else, becomes a hospital nurse.  The
hospital nurse idea is perhaps used by novelists a little too often in
cases of this kind; still, it has an artistic as well as an ethical
value.  The interest of the story centres, however, in Mr. Daylesford,
who marries not for love but for ambition, and is rather severely
punished for doing so.  Mrs. Daylesford has a sister called Polly who
develops, according to the approved psychological method, from a
hobbledehoy girl into a tender sweet woman.  Polly is delightfully drawn,
but the most attractive character in the book, strangely enough, is Mr.
Godfrey Daylesford.  He is very weak, but he is very charming.  So
charming indeed is he, that it is only when one closes the book that one
thinks of censuring him.  While we are in direct contact with him we are
fascinated.  Such a character has at any rate the morality of truth about
it.  Here literature has faithfully followed life.  Mrs. Hunt writes a
very pleasing style, bright and free from affectation.  Indeed,
everything in her work is clever except the title.

A Child of the Revolution is by the accomplished authoress of the Atelier
du Lys.  The scene opens in France in 1793, and the plot is extremely
ingenious.  The wife of Jacques Vaudes, a Lyons deputy, loses by illness
her baby girl while her husband is absent in Paris where he has gone to
see Danton.  At the instigation of an old priest she adopts a child of
the same age, a little orphan of noble birth, whose parents have died in
the Reign of Terror, and passes it off as her own.  Her husband, a stern
and ardent Republican, worships the child with a passion like that of
Jean Valjean for Cosette, nor is it till she has grown to perfect
womanhood that he discovers that he has given his love to the daughter of
his enemy.  This is a noble story, but the workmanship, though good of
its kind, is hardly adequate to the idea.  The style lacks grace,
movement and variety.  It is correct but monotonous.  Seriousness, like
property, has its duties as well as its rights, and the first duty of a
novel is to please.  A Child of the Revolution hardly does that.  Still
it has merits.

Aphrodite is a romance of ancient Hellas.  The supposed date, as given in
the first line of Miss Safford's admirable translation, is 551 B.C.  This,
however, is probably a misprint.  At least, we cannot believe that so
careful an archaeologist as Ernst Eckstein would talk of a famous school
of sculpture existing at Athens in the sixth century, and the whole
character of the civilisation is of a much later date.  The book may be
described as a new setting of the tale of Acontius and Cydippe, and
though Eckstein is a sort of literary Tadema and cares more for his
backgrounds than he does for his figures, still he can tell a story very
well, and his hero is made of flesh and blood.  As regards the style, the
Germans have not the same feeling as we have about technicalities in
literature.  To our ears such words as 'phoreion,' 'secos,' 'oionistes,'
'Thyrides' and the like sound harshly in a novel and give an air of
pedantry, not of picturesqueness.  Yet in its tone Aphrodite reminds us
of the late Greek novels.  Indeed, it might be one of the lost tales of
Miletus.  It deserves to have many readers and a better binding.

(1) Astray: A Tale of a Country Town.  By Charlotte M. Yonge, Mary
Bramston, Christabel Coleridge and Esme Stuart.  (Hatchards.)

(2) Betty's Visions.  By Rhoda Broughton.  (Routledge and Sons.)

(3) That Other Person.  By Mrs. Alfred Hunt.  (Chatto and Windus.)

(4) A Child of the Revolution.  By the Author of Mademoiselle Mori.
(Hatchards.)

(5) Aphrodite.  Translated from the German of Ernst Eckstein by Mary J.
Safford.  (New York: Williams and Gottsberger; London: Trubner and Co.)




A POLITICIAN'S POETRY


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 3, 1886.)

Although it is against etiquette to quote Greek in Parliament, Homer has
always been a great favourite with our statesmen and, indeed, may be said
to be almost a factor in our political life.  For as the cross-benches
form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up, so those who cannot
make up their minds always take to Homeric studies.  Many of our leaders
have sulked in their tents with Achilles after some violent political
crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given
up to poetry what was obviously meant for party.  It would be unjust,
however, to regard Lord Carnarvon's translation of the Odyssey as being
in any sense a political manifesto.  Between Calypso and the colonies
there is no connection, and the search for Penelope has nothing to do
with the search for a policy.  The love of literature alone has produced
this version of the marvellous Greek epic, and to the love of literature
alone it appeals.  As Lord Carnarvon says very truly in his preface, each
generation in turn delights to tell the story of Odysseus in its own
language, for the story is one that never grows old.

Of the labours of his predecessors in translation Lord Carnarvon makes
ample recognition, though we acknowledge that we do not consider Pope's
Homer 'the work of a great poet,' and we must protest that there is more
in Chapman than 'quaint Elizabethan conceits.'  The metre he has selected
is blank verse, which he regards as the best compromise between 'the
inevitable redundancy of rhyme and the stricter accuracy of prose.'  This
choice is, on the whole, a sensible one.  Blank verse undoubtedly gives
the possibility of a clear and simple rendering of the original.  Upon
the other hand, though we may get Homer's meaning, we often miss his
music.  The ten-syllabled line brings but a faint echo of the long roll
of the Homeric hexameter, its rapid movement and continuous harmony.
Besides, except in the hands of a great master of song, blank verse is
apt to be tedious, and Lord Carnarvon's use of the weak ending, his habit
of closing the line with an unimportant word, is hardly consistent with
the stateliness of an epic, however valuable it might be in dramatic
verse.  Now and then, also, Lord Carnarvon exaggerates the value of the
Homeric adjective, and for one word in the Greek gives us a whole line in
the English.  The simple [Greek text], for instance, is converted into
'And when the shades of evening fall around,' in the second book, and
elsewhere purely decorative epithets are expanded into elaborate
descriptions.  However, there are many pleasing qualities in Lord
Carnarvon's verse, and though it may not contain much subtlety of melody,
still it has often a charm and sweetness of its own.

The description of Calypso's garden, for example, is excellent:

   Around the grotto grew a goodly grove,
   Alder, and poplar, and the cypress sweet;
   And the deep-winged sea-birds found their haunt,
   And owls and hawks, and long-tongued cormorants,
   Who joy to live upon the briny flood.
   And o'er the face of the deep cave a vine
   Wove its wild tangles and clustering grapes.
   Four fountains too, each from the other turned,
   Poured their white waters, whilst the grassy meads
   Bloomed with the parsley and the violet's flower.

The story of the Cyclops is not very well told.  The grotesque humour of
the Giant's promise hardly appears in

      Thee then, Noman, last of all
   Will I devour, and this thy gift shall be,

and the bitter play on words Odysseus makes, the pun on [Greek text], in
fact, is not noticed.  The idyll of Nausicaa, however, is very gracefully
translated, and there is a great deal that is delightful in the Circe
episode.  For simplicity of diction this is also very good:

   So to Olympus through the woody isle
   Hermes departed, and I went my way
   To Circe's halls, sore troubled in my mind.
   But by the fair-tressed Goddess' gate I stood,
   And called upon her, and she heard my voice,
   And forth she came and oped the shining doors
   And bade me in; and sad at heart I went.
   Then did she set me on a stately chair,
   Studded with silver nails of cunning work,
   With footstool for my feet, and mixed a draught
   Of her foul witcheries in golden cup,
   For evil was her purpose.  From her hand
   I took the cup and drained it to the dregs,
   Nor felt the magic charm; but with her rod
   She smote me, and she said, 'Go, get thee hence
   And herd thee with thy fellows in the stye.'
   So spake she, and straightway I drew my sword
   Upon the witch, and threatened her with death.

Lord Carnarvon, on the whole, has given us a very pleasing version of the
first half of the Odyssey.  His translation is done in a scholarly and
careful manner and deserves much praise.  It is not quite Homer, of
course, but no translation can hope to be that, for no work of art can
afford to lose its style or to give up the manner that is essential to
it.  Still, those who cannot read Greek will find much beauty in it, and
those who can will often gain a charming reminiscence.

The Odyssey of Homer.  Books I.-XII.  Translated into English Verse by
the Earl of Carnarvon.  (Macmillan and Co.)




MR. SYMONDS' HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 10, 1886.)

Mr. Symonds has at last finished his history of the Italian Renaissance.
The two volumes just published deal with the intellectual and moral
conditions in Italy during the seventy years of the sixteenth century
which followed the coronation of Charles the Fifth at Bologna, an era to
which Mr. Symonds gives the name of the Catholic Reaction, and they
contain a most interesting and valuable account of the position of Spain
in the Italian peninsula, the conduct of the Tridentine Council, the
specific organisation of the Holy Office and the Company of Jesus, and
the state of society upon which those forces were brought to bear.  In
his previous volumes Mr. Symonds had regarded the past rather as a
picture to be painted than as a problem to be solved.  In these two last
volumes, however, he shows a clearer appreciation of the office of
history.  The art of the picturesque chronicler is completed by something
like the science of the true historian, the critical spirit begins to
manifest itself, and life is not treated as a mere spectacle, but the
laws of its evolution and progress are investigated also.  We admit that
the desire to represent life at all costs under dramatic conditions still
accompanies Mr. Symonds, and that he hardly realises that what seems
romance to us was harsh reality to those who were engaged in it.  Like
most dramatists, also, he is more interested in the psychological
exceptions than in the general rule.  He has something of Shakespeare's
sovereign contempt of the masses.  The people stir him very little, but
he is fascinated by great personalities.  Yet it is only fair to remember
that the age itself was one of exaggerated individualism and that
literature had not yet become a mouthpiece for the utterances of
humanity.  Men appreciated the aristocracy of intellect, but with the
democracy of suffering they had no sympathy.  The cry from the
brickfields had still to be heard.  Mr. Symonds' style, too, has much
improved.  Here and there, it is true, we come across traces of the old
manner, as in the apocalyptic vision of the seven devils that entered
Italy with the Spaniard, and the description of the Inquisition as a
Belial-Moloch, a 'hideous idol whose face was blackened with soot from
burning human flesh.'  Such a sentence, also, as 'over the Dead Sea of
social putrefaction floated the sickening oil of Jesuitical hypocrisy,'
reminds us that rhetoric has not yet lost its charms for Mr. Symonds.
Still, on the whole, the style shows far more reserve, balance and
sobriety, than can be found in the earlier volumes where violent
antithesis forms the predominant characteristic, and accuracy is often
sacrificed to an adjective.

Amongst the most interesting chapters of the book are those on the
Inquisition, on Sarpi, the great champion of the severance of Church from
State, and on Giordano Bruno.  Indeed the story of Bruno's life, from his
visit to London and Oxford, his sojourn in Paris and wanderings through
Germany, down to his betrayal at Venice and martyrdom at Rome, is most
powerfully told, and the estimate of the value of his philosophy and the
relation he holds to modern science, is at once just and appreciative.
The account also of Ignatius Loyola and the rise of the Society of Jesus
is extremely interesting, though we cannot think that Mr. Symonds is very
happy in his comparison of the Jesuits to 'fanatics laying stones upon a
railway' or 'dynamiters blowing up an emperor or a corner of Westminster
Hall.'  Such a judgment is harsh and crude in expression and more
suitable to the clamour of the Protestant Union than to the dignity of
the true historian.  Mr. Symonds, however, is rarely deliberately unfair,
and there is no doubt but that his work on the Catholic Reaction is a
most valuable contribution to modern history--so valuable, indeed, that
in the account he gives of the Inquisition in Venice it would be well
worth his while to bring the picturesque fiction of the text into some
harmony with the plain facts of the footnote.

On the poetry of the sixteenth century Mr. Symonds has, of course, a
great deal to say, and on such subjects he always writes with ease,
grace, and delicacy of perception.  We admit that we weary sometimes of
the continual application to literature of epithets appropriate to
plastic and pictorial art.  The conception of the unity of the arts is
certainly of great value, but in the present condition of criticism it
seems to us that it would be more useful to emphasise the fact that each
art has its separate method of expression.  The essay on Tasso, however,
is delightful reading, and the position the poet holds towards modern
music and modern sentiment is analysed with much subtlety.  The essay on
Marino also is full of interest.  We have often wondered whether those
who talk so glibly of Euphuism and Marinism in literature have ever read
either Euphues or the Adone.  To the latter they can have no better guide
than Mr. Symonds, whose description of the poem is most fascinating.
Marino, like many greater men, has suffered much from his disciples, but
he himself was a master of graceful fancy and of exquisite felicity of
phrase; not, of course, a great poet but certainly an artist in poetry
and one to whom language is indebted.  Even those conceits that Mr.
Symonds feels bound to censure have something charming about them.  The
continual use of periphrases is undoubtedly a grave fault in style, yet
who but a pedant would really quarrel with such periphrases as sirena de'
boschi for the nightingale, or il novella Edimione for Galileo?

From the poets Mr. Symonds passes to the painters: not those great
artists of Florence and Venice of whom he has already written, but the
Eclectics of Bologna, the Naturalists of Naples and Rome.  This chapter
is too polemical to be pleasant.  The one on music is much better, and
Mr. Symonds gives us a most interesting description of the gradual steps
by which the Italian genius passed from poetry and painting to melody and
song, till the whole of Europe thrilled with the marvel and mystery of
this new language of the soul.  Some small details should perhaps be
noticed.  It is hardly accurate, for instance, to say that Monteverde's
Orfeo was the first form of the recitative-Opera, as Peri's Dafne and
Euridice and Cavaliere's Rappresentazione preceded it by some years, and
it is somewhat exaggerated to say that 'under the regime of the
Commonwealth the national growth of English music received a check from
which it never afterwards recovered,' as it was with Cromwell's auspices
that the first English Opera was produced, thirteen years before any
Opera was regularly established in Paris.  The fact that England did not
make such development in music as Italy and Germany did, must be ascribed
to other causes than 'the prevalence of Puritan opinion.'

These, however, are minor points.  Mr. Symonds is to be warmly
congratulated on the completion of his history of the Renaissance in
Italy.  It is a most wonderful monument of literary labour, and its value
to the student of Humanism cannot be doubted.  We have often had occasion
to differ from Mr. Symonds on questions of detail, and we have more than
once felt it our duty to protest against the rhetoric and over-emphasis
of his style, but we fully recognise the importance of his work and the
impetus he has given to the study of one of the vital periods of the
world's history.  Mr. Symonds' learning has not made him a pedant; his
culture has widened not narrowed his sympathies, and though he can hardly
be called a great historian, yet he will always occupy a place in English
literature as one of the remarkable men of letters in the nineteenth
century.

Renaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction.  In Two Parts.  By John
Addington Symonds.  (Smith, Elder and Co.)




A 'JOLLY' ART CRITIC


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 18, 1886.)

There is a healthy bank-holiday atmosphere about this book which is
extremely pleasant.  Mr. Quilter is entirely free from affectation of any
kind.  He rollicks through art with the recklessness of the tourist and
describes its beauties with the enthusiasm of the auctioneer.  To many,
no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we
prefer to regard him as being simply British.  Mr. Quilter is the apostle
of the middle classes, and we are glad to welcome his gospel.  After
listening so long to the Don Quixote of art, to listen once to Sancho
Panza is both salutary and refreshing.

As for his Sententiae, they differ very widely in character and subject.
Some of them are ethical, such as 'Humility may be carried too far'; some
literary, as 'For one Froude there are a thousand Mrs. Markhams'; and
some scientific, as 'Objects which are near display more detail than
those which are further off.'  Some, again, breathe a fine spirit of
optimism, as 'Picturesqueness is the birthright of the bargee'; others
are jubilant, as 'Paint firm and be jolly'; and many are purely
autobiographical, such as No. 97, 'Few of us understand what it is that
we mean by Art.'  Nor is Mr. Quilter's manner less interesting than his
matter.  He tells us that at this festive season of the year, with
Christmas and roast beef looming before us, 'Similes drawn from eating
and its results occur most readily to the mind.'  So he announces that
'Subject is the diet of painting,' that 'Perspective is the bread of
art,' and that 'Beauty is in some way like jam'; drawings, he points out,
'are not made by recipe like puddings,' nor is art composed of 'suet,
raisins, and candied peel,' though Mr. Cecil Lawson's landscapes do
'smack of indigestion.'  Occasionally, it is true, he makes daring
excursions into other realms of fancy, as when he says that 'in the best
Reynolds landscapes, one seems _to smell the sawdust_,' or that 'advance
in art is of a _kangaroo_ character'; but, on the whole, he is happiest
in his eating similes, and the secret of his style is evidently 'La
metaphore vient en mangeant.'

About artists and their work Mr. Quilter has, of course, a great deal to
say.  Sculpture he regards as 'Painting's poor relation'; so, with the
exception of a jaunty allusion to the 'rough modelling' of Tanagra
figurines he hardly refers at all to the plastic arts; but on painters he
writes with much vigour and joviality.  Holbein's wonderful Court
portraits naturally do not give him much pleasure; in fact, he compares
them as works of art to the sham series of Scottish kings at Holyrood;
but Dore, he tells us, had a wider imaginative range in all subjects
where the gloomy and the terrible played leading parts than probably any
artist who ever lived, and may be called 'the Carlyle of artists.'  In
Gainsborough he sees 'a plainness almost amounting to brutality,' while
'vulgarity and snobbishness' are the chief qualities he finds in Sir
Joshua Reynolds.  He has grave doubts whether Sir Frederick Leighton's
work is really 'Greek, after all,' and can discover in it but little of
'rocky Ithaca.'  Mr. Poynter, however, is a cart-horse compared to the
President, and Frederick Walker was 'a dull Greek' because he had no
'sympathy with poetry.'  Linnell's pictures, are 'a sort of "Up, Guards,
and at 'em" paintings,' and Mason's exquisite idylls are 'as national as
a Jingo poem'!  Mr. Birket Foster's landscapes 'smile at one much in the
same way that Mr. Carker used to "flash his teeth,"' and Mr. John Collier
gives his sitter 'a cheerful slap on the back, before he says, like a
shampooer in a Turkish bath, "Next man!"  Mr. Herkomer's art is, 'if not
a catch-penny art, at all events a catch-many-pounds art,' and Mr. W. B.
Richmond is a 'clever trifler,' who 'might do really good work' 'if he
would employ his time in learning to paint.'  It is obviously unnecessary
for us to point out how luminous these criticisms are, how delicate in
expression.  The remarks on Sir Joshua Reynolds alone exemplify the truth
of Sententia No. 19, 'From a picture we gain but little more than we
bring.'  On the general principles of art Mr. Quilter writes with equal
lucidity.  That there is a difference between colour and colours, that an
artist, be he portrait-painter or dramatist, always reveals himself in
his manner, are ideas that can hardly be said to occur to him; but Mr.
Quilter really does his best and bravely faces every difficulty in modern
art, with the exception of Mr. Whistler.  Painting, he tells us, is 'of a
different quality to mathematics,' and finish in art is 'adding more
fact'!  Portrait painting is a bad pursuit for an emotional artist as it
destroys his personality and his sympathy; however, even for the
emotional artist there is hope, as a portrait can be converted into a
picture 'by adding to the likeness of the sitter some dramatic interest
or some picturesque adjunct'!  As for etchings, they are of two
kinds--British and foreign.  The latter fail in 'propriety.'  Yet,
'really fine etching is as free and easy as is the chat between old chums
at midnight over a smoking-room fire.'  Consonant with these rollicking
views of art is Mr. Quilter's healthy admiration for 'the three primary
colours: red, blue, and yellow.'  Any one, he points out, 'can paint in
good tone who paints only in black and white,' and 'the great sign of a
good decorator' is 'his capability of doing without neutral tints.'
Indeed, on decoration Mr. Quilter is almost eloquent.  He laments most
bitterly the divorce that has been made between decorative art and 'what
we usually call "pictures,"' makes the customary appeal to the Last
Judgment, and reminds us that in the great days of art Michael Angelo was
the 'furnishing upholsterer.'  With the present tendencies of decorative
art in England Mr. Quilter, consequently, has but little sympathy, and he
makes a gallant appeal to the British householder to stand no more
nonsense.  Let the honest fellow, he says, on his return from his
counting-house tear down the Persian hangings, put a chop on the
Anatolian plate, mix some toddy in the Venetian glass, and carry his wife
off to the National Gallery to look at 'our own Mulready'!  And then the
picture he draws of the ideal home, where everything, though ugly, is
hallowed by domestic memories, and where beauty appeals not to the
heartless eye but the family affections; 'baby's chair there, and the
mother's work-basket . . . near the fire, and the ornaments Fred brought
home from India on the mantel-board'!  It is really impossible not to be
touched by so charming a description.  How valuable, also, in connection
with house decoration is Sententia No. 351, 'There is nothing furnishes a
room like a bookcase, _and plenty of books in it_.'  How cultivated the
mind that thus raises literature to the position of upholstery and puts
thought on a level with the antimacassar!

And, finally, for the young workers in art Mr. Quilter has loud words of
encouragement.  With a sympathy that is absolutely reckless of grammar,
he knows from experience 'what an amount of study and mental strain _are_
involved in painting a bad picture honestly'; he exhorts them (Sententia
No. 267) to 'go on quite bravely and sincerely making mess after mess
from Nature,' and while sternly warning them that there is something
wrong if they do not 'feel _washed out_ after each drawing,' he still
urges them to 'put a new piece of goods in the window' every morning.  In
fact, he is quite severe on Mr. Ruskin for not recognising that 'a
picture should denote the frailty of man,' and remarks with pleasing
courtesy and felicitous grace that 'many phases of feeling . . . are as
much a dead letter to this great art teacher, as Sanskrit to an Islington
cabman.'  Nor is Mr. Quilter one of those who fails to practice what he
preaches.  Far from it.  He goes on quite bravely and sincerely making
mess after mess from literature, and misquotes Shakespeare, Wordsworth,
Alfred de Musset, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Fitzgerald's
Rubaiyat, in strict accordance with Sententia No. 251, which tells us
that 'Work must be abominable if it is ever going to be good.'  Only,
unfortunately, his own work never does get good.  Not content with his
misquotations, he misspells the names of such well-known painters as
Madox-Brown, Bastien Lepage and Meissonier, hesitates between Ingres and
Ingres, talks of _Mr_. Millais and _Mr_. Linton, alludes to Mr. Frank
Holl simply as 'Hall,' speaks with easy familiarity of Mr. Burne-Jones as
'Jones,' and writes of the artist whom he calls 'old Chrome' with an
affection that reminds us of Mr. Tulliver's love for Jeremy Taylor.  On
the whole, the book will not do.  We fully admit that it is extremely
amusing and, no doubt, Mr. Quilter is quite earnest in his endeavours to
elevate art to the dignity of manual labour, but the extraordinary
vulgarity of the style alone will always be sufficient to prevent these
Sententiae Artis from being anything more than curiosities of literature.
Mr. Quilter has missed his chance; for he has failed even to make himself
the Tupper of Painting.

Sententiae: Artis: First Principles of Art for Painters and Picture
Lovers.  By Harry Quilter, M.A.  (Isbister.)

[A reply to this review appeared on November 23.]




A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH LITERATURE


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 1, 1886.)

This is undoubtedly an interesting book, not merely through its eloquence
and earnestness, but also through the wonderful catholicity of taste that
it displays.  Mr. Noel has a passion for panegyric.  His eulogy on Keats
is closely followed by a eulogy on Whitman, and his praise of Lord
Tennyson is equalled only by his praise of Mr. Robert Buchanan.
Sometimes, we admit, we would like a little more fineness of
discrimination, a little more delicacy of perception.  Sincerity of
utterance is valuable in a critic, but sanity of judgment is more
valuable still, and Mr. Noel's judgments are not always distinguished by
their sobriety.  Many of the essays, however, are well worth reading.  The
best is certainly that on The Poetic Interpretation of Nature, in which
Mr. Noel claims that what is called by Mr. Ruskin the 'pathetic fallacy
of literature' is in reality a vital emotional truth; but the essays on
Hugo and Mr. Browning are good also; the little paper entitled Rambles by
the Cornish Seas is a real marvel of delightful description, and the
monograph on Chatterton has a good deal of merit, though we must protest
very strongly against Mr. Noel's idea that Chatterton must be modernised
before he can be appreciated.  Mr. Noel has absolutely no right
whatsoever to alter Chatterton's' yonge damoyselles' and '_anlace_ fell'
into 'youthful damsels' and '_weapon_ fell,' for Chatterton's archaisms
were an essential part of his inspiration and his method.  Mr. Noel in
one of his essays speaks with much severity of those who prefer sound to
sense in poetry and, no doubt, this is a very wicked thing to do; but he
himself is guilty of a much graver sin against art when, in his desire to
emphasise the meaning of Chatterton, he destroys Chatterton's music.  In
the modernised version he gives of the wonderful Songe to AElla, he mars
by his corrections the poem's metrical beauty, ruins the rhymes and robs
the music of its echo.  Nineteenth-century restorations have done quite
enough harm to English architecture without English poetry being treated
in the same manner, and we hope that when Mr. Noel writes again about
Chatterton he will quote from the poet's verse, not from a publisher's
version.

This, however, is not by any means the chief blot on Mr. Noel's book.  The
fault of his book is that it tells us far more about his own personal
feelings than it does about the qualities of the various works of art
that are criticised.  It is in fact a diary of the emotions suggested by
literature, rather than any real addition to literary criticism, and we
fancy that many of the poets about whom he writes so eloquently would be
not a little surprised at the qualities he finds in their work.  Byron,
for instance, who spoke with such contempt of what he called 'twaddling
about trees and babbling o' green fields'; Byron who cried, 'Away with
this cant about nature!  A good poet can imbue a pack of cards with more
poetry than inhabits the forests of America,' is claimed by Mr. Noel as a
true nature-worshipper and Pantheist along with Wordsworth and Shelley;
and we wonder what Keats would have thought of a critic who gravely
suggests that Endymion is 'a parable of the development of the individual
soul.'  There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem.  One is to
misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities that it does
not possess.  The latter is Mr. Noel's method, and in his anxiety to
glorify the artist he often does so at the expense of the work of art.

Mr. Noel also is constantly the victim of his own eloquence.  So facile
is his style that it constantly betrays him into crude and extravagant
statements.  Rhetoric and over-emphasis are the dangers that Mr. Noel has
not always succeeded in avoiding.  It is extravagant, for instance, to
say that all great poetry has been 'pictorial,' or that Coleridge's
Knight's Grave is worth many Kubla Khans, or that Byron has 'the splendid
imperfection of an AEschylus,' or that we had lately 'one dramatist
living in England, and only one, who could be compared to Hugo, and that
was Richard Hengist Horne,' and that 'to find an English dramatist of the
same order before him we must go back to Sheridan if not to Otway.'  Mr.
Noel, again, has a curious habit of classing together the most
incongruous names and comparing the most incongruous works of art.  What
is gained by telling us that 'Sardanapalus' is perhaps hardly equal to
'Sheridan,' that Lord Tennyson's ballad of The Revenge and his Ode on the
Death of the Duke of Wellington are worthy of a place beside Thomson's
Rule Britannia, that Edgar Allan Poe, Disraeli and Mr. Alfred Austin are
artists of note whom we may affiliate on Byron, and that if Sappho and
Milton 'had not high genius, they would be justly reproached as
sensational'?  And surely it is a crude judgment that classes Baudelaire,
of all poets, with Marini and mediaeval troubadours, and a crude style
that writes of 'Goethe, Shelley, Scott, and Wilson,' for a mortal should
not thus intrude upon the immortals, even though he be guilty of holding
with them that Cain is 'one of the finest poems in the English language.'
It is only fair, however, to add that Mr. Noel subsequently makes more
than ample amends for having opened Parnassus to the public in this
reckless manner, by calling Wilson an 'offal-feeder,' on the ground that
he once wrote a severe criticism of some of Lord Tennyson's early poems.
For Mr. Noel does not mince his words.  On the contrary, he speaks with
much scorn of all euphuism and delicacy of expression and, preferring the
affectation of nature to the affectation of art, he thinks nothing of
calling other people 'Laura Bridgmans,' 'Jackasses' and the like.  This,
we think, is to be regretted, especially in a writer so cultured as Mr.
Noel.  For, though indignation may make a great poet, bad temper always
makes a poor critic.

On the whole, Mr. Noel's book has an emotional rather than an
intellectual interest.  It is simply a record of the moods of a man of
letters, and its criticisms merely reveal the critic without illuminating
what he would criticise for us.  The best that we can say of it is that
it is a Sentimental Journey through Literature, the worst that any one
could say of it is that it has all the merits of such an expedition.

Essays on Poetry and Poets.  By the Hon. Roden Noel.  (Kegan Paul.)




COMMON-SENSE IN ART


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 8, 1887.)

At this critical moment in the artistic development of England Mr. John
Collier has come forward as the champion of common-sense in art.  It will
be remembered that Mr. Quilter, in one of his most vivid and picturesque
metaphors, compared Mr. Collier's method as a painter to that of a
shampooer in a Turkish bath. {119}  As a writer Mr. Collier is no less
interesting.  It is true that he is not eloquent, but then he censures
with just severity 'the meaningless eloquence of the writers on
aesthetics'; we admit that he is not subtle, but then he is careful to
remind us that Leonardo da Vinci's views on painting are nonsensical; his
qualities are of a solid, indeed we may say of a stolid order; he is
thoroughly honest, sturdy and downright, and he advises us, if we want to
know anything about art, to study the works of 'Helmholtz, Stokes, or
Tyndall,' to which we hope we may be allowed to add Mr. Collier's own
Manual of Oil Painting.

For this art of painting is a very simple thing indeed, according to Mr.
Collier.  It consists merely in the 'representation of natural objects by
means of pigments on a flat surface.'  There is nothing, he tells us, 'so
very mysterious' in it after all.  'Every natural object appears to us as
a sort of pattern of different shades and colours,' and 'the task of the
artist is so to arrange his shades and colours on his canvas that a
similar pattern is produced.'  This is obviously pure common-sense, and
it is clear that art-definitions of this character can be comprehended by
the very meanest capacity and, indeed, may be said to appeal to it.  For
the perfect development, however, of this pattern-producing faculty a
severe training is necessary.  The art student must begin by painting
china, crockery, and 'still life' generally.  He should rule his straight
lines and employ actual measurements wherever it is possible.  He will
also find that a plumb-line comes in very useful.  Then he should proceed
to Greek sculpture, for from pottery to Phidias is only one step.
Ultimately he will arrive at the living model, and as soon as he can
'faithfully represent any object that he has before him' he is a painter.
After this there is, of course, only one thing to be considered, the
important question of subject.  Subjects, Mr. Collier tells us, are of
two kinds, ancient and modern.  Modern subjects are more healthy than
ancient subjects, but the real difficulty of modernity in art is that the
artist passes his life with respectable people, and that respectable
people are unpictorial.  'For picturesqueness,' consequently, he should
go to 'the rural poor,' and for pathos to the London slums.  Ancient
subjects offer the artist a very much wider field.  If he is fond of
'rich stuffs and costly accessories' he should study the Middle Ages; if
he wishes to paint beautiful people, 'untrammelled by any considerations
of historical accuracy,' he should turn to the Greek and Roman mythology;
and if he is a 'mediocre painter,' he should choose his 'subject from the
Old and New Testament,' a recommendation, by the way, that many of our
Royal Academicians seem already to have carried out.  To paint a real
historical picture one requires the assistance of a theatrical costumier
and a photographer.  From the former one hires the dresses and the latter
supplies one with the true background.  Besides subject-pictures there
are also portraits and landscapes.  Portrait painting, Mr. Collier tells
us, 'makes no demands on the imagination.'  As is the sitter, so is the
work of art.  If the sitter be commonplace, for instance, it would be
'contrary to the fundamental principles of portraiture to make the
picture other than commonplace.'  There are, however, certain rules that
should be followed.  One of the most important of these is that the
artist should always consult his sitter's relations before he begins the
picture.  If they want a profile he must do them a profile; if they
require a full face he must give them a full face; and he should be
careful also to get their opinion as to the costume the sitter should
wear and 'the sort of expression he should put on.'  'After all,' says
Mr. Collier pathetically, 'it is they who have to live with the picture.'

Besides the difficulty of pleasing the victim's family, however, there is
the difficulty of pleasing the victim.  According to Mr. Collier, and he
is, of course, a high authority on the matter, portrait painters bore
their sitters very much.  The true artist consequently should encourage
his sitter to converse, or get some one to read to him; for if the sitter
is bored the portrait will look sad.  Still, if the sitter has not got an
amiable expression naturally the artist is not bound to give him one, nor
'if he is essentially ungraceful' should the artist ever 'put him in a
graceful attitude.'  As regards landscape painting, Mr. Collier tells us
that 'a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the impossibility of
reproducing nature,' but that there is nothing really to prevent a
picture giving to the eye exactly the same impression that an actual
scene gives, for that when he visited 'the celebrated panorama of the
Siege of Paris' he could hardly distinguish the painted from the real
cannons!  The whole passage is extremely interesting, and is really one
out of many examples we might give of the swift and simple manner in
which the common-sense method solves the great problems of art.  The book
concludes with a detailed exposition of the undulatory theory of light
according to the most ancient scientific discoveries.  Mr. Collier points
out how important it is for an artist to hold sound views on the subject
of ether waves, and his own thorough appreciation of Science may be
estimated by the definition he gives of it as being 'neither more nor
less than knowledge.'

Mr. Collier has done his work with much industry and earnestness.  Indeed,
nothing but the most conscientious seriousness, combined with real
labour, could have produced such a book, and the exact value of common-
sense in art has never before been so clearly demonstrated.

A Manual of Oil Painting.  By the Hon. John Collier.  (Cassell and Co.)




MINER AND MINOR POETS


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1887.)

The conditions that precede artistic production are so constantly treated
as qualities of the work of art itself that one sometimes is tempted to
wish that all art were anonymous.  Yet there are certain forms of art so
individual in their utterance, so purely personal in their expression,
that for a full appreciation of their style and manner some knowledge of
the artist's life is necessary.  To this class belongs Mr. Skipsey's
Carols from the Coal-Fields, a volume of intense human interest and high
literary merit, and we are consequently glad to see that Dr. Spence
Watson has added a short biography of his friend to his friend's poems,
for the life and the literature are too indissolubly wedded ever really
to be separated.  Joseph Skipsey, Dr. Watson tells us, was sent into the
coal pits at Percy Main, near North Shields, when he was seven years of
age.  Young as he was he had to work from twelve to sixteen hours in the
day, generally in the pitch dark, and in the dreary winter months he saw
the sun only upon Sundays.  When he went to work he had learned the
alphabet and to put words of two letters together, but he was really his
own schoolmaster, and 'taught himself to write, for example, by copying
the letters from printed bills or notices, when he could get a candle
end,--his paper being the trapdoor, which it was his duty to open and
shut as the wagons passed through, and his pen a piece of chalk.'  The
first book he really read was the Bible, and not content with reading it,
he learned by heart the chapters which specially pleased him.  When
sixteen years old he was presented with a copy of Lindley Murray's
Grammar, by the aid of which he gained some knowledge of the structural
rules of English.  He had already become acquainted with Paradise Lost,
and was another proof of Matthew Prior's axiom, 'Who often reads will
sometimes want to write,' for he had begun to write verse when only 'a
bonnie pit lad.'  For more than forty years of his life he laboured in
'the coal-dark underground,' and is now the caretaker of a Board-school
in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  As for the qualities of his poetry, they are its
directness and its natural grace.  He has an intellectual as well as a
metrical affinity with Blake, and possesses something of Blake's
marvellous power of making simple things seem strange to us, and strange
things seem simple.  How delightful, for instance, is this little poem:

   'Get up!' the caller calls, 'Get up!'
      And in the dead of night,
   To win the bairns their bite and sup,
      I rise a weary wight.

   My flannel dudden donn'd, thrice o'er
      My birds are kiss'd, and then
   I with a whistle shut the door
      I may not ope again.

How exquisite and fanciful this stray lyric:

   The wind comes from the west to-night;
      So sweetly down the lane he bloweth
   Upon my lips, with pure delight
      From head to foot my body gloweth.

   Where did the wind, the magic find
      To charm me thus? say, heart that knoweth!
   'Within a rose on which he blows
      Before upon thy lips he bloweth!'

We admit that Mr. Skipsey's work is extremely unequal, but when it is at
its best it is full of sweetness and strength; and though he has
carefully studied the artistic capabilities of language, he never makes
his form formal by over-polishing.  Beauty with him seems to be an
unconscious result rather than a conscious aim; his style has all the
delicate charm of chance.  We have already pointed out his affinity to
Blake, but with Burns also he may be said to have a spiritual kinship,
and in the songs of the Northumbrian miner we meet with something of the
Ayrshire peasant's wild gaiety and mad humour.  He gives himself up
freely to his impressions, and there is a fine, careless rapture in his
laughter.  The whole book deserves to be read, and much of it deserves to
be loved.  Mr. Skipsey can find music for every mood, whether he is
dealing with the real experiences of the pitman or with the imaginative
experiences of the poet, and his verse has a rich vitality about it.  In
these latter days of shallow rhymes it is pleasant to come across some
one to whom poetry is a passion not a profession.

Mr. F. B. Doveton belongs to a different school.  In his amazing
versatility he reminds us of the gentleman who wrote the immortal
handbills for Mrs. Jarley, for his subjects range from Dr. Carter Moffatt
and the Ammoniaphone to Mr. Whiteley, Lady Bicyclists, and the
Immortality of the Soul.  His verses in praise of Zoedone are a fine
example of didactic poetry, his elegy on the death of Jumbo is quite up
to the level of the subject, and the stanzas on a watering-place,

   Who of its merits can e'er think meanly?
      Scattering ozone to all the land!

are well worthy of a place in any shilling guidebook.  Mr. Doveton
divides his poems into grave and gay, but we like him least when he is
amusing, for in his merriment there is but little melody, and he makes
his muse grin through a horse-collar.  When he is serious he is much
better, and his descriptive poems show that he has completely mastered
the most approved poetical phraseology.  Our old friend Boreas is as
'burly' as ever, 'zephyrs' are consistently 'amorous,' and 'the welkin
rings' upon the smallest provocation; birds are 'the feathered host' or
'the sylvan throng,' the wind 'wantons o'er the lea,' 'vernal gales'
murmur to 'crystal rills,' and Lempriere's Dictionary supplies the Latin
names for the sun and the moon.  Armed with these daring and novel
expressions Mr. Doveton indulges in fierce moods of nature-worship, and
botanises recklessly through the provinces.  Now and then, however, we
come across some pleasing passages.  Mr. Doveton apparently is an
enthusiastic fisherman, and sings merrily of the 'enchanting grayling'
and the 'crimson and gold trout' that rise to the crafty angler's
'feathered wile.'  Still, we fear that he will never produce any real
good work till he has made up his mind whether destiny intends him for a
poet or for an advertising agent, and we venture to hope that should he
ever publish another volume he will find some other rhyme to 'vision'
than 'Elysian,' a dissonance that occurs five times in this well-meaning
but tedious volume.

As for Mr. Ashby-Sterry, those who object to the nude in art should at
once read his lays of The Lazy Minstrel and be converted, for over these
poems the milliner, not the muse, presides, and the result is a little
alarming.  As the Chelsea sage investigated the philosophy of clothes, so
Mr. Ashby-Sterry has set himself to discover the poetry of petticoats,
and seems to find much consolation in the thought that, though art is
long, skirts are worn short.  He is the only pedlar who has climbed
Parnassus since Autolycus sang of

   Lawn as white as driven snow,
   'Cypress black as e'er was crow,

and his details are as amazing as his diminutives.  He is capable of
penning a canto to a crinoline, and has a pathetic monody on a
mackintosh.  He sings of pretty puckers and pliant pleats, and is
eloquent on frills, frocks and chemisettes.  The latest French fashions
stir him to a fine frenzy, and the sight of a pair of Balmoral boots
thrills him with absolute ecstasy.  He writes rondels on ribbons, lyrics
on linen and lace, and his most ambitious ode is addressed to a Tomboy in
Trouserettes!  Yet his verse is often dainty and delicate, and many of
his poems are full of sweet and pretty conceits.  Indeed, of the Thames
at summer time he writes so charmingly, and with such felicitous grace of
epithet, that we cannot but regret that he has chosen to make himself the
Poet of Petticoats and the Troubadour of Trouserettes.

(1) Carols from the Coal-Fields, and Other Songs and Ballads.  By Joseph
Skipsey.  (Walter Scott.)

(2) Sketches in Prose and Verse.  By F. B. Doveton.  (Sampson Low,
Marston and Co.)

(3) The Lazy Minstrel.  By J. Ashby-Sterry.  (Fisher Unwin.)




A NEW CALENDAR


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 17, 1887.)

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding
us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly
uninteresting event.  Their compilers display a degraded passion for
chronicling small beer, and rake out the dust-heap of history in an
ardent search after rubbish.  Mr. Walter Scott, however, has made a new
departure and has published a calendar in which every day of the year is
made beautiful for us by means of an elegant extract from the poems of
Mr. Alfred Austin.  This, undoubtedly, is a step in the right direction.
It is true that such aphorisms as

   Graves are a _mother's dimples_
      When we complain,

or

   The primrose wears a constant smile,
   And captive takes the heart,

can hardly be said to belong to the very highest order of poetry, still,
they are preferable, on the whole, to the date of Hannah More's birth, or
of the burning down of Exeter Change, or of the opening of the Great
Exhibition; and though it would be dangerous to make calendars the basis
of Culture, we should all be much improved if we began each day with a
fine passage of English poetry.  How far this desirable result can be
attained by a use of the volume now before us is, perhaps, open to
question, but it must be admitted that its anonymous compiler has done
his work very conscientiously, nor will we quarrel with him for the fact
that he constantly repeats the same quotation twice over.  No doubt it
was difficult to find in Mr. Austin's work three hundred and sixty-five
different passages really worthy of insertion in an almanac, and,
besides, our climate has so degenerated of late that there is no reason
at all why a motto perfectly suitable for February should not be equally
appropriate when August has set in with its usual severity.  For the
misprints there is less excuse.  Even the most uninteresting poet cannot
survive bad editing.

Prefixed to the Calendar is an introductory note from the pen of Mr.
William Sharp, written in that involved and affected style which is Mr.
Sharp's distinguishing characteristic, and displaying that intimate
acquaintance with Sappho's lost poems which is the privilege only of
those who are not acquainted with Greek literature.  As a criticism it is
not of much value, but as an advertisement it is quite excellent.  Indeed,
Mr. Sharp hints mysteriously at secret political influence, and tells us
that though Mr. Austin 'sings with Tityrus' yet he 'has conversed with
AEneas,' which, we suppose, is a euphemistic method of alluding to the
fact that Mr. Austin once lunched with Lord Beaconsfield.  It is for the
poet, however, not for the politician, that Mr. Sharp reserves his
loftiest panegyric and, in his anxiety to smuggle the author of Leszko
the Bastard and Grandmother's Teaching into the charmed circle of the
Immortals, he leaves no adjective unturned, quoting and misquoting Mr.
Austin with a recklessness that is absolutely fatal to the cause he
pleads.  For mediocre critics are usually safe in their generalities; it
is in their reasons and examples that they come so lamentably to grief.
When, for instance, Mr. Sharp tells us that lines with the 'natural
magic' of Shakespeare, Keats and Coleridge are 'far from infrequent' in
Mr. Austin's poems, all that we can say is that we have never come across
any lines of the kind in Mr. Austin's published works, but it is
difficult to help smiling when Mr. Sharp gravely calls upon us to note
'the illuminative significance' of such a commonplace verse as

   My manhood keeps the dew of morn,
      And what have I to give;
   Being right glad that I was born,
      And thankful that I live.

Nor do Mr. Sharp's constant misquotations really help him out of his
difficulties.  Such a line as

   A meadow ribbed with _drying_ swathes of hay,

has at least the merit of being a simple, straightforward description of
an ordinary scene in an English landscape, but not much can be said in
favour of

   A meadow ribbed with _dying_ swathes of hay,

which is Mr. Sharp's own version, and one that he finds 'delightfully
suggestive.'  It is indeed suggestive, but only of that want of care that
comes from want of taste.

On the whole, Mr. Sharp has attempted an impossible task.  Mr. Austin is
neither an Olympian nor a Titan, and all the puffing in Paternoster Row
cannot set him on Parnassus.

His verse is devoid of all real rhythmical life; it may have the metre of
poetry, but it has not often got its music, nor can there be any true
delicacy in the ear that tolerates such rhymes as 'chord' and 'abroad.'
Even the claim that Mr. Sharp puts forward for him, that his muse takes
her impressions directly from nature and owes nothing to books, cannot be
sustained for a moment.  Wordsworth is a great poet, but bad echoes of
Wordsworth are extremely depressing, and when Mr. Austin calls the cuckoo a

   Voyaging voice

and tells us that

      The stockdove _broods_
   Low to itself,

we must really enter a protest against such silly plagiarisms.

Perhaps, however, we are treating Mr. Sharp too seriously.  He admits
himself that it was at the special request of the compiler of the
Calendar that he wrote the preface at all, and though he courteously adds
that the task is agreeable to him, still he shows only too clearly that
he considers it a task and, like a clever lawyer or a popular clergyman,
tries to atone for his lack of sincerity by a pleasing over-emphasis.  Nor
is there any reason why this Calendar should not be a great success.  If
published as a broad-sheet, with a picture of Mr. Austin 'conversing with
AEneas,' it might gladden many a simple cottage home and prove a source
of innocent amusement to the Conservative working-man.

Days of the Year: A Poetic Calendar from the Works of Alfred Austin.
Selected and edited by A. S.  With Introduction by William Sharp.  (Walter
Scott.)




THE POETS' CORNER--II


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 8, 1837.)

A little schoolboy was once asked to explain the difference between prose
and poetry.  After some consideration he replied, '"blue violets" is
prose, and "violets blue" is poetry.'  The distinction, we admit, is not
exhaustive, but it seems to be the one that is extremely popular with our
minor poets.  Opening at random The Queens Innocent we come across
passages like this:

      Full gladly would I sit
   Of such a potent magus at the feet,

and this:

      The third, while yet a youth,
   Espoused a lady noble but not royal,
   _One only son who gave him_--Pharamond--

lines that, apparently, rest their claim to be regarded as poetry on
their unnecessary and awkward inversions.  Yet this poem is not without
beauty, and the character of Nardi, the little prince who is treated as
the Court fool, shows a delicate grace of fancy, and is both tender and
true.  The most delightful thing in the whole volume is a little lyric
called April, which is like a picture set to music.

The Chimneypiece of Bruges is a narrative poem in blank verse, and tells
us of a young artist who, having been unjustly convicted of his wife's
murder, spends his life in carving on the great chimneypiece of the
prison the whole story of his love and suffering.  The poem is full of
colour, but the blank verse is somewhat heavy in movement.  There are
some pretty things in the book, and a poet without hysterics is rare.

Dr. Dawson Burns's Oliver Cromwell is a pleasant panegyric on the
Protector, and reads like a prize poem by a nice sixth-form boy.  The
verses on The Good Old Times should be sent as a leaflet to all Tories of
Mr. Chaplin's school, and the lines on Bunker's Hill, beginning,

   I stand on Bunker's towering pile,

are sure to be popular in America.

K. E. V.'s little volume is a series of poems on the Saints.  Each poem
is preceded by a brief biography of the Saint it celebrates--which is a
very necessary precaution, as few of them ever existed.  It does not
display much poetic power, and such lines as these on St. Stephen,--

   Did ever man before so fall asleep?
   A cruel shower of stones his only bed,
   For lullaby the curses loud and deep,
      His covering with blood red--

may be said to add another horror to martyrdom.  Still it is a thoroughly
well-intentioned book and eminently suitable for invalids.

Mr. Foskett's poems are very serious and deliberate.  One of the best of
them, Harold Glynde, is a Cantata for Total Abstainers, and has already
been set to music.  A Hindoo Tragedy is the story of an enthusiastic
Brahmin reformer who tries to break down the prohibition against widows
marrying, and there are other interesting tales.  Mr. Foskett has
apparently forgotten to insert the rhymes in his sonnet to Wordsworth;
but, as he tells us elsewhere that 'Poesy is uninspired by Art,' perhaps
he is only heralding a new and formless form.  He is always sincere in
his feelings, and his apostrophe to Canon Farrar is equalled only by his
apostrophe to Shakespeare.

The Pilgrimage of Memory suffers a good deal by being printed as poetry,
and Mr. Barker should republish it at once as a prose work.  Take, for
instance, this description of a lady on a runaway horse:--

   Her screams alarmed the Squire, who seeing the peril of his daughter,
   rode frantic after her.  I saw at once the danger, and stepping from
   the footpath, show'd myself before the startled animal, which
   forthwith slackened pace, and darting up adroitly, I seized the rein,
   and in another moment, had released the maiden's foot, and held her,
   all insensible, within my arms.  Poor girl, her head and face were
   sorely bruised, and I tried hard to staunch the blood which flowed
   from many a scalp-wound, and wipe away the dust that disfigured her
   lovely features.  In another moment the Squire was by my side.  'Poor
   child,' he cried, alarmed, 'is she dead?'  'No, sir; not dead, I
   think,' said I, 'but sorely bruised and injured.'

There is clearly nothing to be gained by dividing the sentences of this
simple and straightforward narrative into lines of unequal length, and
Mr. Barker's own arrangement of the metre,

         In another moment,
         The Squire was by my side.
   'Poor child,' he cried, alarmed, 'is she dead?'
      'No, sir; not dead, I think,' said I,
      'But sorely bruised and injured,'

seems to us to be quite inferior to ours.  We beg that the second edition
of The Pilgrimage of Memory may be issued as a novel in prose.

Mr. Gladstone Turner believes that we are on the verge of a great social
cataclysm, and warns us that our _cradles_ are even now being rocked by
_slumbering volcanoes_!  We hope that there is no truth in this
statement, and that it is merely a startling metaphor introduced for the
sake of effect, for elsewhere in the volume there is a great deal of
beauty which we should be sorry to think was doomed to immediate
extinction.  The Choice, for instance, is a charming poem, and the sonnet
on Evening would be almost perfect if it were not for an unpleasant
assonance in the fifth line.  Indeed, so good is much of Mr. Gladstone
Turner's work that we trust he will give up rhyming 'real' to 'steal' and
'feel,' as such bad habits are apt to grow on careless poets and to blunt
their ear for music.

Nivalis is a five-act tragedy in blank verse.  Most plays that are
written to be read, not to be acted, miss that condensation and
directness of expression which is one of the secrets of true dramatic
diction, and Mr. Schwartz's tragedy is consequently somewhat verbose.
Still, it is full of fine lines and noble scenes.  It is essentially a
work of art, and though, as far as language is concerned, the personages
all speak through the lips of the poet, yet in passion and purpose their
characters are clearly differentiated, and the Queen Nivalis and her
lover Giulio are drawn with real psychological power.  We hope that some
day Mr. Schwartz will write a play for the stage, as he has the dramatic
instinct and the dramatic imagination, and can make life pass into
literature without robbing it of its reality.

(1) The Queen's Innocent, with Other Poems.  By Elise Cooper.  (David
Stott.)

(2) The Chimneypiece of Bruges and Other Poems.  By Constance E. Dixon.
(Elliot Stock.)

(3) Oliver Cromwell and Other Poems.  By Dawson Burns, D.D.  (Partridge
and Co.)

(4) The Circle of Saints.  By K. E. V.  (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)

(5) Poems.  By Edward Foskett.  (Kegan Paul.)

(6) The Pilgrimage of Memory.  By John Thomas Barker.  (Simpkin, Marshall
and Co.)

(7) Errata.  By G. Gladstone Turner.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(8) Nivalis.  By J. M. W. Schwartz.  (Kegan Paul.)




GREAT WRITERS BY LITTLE MEN


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 28, 1887.)

In an introductory note prefixed to the initial volume of 'Great
Writers,' a series of literary monographs now being issued by Mr. Walter
Scott, the publisher himself comes forward in the kindest manner possible
to give his authors the requisite 'puff preliminary,' and ventures to
express the modest opinion that such original and valuable works 'have
never before been produced in any part of the world at a price so low as
a shilling a volume.'  Far be it from us to make any heartless allusion
to the fact that Shakespeare's Sonnets were brought out at fivepence, or
that for fourpence-halfpenny one could have bought a Martial in ancient
Rome.  Every man, a cynical American tells us, has the right to beat a
drum before his booth.  Still, we must acknowledge that Mr. Walter Scott
would have been much better employed in correcting some of the more
obvious errors that appear in his series.  When, for instance, we come
across such a phrase as 'the brotherly liberality of the brothers
Wedgewood,' the awkwardness of the expression is hardly atoned for by the
fact that the name of the great potter is misspelt; Longfellow is so
essentially poor in rhymes that it is unfair to rob him even of one, and
the misquotation on page 77 is absolutely unkind; the joke Coleridge
himself made upon the subject should have been sufficient to remind any
one that 'Comberbach' (sic) was not the name under which he enlisted, and
no real beauty is added to the first line of his pathetic Work Without
Hope by printing 'lare' (sic) instead of 'lair.'  The truth is that all
premature panegyrics bring their own punishment upon themselves and, in
the present case, though the series has only just entered upon existence,
already a great deal of the work done is careless, disappointing, unequal
and tedious.

Mr. Eric Robertson's Longfellow is a most depressing book.  No one
survives being over-estimated, nor is there any surer way of destroying
an author's reputation than to glorify him without judgment and to praise
him without tact.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the first true
men of letters America produced, and as such deserves a high place in any
history of American civilisation.  To a land out of breath in its greed
for gain he showed the example of a life devoted entirely to the study of
literature; his lectures, though not by any means brilliant, were still
productive of much good; he had a most charming and gracious personality,
and he wrote some pretty poems.  But his poems are not of the kind that
call for intellectual analysis or for elaborate description or, indeed,
for any serious discussion at all.  They are as unsuited for panegyric as
they are unworthy of censure, and it is difficult to help smiling when
Mr. Robertson gravely tells us that few modern poets have given utterance
to a faith so comprehensive as that expressed in the Psalm of Life, or
that Evangeline should confer on Longfellow the title of
'Golden-mouthed,' and that the style of metre adopted 'carries the ear
back to times in the world's history when grand simplicities were sung.'
Surely Mr. Robertson does not believe that there is any connection at all
between Longfellow's unrhymed dactylics and the hexameter of Greece and
Rome, or that any one reading Evangeline would be reminded of Homer's or
Virgil's line?  Where also lies the advantage of confusing popularity
with poetic power?  Though the Psalm of Life be shouted from Maine to
California, that would not make it true poetry.  Why call upon us to
admire a bad misquotation from the Midnight Mass for the Dying Year, and
why talk of Longfellow's 'hundreds of imitators'?  Longfellow has no
imitators, for of echoes themselves there are no echoes and it is only
style that makes a school.

Now and then, however, Mr. Robertson considers it necessary to assume a
critical attitude.  He tells us, for instance, that whether or not
Longfellow was a genius of the first order, it must be admitted that he
loved social pleasures and was a good eater and judge of wines, admiring
'Bass's ale' more than anything else he had seen in England!  The remarks
on Excelsior are even still more amazing.  Excelsior, says Mr. Robertson,
is not a ballad because a ballad deals either with real or with
supernatural people, and the hero of the poem cannot be brought under
either category.  For, 'were he of human flesh, his madcap notion of
scaling a mountain with the purpose of getting to the sky would be simply
drivelling lunacy,' to say nothing of the fact that the peak in question
is much frequented by tourists, while, on the other hand, 'it would be
absurd to suppose him a spirit . . . for no spirit would be so silly as
climb a snowy mountain for nothing'!  It is really painful to have to
read such preposterous nonsense, and if Mr. Walter Scott imagines that
work of this kind is 'original and valuable' he has much to learn.  Nor
are Mr. Robertson's criticisms upon other poets at all more felicitous.
The casual allusion to Herrick's 'confectioneries of verse' is, of
course, quite explicable, coming as it does from an editor who excluded
Herrick from an anthology of the child-poems of our literature in favour
of Mr. Ashby-Sterry and Mr. William Sharp, but when Mr. Robertson tells
us that Poe's 'loftiest flights of imagination in verse . . . rise into
no more empyreal realm than the fantastic,' we can only recommend him to
read as soon as possible the marvellous lines To Helen, a poem as
beautiful as a Greek gem and as musical as Apollo's lute.  The remarks,
too, on Poe's critical estimate of his own work show that Mr. Robertson
has never really studied the poet on whom he pronounces such glib and
shallow judgments, and exemplify very clearly the fact that even
dogmatism is no excuse for ignorance.

After reading Mr. Hall Caine's Coleridge we are irresistibly reminded of
what Wordsworth once said about a bust that had been done of himself.
After contemplating it for some time, he remarked, 'It is not a bad
Wordsworth, but it is not the real Wordsworth; it is not Wordsworth the
poet, it is the sort of Wordsworth who might be Chancellor of the
Exchequer.'  Mr. Caine's Coleridge is certainly not the sort of Coleridge
who might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the author of
Christabel was not by any means remarkable as a financier; but, for all
that, it is not the real Coleridge, it is not Coleridge the poet.  The
incidents of the life are duly recounted; the gunpowder plot at
Cambridge, the egg-hot and oronokoo at the little tavern in Newgate
Street, the blue coat and white waistcoat that so amazed the worthy
Unitarians, and the terrible smoking experiment at Birmingham are all
carefully chronicled, as no doubt they should be in every popular
biography; but of the spiritual progress of the man's soul we hear
absolutely nothing.  Never for one single instant are we brought near to
Coleridge; the magic of that wonderful personality is hidden from us by a
cloud of mean details, an unholy jungle of facts, and the 'critical
history' promised to us by Mr. Walter Scott in his unfortunate preface is
conspicuous only by its absence.

Carlyle once proposed in jest to write a life of Michael Angelo without
making any reference to his art, and Mr. Caine has shown that such a
project is perfectly feasible.  He has written the life of a great
peripatetic philosopher and chronicled only the peripatetics.  He has
tried to tell us about a poet, and his book might be the biography of the
famous tallow-chandler who would not appreciate the Watchman.  The real
events of Coleridge's life are not his gig excursions and his walking
tours; they are his thoughts, dreams and passions, his moments of
creative impulse, their source and secret, his moods of imaginative joy,
their marvel and their meaning, and not his moods merely but the music
and the melancholy that they brought him; the lyric loveliness of his
voice when he sang, the sterile sorrow of the years when he was silent.
It is said that every man's life is a Soul's Tragedy.  Coleridge's
certainly was so, and though we may not be able to pluck out the heart of
his mystery, still let us recognise that mystery is there; and that the
goings-out and comings-in of a man, his places of sojourn and his roads
of travel are but idle things to chronicle, if that which is the man be
left unrecorded.  So mediocre is Mr. Caine's book that even accuracy
could not make it better.

On the whole, then, Mr. Walter Scott cannot be congratulated on the
success of his venture so far, The one really admirable feature of the
series is the bibliography that is appended to each volume.  These
bibliographies are compiled by Mr. Anderson, of the British Museum, and
are so valuable to the student, as well as interesting in themselves,
that it is much to be regretted that they should be accompanied by such
tedious letterpress.

(1) Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  By Eric S. Robertson.

(2) Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  By Hall Caine.  'Great Writers'
Series.  (Walter Scott.)




A NEW BOOK ON DICKENS


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 31, 1887.)

Mr. Marzials' Dickens is a great improvement on the Longfellow and
Coleridge of his predecessors.  It is certainly a little sad to find our
old friend the manager of the Theatre Royal, Portsmouth, appearing as
'Mr. Vincent Crumules' (sic), but such misprints are not by any means
uncommon in Mr. Walter Scott's publications, and, on the whole, this is a
very pleasant book indeed.  It is brightly and cleverly written,
admirably constructed, and gives a most vivid and graphic picture of that
strange modern drama, the drama of Dickens's life.  The earlier chapters
are quite excellent, and, though the story of the famous novelist's
boyhood has been often told before, Mr. Marzials shows that it can be
told again without losing any of the charm of its interest, while the
account of Dickens in the plenitude of his glory is most appreciative and
genial.  We are really brought close to the man with his indomitable
energy, his extraordinary capacity for work, his high spirits, his
fascinating, tyrannous personality.  The description of his method of
reading is admirable, and the amazing stump-campaign in America attains,
in Mr. Marzials' hands, to the dignity of a mock-heroic poem.  One side
of Dickens's character, however, is left almost entirely untouched, and
yet it is one in every way deserving of close study.  That Dickens should
have felt bitterly towards his father and mother is quite explicable, but
that, while feeling so bitterly, he should have caricatured them for the
amusement of the public, with an evident delight in his own humour, has
always seemed to us a most curious psychological problem.  We are far
from complaining that he did so.  Good novelists are much rarer than good
sons, and none of us would part readily with Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby.
Still, the fact remains that a man who was affectionate and loving to his
children, generous and warm-hearted to his friends, and whose books are
the very bacchanalia of benevolence, pilloried his parents to make the
groundlings laugh, and this fact every biographer of Dickens should face
and, if possible, explain.

As for Mr. Marzials' critical estimate of Dickens as a writer, he tells
us quite frankly that he believes that Dickens at his best was 'one of
the greatest masters of pathos who ever lived,' a remark that seems to us
an excellent example of what novelists call 'the fine courage of
despair.'  Of course, no biographer of Dickens could say anything else,
just at present.  A popular series is bound to express popular views, and
cheap criticisms may be excused in cheap books.  Besides, it is always
open to every one to accept G. H. Lewes's unfortunate maxim that any
author who makes one cry possesses the gift of pathos and, indeed, there
is something very flattering in being told that one's own emotions are
the ultimate test of literature.  When Mr. Marzials discusses Dickens's
power of drawing human nature we are upon somewhat safer ground, and we
cannot but admire the cleverness with which he passes over his hero's
innumerable failures.  For, in some respects, Dickens might be likened to
those old sculptors of our Gothic cathedrals who could give form to the
most fantastic fancy, and crowd with grotesque monsters a curious world
of dreams, but saw little of the grace and dignity of the men and women
among whom they lived, and whose art, lacking sanity, was therefore
incomplete.  Yet they at least knew the limitations of their art, while
Dickens never knew the limitations of his.  When he tries to be serious
he succeeds only in being dull, when he aims at truth he reaches merely
platitude.  Shakespeare could place Ferdinand and Miranda by the side of
Caliban, and Life recognises them all as her own, but Dickens's Mirandas
are the young ladies out of a fashion-book, and his Ferdinands the
walking gentlemen of an unsuccessful company of third-rate players.  So
little sanity, indeed, had Dickens's art that he was never able even to
satirise: he could only caricature; and so little does Mr. Marzials
realise where Dickens's true strength and weakness lie, that he actually
complains that Cruikshank's illustrations are too much exaggerated and
that he could never draw either a lady or a gentleman.

The latter was hardly a disqualification for illustrating Dickens as few
such characters occur in his books, unless we are to regard Lord
Frederick Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk as valuable studies of high
life; and, for our own part, we have always considered that the greatest
injustice ever done to Dickens has been done by those who have tried to
illustrate him seriously.

In conclusion, Mr. Marzials expresses his belief that a century hence
Dickens will be read as much as we now read Scott, and says rather
prettily that as long as he is read 'there will be one gentle and
humanising influence the more at work among men,' which is always a
useful tag to append to the life of any popular author.  Remembering that
of all forms of error prophecy is the most gratuitous, we will not take
upon ourselves to decide the question of Dickens's immortality.  If our
descendants do not read him they will miss a great source of amusement,
and if they do, we hope they will not model their style upon his.  Of
this, however, there is but little danger, for no age ever borrows the
slang of its predecessor.  As for 'the gentle and humanising influence,'
this is taking Dickens just a little too seriously.

Life of Charles Dickens.  By Frank T. Marzials.  'Great Writers' Series.
(Walter Scott.)




OUR BOOK-SHELF


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1887.)

The Master Of Tanagra is certainly one of Ernst von Wildenbruch's most
delightful productions.  It presents an exceedingly pretty picture of the
bright external side of ancient Greek life, and tells how a handsome
young Tanagrian left his home for the sake of art, and returned to it for
love's sake--an old story, no doubt, but one which gains a new charm from
its new setting.  The historical characters of the book, such as
Praxiteles and Phryne, seem somehow less real than those that are purely
imaginary, but this is usually the case in all novels that would recreate
the past for us, and is a form of penalty that Romance has often to pay
when she tries to blend fact with fancy, and to turn the great personages
of history into puppets for a little play.  The translation, which is
from the pen of the Baroness von Lauer, reads very pleasantly, and some
of the illustrations are good, though it is impossible to reproduce by
any process the delicate and exquisite charm of the Tanagra figurines.

M. Paul Stapfer in his book Moliere et Shakespeare shows very clearly
that the French have not yet forgiven Schlegel for having threatened
that, as a reprisal for the atrocities committed by Napoleon, he would
prove that Moliere was no poet.  Indeed, M. Stapfer, while admitting that
one should be fair 'envers tout le monde, meme envers les Allemands,'
charges down upon the German critics with the brilliancy and dash of a
French cuirassier, and mocks at them for their dulness, at the very
moment that he is annexing their erudition, an achievement for which the
French genius is justly renowned.  As for the relative merits of Moliere
and Shakespeare, M. Stapfer has no hesitation in placing the author of Le
Misanthrope by the side of the author of Hamlet.  Shakespeare's comedies
seem to him somewhat wilful and fantastic; he prefers Orgon and Tartuffe
to Oberon and Titania, and can hardly forgive Beatrice for having been
'born to speak all mirth, and no matter.'

Perhaps he hardly realises that it is as a poet, not as a playwright,
that we love Shakespeare in England, and that Ariel singing by the yellow
sands, or fairies hiding in a wood near Athens, may be as real as Alceste
in his wooing of Celimene, and as true as Harpagon weeping for his money-
box; still, his book is full of interesting suggestion, many of his
remarks on literature are quite excellent, and his style has the
qualities of grace, distinction, and ease of movement.

Not so much can be said for Annals of the Life of Shakespeare, which is a
dull though well-meaning little book.  What we do not know about
Shakespeare is a most fascinating subject, and one that would fill a
volume, but what we do know about him is so meagre and inadequate that
when it is collected together the result is rather depressing.  However,
there are many people, no doubt, who find a great source of interest in
the fact that  he author of The Merchant of Venice once brought an action
for the sum of 1 pound, 15s. 10d. and gained his suit, and for these this
volume will have considerable charm.  It is a pity that the finest line
Ben Jonson ever wrote about Shakespeare should be misquoted at the very
beginning of the book, and the illustration of Shakespeare's monument
gives the inscription very badly indeed.  Also, it was Ben Jonson's
stepfather, not his 'father-in-law,' as stated, who was the bricklayer;
but it is quite useless to dwell upon these things, as nobody nowadays
seems to have any time either to correct proofs or to consult
authorities.

One of the most pleasing volumes that has appeared as yet in the
Canterbury Series is the collection of Allan Ramsay's poems.  Ramsay,
whose profession was the making of periwigs, and whose pleasure was the
making of poetry, is always delightful reading, except when he tries to
write English and to imitate Pope.  His Gentle Shepherd is a charming
pastoral play, full of humour and romance; his Vision has a good deal of
natural fire; and some of his songs, such as The Yellow-hair'd Laddie and
The Lass of Patie's Mill, might rank beside those of Burns.  The preface
to this attractive little edition is from the pen of Mr. J. Logie
Robertson, and the simple, straightforward style in which it is written
contrasts favourably with the silly pompous manner affected by so many of
the other editors of the series.

Ramsay's life is worth telling well, and Mr. Robertson tells it well, and
gives us a really capital picture of Edinburgh society in the early half
of the last century.

Dante for Beginners, by Miss Arabella Shore, is a sort of literary guide-
book.  What Virgil was to the great Florentine, Miss Shore would be to
the British public, and her modest little volume can do no possible harm
to Dante, which is more than one can say of many commentaries on the
Divine Comedy.

Miss Phillimore's Studies in Italian Literature is a much more elaborate
work, and displays a good deal of erudition.  Indeed, the erudition is
sometimes displayed a little too much, and we should like to see the lead
of learning transmuted more often into the gold of thought.  The essays
on Petrarch and Tasso are tedious, but those on Aleardi and Count
Arrivabene are excellent, particularly the former.  Aleardi was a poet of
wonderful descriptive power, and though, as he said himself, he
subordinated his love of poetry to his love of country, yet in such
service he found perfect freedom.

The article on Edoardo Fusco also is full of interest, and is a timely
tribute to the memory of one who did so much for the education and
culture of modern Italy.  On the whole, the book is well worth reading;
so well worth reading, indeed, that we hope that the foolish remarks on
the Greek Drama will be amended in a second edition, or, which would be
better still, struck out altogether.  They show a want of knowledge that
must be the result of years of study.

(1) The Master of Tanagra.  Translated from the German of Ernst von
Wildenbruch by the Baroness von Lauer.  (H. Grevel and Co.)

(2) Moliere et Shakespeare.  By Paul Stapfer.  (Hachette.)

(3) Annals of the Life of Shakespeare.  (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)

(4) Poems by Allan Ramsay.  Selected and arranged, with a Biographical
Sketch of the Poet, by J. Logie Robertson, M.A. 'Canterbury Poets.'
(Walter Scott.)

(5) Dante for Beginners.  By Arabella Shore.  (Chapman and Hall.)

(6) Studies in Italian Literature.  By Miss Phillimore.  (Sampson Low,
Marston and Co.)




A CHEAP EDITION OF A GREAT MAN


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 18, 1887.)

Formerly we used to canonise our great men; nowadays we vulgarise them.
The vulgarisation of Rossetti has been going on for some time past with
really remarkable success, and there seems no probability at present of
the process being discontinued.  The grass was hardly green upon the
quiet grave in Birchington churchyard when Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. William
Sharp rushed into print with their Memoirs and Recollections.  Then came
the usual mob of magazine-hacks with their various views and attitudes,
and now Mr. Joseph Knight has produced for the edification of the British
public a popular biography of the poet of the Blessed Damozel, the
painter of Dante's Dream.

It is only fair to state that Mr. Knight's work is much better than that
of his predecessors in the same field.  His book is, on the whole,
modestly and simply written; whatever its other faults may be, it is at
least free from affectation of any kind; and it makes no serious pretence
at being either exhaustive or definitive.  Yet the best we can say of it
is that it is just the sort of biography Guildenstern might have written
of Hamlet.  Nor does its unsatisfactory character come merely from the
ludicrous inadequacy of the materials at Mr. Knight's disposal; it is the
whole scheme and method of the book that is radically wrong.  Rossetti's
was a great personality, and personalities such as his do not easily
survive shilling primers.  Sooner or later they have inevitably to come
down to the level of their biographers, and in the present instance
nothing could be more absolutely commonplace than the picture Mr. Knight
gives us of the wonderful seer and singer whose life he has so recklessly
essayed to write.

No doubt there are many people who will be deeply interested to know that
Rossetti was once chased round his garden by an infuriated zebu he was
trying to exhibit to Mr. Whistler, or that he had a great affection for a
dog called 'Dizzy,' or that 'sloshy' was one of his favourite words of
contempt, or that Mr. Gosse thought him very like Chaucer in appearance,
or that he had 'an absolute disqualification' for whist-playing, or that
he was very fond of quoting the Bab Ballads, or that he once said that if
he could live by writing poetry he would see painting d---d!  For our
part, however, we cannot help expressing our regret that such a shallow
and superficial biography as this should ever have been published.  It is
but a sorry task to rip the twisted ravel from the worn garment of life
and to turn the grout in a drained cup.  Better, after all, that we knew
a painter only through his vision and a poet through his song, than that
the image of a great man should be marred and made mean for us by the
clumsy geniality of good intentions.  A true artist, and such Rossetti
undoubtedly was, reveals himself so perfectly in his work, that unless a
biographer has something more valuable to give us than idle anecdotes and
unmeaning tales, his labour is misspent and his industry misdirected.

Bad, however, as is Mr. Knight's treatment of Rossetti's life, his
treatment of Rossetti's poetry is infinitely worse.  Considering the
small size of the volume, and the consequently limited number of
extracts, the amount of misquotation is almost incredible, and puts all
recent achievements in this sphere of modern literature completely into
the shade.  The fine line in the first canto of Rose Mary:

   What glints there like a lance that flees?

appears as:

   What glints there like a _glance_ that flees?

which is very painful nonsense; in the description of that graceful and
fanciful sonnet Autumn Idleness, the deer are represented as '_grazing_
from hillock eaves' instead of gazing from hillock-eaves; the opening of
Dantis Tenebrae is rendered quite incomprehensible by the substitution of
'my' for 'thy' in the second line; even such a well-known ballad as
Sister Helen is misquoted, and, indeed, from the Burden of Nineveh, the
Blessed Damozel, the King's Tragedy and Guido Cavalcanti's lovely
ballata, down to the Portrait and such sonnets as Love-sweetness,
Farewell to the Glen, and A Match with the Moon, there is not one single
poem that does not display some careless error or some stupid misprint.

As for Rossetti's elaborate system of punctuation, Mr. Knight pays no
attention to it whatsoever.  Indeed, he shows quite a rollicking
indifference to all the secrets and subtleties of style, and inserts or
removes stops in a manner that is absolutely destructive to the lyrical
beauty of the verse.  The hyphen, also, so constantly employed by
Rossetti in the case of such expressions as 'hillock-eaves' quoted above,
'hill-fire,' 'birth-hour,' and the like, is almost invariably
disregarded, and by the brilliant omission of a semicolon Mr. Knight has
succeeded in spoiling one of the best stanzas in The Staff and Scrip--a
poem, by the way, that he speaks of as The Staff and the Scrip (sic).
After this tedious comedy of errors it seems almost unnecessary to point
out that the earliest Italian poet is not called Ciullo D'Alcano (sic),
or that The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (sic) is not the title of Clough's
boisterous epic, or that Dante and his Cycle (sic) is not the name
Rossetti gave to his collection of translations; and why Troy Town should
appear in the index as Tory Town is really quite inexplicable, unless it
is intended as a compliment to Mr. Hall Caine who once dedicated, or
rather tried to dedicate, to Rossetti a lecture on the relations of poets
to politics.  We are sorry, too, to find an English dramatic critic
misquoting Shakespeare, as we had always been of opinion that this was a
privilege reserved specially for our English actors.  We sincerely hope
that there will soon be an end to all biographies of this kind.  They rob
life of much of its dignity and its wonder, add to death itself a new
terror, and make one wish that all art were anonymous.  Nor could there
have been any more unfortunate choice of a subject for popular treatment
than that to which we owe the memoir that now lies before us.  A pillar
of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who knew him
not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and tittle-tattle
of a shallow age.  He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul,
nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at.
Passionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature
something of high austerity.  He loved seclusion, and hated notoriety,
and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years after his
death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular biographies,
sandwiched between the author of Pickwick and the Great Lexicographer.
One man alone, the friend his verse won for him, did he desire should
write his life, and it is to Mr. Theodore Watts that we, too, must look
to give us the real Rossetti.  It may be admitted at once that Mr.
Watts's subject has for the moment been a little spoiled for him.  Rude
hands have touched it, and unmusical voices have made it sound almost
common in our ears.  Yet none the less is it for him to tell us of the
marvel of this man whose art he has analysed with such exquisite insight,
whose life he knows as no one else can know it, whom he so loyally loved
and tended, and by whom he was so loyally beloved in turn.  As for the
others, the scribblers and nibblers of literature, if they indeed
reverence Rossetti's memory, let them pay him the one homage he would
most have valued, the gracious homage of silence.  'Though you can fret
me, yet you cannot play upon me,' says Hamlet to his false friend, and
even so might Rossetti speak to those well-intentioned mediocrities who
would seem to know his stops and would sound him to the top of his
compass.  True, they cannot fret him now, for he has passed beyond the
possibility of pain; yet they cannot play upon him either; it is not for
them to pluck out the heart of his mystery.

There is, however, one feature of this book that deserves unstinted
praise.  Mr. Anderson's bibliography will be found of immense use by
every student of Rossetti's work and influence.  Perhaps Young's very
powerful attack on Pre-Raphaelitism, as expounded by Mr. Ruskin
(Longmans, 1857), might be included, but, in all other respects, it seems
quite complete, and the chronological list of paintings and drawings is
really admirable.  When this unfortunate 'Great Writers' Series comes to
an end, Mr. Anderson's bibliographies should be collected together and
published in a separate volume.  At present they are in a very second-
rate company indeed.

Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  By Joseph Knight.  'Great Writers'
Series.  (Walter Scott.)




MR. MORRIS'S ODYSSEY


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 26, 1887.)

Of all our modern poets, Mr. William Morris is the one best qualified by
nature and by art to translate for us the marvellous epic of the
wanderings of Odysseus.  For he is our only true story-singer since
Chaucer; if he is a Socialist, he is also a Saga-man; and there was a
time when he was never wearied of telling us strange legends of gods and
men, wonderful tales of chivalry and romance.  Master as he is of
decorative and descriptive verse, he has all the Greek's joy in the
visible aspect of things, all the Greek's sense of delicate and
delightful detail, all the Greek's pleasure in beautiful textures and
exquisite materials and imaginative designs; nor can any one have a
keener sympathy with the Homeric admiration for the workers and the
craftsmen in the various arts, from the stainers in white ivory and the
embroiderers in purple and fold, to the weaver sitting by the loom and
the dyer dipping in the vat, the chaser of shield and helmet, the carver
of wood or stone.  And to all this is added the true temper of high
romance, the power to make the past as real to us as the present, the
subtle instinct to discern passion, the swift impulse to portray life.

It is no wonder the lovers of Greek literature have so eagerly looked
forward to Mr. Morris's version of the Odyssean epic, and now that the
first volume has appeared, it is not extravagant to say that of all our
English translations this is the most perfect and the most satisfying.  In
spite of Coleridge's well-known views on the subject, we have always held
that Chapman's Odyssey is immeasurably inferior to his Iliad, the mere
difference of metre alone being sufficient to set the former in a
secondary place; Pope's Odyssey, with its glittering rhetoric and smart
antithesis, has nothing of the grand manner of the original; Cowper is
dull, and Bryant dreadful, and Worsley too full of Spenserian
prettinesses; while excellent though Messrs. Butcher and Lang's version
undoubtedly is in many respects, still, on the whole, it gives us merely
the facts of the Odyssey without providing anything of its artistic
effect.  Avia's translation even, though better than almost all its
predecessors in the same field, is not worthy of taking rank beside Mr.
Morris's, for here we have a true work of art, a rendering not merely of
language into language, but of poetry into poetry, and though the new
spirit added in the transfusion may seem to many rather Norse than Greek,
and, perhaps at times, more boisterous than beautiful, there is yet a
vigour of life in every line, a splendid ardour through each canto, that
stirs the blood while one reads like the sound of a trumpet, and that,
producing a physical as well as a spiritual delight, exults the senses no
less than it exalts the soul.  It may be admitted at once that, here and
there, Mr. Morris has missed something of the marvellous dignity of the
Homeric verse, and that, in his desire for rushing and ringing metre, he
has occasionally sacrificed majesty to movement, and made stateliness
give place to speed; but it is really only in such blank verse as
Milton's that this effect of calm and lofty music can be attained, and in
all other respects blank verse is the most inadequate medium for
reproducing the full flow and fervour of the Greek hexameter.  One merit,
at any rate, Mr. Morris's version entirely and absolutely possesses.  It
is, in no sense of the word, literary; it seems to deal immediately with
life itself, and to take from the reality of things its own form and
colour; it is always direct and simple, and at its best has something of
the 'large utterance of the early gods.'

As for individual passages of beauty, nothing could be better than the
wonderful description of the house of the Phoeacian king, or the whole
telling of the lovely legend of Circe, or the manner in which the pageant
of the pale phantoms in Hades is brought before our eyes.  Perhaps the
huge epic humour of the escape from the Cyclops is hardly realised, but
there is always a linguistic difficulty about rendering this fascinating
story into English, and where we are given so much poetry we should not
complain about losing a pun; and the exquisite idyll of the meeting and
parting with the daughter of Alcinous is really delightfully told.  How
good, for instance, is this passage taken at random from the Sixth Book:

   But therewith unto the handmaids goodly Odysseus spake:
   'Stand off I bid you, damsels, while the work in hand I take,
   And wash the brine from my shoulders, and sleek them all around.
   Since verily now this long while sweet oil they have not found.
   But before you nought will I wash me, for shame I have indeed,
   Amidst of fair-tressed damsels to be all bare of weed.'
   So he spake and aloof they gat them, and thereof they told the may,
   But Odysseus with the river from his body washed away
   The brine from his back and his shoulders wrought broad and mightily,
   And from his head was he wiping the foam of the untilled sea;
   But when he had throughly washed him, and the oil about him had shed
   He did upon the raiment the gift of the maid unwed.
   But Athene, Zeus-begotten, dealt with him in such wise
   That bigger yet was his seeming, and mightier to all eyes,
   With the hair on his head crisp curling as the bloom of the daffodil.
   And as when the silver with gold is o'erlaid by a man of skill,
   Yea, a craftsman whom Hephaestus and Pallas Athene have taught
   To be master over masters, and lovely work he hath wrought;
   So she round his head and his shoulders shed grace abundantly.

It may be objected by some that the line

   With the hair on his head crisp curling as the bloom of the daffodil,

is a rather fanciful version of

   [Greek text]

and it certainly seems probable that the allusion is to the dark colour
of the hero's hair; still, the point is not one of much importance,
though it may be worth noting that a similar expression occurs in
Ogilby's superbly illustrated translation of the Odyssey, published in
1665, where Charles II.'s Master of the Revels in Ireland gives the
passage thus:

   Minerva renders him more tall and fair,
   Curling in rings like daffodils his hair.

No anthology, however, can show the true merit of Mr. Morris's
translation, whose real merit does not depend on stray beauties, nor is
revealed by chance selections, but lies in the absolute rightness and
coherence of the whole, in its purity and justice of touch, its freedom
from affectation and commonplace, its harmony of form and matter.  It is
sufficient to say that this is a poet's version of a poet, and for such
surely we should be thankful.  In these latter days of coarse and vulgar
literature, it is something to have made the great sea-epic of the South
native and natural to our northern isle, something to have shown that our
English speech may be a pipe through which Greek lips can blow, something
to have taught Nausicaa to speak the same language as Perdita.

The Odyssey of Homer.  Done into English Verse by William Morris, author
of The Earthly Paradise.  In two volumes.  Volume I.  (Reeves and
Turner.)

For review of Volume II. see Mr. Morris's Completion of the Odyssey, page
215.




A BATCH OF NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 2, 1887.)

Of the three great Russian novelists of our time Tourgenieff is by far
the finest artist.  He has that spirit of exquisite selection, that
delicate choice of detail, which is the essence of style; his work is
entirely free from any personal intention; and by taking existence at its
most fiery-coloured moments he can distil into a few pages of perfect
prose the moods and passions of many lives.

Count Tolstoi's method is much larger, and his field of vision more
extended.  He reminds us sometimes of Paul Veronese, and, like that great
painter, can crowd, without over-crowding, the giant canvas on which he
works.  We may not at first gain from his works that artistic unity of
impression which is Tourgenieff's chief charm, but once that we have
mastered the details the whole seems to have the grandeur and the
simplicity of an epic.  Dostoieffski differs widely from both his rivals.
He is not so fine an artist as Tourgenieff, for he deals more with the
facts than with the effects of life; nor has he Tolstoi's largeness of
vision and epic dignity; but he has qualities that are distinctively and
absolutely his own, such as a fierce intensity of passion and
concentration of impulse, a power of dealing with the deepest mysteries
of psychology and the most hidden springs of life, and a realism that is
pitiless in its fidelity, and terrible because it is true.  Some time ago
we had occasion to draw attention to his marvellous novel Crime and
Punishment, where in the haunt of impurity and vice a harlot and an
assassin meet together to read the story of Dives and Lazarus, and the
outcast girl leads the sinner to make atonement for his sin; nor is the
book entitled Injury and Insult at all inferior to that great
masterpiece.  Mean and ordinary though the surroundings of the story may
seem, the heroine Natasha is like one of the noble victims of Greek
tragedy; she is Antigone with the passion of Phaedra, and it is
impossible to approach her without a feeling of awe.  Greek also is the
gloom of Nemesis that hangs over each character, only it is a Nemesis
that does not stand outside of life, but is part of our own nature and of
the same material as life itself.  Aleosha, the beautiful young lad whom
Natasha follows to her doom, is a second Tito Melema, and has all Tito's
charm and grace and fascination.  Yet he is different.  He would never
have denied Baldassare in the Square at Florence, nor lied to Romola
about Tessa.  He has a magnificent, momentary sincerity, a boyish
unconsciousness of all that life signifies, an ardent enthusiasm for all
that life cannot give.  There is nothing calculating about him.  He never
thinks evil, he only does it.  From a psychological point of view he is
one of the most interesting characters of modem fiction, as from an
artistic he is one of the most attractive.  As we grow to know him he
stirs strange questions for us, and makes us feel that it is not the
wicked only who do wrong, nor the bad alone who work evil.

And by what a subtle objective method does Dostoieffski show us his
characters!  He never tickets them with a list nor labels them with a
description.  We grow to know them very gradually, as we know people whom
we meet in society, at first by little tricks of manner, personal
appearance, fancies in dress, and the like; and afterwards by their deeds
and words; and even then they constantly elude us, for though
Dostoieffski may lay bare for us the secrets of their nature, yet he
never explains his personages away; they are always surprising us by
something that they say or do, and keep to the end the eternal mystery of
life.

Irrespective of its value as a work of art, this novel possesses a deep
autobiographical interest also, as the character of Vania, the poor
student who loves Natasha through all her sin and shame, is
Dostoieffski's study of himself.  Goethe once had to delay the completion
of one of his novels till experience had furnished him with new
situations, but almost before he had arrived at manhood Dostoieffski knew
life in its most real forms; poverty and suffering, pain and misery,
prison, exile, and love, were soon familiar to him, and by the lips of
Vania he has told his own story.  This note of personal feeling, this
harsh reality of actual experience, undoubtedly gives the book something
of its strange fervour and terrible passion, yet it has not made it
egotistic; we see things from every point of view, and we feel, not that
fiction has been trammelled by fact, but that fact itself has become
ideal and imaginative.  Pitiless, too, though Dostoieffski is in his
method as an artist, as a man he is full of human pity for all, for those
who do evil as well as for those who suffer it, for the selfish no less
than for those whose lives are wrecked for others and whose sacrifice is
in vain.  Since Adam Bede and Le Pere Goriot no more powerful novel has
been written than Insult and Injury.

Mr. Hardinge's book Willow Garth deals, strangely enough, with something
like the same idea, though the treatment is, of course, entirely
different.  A girl of high birth falls passionately in love with a young
farm-bailiff who is a sort of Arcadian Antinous and a very Ganymede in
gaiters.  Social difficulties naturally intervene, so she drowns her
handsome rustic in a convenient pond.  Mr. Hardinge has a most charming
style, and, as a writer, possesses both distinction and grace.  The book
is a delightful combination of romance and satire, and the heroine's
crime is treated in the most picturesque manner possible.

Marcella Grace tells of modern life in Ireland, and is one of the best
books Miss Mulholland has ever published.  In its artistic reserve, and
the perfect simplicity of its style, it is an excellent model for all
lady-novelists to follow, and the scene where the heroine finds the man,
who has been sent to shoot her, lying fever-stricken behind a hedge with
his gun by his side, is really remarkable.  Nor could anything be better
than Miss Mulholland's treatment of external nature.  She never shrieks
over scenery like a tourist, nor wearies us with sunsets like the Scotch
school; but all through her book there is a subtle atmosphere of purple
hills and silent moorland; she makes us live with nature and not merely
look at it.

The accomplished authoress of Soap was once compared to George Eliot by
the Court Journal, and to Carlyle by the Daily News, but we fear that we
cannot compete with our contemporaries in these daring comparisons.  Her
present book is very clever, rather vulgar, and contains some fine
examples of bad French.

As for A Marked Man, That Winter Night, and Driven Home, the first shows
some power of description and treatment, but is sadly incomplete; the
second is quite unworthy of any man of letters, and the third is
absolutely silly.  We sincerely hope that a few more novels like these
will be published, as the public will then find out that a bad book is
very dear at a shilling.

(1) Injury and Insult.  By Fedor Dostoieffski.  Translated from the
Russian by Frederick Whishaw.  (Vizetelly and Co.)

(2) The Willow Garth.  By W. M. Hardinge.  (Bentley and Son.)

(3) Marcella Grace.  By Rosa Mulholland.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(4) Soap.  By Constance MacEwen.  (Arrowsmith.)

(5) A Marked Man.  By Faucet Streets.  (Hamilton and Adams.)

(6) That Winter Night.  By Robert Buchanan.  (Arrowsmith.)

(7) Driven Home.  By Evelyn Owen.  (Arrowsmith.)




SOME NOVELS


(Saturday Review, May 7, 1887.)

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of
place is history.  In novels they are detestable, and Miss Bayle's
Romance is entirely spoiled as a realistic presentation of life by the
author's attempt to introduce into her story a whole mob of modern
celebrities and notorieties, including the Heir Apparent and Mr. Edmund
Yates.  The identity of the latter personage is delicately veiled under
the pseudonym of 'Mr. Atlas, editor of the World,' but the former appears
as 'The Prince of Wales' pur et simple, and is represented as spending
his time yachting in the Channel and junketing at Homburg with a second-
rate American family who, by the way, always address him as 'Prince,' and
show in other respects an ignorance that even their ignorance cannot
excuse.  Indeed, His Royal Highness is no mere spectator of the story; he
is one of the chief actors in it, and it is through his influence that
the noisy Chicago belle, whose lack of romance gives the book its title,
achieves her chief social success.  As for the conversation with which
the Prince is credited, it is of the most amazing kind.  We find him on
one page gravely discussing the depression of trade with Mr. Ezra P.
Bayle, a shoddy American millionaire, who promptly replies, 'Depression
of fiddle-sticks, Prince'; in another passage he naively inquires of the
same shrewd speculator whether the thunderstorms and prairie fires of the
West are still 'on so grand a scale' as when he visited Illinois; and we
are told in the second volume that, after contemplating the magnificent
view from St. Ives he exclaimed with enthusiasm, 'Surely Mr. Brett must
have had a scene like this in his eye when he painted Britannia's Realm?
I never saw anything more beautiful.'  Even Her Majesty figures in this
extraordinary story in spite of the excellent aphorism ne touchez pas a
la reine; and when Miss Alma J. Bayle is married to the Duke of Windsor's
second son she receives from the hands of royalty not merely the
customary Cashmere shawl of Court tradition, but also a copy of Diaries
in the Highlands inscribed 'To _the_ Lady Plowden Eton, with the kindest
wishes of Victoria R.I.', a mistake that the Queen, of all persons in the
world, is the least likely to have committed.  Perhaps, however, we are
treating Miss Bayle's Romance too seriously.  The book has really no
claim to be regarded as a novel at all.  It is simply a society paragraph
expanded into three volumes and, like most paragraphs of the kind, is in
the worst possible taste.  We are not by any means surprised that the
author, while making free with the names of others, has chosen to conceal
his own name; for no reputation could possibly survive the production of
such silly, stupid work; but we must say that we are surprised that this
book has been brought out by the Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty
the Queen.  We do not know what the duties attaching to this office are,
but we should not have thought that the issuing of vulgar stories about
the Royal Family was one of them.

From Heather Hills is very pleasant reading indeed.  It is healthy
without being affected; and though Mrs. Perks gives us many descriptions
of Scotch scenery we are glad to say that she has not adopted the common
chromo-lithographic method of those popular North British novelists who
have never yet fully realised the difference between colour and colours,
and who imagine that by emptying a paint box over every page they can
bring before us the magic of mist and mountain, the wonder of sea or
glen.  Mrs. Perks has a grace and delicacy of touch that is quite
charming, and she can deal with nature without either botanising or being
blatant, which nowadays is a somewhat rare accomplishment.  The interest
of the story centres on Margaret Dalrymple, a lovely Scotch girl who is
brought to London by her aunt, takes every one by storm and falls in love
with young Lord Erinwood, who is on the brink of proposing to her when he
is dissuaded from doing so by a philosophic man of the world who thinks
that a woodland Artemis is a bad wife for an English peer, and that no
woman who has a habit of saying exactly what she means can possibly get
on in smart society.  The would-be philosopher is ultimately hoist with
his own petard, as he falls in love himself with Margaret Dalrymple, and
as for the weak young hero he is promptly snatched up, rather against his
will, by a sort of Becky Sharp, who succeeds in becoming Lady Erinwood.
However, a convenient railway accident, the deus ex machina of nineteenth-
century novels, carries Miss Norma Novello off; and everybody is finally
made happy, except, of course, the philosopher, who gets only a lesson
where he wanted to get love.  There is just one part of the novel to
which we must take exception.  The whole story of Alice Morgan is not
merely needlessly painful, but it is of very little artistic value.  A
tragedy may be the basis of a story, but it should never be simply a
casual episode.  At least, if it is so, it entirely fails to produce any
artistic effect.  We hope, too, that in Mrs. Perks's next novel she will
not allow her hero to misquote English poetry.  This is a privilege
reserved for Mrs. Malaprop.

A constancy that lasts through three volumes is often rather tedious, so
that we are glad to make the acquaintance of Miss Lilian Ufford, the
heroine of Mrs. Houston's A Heart on Fire.  This young lady begins by
being desperately in love with Mr. Frank Thorburn, a struggling
schoolmaster, and ends by being desperately in love with Colonel Dallas,
a rich country gentleman who spends most of his time and his money in
preaching a crusade against beer.  After she gets engaged to the Colonel
she discovers that Mr. Thorburn is in reality Lord Netherby's son and
heir, and for the moment she seems to have a true woman's regret at
having given up a pretty title; but all ends well, and the story is
brightly and pleasantly told.  The Colonel is a middle-aged Romeo of the
most impassioned character, and as it is his heart that is 'on fire,' he
may serve as a psychological pendant to La Femme de Quarante Ans.

Mr. G. Manville Fenn's A Bag of Diamonds belongs to the Drury Lane School
of Fiction and is a sort of fireside melodrama for the family circle.  It
is evidently written to thrill Bayswater, and no doubt Bayswater will be
thrilled.  Indeed, there is a great deal that is exciting in the book,
and the scene in which a kindly policeman assists two murderers to convey
their unconscious victim into a four-wheeled cab, under the impression
that they are a party of guests returning from a convivial supper in
Bloomsbury, is quite excellent of its kind, and, on the whole, not too
improbable, considering that shilling literature is always making demands
on our credulity without ever appealing to our imagination.

The Great Hesper, by Mr. Frank Barrett, has at least the merit of
introducing into fiction an entirely new character.  The villain is
Nyctalops, and, though we are not prepared to say that there is any
necessary connection between Nyctalopy and crime, we are quite ready to
accept Mr. Barrett's picture of Jan Van Hoeck as an interesting example
of the modern method of dealing with life.  For, Pathology is rapidly
becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in art, as in politics,
there is a great future for monsters.  What a Nyctalops is we leave Mr.
Barrett to explain.  His novel belongs to a class of book that many
people might read once for curiosity but nobody could read a second time
for pleasure.

A Day after the Fair is an account of a holiday tour through Scotland
taken by two young barristers, one of whom rescues a pretty girl from
drowning, falls in love with her, and is rewarded for his heroism by
seeing her married to his friend.  The idea of the book is not bad, but
the treatment is very unsatisfactory, and combines the triviality of the
tourist with the dulness of good intentions.

'Mr. Winter' is always amusing and audacious, though we cannot say that
we entirely approve of the names he gives to his stories.  Bootle's Baby
was a masterpiece, but Houp-la was a terrible title, and That Imp is not
much better.  The book, however, is undoubtedly clever, and the Imp in
question is not a Nyctalops nor a specimen for a travelling museum, but a
very pretty girl who, because an officer has kissed her without any
serious matrimonial intentions, exerts all her fascinations to bring the
unfortunate Lovelace to her feet and, having succeeded in doing so,
promptly rejects him with a virtuous indignation that is as delightful as
it is out of place.  We must confess that we have a good deal of sympathy
for 'Driver' Dallas, of the Royal Horse, who suffers fearful agonies at
what he imagines is a heartless flirtation on the part of the lady of his
dreams; but the story is told from the Imp's point of view, and as such
we must accept it.  There is a very brilliant description of a battle in
the Soudan, and the account of barrack life is, of course, admirable.  So
admirable indeed is it that we hope that 'Mr. Winter' will soon turn his
attention to new topics and try to handle fresh subjects.  It would be
sad if such a clever and observant writer became merely the garrison hack
of literature.  We would also earnestly beg 'Mr. Winter' not to write
foolish prefaces about unappreciative critics; for it is only
mediocrities and old maids who consider it a grievance to be
misunderstood.

(1) Miss Bayle's Romance: A Story of To-Day.  (Bentley and Son,
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen.)

(2) From Heather Hills.  By Mrs. J. Hartley Perks.  (Hurst and Blackett.)

(3) A Heart on Fire.  By Mrs. Houston.  (F. V. White and Co.)

(4) A Bag of Diamonds.  By George Manville Fenn.  (Ward and Downey.)

(5) The Great Hesper.  By Frank Barrett.  (Ward and Downey.)

(6) A Day after the Fair.  By William Cairns.  (Swan Sonnenschein and
Co.)

(7) That Imp.  By John Strange Winter, Author of Booties' Baby, etc.  (F.
V. White and Co.)




THE POETS' CORNER--III


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 30, 1887.)

Such a pseudonym for a poet as 'Glenessa' reminds us of the good old days
of the Della Cruscans, but it would not be fair to attribute Glenessa's
poetry to any known school of literature, either past or present.
Whatever qualities it possesses are entirely its own.  Glenessa's most
ambitious work, and the one that gives the title to his book, is a poetic
drama about the Garden of Eden.  The subject is undoubtedly interesting,
but the execution can hardly be said to be quite worthy of it.  Devils,
on account of their inherent wickedness, may be excused for singing--

   Then we'll rally--rally--rally--
   Yes, we'll rally--rally O!--

but such scenes as--

   Enter ADAM.

   ADAM (excitedly).  Eve, where art thou?

   EVE (surprised).  Oh!

   ADAM (in astonishment).  Eve! my God, she's there
   Beside that fatal tree;

or--

   Enter ADAM and EVE.

   EVE (in astonishment).  Well, is not this surprising?

   ADAM (distracted).  It is--

seem to belong rather to the sphere of comedy than to that of serious
verse.  Poor Glenessa! the gods have not made him poetical, and we hope
he will abandon his wooing of the muse.  He is fitted, not for better,
but for other things.

Vortigern and Rowena is a cantata about the Britons and the Danes.  There
is a Druid priestess who sings of Cynthia and Endymion, and a chorus of
jubilant Vikings.  It is charmingly printed, and as a libretto for music
quite above the average.

As truly religious people are resigned to everything, even to mediocre
poetry, there is no reason at all why Madame Guyon's verses should not be
popular with a large section of the community.  Their editor, Mr. Dyer,
has reprinted the translations Cowper made for Mr. Bull, added some
versions of his own and written a pleasing preface about this gentle
seventeenth-century saint whose life was her best, indeed her only true
poem.

Mr. Pierce has discovered a tenth muse and writes impassioned verses to
the Goddess of Chess whom he apostrophises as 'Sublime Caissa'!  Zukertort
and Steinitz are his heroes, and he is as melodious on mates as he is
graceful on gambits.  We are glad to say, however, that he has other
subjects, and one of his poems beginning:

   Cedar boxes deeply cut,
      China bowls of quaint device,
      Heap'd with rosy leaves and spice,
   Violets in old volumes shut--

is very dainty and musical.

Mr. Clifford Harrison is well known as the most poetic of our reciters,
but as a writer himself of poetry he is not so famous.  Yet his little
volume In Hours of Leisure contains some charming pieces, and many of the
short fourteen-line poems are really pretty, though they are very
defective in form.  Indeed, of form Mr. Harrison is curiously careless.
Such rhymes as 'calm' and 'charm,' 'baize' and 'place,' 'jeu' and 'knew,'
are quite dreadful, while 'operas' and 'stars,' 'Gautama' and 'afar' are
too bad even for Steinway Hall.  Those who have Keats's genius may borrow
Keats's cockneyisms, but from minor poets we have a right to expect some
regard to the ordinary technique of verse.  However, if Mr. Harrison has
not always form, at least he has always feeling.  He has a wonderful
command over all the egotistic emotions, is quite conscious of the
artistic value of remorse, and displays a sincere sympathy with his own
moments of sadness, playing upon his moods as a young lady plays upon the
piano.  Now and then we come across some delicate descriptive touches,
such as

   The cuckoo knew its latest day had come,
   And told its name once more to all the hills,

and whenever Mr. Harrison writes about nature he is certainly pleasing
and picturesque but, as a rule, he is over-anxious about himself and
forgets that the personal expression of joy or sorrow is not poetry,
though it may afford excellent material for a sentimental diary.

The daily increasing class of readers that likes unintelligible poetry
should study AEonial.  It is in many ways a really remarkable production.
Very fantastic, very daring, crowded with strange metaphor and clouded by
monstrous imagery, it has a sort of turbid splendour about it, and should
the author some day add meaning to his music he may give us a true work
of art.  At present he hardly realises that an artist should be
articulate.

Seymour's Inheritance is a short novel in blank verse.  On the whole, it
is very harmless both in manner and matter, but we must protest against
such lines as

   And in the windows of his heart the blinds
   Of happiness had been drawn down by Grief,

for a simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.  Some
of the other poems are so simple and modest that we hope Mr. Ross will
not carry out his threat of issuing a 'more pretentious volume.'
Pretentious volumes of poetry are very common and very worthless.

Mr. Brodie's Lyrics of the Sea are spirited and manly, and show a certain
freedom of rhythmical movement, pleasant in days of wooden verse.  He is
at his best, however, in his sonnets.  Their architecture is not always
of the finest order but, here and there, one meets with lines that are
graceful and felicitous.

   Like silver swallows on a summer morn
   Cutting the air with momentary wings,

is pretty, and on flowers Mr. Brodie writes quite charmingly.  The only
thoroughly bad piece in the book is The Workman's Song.  Nothing can be
said in favour of

   Is there a bit of blue, boys?
      Is there a bit of blue?
   In heaven's leaden hue, boys?
         'Tis hope's eye peeping through . . .

for optimism of this kind is far more dispiriting than Schopenhauer or
Hartmann at their worst, nor are there really any grounds for supposing
that the British workman enjoys third-rate poetry.

(1) The Discovery and Other Poems.  By Glenessa.  (National Publishing
Co.)

(2) Vortigern and Rowena: A Dramatic Cantata.  By Edwin Ellis Griffin.
(Hutchings and Crowsley.)

(3) The Poems of Madame de la Mothe Guyon.  Edited and arranged by the
Rev. A. Saunders Dyer, M.A.  (Bryce and Son.)

(4) Stanzas and Sonnets.  By J. Pierce, M.A.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(5) In Hours of Leisure.  By Clifford Harrison.  (Kegan Paul.)

(6) AEonial.  By the Author of The White Africans.  (Elliot Stock.)

(7) Seymour's Inheritance.  By James Ross.  (Arrowsmith.)

(8) Lyrics of the Sea.  By E. H. Brodie.  (Bell and Sons.)




MR. PATER'S IMAGINARY PORTRAITS


(Pall Mall Gazette, June 11, 1887.)

To convey ideas through the medium of images has always been the aim of
those who are artists as well as thinkers in literature, and it is to a
desire to give a sensuous environment to intellectual concepts that we
owe Mr. Pater's last volume.  For these Imaginary or, as we should prefer
to call them, Imaginative Portraits of his, form a series of philosophic
studies in which the philosophy is tempered by personality, and the
thought shown under varying conditions of mood and manner, the very
permanence of each principle gaining something through the change and
colour of the life through which it finds expression.  The most
fascinating of all these pictures is undoubtedly that of Sebastian Van
Storck.  The account of Watteau is perhaps a little too fanciful, and the
description of him as one who was 'always a seeker after something in the
world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all,' seems to
us more applicable to him who saw Mona Lisa sitting among the rocks than
to the gay and debonair peintre des fetes galantes.  But Sebastian, the
grave young Dutch philosopher, is charmingly drawn.  From the first
glimpse we get of him, skating over the water-meadows with his plume of
squirrel's tail and his fur muff, in all the modest pleasantness of
boyhood, down to his strange death in the desolate house amid the sands
of the Helder, we seem to see him, to know him, almost to hear the low
music of his voice.  He is a dreamer, as the common phrase goes, and yet
he is poetical in this sense, that his theorems shape life for him,
directly.  Early in youth he is stirred by a fine saying of Spinoza, and
sets himself to realise the ideal of an intellectual disinterestedness,
separating himself more and more from the transient world of sensation,
accident and even affection, till what is finite and relative becomes of
no interest to him, and he feels that as nature is but a thought of his,
so he himself is but a passing thought of God.  This conception, of the
power of a mere metaphysical abstraction over the mind of one so
fortunately endowed for the reception of the sensible world, is
exceedingly delightful, and Mr. Pater has never written a more subtle
psychological study, the fact that Sebastian dies in an attempt to save
the life of a little child giving to the whole story a touch of poignant
pathos and sad irony.

Denys l'Auxerrois is suggested by a figure found, or said to be found, on
some old tapestries in Auxerre, the figure of a 'flaxen and flowery
creature, sometimes wellnigh naked among the vine-leaves, sometimes
muffled in skins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but
always with a strong impress of real character and incident from the
veritable streets' of the town itself.  From this strange design Mr.
Pater has fashioned a curious mediaeval myth of the return of Dionysus
among men, a myth steeped in colour and passion and old romance, full of
wonder and full of worship, Denys himself being half animal and half god,
making the world mad with a new ecstasy of living, stirring the artists
simply by his visible presence, drawing the marvel of music from reed and
pipe, and slain at last in a stage-play by those who had loved him.  In
its rich affluence of imagery this story is like a picture by Mantegna,
and indeed Mantegna might have suggested the description of the pageant
in which Denys rides upon a gaily-painted chariot, in soft silken raiment
and, for head-dress, a strange elephant scalp with gilded tusks.

If Denys l'Auxerrois symbolises the passion of the senses and Sebastian
Van Storck the philosophic passion, as they certainly seem to do, though
no mere formula or definition can adequately express the freedom and
variety of the life that they portray, the passion for the imaginative
world of art is the basis of the story of Duke Carl of Rosenmold.  Duke
Carl is not unlike the late King of Bavaria, in his love of France, his
admiration for the Grand Monarque and his fantastic desire to amaze and
to bewilder, but the resemblance is possibly only a chance one.  In fact
Mr. Pater's young hero is the precursor of the Aufklarung of the last
century, the German precursor of Herder and Lessing and Goethe himself,
and finds the forms of art ready to his hand without any national spirit
to fill them or make them vital and responsive.  He too dies, trampled to
death by the soldiers of the country he so much admired, on the night of
his marriage with a peasant girl, the very failure of his life lending
him a certain melancholy grace and dramatic interest.

On the whole, then, this is a singularly attractive book.  Mr. Pater is
an intellectual impressionist.  He does not weary us with any definite
doctrine or seek to suit life to any formal creed.  He is always looking
for exquisite moments and, when he has found them, he analyses them with
delicate and delightful art and then passes on, often to the opposite
pole of thought or feeling, knowing that every mood has its own quality
and charm and is justified by its mere existence.  He has taken the
sensationalism of Greek philosophy and made it a new method of art
criticism.  As for his style, it is curiously ascetic.  Now and then, we
come across phrases with a strange sensuousness of expression, as when he
tells us how Denys l'Auxerrois, on his return from a long journey, 'ate
flesh for the first time, tearing the hot, red morsels with his delicate
fingers in a kind of wild greed,' but such passages are rare.  Asceticism
is the keynote of Mr. Pater's prose; at times it is almost too severe in
its self-control and makes us long for a little more freedom.  For
indeed, the danger of such prose as his is that it is apt to become
somewhat laborious.  Here and there, one is tempted to say of Mr. Pater
that he is 'a seeker after something in language, that is there in no
satisfying measure, or not at all.'  The continual preoccupation with
phrase and epithet has its drawbacks as well as its virtues.  And yet,
when all is said, what wonderful prose it is, with its subtle
preferences, its fastidious purity, its rejection of what is common or
ordinary!  Mr. Pater has the true spirit of selection, the true tact of
omission.  If he be not among the greatest prose writers of our
literature he is, at least, our greatest artist in prose; and though it
may be admitted that the best style is that which seems an unconscious
result rather than a conscious aim, still in these latter days when
violent rhetoric does duty for eloquence and vulgarity usurps the name of
nature, we should be grateful for a style that deliberately aims at
perfection of form, that seeks to produce its effect by artistic means
and sets before itself an ideal of grave and chastened beauty.

Imaginary Portraits.  By Walter Pater, M.A., Fellow of Brasenose College,
Oxford.  (Macmillan and Co.)




A GOOD HISTORICAL NOVEL


(Pall Mall Gazette, August 8, 1887.)

Most modern Russian novelists look upon the historical novel as a faux
genre, or a sort of fancy dress ball in literature, a mere puppet show,
not a true picture of life.  Yet their own history is full of such
wonderful scenes and situations, ready for dramatist or novelist to treat
of, that we are not surprised that, in spite of the dogmas of the ecole
naturaliste, Mr. Stephen Coleridge has taken the Russia of the sixteenth
century as the background for his strange tale.  Indeed, there is much to
be said in favour of a form remote from actual experience.  Passion
itself gains something from picturesqueness of surroundings; distance of
time, unlike distance of space, makes objects larger and more vivid; over
the common things of contemporary life there hangs a mist of familiarity
that often makes their meaning obscure.  There are also moments when we
feel that but little artistic pleasure is to be gained from the study of
the modern realistic school.  Its works are powerful but they are
painful, and after a time we tire of their harshness, their violence and
their crudity.  They exaggerate the importance of facts and underrate the
importance of fiction.  Such, at any rate, is the mood--and what is
criticism itself but a mood?--produced in us by a perusal of Mr.
Coleridge's Demetrius.  It is the story of a young lad of unknown
parentage who is brought up in the household of a Polish noble.  He is a
tall, fair-looking youth, by name Alexis, with a pride of bearing and
grace of manner that seem strange in one of such low station.  Suddenly
he is recognised by an exiled Russian noble as Demetrius, the son of Ivan
the Terrible who was supposed to have been murdered by the usurper Boris.
His identity is still further established by a strange cross of seven
emeralds that he wears round his neck, and by a Greek inscription in his
book of prayers which discloses the secret of his birth and the story of
his rescue.  He himself feels that the blood of kings beats in his veins,
and appeals to the nobles of the Polish Diet to espouse his cause.  By
his passionate utterance he makes them acknowledge him as the true Tsar
and invades Russia at the head of a large army.  The people throng to him
from every side, and Marfa, the widow of Ivan the Terrible, escapes from
the convent in which she has been immured by Boris and comes to meet her
son.  At first she seems not to recognise him, but the music of his voice
and the wonderful eloquence of his pleading win her over, and she
embraces him in presence of the army and admits him to be her child.  The
usurper, terrified at the tidings, and deserted by his soldiers, commits
suicide, and Alexis enters Moscow in triumph, and is crowned in the
Kremlin.  Yet he is not the true Demetrius, after all.  He is deceived
himself and he deceives others.  Mr. Coleridge has drawn his character
with delicate subtlety and quick insight, and the scene in which he
discovers that he is no son of Ivan's and has no right to the name he
claims, is exceedingly powerful and dramatic.  One point of resemblance
does exist between Alexis and the real Demetrius.  Both of them are
murdered, and with the death of this strange hero Mr. Coleridge ends his
remarkable story.

On the whole, Mr. Coleridge has written a really good historical novel
and may be congratulated on his success.  The style is particularly
interesting, and the narrative parts of the book are deserving of high
praise for their clearness, dignity and sobriety.  The speeches and
passages of dialogue are not so fortunate, as they have an awkward
tendency to lapse into bad blank verse.  Here, for instance, is a speech
printed by Mr. Coleridge as prose, in which the true music of prose is
sacrificed to a false metrical system which is at once monotonous and
tiresome:

   But Death, who brings us freedom from all falsehood,
   Who heals the heart when the physician fails,
   Who comforts all whom life cannot console,
   Who stretches out in sleep the tired watchers;
   He takes the King and proves him but a beggar!
   He speaks, and we, deaf to our Maker's voice,
   Hear and obey the call of our destroyer!
   Then let us murmur not at anything;
   For if our ills are curable, 'tis idle,
   And if they are past remedy, 'tis vain.
   The worst our strongest enemy can do
   Is take from us our life, and this indeed
   Is in the power of the weakest also.

This is not good prose; it is merely blank verse of an inferior quality,
and we hope that Mr. Coleridge in his next novel will not ask us to
accept second-rate poetry as musical prose.  For, that Mr. Coleridge is a
young writer of great ability and culture cannot be doubted and, indeed,
in spite of the error we have pointed out, Demetrius remains one of the
most fascinating and delightful novels that has appeared this season.

Demetrius.  By the Hon. Stephen Coleridge.  (Kegan Paul.)




NEW NOVELS


(Saturday Review, August 20, 1887.)

Teutonic fiction, as a rule, is somewhat heavy and very sentimental; but
Werner's Her Son, excellently translated by Miss Tyrrell, is really a
capital story and would make a capital play.  Old Count Steinruck has two
grandsons, Raoul and Michael.  The latter is brought up like a peasant's
child, cruelly treated by his grandfather and by the peasant to whose
care he is confided, his mother, the Countess Louis Steinruck, having
married an adventurer and a gambler.  He is the rough hero of the tale,
the Saint Michael of that war with evil which is life; while Raoul,
spoiled by his grandfather and his French mother, betrays his country and
tarnishes his name.  At every step in the narrative these two young men
come into collision.  There is a war of character, a clash of
personalities.  Michael is proud, stern and noble.  Raoul is weak,
charming and evil.  Michael has the world against him and conquers.  Raoul
has the world on his side and loses.  The whole story is full of movement
and life, and the psychology of the characters is displayed by action not
by analysis, by deeds not by description.  Though there are three long
volumes, we do not tire of the tale.  It has truth, passion and power,
and there are no better things than these in fiction.

The interest of Mr. Sale Lloyd's Scamp depends on one of those
misunderstandings which is the stock-in-trade of second-rate novelists.
Captain Egerton falls in love with Miss Adela Thorndyke, who is a sort of
feeble echo of some of Miss Broughton's heroines, but will not marry her
because he has seen her talking with a young man who lives in the
neighbourhood and is one of his oldest friends.  We are sorry to say that
Miss Thorndyke remains quite faithful to Captain Egerton, and goes so far
as to refuse for his sake the rector of the parish, a local baronet, and
a real live lord.  There are endless pages of five o'clock tea-prattle
and a good many tedious characters.  Such novels as Scamp are possibly
more easy to write than they are to read.

James Hepburn belongs to a very different class of book.  It is not a
mere chaos of conversation, but a strong story of real life, and it
cannot fail to give Miss Veitch a prominent position among modern
novelists.  James Hepburn is the Free Church minister of Mossgiel, and
presides over a congregation of pleasant sinners and serious hypocrites.
Two people interest him, Lady Ellinor Farquharson and a handsome young
vagabond called Robert Blackwood.  Through his efforts to save Lady
Ellinor from shame and ruin he is accused of being her lover; through his
intimacy with Robert Blackwood he is suspected of having murdered a young
girl in his household.  A meeting of the elders and office-bearers of the
church is held to consider the question of the minister's resignation, at
which, to the amazement of every one, Robert Blackwood comes forth and
confesses to the crime of which Hepburn is accused.  The whole story is
exceedingly powerful, and there is no extravagant use of the Scotch
dialect, which is a great advantage to the reader.

The title-page of Tiff informs us that it was written by the author of
Lucy; or, a Great Mistake, which seems to us a form of anonymity, as we
have never heard of the novel in question.  We hope, however, that it was
better than Tiff, for Tiff is undeniably tedious.  It is the story of a
beautiful girl who has many lovers and loses them, and of an ugly girl
who has one lover and keeps him.  It is a rather confused tale, and there
are far too many love-scenes in it.  If this 'Favourite Fiction' Series,
in which Tiff appears, is to be continued, we would entreat the publisher
to alter the type and the binding.  The former is far too small: while,
as for the cover, it is of sham crocodile leather adorned with a blue
spider and a vulgar illustration of the heroine in the arms of a young
man in evening dress.  Dull as Tiff is--and its dulness is quite
remarkable--it does not deserve so detestable a binding.

(1) Her Son.  Translated from the German of E. Werner by Christina
Tyrrell.  (Richard Bentley and Son.)

(2) Scamp.  By J. Sale Lloyd.  (White and Co.)

(3) James Hepburn.  By Sophie Veitch.  (Alexander Gardner.)

(4) Tiff.  By the Author of Lucy; or, A Great Mistake.  'Favourite
Fiction' Series.  (William Stevens.)




TWO BIOGRAPHIES OF KEATS


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1887.)

A poet, said Keats once, 'is the most unpoetical of all God's creatures,'
and whether the aphorism be universally true or not, this is certainly
the impression produced by the two last biographies that have appeared of
Keats himself.  It cannot be said that either Mr. Colvin or Mr. William
Rossetti makes us love Keats more or understand him better.  In both
these books there is much that is like 'chaff in the mouth,' and in Mr.
Rossetti's there is not a little that is like 'brass on the palate.'  To
a certain degree this is, no doubt, inevitable nowadays.  Everybody pays
a penalty for peeping through keyholes, and the keyhole and the
backstairs are essential parts of the method of the modern biographers.
It is only fair, however, to state at the outset that Mr. Colvin has done
his work much better than Mr. Rossetti.  The account Mr. Colvin gives of
Keats's boyhood, for instance, is very pleasing, and so is the sketch of
Keats's circle of friends, both Leigh Hunt and Haydon being admirably
drawn.  Here and there, trivial family details are introduced without
much regard to proportion, and the posthumous panegyrics of devoted
friends are not really of so much value, in helping us to form any true
estimate of Keats's actual character, as Mr. Colvin seems to imagine.  We
have no doubt that when Bailey wrote to Lord Houghton that common-sense
and gentleness were Keats's two special characteristics the worthy
Archdeacon meant extremely well, but we prefer the real Keats, with his
passionate wilfulness, his fantastic moods and his fine inconsistence.
Part of Keats's charm as a man is his fascinating incompleteness.  We do
not want him reduced to a sand-paper smoothness or made perfect by the
addition of popular virtues.  Still, if Mr. Colvin has not given us a
very true picture of Keats's character, he has certainly told the story
of his life in a pleasant and readable manner.  He may not write with the
ease and grace of a man of letters, but he is never pretentious and not
often pedantic.

Mr. Rossetti's book is a great failure.  To begin with, Mr. Rossetti
commits the great mistake of separating the man from the artist.  The
facts of Keats's life are interesting only when they are shown in their
relation to his creative activity.  The moment they are isolated they are
either uninteresting or painful.  Mr. Rossetti complains that the early
part of Keats's life is uneventful and the latter part depressing, but
the fault lies with the biographer, not with the subject.

The book opens with a detailed account of Keats's life, in which he
spares us nothing, from what he calls the 'sexual misadventure at Oxford'
down to the six weeks' dissipation after the appearance of the Blackwood
article and the hysterical and morbid ravings of the dying man.  No
doubt, most if not all of the things Mr. Rossetti tells us are facts; but
there is neither tact shown in the selection that is made of the facts
nor sympathy in the use to which they are put.  When Mr. Rossetti writes
of the man he forgets the poet, and when he criticises the poet he shows
that he does not understand the man.  His first error, as we have said,
is isolating the life from the work; his second error is his treatment of
the work itself.  Take, for instance, his criticism of that wonderful Ode
to a Nightingale, with all its marvellous magic of music, colour and
form.  He begins by saying that 'the first point of weakness' in the poem
is the 'surfeit of mythological allusions,' a statement which is
absolutely untrue, as out of the eight stanzas of the poem only three
contain any mythological allusions at all, and of these not one is either
forced or remote.  Then coming to the second verse,

   Oh for a draught of vintage, that hath been
      Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
   Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
      Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

Mr. Rossetti exclaims in a fine fit of 'Blue Ribbon' enthusiasm: 'Surely
nobody wants wine as a preparation for enjoying a nightingale's music,
whether in a literal or in a fanciful relation'!  'To call wine "the
true, the blushful Hippocrene" . . . seems' to him 'both stilted and
repulsive'; 'the phrase "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim" is
(though picturesque) trivial'; 'the succeeding image, "Not charioted by
Bacchus and his pards"' is 'far worse'; while such an expression as
'light-winged Dryad of the trees' is an obvious pleonasm, for Dryad
really means Oak-nymph!  As for that superb burst of passion,

   Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
      No hungry generations tread thee down;
   The voice I hear this passing night was heard
      In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Mr. Rossetti tells us that it is a palpable, or rather 'palpaple (sic)
fact that this address . . . is a logical solecism,' as men live longer
than nightingales.  As Mr. Colvin makes very much the same criticism,
talking of 'a breach of logic which is also . . . a flaw in the poetry,'
it may be worth while to point out to these two last critics of Keats's
work that what Keats meant to convey was the contrast between the
permanence of beauty and the change and decay of human life, an idea
which receives its fullest expression in the Ode on a Grecian Urn.  Nor
do the other poems fare much better at Mr. Rossetti's hands.  The fine
invocation in Isabella--

   Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
      From the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
   Through bronzed lyre in tragic order go,
      And touch the strings into a mystery,

seems to him 'a fadeur'; the Indian Bacchante of the fourth book of
Endymion he calls a 'sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber,' and, as for
Endymion himself, he declares that he cannot understand 'how his human
organism, _with respirative and digestive processes_, continues to
exist,' and gives us his own idea of how Keats should have treated the
subject.  An eminent French critic once exclaimed in despair, 'Je trouve
des physiologistes partout!'; but it has been reserved for Mr. Rossetti
to speculate on Endymion's digestion, and we readily accord to him all
the distinction of the position.  Even where Mr. Rossetti seeks to
praise, he spoils what he praises.  To speak of Hyperion as 'a monument
of Cyclopean architecture in verse' is bad enough, but to call it 'a
Stonehenge of reverberance' is absolutely detestable; nor do we learn
much about The Eve of St. Mark by being told that its 'simplicity is full-
blooded as well as quaint.'  What is the meaning, also, of stating that
Keats's Notes on Shakespeare are 'somewhat strained and _bloated_'? and
is there nothing better to be said of Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes
than that 'she is made a very charming and loveable figure, _although she
does nothing very particular except to undress without looking behind
her, and to elope_'?  There is no necessity to follow Mr. Rossetti any
further as he flounders about through the quagmire that he has made for
his own feet.  A critic who can say that 'not many of Keats's poems are
highly admirable' need not be too seriously treated.  Mr. Rossetti is an
industrious man and a painstaking writer, but he entirely lacks the
temper necessary for the interpretation of such poetry as was written by
John Keats.

It is pleasant to turn again to Mr. Colvin, who criticises always with
modesty and often with acumen.  We do not agree with him when he accepts
Mrs. Owens's theory of a symbolic and allegoric meaning underlying
Endymion, his final judgment on Keats as 'the most Shaksperean spirit
that has lived since Shakspere' is not very fortunate, and we are
surprised to find him suggesting, on the evidence of a rather silly story
of Severn's, that Sir Walter Scott was privy to the Blackwood article.
There is nothing, however, about his estimate of the poet's work that is
harsh, irritating or uncouth.  The true Marcellus of English song has not
yet found his Virgil, but Mr. Colvin makes a tolerable Statius.

(1) Keats.  By Sidney Colvin.  'English Men of Letters' Series.
(Macmillan and Co.)

(2) Life of John Keats.  By William Michael Rossetti.  'Great Writers'
Series.  (Walter Scott.)




A SCOTCHMAN ON SCOTTISH POETRY


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1887.)

A distinguished living critic, born south of the Tweed, once whispered in
confidence to a friend that he believed that the Scotch knew really very
little about their own national literature.  He quite admitted that they
love their 'Robbie Burns' and their 'Sir Walter' with a patriotic
enthusiasm that makes them extremely severe upon any unfortunate southron
who ventures to praise either in their presence, but he claimed that the
works of such great national poets as Dunbar, Henryson and Sir David
Lyndsay are sealed books to the majority of the reading public in
Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow, and that few Scotch people have any idea
of the wonderful outburst of poetry that took place in their country
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at a time when there was
little corresponding development in England.  Whether this terrible
accusation be absolutely true, or not, it is needless to discuss at
present.  It is probable that the archaism of language alone will always
prevent a poet like Dunbar from being popular in the ordinary acceptation
of the word.  Professor Veitch's book, however, shows that there are
some, at any rate, in the 'land o' cakes' who can admire and appreciate
their marvellous early singers, and whose admiration for The Lord of the
Isles and the verses To a Mountain Daisy does not blind them to the
exquisite beauties of The Testament of Cresseid, The Thistle and the
Rose, and the Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour.

Taking as the subject of his two interesting volumes the feeling for
Nature in Scottish Poetry, Professor Veitch starts with a historical
disquisition on the growth of the sentiment in humanity.  The primitive
state he regards as being simply a sort of 'open-air feeling.'  The chief
sources of pleasure are the warmth of the sunshine, the cool of the
breeze and the general fresh aspect of the earth and sky, connecting
itself with a consciousness of life and sensuous enjoyment; while
darkness, storm and cold are regarded as repulsive.  This is followed by
the pastoral stage in which we find the love of green meadows and of
shady trees and of all things that make life pleasant and comfortable.
This, again, by the stage of agriculture, the era of the war with earth,
when men take pleasure in the cornfield and in the garden, but hate
everything that is opposed to tillage, such as woodland and rock, or that
cannot be subdued to utility, such as mountain and sea.  Finally we come
to the pure nature-feeling, the free delight in the mere contemplation of
the external world, the joy in sense-impressions irrespective of all
questions of Nature's utility and beneficence.  But here the growth does
not stop.  The Greek, desiring to make Nature one with humanity, peopled
the grove and hillside with beautiful and fantastic forms, saw the god
hiding in the thicket, and the naiad drifting with the stream.  The
modern Wordsworthian, desiring to make man one with Nature, finds in
external things 'the symbols of our inner life, the workings of a spirit
akin to our own.'  There is much that is suggestive in these early
chapters of Professor Veitch's book, but we cannot agree with him in the
view he takes of the primitive attitude towards Nature.  The 'open-air
feeling,' of which he talks, seems to us comparatively modern.  The
earliest Nature-myths tell us, not of man's 'sensuous enjoyment' of
Nature, but of the terror that Nature inspires.  Nor are darkness and
storm regarded by the primitive man as 'simply repulsive'; they are to
him divine and supernatural things, full of wonder and full of awe.  Some
reference, also, should have been made to the influence of towns on the
development of the nature-feeling, for, paradox though it may seem, it is
none the less true that it is largely to the creation of cities that we
owe the love of the country.

Professor Veitch is on a safer ground when he comes to deal with the
growth and manifestations of this feeling as displayed in Scotch poetry.
The early singers, as he points out, had all the mediaeval love of
gardens, all the artistic delight in the bright colours of flowers and
the pleasant song of birds, but they felt no sympathy for the wild
solitary moorland, with its purple heather, its grey rocks and its waving
bracken.  Montgomerie was the first to wander out on the banks and braes
and to listen to the music of the burns, and it was reserved for Drummond
of Hawthornden to sing of flood and forest and to notice the beauty of
the mists on the hillside and the snow on the mountain tops.  Then came
Allan Ramsay with his honest homely pastorals; Thomson, who writes about
Nature like an eloquent auctioneer, and yet was a keen observer, with a
fresh eye and an open heart; Beattie, who approached the problems that
Wordsworth afterwards solved; the great Celtic epic of Ossian, such an
important factor in the romantic movement of Germany and France;
Fergusson, to whom Burns is so much indebted; Burns himself, Leyden, Sir
Walter Scott, James Hogg and (longo intervallo) Christopher North and the
late Professor Shairp.  On nearly all these poets Professor Veitch writes
with fine judgment and delicate feeling, and even his admiration for
Burns has nothing absolutely aggressive about it.  He shows, however, a
certain lack of the true sense of literary proportion in the amount of
space he devotes to the two last writers on our list.  Christopher North
was undoubtedly an interesting personality to the Edinburgh of his day,
but he has not left behind him anything of real permanent value.  There
was too much noise in his criticism, too little music in his poetry.  As
for Professor Shairp, looked on as a critic he was a tragic example of
the unfortunate influence of Wordsworth, for he was always confusing
ethical with aesthetical questions, and never had the slightest idea how
to approach such poets as Shelley and Rossetti whom it was his mission to
interpret to young Oxford in his later years; {189} while, considered as
a poet, he deserves hardly more than a passing reference.  Professor
Veitch gravely tells us that one of the descriptions of Kilmahoe is 'not
surpassed in the language for real presence, felicity of epithet, and
purity of reproduction,' and statements of this kind serve to remind us
of the fact that a criticism which is based on patriotism is always
provincial in its result.  But it is only fair to add that it is very
rarely that Professor Veitch is so extravagant and so grotesque.  His
judgment and taste are, as a rule, excellent, and his book is, on the
whole, a very fascinating and delightful contribution to the history of
literature.

The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry.  By John Veitch, Professor of
Logic and Rhetoric in the University of Glasgow.  (Blackwood and Son.)




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--I


(Woman's World, November 1887.)

The Princess Christian's translation of the Memoirs of Wilhelmine,
Margravine of Baireuth, is a most fascinating and delightful book.  The
Margravine and her brother, Frederick the Great, were, as the Princess
herself points out in an admirably written introduction, 'among the first
of those questioning minds that strove after spiritual freedom' in the
last century.  'They had studied,' says the Princess, 'the English
philosophers, Newton, Locke, and Shaftesbury, and were roused to
enthusiasm by the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau.  Their whole lives
bore the impress of the influence of French thought on the burning
questions of the day.  In the eighteenth century began that great
struggle of philosophy against tyranny and worn-out abuses which
culminated in the French Revolution.  The noblest minds were engaged in
the struggle, and, like most reformers, they pushed their conclusions to
extremes, and too often lost sight of the need of a due proportion in
things.  The Margravine's influence on the intellectual development of
her country is untold.  She formed at Baireuth a centre of culture and
learning which had before been undreamt of in Germany.'

The historical value of these Memoirs is, of course, well known.  Carlyle
speaks of them as being 'by far the best authority' on the early life of
Frederick the Great.  But considered merely as the autobiography of a
clever and charming woman, they are no less interesting, and even those
who care nothing for eighteenth-century politics, and look upon history
itself as an unattractive form of fiction, cannot fail to be fascinated
by the Margravine's wit, vivacity and humour, by her keen powers of
observation, and by her brilliant and assertive egotism.  Not that her
life was by any means a happy one.  Her father, to quote the Princess
Christian, 'ruled his family with the same harsh despotism with which he
ruled his country, taking pleasure in making his power felt by all in the
most galling manner,' and the Margravine and her brother 'had much to
suffer, not only from his ungovernable temper, but also from the real
privations to which they were subjected.'  Indeed, the picture the
Margravine gives of the King is quite extraordinary.  'He despised all
learning,' she writes, 'and wished me to occupy myself with nothing but
needlework and household duties or details.  Had he found me writing or
reading, he would probably have whipped me.'  He 'considered music a
capital offence, and maintained that every one should devote himself to
one object: men to the military service, and women to their household
duties.  Science and the arts he counted among the "seven deadly sins."'
Sometimes he took to religion, 'and then,' says the Margravine, 'we lived
like Trappists, to the great grief of my brother and myself.  Every
afternoon the King preached a sermon, to which we had to listen as
attentively as if it proceeded from an Apostle.  My brother and I were
often seized with such an intense sense of the ridiculous that we burst
out laughing, upon which an apostolic curse was poured out on our heads,
which we had to accept with a show of humility and penitence.'  Economy
and soldiers were his only topics of conversation; his chief social
amusement was to make his guests intoxicated; and as for his temper, the
accounts the Margravine gives of it would be almost incredible if they
were not amply corroborated from other sources.  Suetonius has written of
the strange madness that comes on kings, but even in his melodramatic
chronicles there is hardly anything that rivals what the Margravine has
to tell us.  Here is one of her pictures of family life at a Royal Court
in the last century, and it is not by any means the worst scene she
describes:

   On one occasion, when his temper was more than usually bad, he told
   the Queen that he had received letters from Anspach, in which the
   Margrave announced his arrival at Berlin for the beginning of May.  He
   was coming there for the purpose of marrying my sister, and one of his
   ministers would arrive previously with the betrothal ring.  My father
   asked my sister whether she were pleased at this prospect, and how she
   would arrange her household.  Now my sister had always made a point of
   telling him whatever came into her head, even the greatest
   home-truths, and he had never taken her outspokenness amiss.  On this
   occasion, therefore, relying on former experience, she answered him as
   follows: 'When I have a house of my own, I shall take care to have a
   well-appointed dinner-table, better than yours is, and if I have
   children of my own, I shall not plague them as you do yours, and force
   them to eat things they thoroughly dislike!'

   'What is amiss with my dinner-table?' the King enquired, getting very
   red in the face.

   'You ask what is the matter with it,' my sister replied; 'there is not
   enough on it for us to eat, and what there is is cabbage and carrots,
   which we detest.'  Her first answer had already angered my father, but
   now he gave vent to his fury.  But instead of punishing my sister he
   poured it all on my mother, my brother, and myself.  To begin with he
   threw his plate at my brother's head, who would have been struck had
   he not got out of the way; a second one he threw at me, which I also
   happily escaped; then torrents of abuse followed these first signs of
   hostility.  He reproached the Queen with having brought up her
   children so badly.  'You will curse your mother,' he said to my
   brother, 'for having made you such a good-for-nothing creature.' . . .
   As my brother and I passed near him to leave the room, he hit out at
   us with his crutch.  Happily we escaped the blow; for it would
   certainly have struck us down, and we at last escaped without harm.

Yet, as the Princess Christian remarks, 'despite the almost cruel
treatment Wilhelmine received from her father, it is noticeable that
throughout her memoirs she speaks of him with the greatest affection.  She
makes constant reference to his "good heart"'; and says that his faults
'were more those of temper than of nature.'  Nor could all the misery and
wretchedness of her home life dull the brightness of her intellect.  What
would have made others morbid, made her satirical.  Instead of weeping
over her own personal tragedies, she laughs at the general comedy of
life.  Here, for instance, is her description of Peter the Great and his
wife, who arrived at Berlin in 1718:

   The Czarina was small, broad, and brown-looking, without the slightest
   dignity or appearance.  You had only to look at her to detect her low
   origin.  She might have passed for a German actress, she had decked
   herself out in such a manner.  Her dress had been bought second-hand,
   and was trimmed with some dirty looking silver embroidery; the bodice
   was trimmed with precious stones, arranged in such a manner as to
   represent the double eagle.  She wore a dozen orders; and round the
   bottom of her dress hung quantities of relics and pictures of saints,
   which rattled when she walked, and reminded one of a smartly harnessed
   mule.  The orders too made a great noise, knocking against each other.

   The Czar, on the other hand, was tall and well grown, with a handsome
   face, but his expression was coarse, and impressed one with fear.  He
   wore a simple sailor's dress.  His wife, who spoke German very badly,
   called her court jester to her aid, and spoke Russian with her.  This
   poor creature was a Princess Gallizin, who had been obliged to
   undertake this sorry office to save her life, as she had been mixed up
   in a conspiracy against the Czar, and had twice been flogged with the
   knout!

   * * * * * *

   The following day [the Czar] visited all the sights of Berlin, amongst
   others the very curious collection of coins and antiques.  Amongst
   these last named was a statue, representing a heathen god.  It was
   anything but attractive, but was the most valuable in the collection.
   The Czar admired it very much, and insisted on the Czarina kissing it.
   On her refusing, he said to her in bad German that she should lose her
   head if she did not at once obey him.  Being terrified at the Czar's
   anger she immediately complied with his orders without the least
   hesitation.  The Czar asked the King to give him this and other
   statues, a request which he could not refuse.  The same thing happened
   about a cupboard, inlaid with amber.  It was the only one of its kind,
   and had cost King Frederick I. an enormous sum, and the consternation
   was general on its having to be sent to Petersburg.

   This barbarous Court happily left after two days.  The Queen rushed at
   once to Monbijou, which she found in a state resembling that of the
   fall of Jerusalem.  I never saw such a sight.  Everything was
   destroyed, so that the Queen was obliged to rebuild the whole house.

Nor are the Margravine's descriptions of her reception as a bride in the
principality of Baireuth less amusing.  Hof was the first town she came
to, and a deputation of nobles was waiting there to welcome her.  This is
her account of them:

   Their faces would have frightened little children, and, to add to
   their beauty, they had arranged their hair to resemble the wigs that
   were then in fashion.  Their dresses clearly denoted the antiquity of
   their families, as they were composed of heirlooms, and were cut
   accordingly, so that most of them did not fit.  In spite of their
   costumes being the 'Court Dresses,' the gold and silver trimmings were
   so black that you had a difficulty in making out of what they were
   made.  The manners of these nobles suited their faces and their
   clothes.  They might have passed for peasants.  I could scarcely
   restrain my laughter when I first beheld these strange figures.  I
   spoke to each in turn, but none of them understood what I said, and
   their replies sounded to me like Hebrew, because the dialect of the
   Empire is quite different from that spoken in Brandenburg.

   The clergy also presented themselves.  These were totally different
   creatures.  Round their necks they wore great ruffs, which resembled
   washing baskets.  They spoke very slowly, so that I might be able to
   understand them better.  They said the most foolish things, and it was
   only with much difficulty that I was able to prevent myself from
   laughing.  At last I got rid of all these people, and we sat down to
   dinner.  I tried my best to converse with those at table, but it was
   useless.  At last I touched on agricultural topics, and then they
   began to thaw.  I was at once informed of all their different
   farmsteads and herds of cattle.  An almost interesting discussion took
   place as to whether the oxen in the upper part of the country were
   fatter than those in the lowlands.

   * * * * *

   I was told that as the next day was Sunday, I must spend it at Hof,
   and listen to a sermon.  Never before had I heard such a sermon!  The
   clergyman began by giving us an account of all the marriages that had
   taken place from Adam's time to that of Noah.  We were spared no
   detail, so that the gentlemen all laughed and the poor ladies blushed.
   The dinner went off as on the previous day.  In the afternoon all the
   ladies came to pay me their respects.  Gracious heavens!  What ladies,
   too!  They were all as ugly as the gentlemen, and their head-dresses
   were so curious that swallows might have built their nests in them.

As for Baireuth itself, and its petty Court, the picture she gives of it
is exceedingly curious.  Her father-in-law, the reigning Margrave, was a
narrow-minded mediocrity, whose conversation 'resembled that of a sermon
read aloud for the purpose of sending the listener to sleep,' and he had
only two topics, Telemachus, and Amelot de la Houssaye's Roman History.
The Ministers, from Baron von Stein, who always said 'yes' to everything,
to Baron von Voit, who always said 'no,' were not by any means an
intellectual set of men.  'Their chief amusement,' says the Margravine,
'was drinking from morning till night,' and horses and cattle were all
they talked about.  The palace itself was shabby, decayed and dirty.  'I
was like a lamb among wolves,' cries the poor Margravine; 'I was settled
in a strange country, at a Court which more resembled a peasant's farm,
surrounded by coarse, bad, dangerous, and tiresome people.'

Yet her esprit never deserted her.  She is always clever, witty, and
entertaining.  Her stories about the endless squabbles over precedence
are extremely amusing.  The society of her day cared very little for good
manners, knew, indeed, very little about them, but all questions of
etiquette were of vital importance, and the Margravine herself, though
she saw the shallowness of the whole system, was far too proud not to
assert her rights when circumstances demanded it, as the description she
gives of her visit to the Empress of Germany shows very clearly.  When
this meeting was first proposed, the Margravine declined positively to
entertain the idea.  'There was no precedent,' she writes, 'of a King's
daughter and the Empress having met, and I did not know to what rights I
ought to lay claim.'  Finally, however, she is induced to consent, but
she lays down three conditions for her reception:

   I desired first of all that the Empress's Court should receive me at
   the foot of the stairs, secondly, that she should meet me at the door
   of her bedroom, and, thirdly, that she should offer me an armchair to
   sit on.

   * * * * *

   They disputed all day over the conditions I had made.  The two first
   were granted me, but all that could be obtained with respect to the
   third was, that the Empress would use quite a small armchair, whilst
   she gave me a chair.

   Next day I saw this Royal personage.  I own that had I been in her
   place I would have made all the rules of etiquette and ceremony the
   excuse for not being obliged to appear.  The Empress was small and
   stout, round as a ball, very ugly, and without dignity or manner.  Her
   mind corresponded to her body.  She was terribly bigoted, and spent
   her whole day praying.  The old and ugly are generally the Almighty's
   portion.  She received me trembling all over, and was so upset that
   she could not say a word.

   After some silence I began the conversation in French.  She answered
   me in her Austrian dialect that she could not speak in that language,
   and begged I would speak in German.  The conversation did not last
   long, for the Austrian and low Saxon tongues are so different from
   each other that to those acquainted with only one the other is
   unintelligible.  This is what happened to us.  A third person would
   have laughed at our misunderstandings, for we caught only a word here
   and there, and had to guess the rest.  The poor Empress was such a
   slave to etiquette that she would have thought it high treason had she
   spoken to me in a foreign language, though she understood French quite
   well.

Many other extracts might be given from this delightful book, but from
the few that have been selected some idea can be formed of the vivacity
and picturesqueness of the Margravine's style.  As for her character, it
is very well summed up by the Princess Christian, who, while admitting
that she often appears almost heartless and inconsiderate, yet claims
that, 'taken as a whole, she stands out in marked prominence among the
most gifted women of the eighteenth century, not only by her mental
powers, but by her goodness of heart, her self-sacrificing devotion, and
true friendship.'  An interesting sequel to her Memoirs would be her
correspondence with Voltaire, and it is to be hoped that we may shortly
see a translation of these letters from the same accomplished pen to
which we owe the present volume. {198}

* * * * *

Women's Voices is an anthology of the most characteristic poems by
English, Scotch and Irish women, selected and arranged by Mrs. William
Sharp.  'The idea of making this anthology,' says Mrs. Sharp, in her
preface, 'arose primarily from the conviction that our women-poets had
never been collectively represented with anything like adequate justice;
that the works of many are not so widely known as they deserve to be; and
that at least some fine fugitive poetry could be thus rescued from
oblivion'; and Mrs. Sharp proceeds to claim that the 'selections will
further emphasise the value of women's work in poetry for those who are
already well acquainted with English Literature, and that they will
convince many it is as possible to form an anthology of "pure poetry"
from the writings of women as from those of men.'  It is somewhat
difficult to define what 'pure poetry' really is, but the collection is
certainly extremely interesting, extending, as it does, over nearly three
centuries of our literature.  It opens with Revenge, a poem by the
'learned, virtuous, and truly noble Ladie,' Elizabeth Carew, who
published a Tragedie of Marian, the faire Queene of Iewry, in 1613, from
which Revenge is taken.  Then come some very pretty verses by Margaret,
Duchess of Newcastle, who produced a volume of poems in 1653.  They are
supposed to be sung by a sea-goddess, and their fantastic charm and the
graceful wilfulness of their fancy are well worthy of note, as these
first stanzas show:

   My cabinets are oyster-shells,
   In which I keep my Orient pearls;
   And modest coral I do wear,
   Which blushes when it touches air.

   On silvery waves I sit and sing,
   And then the fish lie listening:
   Then resting on a rocky stone
   I comb my hair with fishes' bone;

   The whilst Apollo with his beams
   Doth dry my hair from soaking streams,
   His light doth glaze the water's face,
   And make the sea my looking-glass.

Then follow Friendship's Mystery, by 'The Matchless Orinda,' Mrs.
Katherine Philips; A Song, by Mrs. Aphra Behn, 'the first English woman
who adopted literature as a profession'; and the Countess of Winchelsea's
Nocturnal Reverie.  Wordsworth once said that, with the exception of this
poem and Pope's Windsor Forest, 'the poetry of the period intervening
between Paradise Lost and The Seasons does not contain a single new image
of external nature,' and though the statement is hardly accurate, as it
leaves Gay entirely out of account, it must be admitted that the simple
naturalism of Lady Winchelsea's description is extremely remarkable.
Passing on through Mrs. Sharp's collection, we come across poems by Lady
Grisell Baillie; by Jean Adams, a poor 'sewing-maid in a Scotch manse,'
who died in the Greenock Workhouse; by Isobel Pagan, 'an Ayrshire lucky,
who kept an alehouse, and sold whiskey without a license,' 'and sang her
own songs as a means of subsistence'; by Mrs. Thrale, Dr. Johnson's
friend; by Mrs. Hunter, the wife of the great anatomist; by the worthy
Mrs. Barbauld; and by the excellent Mrs. Hannah More.  Here is Miss Anna
Seward, 'called by her admirers "the Swan of Lichfield,"' who was so
angry with Dr. Darwin for plagiarising some of her verses; Lady Anne
Barnard, whose Auld Robin Gray was described by Sir Walter Scott as
'worth all the dialogues Corydon and Phyllis have together spoken from
the days of Theocritus downwards'; Jean Glover, a Scottish weaver's
daughter, who 'married a strolling player and became the best singer and
actor of his troop'; Joanna Baillie, whose tedious dramas thrilled our
grandfathers; Mrs. Tighe, whose Psyche was very much admired by Keats in
his youthful days; Frances Kemble, Mrs. Siddons's niece; poor L. E. L.,
whom Disraeli described as 'the personification of Brompton, pink satin
dress, white satin shoes, red cheeks, snub nose, and her hair a la
Sappho'; the two beautiful sisters, Lady Dufferin and Mrs. Norton; Emily
Bronte, whose poems are instinct with tragic power and quite terrible in
their bitter intensity of passion, the fierce fire of feeling seeming
almost to consume the raiment of form; Eliza Cook, a kindly, vulgar
writer; George Eliot, whose poetry is too abstract, and lacks all
rhythmical life; Mrs. Carlyle, who wrote much better poetry than her
husband, though this is hardly high praise; and Mrs. Browning, the first
really great poetess in our literature.  Nor are contemporary writers
forgotten.  Christina Rossetti, some of whose poems are quite priceless
in their beauty; Mrs. Augusta Webster, Mrs. Hamilton King, Miss Mary
Robinson, Mrs. Craik; Jean Ingelow, whose sonnet on An Ancient Chess King
is like an exquisitely carved gem; Mrs. Pfeiffer; Miss May Probyn, a
poetess with the true lyrical impulse of song, whose work is as delicate
as it is delightful; Mrs. Nesbit, a very pure and perfect artist; Miss
Rosa Mulholland, Miss Katharine Tynan, Lady Charlotte Elliot, and many
other well-known writers, are duly and adequately represented.  On the
whole, Mrs. Sharp's collection is very pleasant reading indeed, and the
extracts given from the works of living poetesses are extremely
remarkable, not merely for their absolute artistic excellence, but also
for the light they throw upon the spirit of modern culture.

It is not, however, by any means a complete anthology.  Dame Juliana
Berners is possibly too antiquated in style to be suitable to a modern
audience.  But where is Anne Askew, who wrote a ballad in Newgate; and
where is Queen Elizabeth, whose 'most sweet and sententious ditty' on
Mary Stuart is so highly praised by Puttenham as an example of
'Exargasia,' or The Gorgeous in Literature?  Why is the Countess of
Pembroke excluded?  Sidney's sister should surely have a place in any
anthology of English verse.  Where is Sidney's niece, Lady Mary Wroth, to
whom Ben Jonson dedicated The Alchemist?  Where is 'the noble ladie Diana
Primrose,' who wrote A Chain of Pearl, or a memorial of the peerless
graces and heroic virtues of Queen Elizabeth, of glorious memory?  Where
is Mary Morpeth, the friend and admirer of Drummond of Hawthornden?  Where
is the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I., and where is Anne
Killigrew, maid of honour to the Duchess of York?  The Marchioness of
Wharton, whose poems were praised by Waller; Lady Chudleigh, whose lines
beginning--

   Wife and servant are the same,
   But only differ in the name,

are very curious and interesting; Rachel Lady Russell, Constantia
Grierson, Mary Barber, Laetitia Pilkington; Eliza Haywood, whom Pope
honoured by a place in The Dunciad; Lady Luxborough, Lord Bolingbroke's
half-sister; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Lady Temple, whose poems were
printed by Horace Walpole; Perdita, whose lines on the snowdrop are very
pathetic; the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, of whom Gibbon said that
'she was made for something better than a Duchess'; Mrs. Ratcliffe, Mrs.
Chapone, and Amelia Opie, all deserve a place on historical, if not on
artistic, grounds.  In fact, the space given by Mrs. Sharp to modern and
living poetesses is somewhat disproportionate, and I am sure that those
on whose brows the laurels are still green would not grudge a little room
to those the green of whose laurels is withered and the music of whose
lyres is mute.

* * * * *

One of the most powerful and pathetic novels that has recently appeared
is A Village Tragedy by Margaret L. Woods.  To find any parallel to this
lurid little story, one must go to Dostoieffski or to Guy de Maupassant.
Not that Mrs. Woods can be said to have taken either of these two great
masters of fiction as her model, but there is something in her work that
recalls their method; she has not a little of their fierce intensity,
their terrible concentration, their passionless yet poignant objectivity;
like them, she seems to allow life to suggest its own mode of
presentation; and, like them, she recognises that a frank acceptance of
the facts of life is the true basis of all modern imitative art.  The
scene of Mrs. Woods's story lies in one of the villages near Oxford; the
characters are very few in number, and the plot is extremely simple.  It
is a romance of modern Arcadia--a tale of the love of a farm-labourer for
a girl who, though slightly above him in social station and education, is
yet herself also a servant on a farm.  True Arcadians they are, both of
them, and their ignorance and isolation serve only to intensify the
tragedy that gives the story its title.  It is the fashion nowadays to
label literature, so, no doubt, Mrs. Woods's novel will be spoken of as
'realistic.'  Its realism, however, is the realism of the artist, not of
the reporter; its tact of treatment, subtlety of perception, and fine
distinction of style, make it rather a poem than a proces-verbal; and
though it lays bare to us the mere misery of life, it suggests something
of life's mystery also.  Very delicate, too, is the handling of external
Nature.  There are no formal guide-book descriptions of scenery, nor
anything of what Byron petulantly called 'twaddling about trees,' but we
seem to breathe the atmosphere of the country, to catch the exquisite
scent of the beanfields, so familiar to all who have ever wandered
through the Oxfordshire lanes in June; to hear the birds singing in the
thicket, and the sheep-bells tinkling from the hill.  Characterisation,
that enemy of literary form, is such an essential part of the method of
the modern writer of fiction, that Nature has almost become to the
novelist what light and shade are to the painter--the one permanent
element of style; and if the power of A Village Tragedy be due to its
portrayal of human life, no small portion of its charm comes from its
Theocritean setting.

* * * * *

It is, however, not merely in fiction and in poetry that the women of
this century are making their mark.  Their appearance amongst the
prominent speakers at the Church Congress, some weeks ago, was in itself
a very remarkable proof of the growing influence of women's opinions on
all matters connected with the elevation of our national life, and the
amelioration of our social conditions.  When the Bishops left the
platform to their wives, it may be said that a new era began, and the
change will, no doubt, be productive of much good.  The Apostolic dictum,
that women should not be suffered to teach, is no longer applicable to a
society such as ours, with its solidarity of interests, its recognition
of natural rights, and its universal education, however suitable it may
have been to the Greek cities under Roman rule.  Nothing in the United
States struck me more than the fact that the remarkable intellectual
progress of that country is very largely due to the efforts of American
women, who edit many of the most powerful magazines and newspapers, take
part in the discussion of every question of public interest, and exercise
an important influence upon the growth and tendencies of literature and
art.  Indeed, the women of America are the one class in the community
that enjoys that leisure which is so necessary for culture.  The men are,
as a rule, so absorbed in business, that the task of bringing some
element of form into the chaos of daily life is left almost entirely to
the opposite sex, and an eminent Bostonian once assured me that in the
twentieth century the whole culture of his country would be in
petticoats.  By that time, however, it is probable that the dress of the
two sexes will be assimilated, as similarity of costume always follows
similarity of pursuits.

* * * * *

In a recent article in La France, M. Sarcey puts this point very well.
The further we advance, he says, the more apparent does it become that
women are to take their share as bread-winners in the world.  The task is
no longer monopolised by men, and will, perhaps, be equally shared by the
sexes in another hundred years.  It will be necessary, however, for women
to invent a suitable costume, as their present style of dress is quite
inappropriate to any kind of mechanical labour, and must be radically
changed before they can compete with men upon their own ground.  As to
the question of desirability, M. Sarcey refuses to speak.  'I shall not
see the end of this revolution,' he remarks, 'and I am glad of it.'  But,
as is pointed out in a very sensible article in the Daily News, there is
no doubt that M. Sarcey has reason and common-sense on his side with
regard to the absolute unsuitability of ordinary feminine attire to any
sort of handicraft, or even to any occupation which necessitates a daily
walk to business and back again in all kinds of weather.  Women's dress
can easily be modified and adapted to any exigencies of the kind; but
most women refuse to modify or adapt it.  They must follow the fashion,
whether it be convenient or the reverse.  And, after all, what is a
fashion?  From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of
ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.  From
the point of view of science, it not unfrequently violates every law of
health, every principle of hygiene.  While from the point of view of
simple ease and comfort, it is not too much to say that, with the
exception of M. Felix's charming tea-gowns, and a few English tailor-made
costumes, there is not a single form of really fashionable dress that can
be worn without a certain amount of absolute misery to the wearer.  The
contortion of the feet of the Chinese beauty, said Dr. Naftel at the last
International Medical Congress, held at Washington, is no more barbarous
or unnatural than the panoply of the femme du monde.

And yet how sensible is the dress of the London milk-woman, of the Irish
or Scotch fishwife, of the North-Country factory-girl!  An attempt was
made recently to prevent the pit-women from working, on the ground that
their costume was unsuited to their sex, but it is really only the idle
classes who dress badly.  Wherever physical labour of any kind is
required, the costume used is, as a rule, absolutely right, for labour
necessitates freedom, and without freedom there is no such thing as
beauty in dress at all.  In fact, the beauty of dress depends on the
beauty of the human figure, and whatever limits, constrains, and
mutilates is essentially ugly, though the eyes of many are so blinded by
custom that they do not notice the ugliness till it has become
unfashionable.

What women's dress will be in the future it is difficult to say.  The
writer of the Daily News article is of opinion that skirts will always be
worn as distinctive of the sex, and it is obvious that men's dress, in
its present condition, is not by any means an example of a perfectly
rational costume.  It is more than probable, however, that the dress of
the twentieth century will emphasise distinctions of occupation, not
distinctions of sex.

* * * * *

It is hardly too much to say that, by the death of the author of John
Halifax, Gentleman, our literature has sustained a heavy loss.  Mrs.
Craik was one of the finest of our women-writers, and though her art had
always what Keats called 'a palpable intention upon one,' still its
imaginative qualities were of no mean order.  There is hardly one of her
books that has not some distinction of style; there is certainly not one
of them that does not show an ardent love of all that is beautiful and
good in life.  The good she, perhaps, loved somewhat more than the
beautiful, but her heart had room for both.  Her first novel appeared in
1849, the year of the publication of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and
Mrs. Gaskell's Ruth, and her last work was done for the magazine which I
have the honour to edit.  She was very much interested in the scheme for
the foundation of the Woman's World, suggested its title, and promised to
be one of its warmest supporters.  One article from her pen is already in
proof and will appear next month, and in a letter I received from her, a
few days before she died, she told me that she had almost finished a
second, to be called Between Schooldays and Marriage.  Few women have
enjoyed a greater popularity than Mrs. Craik, or have better deserved it.
It is sometimes said that John Halifax is not a real man, but only a
woman's ideal of a man.  Well, let us be grateful for such ideals.  No
one can read the story of which John Halifax is the hero without being
the better for it.  Mrs. Craik will live long in the affectionate memory
of all who knew her, and one of her novels, at any rate, will always have
a high and honourable place in English fiction.  Indeed, for simple
narrative power, some of the chapters of John Halifax, Gentleman, are
almost unequalled in our prose literature.

* * * * *

The news of the death of Lady Brassey has been also received by the
English people with every expression of sorrow and sympathy.  Though her
books were not remarkable for any perfection of literary style, they had
the charm of brightness, vivacity, and unconventionality.  They revealed
a fascinating personality, and their touches of domesticity made them
classics in many an English household.  In all modern movements Lady
Brassey took a keen interest.  She gained a first-class certificate in
the South Kensington School of Cookery, scullery department and all; was
one of the most energetic members of the St. John's Ambulance
Association, many branches of which she succeeded in founding; and,
whether at Normanhurst or in Park Lane, always managed to devote some
portion of her day to useful and practical work.  It is sad to have to
chronicle in the first number of the Woman's World the death of two of
the most remarkable Englishwomen of our day.

(1) Memoirs of Wilhelmine Margravine of Baireuth.  Translated and edited
by Her Royal Highness Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, Princess
of Great Britain and Ireland.  (David Stott.)

(2) Women's Voices: An Anthology of the most Characteristic Poems by
English, Scotch, and Irish Women.  Selected, edited, and arranged by Mrs.
William Sharp.  (Walter Scott.)

(3) A Village Tragedy.  By Margaret L. Woods.  (Bentley and Son.)




MR. MAHAFFY'S NEW BOOK


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 9, 1887.)

Mr. Mahaffy's new book will be a great disappointment to everybody except
the Paper-Unionists and the members of the Primrose League.  His subject,
the history of Greek Life and Thought: from the Age of Alexander to the
Roman Conquest, is extremely interesting, but the manner in which the
subject is treated is quite unworthy of a scholar, nor can there be
anything more depressing than Mr. Mahaffy's continual efforts to degrade
history to the level of the ordinary political pamphlet of contemporary
party warfare.  There is, of course, no reason why Mr. Mahaffy should be
called upon to express any sympathy with the aspirations of the old Greek
cities for freedom and autonomy.  The personal preferences of modern
historians on these points are matters of no import whatsoever.  But in
his attempts to treat the Hellenic world as 'Tipperary writ large,' to
use Alexander the Great as a means of whitewashing Mr. Smith, and to
finish the battle of Chaeronea on the plains of Mitchelstown, Mr. Mahaffy
shows an amount of political bias and literary blindness that is quite
extraordinary.  He might have made his book a work of solid and enduring
interest, but he has chosen to give it a merely ephemeral value and to
substitute for the scientific temper of the true historian the prejudice,
the flippancy, and the violence of the platform partisan.  For the
flippancy parallels can, no doubt, be found in some of Mr. Mahaffy's
earlier books, but the prejudice and the violence are new, and their
appearance is very much to be regretted.  There is always something
peculiarly impotent about the violence of a literary man.  It seems to
bear no reference to facts, for it is never kept in check by action.  It
is simply a question of adjectives and rhetoric, of exaggeration and over-
emphasis.  Mr. Balfour is very anxious that Mr. William O'Brien should
wear prison clothes, sleep on a plank bed, and be subjected to other
indignities, but Mr. Mahaffy goes far beyond such mild measures as these,
and begins his history by frankly expressing his regret that Demosthenes
was not summarily put to death for his attempt to keep the spirit of
patriotism alive among the citizens of Athens!  Indeed, he has no
patience with what he calls 'the foolish and senseless opposition to
Macedonia'; regards the revolt of the Spartans against 'Alexander's Lord
Lieutenant for Greece' as an example of 'parochial politics'; indulges in
Primrose League platitudes against a low franchise and the iniquity of
allowing 'every pauper' to have a vote; and tells us that the
'demagogues' and 'pretended patriots' were so lost to shame that they
actually preached to the parasitic mob of Athens the doctrine of
autonomy--'not now extinct,' Mr. Mahaffy adds regretfully--and
propounded, as a principle of political economy, the curious idea that
people should be allowed to manage their own affairs!  As for the
personal character of the despots, Mr. Mahaffy admits that if he had to
judge by the accounts in the Greek historians, from Herodotus downwards,
he 'would certainly have said that the ineffaceable passion for autonomy,
which marks every epoch of Greek history, and every canton within its
limits, must have arisen from the excesses committed by the officers of
foreign potentates, or local tyrants,' but a careful study of the
cartoons published in United Ireland has convinced him 'that a ruler may
be the soberest, the most conscientious, the most considerate, and yet
have terrible things said of him by mere political malcontents.'  In
fact, since Mr. Balfour has been caricatured, Greek history must be
entirely rewritten!  This is the pass to which the distinguished
professor of a distinguished university has been brought.  Nor can
anything equal Mr. Mahaffy's prejudice against the Greek patriots, unless
it be his contempt for those few fine Romans who, sympathising with
Hellenic civilisation and culture, recognised the political value of
autonomy and the intellectual importance of a healthy national life.  He
mocks at what he calls their 'vulgar mawkishness about Greek liberties,
their anxiety to redress historical wrongs,' and congratulates his
readers that this feeling was not intensified by the remorse that their
own forefathers had been the oppressors.  Luckily, says Mr. Mahaffy, the
old Greeks had conquered Troy, and so the pangs of conscience which now
so deeply afflict a Gladstone and a Morley for the sins of their
ancestors could hardly affect a Marcius or a Quinctius!  It is quite
unnecessary to comment on the silliness and bad taste of passages of this
kind, but it is interesting to note that the facts of history are too
strong even for Mr. Mahaffy.  In spite of his sneers at the provinciality
of national feeling and his vague panegyrics on cosmopolitan culture, he
is compelled to admit that 'however patriotism may be superseded in stray
individuals by larger benevolence, bodies of men who abandon it will only
replace it by meaner motives,' and cannot help expressing his regret that
the better classes among the Greek communities were so entirely devoid of
public spirit that they squandered 'as idle absentees, or still idler
residents, the time and means given them to benefit their country,' and
failed to recognise their opportunity of founding a Hellenic Federal
Empire.  Even when he comes to deal with art, he cannot help admitting
that the noblest sculpture of the time was that which expressed the
spirit of the first great _national_ struggle, the repulse of the Gallic
hordes which overran Greece in 278 B.C., and that to the patriotic
feeling evoked at this crisis we owe the Belvedere Apollo, the Artemis of
the Vatican, the Dying Gaul, and the finest achievements of the Perganene
school.  In literature, also, Mr. Mahaffy is loud in his lamentations
over what he considers to be the shallow society tendencies of the new
comedy, and misses the fine freedom of Aristophanes, with his intense
patriotism, his vital interest in politics, his large issues and his
delight in vigorous national life.  He confesses the decay of oratory
under the blighting influences of imperialism, and the sterility of those
pedantic disquisitions upon style which are the inevitable consequence of
the lack of healthy subject-matter.  Indeed, on the last page of his
history Mr. Mahaffy makes a formal recantation of most of his political
prejudices.  He is still of opinion that Demosthenes should have been put
to death for resisting the Macedonian invasion, but admits that the
imperialism of Rome, which followed the imperialism of Alexander,
produced incalculable mischief, beginning with intellectual decay, and
ending with financial ruin.  'The touch of Rome,' he says, 'numbed Greece
and Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor, and if there are great buildings
attesting the splendour of the Empire, where are the signs of
intellectual and moral vigour, if we except that stronghold of
nationality, the little land of Palestine?'  This palinode is, no doubt,
intended to give a plausible air of fairness to the book, but such a
death-bed repentance comes too late, and makes the whole preceding
history seem not fair but foolish.

It is a relief to turn to the few chapters that deal directly with the
social life and thought of the Greeks.  Here Mr. Mahaffy is very pleasant
reading indeed.  His account of the colleges at Athens and Alexandria,
for instance, is extremely interesting, and so is his estimate of the
schools of Zeno, of Epicurus, and of Pyrrho.  Excellent, too, in many
points is the description of the literature and art of the period.  We do
not agree with Mr. Mahaffy in his panegyric of the Laocoon, and we are
surprised to find a writer, who is very indignant at what he considers to
be the modern indifference to Alexandrine poetry, gravely stating that no
study is 'more wearisome and profitless' than that of the Greek
Anthology.

The criticism of the new comedy, also, seems to us somewhat pedantic.  The
aim of social comedy, in Menander no less than in Sheridan, is to mirror
the manners, not to reform the morals, of its day, and the censure of the
Puritan, whether real or affected, is always out of place in literary
criticism, and shows a want of recognition of the essential distinction
between art and life.  After all, it is only the Philistine who thinks of
blaming Jack Absolute for his deception, Bob Acres for his cowardice, and
Charles Surface for his extravagance, and there is very little use in
airing one's moral sense at the expense of one's artistic appreciation.
Valuable, also, though modernity of expression undoubtedly is, still it
requires to be used with tact and judgment.  There is no objection to Mr.
Mahaffy's describing Philopoemen as the Garibaldi, and Antigonus Doson as
the Victor Emmanuel of his age.  Such comparisons have, no doubt, a
certain cheap popular value.  But, on the other hand, a phrase like
'Greek Pre-Raphaelitism' is rather awkward; not much is gained by
dragging in an allusion to Mr. Shorthouse's John Inglesant in a
description of the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius; and when we are
told that the superb Pavilion erected in Alexandria by Ptolemy
Philadelphus was a 'sort of glorified Holborn Restaurant,' we must say
that the elaborate description of the building given in Athenaeus could
have been summed up in a better and a more intelligible epigram.

On the whole, however, Mr. Mahaffy's book may have the effect of drawing
attention to a very important and interesting period in the history of
Hellenism.  We can only regret that, just as he has spoiled his account
of Greek politics by a foolish partisan bias, so he should have marred
the value of some of his remarks on literature by a bias that is quite as
unmeaning.  It is uncouth and harsh to say that 'the superannuated
schoolboy who holds fellowships and masterships at English colleges'
knows nothing of the period in question except what he reads in
Theocritus, or that a man may be considered in England a distinguished
Greek professor 'who does not know a single date in Greek history between
the death of Alexander and the battle of Cynoscephalae'; and the
statement that Lucian, Plutarch, and the four Gospels are excluded from
English school and college studies in consequence of the pedantry of
'pure scholars, as they are pleased to call themselves,' is, of course,
quite inaccurate.  In fact, not merely does Mr. Mahaffy miss the spirit
of the true historian, but he often seems entirely devoid of the temper
of the true man of letters.  He is clever, and, at times, even brilliant,
but he lacks reasonableness, moderation, style and charm.  He seems to
have no sense of literary proportion, and, as a rule, spoils his case by
overstating it.  With all his passion for imperialism, there is something
about Mr. Mahaffy that is, if not parochial, at least provincial, and we
cannot say that this last book of his will add anything to his reputation
either as an historian, a critic, or a man of taste.

Greek Life and Thought: from the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest.
By J. P. Mahaffy, Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin.  (Macmillan and Co.)




MR. MORRIS'S COMPLETION OF THE ODYSSEY


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 24, 1887.)

Mr. Morris's second volume brings the great romantic epic of Greek
literature to its perfect conclusion, and although there can never be an
ultimate translation of either Iliad or Odyssey, as each successive age
is sure to find pleasure in rendering the two poems in its own manner and
according to its own canons of taste, still it is not too much to say
that Mr. Morris's version will always be a true classic amongst our
classical translations.  It is not, of course, flawless.  In our notice
of the first volume we ventured to say that Mr. Morris was sometimes far
more Norse than Greek, nor does the volume that now lies before us make
us alter that opinion.  The particular metre, also, selected by Mr.
Morris, although admirably adapted to express 'the strong-winged music of
Homer,' as far as its flow and freedom are concerned, misses something of
its dignity and calm.  Here, it must be admitted, we feel a distinct
loss, for there is in Homer not a little of Milton's lofty manner, and if
swiftness be an essential of the Greek hexameter, stateliness is one of
its distinguishing qualities in Homer's hands.  This defect, however, if
we must call it a defect, seems almost unavoidable, as for certain
metrical reasons a majestic movement in English verse is necessarily a
slow movement; and, after all that can be said is said, how really
admirable is this whole translation!  If we set aside its noble qualities
as a poem and look on it purely from the scholar's point of view, how
straightforward it is, how honest and direct!  Its fidelity to the
original is far beyond that of any other verse-translation in our
literature, and yet it is not the fidelity of a pedant to his text but
rather the fine loyalty of poet to poet.

When Mr. Morris's first volume appeared many of the critics complained
that his occasional use of archaic words and unusual expressions robbed
his version of the true Homeric simplicity.  This, however, is not a very
felicitous criticism, for while Homer is undoubtedly simple in his
clearness and largeness of vision, his wonderful power of direct
narration, his wholesome sanity, and the purity and precision of his
method, simple in language he undoubtedly is not.  What he was to his
contemporaries we have, of course, no means of judging, but we know that
the Athenian of the fifth century B.C. found him in many places difficult
to understand, and when the creative age was succeeded by the age of
criticism and Alexandria began to take the place of Athens as the centre
of culture for the Hellenistic world, Homeric dictionaries and glossaries
seem to have been constantly published.  Indeed, Athenaeus tells us of a
wonderful Byzantine blue-stocking, a precieuse from the Propontis, who
wrote a long hexameter poem, called Mnemosyne, full of ingenious
commentaries on difficulties in Homer, and in fact, it is evident that,
as far as the language is concerned, such a phrase as 'Homeric
simplicity' would have rather amazed an ancient Greek.  As for Mr.
Morris's tendency to emphasise the etymological meaning of words, a point
commented on with somewhat flippant severity in a recent number of
Macmillan's Magazine, here Mr. Morris seems to us to be in complete
accord, not merely with the spirit of Homer, but with the spirit of all
early poetry.  It is quite true that language is apt to degenerate into a
system of almost algebraic symbols, and the modern city-man who takes a
ticket for Blackfriars Bridge, naturally never thinks of the Dominican
monks who once had their monastery by Thames-side, and after whom the
spot is named.  But in earlier times it was not so.  Men were then keenly
conscious of the real meaning of words, and early poetry, especially, is
full of this feeling, and, indeed, may be said to owe to it no small
portion of its poetic power and charm.  These old words, then, and this
old use of words which we find in Mr. Morris's Odyssey can be amply
justified upon historical grounds, and as for their artistic effect, it
is quite excellent.  Pope tried to put Homer into the ordinary language
of his day, with what result we know only too well; but Mr. Morris, who
uses his archaisms with the tact of a true artist, and to whom indeed
they seem to come absolutely naturally, has succeeded in giving to his
version by their aid that touch, not of 'quaintness,' for Homer is never
quaint, but of old-world romance and old-world beauty, which we moderns
find so pleasurable, and to which the Greeks themselves were so keenly
sensitive.

As for individual passages of special merit, Mr. Morris's translation is
no robe of rags sewn with purple patches for critics to sample.  Its real
value lies in the absolute rightness and coherence of the whole, in the
grand architecture of the swift, strong verse, and in the fact that the
standard is not merely high but everywhere sustained.  It is impossible,
however, to resist the temptation of quoting Mr. Morris's rendering of
that famous passage in the twenty-third book of the epic, in which
Odysseus eludes the trap laid for him by Penelope, whose very faith in
the certainty of her husband's return makes her sceptical of his identity
when he stands before her; an instance, by the way, of Homer's wonderful
psychological knowledge of human nature, as it is always the dreamer
himself who is most surprised when his dream comes true.

   Thus she spake to prove her husband; but Odysseus, grieved at heart,
   Spake thus unto his bed-mate well-skilled in gainful art:
   'O woman, thou sayest a word exceeding grievous to me!
   Who hath otherwhere shifted my bedstead? full hard for him should it
   be,
   For as deft as he were, unless soothly a very God come here,
   Who easily, if he willed it, might shift it otherwhere.
   But no mortal man is living, how strong soe'er in his youth,
   Who shall lightly hale it elsewhere, since a mighty wonder forsooth
   Is wrought in that fashioned bedstead, and I wrought it, and I alone.
   In the close grew a thicket of olive, a long-leaved tree full-grown,
   That flourished and grew goodly as big as a pillar about,
   So round it I built my bride-room, till I did the work right out
   With ashlar stone close-fitting; and I roofed it overhead,
   And thereto joined doors I made me, well-fitting in their stead.
   Then I lopped away the boughs of the long-leafed olive-tree,
   And shearing the bole from the root up full well and cunningly,
   I planed it about with the brass, and set the rule thereto,
   And shaping thereof a bed-post, with the wimble I bored it through.
   So beginning, I wrought out the bedstead, and finished it utterly,
   And with gold enwrought it about, and with silver and ivory,
   And stretched on it a thong of oxhide with the purple dye made bright.
   Thus then the sign I have shown thee; nor, woman, know I aright
   If my bed yet bideth steadfast, or if to another place
   Some man hath moved it, and smitten the olive-bole from its base.'

These last twelve books of the Odyssey have not the same marvel of
romance, adventure and colour that we find in the earlier part of the
epic.  There is nothing in them that we can compare to the exquisite
idyll of Nausicaa or to the Titanic humour of the episode in the Cyclops'
cave.  Penelope has not the glamour of Circe, and the song of the Sirens
may sound sweeter than the whizz of the arrows of Odysseus as he stands
on the threshold of his hall.  Yet, for sheer intensity of passionate
power, for concentration of intellectual interest and for masterly
dramatic construction, these latter books are quite unequalled.  Indeed,
they show very clearly how it was that, as Greek art developed, the epos
passed into the drama.  The whole scheme of the argument, the return of
the hero in disguise, his disclosure of himself to his son, his terrible
vengeance on his enemies and his final recognition by his wife, reminds
us of the plot of more than one Greek play, and shows us what the great
Athenian poet meant when he said that his own dramas were merely scraps
from Homer's table.  In rendering this splendid poem into English verse,
Mr. Morris has done our literature a service that can hardly be
over-estimated, and it is pleasant to think that, even should the
classics be entirely excluded from our educational systems, the English
boy will still be able to know something of Homer's delightful tales, to
catch an echo of his grand music and to wander with the wise Odysseus
round 'the shores of old romance.'

The Odyssey of Homer.  Done into English Verse by William Morris, Author
of The Earthly Paradise.  Volume II.  (Reeves and Turner.)




SIR CHARLES BOWEN'S VIRGIL


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 30, 1887.)

Sir Charles Bowen's translation of the Eclogues and the first six books
of the AEneid is hardly the work of a poet, but it is a very charming
version for all that, combining as it does the fine loyalty and learning
of a scholar with the graceful style of a man of letters, two essential
qualifications for any one who would render in English verse the
picturesque pastorals of Italian provincial life, or the stately and
polished epic of Imperial Rome.  Dryden was a true poet, but, for some
reason or other, he failed to catch the real Virgilian spirit.  His own
qualities became defects when he accepted the task of a translator.  He
is too robust, too manly, too strong.  He misses Virgil's strange and
subtle sweetness and has but little of his exquisite melody.  Professor
Conington, on the other hand, was an admirable and painstaking scholar,
but he was so entirely devoid of literary tact and artistic insight that
he thought that the majesty of Virgil could be rendered in the jingling
manner of Marmion, and though there is certainly far more of the mediaeval
knight than of the moss-trooper about AEneas, even Mr. Morris's version
is not by any means perfect.  Compared with professor Conington's bad
ballad it is, of course, as gold to brass; considered simply as a poem it
has noble and enduring qualities of beauty, music and strength; but it
hardly conveys to us the sense that the AEneid is the literary epic of a
literary age.  There is more of Homer in it than of Virgil, and the
ordinary reader would hardly realise from the flow and spirit of its
swinging lines that Virgil was a self-conscious artist, the Laureate of a
cultured Court.  The AEneid bears almost the same relation to the Iliad
that the Idylls of the King do to the old Celtic romances of Arthur.  Like
them it is full of felicitous modernisms, of exquisite literary echoes
and of delicate and delightful pictures; as Lord Tennyson loves England
so did Virgil love Rome; the pageants of history and the purple of empire
are equally dear to both poets; but neither of them has the grand
simplicity or the large humanity of the early singers, and, as a hero,
AEneas is no less a failure than Arthur.  Sir Charles Bowen's version
hardly gives us this peculiar literary quality of Virgil's verse, and,
now and then, it reminds us, by some awkward inversion, of the fact that
it is a translation; still, on the whole, it is extremely pleasant to
read, and, if it does not absolutely mirror Virgil, it at least brings us
many charming memories of him.

The metre Sir Charles Bowen has selected is a form of English hexameter,
with the final dissyllable shortened into a foot of a single syllable
only.  It is, of course, accentual not quantitative, and though it misses
that element of sustained strength which is given by the dissyllabic
ending of the Latin verse, and has consequently a tendency to fall into
couplets, the increased facility of rhyming gained by the change is of no
small value.  To any English metre that aims at swiftness of movement
rhyme seems to be an absolute essential, and there are not enough double
rhymes in our language to admit of the retention of this final
dissyllabic foot.

As an example of Sir Charles Bowen's method we would take his rendering
of the famous passage in the fifth Eclogue on the death of Daphnis:

   All of the nymphs went weeping for Daphnis cruelly slain:
   Ye were witnesses, hazels and river waves, of the pain
   When to her son's sad body the mother clave with a cry,
   Calling the great gods cruel, and cruel the stars of the sky.
   None upon those dark days their pastured oxen did lead,
   Daphnis, to drink of the cold clear rivulet; never a steed
   Tasted the flowing waters, or cropped one blade in the mead.
   Over thy grave how the lions of Carthage roared in despair,
   Daphnis, the echoes of mountain wild and of forest declare.
   Daphnis was first who taught us to guide, with a chariot rein,
   Far Armenia's tigers, the chorus of Iacchus to train,
   Led us with foliage waving the pliant spear to entwine.
   As to the tree her vine is a glory, her grapes to the vine,
   Bull to the horned herd, and the corn to a fruitful plain,
   Thou to thine own wert beauty; and since fate robbed us of thee,
   Pales herself, and Apollo are gone from meadow and lea.

'Calling the great gods cruel, and cruel the stars of the sky' is a very
felicitous rendering of 'Atque deos atque astra vocat crudelia mater,'
and so is 'Thou to thine own wert beauty' for 'Tu decus omne tuis.'  This
passage, too, from the fourth book of the AEneid is good:

   Now was the night.  Tired limbs upon earth were folded to sleep,
   Silent the forests and fierce sea-waves; in the firmament deep
   Midway rolled heaven's stars; no sound on the meadow stirred;
   Every beast of the field, each bright-hued feathery bird
   Haunting the limpid lakes, or the tangled briary glade,
   Under the silent night in sleep were peacefully laid:
   All but the grieving Queen.  She yields her never to rest,
   Takes not the quiet night to her eyelids or wearied breast.

And this from the sixth book is worth quoting:

   'Never again such hopes shall a youth of the lineage of Troy
   Rouse in his great forefathers of Latium!  Never a boy
   Nobler pride shall inspire in the ancient Romulus land!
   Ah, for his filial love! for his old-world faith! for his hand
   Matchless in battle!  Unharmed what foemen had offered to stand
   Forth in his path, when charging on foot for the enemy's ranks
   Or when plunging the spur in his foam-flecked courser's flanks!
   Child of a nation's sorrow! if thou canst baffle the Fates'
   Bitter decrees, and break for a while their barrier gates,
   Thine to become Marcellus!  I pray thee bring me anon
   Handfuls of lilies, that I bright flowers may strew on my son,
   Heap on the shade of the boy unborn these gifts at the least,
   Doing the dead, though vainly, the last sad service.'
      He ceased.

'Thine to become Marcellus' has hardly the simple pathos of 'Tu Marcellus
eris,' but 'Child of a nation's sorrow' is a graceful rendering of 'Heu,
miserande puer.'  Indeed, there is a great deal of feeling in the whole
translation, and the tendency of the metre to run into couplets, of which
we have spoken before, is corrected to a certain degree in the passage
quoted above from the Eclogues by the occasional use of the triplet, as,
elsewhere, by the introduction of alternate, not successive, rhymes.

Sir Charles Bowen is to be congratulated on the success of his version.
It has both style and fidelity to recommend it.  The metre he has chosen
seems to us more suited to the sustained majesty of the AEneid than it is
to the pastoral note of the Eclogues.  It can bring us something of the
strength of the lyre but has hardly caught the sweetness of the pipe.
Still, it is in many points a very charming translation, and we gladly
welcome it as a most valuable addition to the literature of echoes.

Virgil in English Verse.  Eclogues and AEneid I.-VI.  By the Right Hon.
Sir Charles Bowen, one of Her Majesty's Lords Justices of Appeal.  (John
Murray.)




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--II


(Woman's World, December 1887.)

Lady Bellairs's Gossips with Girls and Maidens contains some very
interesting essays, and a quite extraordinary amount of useful
information on all matters connected with the mental and physical
training of women.  It is very difficult to give good advice without
being irritating, and almost impossible to be at once didactic and
delightful; but Lady Bellairs manages very cleverly to steer a middle
course between the Charybdis of dulness and the Scylla of flippancy.
There is a pleasing intimite about her style, and almost everything that
she says has both good sense and good humour to recommend it.  Nor does
she confine herself to those broad generalisations on morals, which are
so easy to make, so difficult to apply.  Indeed, she seems to have a
wholesome contempt for the cheap severity of abstract ethics, enters into
the most minute details for the guidance of conduct, and draws out
elaborate lists of what girls should avoid, and what they should
cultivate.

Here are some specimens of 'What to Avoid':--

   A loud, weak, affected, whining, harsh, or shrill tone of voice.
   Extravagancies in conversation--such phrases as 'Awfully this,'
   'Beastly that,' 'Loads of time,' 'Don't you know,' 'hate' for
   'dislike,' etc.
   Sudden exclamations of annoyance, surprise, or joy--often dangerously
   approaching to 'female swearing'--as 'Bother!'  'Gracious!'  'How
   jolly!'
   Yawning when listening to any one.
   Talking on family matters, even to your bosom friends.
   Attempting any vocal or instrumental piece of music that you cannot
   execute with ease.
   Crossing your letters.
   Making a short, sharp nod with the head, intended to do duty for a
   bow.
   All nonsense in the shape of belief in dreams, omens, presentiments,
   ghosts, spiritualism, palmistry, etc.
   Entertaining wild flights of the imagination, or empty idealistic
   aspirations.

I am afraid that I have a good deal of sympathy with what are called
'empty idealistic aspirations'; and 'wild flights of the imagination' are
so extremely rare in the nineteenth century that they seem to me
deserving rather of praise than of censure.  The exclamation 'Bother!'
also, though certainly lacking in beauty, might, I think, be permitted
under circumstances of extreme aggravation, such as, for instance, the
rejection of a manuscript by the editor of a magazine; but in all other
respects the list seems to be quite excellent.  As for 'What to
Cultivate,' nothing could be better than the following:

   An unaffected, low, distinct, silver-toned voice.
   The art of pleasing those around you, and seeming pleased with them,
   and all they may do for you.
   The charm of making little sacrifices quite naturally, as if of no
   account to yourself.
   The habit of making allowances for the opinions, feelings, or
   prejudices of others.
   An erect carriage--that is, a sound body.
   A good memory for faces, and facts connected with them--thus avoiding
   giving offence through not recognising or bowing to people, or saying
   to them what had best been left unsaid.
   The art of listening without impatience to prosy talkers, and smiling
   at the twice-told tale or joke.

I cannot help thinking that the last aphorism aims at too high a
standard.  There is always a certain amount of danger in any attempt to
cultivate impossible virtues.  However, it is only fair to add that Lady
Bellairs recognises the importance of self-development quite as much as
the importance of self-denial; and there is a great deal of sound sense
in everything that she says about the gradual growth and formation of
character.  Indeed, those who have not read Aristotle upon this point
might with advantage read Lady Bellairs.

Miss Constance Naden's little volume, A Modern Apostle and Other Poems,
shows both culture and courage--culture in its use of language, courage
in its selection of subject-matter.  The modern apostle of whom Miss
Naden sings is a young clergyman who preaches Pantheistic Socialism in
the Free Church of some provincial manufacturing town, converts
everybody, except the woman whom he loves, and is killed in a street
riot.  The story is exceedingly powerful, but seems more suitable for
prose than for verse.  It is right that a poet should be full of the
spirit of his age, but the external forms of modern life are hardly, as
yet, expressive of that spirit.  They are truths of fact, not truths of
the imagination, and though they may give the poet an opportunity for
realism, they often rob the poem of the reality that is so essential to
it.  Art, however, is a matter of result, not of theory, and if the fruit
is pleasant, we should not quarrel about the tree.  Miss Naden's work is
distinguished by rich imagery, fine colour, and sweet music, and these
are things for which we should be grateful, wherever we find them.  In
point of mere technical skill, her longer poems are the best; but some of
the shorter poems are very fascinating.  This, for instance, is pretty:

   The copyist group was gathered round
   A time-worn fresco, world-renowned,
   Whose central glory once had been
   The face of Christ, the Nazarene.

   And every copyist of the crowd
   With his own soul that face endowed,
   Gentle, severe, majestic, mean;
   But which was Christ, the Nazarene?

   Then one who watched them made complaint,
   And marvelled, saying, 'Wherefore paint
   Till ye be sure your eyes have seen
   The face of Christ, the Nazarene?'

And this sonnet is full of suggestion:

   The wine-flushed monarch slept, but in his ear
      An angel breathed--'Repent, or choose the flame
      Quenchless.'  In dread he woke, but not in shame,
   Deep musing--'Sin I love, yet hell I fear.'

   Wherefore he left his feasts and minions dear,
      And justly ruled, and died a saint in name.
      But when his hasting spirit heavenward came,
   A stern voice cried--'O Soul! what dost thou here?'

   'Love I forswore, and wine, and kept my vow
      To live a just and joyless life, and now
      I crave reward.'  The voice came like a knell--
   'Fool! dost thou hope to find again thy mirth,
   And those foul joys thou didst renounce on earth?
      Yea, enter in!  My heaven shall be thy hell.'

Miss Constance Naden deserves a high place among our living poetesses,
and this, as Mrs. Sharp has shown lately in her volume, entitled Women's
Voices, is no mean distinction.

Phyllis Browne's Life of Mrs. Somerville forms part of a very interesting
little series, called 'The World's Workers'--a collection of short
biographies catholic enough to include personalities so widely different
as Turner and Richard Cobden, Handel and Sir Titus Salt, Robert
Stephenson and Florence Nightingale, and yet possessing a certain
definite aim.  As a mathematician and a scientist, the translator and
populariser of La Mecanique Celeste, and the author of an important book
on physical geography, Mrs. Somerville is, of course, well known.  The
scientific bodies of Europe covered her with honours; her bust stands in
the hall of the Royal Society, and one of the Women's Colleges at Oxford
bears her name.  Yet, considered simply in the light of a wife and a
mother, she is no less admirable; and those who consider that stupidity
is the proper basis for the domestic virtues, and that intellectual women
must of necessity be helpless with their hands, cannot do better than
read Phyllis Browne's pleasant little book, in which they will find that
the greatest woman-mathematician of any age was a clever needlewoman, a
good housekeeper, and a most skilful cook.  Indeed, Mrs. Somerville seems
to have been quite renowned for her cookery.  The discoverers of the
North-West Passage christened an island 'Somerville,' not as a tribute to
the distinguished mathematician, but as a recognition of the excellence
of some orange marmalade which the distinguished mathematician had
prepared with her own hands and presented to the ships before they left
England; and to the fact that she was able to make currant jelly at a
very critical moment she owed the affection of some of her husband's
relatives, who up to that time had been rather prejudiced against her on
the ground that she was merely an unpractical Blue-stocking.

Nor did her scientific knowledge ever warp or dull the tenderness and
humanity of her nature.  For birds and animals she had always a great
love.  We hear of her as a little girl watching with eager eyes the
swallows as they built their nests in summer or prepared for their flight
in the autumn; and when snow was on the ground she used to open the
windows to let the robins hop in and pick crumbs on the breakfast-table.
On one occasion she went with her father on a tour in the Highlands, and
found on her return that a pet goldfinch, which had been left in the
charge of the servants, had been neglected by them and had died of
starvation.  She was almost heart-broken at the event, and in writing her
Recollections, seventy years after, she mentioned it and said that, as
she wrote, she felt deep pain.  Her chief pet in her old age was a
mountain sparrow, which used to perch on her arm and go to sleep there
while she was writing.  One day the sparrow fell into the water-jug and
was drowned, to the great grief of its mistress who could hardly be
consoled for its loss, though later on we hear of a beautiful paroquet
taking the place of le moineau d'Uranie, and becoming Mrs. Somerville's
constant companion.  She was also very energetic, Phyllis Browne tells
us, in trying to get a law passed in the Italian Parliament for the
protection of animals, and said once, with reference to this subject, 'We
English cannot boast of humanity so long as our sportsmen find pleasure
in shooting down tame pigeons as they fly terrified out of a cage'--a
remark with which I entirely agree.  Mr. Herbert's Bill for the
protection of land birds gave her immense pleasure, though, to quote her
own words, she was 'grieved to find that "the lark, which at heaven's
gate sings," is thought unworthy of man's protection'; and she took a
great fancy to a gentleman who, on being told of the number of singing
birds that is eaten in Italy--nightingales, goldfinches, and
robins--exclaimed in horror, 'What! robins! our household birds!  I would
as soon eat a child!'  Indeed, she believed to some extent in the
immortality of animals on the ground that, if animals have no future, it
would seem as if some were created for uncompensated misery--an idea
which does not seem to me to be either extravagant or fantastic, though
it must be admitted that the optimism on which it is based receives
absolutely no support from science.

On the whole, Phyllis Browne's book is very pleasant reading.  Its only
fault is that it is far too short, and this is a fault so rare in modern
literature that it almost amounts to a distinction.  However, Phyllis
Browne has managed to crowd into the narrow limits at her disposal a
great many interesting anecdotes.  The picture she gives of Mrs.
Somerville working away at her translation of Laplace in the same room
with her children is very charming, and reminds one of what is told of
George Sand; there is an amusing account of Mrs. Somerville's visit to
the widow of the young Pretender, the Countess of Albany, who, after
talking with her for some time, exclaimed, 'So you don't speak Italian.
You must have had a very bad education'!  And this story about the
Waverley Novels may possibly be new to some of my readers:

   A very amusing circumstance in connection with Mrs. Somerville's
   acquaintance with Sir Walter arose out of the childish inquisitiveness
   of Woronzow Greig, Mrs. Somerville's little boy.

   During the time Mrs. Somerville was visiting Abbotsford the Waverley
   Novels were appearing, and were creating a great sensation; yet even
   Scott's intimate friends did not know that he was the author; he
   enjoyed keeping the affair a mystery.  But little Woronzow discovered
   what he was about.  One day when Mrs. Somerville was talking about a
   novel that had just been published, Woronzow said, 'I knew all these
   stories long ago, for Mr. Scott writes on the dinner-table; when he
   has finished he puts the green cloth with the papers in a corner of
   the dining-room, and when he goes out Charlie Scott and I read the
   stories.'

Phyllis Browne remarks that this incident shows 'that persons who want to
keep a secret ought to be very careful when children are about'; but the
story seems to me to be far too charming to require any moral of the
kind.

Bound up in the same volume is a Life of Miss Mary Carpenter, also
written by Phyllis Browne.  Miss Carpenter does not seem to me to have
the charm and fascination of Mrs. Somerville.  There is always something
about her that is formal, limited, and precise.  When she was about two
years old she insisted on being called 'Doctor Carpenter' in the nursery;
at the age of twelve she is described by a friend as a sedate little
girl, who always spoke like a book; and before she entered on her
educational schemes she wrote down a solemn dedication of herself to the
service of humanity.  However, she was one of the practical, hardworking
saints of the nineteenth century, and it is no doubt quite right that the
saints should take themselves very seriously.  It is only fair also to
remember that her work of rescue and reformation was carried on under
great difficulties.  Here, for instance, is the picture Miss Cobbe gives
us of one of the Bristol night-schools:

   It was a wonderful spectacle to see Mary Carpenter sitting patiently
   before the large school gallery in St. James's Back, teaching,
   singing, and praying with the wild street-boys, in spite of endless
   interruptions caused by such proceedings as shooting marbles at any
   object behind her, whistling, stamping, fighting, shrieking out 'Amen'
   in the middle of a prayer, and sometimes rising en masse and tearing
   like a troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes down from the gallery,
   round the great schoolroom, and down the stairs, and into the street.
   These irrepressible outbreaks she bore with infinite good humour.

Her own account is somewhat pleasanter, and shows that 'the troop of
bisons in hob-nailed shoes' was not always so barbarous.

   I had taken to my class on the preceding week some specimens of ferns
   neatly gummed on white paper. . . .  This time I took a piece of coal-
   shale, with impressions of ferns, to show them. . . .  I told each to
   examine the specimen, and tell me what he thought it was.  W. gave so
   bright a smile that I saw he knew; none of the others could tell; he
   said they were ferns, like what I showed them last week, but he
   thought they were chiselled on the stone.  Their surprise and pleasure
   were great when I explained the matter to them.

   The history of Joseph: they all found a difficulty in realising that
   this had actually occurred.  One asked if Egypt existed now, and if
   people lived in it.  When I told them that buildings now stood which
   had been erected about the time of Joseph, one said that it was
   impossible, as they must have fallen down ere this.  I showed them the
   form of a pyramid, and they were satisfied.  One asked if _all_ books
   were true.

   The story of Macbeth impressed them very much.  They knew the name of
   Shakespeare, having seen his name over a public-house.

A boy defined conscience as 'a thing a gentleman hasn't got, who, when a
boy finds his purse and gives it back to him, doesn't give the boy
sixpence.'

Another boy was asked, after a Sunday evening lecture on 'Thankfulness,'
what pleasure he enjoyed most in the course of a year.  He replied
candidly, 'Cock-fightin', ma'am; there's a pit up by the "Black Boy" as
is worth anythink in Brissel.'

There is something a little pathetic in the attempt to civilise the rough
street-boy by means of the refining influence of ferns and fossils, and
it is difficult to help feeling that Miss Carpenter rather overestimated
the value of elementary education.  The poor are not to be fed upon
facts.  Even Shakespeare and the Pyramids are not sufficient; nor is
there much use in giving them the results of culture, unless we also give
them those conditions under which culture can be realised.  In these
cold, crowded cities of the North, the proper basis for morals, using the
word in its wide Hellenic signification, is to be found in architecture,
not in books.

Still, it would be ungenerous not to recognise that Mary Carpenter gave
to the children of the poor not merely her learning, but her love.  In
early life, her biographer tells us, she had longed for the happiness of
being a wife and a mother; but later she became content that her
affection could be freely given to all who needed it, and the verse in
the prophecies, 'I have given thee children whom thou hast not borne,'
seemed to her to indicate what was to be her true mission.  Indeed, she
rather inclined to Bacon's opinion, that unmarried people do the best
public work.  'It is quite striking,' she says in one of her letters, 'to
observe how much the useful power and influence of woman has developed of
late years.  Unattached ladies, such as widows and unmarried women, have
quite ample work to do in the world for the good of others to absorb all
their powers.  Wives and mothers have a very noble work given them by
God, and want no more.'  The whole passage is extremely interesting, and
the phrase 'unattached ladies' is quite delightful, and reminds one of
Charles Lamb.

* * * * *

Ismay's Children is by the clever authoress of that wonderful little
story Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor, a story which delighted the
realists by its truth, fascinated Mr. Ruskin by its beauty, and remains
to the present day the most perfect picture of street-arab life in all
English prose fiction.  The scene of the novel is laid in the south of
Ireland, and the plot is extremely dramatic and ingenious.  Godfrey
Mauleverer, a reckless young Irishman, runs away with Ismay D'Arcy, a
pretty, penniless governess, and is privately married to her in Scotland.
Some time after the birth of her third child, Ismay died, and her
husband, who had never made his marriage public, nor taken any pains to
establish the legitimacy of his children, is drowned while yachting off
the coast of France.  The care of Ismay's children then devolves on an
old aunt, Miss Juliet D'Arcy, who brings them back to Ireland to claim
their inheritance for them.  But a sudden stroke of paralysis deprives
her of her memory, and she forgets the name of the little Scotch village
in which Ismay's informal marriage took place.  So Tighe O'Malley holds
Barrettstown, and Ismay's children live in an old mill close to the great
park of which they are the rightful heirs.  The boy, who is called
Godfrey after his father, is a fascinating study, with his swarthy
foreign beauty, his fierce moods of love and hate, his passionate pride,
and his passionate tenderness.  The account of his midnight ride to warn
his enemy of an impending attack of Moonlighters is most powerful and
spirited; and it is pleasant to meet in modern fiction a character that
has all the fine inconsistencies of life, and is neither too fantastic an
exception to be true, nor too ordinary a type to be common.  Excellent
also, in its direct simplicity of rendering, is the picture of Miss
Juliet D'Arcy; and the scene in which, at the moment of her death, the
old woman's memory returns to her is quite admirable, both in conception
and in treatment.  To me, however, the chief interest of the book lies in
the little lifelike sketches of Irish character with which it abounds.
Modern realistic art has not yet produced a Hamlet, but at least it may
claim to have studied Guildenstern and Rosencrantz very closely; and, for
pure fidelity and truth to nature, nothing could be better than the minor
characters in Ismay's Children.  Here we have the kindly old priest who
arranges all the marriages in his parish, and has a strong objection to
people who insist on making long confessions; the important young curate
fresh from Maynooth, who gives himself more airs than a bishop, and has
to be kept in order; the professional beggars, with their devout faith,
their grotesque humour, and their incorrigible laziness; the shrewd
shopkeeper, who imports arms in flour-barrels for the use of the
Moonlighters and, as soon as he has got rid of them, gives information of
their whereabouts to the police; the young men who go out at night to be
drilled by an Irish-American; the farmers with their wild land-hunger,
bidding secretly against each other for every vacant field; the
dispensary doctor, who is always regretting that he has not got a Trinity
College degree; the plain girls, who want to go into convents; the pretty
girls, who want to get married; and the shopkeepers' daughters, who want
to be thought young ladies.  There is a whole pell-mell of men and women,
a complete panorama of provincial life, an absolutely faithful picture of
the peasant in his own home.  This note of realism in dealing with
national types of character has always been a distinguishing
characteristic of Irish fiction, from the days of Miss Edgeworth down to
our own days, and it is not difficult to see in Ismay's Children some
traces of the influence of Castle Rack-rent.  I fear, however, that few
people read Miss Edgeworth nowadays, though both Scott and Tourgenieff
acknowledged their indebtedness to her novels, and her style is always
admirable in its clearness and precision.

* * * * *

Miss Leffler-Arnim's statement, in a lecture delivered recently at St.
Saviour's Hospital, that 'she had heard of instances where ladies were so
determined not to exceed the fashionable measurement that they had
actually held on to a cross-bar while their maids fastened the fifteen-
inch corset,' has excited a good deal of incredulity, but there is
nothing really improbable in it.  From the sixteenth century to our own
day there is hardly any form of torture that has not been inflicted on
girls, and endured by women, in obedience to the dictates of an
unreasonable and monstrous Fashion.  'In order to obtain a real Spanish
figure,' says Montaigne, 'what a Gehenna of suffering will not women
endure, drawn in and compressed by great coches entering the flesh; nay,
sometimes they even die thereof.'  'A few days after my arrival at
school,' Mrs. Somerville tells us in her memoirs, 'although perfectly
straight and well made, I was enclosed in stiff stays, with a steel busk
in front; while above my frock, bands drew my shoulders back till the
shoulder-blades met.  Then a steel rod with a semicircle, which went
under my chin, was clasped to the steel busk in my stays.  In this
constrained state I and most of the younger girls had to prepare our
lessons'; and in the life of Miss Edgeworth we read that, being sent to a
certain fashionable establishment, 'she underwent all the usual tortures
of back-boards, iron collars and dumbs, and also (because she was a very
tiny person) the unusual one of being hung by the neck to draw out the
muscles and increase the growth,' a signal failure in her case.  Indeed,
instances of absolute mutilation and misery are so common in the past
that it is unnecessary to multiply them; but it is really sad to think
that in our own day a civilised woman can hang on to a cross-bar while
her maid laces her waist into a fifteen-inch circle.  To begin with, the
waist is not a circle at all, but an oval; nor can there be any greater
error than to imagine that an unnaturally small waist gives an air of
grace, or even of slightness; to the whole figure.  Its effect, as a
rule, is simply to exaggerate the width of the shoulders and the hips;
and those whose figures possess that stateliness which is called
stoutness by the vulgar, convert what is a quality into a defect by
yielding to the silly edicts of Fashion on the subject of tight-lacing.
The fashionable English waist, also, is not merely far too small, and
consequently quite out of proportion to the rest of the figure, but it is
worn far too low down.  I use the expression 'worn' advisedly, for a
waist nowadays seems to be regarded as an article of apparel to be put on
when and where one likes.  A long waist always implies shortness of the
lower limbs, and, from the artistic point of view, has the effect of
diminishing the height; and I am glad to see that many of the most
charming women in Paris are returning to the idea of the Directoire style
of dress.  This style is not by any means perfect, but at least it has
the merit of indicating the proper position of the waist.  I feel quite
sure that all English women of culture and position will set their faces
against such stupid and dangerous practices as are related by Miss
Leffler-Arnim.  Fashion's motto is: Il faut souffrir pour etre belle; but
the motto of art and of common-sense is: Il faut etre bete pour souffrir.

* * * * *

Talking of Fashion, a critic in the Pall Mall Gazette expresses his
surprise that I should have allowed an illustration of a hat, covered
with 'the bodies of dead birds,' to appear in the first number of the
Woman's World; and as I have received many letters on the subject, it is
only right that I should state my exact position in the matter.  Fashion
is such an essential part of the mundus muliebris of our day, that it
seems to me absolutely necessary that its growth, development, and phases
should be duly chronicled; and the historical and practical value of such
a record depends entirely upon its perfect fidelity to fact.  Besides, it
is quite easy for the children of light to adapt almost any fashionable
form of dress to the requirements of utility and the demands of good
taste.  The Sarah Bernhardt tea-gown, for instance, figured in the
present issue, has many good points about it, and the gigantic
dress-improver does not appear to me to be really essential to the mode;
and though the Postillion costume of the fancy dress ball is absolutely
detestable in its silliness and vulgarity, the so-called Late Georgian
costume in the same plate is rather pleasing.  I must, however, protest
against the idea that to chronicle the development of Fashion implies any
approval of the particular forms that Fashion may adopt.

* * * * *

Mrs. Craik's article on the condition of the English stage will, I feel
sure, be read with great interest by all who are watching the development
of dramatic art in this country.  It was the last thing written by the
author of John Halifax, Gentleman, and reached me only a few days before
her lamented death.  That the state of things is such as Mrs. Craik
describes, few will be inclined to deny; though, for my own part, I must
acknowledge that I see more vulgarity than vice in the tendencies of the
modern stage; nor do I think it possible to elevate dramatic art by
limiting its subject-matter.  On tue une litterature quand on lui
interdit la verite humaine.  As far as the serious presentation of life
is concerned, what we require is more imaginative treatment, greater
freedom from theatric language and theatric convention.  It may be
questioned, also, whether the consistent reward of virtue and punishment
of wickedness be really the healthiest ideal for an art that claims to
mirror nature.  However, it is impossible not to recognise the fine
feeling that actuates every line of Mrs. Craik's article; and though one
may venture to disagree with the proposed method, one cannot but
sympathise with the purity and delicacy of the thought, and the high
nobility of the aim.

* * * * *

The French Minister of Education, M. Spuller, has paid Racine a very
graceful and appropriate compliment, in naming after him the second
college that has been opened in Paris for the higher education of girls.
Racine was one of the privileged few who was allowed to read the
celebrated Traite de l'Education des Filles before it appeared in print;
he was charged, along with Boileau, with the task of revising the text of
the constitution and rules of Madame de Maintenon's great college; it was
for the Demoiselles de St. Cyr that he composed Athalie; and he devoted a
great deal of his time to the education of his own children.  The Lycee
Racine will, no doubt, become as important an institution as the Lycee
Fenelon, and the speech delivered by M. Spuller on the occasion of its
opening was full of the happiest augury for the future.  M. Spuller dwelt
at great length on the value of Goethe's aphorism, that the test of a
good wife is her capacity to take her husband's place and to become a
father to his children, and mentioned that the thing that struck him most
in America was the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge, a superb titanic structure,
which was completed under the direction of the engineer's wife, the
engineer himself having died while the building of the bridge was in
progress.  'Il me semble,' said M. Spuller, 'que la femme de l'ingenieur
du pont de Brooklyn a realise la pensee de Goethe, et que non seulement
elle est devenue un pere pour ses enfants, mais un autre pere pour
l'oeuvre admirable, vraiment unique, qui a immortalise le nom qu'elle
portait avec son mari.'  M. Spuller also laid great stress on the
necessity of a thoroughly practical education, and was extremely severe
on the 'Blue-stockings' of literature.  'Il ne s'agit pas de former ici
des "femmes savantes."  Les "femmes savantes" ont ete marquees pour
jamais par un des plus grands genies de notre race d'une legere teinte de
ridicule.  Non, ce n'est pas des femmes savantes que nous voulons: ce
sont tout simplement des femmes: des femmes dignes de ce pays de France,
qui est la patrie du bons sens, de la mesure, et de la grace; des femmes
ayant la notion juste et le sens exquis du role qui doit leur appartenir
dans la societe moderne.'  There is, no doubt, a great deal of truth in
M. Spuller's observations, but we must not mistake a caricature for the
reality.  After all, Les Precieuses Ridicules contrasted very favourably
with the ordinary type of womanhood of their day, not merely in France,
but also in England; and an uncritical love of sonnets is preferable, on
the whole, to coarseness, vulgarity and ignorance.

* * * * *

I am glad to see that Miss Ramsay's brilliant success at Cambridge is not
destined to remain an isolated instance of what women can do in
intellectual competitions with men.  At the Royal University in Ireland,
the Literature Scholarship of 100 pounds a year for five years has been
won by Miss Story, the daughter of a North of Ireland clergyman.  It is
pleasant to be able to chronicle an item of Irish news that has nothing
to do with the violence of party politics or party feeling, and that
shows how worthy women are of that higher culture and education which has
been so tardily and, in some instances, so grudgingly granted to them.

* * * * *

The Empress of Japan has been ordering a whole wardrobe of fashionable
dresses in Paris for her own use and the use of her ladies-in-waiting.
The chrysanthemum (the imperial flower of Japan) has suggested the tints
of most of the Empress's own gowns, and in accordance with the colour-
schemes of other flowers the rest of the costumes have been designed.  The
same steamer, however, that carries out the masterpieces of M. Worth and
M. Felix to the Land of the Rising Sun, also brings to the Empress a
letter of formal and respectful remonstrance from the English Rational
Dress Society.  I trust that, even if the Empress rejects the sensible
arguments of this important Society, her own artistic feeling may induce
her to reconsider her resolution to abandon Eastern for Western costume.

* * * * *

I hope that some of my readers will interest themselves in the
Ministering Children's League for which Mr. Walter Crane has done the
beautiful and suggestive design of The Young Knight.  The best way to
make children good is to make them happy, and happiness seems to me an
essential part of Lady Meath's admirable scheme.

(1) Gossips with Girls and Maidens Betrothed and Free.  By Lady Bellairs.
(Blackwood and Sons.)

(2) A Modern Apostle and Other Poems.  By Constance Naden.  (Kegan Paul.)

(3) Mrs. Somerville and Mary Carpenter.  By Phyllis Browne, Author of
What Girls Can Do, etc.  (Cassell and Co.)

(4) Ismay's Children.  By the Author of Hogan, M.P.; Flitters, Tatters,
and the Counsellor, etc.  (Macmillan and Co.)




ARISTOTLE AT AFTERNOON TEA


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 16, 1887.)

In society, says Mr. Mahaffy, every civilised man and woman ought to feel
it their duty to say something, even when there is hardly anything to be
said, and, in order to encourage this delightful art of brilliant
chatter, he has published a social guide without which no debutante or
dandy should ever dream of going out to dine.  Not that Mr. Mahaffy's
book can be said to be, in any sense of the word, popular.  In discussing
this important subject of conversation, he has not merely followed the
scientific method of Aristotle which is, perhaps, excusable, but he has
adopted the literary style of Aristotle for which no excuse is possible.
There is, also, hardly a single anecdote, hardly a single illustration,
and the reader is left to put the Professor's abstract rules into
practice, without either the examples or the warnings of history to
encourage or to dissuade him in his reckless career.  Still, the book can
be warmly recommended to all who propose to substitute the vice of
verbosity for the stupidity of silence.  It fascinates in spite of its
form and pleases in spite of its pedantry, and is the nearest approach,
that we know of, in modern literature to meeting Aristotle at an
afternoon tea.

As regards physical conditions, the only one that is considered by Mr.
Mahaffy as being absolutely essential to a good conversationalist, is the
possession of a musical voice.  Some learned writers have been of opinion
that a slight stammer often gives peculiar zest to conversation, but Mr.
Mahaffy rejects this view and is extremely severe on every eccentricity
from a native brogue to an artificial catchword.  With his remarks on the
latter point, the meaningless repetition of phrases, we entirely agree.
Nothing can be more irritating than the scientific person who is always
saying '_Exactly_ so,' or the commonplace person who ends every sentence
with '_Don't you know_?' or the pseudo-artistic person who murmurs
'_Charming, charming_,' on the smallest provocation.  It is, however,
with the mental and moral qualifications for conversation that Mr.
Mahaffy specially deals.  Knowledge he, naturally, regards as an absolute
essential, for, as he most justly observes, 'an ignorant man is seldom
agreeable, except as a butt.'  Upon the other hand, strict accuracy
should be avoided.  'Even a consummate liar,' says Mr. Mahaffy, is a
better ingredient in a company than 'the scrupulously truthful man, who
weighs every statement, questions every fact, and corrects every
inaccuracy.'  The liar at any rate recognises that recreation, not
instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised
being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story
which is told simply for the amusement of the company.  Mr. Mahaffy,
however, makes an exception in favour of the eminent specialist and tells
us that intelligent questions addressed to an astronomer, or a pure
mathematician, will elicit many curious facts which will pleasantly
beguile the time.  Here, in the interest of Society, we feel bound to
enter a formal protest.  Nobody, even in the provinces, should ever be
allowed to ask an intelligent question about pure mathematics across a
dinner-table.  A question of this kind is quite as bad as inquiring
suddenly about the state of a man's soul, a sort of coup which, as Mr.
Mahaffy remarks elsewhere, 'many pious people have actually thought a
decent introduction to a conversation.'

As for the moral qualifications of a good talker, Mr. Mahaffy, following
the example of his great master, warns us against any disproportionate
excess of virtue.  Modesty, for instance, may easily become a social
vice, and to be continually apologising for one's ignorance or stupidity
is a grave injury to conversation, for, 'what we want to learn from each
member is his free opinion on the subject in hand, not his own estimate
of the value of that opinion.'  Simplicity, too, is not without its
dangers.  The enfant terrible, with his shameless love of truth, the raw
country-bred girl who always says what she means, and the plain, blunt
man who makes a point of speaking his mind on every possible occasion,
without ever considering whether he has a mind at all, are the fatal
examples of what simplicity leads to.  Shyness may be a form of vanity,
and reserve a development of pride, and as for sympathy, what can be more
detestable than the man, or woman, who insists on agreeing with
everybody, and so makes 'a discussion, which implies differences in
opinion,' absolutely impossible?  Even the unselfish listener is apt to
become a bore.  'These silent people,' says Mr. Mahaffy, 'not only take
all they can get in Society for nothing, but they take it without the
smallest gratitude, and have the audacity afterwards to censure those who
have laboured for their amusement.'  Tact, which is an exquisite sense of
the symmetry of things, is, according to Mr. Mahaffy, the highest and
best of all the moral conditions for conversation.  The man of tact, he
most wisely remarks, 'will instinctively avoid jokes about Blue Beard' in
the company of a woman who is a man's third wife; he will never be guilty
of talking like a book, but will rather avoid too careful an attention to
grammar and the rounding of periods; he will cultivate the art of
graceful interruption, so as to prevent a subject being worn threadbare
by the aged or the inexperienced; and should he be desirous of telling a
story, he will look round and consider each member of the party, and if
there be a single stranger present will forgo the pleasure of anecdotage
rather than make the social mistake of hurting even one of the guests.  As
for prepared or premeditated art, Mr. Mahaffy has a great contempt for it
and tells us of a certain college don (let us hope not at Oxford or
Cambridge) who always carried a jest-book in his pocket and had to refer
to it when he wished to make a repartee.  Great wits, too, are often very
cruel, and great humourists often very vulgar, so it will be better to
try and 'make good conversation without any large help from these
brilliant but dangerous gifts.'

In a tete-a-tete one should talk about persons, and in general Society
about things.  The state of the weather is always an excusable exordium,
but it is convenient to have a paradox or heresy on the subject always
ready so as to direct the conversation into other channels.  Really
domestic people are almost invariably bad talkers as their very virtues
in home life have dulled their interest in outer things.  The very best
mothers will insist on chattering of their babies and prattling about
infant education.  In fact, most women do not take sufficient interest in
politics, just as most men are deficient in general reading.  Still,
anybody can be made to talk, except the very obstinate, and even a
commercial traveller may be drawn out and become quite interesting.  As
for Society small talk, it is impossible, Mr. Mahaffy tells us, for any
sound theory of conversation to depreciate gossip, 'which is perhaps the
main factor in agreeable talk throughout Society.'  The retailing of
small personal points about great people always gives pleasure, and if
one is not fortunate enough to be an Arctic traveller or an escaped
Nihilist, the best thing one can do is to relate some anecdote of 'Prince
Bismarck, or King Victor Emmanuel, or Mr. Gladstone.'  In the case of
meeting a genius and a Duke at dinner, the good talker will try to raise
himself to the level of the former and to bring the latter down to his
own level.  To succeed among one's social superiors one must have no
hesitation in contradicting them.  Indeed, one should make bold
criticisms and introduce a bright and free tone into a Society whose
grandeur and extreme respectability make it, Mr. Mahaffy remarks, as
pathetically as inaccurately, 'perhaps somewhat dull.'  The best
conversationalists are those whose ancestors have been bilingual, like
the French and Irish, but the art of conversation is really within the
reach of almost every one, except those who are morbidly truthful, or
whose high moral worth requires to be sustained by a permanent gravity of
demeanour and a general dulness of mind.

These are the broad principles contained in Mr. Mahaffy's clever little
book, and many of them will, no doubt, commend themselves to our readers.
The maxim, 'If you find the company dull, blame yourself,' seems to us
somewhat optimistic, and we have no sympathy at all with the professional
story-teller who is really a great bore at a dinner-table; but Mr.
Mahaffy is quite right in insisting that no bright social intercourse is
possible without equality, and it is no objection to his book to say that
it will not teach people how to talk cleverly.  It is not logic that
makes men reasonable, nor the science of ethics that makes men good, but
it is always useful to analyse, to formularise and to investigate.  The
only thing to be regretted in the volume is the arid and jejune character
of the style.  If Mr. Mahaffy would only write as he talks, his book
would be much pleasanter reading.

The Principles of the Art of Conversation: A Social Essay.  By J. P.
Mahaffy.  (Macmillan and Co.)




EARLY CHRISTIAN ART IN IRELAND


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 17, 1887.)

The want of a good series of popular handbooks on Irish art has long been
felt, the works of Sir William Wilde, Petrie and others being somewhat
too elaborate for the ordinary student; so we are glad to notice the
appearance, under the auspices of the Committee of Council on Education,
of Miss Margaret Stokes's useful little volume on the early Christian art
of her country.  There is, of course, nothing particularly original in
Miss Stokes's book, nor can she be said to be a very attractive or
pleasing writer, but it is unfair to look for originality in primers, and
the charm of the illustrations fully atones for the somewhat heavy and
pedantic character of the style.

This early Christian art of Ireland is full of interest to the artist,
the archaeologist and the historian.  In its rudest forms, such as the
little iron hand-bell, the plain stone chalice and the rough wooden
staff, it brings us back to the simplicity of the primitive Christian
Church, while to the period of its highest development we owe the great
masterpieces of Celtic metal-work.  The stone chalice is now replaced by
the chalice of silver and gold; the iron bell has its jewel-studded
shrine, and the rough staff its gorgeous casing; rich caskets and
splendid bindings preserve the holy books of the Saints and, instead of
the rudely carved symbol of the early missionaries, we have such
beautiful works of art as the processional cross of Cong Abbey.  Beautiful
this cross certainly is with its delicate intricacy of ornamentation, its
grace of proportion and its marvel of mere workmanship, nor is there any
doubt about its history.  From the inscriptions on it, which are
corroborated by the annals of Innisfallen and the book of Clonmacnoise,
we learn that it was made for King Turlough O'Connor by a native artist
under the superintendence of Bishop O'Duffy, its primary object being to
enshrine a portion of the true cross that was sent to the king in 1123.
Brought to Cong some years afterwards, probably by the archbishop, who
died there in 1150, it was concealed at the time of the Reformation, but
at the beginning of the present century was still in the possession of
the last abbot, and at his death it was purchased by professor MacCullagh
and presented by him to the museum of the Royal Irish Academy.  This
wonderful work is alone well worth a visit to Dublin, but not less lovely
is the chalice of Ardagh, a two-handled silver cup, absolutely classical
in its perfect purity of form, and decorated with gold and amber and
crystal and with varieties of cloisonne and champleve enamel.  There is
no mention of this cup, or of the so-called Tara brooch, in ancient Irish
history.  All that we know of them is that they were found accidentally,
the former by a boy who was digging potatoes near the old Rath of Ardagh,
the latter by a poor child who picked it up near the seashore.  They
both, however, belong probably to the tenth century.

Of all these works, as well as of the bell shrines, book-covers,
sculptured crosses and illuminated designs in manuscripts, excellent
pictures are given in Miss Stokes's handbook.  The extremely interesting
Fiachal Phadrig, or shrine of St. Patrick's tooth, might have been
figured and noted as an interesting example of the survival of ornament,
and one of the old miniatures of the scribe or Evangelist writing would
have given an additional interest to the chapter on Irish MSS.  On the
whole, however, the book is wonderfully well illustrated, and the
ordinary art student will be able to get some useful suggestions from it.
Indeed, Miss Stokes, echoing the aspirations of many of the great Irish
archaeologists, looks forward to the revival of a native Irish school in
architecture, sculpture, metal-work and painting.  Such an aspiration is,
of course, very laudable, but there is always a danger of these revivals
being merely artificial reproductions, and it may be questioned whether
the peculiar forms of Irish ornamentation could be made at all expressive
of the modern spirit.  A recent writer on house decoration has gravely
suggested that the British householder should take his meals in a Celtic
dining-room adorned with a dado of Ogham inscriptions, and such wicked
proposals may serve as a warning to all who fancy that the reproduction
of a form necessarily implies a revival of the spirit that gave the form
life and meaning, and who fail to recognise the difference between art
and anachronisms.  Miss Stokes's proposal for an ark-shaped church in
which the mural painter is to repeat the arcades and 'follow the
architectural compositions of the grand pages of the Eusebian canons in
the Book of Kells,' has, of course, nothing grotesque about it, but it is
not probable that the artistic genius of the Irish people will, even when
'the land has rest,' find in such interesting imitations its healthiest
or best expression.  Still, there are certain elements of beauty in
ancient Irish art that the modern artist would do well to study.  The
value of the intricate illuminations in the Book of Kells, as far as
their adaptability to modern designs and modern material goes, has been
very much overrated, but in the ancient Irish torques, brooches, pins,
clasps and the like, the modern goldsmith will find a rich and,
comparatively speaking, an untouched field; and now that the Celtic
spirit has become the leaven of our politics, there is no reason why it
should not contribute something to our decorative art.  This result,
however, will not be obtained by a patriotic misuse of old designs, and
even the most enthusiastic Home Ruler must not be allowed to decorate his
dining-room with a dado of Oghams.

Early Christian Art in Ireland.  By Margaret Stokes.  (Published for the
Committee of Council on Education by Chapman and Hall.)




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--III


(Woman's World, January 1888.)

Madame Ristori's Etudes et Souvenirs is one of the most delightful books
on the stage that has appeared since Lady Martin's charming volume on the
Shakespearian heroines.  It is often said that actors leave nothing
behind them but a barren name and a withered wreath; that they subsist
simply upon the applause of the moment; that they are ultimately doomed
to the oblivion of old play-bills; and that their art, in a word, dies
with them, and shares their own mortality.  'Chippendale, the cabinet-
maker,' says the clever author of Obiter Dicta, 'is more potent than
Garrick the actor.  The vivacity of the latter no longer charms (save in
Boswell); the chairs of the former still render rest impossible in a
hundred homes.'  This view, however, seems to me to be exaggerated.  It
rests on the assumption that acting is simply a mimetic art, and takes no
account of its imaginative and intellectual basis.  It is quite true, of
course, that the personality of the player passes away, and with it that
pleasure-giving power by virtue of which the arts exist.  Yet the
artistic method of a great actor survives.  It lives on in tradition, and
becomes part of the science of a school.  It has all the intellectual
life of a principle.  In England, at the present moment, the influence of
Garrick on our actors is far stronger than that of Reynolds on our
painters of portraits, and if we turn to France it is easy to discern the
tradition of Talma, but where is the tradition of David?

Madame Ristori's memoirs, then, have not merely the charm that always
attaches to the autobiography of a brilliant and beautiful woman, but
have also a definite and distinct artistic value.  Her analysis of the
character of Lady Macbeth, for instance, is full of psychological
interest, and shows us that the subtleties of Shakespearian criticism are
not necessarily confined to those who have views on weak endings and
rhyming tags, but may also be suggested by the art of acting itself.  The
author of Obiter Dicta seeks to deny to actors all critical insight and
all literary appreciation.  The actor, he tells us, is art's slave, not
her child, and lives entirely outside literature, 'with its words for
ever on his lips, and none of its truths engraven on his heart.'  But
this seems to me to be a harsh and reckless generalisation.  Indeed, so
far from agreeing with it, I would be inclined to say that the mere
artistic process of acting, the translation of literature back again into
life, and the presentation of thought under the conditions of action, is
in itself a critical method of a very high order; nor do I think that a
study of the careers of our great English actors will really sustain the
charge of want of literary appreciation.  It may be true that actors pass
too quickly away from the form, in order to get at the feeling that gives
the form beauty and colour, and that, where the literary critic studies
the language, the actor looks simply for the life; and yet, how well the
great actors have appreciated that marvellous music of words which in
Shakespeare, at any rate, is so vital an element of poetic power, if,
indeed, it be not equally so in the case of all who have any claim to be
regarded as true poets.  'The sensual life of verse,' says Keats, in a
dramatic criticism published in the Champion, 'springs warm from the lips
of Kean, and to one learned in Shakespearian hieroglyphics, learned in
the spiritual portion of those lines to which Kean adds a sensual
grandeur, his tongue must seem to have robbed the Hybla bees and left
them honeyless.'  This particular feeling, of which Keats speaks, is
familiar to all who have heard Salvini, Sarah Bernhardt, Ristori, or any
of the great artists of our day, and it is a feeling that one cannot, I
think, gain merely by reading the passage to oneself.  For my own part, I
must confess that it was not until I heard Sarah Bernhardt in Phedre that
I absolutely realised the sweetness of the music of Racine.  As for Mr.
Birrell's statement that actors have the words of literature for ever on
their lips, but none of its truths engraved on their hearts, all that one
can say is that, if it be true, it is a defect which actors share with
the majority of literary critics.

The account Madame Ristori gives of her own struggles, voyages and
adventures, is very pleasant reading indeed.  The child of poor actors,
she made her first appearance when she was three months old, being
brought on in a hamper as a New Year's gift to a selfish old gentleman
who would not forgive his daughter for having married for love.  As,
however, she began to cry long before the hamper was opened, the comedy
became a farce, to the immense amusement of the public.  She next
appeared in a mediaeval melodrama, being then three years of age, and was
so terrified at the machinations of the villain that she ran away at the
most critical moment.  However, her stage-fright seems to have
disappeared, and we find her playing Silvio Pellico's Francesco, da
Rimini at fifteen, and at eighteen making her debut as Marie Stuart.  At
this time the naturalism of the French method was gradually displacing
the artificial elocution and academic poses of the Italian school of
acting.  Madame Ristori seems to have tried to combine simplicity with
style, and the passion of nature with the self-restraint of the artist.
'J'ai voulu fondre les deux manieres,' she tells us, 'car je sentais que
toutes choses etant susceptibles de progres, l'art dramatique aussi etait
appele a subir des transformations.'  The natural development, however,
of the Italian drama was almost arrested by the ridiculous censorship of
plays then existing in each town under Austrian or Papal rule.  The
slightest allusion to the sentiment of nationality or the spirit of
freedom was prohibited.  Even the word patria was regarded as
treasonable, and Madame Ristori tells us an amusing story of the
indignation of a censor who was asked to license a play, in which a dumb
man returns home after an absence of many years, and on his entrance upon
the stage makes gestures expressive of his joy in seeing his native land
once more.  'Gestures of this kind,' said the censor, 'are obviously of a
very revolutionary tendency, and cannot possibly be allowed.  The only
gestures that I could think of permitting would be gestures expressive of
a dumb man's delight in scenery generally.'

The stage directions were accordingly altered, and the word 'landscape'
substituted for 'native land'!  Another censor was extremely severe on an
unfortunate poet who had used the expression 'the beautiful Italian sky,'
and explained to him that 'the beautiful Lombardo-Venetian sky' was the
proper official expression to use.  Poor Gregory in Romeo and Juliet had
to be rechristened, because Gregory is a name dear to the Popes; and the

   Here I have a pilot's thumb,
   Wrecked as homeward he did come,

of the first witch in Macbeth was ruthlessly struck out as containing an
obvious allusion to the steersman of St. Peter's bark.  Finally, bored
and bothered by the political and theological Dogberrys of the day, with
their inane prejudices, their solemn stupidity, and their entire
ignorance of the conditions necessary for the growth of sane and healthy
art, Madame Ristori made up her mind to leave the stage.  She, however,
was extremely anxious to appear once before a Parisian audience, Paris
being at that time the centre of dramatic activity, and after some
consideration left Italy for France in the year 1855.  There she seems to
have been a great success, particularly in the part of Myrrha; classical
without being cold, artistic without being academic, she brought to the
interpretation of the character of Alfieri's great heroine the colour-
element of passion, the form-element of style.  Jules Janin was loud in
his praises, the Emperor begged Ristori to join the troupe of the Comedie
Francaise, and Rachel, with the strange narrow jealousy of her nature,
trembled for her laurels.  Myrrha was followed by Marie Stuart, and Marie
Stuart by Medea.  In the latter part Madame Ristori excited the greatest
enthusiasm.  Ary Scheffer designed her costumes for her; and the Niobe
that stands in the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, suggested to Madame
Ristori her famous pose in the scene with the children.  She would not
consent, however, to remain in France, and we find her subsequently
playing in almost every country in the world from Egypt to Mexico, from
Denmark to Honolulu.  Her representations of classical plays seem to have
been always immensely admired.  When she played at Athens, the King
offered to arrange for a performance in the beautiful old theatre of
Dionysos, and during her tour in Portugal she produced Medea before the
University of Coimbra.  Her description of the latter engagement is
extremely interesting.  On her arrival at the University, she was
received by the entire body of the undergraduates, who still wear a
costume almost mediaeval in character.  Some of them came on the stage in
the course of the play as the handmaidens of Creusa, hiding their black
beards beneath heavy veils, and as soon as they had finished their parts
they took their places gravely among the audience, to Madame Ristori's
horror, still in their Greek dress, but with their veils thrown back, and
smoking long cigars.  'Ce n'est pas la premiere fois,' she says, 'que
j'ai du empecher, par un effort de volonte, la tragedie de se terminer en
farce.'  Very interesting, also, is her account of the production of
Montanelli's Camma, and she tells an amusing story of the arrest of the
author by the French police on the charge of murder, in consequence of a
telegram she sent to him in which the words 'body of the victim'
occurred.  Indeed, the whole book is full of cleverly written stories,
and admirable criticisms on dramatic art.  I have quoted from the French
version, which happens to be the one that lies before me, but whether in
French or Italian the book is one of the most fascinating autobiographies
that has appeared for some time, even in an age like ours when literary
egotism has been brought to such an exquisite pitch of perfection.

* * * * *

The New Purgatory and Other Poems, by Miss E. R. Chapman, is, in some
respects, a very remarkable little volume.  It used to be said that women
were too poetical by nature to make great poets, too receptive to be
really creative, too well satisfied with mere feeling to search after the
marble splendour of form.  But we must not judge of woman's poetic power
by her achievements in days when education was denied to her, for where
there is no faculty of expression no art is possible.  Mrs. Browning, the
first great English poetess, was also an admirable scholar, though she
may not have put the accents on her Greek, and even in those poems that
seem most remote from classical life, such as Aurora Leigh, for instance,
it is not difficult to trace the fine literary influence of a classical
training.  Since Mrs. Browning's time, education has become, not the
privilege of a few women, but the inalienable inheritance of all; and, as
a natural consequence of the increased faculty of expression thereby
gained, the women poets of our day hold a very high literary position.
Curiously enough, their poetry is, as a rule, more distinguished for
strength than for beauty; they seem to love to grapple with the big
intellectual problems of modern life; science, philosophy and metaphysics
form a large portion of their ordinary subject-matter; they leave the
triviality of triolets to men, and try to read the writing on the wall,
and to solve the last secret of the Sphinx.  Hence Robert Browning, not
Keats, is their idol; Sordello moves them more than the Ode on a Grecian
Urn; and all Lord Tennyson's magic and music seems to them as nothing
compared with the psychological subtleties of The Ring and the Book, or
the pregnant questions stirred in the dialogue between Blougram and
Gigadibs.  Indeed I remember hearing a charming young Girtonian,
forgetting for a moment the exquisite lyrics in Pippa Passes, and the
superb blank verse of Men and Women, state quite seriously that the
reason she admired the author of Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country was that he
had headed a reaction against beauty in poetry!

Miss Chapman is probably one of Mr. Browning's disciples.  She does not
imitate him, but it is easy to discern his influence on her verse, and
she has caught something of his fine, strange faith.  Take, for instance,
her poem, A Strong-minded Woman:

   See her?  Oh, yes!--Come this way--hush! this way,
      Here she is lying,
   Sweet--with the smile her face wore yesterday,
      As she lay dying.
   Calm, the mind-fever gone, and, praise God! gone
      All the heart-hunger;
   Looking the merest girl at forty-one--
      You guessed her younger?
   Well, she'd the flower-bloom that children have,
      Was lithe and pliant,
   With eyes as innocent blue as they were brave,
      Resolved, defiant.
   Yourself--you worship art!  Well, at that shrine
      She too bowed lowly,
   Drank thirstily of beauty, as of wine,
      Proclaimed it holy.
   But could you follow her when, in a breath,
      She knelt to science,
   Vowing to truth true service to the death,
      And heart-reliance?
   Nay,--then for you she underwent eclipse,
      Appeared as alien
   As once, before he prayed, those ivory lips
      Seemed to Pygmalion.

   * * * * *

   Hear from your heaven, my dear, my lost delight,
      You who were woman
   To your heart's heart, and not more pure, more white,
      Than warmly human.
   How shall I answer?  How express, reveal
      Your true life-story?
   How utter, if they cannot guess--not feel
      Your crowning glory?
   This way.  Attend my words.  The rich, we know,
      Do into heaven
   Enter but hardly; to the poor, the low,
      God's kingdom's given.
   Well, there's another heaven--a heaven on earth--
      (That's love's fruition)
   Whereto a certain lack--a certain dearth--
      Gains best admission.
   Here, too, she was too rich--ah, God! if less
      Love had been lent her!--
   Into the realm of human happiness
      These look--not enter.

Well, here we have, if not quite an echo, at least a reminiscence of the
metre of The Grammarian's Funeral; and the peculiar blending together of
lyrical and dramatic forms, seems essentially characteristic of Mr.
Browning's method.  Yet there is a distinct personal note running all
through the poem, and true originality is to be found rather in the use
made of a model than in the rejection of all models and masters.  Dans
l'art comme dans la nature on est toujours fils de quelqu'un, and we
should not quarrel with the reed if it whispers to us the music of the
lyre.  A little child once asked me if it was the nightingale who taught
the linnets how to sing.

Miss Chapman's other poems contain a great deal that is interesting.  The
most ambitious is The New Purgatory, to which the book owes its title.  It
is a vision of a strange garden in which, cleansed and purified of all
stain and shame, walk Judas of Cherioth, Nero the Lord of Rome, Ysabel
the wife of Ahab, and others, around whose names cling terrible memories
of horror, or awful splendours of sin.  The conception is fine, but the
treatment is hardly adequate.  There are, however, some good strong lines
in it, and, indeed, almost all of Miss Chapman's poems are worth reading,
if not for their absolute beauty, at least for their intellectual
intention.

* * * * *

Nothing is more interesting than to watch the change and development of
the art of novel-writing in this nineteenth century--'this so-called
nineteenth century,' as an impassioned young orator once termed it, after
a contemptuous diatribe against the evils of modern civilisation.  In
France they have had one great genius, Balzac, who invented the modern
method of looking at life; and one great artist, Flaubert, who is the
impeccable master of style; and to the influence of these two men we may
trace almost all contemporary French fiction.  But in England we have had
no schools worth speaking of.  The fiery torch lit by the Brontes has not
been passed on to other hands; Dickens has influenced only journalism;
Thackeray's delightful superficial philosophy, superb narrative power,
and clever social satire have found no echoes; nor has Trollope left any
direct successors behind him--a fact which is not much to be regretted,
however, as, admirable though Trollope undoubtedly is for rainy
afternoons and tedious railway journeys, from the point of view of
literature he is merely the perpetual curate of Pudlington Parva.  As for
George Meredith, who could hope to reproduce him?  His style is chaos
illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning.  As a writer he has mastered
everything, except language; as a novelist he can do everything, except
tell a story; as an artist he is everything, except articulate.  Too
strange to be popular, too individual to have imitators, the author of
Richard Feverel stands absolutely alone.  It is easy to disarm criticism,
but he has disarmed the disciple.  He gives us his philosophy through the
medium of wit, and is never so pathetic as when he is humorous.  To turn
truth into a paradox is not difficult, but George Meredith makes all his
paradoxes truths, and no Theseus can thread his labyrinth, no OEdipus
solve his secret.

However, it is only fair to acknowledge that there are some signs of a
school springing up amongst us.  This school is not native, nor does it
seek to reproduce any English master.  It may be described as the result
of the realism of Paris filtered through the refining influence of
Boston.  Analysis, not action, is its aim; it has more psychology than
passion, and it plays very cleverly upon one string, and this is the
commonplace.

* * * * *

As a reaction against this school, it is pleasant to come across a novel
like Lady Augusta Noel's Hithersea Mere.  If this story has any definite
defect, it comes from its delicacy and lightness of treatment.  An
industrious Bostonian would have made half a dozen novels out of it, and
have had enough left for a serial.  Lady Augusta Noel is content to
vivify her characters, and does not care about vivisection; she suggests
rather than explains; and she does not seek to make life too obviously
rational.  Romance, picturesqueness, charm--these are the qualities of
her book.  As for its plot, it has so many plots that it is difficult to
describe them.  We have the story of Rhona Somerville, the daughter of a
great popular preacher, who tries to write her father's life, and, on
looking over his papers and early diaries, finds struggle where she
expected calm, and doubt where she looked for faith, and is afraid to
keep back the truth, and yet dares not publish it.  Rhona is quite
charming; she is like a little flower that takes itself very seriously,
and she shows us how thoroughly nice and natural a narrow-minded girl may
be.  Then we have the two brothers, John and Adrian Mowbray.  John is the
hard-working, vigorous clergyman, who is impatient of all theories,
brings his faith to the test of action, not of intellect, lives what he
believes, and has no sympathy for those who waver or question--a
thoroughly admirable, practical, and extremely irritating man.  Adrian is
the fascinating dilettante, the philosophic doubter, a sort of romantic
rationalist with a taste for art.  Of course, Rhona marries the brother
who needs conversion, and their gradual influence on each other is
indicated by a few subtle touches.  Then we have the curious story of
Olga, Adrian Mowbray's first love.  She is a wonderful and mystical girl,
like a little maiden out of the Sagas, with the blue eyes and fair hair
of the North.  An old Norwegian nurse is always at her side, a sort of
Lapland witch who teaches her how to see visions and to interpret dreams.
Adrian mocks at this superstition, as he calls it, but as a consequence
of disregarding it, Olga's only brother is drowned skating, and she never
speaks to Adrian again.  The whole story is told in the most suggestive
way, the mere delicacy of the touch making what is strange seem real.  The
most delightful character in the whole book, however, is a girl called
Hilary Marston, and hers also is the most tragic tale of all.  Hilary is
like a little woodland faun, half Greek and half gipsy; she knows the
note of every bird, and the haunt of every animal; she is terribly out of
place in a drawing-room, but is on intimate terms with every young
poacher in the district; squirrels come and sit on her shoulder, which is
pretty, and she carries ferrets in her pockets, which is dreadful; she
never reads a book, and has not got a single accomplishment, but she is
fascinating and fearless, and wiser, in her own way, than any pedant or
bookworm.  This poor little English Dryad falls passionately in love with
a great blind helpless hero, who regards her as a sort of pleasant tom-
boy; and her death is most touching and pathetic.  Lady Augusta Noel has
a charming and winning style, her descriptions of Nature are quite
admirable, and her book is one of the most pleasantly-written novels that
has appeared this winter.

Miss Alice Corkran's Margery Merton's Girlhood has the same lightness of
touch and grace of treatment.  Though ostensibly meant for young people,
it is a story that all can read with pleasure, for it is true without
being harsh, and beautiful without being affected, and its rejection of
the stronger and more violent passions of life is artistic rather than
ascetic.  In a word, it is a little piece of true literature, as dainty
as it is delicate, and as sweet as it is simple.  Margery Merton is
brought up in Paris by an old maiden aunt, who has an elaborate theory of
education, and strict ideas about discipline.  Her system is an excellent
one, being founded on the science of Darwin and the wisdom of Solomon,
but it comes to terrible grief when put into practice; and finally she
has to procure a governess, Madame Reville, the widow of a great and
unappreciated French painter.  From her Margery gets her first feeling
for art, and the chief interest of the book centres round a competition
for an art scholarship, into which Margery and the other girls of the
convent school enter.  Margery selects Joan of Arc as her subject; and,
rather to the horror of the good nuns, who think that the saint should
have her golden aureole, and be as gorgeous and as ecclesiastical as
bright paints and bad drawing can make her, the picture represents a
common peasant girl, standing in an old orchard, and listening in
ignorant terror to the strange voices whispering in her ear.  The scene
in which she shows her sketch for the first time to the art master and
the Mother Superior is very cleverly rendered indeed, and shows
considerable dramatic power.

Of course, a good deal of opposition takes place, but ultimately Margery
has her own way and, in spite of a wicked plot set on foot by a jealous
competitor, who persuades the Mother Superior that the picture is not
Margery's own work, she succeeds in winning the prize.  The whole account
of the gradual development of the conception in the girl's mind, and the
various attempts she makes to give her dream its perfect form, is
extremely interesting and, indeed, the book deserves a place among what
Sir George Trevelyan has happily termed 'the art-literature' of our day.
Mr. Ruskin in prose, and Mr. Browning in poetry, were the first who drew
for us the workings of the artist soul, the first who led us from the
painting or statue to the hand that fashioned it, and the brain that gave
it life.  They seem to have made art more expressive for us, to have
shown us a passionate humanity lying behind line and colour.  Theirs was
the seed of this new literature, and theirs, too, is its flower; but it
is pleasant to note their influence on Miss Corkran's little story, in
which the creation of a picture forms the dominant motif.

* * * * *

Mrs. Pfeiffer's Women and Work is a collection of most interesting essays
on the relation to health and physical development of the higher
education of girls, and the intellectual or more systematised effort of
woman.  Mrs. Pfeiffer, who writes a most admirable prose style, deals in
succession with the sentimental difficulty, with the economic problem,
and with the arguments of physiologists.  She boldly grapples with
Professor Romanes, whose recent article in the Nineteenth Century, on the
leading characters which mentally differentiate men and women, attracted
so much attention, and produces some very valuable statistics from
America, where the influence of education on health has been most
carefully studied.  Her book is a most important contribution to the
discussion of one of the great social problems of our day.  The extended
activity of women is now an accomplished fact; its results are on their
trial; and Mrs. Pfeiffer's excellent essays sum up the situation very
completely, and show the rational and scientific basis of the movement
more clearly and more logically than any other treatise I have as yet
seen.

* * * * *

It is interesting to note that many of the most advanced modern ideas on
the subject of the education of women are anticipated by Defoe in his
wonderful Essay upon Projects, where he proposes that a college for women
should be erected in every county in England, and ten colleges of the
kind in London.  'I have often thought of it, 'he says,' as one of the
most barbarous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of
learning to women.  Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sew,
or make baubles.  They are taught to read, indeed, and perhaps to write
their names or so, and that is the height of a woman's education.  And I
would but ask any who slight the sex for their understanding, "What is a
man (a gentleman I mean) good for that is taught no more?"  What has the
woman done to forfeit the privilege of being taught?  Shall we upbraid
women with folly when it is only the error of this inhuman custom that
hindered them being made wiser?'  Defoe then proceeds to elaborate his
scheme for the foundation of women's colleges, and enters into minute
details about the architecture, the general curriculum, and the
discipline.  His suggestion that the penalty of death should be inflicted
on any man who ventured to make a proposal of marriage to any of the girl
students during term time possibly suggested the plot of Lord Tennyson's
Princess, so its harshness may be excused, and in all other respects his
ideas are admirable.  I am glad to see that this curious little volume
forms one of the National Library series.  In its anticipations of many
of our most modern inventions it shows how thoroughly practical all
dreamers are.

* * * * *

I am sorry to see that Mrs. Fawcett deprecates the engagement of ladies
of education as dressmakers and milliners, and speaks of it as being
detrimental to those who have fewer educational advantages.  I myself
would like to see dressmaking regarded not merely as a learned
profession, but as a fine art.  To construct a costume that will be at
once rational and beautiful requires an accurate knowledge of the
principles of proportion, a thorough acquaintance with the laws of
health, a subtle sense of colour, and a quick appreciation of the proper
use of materials, and the proper qualities of pattern and design.  The
health of a nation depends very largely on its mode of dress; the
artistic feeling of a nation should find expression in its costume quite
as much as in its architecture; and just as the upholstering tradesman
has had to give place to the decorative artist, so the ordinary milliner,
with her lack of taste and lack of knowledge, her foolish fashions and
her feeble inventions, will have to make way for the scientific and
artistic dress designer.  Indeed, so far from it being wise to discourage
women of education from taking up the profession of dressmakers, it is
exactly women of education who are needed, and I am glad to see in the
new technical college for women at Bedford, millinery and dressmaking are
to be taught as part of the ordinary curriculum.  There has also been
started in London a Society of Lady Dressmakers for the purpose of
teaching educated girls and women, and the Scientific Dress Association
is, I hear, doing very good work in the same direction.

* * * * *

I have received some very beautiful specimens of Christmas books from
Messrs. Griffith and Farran.  Treasures of Art and Song, edited by Robert
Ellice Mack, is a real edition de luxe of pretty poems and pretty
pictures; and Through the Year is a wonderfully artistic calendar.

Messrs. Hildesheimer and Faulkner have also sent me Rhymes and Roses,
illustrated by Ernest Wilson and St. Clair Simmons; Cape Town Dicky, a
child's book, with some very lovely pictures by Miss Alice Havers; a
wonderful edition of The Deserted Village, illustrated by Mr. Charles
Gregory and Mr. Hines; and some really charming Christmas cards, those by
Miss Alice Havers, Miss Edwards, and Miss Dealy being especially good.

* * * * *

The most perfect and the most poisonous of all modern French poets once
remarked that a man can live for three days without bread, but that no
one can live for three days without poetry.  This, however, can hardly be
said to be a popular view, or one that commends itself to that curiously
uncommon quality which is called common-sense.  I fancy that most people,
if they do not actually prefer a salmis to a sonnet, certainly like their
culture to repose on a basis of good cookery, and as there is something
to be said for this attitude, I am glad to see that several ladies are
interesting themselves in cookery classes.  Mrs. Marshall's brilliant
lectures are, of course, well known, and besides her there is Madame
Lebour-Fawssett, who holds weekly classes in Kensington.  Madame Fawssett
is the author of an admirable little book, entitled Economical French
Cookery for Ladies, and I am glad to hear that her lectures are so
successful.  I was talking the other day to a lady who works a great deal
at the East End of London, and she told me that no small part of the
permanent misery of the poor is due to their entire ignorance of the
cleanliness and economy necessary for good cooking.

* * * * *

The Popular Ballad Concert Society has been reorganised under the name of
the Popular Musical Union.  Its object will be to train the working
classes thoroughly in the enjoyment and performance of music, and to
provide the inhabitants of the crowded districts of the East End with
concerts and oratorios, to be performed as far as possible by trained
members of the working classes; and, though money is urgently required,
it is proposed to make the Society to a certain degree self-supporting by
giving something in the form of high-class concerts in return for
subscriptions and donations.  The whole scheme is an excellent one, and I
hope that the readers of the Woman's World will give it their valuable
support.  Mrs. Ernest Hart was the secretary, and the treasurer is the
Rev. S. Barnett.

(1) Etudes et Souvenirs.  By Madame Ristori.  (Paul Ollendorff.)

(2) The New Purgatory and Other Poems.  By Elizabeth Rachel Chapman.
(Fisher Unwin.)

(3) Hithersea Mere.  By Lady Augusta Noel, Author of Wandering Willie,
From Generation to Generation, etc.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(4) Margery Merton's Girlhood.  By Alice Corkran.  (Blackie and Son.)

(5) Women and Work.  By Emily Pfeiffer.  (Trubner and Co.)

(6) Treasures of Art and Song.  Edited by Robert Ellice Mack.  (Griffith
and Farren.)

(7) Rhymes and Roses.  Illustrated by Ernest Wilson and St. Clair Simons.
Cape Town Dicky.  Illustrated by Alice Havers.  The Deserted Pillage.
Illustrated by Charles Gregory and John Hines.  (Hildesheimer and
Faulkner.)




THE POETS' CORNER--IV


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 20, 1888.)

A cynical critic once remarked that no great poet is intelligible and no
little poet worth understanding, but that otherwise poetry is an
admirable thing.  This, however, seems to us a somewhat harsh view of the
subject.  Little poets are an extremely interesting study.  The best of
them have often some new beauty to show us, and though the worst of them
may bore yet they rarely brutalise.  Poor Folks' Lives, for instance, by
the Rev. Frederick Langbridge, is a volume that could do no possible harm
to any one.  These poems display a healthy, rollicking, G. R. Sims tone
of feeling, an almost unbounded regard for the converted drunkard, and a
strong sympathy with the sufferings of the poor.  As for their theology,
it is of that honest, downright and popular kind, which in these
rationalistic days is probably quite as useful as any other form of
theological thought.  Here is the opening of a poem called A Street
Sermon, which is an interesting example of what muscular Christianity can
do in the sphere of verse-making:

   What, God fight shy of the city?
      He's t' other side up I guess;
   If you ever want to find Him,
      Whitechapel's the right address.

Those who prefer pseudo-poetical prose to really prosaic poetry will wish
that Mr. Dalziel had converted most of his Pictures in the Fire into
leaders for the Daily Telegraph, as, from the literary point of view,
they have all the qualities dear to the Asiatic school.  What a splendid
leader the young lions of Fleet Street would have made out of The
Prestige of England, for instance, a poem suggested by the opening of the
Zulu war in 1879.

   Now away sail our ships far away o'er the sea,
      Far away with our gallant and brave;
   The loud war-cry is sounding like wild revelrie,
      And our heroes dash on to their grave;
   For the fierce Zulu tribes have arisen in their might,
      And in thousands swept down on our few;
   But these braves only yielded when crushed in the fight,
      Man to man to their colours were true.

The conception of the war-cry sounding 'like wild revelrie' is quite in
the true Asiatic spirit, and indeed the whole poem is full of the daring
English of a special correspondent.  Personally, we prefer Mr. Dalziel
when he is not quite so military.  The Fairies, for instance, is a very
pretty poem, and reminds us of some of Dicky Doyle's charming drawings,
and Nat Bentley is a capital ballad in its way.  The Irish poems,
however, are rather vulgar and should be expunged.  The Celtic element in
literature is extremely valuable, but there is absolutely no excuse for
shrieking 'Shillelagh!' and 'O Gorrah!'

Women must Weep, by Professor Harald Williams, has the most dreadful
cover of any book that we have come across for some time past.  It is
possibly intended to symbolise the sorrow of the world, but it merely
suggests the decorative tendencies of an undertaker and is as depressing
as it is detestable.  However, as the cowl does not make the monk, so the
binding, in the case of the Savile Club school, does not make the poet,
and we open the volume without prejudice.  The first poem that we come to
is a vigorous attack on those wicked and misguided people who believe
that Beauty is its own reason for existing, and that Art should have no
other aim but her own perfection.  Here are some of the Professor's
gravest accusations:

   Why do they patch, in their fatal choice,
      When at secrets such the angels quake,
   But a play of the Vision and the Voice?--
      Oh, it's all for Art's sake.

   Why do they gather what should be left,
      And leave behind what they ought to take,
   And exult in the basest blank or theft?--
      Oh, it's all for Art's sake.

It certainly must be admitted that to 'patch' or to 'exult in the basest
blank' is a form of conduct quite unbefitting an artist, the very
obscurity and incomprehensible character of such a crime adding something
to its horror.  However, while fully recognising the wickedness of
'patching' we cannot but think that Professor Harald Williams is happier
in his criticism of life than he is in his art criticism.  His poem
Between the Banks, for instance, has a touch of sincerity and fine
feeling that almost atones for its over-emphasis.

Mr. Buchan's blank verse drama Joseph and His Brethren bears no
resemblance to that strange play on the same subject which Mr. Swinburne
so much admires.  Indeed, it may be said to possess all the fatal
originality of inexperience.  However, Mr. Buchan does not leave us in
any doubt about his particular method of writing.  'As to the dialogue,'
he says, 'I have put the language of real life into the mouths of the
speakers, except when they may be supposed to be under strong emotion;
then their utterances become more rapid--broken--figurative--in short
more poetical.'  Well, here is the speech of Potiphar's wife under strong
emotion:

   ZULEEKHA (seizing him).  Love me! or death!
   Ha! dost thou think thou wilt not, and yet live?
   By Isis, no.  And thou wilt turn away,
   Iron, marble mockman!  Ah!  I hold thy life!
   Love feeds on death.  It swallows up all life,
   Hugging, or killing.  I to woo, and thou--
   Unhappy me!  Oh!

The language here is certainly rapid and broken, and the expression
'marble mockman' is, we suppose, figurative, but the passage can scarcely
be described as poetical, though it fulfils all Mr. Buchan's conditions.
Still, tedious as Zuleekha and Joseph are, the Chorus of Ancients is much
worse.  These 'ideal spectators' seem to spend their lives in uttering
those solemn platitudes that with the aged pass for wisdom.  The chief
offenders are the members of what Mr. Buchan calls 'The
2nd.--Semi-chorus,' who have absolutely no hesitation in interrupting the
progress of the play with observations of this kind:

   2ND.--semi-chorus

   Ah! but favour extreme shown to one
      Among equals who yet stand apart,
         Awakeneth, say ye, if naturally,
            The demons--jealousy, envy, hate,--
         In the breast of those passed by.

It is a curious thing that when minor poets write choruses to a play they
should always consider it necessary to adopt the style and language of a
bad translator.  We fear that Mr. Bohn has much to answer for.

God's Garden is a well-meaning attempt to use Nature for theological and
educational purposes.  It belongs to that antiquated school of thought
that, in spite of the discoveries of modern science, invites the sluggard
to look at the ant, and the idle to imitate the bee.  It is full of false
analogies and dull eighteenth-century didactics.  It tells us that the
flowering cactus should remind us that a dwarf may possess mental and
moral qualities, that the mountain ash should teach us the precious
fruits of affliction, and that a fond father should learn from the
example of the chestnut that the most beautiful children often turn out
badly!  We must admit that we have no sympathy with this point of view,
and we strongly protest against the idea that

   The flaming poppy, with its black core, tells
   Of anger's flushing face, and heart of sin.

The worst use that man can make of Nature is to turn her into a mirror
for his own vices, nor are Nature's secrets ever disclosed to those who
approach her in this spirit.  However, the author of this irritating
little volume is not always botanising and moralising in this reckless
and improper fashion.  He has better moments, and those who sympathise
with the Duke of Westminster's efforts to provide open spaces for the
people, will no doubt join in the aspiration--

   God bless wise Grosvenors whose hearts incline,
   Workmen to fete, and grateful souls refine;

though they may regret that so noble a sentiment is expressed in so
inadequate a form.

It is difficult to understand why Mr. Cyrus Thornton should have called
his volume Voices of the Street.  However, poets have a perfect right to
christen their own children, and if the wine is good no one should
quarrel with the bush.  Mr. Thornton's verse is often graceful and
melodious, and some of his lines, such as--

   And the wise old Roman bondsman saw no terror in the dead--
   Children when the play was over, going softly home to bed,

have a pleasant Tennysonian ring.  The Ballad of the Old Year is rather
depressing.  'Bury the Old Year Solemnly' has been said far too often,
and the sentiment is suitable only for Christmas crackers.  The best
thing in the book is The Poet's Vision of Death, which is quite above the
average.

Mrs. Dobell informs us that she has already published sixteen volumes of
poetry and that she intends to publish two more.  The volume that now
lies before us is entitled In the Watches of the Night, most of the poems
that it contains having been composed 'in the neighbourhood of the sea,
between the hours of ten and two o'clock.'  Judging from the following
extract we cannot say that we consider this a very favourable time for
inspiration, at any rate in the case of Mrs. Dobell:

   Were Anthony Trollope and George Eliot
   Alive--which unfortunately they are not--
   As regards the subject of 'quack-snubbing,' you know,
   To support me I am sure they hadn't been slow--
   For they, too, hated the wretched parasite
   That fattens on the freshest, the most bright
   Of the blossoms springing from the--Public Press!--
   And that oft are flowers that even our quacks should bless!

(1) Poor Folks' Lives.  By the Rev. Frederick Langbridge.  (Simpkin,
Marshall and Co.)

(2) Pictures in the Fire.  By George Dalziel.  (Privately Printed.)

(3) Women Must Weep.  By Professor F. Harald Williams.  (Swan
Sonnenschein and Co.)

(4) Joseph and His Brethren: a Trilogy.  By Alexander Buchan.  (Digby and
Long.)

(5) God's Garden.  By Heartsease.  (James Nisbet and Co.)

(6) Voices of the Street.  By Cyrus Thornton.  (Elliot Stock.)

(7) In the Watches of the Night.  By Mrs. Horace Dobell.  (Remington and
Co.)




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--IV


(Woman's World, February 1888.)

Canute The Great, by Michael Field, is in many respects a really
remarkable work of art.  Its tragic element is to be found in life, not
in death; in the hero's psychological development, not in his moral
declension or in any physical calamity; and the author has borrowed from
modern science the idea that in the evolutionary struggle for existence
the true tragedy may be that of the survivor.  Canute, the rough generous
Viking, finds himself alienated from his gods, his forefathers, his very
dreams.  With centuries of Pagan blood in his veins, he sets himself to
the task of becoming a great Christian governor and lawgiver to men; and
yet he is fully conscious that, while he has abandoned the noble impulses
of his race, he still retains that which in his nature is most fierce or
fearful.  It is not by faith that he reaches the new creed, nor through
gentleness that he seeks after the new culture.  The beautiful Christian
woman whom he has made queen of his life and lands teaches him no mercy,
and knows nothing of forgiveness.  It is sin and not suffering that
purifies him--mere sin itself.  'Be not afraid,' he says in the last
great scene of the play:

      'Be not afraid;
   I have learnt this, sin is a mighty bond
   'Twixt God and man.  Love that has ne'er forgiven
   Is virgin and untender; spousal passion
   Becomes acquainted with life's vilest things,
   Transmutes them, and exalts.  Oh, wonderful,
   This touch of pardon,--all the shame cast out;
   The heart a-ripple with the gaiety,
   The leaping consciousness that Heaven knows all,
   And yet esteems us royal.  Think of it--
   The joy, the hope!'

This strange and powerful conception is worked out in a manner as strong
as it is subtle; and, indeed, almost every character in the play seems to
suggest some new psychological problem.  The mere handling of the verse
is essentially characteristic of our modern introspective method, as it
presents to us, not thought in its perfected form, but the involutions of
thought seeking for expression.  We seem to witness the very workings of
the mind, and to watch the passion struggling for utterance.  In plays of
this kind (plays that are meant to be read, not to be acted) it must be
admitted that we often miss that narrative and descriptive element which
in the epic is so great a charm, and, indeed, may be said to be almost
essential to the perfect literary presentation of any story.  This
element the Greek managed to retain by the introduction of chorus and
messenger; but we seem to have been unable to invent any substitute for
it.  That there is here a distinct loss cannot, I think, be denied.  There
is something harsh, abrupt, and inartistic in such a stage-direction as
'Canute strangles Edric, flings his body into the stream, and gazes out.'
It strikes no dramatic note, it conveys no picture, it is meagre and
inadequate.  If acted it might be fine; but as read, it is unimpressive.
However, there is no form of art that has not got its limitations, and
though it is sad to see the action of a play relegated to a formal
footnote, still there is undoubtedly a certain gain in psychological
analysis and psychological concentration.

It is a far cry from the Knutlinga Saga to Rossetti's note-book, but
Michael Field passes from one to the other without any loss of power.
Indeed, most readers will probably prefer The Cup of Water, which is the
second play in this volume, to the earlier historical drama.  It is more
purely poetical; and if it has less power, it has certainly more beauty.
Rossetti conceived the idea of a story in which a young king falls
passionately in love with a little peasant girl who gives him a cup of
water, and is by her beloved in turn, but being betrothed to a noble
lady, he yields her in marriage to his friend, on condition that once a
year--on the anniversary of their meeting--she brings him a cup of water.
The girl dies in childbirth, leaving a daughter who grows into her
mother's perfect likeness, and comes to meet the king when he is hunting.
Just, however, as he is about to take the cup from her hand, a second
figure, in her exact likeness, but dressed in peasant's clothes, steps to
her side, looks in the king's face, and kisses him on the mouth.  He
falls forward on his horse's neck, and is lifted up dead.  Michael Field
has struck out the supernatural element so characteristic of Rossetti's
genius, and in some other respects modified for dramatic purposes
material Rossetti left unused.  The result is a poem of exquisite and
pathetic grace.  Cara, the peasant girl, is a creation as delicate as it
is delightful, and it deserves to rank beside the Faun of Callirhoe.  As
for the young king who loses all the happiness of his life through one
noble moment of unselfishness, and who recognised as he stands over
Cara's dead body that

      women are not chattels,
   To deal with as one's generosity
   May prompt or straiten, . . .

and that

      we must learn
   To drink life's pleasures if we would be pure,

he is one of the most romantic figures in all modern dramatic work.
Looked at from a purely technical point of view, Michael Field's verse is
sometimes lacking in music, and has no sustained grandeur of movement;
but it is extremely dramatic, and its method is admirably suited to
express those swift touches of nature and sudden flashes of thought which
are Michael Field's distinguishing qualities.  As for the moral contained
in these plays, work that has the rich vitality of life has always
something of life's mystery also; it cannot be narrowed down to a formal
creed, nor summed up in a platitude; it has many answers, and more than
one secret.

* * * * *

Miss Frances Martin's Life of Elizabeth Gilbert is an extremely
interesting book.  Elizabeth Gilbert was born at a time when, as her
biographer reminds us, kindly and intelligent men and women could gravely
implore the Almighty to 'take away' a child merely because it was blind;
when they could argue that to teach the blind to read, or to attempt to
teach them to work, was to fly in the face of Providence; and her whole
life was given to the endeavour to overcome this prejudice and
superstition; to show that blindness, though a great privation, is not
necessarily a disqualification; and that blind men and women can learn,
labour, and fulfil all the duties of life.  Before her day all that the
blind were taught was to commit texts from the Bible to memory.  She saw
that they could learn handicrafts, and be made industrious and
self-supporting.  She began with a small cellar in Holborn, at the rent
of eighteenpence a week, but before her death she could point to large
and well-appointed workshops in almost every city of England where blind
men and women are employed, where tools have been invented by or modified
for them, and where agencies have been established for the sale of their
work.  The whole story of her life is full of pathos and of beauty.  She
was not born blind, but lost her sight through an attack of scarlet fever
when she was three years old.  For a long time she could not realise her
position, and we hear of the little child making earnest appeals to be
taken 'out of the dark room,' or to have a candle lighted; and once she
whispered to her father, 'If I am a very good little girl, may I see my
doll to-morrow?'  However, all memory of vision seems to have faded from
her before she left the sick-room, though, taught by those around her,
she soon began to take an imaginary interest in colour, and a very real
one in form and texture.  An old nurse is still alive who remembers
making a pink frock for her when she was a child, her delight at its
being pink and her pleasure in stroking down the folds; and when in 1835
the young Princess Victoria visited Oxford with her mother, Bessie, as
she was always called, came running home, exclaiming, 'Oh, mamma, I have
seen the Duchess of Kent, and she had on a brown silk dress.'  Her
youthful admiration of Wordsworth was based chiefly upon his love of
flowers, but also on personal knowledge.  When she was about ten years
old, Wordsworth went to Oxford to receive the honorary degree of D.C.L.
from the University.  He stayed with Dr. Gilbert, then Principal of
Brasenose, and won Bessie's heart the first day by telling at the dinner
table how he had almost leapt off the coach in Bagley Wood to gather the
blue veronica.  But she had a better reason for remembering that visit.
One day she was in the drawing-room alone, and Wordsworth entered.  For a
moment he stood silent before the blind child, the little sensitive face,
with its wondering, inquiring look, turned towards him.  Then he gravely
said, 'Madam, I hope I do not disturb you.'  She never forgot that
'Madam'--grave, solemn, almost reverential.

As for the great practical work of her life, the amelioration of the
condition of the blind, Miss Martin gives a wonderful account of her
noble efforts and her noble success; and the volume contains a great many
interesting letters from eminent people, of which the following
characteristic note from Mr. Ruskin is not the least interesting:

   DENMARK HILL, 2nd September 1871.

   MADAM,--I am obliged by your letter, and I deeply sympathise with the
   objects of the institution over which you preside.  But one of my main
   principles of work is that every one must do their best, and spend
   their all in their own work, and mine is with a much lower race of
   sufferers than you plead for--with those who 'have eyes and see
   not.'--I am, Madam, your faithful servant, J. Ruskin.

Miss Martin is a most sympathetic biographer, and her book should be read
by all who care to know the history of one of the remarkable women of our
century.

* * * * *

Ourselves and Our Neighbours is a pleasant volume of social essays from
the pen of one of the most graceful and attractive of all American
poetesses, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton.  Mrs. Moulton, who has a very
light literary touch, discusses every important modern problem--from
Society rosebuds and old bachelors, down to the latest fashions in
bonnets and in sonnets.  The best chapter in the book is that entitled
'The Gospel of Good Gowns,' which contains some very excellent remarks on
the ethics of dress.  Mrs. Moulton sums up her position in the following
passage:--

   The desire to please is a natural characteristic of unspoiled
   womanhood.  'If I lived in the woods, I should dress for the trees,'
   said a woman widely known for taste and for culture.  Every woman's
   dress should be, and if she has any ideality will be, an expression of
   herself. . . .  The true gospel of dress is that of fitness and taste.
   Pictures are painted, and music is written, and flowers are fostered,
   that life may be made beautiful.  Let women delight our eyes like
   pictures, be harmonious as music, and fragrant as flowers, that they
   also may fulfil their mission of grace and of beauty.  By
   companionship with beautiful thoughts shall their tastes be so formed
   that their toilets will never be out of harmony with their means or
   their position.  They will be clothed almost as unconsciously as the
   lilies of the field; but each one will be herself, and there will be
   no more uniformity in their attire than in their faces.

The modern Dryad who is ready to 'dress for the trees' seems to me a
charming type; but I hardly think that Mrs. Moulton is right when she
says that the woman of the future will be clothed 'almost as
unconsciously as the lilies of the field.'  Possibly, however, she means
merely to emphasise the distinction between dressing and dressing-up, a
distinction which is often forgotten.

* * * * *

Warring' Angels is a very sad and suggestive story.  It contains no
impossible heroine and no improbable hero, but is simply a faithful
transcript from life, a truthful picture of men and women as they are.
Darwin could not have enjoyed it, as it does not end happily.  There is,
at least, no distribution of cakes and ale in the last chapter.  But,
then, scientific people are not always the best judges of literature.
They seem to think that the sole aim of art should be to amuse, and had
they been consulted on the subject would have banished Melpomene from
Parnassus.  It may be admitted, however, that not a little of our modern
art is somewhat harsh and painful.  Our Castaly is very salt with tears,
and we have bound the brows of the Muses with cypress and with yew.  We
are often told that we are a shallow age, yet we have certainly the
saddest literature of all the ages, for we have made Truth and not Beauty
the aim of art, and seem to value imitation more than imagination.  This
tendency is, of course, more marked in fiction than it is in poetry.
Beauty of form is always in itself a source of joy; the mere _technique_
of verse has an imaginative and spiritual element; and life must, to a
certain degree, be transfigured before it can find its expression in
music.  But ordinary fiction, rejecting the beauty of form in order to
realise the facts of life, seems often to lack the vital element of
delight, to miss that pleasure-giving power in virtue of which the arts
exist.  It would not, however, be fair to regard Warring Angels simply as
a specimen of literary photography.  It has a marked distinction of
style, a definite grace and simplicity of manner.  There is nothing crude
in it, though it is to a certain degree inexperienced; nothing violent,
though it is often strong.  The story it has to tell has frequently been
told before, but the treatment makes it new; and Lady Flower, for whose
white soul the angels of good and evil are at war, is admirably
conceived, and admirably drawn.

* * * * *

A Song of Jubilee and Other Poems contains some pretty, picturesque
verses.  Its author is Mrs. De Courcy Laffan, who, under the name of Mrs.
Leith Adams, is well known as a novelist and story writer.  The Jubilee
Ode is quite as good as most of the Jubilee Odes have been, and some of
the short poems are graceful.  This from The First Butterfly is pretty:

   O little bird without a song!  I love
   Thy silent presence, floating in the light--
   A living, perfect thing, when scarcely yet
   The snow-white blossom crawls along the wall,
   And not a daisy shows its star-like head
   Amid the grass.

Miss Bella Duffy's Life of Madame de Stael forms part of that admirable
'Eminent Women' Series, which is so well edited by Mr. John H. Ingram.
There is nothing absolutely new in Miss Duffy's book, but this was not to
be expected.  Unpublished correspondence, that delight of the eager
biographer, is not to be had in the case of Madame de Stael, the De
Broglie family having either destroyed or successfully concealed all the
papers which might have revealed any facts not already in the possession
of the world.  Upon the other hand, the book has the excellent quality of
condensation, and gives us in less than two hundred pages a very good
picture of Madame de Stael and her day.  Miss Duffy's criticism of
Corinne is worth quoting:

   Corinne is a classic of which everybody is bound to speak with
   respect.  The enormous admiration which it exacted at the time of its
   appearance may seem somewhat strange in this year of grace; but then
   it must be remembered that Italy was not the over-written country it
   has since become.  Besides this, Madame de Stael was the most
   conspicuous personage of her day.  Except Chateaubriand, she had
   nobody to dispute with her the palm of literary glory in France.  Her
   exile, her literary circle, her courageous opinions, had kept the eyes
   of Europe fixed on her for years, so that any work from her pen was
   sure to excite the liveliest curiosity.

   Corinne is a kind of glorified guide-book, with some of the qualities
   of a good novel.  It is very long winded, but the appetite of the age
   was robust in that respect, and the highly-strung emotions of the hero
   and heroine could not shock a taste which had been formed by the
   Sorrows of Werther.  It is extremely moral, deeply sentimental, and of
   a deadly earnestness--three characteristics which could not fail to
   recommend it to a dreary and ponderous generation, the most deficient
   in taste that ever trod the earth.

   But it is artistic in the sense that the interest is concentrated from
   first to last on the central figure, and the drama, such as it is,
   unfolds itself naturally from its starting point, which is the
   contrast between the characters of Oswald and Corinne.

The 'dreary and ponderous generation, the most deficient in taste that
ever trod the earth,' seems to me a somewhat exaggerated mode of
expression, but 'glorified guide-book' is a not unfelicitous description
of the novel that once thrilled Europe.  Miss Duffy sums up her opinion
of Madame de Stael as a writer in the following passage:

   Her mind was strong of grasp and wide in range, but continuous effort
   fatigued it.  She could strike out isolated sentences alternately
   brilliant, exhaustive, and profound, but she could not link them to
   other sentences so as to form an organic whole.  Her thought was
   definite singly, but vague as a whole.  She always saw things
   separately, and tried to combine them arbitrarily, and it is generally
   difficult to follow out any idea of hers from its origin to its end.
   Her thoughts are like pearls of price profusely scattered, or
   carelessly strung together, but not set in any design.  On closing one
   of her books, the reader is left with no continuous impression.  He
   has been dazzled and delighted, enlightened also by flashes; but the
   horizons disclosed have vanished again, and the outlook is enriched by
   no new vistas.

   Then she was deficient in the higher qualities of the imagination.  She
   could analyse, but not characterise; construct, but not create.  She
   could take one defect like selfishness, or one passion like love, and
   display its workings; or she could describe a whole character, like
   Napoleon's, with marvellous penetration; but she could not make her
   personages talk, or act like human beings.  She lacked pathos, and had
   no sense of humour.  In short, hers was a mind endowed with enormous
   powers of comprehension, and an amazing richness of ideas, but
   deficient in perception of beauty, in poetry, and in true originality.
   She was a great social personage, but her influence on literature was
   not destined to be lasting, because, in spite of foreseeing too much,
   she had not the true prophetic sense of proportion, and confused the
   things of the present with those of the future--the accidental with
   the enduring.

I cannot but think that in this passage Miss Duffy rather underrates
Madame de Stael's influence on the literature of the nineteenth century.
It is true that she gave our literature no new form, but she was one of
those who gave it a new spirit, and the romantic movement owes her no
small debt.  However, a biography should be read for its pictures more
than for its criticisms, and Miss Duffy shows a remarkable narrative
power, and tells with a good deal of esprit the wonderful adventures of
the brilliant woman whom Heine termed 'a whirlwind in petticoats.'

* * * * *

Mr. Harcourt's reprint of John Evelyn's Life of Mrs. Godolphin is a
welcome addition to the list of charming library books.  Mr. Harcourt's
grandfather, the Archbishop of York, himself John Evelyn's great-great-
grandson, inherited the manuscript from his distinguished ancestor, and
in 1847 entrusted it for publication to Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop
of Oxford.  As the book has been for a long time out of print, this new
edition is sure to awake fresh interest in the life of the noble and
virtuous lady whom John Evelyn so much admired.  Margaret Godolphin was
one of the Queen's Maids of Honour at the Court of Charles II., and was
distinguished for the delicate purity of her nature, as well as for her
high intellectual attainments.  Some of the extracts Evelyn gives from
her Diary seem to show an austere, formal, almost ascetic spirit; but it
was inevitable that a nature so refined as hers should have turned in
horror from such ideals of life as were presented by men like Buckingham
and Rochester, like Etheridge, Killigrew, and Sedley, like the King
himself, to whom she could scarcely bring herself to speak.  After her
marriage she seems to have become happier and brighter, and her early
death makes her a pathetic and interesting figure in the history of the
time.  Evelyn can see no fault in her, and his life of her is the most
wonderful of all panegyrics.

* * * * *

Amongst the Maids-of-Honour mentioned by John Evelyn is Frances Jennings,
the elder sister of the great Duchess of Marlborough.  Miss Jennings, who
was one of the most beautiful women of her day, married first Sir George
Hamilton, brother of the author of the Memoires de Grammont, and
afterwards Richard Talbot, who was made Duke of Tyrconnel by James II.
William's successful occupation of Ireland, where her husband was Lord
Deputy, reduced her to poverty and obscurity, and she was probably the
first Peeress who ever took to millinery as a livelihood.  She had a
dressmaker's shop in the Strand, and, not wishing to be detected, sat in
a white mask and a white dress, and was known by the name of the 'White
Widow.'

I was reminded of the Duchess when I read Miss Emily Faithfull's
admirable article in Gralignani on 'Ladies as Shopkeepers.'  'The most
daring innovation in England at this moment,' says Miss Faithfull, 'is
the lady shopkeeper.  At present but few people have had the courage to
brave the current social prejudice.  We draw such fine distinctions
between the wholesale and retail traders that our cotton-spinners, calico-
makers, and general merchants seem to think that they belong to a totally
different sphere, from which they look down on the lady who has had
sufficient brains, capital, and courage to open a shop.  But the old
world moves faster than it did in former days, and before the end of the
nineteenth century it is probable that a gentlewoman will be recognised
in spite of her having entered on commercial pursuits, especially as we
are growing accustomed to see scions of our noblest families on our Stock
Exchange and in tea-merchants' houses; one Peer of the realm is now doing
an extensive business in coals, and another is a cab proprietor.'  Miss
Faithfull then proceeds to give a most interesting account of the London
dairy opened by the Hon. Mrs. Maberley, of Madame Isabel's millinery
establishment, and of the wonderful work done by Miss Charlotte Robinson,
who has recently been appointed Decorator to the Queen.  About three
years ago, Miss Faithfull tells us, Miss Robinson came to Manchester, and
opened a shop in King Street, and, regardless of that bugbear which
terrifies most women--the loss of social status--she put up her own name
over the door, and without the least self-assertion quietly entered into
competition with the sterner sex.  The result has been eminently
satisfactory.  This year Miss Robinson has exhibited at Saltaire and at
Manchester, and next year she proposes to exhibit at Glasgow, and,
possibly, at Brussels.  At first she had some difficulty in making people
understand that her work is really commercial, not charitable; she feels
that, until a healthy public opinion is created, women will pose as
'destitute ladies,' and never take a dignified position in any calling
they adopt.  Gentlemen who earn their own living are not spoken of as
'destitute,' and we must banish this idea in connection with ladies who
are engaged in an equally honourable manner.  Miss Faithfull concludes
her most valuable article as follows: 'The more highly educated our women
of business are, the better for themselves, their work, and the whole
community.  Many of the professions to which ladies have hitherto turned
are overcrowded, and when once the fear of losing social position is
boldy disregarded, it will be found that commercial life offers a variety
of more or less lucrative employments to ladies of birth and capital, who
find it more congenial to their tastes and requirements to invest their
money and spend their energies in a business which yields a fair return
rather than sit at home content with a scanty pittance.'

I myself entirely agree with Miss Faithfull, though I feel that there is
something to be said in favour of the view put forward by Lady Shrewsbury
in the Woman's World, {289} and a great deal to be said in favour of Mrs.
Joyce's scheme for emigration.  Mr. Walter Besant, if we are to judge
from his last novel, is of Lady Shrewsbury's way of thinking.

* * * * *

I hope that some of my readers will be interested in Miss Beatrice
Crane's little poem, Blush-Roses, for which her father, Mr. Walter Crane,
has done so lovely and graceful a design.  Mrs. Simon, of Birkdale Park,
Southport, tells me that she offered a prize last term at her school for
the best sonnet on any work of art.  The poems were sent to Professor
Dowden, who awarded the prize to the youthful authoress of the following
sonnet on Mr. Watts's picture of Hope:

   She sits with drooping form and fair bent head,
   Low-bent to hear the faintly-sounding strain
   That thrills her with the sweet uncertain pain
   Of timid trust and restful tears unshed.
   Around she feels vast spaces.  Awe and dread

   Encompass her.
   And the dark doubt she fain
   Would banish, sees the shuddering fear remain,
   And ever presses near with stealthy tread.

   But not for ever will the misty space
   Close down upon her meekly-patient eyes.
   The steady light within them soon will ope
   Their heavy lids, and then the sweet fair face,
   Uplifted in a sudden glad surprise,
   Will find the bright reward which comes to Hope.

I myself am rather inclined to prefer this sonnet on Mr. Watts's Psyche.
The sixth line is deficient; but, in spite of the faulty _technique_,
there is a great deal that is suggestive in it:

   Unfathomable boundless mystery,
   Last work of the Creator, deathless, vast,
   Soul--essence moulded of a changeful past;
   Thou art the offspring of Eternity;
   Breath of his breath, by his vitality
   Engendered, in his image cast,
   Part of the Nature-song whereof the last
   Chord soundeth never in the harmony.
   'Psyche'!  Thy form is shadowed o'er with pain
   Born of intensest longing, and the rain
   Of a world's weeping lieth like a sea
   Of silent soundless sorrow in thine eyes.
   Yet grief is not eternal, for clouds rise
   From out the ocean everlastingly.

I have to thank Mr. William Rossetti for kindly allowing me to reproduce
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's drawing of the authoress of Goblin Market; and
thanks are also due to Mr. Lafayette, of Dublin, for the use of his
photograph of H.R.H. the Princess of Wales in her Academic Robes as
Doctor of Music, which served as our frontispiece last month, and to
Messrs. Hills and Saunders, of Oxford, and Mr. Lord and Mr. Blanchard, of
Cambridge, for a similar courtesy in the case of the article on Greek
Plays at the Universities.

(1) Canute the Great.  By Michael Field.  (Bell and Sons.)

(2) Life of Elizabeth Gilbert.  By Frances Martin.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(3) Ourselves and Our Neighbours.  By Louise Chandler Moulton.  (Ward and
Downey.)

(4) Warring Angels.  (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) A Song of Jubilee and Other Poems.  By Mrs. De Courcy Laffan.  (Kegan
Paul.)

(6) Life of Madame de Stael.  By Bella Duffy.  'Eminent Women' Series.

(7) Life of Mrs. Godolphin.  By John Evelyn, Esq., of Wooton.  Edited by
William Harcourt of Nuneham.  (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)




THE POETS' CORNER--V


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1888.)

Mr. Heywood's Salome seems to have thrilled the critics of the United
States.  From a collection of press notices prefixed to the volume we
learn that Putnam's Magazine has found in it 'the simplicity and grace of
naked Grecian statues,' and that Dr. Jos. G. Cogswell, LL.D., has
declared that it will live to be appreciated 'as long as the English
language endures.'  Remembering that prophecy is the most gratuitous form
of error, we will not attempt to argue with Dr. Jos. G. Cogswell, LL.D.,
but will content ourselves with protesting against such a detestable
expression as 'naked Grecian statues.'  If this be the literary style of
the future the English language will not endure very long.  As for the
poem itself, the best that one can say of it is that it is a triumph of
conscientious industry.  From an artistic point of view it is a very
commonplace production indeed, and we must protest against such blank
verse as the following:

   From the hour I saw her first, I was entranced,
   Or embosomed in a charmed world, circumscribed
   By its proper circumambient atmosphere,
   Herself its centre, and wide pervading spirit.
   The air all beauty of colour held dissolved,
   And tints distilled as dew are shed by heaven.

Mr. Griffiths' Sonnets and Other Poems are very simple, which is a good
thing, and very sentimental, which is a thing not quite so good.  As a
general rule, his verse is full of pretty echoes of other writers, but in
one sonnet he makes a distinct attempt to be original and the result is
extremely depressing.

   Earth wears her grandest robe, by autumn spun,
   Like some stout matron who of youth has run
   The course, . . .

is the most dreadful simile we have ever come across even in poetry.  Mr.
Griffiths should beware of originality.  Like beauty, it is a fatal gift.

Imitators of Mr. Browning are, unfortunately, common enough, but
imitators of Mr. and Mrs. Browning combined are so very rare that we have
read Mr. Francis Prevost's Fires of Green Wood with great interest.  Here
is a curious reproduction of the manner of Aurora Leigh:

   But Spring! that part at least our unchaste eyes
   Infer from some wind-blown philactery,
   (It wears its breast bare also)--chestnut buds,
   Pack'd in white wool as though sent here from heaven,
   Stretching wild stems to reach each climbing lark
   That shouts against the fading stars.

And here is a copy of Mr. Browning's mannerisms.  We do not like it quite
so well:

      If another
      Save all bother,
   Hold that perhaps loaves grow like parsnips:
      Call the baker
      Heaven's care-taker,
   Live, die; Death may show him where the farce nips.
      Not I; truly
      He may duly
   Into church or church-day shunt God;
      Chink his pocket,
      Win your locket;--
   Down we go together to confront God.

Yet, in spite of these ingenious caricatures there are some good poems,
or perhaps we should say some good passages, in Mr. Prevost's volume.  The
Whitening of the Thorn-tree, for instance, opens admirably, and is, in
some respects, a rather remarkable story.  We have no doubt that some day
Mr. Prevost will be able to study the great masters without stealing from
them.

Mr. John Cameron Grant has christened himself 'England's Empire Poet,'
and, lest we should have any doubts upon the subject, tells us that he
'dare not lie,' a statement which in a poet seems to show a great want of
courage.  Protection and Paper-Unionism are the gods of Mr. Grant's
idolatry, and his verse is full of such fine fallacies and masterly
misrepresentations that he should be made Laureate to the Primrose League
at once.  Such a stanza as--

   Ask the ruined Sugar-worker if he loves the foreign beet--
   Rather, one can hear him answer, would I see my children eat--

would thrill any Tory tea-party in the provinces, and it would be
difficult for the advocates of Coercion to find a more appropriate or a
more characteristic peroration for a stump speech than

   We have not to do with justice, right depends on point of view,
   The one question for our thought is, what's our neighbour going to do.

The hymn to the Union Jack, also, would make a capital leaflet for
distribution in boroughs where the science of heraldry is absolutely
unknown, and the sonnet on Mr. Gladstone is sure to be popular with all
who admire violence and vulgarity in literature.  It is quite worthy of
Thersites at his best.

Mr. Evans's Caesar Borgia is a very tedious tragedy.  Some of the
passages are in the true 'Ercles' vein,' like the following:

   CAESAR (starting up).
   Help, Michelotto, help!  Begone!  Begone!
   Fiends! torments! devils!  Gandia!  What, Gandia?
   O turn those staring eyes away.  See!  See
   He bleeds to death!  O fly!  Who are those fiends
   That tug me by the throat?  O!  O!  O!  O!  (Pauses.)

But, as a rule, the style is of a more commonplace character.  The other
poems in the volume are comparatively harmless, though it is sad to find
Shakespeare's 'Bacchus with pink eyne' reappearing as 'pinky-eyed
Silenus.'

The Cross and the Grail is a collection of poems on the subject of
temperance.  Compared to real poetry these verses are as 'water unto
wine,' but no doubt this was the effect intended.  The illustrations are
quite dreadful, especially one of an angel appearing to a young man from
Chicago who seems to be drinking brown sherry.

Juvenal in Piccadilly and The Excellent Mystery are two fierce social
satires and, like most satires, they are the product of the corruption
they pillory.  The first is written on a very convenient principle.  Blank
spaces are left for the names of the victims and these the reader can
fill up as he wishes.

   Must--bluster,--give the lie,
   --wear the night out,--sneer!

is an example of this anonymous method.  It does not seem to us very
effective.  The Excellent Mystery is much better.  It is full of clever
epigrammatic lines, and its wit fully atones for its bitterness.  It is
hardly a poem to quote but it is certainly a poem to read.

The Chronicle of Mites is a mock-heroic poem about the inhabitants of a
decaying cheese who speculate about the origin of their species and hold
learned discussions upon the meaning of evolution and the Gospel
according to Darwin.  This cheese-epic is a rather unsavoury production
and the style is at times so monstrous and so realistic that the author
should be called the Gorgon-Zola of literature.

(1) Salome.  By J. C. Heywood.  (Kegan Paul.)

(2) Sonnets and Other Poems.  By William Griffiths.  (Digby and Long.)

(3) Fires of Green Wood.  By Francis Prevost.  (Kegan Paul.)

(4) Vanclin and Other Verses.  By John Cameron Grant.  (E. W. Allen.)

(5) Caesar Borgia.  By W. Evans, M.A.  (William Maxwell and Son.)

(6) The Cross and the Grail.  (Women's Temperance Association, Chicago.)

(7) Juvenal in Piccadilly.  By Oxoniensis.  (Vizetelly and Co.)

(8) The Excellent Mystery: A Matrimonial Satire.  By Lord Pimlico.
(Vizetelly and Co.)

(9) The Chronicle of Mites.  By James Aitchison.  (Kegan Paul.)




VENUS OR VICTORY


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 24, 1888.)

There are certain problems in archaeology that seem to possess a real
romantic interest, and foremost among these is the question of the so-
called Venus of Melos.  Who is she, this marble mutilated goddess whom
Gautier loved, to whom Heine bent his knee?  What sculptor wrought her,
and for what shrine?  Whose hands walled her up in that rude niche where
the Melian peasant found her?  What symbol of her divinity did she carry?
Was it apple of gold or shield of bronze?  Where is her city and what was
her name among gods and men?  The last writer on this fascinating subject
is Mr. Stillman, who in a most interesting book recently published in
America, claims that the work of art in question is no sea-born and foam-
born Aphrodite, but the very Victory Without Wings that once stood in the
little chapel outside the gates of the Acropolis at Athens.  So long ago
as 1826, that is to say six years after the discovery of the statue, the
Venus hypothesis was violently attacked by Millingen, and from that time
to this the battle of the archaeologists has never ceased.  Mr. Stillman,
who fights, of course, under Millingen's banner, points out that the
statue is not of the Venus type at all, being far too heroic in character
to correspond to the Greek conception of Aphrodite at any period of their
artistic development, but that it agrees distinctly with certain well-
known statues of Victory, such as the celebrated 'Victory of Brescia.'
The latter is in bronze, is later, and has the wings, but the type is
unmistakable, and though not a reproduction it is certainly a
recollection of the Melian statue.  The representation of Victory on the
coin of Agathocles is also obviously of the Melian type, and in the
museum of Naples is a terra-cotta Victory in almost the identical action
and drapery.  As for Dumont d'Urville's statement that, when the statue
was discovered, one hand held an apple and the other a fold of the
drapery, the latter is obviously a mistake, and the whole evidence on the
subject is so contradictory that no reliance can be placed on the
statement made by the French Consul and the French naval officers, none
of whom seems to have taken the trouble to ascertain whether the arm and
hand now in the Louvre were really found in the same niche as the statue
at all.  At any rate, these fragments seem to be of extremely inferior
workmanship, and they are so imperfect that they are quite worthless as
data for measure or opinion.  So far, Mr. Stillman is on old ground.  His
real artistic discovery is this.  In working about the Acropolis of
Athens, some years ago, he photographed among other sculptures the
mutilated Victories in the Temple of Nike Apteros, the 'Wingless
Victory,' the little Ionic temple in which stood that statue of Victory
of which it was said that '_the Athenians made her without wings that she
might never leave Athens_.'  Looking over the photographs afterwards,
when the impression of the comparatively diminutive size had passed, he
was struck with the close resemblance of the type to that of the Melian
statue.  Now, this resemblance is so striking that it cannot be
questioned by any one who has an eye for form.  There are the same large
heroic proportions, the same ampleness of physical development, and the
same treatment of drapery, and there is also that perfect spiritual
kinship which, to any true antiquarian, is one of the most valuable modes
of evidence.  Now it is generally admitted on both sides that the Melian
statue is probably Attic in its origin, and belongs certainly to the
period between Phidias and Praxiteles, that is to say, to the age of
Scopas, if it be not actually the work of Scopas himself; and as it is to
Scopas that these bas-reliefs have been always attributed, the similarity
of style can, on Mr. Stillman's hypothesis, be easily accounted for.

As regards the appearance of the statue in Melos, Mr. Stillman points out
that Melos belonged to Athens as late as she had any Greek allegiance,
and that it is probable that the statue was sent there for concealment on
the occasion of some siege or invasion.  When this took place, Mr.
Stillman does not pretend to decide with any degree of certainty, but it
is evident that it must have been subsequent to the establishment of the
Roman hegemony, as the brickwork of the niche in which the statue was
found is clearly Roman in character, and before the time of Pausanias and
Pliny, as neither of these antiquaries mentions the statue.  Accepting,
then, the statue as that of the Victory Without Wings, Mr. Stillman
agrees with Millingen in supposing that in her left hand she held a
bronze shield, the lower rim of which rested on the left knee where some
marks of the kind are easily recognisable, while with her right hand she
traced, or had just finished tracing, the names of the great heroes of
Athens.  Valentin's objection, that if this were so the left thigh would
incline outwards so as to secure a balance, Mr. Stillman meets partly by
the analogy of the Victory of Brescia and partly by the evidence of
Nature herself; for he has had a model photographed in the same position
as the statue and holding a shield in the manner he proposes in his
restoration.  The result is precisely the contrary to that which Valentin
assumes.  Of course, Mr. Stillman's solution of the whole matter must not
be regarded as an absolutely scientific demonstration.  It is simply an
induction in which a kind of artistic instinct, not communicable or
equally valuable to all people, has had the greatest part, but to this
mode of interpretation archaeologists as a class have been far too
indifferent; and it is certain that in the present case it has given us a
theory which is most fruitful and suggestive.

The little temple of Nike Apteros has had, as Mr. Stillman reminds us, a
destiny unique of its kind.  Like the Parthenon, it was standing little
more than two hundred years ago, but during the Turkish occupation it was
razed, and its stones all built into the great bastion which covered the
front of the Acropolis and blocked up the staircase to the Propylaea.  It
was dug out and restored, nearly every stone in its place, by two German
architects during the reign of Otho, and it stands again just as
Pausanias described it on the spot where old AEgeus watched for the
return of Theseus from Crete.  In the distance are Salamis and AEgina,
and beyond the purple hills lies Marathon.  If the Melian statue be
indeed the Victory Without Wings, she had no unworthy shrine.

There are some other interesting essays in Mr. Stillman's book on the
wonderful topographical knowledge of Ithaca displayed in the Odyssey, and
discussions of this kind are always interesting as long as there is no
attempt to represent Homer as the ordinary literary man; but the article
on the Melian statue is by far the most important and the most
delightful.  Some people will, no doubt, regret the possibility of the
disappearance of the old name, and as Venus not as Victory will still
worship the stately goddess, but there are others who will be glad to see
in her the image and ideal of that spiritual enthusiasm to which Athens
owed her liberty, and by which alone can liberty be won.

On the Track of Ulysses; together with an Excursion in Quest of the So-
called Venus of Melos.  By W. J. Stillman.  (Houghton, Mifflin and Co.,
Boston.)




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--V


(Woman's World, March 1888.)

The Princess Emily Ruete of Oman and Zanzibar, whose efforts to introduce
women doctors into the East are so well known, has just published a most
interesting account of her life, under the title of Memoirs of an Arabian
Princess.  The Princess is the daughter of the celebrated Sejid Said,
Imam of Mesket and Sultan of Zanzibar, and her long residence in Germany
has given her the opportunity of comparing Eastern with Western
civilisation.  She writes in a very simple and unaffected manner; and
though she has many grievances against her brother, the present Sultan
(who seems never to have forgiven her for her conversion to Christianity
and her marriage with a German subject), she has too much tact, esprit,
and good humour to trouble her readers with any dreary record of family
quarrels and domestic differences.  Her book throws a great deal of light
on the question of the position of women in the East, and shows that much
of what has been written on this subject is quite inaccurate.  One of the
most curious passages is that in which the Princess gives an account of
her mother:

   My mother was a Circassian by birth, who in early youth had been torn
   away from her home.  Her father had been a farmer, and she had always
   lived peacefully with her parents and her little brother and sister.
   War broke out suddenly, and the country was overrun by marauding
   bands.  On their approach, the family fled into an underground place,
   as my mother called it--she probably meant a cellar, which is not
   known in Zanzibar.  Their place of refuge was, however, invaded by a
   merciless horde, the parents were slain, and the children carried off
   by three mounted Arnauts.

   She came into my father's possession when quite a child, probably at
   the tender age of seven or eight years, as she cast her first tooth in
   our house.  She was at once adopted as playmate by two of my sisters,
   her own age, with whom she was educated and brought up.  Together with
   them she learnt to read, which raised her a good deal above her
   equals, who, as a rule, became members of our family at the age of
   sixteen or eighteen years, or older still, when they had outgrown
   whatever taste they might once have had for schooling.  She could
   scarcely be called pretty; but she was tall and shapely, had black
   eyes, and hair down to her knees.  Of a very gentle disposition, her
   greatest pleasure consisted in assisting other people, in looking
   after and nursing any sick person in the house; and I well remember
   her going about with her books from one patient to another, reading
   prayers to them.

   She was in great favour with my father, who never refused her
   anything, though she interceded mostly for others; and when she came
   to see him, he always rose to meet her half-way--a distinction he
   conferred but very rarely.  She was as kind and pious as she was
   modest, and in all her dealings frank and open.  She had another
   daughter besides myself, who had died quite young.  Her mental powers
   were not great, but she was very clever at needlework.  She had always
   been a tender and loving mother to me, but this did not hinder her
   from punishing me severely when she deemed it necessary.

   She had many friends at Bet-il-Mtoni, which is rarely to be met with
   in an Arab harem.  She had the most unshaken and firmest trust in God.
   When I was about five years old, I remember a fire breaking out in the
   stables close by, one night while my father was at his city residence.
   A false alarm spread over the house that we, too, were in imminent
   danger; upon which the good woman hastened to take me on her arm, and
   her big kuran (we pronounce the word thus) on the other, and hurried
   into the open air.  On the rest of her possessions she set no value in
   this hour of danger.

Here is a description of Schesade, the Sultan's second legitimate wife:

   She was a Persian Princess of entrancing beauty, and of inordinate
   extravagance.  Her little retinue was composed of one hundred and
   fifty cavaliers, all Persians, who lived on the ground floor; with
   them she hunted and rode in the broad day--rather contrary to Arab
   notions.  The Persian women are subjected to quite a Spartan training
   in bodily exercise; they enjoy great liberty, much more so than Arab
   women, but they are also more rude in mind and action.

   Schesade is said to have carried on her extravagant style of life
   beyond bounds; her dresses, cut always after the Persian fashion, were
   literally covered with embroideries of pearls.  A great many of these
   were picked up nearly every morning by the servants in her rooms,
   where she had dropped them from her garments, but the Princess would
   never take any of these precious jewels back again.  She did not only
   drain my father's exchequer most wantonly, but violated many of our
   sacred laws; in fact, she had only married him for his high station
   and wealth, and had loved some one else all the time.  Such a state of
   things could, of course, only end in a divorce; fortunately Schesade
   had no children of her own.  There is a rumour still current among us
   that beautiful Schesade was observed, some years after this event,
   when my father carried on war in Persia, and had the good fortune of
   taking the fortress of Bender Abbas on the Persian Gulf, heading her
   troops, and taking aim at the members of our family herself.

Another of the remarkable women mentioned by the Princess was her
stepmother, Azze-bint-Zef, who seems to have completely ruled the Sultan,
and to have settled all questions of home and foreign policy; while her
great-aunt, the Princess Asche, was regent of the empire during the
Sultan's minority, and was the heroine of the siege of Mesket.  Of her
the Princess gives the following account:

   Dressed in man's clothes, she inspected the outposts herself at night,
   she watched and encouraged the soldiers in all exposed places, and was
   saved several times only by the speed of her horse in unforeseen
   attacks.  One night she rode out, oppressed with care, having just
   received information that the enemy was about to attempt an entrance
   into the city by means of bribery that night, and with intent to
   massacre all; and now she went to convince herself of the loyalty of
   her troops.  Very cautiously she rode up to a guard, requesting to
   speak to the 'Akid' (the officer in charge), and did all in her power
   to seduce him from his duty by great offers of reward on the part of
   the besiegers.  The indignation of the brave man, however, completely
   allayed her fears as to the fidelity of the troops, but the experiment
   nearly cost her her own life.  The soldiers were about to massacre the
   supposed spy on the spot, and it required all her presence of mind to
   make good her escape.

   The situation grew, however, to be very critical at Mesket.  Famine at
   last broke out, and the people were well-nigh distracted, as no
   assistance or relief could be expected from without.  It was therefore
   decided to attempt a last sortie in order to die at least with glory.
   There was just sufficient powder left for one more attack, but there
   was no more lead for either guns or muskets.  In this emergency the
   regent ordered iron nails and pebbles to be used in place of balls.
   The guns were loaded with all the old iron and brass that could be
   collected, and she opened her treasury to have bullets made out of her
   own silver dollars.  Every nerve was strained, and the sally succeeded
   beyond all hope.  The enemy was completely taken by surprise and fled
   in all directions, leaving more than half their men dead and wounded
   on the field.  Mesket was saved, and, delivered out of her deep
   distress, the brave woman knelt down on the battlefield and thanked
   God in fervent prayer.

   From that time her Government was a peaceful one, and she ruled so
   wisely that she was able to transfer to her nephew, my father, an
   empire so unimpaired as to place him in a position to extend the
   empire by the conquest of Zanzibar.  It is to my great-aunt,
   therefore, that we owe, and not to an inconsiderable degree, the
   acquisition of this second empire.

She, too, was an Eastern woman!

All through her book the Princess protests against the idea that Oriental
women are degraded or oppressed, and in the following passage she points
out how difficult it is for foreigners to get any real information on the
subject:

   The education of the children is left entirely to the mother, whether
   she be legitimate wife or purchased slave, and it constitutes her
   chief happiness.  Some fashionable mothers in Europe shift this duty
   on to the nurse, and, by-and-by, on the governess, and are quite
   satisfied with looking up their children, or receiving their visits,
   once a day.  In France the child is sent to be nursed in the country,
   and left to the care of strangers.  An Arab mother, on the other hand,
   looks continually after her children.  She watches and nurses them
   with the greatest affection, and never leaves them as long as they may
   stand in need of her motherly care, for which she is rewarded by the
   fondest filial love.

   If foreigners had more frequent opportunities to observe the
   cheerfulness, the exuberance of spirits even, of Eastern women, they
   would soon and more easily be convinced of the untruth of all those
   stories afloat about the degraded, oppressed, and listless state of
   their life.  It is impossible to gain a true insight into the actual
   domesticity in a few moments' visit; and the conversation carried on,
   on those formal occasions, hardly deserves that name; there is barely
   more than the exchange of a few commonplace remarks--and it is
   questionable if even these have been correctly interpreted.

   Notwithstanding his innate hospitality, the Arab has the greatest
   possible objection to having his home pried into by those of another
   land and creed.  Whenever, therefore, a European lady called on us,
   the enormous circumference of her hoops (which were the fashion then,
   and took up the entire width of the stairs) was the first thing to
   strike us dumb with wonder; after which, the very meagre conversation
   generally confined itself on both sides to the mysteries of different
   costumes; and the lady retired as wise as she was when she came, after
   having been sprinkled over with attar of roses, and being the richer
   for some parting presents.  It is true she had entered a harem; she
   had seen the much-pitied Oriental ladies (though only through their
   veils); she had with her own eyes seen our dresses, our jewellery, the
   nimbleness with which we sat down on the floor--and that was all.  She
   could not boast of having seen more than any other foreign lady who
   had called before her.  She is conducted upstairs and downstairs, and
   is watched all the time.  Rarely she sees more than the
   reception-room, and more rarely still can she guess or find out who
   the veiled lady is with whom she conversed.  In short, she has had no
   opportunity whatsoever of learning anything of domestic life, or the
   position of Eastern women.

No one who is interested in the social position of women in the East
should fail to read these pleasantly-written memoirs.  The Princess is
herself a woman of high culture, and the story of her life is as
instructive as history and as fascinating as fiction.

* * * * *

Mrs. Oliphant's Makers of Venice is an admirable literary pendant to the
same writer's charming book on Florence, though there is a wide
difference between the beautiful Tuscan city and the sea-city of the
Adriatic.  Florence, as Mrs. Oliphant points out, is a city full of
memories of the great figures of the past.  The traveller cannot pass
along her streets without treading in the very traces of Dante, without
stepping on soil made memorable by footprints never to be effaced.  The
greatness of the surroundings, the palaces, churches, and frowning
mediaeval castles in the midst of the city, are all thrown into the
background by the greatness, the individuality, the living power and
vigour of the men who are their originators, and at the same time their
inspiring soul.  But when we turn to Venice the effect is very different.
We do not think of the makers of that marvellous city, but rather of what
they made.  The idealised image of Venice herself meets us everywhere.
The mother is not overshadowed by the too great glory of any of her sons.
In her records the city is everything--the republic, the worshipped ideal
of a community in which every man for the common glory seems to have been
willing to sink his own.  We know that Dante stood within the red walls
of the arsenal, and saw the galleys making and mending, and the pitch
flaming up to heaven; Petrarch came to visit the great Mistress of the
Sea, taking refuge there, 'in this city, true home of the human race,'
from trouble, war and pestilence outside; and Byron, with his facile
enthusiasms and fervent eloquence, made his home for a time in one of the
stately, decaying palaces; but with these exceptions no great poet has
ever associated himself with the life of Venice.  She had architects,
sculptors and painters, but no singer of her own.  The arts through which
she gave her message to the world were visible and imitative.  Mrs.
Oliphant, in her bright, picturesque style, tells the story of Venice
pleasantly and well.  Her account of the two Bellinis is especially
charming; and the chapters on Titian and Tintoret are admirably written.
She concludes her interesting and useful history with the following
words, which are well worthy of quotation, though I must confess that the
'alien modernisms' trouble me not a little:

   The critics of recent days have had much to say as to the
   deterioration of Venice in her new activity, and the introduction of
   alien modernisms, in the shape of steamboats and other new industrial
   agents, into her canals and lagoons.  But in this adoption of every
   new development of power, Venice is only proving herself the most
   faithful representative of the vigorous republic of old.  Whatever
   prejudice or angry love may say, we cannot doubt that the Michiels,
   the Dandolos, the Foscari, the great rulers who formed Venice, had
   steamboats existed in their day, serving their purpose better than
   their barges and peati, would have adopted them without hesitation,
   without a thought of what any critics might say.  The wonderful new
   impulse which has made Italy a great power has justly put strength and
   life before those old traditions of beauty, which made her not only
   the 'woman country' of Europe, but a sort of Odalisque trading upon
   her charms, rather than the nursing mother of a noble and independent
   nation.  That in her recoil from that somewhat degrading position, she
   may here and there have proved too regardless of the claims of
   antiquity, we need not attempt to deny; the new spring of life in her
   is too genuine and great to keep her entirely free from this evident
   danger.  But it is strange that any one who loves Italy, and sincerely
   rejoices in her amazing resurrection, should fail to recognise how
   venial is this fault.

Miss Mabel Robinson's last novel, The Plan of Campaign, is a very
powerful study of modern political life.  As a concession to humanity,
each of the politicians is made to fall in love, and the charm of their
various romances fully atones for the soundness of the author's theory of
rent.  Miss Robinson dissects, describes, and discourses with keen
scientific insight and minute observation.  Her style, though somewhat
lacking in grace, is, at its best, simple and strong.  Richard Talbot and
Elinor Fetherston are admirably conceived and admirably drawn, and the
whole account of the murder of Lord Roeglass is most dramatic.

A Year in Eden, by Harriet Waters Preston, is a chronicle of New England
life, and is full of the elaborate subtlety of the American school of
fiction.  The Eden in question is the little village of Pierpont, and the
Eve of this provincial paradise is a beautiful girl called Monza
Middleton, a fascinating, fearless creature, who brings ruin and misery
on all who love her.  Miss Preston writes an admirable prose style, and
the minor characters in the book are wonderfully lifelike and true.

The Englishwoman's Year-Book contains a really extraordinary amount of
useful information on every subject connected with woman's work.  In the
census taken in 1831 (six years before the Queen ascended the Throne), no
occupation whatever was specified as appertaining to women, except that
of domestic service; but in the census of 1881, the number of occupations
mentioned as followed by women is upwards of three hundred and thirty.
The most popular occupations seem to be those of domestic service, school
teaching, and dressmaking; the lowest numbers on the list are those of
bankers, gardeners, and persons engaged in scientific pursuits.  Besides
these, the Year-Book makes mention of stockbroking and conveyancing as
professions that women are beginning to adopt.  The historical account of
the literary work done by Englishwomen in this century, as given in the
Year-Book, is curiously inadequate, and the list of women's magazines is
not complete, but in all other respects the publication seems a most
useful and excellent one.

* * * * *

Wordsworth, in one of his interesting letters to Lady Beaumont, says that
it is 'an awful truth that there neither is nor can be any genuine
enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who
live or wish to live in the broad light of the world--among those who
either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration
in society,' adding that the mission of poetry is 'to console the
afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to
teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel,
and, therefore, to become more actively and securely virtuous.'  I am,
however, rather disposed to think that the age in which we live is one
that has a very genuine enjoyment of poetry, though we may no longer
agree with Wordsworth's ideas on the subject of the poet's proper
mission; and it is interesting to note that this enjoyment manifests
itself by creation even more than by criticism.  To realise the
popularity of the great poets, one should turn to the minor poets and see
whom they follow, what master they select, whose music they echo.  At
present, there seems to be a reaction in favour of Lord Tennyson, if we
are to judge by Rachel and Other Poems, which is a rather remarkable
little volume in its way.  The poem that gives its title to the book is
full of strong lines and good images; and, in spite of its Tennysonian
echoes, there is something attractive in such verses as the following:

   Day by day along the Orient faintly glows the tender dawn,
   Day by day the pearly dewdrops tremble on the upland lawn:

   Day by day the star of morning pales before the coming ray,
   And the first faint streak of radiance brightens to the perfect day.

   Day by day the rosebud gathers to itself, from earth and sky,
   Fragrant stores and ampler beauty, lovelier form and deeper dye:

   Day by day a richer crimson mantles in its glowing breast--
   Every golden hour conferring some sweet grace that crowns the rest.

   And thou canst not tell the moment when the day ascends her throne,
   When the morning star hath vanished, and the rose is fully blown.

   So each day fulfils its purpose, calm, unresting, strong, and sure,
   Moving onward to completion, doth the work of God endure.

   How unlike man's toil and hurry! how unlike the noise, the strife,
   All the pain of incompleteness, all the weariness of life!

   Ye look upward and take courage.  He who leads the golden hours,
   Feeds the birds, and clothes the lily, made these human hearts of
   ours:

   Knows their need, and will supply it, manna falling day by day,
   Bread from heaven, and food of angels, all along the desert way.

The Secretary of the International Technical College at Bedford has
issued a most interesting prospectus of the aims and objects of the
Institution.  The College seems to be intended chiefly for ladies who
have completed their ordinary course of English studies, and it will be
divided into two departments, Educational and Industrial.  In the latter,
classes will be held for various decorative and technical arts, and for
wood-carving, etching, and photography, as well as sick-nursing,
dressmaking, cookery, physiology, poultry-rearing, and the cultivation of
flowers.  The curriculum certainly embraces a wonderful amount of
subjects, and I have no doubt that the College will supply a real want.

* * * * *

The Ladies' Employment Society has been so successful that it has moved
to new premises in Park Street, Grosvenor Square, where there are some
very pretty and useful things for sale.  The children's smocks are quite
charming, and seem very inexpensive.  The subscription to the Society is
one guinea a year, and a commission of five per cent. is charged on each
thing sold.

* * * * *

Miss May Morris, whose exquisite needle-work is well known, has just
completed a pair of curtains for a house in Boston.  They are amongst the
most perfect specimens of modern embroidery that I have seen, and are
from Miss Morris's own design.  I am glad to hear that Miss Morris has
determined to give lessons in embroidery.  She has a thorough knowledge
of the art, her sense of beauty is as rare as it is refined, and her
power of design is quite remarkable.

Mrs. Jopling's life-classes for ladies have been such a success that a
similar class has been started in Chelsea by Mr. Clegg Wilkinson at the
Carlyle Studios, King's Road.  Mr. Wilkinson (who is a very brilliant
young painter) is strongly of opinion that life should be studied from
life itself, and not from that abstract presentation of life which we
find in Greek marbles--a position which I have always held very strongly
myself.

(1) Memoirs of an Arabian Princess.  By the Princess Emily Ruete of Oman
and Zanzibar.  (Ward and Downey.)

(2) Makers of Venice.  By Mrs. Oliphant.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(3) The Plan of Campaign.  By Mabel Robinson.  (Vizetelly and Co.)

(4) A Year in Eden.  By Harriet Waters Preston.  (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) The Englishwoman's Year-Book, 1888.  (Hatchards.)

(6) Rachel and Other Poems.  (Cornish Brothers.)




THE POETS' CORNER--VI


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 6, 1888.)

David Westren, by Mr. Alfred Hayes, is a long narrative poem in
Tennysonian blank verse, a sort of serious novel set to music.  It is
somewhat lacking in actuality, and the picturesque style in which it is
written rather contributes to this effect, lending the story beauty but
robbing it of truth.  Still, it is not without power, and cultured verse
is certainly a pleasanter medium for story-telling than coarse and common
prose.  The hero of the poem is a young clergyman of the muscular
Christian school:

   A lover of good cheer; a bubbling source
   Of jest and tale; a monarch of the gun;
   A dreader tyrant of the darting trout
   Than that bright bird whose azure lightning threads
   The brooklet's bowery windings; the red fox
   Did well to seek the boulder-strewn hill-side,
   When Westren cheered her dappled foes; the otter
   Had cause to rue the dawn when Westren's form
   Loomed through the streaming bracken, to waylay
   Her late return from plunder, the rough pack
   Barking a jealous welcome round their friend.

One day he meets on the river a lovely girl who is angling, and helps her
to land

   A gallant fish, all flashing in the sun
   In silver mail inlaid with scarlet gems,
   His back thick-sprinkled as a leopard's hide
   With rich brown spots, and belly of bright gold.

They naturally fall in love with each other and marry, and for many years
David Westren leads a perfectly happy life.  Suddenly calamity comes upon
him, his wife and children die and he finds himself alone and desolate.
Then begins his struggle.  Like Job, he cries out against the injustice
of things, and his own personal sorrow makes him realise the sorrow and
misery of the world.  But the answer that satisfied Job does not satisfy
him.  He finds no comfort in contemplating Leviathan:

   As if we lacked reminding of brute force,
   As if we never felt the clumsy hoof,
   As if the bulk of twenty million whales
   Were worth one pleading soul, or all the laws
   That rule the lifeless suns could soothe the sense
   Of outrage in a loving human heart!
   Sublime? majestic?  Ay, but when our trust
   Totters, and faith is shattered to the base,
   Grand words will not uprear it.

Mr. Hayes states the problem of life extremely well, but his solution is
sadly inadequate both from a psychological and from a dramatic point of
view.  David Westren ultimately becomes a mild Unitarian, a sort of
pastoral Stopford Brooke with leanings towards Positivism, and we leave
him preaching platitudes to a village congregation.  However, in spite of
this commonplace conclusion there is a great deal in Mr. Hayes's poem
that is strong and fine, and he undoubtedly possesses a fair ear for
music and a remarkable faculty of poetical expression.  Some of his
descriptive touches of nature, such as

   In meeting woods, whereon a film of mist
   Slept like the bloom upon the purple grape,

are very graceful and suggestive, and he will probably make his mark in
literature.

There is much that is fascinating in Mr. Rennell Rodd's last volume, The
Unknown Madonna and Other Poems.  Mr. Rodd looks at life with all the
charming optimism of a young man, though he is quite conscious of the
fact that a stray note of melancholy, here and there, has an artistic as
well as a popular value; he has a keen sense of the pleasurableness of
colour, and his verse is distinguished by a certain refinement and purity
of outline; though not passionate he can play very prettily with the
words of passion, and his emotions are quite healthy and quite harmless.
In Excelsis, the most ambitious poem in the book, is somewhat too
abstract and metaphysical, and such lines as

   Lift thee o'er thy 'here' and 'now,'
   Look beyond thine 'I' and 'thou,'

are excessively tedious.  But when Mr. Rodd leaves the problem of the
Unconditioned to take care of itself, and makes no attempt to solve the
mysteries of the Ego and the non-Ego, he is very pleasant reading indeed.
A Mazurka of Chopin is charming, in spite of the awkwardness of the fifth
line, and so are the verses on Assisi, and those on San Servolo at
Venice.  These last have all the brilliancy of a clever pastel.  The
prettiest thing in the whole volume is this little lyric on Spring:

   Such blue of sky, so palely fair,
   Such glow of earth, such lucid air!
   Such purple on the mountain lines,
   Such deep new verdure in the pines!
   The live light strikes the broken towers,
   The crocus bulbs burst into flowers,
   The sap strikes up the black vine stock,
   And the lizard wakes in the splintered rock,
   And the wheat's young green peeps through the sod,
   And the heart is touched with a thought of God;
   The very silence seems to sing,
   It must be Spring, it must be Spring!

We do not care for 'palely fair' in the first line, and the repetition of
the word 'strikes' is not very felicitous, but the grace of movement and
delicacy of touch are pleasing.

The Wind, by Mr. James Ross, is a rather gusty ode, written apparently
without any definite scheme of metre, and not very impressive as it lacks
both the strength of the blizzard and the sweetness of Zephyr.  Here is
the opening:

      The roaming, tentless wind
      No rest can ever find--
   From east, and west, and south, and north
   He is for ever driven forth!
      From the chill east
   Where fierce hyaenas seek their awful feast:
      From the warm west,
   By beams of glitt'ring summer blest.

Nothing could be much worse than this, and if the line 'Where fierce
hyaenas seek their awful feast' is intended to frighten us, it entirely
misses its effect.  The ode is followed by some sonnets which are
destined, we fear, to be ludibria ventis.  Immortality, even in the
nineteenth century, is not granted to those who rhyme 'awe' and 'war'
together.

Mr. Isaac Sharp's Saul of Tarsus is an interesting, and, in some
respects, a fine poem.

   Saul of Tarsus, silently,
   With a silent company,
   To Damascus' gates drew nigh.

   * * * * *

   And his eyes, too, and his mien
   Were, as are the eagles, keen;
   All the man was aquiline--

are two strong, simple verses, and indeed the spirit of the whole poem is
dignified and stately.  The rest of the volume, however, is
disappointing.  Ordinary theology has long since converted its gold into
lead, and words and phrases that once touched the heart of the world have
become wearisome and meaningless through repetition.  If Theology desires
to move us, she must re-write her formulas.

There is something very pleasant in coming across a poet who can
apostrophise Byron as

      transcendent star
   That gems the firmament of poesy,

and can speak of Longfellow as a 'mighty Titan.'  Reckless panegyrics of
this kind show a kindly nature and a good heart, and Mr. Mackenzie's
Highland Daydreams could not possibly offend any one.  It must be
admitted that they are rather old-fashioned, but this is usually the case
with natural spontaneous verse.  It takes a great artist to be thoroughly
modern.  Nature is always a little behind the age.

The Story of the Cross, an attempt to versify the Gospel narratives, is a
strange survival of the Tate and Brady school of poetry.  Mr. Nash, who
styles himself 'a humble soldier in the army of Faith,' expresses a hope
that his book may 'invigorate devotional feeling, especially among the
young, to whom verse is perhaps more attractive than to their elders,'
but we should be sorry to think that people of any age could admire such
a paraphrase as the following:

   Foxes have holes, in which to slink for rest,
   The birds of air find shelter in the nest;
   But He, the Son of Man and Lord of all,
   Has no abiding place His own to call.

It is a curious fact that the worst work is always done with the best
intentions, and that people are never so trivial as when they take
themselves very seriously.

(1) David Westren.  By Alfred Hayes, M.A.  New Coll., Oxon.  (Birmingham:
Cornish Brothers.)

(2) The Unknown Madonna and Other Poems.  By Rennell Rodd.  (David
Stott.)

(3) The Wind and Six Sonnets.  By James Ross.  (Bristol: J. W.
Arrowsmith.)

(4) Saul of Tarsus.  By Isaac Sharp.  (Kegan Paul.)

(5) Highland Daydreams.  By George Mackenzie.  (Inverness: Office of the
Northern Chronicle.)

(6) The Story of the Cross.  By Charles Nash.  (Elliot Stock.)




M. CARO ON GEORGE SAND


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1888.)

The biography of a very great man from the pen of a very ladylike
writer--this is the best description we can give of M. Caro's Life of
George Sand.  The late Professor of the Sorbonne could chatter charmingly
about culture, and had all the fascinating insincerity of an accomplished
phrase-maker; being an extremely superior person he had a great contempt
for Democracy and its doings, but he was always popular with the
Duchesses of the Faubourg, as there was nothing in history or in
literature that he could not explain away for their edification; having
never done anything remarkable he was naturally elected a member of the
Academy, and he always remained loyal to the traditions of that
thoroughly respectable and thoroughly pretentious institution.  In fact,
he was just the sort of man who should never have attempted to write a
Life of George Sand or to interpret George Sand's genius.  He was too
feminine to appreciate the grandeur of that large womanly nature, too
much of a dilettante to realise the masculine force of that strong and
ardent mind.  He never gets at the secret of George Sand, and never
brings us near to her wonderful personality.  He looks on her simply as a
litterateur, as a writer of pretty stories of country life and of
charming, if somewhat exaggerated, romances.  But George Sand was much
more than this.  Beautiful as are such books as Consuelo and Mauprat,
Francois le Champi and La Mare au Diable, yet in none of them is she
adequately expressed, by none of them is she adequately revealed.  As Mr.
Matthew Arnold said, many years ago, 'We do not know George Sand unless
we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole.'  With this
spirit, however, M. Caro has no sympathy.  Madame Sand's doctrines are
antediluvian, he tells us, her philosophy is quite dead and her ideas of
social regeneration are Utopian, incoherent and absurd.  The best thing
for us to do is to forget these silly dreams and to read Teverino and Le
Secretaire Intime.  Poor M. Caro!  This spirit, which he treats with such
airy flippancy, is the very leaven of modern life.  It is remoulding the
world for us and fashioning our age anew.  If it is antediluvian, it is
so because the deluge is yet to come; if it is Utopian, then Utopia must
be added to our geographies.  To what curious straits M. Caro is driven
by his violent prejudices may be estimated by the fact that he tries to
class George Sand's novels with the old Chansons de geste, the stories of
adventure characteristic of primitive literatures; whereas in using
fiction as a vehicle of thought, and romance as a means of influencing
the social ideals of her age, George Sand was merely carrying out the
traditions of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Diderot and of Chateaubriand.  The
novel, says M. Caro, must be allied either to poetry or to science.  That
it has found in philosophy one of its strongest allies seems not to have
occurred to him.  In an English critic such a view might possibly be
excusable.  Our greatest novelists, such as Fielding, Scott and Thackeray
cared little for the philosophy of their age.  But coming, as it does,
from a French critic, the statement seems to show a strange want of
recognition of one of the most important elements of French fiction.  Nor,
even in the narrow limits that he has imposed upon himself, can M. Caro
be said to be a very fortunate or felicitous critic.  To take merely one
instance out of many, he says nothing of George Sand's delightful
treatment of art and the artist's life.  And yet how exquisitely does she
analyse each separate art and present it to us in its relation to life!
In Consuelo she tells us of music; in Horace of authorship; in Le Chateau
des Desertes of acting; in Les Maitres Mosaistes of mosaic work; in Le
Chateau de Pictordu of portrait painting; and in La Daniella of the
painting of landscape.  What Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning have done for
England she did for France.  She invented an art literature.  It is
unnecessary, however, to discuss any of M. Caro's minor failings, for the
whole effect of the book, so far as it attempts to portray for us the
scope and character of George Sand's genius, is entirely spoiled by the
false attitude assumed from the beginning, and though the dictum may seem
to many harsh and exclusive, we cannot help feeling that an absolute
incapacity for appreciating the spirit of a great writer is no
qualification for writing a treatise on the subject.

As for Madame Sand's private life, which is so intimately connected with
her art (for, like Goethe, she had to live her romances before she could
write them), M. Caro says hardly anything about it.  He passes it over
with a modesty that almost makes one blush, and for fear of wounding the
susceptibilities of those grandes dames whose passions M. Paul Bourget
analyses with such subtlety, he transforms her mother, who was a typical
French grisette, into 'a very amiable and spirituelle milliner'!  It must
be admitted that Joseph Surface himself could hardly show greater tact
and delicacy, though we ourselves must plead guilty to preferring Madame
Sand's own description of her as an 'enfant du vieux pave de Paris.'

As regards the English version, which is by M. Gustave Masson, it may be
up to the intellectual requirements of the Harrow schoolboys, but it will
hardly satisfy those who consider that accuracy, lucidity and ease are
essential to a good translation.  Its carelessness is absolutely
astounding, and it is difficult to understand how a publisher like Mr.
Routledge could have allowed such a piece of work to issue from his
press.  'Il descend avec le sourire d'un Machiavel' appears as 'he
descends into the smile of a Machiavelli'; George Sand's remark to
Flaubert about literary style, 'tu la consideres comme un but, elle n'est
qu'un effet' is translated 'you consider it an end, it is merely an
effort'; and such a simple phrase as 'ainsi le veut Festhe'tique du
roman' is converted into 'so the aesthetes of the world would have it.'
'Il faudra relacher mes Economies' is 'I will have to draw upon my
savings,' not 'my economies will assuredly be relaxed'; 'cassures
resineuses' is not 'cleavages full of rosin,' and 'Mme. Sand ne reussit
que deux fois' is hardly 'Madame Sand was not twice successful.'
'Querelles d'ecole' does not mean 'school disputations'; 'ceux qui se
font une sorte d'esthetique de l'indifference absolue' is not 'those of
which the aesthetics seem to be an absolute indifference'; 'chimere'
should not be translated 'chimera,' nor 'lettres ineditees' 'inedited
letters'; 'ridicules' means absurdities, not 'ridicules,' and 'qui pourra
definir sa pensee?' is not 'who can clearly despise her thought?'  M.
Masson comes to grief over even such a simple sentence as 'elle s'etonna
des fureurs qui accueillirent ce livre, ne comprenant pas que l'on haisse
un auteur a travers son oeuvre,' which he translates 'she was surprised
at the storm which greeted this book, _not understanding that the author
is hated through his work_.'  Then, passing over such phrases as
'substituted by religion' instead of 'replaced by religion,' and
'vulgarisation' where 'popularisation' is meant, we come to that most
irritating form of translation, the literal word-for-word style.  The
stream 'excites itself by the declivity which it obeys' is one of M.
Masson's finest achievements in this genre, and it is an admirable
instance of the influence of schoolboys on their masters.  However, it
would be tedious to make a complete 'catalogue of slips,' so we will
content ourselves by saying that M. Masson's translation is not merely
quite unworthy of himself, but is also quite undeserved by the public.
Nowadays, the public has its feelings.

George Sand.  By the late Elme Marie Caro.  Translated by Gustave Masson,
B.A., Assistant Master, Harrow School.  'Great French Writers' Series.
(Routledge and Sons.)




THE POETS' CORNER--VII


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1888.)

Mr. Ian Hamilton's Ballad of Hadji is undeniably clever.  Hadji is a
wonderful Arab horse that a reckless hunter rides to death in the pursuit
of a wild boar, and the moral of the poem--for there is a moral--seems to
be that an absorbing passion is a very dangerous thing and blunts the
human sympathies.  In the course of the chase a little child is drowned,
a Brahmin maiden murdered, and an aged peasant severely wounded, but the
hunter cares for none of these things and will not hear of stopping to
render any assistance.  Some of the stanzas are very graceful, notably
one beginning

   Yes--like a bubble filled with smoke--
   The curd-white moon upswimming broke
   The vacancy of space;

but such lines as the following, which occur in the description of the
fight with the boar--

   I hung as close as keepsake locket
   On maiden breast--but from its socket
   He wrenched my bridle arm,

are dreadful, and 'his brains festooned the thorn' is not a very happy
way of telling the reader how the boar died.  All through the volume we
find the same curious mixture of good and bad.  To say that the sun
kisses the earth 'with flame-moustachoed lip' is awkward and uncouth, and
yet the poem in which the expression occurs has some pretty lines.  Mr.
Ian Hamilton should prune.  Pruning, whether in the garden or in the
study, is a most healthy and useful employment.  The volume is nicely
printed, but Mr. Strang's frontispiece is not a great success, and most
of the tail-pieces seem to have been designed without any reference to
the size of the page.

Mr. Catty dedicates his book to the memory of Wordsworth, Shelley,
Coleridge and Keats--a somewhat pompous signboard for such very ordinary
wine--and an inscription in golden letters on the cover informs us that
his poems are 'addressed to the rising generation,' whom, he tells us
elsewhere, he is anxious to initiate into the great comprehensive truth
that 'Virtue is no other than self-interest, deeply understood.'  In
order to further this laudable aim he has written a very tedious blank
verse poem which he calls The Secret of Content, but it certainly does
not convey that secret to the reader.  It is heavy, abstract and prosaic,
and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions
and the most earnest beliefs.  In the rest of the volume, where Mr. Catty
does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing
things.  The sonnet on Shelley's room at University College would be
admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.

   Green in the wizard arms
   Of the foam-bearded Atlantic,
   An isle of old enchantment,
   A melancholy isle,
   Enchanted and dreaming lies;
   And there, by Shannon's flowing
   In the moonlight, spectre-thin,
   The spectre Erin sits.

   Wail no more, lonely one, mother of exile wail no more,
   Banshee of the world--no more!
   Thy sorrows are the world's, thou art no more alone;
   Thy wrongs the world's--

are the first and last stanzas of Mr. Todhunter's poem The Banshee.  To
throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is, as Mr.
Swinburne once remarked, a wilful abdication of half the power and half
the charm of verse, and we cannot say that Mr. Todhunter has given us
much that consoles us for its loss.  Part of his poem reads like a
translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for
poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose.  It is an interesting
specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art.  It is
amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems,
The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of
Turann.  Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to song, and though
the lovely lute-builded walls of Thebes may have risen up to unrhymed
choral metres, we have had no modern Amphion to work such wonders for us.
Such a verse as--

   Five were the chiefs who challenged
   By their deeds the Over-kingship,
   Bov Derg, the Daghda's son, Ilbrac of Assaroe,
   And Lir of the White Field in the plain of Emain Macha;
   And after them stood up Midhir the proud, who reigned
   Upon the hills of Bri,
   Of Bri the loved of Liath, Bri of the broken heart;
   And last was Angus Og; all these had many voices,
   But for Bov Derg were most,

has, of course, an archaeological interest, but has no artistic value at
all.  Indeed, from the point of view of art, the few little poems at the
end of the volume are worth all the ambitious pseudo-epics that Mr.
Todhunter has tried to construct out of Celtic lore.  A Bacchic Day is
charming, and the sonnet on the open-air performance of The Faithfull
Shepherdesse is most gracefully phrased and most happy in conception.

Mr. Peacock is an American poet, and Professor Thomas Danleigh Supplee,
A.M., Ph.D., F.R.S., who has written a preface to his Poems of the Plains
and Songs of the Solitudes, tells us that he is entitled to be called the
Laureate of the West.  Though a staunch Republican, Mr. Peacock,
according to the enthusiastic Professor, is not ashamed of his ancestor
King William of Holland, nor of his relatives Lord and Lady Peacock who,
it seems, are natives of Scotland.  He was brought up at Zanesville,
Muskingum Co., Ohio, where his father edited the Zanesville Aurora, and
he had an uncle who was 'a superior man' and edited the Wheeling
Intelligencer.  His poems seem to be extremely popular, and have been
highly praised, the Professor informs us, by Victor Hugo, the Saturday
Review and the Commercial Advertiser.  The preface is the most amusing
part of the book, but the poems also are worth studying.  The Maniac, The
Bandit Chief, and The Outlaw can hardly be called light reading, but we
strongly recommend the poem on Chicago:

   Chicago! great city of the West!
   All that wealth, all that power invest;
   Thou sprang like magic from the sand,
   As touched by the magician's wand.

'Thou sprang' is slightly depressing, and the second line is rather
obscure, but we should not measure by too high a standard the untutored
utterances of artless nature.  The opening lines of The Vendetta also
deserve mention:

   When stars are glowing through day's gloaming glow,
   Reflecting from ocean's deep, mighty flow,
   At twilight, when no grim shadows of night,
   Like ghouls, have stalked in wake of the light.

The first line is certainly a masterpiece, and, indeed, the whole volume
is full of gems of this kind.  The Professor remarks in his elaborate
preface that Mr. Peacock 'frequently rises to the sublime,' and the two
passages quoted above show how keenly critical is his taste in these
matters and how well the poet deserves his panegyric.

Mr. Alexander Skene Smith's Holiday Recreations and Other Poems is
heralded by a preface for which Principal Cairns is responsible.
Principal Cairns claims that the life-story enshrined in Mr. Smith's
poems shows the wide diffusion of native fire and literary culture in all
parts of Scotland, 'happily under higher auspices than those of mere
poetic impulse.'  This is hardly a very felicitous way of introducing a
poet, nor can we say that Mr. Smith's poems are distinguished by either
fire or culture.  He has a placid, pleasant way of writing, and, indeed,
his verses cannot do any harm, though he really should not publish such
attempts at metrical versions of the Psalms as the following:

   A septuagenarian
      We frequently may see;
   An octogenarian
      If one should live to be,
   He is a burden to himself
      With weariness and woe
   And soon he dies, and off he flies,
      And leaveth all below.

The 'literary culture' that produced these lines is, we fear, not of a
very high order.

'I study Poetry simply as a fine art by which I may exercise my intellect
and elevate my taste,' wrote the late Mr. George Morine many years ago to
a friend, and the little posthumous volume that now lies before us
contains the record of his quiet literary life.  One of the sonnets, that
entitled Sunset, appeared in Mr. Waddington's anthology, about ten years
after Mr. Morine's death, but this is the first time that his collected
poems have been published.  They are often distinguished by a grave and
chastened beauty of style, and their solemn cadences have something of
the 'grand manner' about them.  The editor, Mr. Wilton, to whom Mr.
Morine bequeathed his manuscripts, seems to have performed his task with
great tact and judgment, and we hope that this little book will meet with
the recognition that it deserves.

(1) The Ballad of Hadji and Other Poems.  By Ian Hamilton.  (Kegan Paul.)

(2) Poems in the Modern Spirit, with The Secret of Content.  By Charles
Catty.  (Walter Scott.)

(3) The Banshee and Other Poems.  By John Todhunter.  (Kegan Paul.)

(4) Poems of the Plain and Songs of the Solitudes.  By Thomas Bower
Peacock.  (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)

(5) Holiday Recreations and Other Poems.  By Alexander Skene Smith.
(Chapman and Hall.)

(6) Poems.  By George Morine.  (Bell and Son.)




A FASCINATING BOOK


(Woman's World, November 1888.)

Mr. Alan Cole's carefully-edited translation of M. Lefebure's history of
Embroidery and Lace is one of the most fascinating books that has
appeared on this delightful subject.  M. Lefebure is one of the
administrators of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at Paris, besides being a
lace manufacturer; and his work has not merely an important historical
value, but as a handbook of technical instruction it will be found of the
greatest service by all needle-women.  Indeed, as the translator himself
points out, M. Lefebure's book suggests the question whether it is not
rather by the needle and the bobbin, than by the brush, the graver or the
chisel, that the influence of woman should assert itself in the arts.  In
Europe, at any rate, woman is sovereign in the domain of art-needle-work,
and few men would care to dispute with her the right of using those
delicate implements so intimately associated with the dexterity of her
nimble and slender fingers; nor is there any reason why the productions
of embroidery should not, as Mr. Alan Cole suggests, be placed on the
same level with those of painting, engraving and sculpture, though there
must always be a great difference between those purely decorative arts
that glorify their own material and the more imaginative arts in which
the material is, as it were, annihilated, and absorbed into the creation
of a new form.  In the beautifying of modern houses it certainly must be
admitted--indeed, it should be more generally recognised than it is--that
rich embroidery on hangings and curtains, portieres, couches and the
like, produces a far more decorative and far more artistic effect than
can be gained from our somewhat wearisome English practice of covering
the walls with pictures and engravings; and the almost complete
disappearance of embroidery from dress has robbed modern costume of one
of the chief elements of grace and fancy.

That, however, a great improvement has taken place in English embroidery
during the last ten or fifteen years cannot, I think, be denied.  It is
shown, not merely in the work of individual artists, such as Mrs.
Holiday, Miss May Morris and others, but also in the admirable
productions of the South Kensington School of Embroidery (the
best--indeed, the only really good--school that South Kensington has
produced).  It is pleasant to note, on turning over the leaves of M.
Lefebure's book, that in this we are merely carrying out certain old
traditions of Early English art.  In the seventh century, St. Ethelreda,
first abbess of the Monastery of Ely, made an offering to St. Cuthbert of
a sacred ornament she had worked with gold and precious stones, and the
cope and maniple of St. Cuthbert, which are preserved at Durham, are
considered to be specimens of opus Anglicanum.  In the year 800, the
Bishop of Durham allotted the income of a farm of two hundred acres for
life to an embroideress named Eanswitha, in consideration of her keeping
in repair the vestments of the clergy in his diocese.  The battle
standard of King Alfred was embroidered by Danish princesses; and the
Anglo-Saxon Gudric gave Alcuid a piece of land, on condition that she
instructed his daughter in needle-work.  Queen Mathilda bequeathed to the
Abbey of the Holy Trinity at Caen a tunic embroidered at Winchester by
the wife of one Alderet; and when William presented himself to the
English nobles, after the Battle of Hastings, he wore a mantle covered
with Anglo-Saxon embroideries, which is probably, M. Lefebure suggests,
the same as that mentioned in the inventory of the Bayeux Cathedral,
where, after the entry relating to the broderie a telle (representing the
conquest of England), two mantles are described--one of King William,
'all of gold, powdered with crosses and blossoms of gold, and edged along
the lower border with an orphrey of figures.'  The most splendid example
of the opus Anglicanum now in existence is, of course, the Syon cope at
the South Kensington Museum; but English work seems to have been
celebrated all over the Continent.  Pope Innocent IV. so admired the
splendid vestments worn by the English clergy in 1246, that he ordered
similar articles from Cistercian monasteries in England.  St. Dunstan,
the artistic English monk, was known as a designer for embroideries; and
the stole of St. Thomas a Becket is still preserved in the cathedral at
Sens, and shows us the interlaced scroll-forms used by Anglo-Saxon MS.
illuminators.

How far this modern artistic revival of rich and delicate embroidery will
bear fruit depends, of course, almost entirely on the energy and study
that women are ready to devote to it; but I think that it must be
admitted that all our decorative arts in Europe at present have, at
least, this element of strength--that they are in immediate relationship
with the decorative arts of Asia.  Wherever we find in European history a
revival of decorative art, it has, I fancy, nearly always been due to
Oriental influence and contact with Oriental nations.  Our own keenly
intellectual art has more than once been ready to sacrifice real
decorative beauty either to imitative presentation or to ideal motive.  It
has taken upon itself the burden of expression, and has sought to
interpret the secrets of thought and passion.  In its marvellous truth of
presentation it has found its strength, and yet its weakness is there
also.  It is never with impunity that an art seeks to mirror life.  If
Truth has her revenge upon those who do not follow her, she is often
pitiless to her worshippers.  In Byzantium the two arts met--Greek art,
with its intellectual sense of form, and its quick sympathy with
humanity; Oriental art, with its gorgeous materialism, its frank
rejection of imitation, its wonderful secrets of craft and colour, its
splendid textures, its rare metals and jewels, its marvellous and
priceless traditions.  They had, indeed, met before, but in Byzantium
they were married; and the sacred tree of the Persians, the palm of
Zoroaster, was embroidered on the hem of the garments of the Western
world.  Even the Iconoclasts, the Philistines of theological history,
who, in one of those strange outbursts of rage against Beauty that seem
to occur only amongst European nations, rose up against the wonder and
magnificence of the new art, served merely to distribute its secrets more
widely; and in the Liber Pontificalis, written in 687 by Athanasius, the
librarian, we read of an influx into Rome of gorgeous embroideries, the
work of men who had arrived from Constantinople and from Greece.  The
triumph of the Mussulman gave the decorative art of Europe a new
departure--that very principle of their religion that forbade the actual
representation of any object in nature being of the greatest artistic
service to them, though it was not, of course, strictly carried out.  The
Saracens introduced into Sicily the art of weaving silken and golden
fabrics; and from Sicily the manufacture of fine stuffs spread to the
North of Italy, and became localised in Genoa, Florence, Venice, and
other towns.  A still greater art-movement took place in Spain under the
Moors and Saracens, who brought over workmen from Persia to make
beautiful things for them.  M. Lefebure tells us of Persian embroidery
penetrating as far as Andalusia; and Almeria, like Palermo, had its Hotel
des Tiraz, which rivalled the Hotel des Tiraz at Bagdad, tiraz being the
generic name for ornamental tissues and costumes made with them.  Spangles
(those pretty little discs of gold, silver, or polished steel, used in
certain embroidery for dainty glinting effects) were a Saracenic
invention; and Arabic letters often took the place of letters in the
Roman characters for use in inscriptions upon embroidered robes and
Middle Age tapestries, their decorative value being so much greater.  The
book of crafts by Etienne Boileau, provost of the merchants in 1258-1268,
contains a curious enumeration of the different craft-guilds of Paris,
among which we find 'the tapiciers, or makers of the tapis sarrasinois
(or Saracen cloths), who say that their craft is for the service only of
churches, or great men like kings and counts'; and, indeed, even in our
own day, nearly all our words descriptive of decorative textures and
decorative methods point to an Oriental origin.  What the inroads of the
Mohammedans did for Sicily and Spain, the return of the Crusaders did for
the other countries of Europe.  The nobles who left for Palestine clad in
armour, came back in the rich stuffs of the East; and their costumes,
pouches (aumonieres sarra-sinoises), and caparisons excited the
admiration of the needle-workers of the West.  Matthew Paris says that at
the sacking of Antioch, in 1098, gold, silver and priceless costumes were
so equally distributed among the Crusaders, that many who the night
before were famishing and imploring relief, suddenly found themselves
overwhelmed with wealth; and Robert de Clair tells us of the wonderful
fetes that followed the capture of Constantinople.  The thirteenth
century, as M. Lefebure points out, was conspicuous for an increased
demand in the West for embroidery.  Many Crusaders made offerings to
churches of plunder from Palestine; and St. Louis, on his return from the
first Crusade, offered thanks at St. Denis to God for mercies bestowed on
him during his six years' absence and travel, and presented some richly-
embroidered stuffs to be used on great occasions as coverings to the
reliquaries containing the relics of holy martyrs.  European embroidery,
having thus become possessed of new materials and wonderful methods,
developed on its own intellectual and imitative lines, inclining, as it
went on, to the purely pictorial, and seeking to rival painting, and to
produce landscapes and figure-subjects with elaborate perspective and
subtle aerial effects.  A fresh Oriental influence, however, came through
the Dutch and the Portuguese, and the famous Compagnie des Grandes Indes;
and M. Lefebure gives an illustration of a door-hanging now in the Cluny
Museum, where we find the French fleurs-de-lys intermixed with Indian
ornament.  The hangings of Madame de Maintenon's room at Fontainebleau,
which were embroidered at St. Cyr, represent Chinese scenery upon a
jonquil-yellow ground.

Clothes were sent out ready cut to the East to be embroidered, and many
of the delightful coats of the period of Louis XV. and Louis XVI. owe
their dainty decoration to the needles of Chinese artists.  In our own
day the influence of the East is strongly marked.  Persia has sent us her
carpets for patterns, and Cashmere her lovely shawls, and India her
dainty muslins finely worked with gold thread palmates, and stitched over
with iridescent beetles' wings.  We are beginning now to dye by Oriental
methods, and the silk robes of China and Japan have taught us new wonders
of colour-combination, and new subtleties of delicate design.  Whether we
have yet learned to make a wise use of what we have acquired is less
certain.  If books produce an effect, this book of M. Lefebure should
certainly make us study with still deeper interest the whole question of
embroidery, and by those who already work with their needles it will be
found full of most fertile suggestion and most admirable advice.

Even to read of the marvellous works of embroidery that were fashioned in
bygone ages is pleasant.  Time has kept a few fragments of Greek
embroidery of the fourth century B.C. for us.  One is figured in M.
Lefebure's book--a chain-stitch embroidery of yellow flax upon a mulberry-
coloured worsted material, with graceful spirals and palmetto-patterns:
and another, a tapestried cloth powdered with ducks, was reproduced in
the Woman's World some months ago for an article by Mr. Alan Cole. {334a}
Now and then we find in the tomb of some dead Egyptian a piece of
delicate work.  In the treasury at Ratisbon is preserved a specimen of
Byzantine embroidery on which the Emperor Constantine is depicted riding
on a white palfrey, and receiving homage from the East and West.  Metz
has a red silk cope wrought with great eagles, the gift of Charlemagne,
and Bayeux the needle-wrought epic of Queen Matilda.  But where is the
great crocus-coloured robe, wrought for Athena, on which the gods fought
against the giants?  Where is the huge velarium that Nero stretched
across the Colosseum at Rome, on which was represented the starry sky,
and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by steeds?  How one would like to see
the curious table-napkins wrought for Heliogabalus, on which were
displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast;
or the mortuary-cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
bees; or the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop
of Pontus, and were embroidered with 'lions, panthers, bears, dogs,
forests, rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that painters can copy from
nature.'  Charles of Orleans had a coat, on the sleeves of which were
embroidered the verses of a song beginning 'Madame, je suis tout joyeux,'
the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread, and
each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four pearls. {334b}
The room prepared in the palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of
Burgundy was decorated with 'thirteen hundred and twenty-one papegauts
(parrots) made in broidery and blazoned with the King's arms, and five
hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented
with the Queen's arms--the whole worked in fine gold.'  Catherine de
Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her 'of black velvet embroidered with
pearls and powdered with crescents and suns.'  Its curtains were of
damask, 'with leafy wreaths and garlands figured upon a gold and silver
ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls,' and it
stood in a room hung with rows of the Queen's devices in cut black velvet
on cloth of silver.  Louis XIV. had gold-embroidered caryatides fifteen
feet high in his apartment.  The state-bed of Sobieski, King of Poland,
was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises and pearls,
with verses from the Koran; its supports were of silver-gilt, beautifully
chased and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions.  He had
taken it from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of Mahomet
had stood under it.  The Duchess de la Ferte wore a dress of
reddish-brown velvet, the skirt of which, adjusted in graceful folds, was
held up by big butterflies made of Dresden china; the front was a tablier
of cloth of silver, upon which was embroidered an orchestra of musicians
arranged in a pyramidal group, consisting of a series of six ranks of
performers, with beautiful instruments wrought in raised needle-work.
'Into the night go one and all,' as Mr. Henley sings in his charming
Ballade of Dead Actors.

Many of the facts related by M. Lefebure about the embroiderers' guilds
are also extremely interesting.  Etienne Boileau, in his book of crafts,
to which I have already alluded, tells us that a member of the guild was
prohibited from using gold of less value than 'eight sous (about 6s.) the
skein; he was bound to use the best silk, and never to mix thread with
silk, because that made the work false and bad.'  The test or trial piece
prescribed for a worker who was the son of a master-embroiderer was 'a
single figure, a sixth of the natural size, to be shaded in gold'; whilst
one not the son of a master was required to produce 'a complete incident
with many figures.'  The book of crafts also mentions 'cutters-out and
stencillers and illuminators' amongst those employed in the industry of
embroidery.  In 1551 the Parisian Corporation of Embroiderers issued a
notice that 'for the future, the colouring in representations of nude
figures and faces should be done in three or four gradations of carnation-
dyed silk, and not, as formerly, in white silks.'  During the fifteenth
century every household of any position retained the services of an
embroiderer by the year.  The preparation of colours also, whether for
painting or for dyeing threads and textile fabrics, was a matter which,
M. Lefebure points out, received close attention from the artists of the
Middle Ages.  Many undertook long journeys to obtain the more famous
recipes, which they filed, subsequently adding to and correcting them as
experience dictated.  Nor were great artists above making and supplying
designs for embroidery.  Raphael made designs for Francis I., and Boucher
for Louis XV.; and in the Ambras collection at Vienna is a superb set of
sacerdotal robes from designs by the brothers Van Eyck and their pupils.
Early in the sixteenth century books of embroidery designs were produced,
and their success was so great that in a few years French, German,
Italian, Flemish, and English publishers spread broadcast books of design
made by their best engravers.  In the same century, in order to give the
designers opportunity of studying directly from nature, Jean Robin opened
a garden with conservatories, in which he cultivated strange varieties of
plants then but little known in our latitudes.  The rich brocades and
brocadelles of the time are characterised by the introduction of large
flowery patterns, with pomegranates and other fruits with fine foliage.

The second part of M. Lefebure's book is devoted to the history of lace,
and though some may not find it quite as interesting as the earlier
portion it will more than repay perusal; and those who still work in this
delicate and fanciful art will find many valuable suggestions in it, as
well as a large number of exceedingly beautiful designs.  Compared to
embroidery, lace seems comparatively modern.  M. Lefebure and Mr. Alan
Cole tell us that there is no reliable or documentary evidence to prove
the existence of lace before the fifteenth century.  Of course in the
East, light tissues, such as gauzes, muslins, and nets, were made at very
early times, and were used as veils and scarfs after the manner of
subsequent laces, and women enriched them with some sort of embroidery,
or varied the openness of them by here and there drawing out threads.  The
threads of fringes seem also to have been plaited and knotted together,
and the borders of one of the many fashions of Roman toga were of open
reticulated weaving.  The Egyptian Museum at the Louvre has a curious
network embellished with glass beads; and the monk Reginald, who took
part in opening the tomb of St. Cuthbert at Durham in the twelfth
century, writes that the Saint's shroud had a fringe of linen threads an
inch long, surmounted by a border, 'worked upon the threads,' with
representations of birds and pairs of beasts, there being between each
such pair a branching tree, a survival of the palm of Zoroaster, to which
I have before alluded.  Our authors, however, do not in these examples
recognise lace, the production of which involves more refined and
artistic methods, and postulates a combination of skill and varied
execution carried to a higher degree of perfection.  Lace, as we know it,
seems to have had its origin in the habit of embroidering linen.  White
embroidery on linen has, M. Lefebure remarks, a cold and monotonous
aspect; that with coloured threads is brighter and gayer in effect, but
is apt to fade in frequent washing; but white embroidery relieved by open
spaces in, or shapes cut from, the linen ground, is possessed of an
entirely new charm; and from a sense of this the birth may be traced of
an art in the result of which happy contrasts are effected between
ornamental details of close texture and others of open-work.

Soon, also, was suggested the idea that, instead of laboriously
withdrawing threads from stout linen, it would be more convenient to
introduce a needle-made pattern into an open network ground, which was
called a lacis.  Of this kind of embroidery many specimens are extant.
The Cluny Museum possesses a linen cap said to have belonged to Charles
V.; and an alb of linen drawn-thread work, supposed to have been made by
Anne of Bohemia (1527), is preserved in the cathedral at Prague.
Catherine de Medicis had a bed draped with squares of reseuil, or lacis,
and it is recorded that 'the girls and servants of her household consumed
much time in making squares of reseuil.'  The interesting pattern-books
for open-ground embroidery, of which the first was published in 1527 by
Pierre Quinty, of Cologne, supply us with the means of tracing the stages
in the transition from white thread embroidery to needle-point lace.  We
meet in them with a style of needle-work which differs from embroidery in
not being wrought upon a stuff foundation.  It is, in fact, true lace,
done, as it were, 'in the air,' both ground and pattern being entirely
produced by the lace-maker.

The elaborate use of lace in costume was, of course, largely stimulated
by the fashion of wearing ruffs, and their companion cuffs or sleeves.
Catherine de Medicis induced one Frederic Vinciolo to come from Italy and
make ruffs and gadrooned collars, the fashion of which she started in
France; and Henry III. was so punctilious over his ruffs that he would
iron and goffer his cuffs and collars himself rather than see their
pleats limp and out of shape.  The pattern-books also gave a great
impulse to the art.  M. Lefebure mentions German books with patterns of
eagles, heraldic emblems, hunting scenes, and plants and leaves belonging
to Northern vegetation; and Italian books, in which the motifs consist of
oleander blossoms, and elegant wreaths and scrolls, landscapes with
mythological scenes, and hunting episodes, less realistic than the
Northern ones, in which appear fauns, and nymphs or amorini shooting
arrows.  With regard to these patterns, M. Lefebure notices a curious
fact.  The oldest painting in which lace is depicted is that of a lady,
by Carpaccio, who died about 1523.  The cuffs of the lady are edged with
a narrow lace, the pattern of which reappears in Vecellio's Corona, a
book not published until 1591.  This particular pattern was, therefore,
in use at least eighty years before it got into circulation with other
published patterns.

It was not, however, till the seventeenth century that lace acquired a
really independent character and individuality, and M. Duplessis states
that the production of the more noteworthy of early laces owes more to
the influence of men than to that of women.  The reign of Louis XIV.
witnessed the production of the most stately needle-point laces, the
transformation of Venetian point, and the growth of Points d'Alencon,
d'Argentan, de Bruxelles and d'Angleterre.

The king, aided by Colbert, determined to make France the centre, if
possible, for lace manufacture, sending for this purpose both to Venice
and to Flanders for workers.  The studio of the Gobelins supplied
designs.  The dandies had their huge rabatos or bands falling from
beneath the chin over the breast, and great prelates, like Bossuet and
Fenelon, wore their wonderful albs and rochets.  It is related of a
collar made at Venice for Louis XIV. that the lace-workers, being unable
to find sufficiently fine horse-hair, employed some of their own hairs
instead, in order to secure that marvellous delicacy of work which they
aimed at producing.

In the eighteenth century, Venice, finding that laces of lighter texture
were sought after, set herself to make rose-point; and at the Court of
Louis XV. the choice of lace was regulated by still more elaborate
etiquette.  The Revolution, however, ruined many of the manufactures.
Alencon survived, and Napoleon encouraged it, and endeavoured to renew
the old rules about the necessity of wearing point-lace at Court
receptions.  A wonderful piece of lace, powdered over with devices of
bees, and costing 40,000 francs, was ordered.  It was begun for the
Empress Josephine, but in the course of its making her escutcheons were
replaced by those of Marie Louise.

M. Lefebure concludes his interesting history by stating very clearly his
attitude towards machine-made lace.  'It would be an obvious loss to
art,' he says, 'should the making of lace by hand become extinct, for
machinery, as skilfully devised as possible, cannot do what the hand
does.'  It can give us 'the results of processes, not the creations of
artistic handicraft.'  Art is absent 'where formal calculation pretends
to supersede emotion'; it is absent 'where no trace can be detected of
intelligence guiding handicraft, whose hesitancies even possess peculiar
charm . . . cheapness is never commendable in respect of things which are
not absolute necessities; it lowers artistic standard.'  These are
admirable remarks, and with them we take leave of this fascinating book,
with its delightful illustrations, its charming anecdotes, its excellent
advice.  Mr. Alan Cole deserves the thanks of all who are interested in
art for bringing this book before the public in so attractive and so
inexpensive a form.

Embroidery and Lace: Their Manufacture and History from the Remotest
Antiquity to the Present Day.  Translated and enlarged by Alan S. Cole
from the French of Ernest Lefebure.  (Grevel and Co.)




THE POETS' CORNER--VIII


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 16, 1888.)

A few years ago some of our minor poets tried to set Science to music, to
write sonnets on the survival of the fittest and odes to Natural
Selection.  Socialism, and the sympathy with those who are unfit, seem,
if we may judge from Miss Nesbit's remarkable volume, to be the new theme
of song, the fresh subject-matter for poetry.  The change has some
advantages.  Scientific laws are at once too abstract and too clearly
defined, and even the visible arts have not yet been able to translate
into any symbols of beauty the discoveries of modern science.  At the
Arts and Crafts Exhibition we find the cosmogony of Moses, not the
cosmogony of Darwin.  To Mr. Burne-Jones Man is still a fallen angel, not
a greater ape.  Poverty and misery, upon the other hand, are terribly
concrete things.  We find their incarnation everywhere and, as we are
discussing a matter of art, we have no hesitation in saying that they are
not devoid of picturesqueness.  The etcher or the painter finds in them
'a subject made to his hand,' and the poet has admirable opportunities of
drawing weird and dramatic contrasts between the purple of the rich and
the rags of the poor.  From Miss Nesbit's book comes not merely the voice
of sympathy but also the cry of revolution:

   This is our vengeance day.  Our masters made fat with our fasting
   Shall fall before us like corn when the sickle for harvest is strong:
   Old wrongs shall give might to our arm, remembrance of wrongs shall
   make lasting
   The graves we will dig for our tyrants we bore with too much and too
   long.

The poem from which we take this stanza is remarkably vigorous, and the
only consolation that we can offer to the timid and the Tories is that as
long as so much strength is employed in blowing the trumpet, the sword,
so far as Miss Nesbit is concerned, will probably remain sheathed.
Personally, and looking at the matter from a purely artistic point of
view, we prefer Miss Nesbit's gentler moments.  Her eye for Nature is
peculiarly keen.  She has always an exquisite sense of colour and
sometimes a most delicate ear for music.  Many of her poems, such as The
Moat House, Absolution, and The Singing of the Magnificat are true works
of art, and Vies Manquees is a little gem of song, with its dainty
dancing measure, its delicate and wilful fancy and the sharp poignant
note of passion that suddenly strikes across it, marring its light
laughter and lending its beauty a terrible and tragic meaning.

From the sonnets we take this at random:

   Not Spring--too lavish of her bud and leaf--
      But Autumn with sad eyes and brows austere,
      When fields are bare, and woods are brown and sere,
   And leaden skies weep their enchantless grief.
   Spring is so much too bright, since Spring is brief,
      And in our hearts is Autumn all the year,
      Least sad when the wide pastures are most drear
   And fields grieve most--robbed of the last gold sheaf.

These too, the opening stanzas of The Last Envoy, are charming:

   The Wind, that through the silent woodland blows
   O'er rippling corn and dreaming pastures goes
      Straight to the garden where the heart of Spring
   Faints in the heart of Summer's earliest rose.

   Dimpling the meadow's grassy green and grey,
   By furze that yellows all the common way,
      Gathering the gladness of the common broom,
   And too persistent fragrance of the may--

   Gathering whatever is of sweet and dear,
   The wandering wind has passed away from here,
      Has passed to where within your garden waits
   The concentrated sweetness of the year.

But Miss Nesbit is not to be judged by mere extracts.  Her work is too
rich and too full for that.

Mr. Foster is an American poet who has read Hawthorne, which is wise of
him, and imitated Longfellow, which is not quite so commendable.  His
Rebecca the Witch is a story of old Salem, written in the metre of
Hiawatha, with a few rhymes thrown in, and conceived in the spirit of the
author of The Scarlet Letter.  The combination is not very satisfactory,
but the poem, as a piece of fiction, has many elements of interest.  Mr.
Foster seems to be quite popular in America.  The Chicago Times finds his
fancies 'very playful and sunny,' and the Indianapolis Journal speaks of
his 'tender and appreciative style.'  He is certainly a clever
story-teller, and The Noah's Ark (which 'somehow had escaped the
sheriff's hand') is bright and amusing, and its pathos, like the pathos
of a melodrama, is a purely picturesque element not intended to be taken
too seriously.  We cannot, however, recommend the definitely comic poems.
They are very depressing.

Mr. John Renton Denning dedicates his book to the Duke of Connaught, who
is Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade, in which regiment Mr. Denning
was once himself a private soldier.  His poems show an ardent love of
Keats and a profligate luxuriance of adjectives:

   And I will build a bower for thee, sweet,
   A verdurous shelter from the noonday heat,
   Thick rustling ivy, broad and green, and shining,
   With honeysuckle creeping up and twining
   Its nectared sweetness round thee; violets
   And daisies with their fringed coronets
   And the white bells of tiny valley lilies,
   And golden-leaved narcissi--daffodillies
   Shall grow around thy dwelling--luscious fare
   Of fruit on which the sun has laughed;

this is the immature manner of Endymion with a vengeance and is not to be
encouraged.  Still, Mr. Denning is not always so anxious to reproduce the
faults of his master.  Sometimes he writes with wonderful grace and
charm.  Sylvia, for instance, is an exceedingly pretty poem, and The
Exile has many powerful and picturesque lines.  Mr. Denning should make a
selection of his poems and publish them in better type and on better
paper.  The 'get-up' of his volume, to use the slang phrase of our young
poets, is very bad indeed, and reflects no credit on the press of the
Education Society of Bombay.

The best poem in Mr. Joseph McKim's little book is, undoubtedly, William
the Silent.  It is written in the spirited Macaulay style:

   Awake, awake, ye burghers brave! shout, shout for joy and sing!
   With thirty thousand at his back comes forth your hero King.
   Now shake for ever from your necks the servile yoke of Spain,
   And raise your arms and end for aye false Alva's cruel reign.
   Ho!  Maestricht, Liege, Brussels fair! pour forth your warriors brave,
   And join your hands with him who comes your hearths and homes to save.

Some people like this style.

Mrs. Horace Dobell, who has arrived at her seventeenth volume of poetry,
seems very angry with everybody, and writes poems to A Human Toad with
lurid and mysterious footnotes such as--'Yet some one, _not_ a friend of
--- _did_! on a certain occasion of a glib utterance of calumnies, by ---!
at Hampstead.'  Here indeed is a Soul's Tragedy.

'In many cases I have deliberately employed alliteration, believing that
the music of a line is intensified thereby,' says Mr. Kelly in the
preface to his poems, and there is certainly no reason why Mr. Kelly
should not employ this 'artful aid.'  Alliteration is one of the many
secrets of English poetry, and as long as it is kept a secret it is
admirable.  Mr. Kelly, it must be admitted, uses it with becoming modesty
and reserve and never suffers it to trammel the white feet of his bright
and buoyant muse.  His volume is, in many ways, extremely interesting.
Most minor poets are at their best in sonnets, but with him it is not so.
His sonnets are too narrative, too diffuse, and too lyrical.  They lack
concentration, and concentration is the very essence of a sonnet.  His
longer poems, on the other hand, have many good qualities.  We do not
care for Psychossolles, which is elaborately commonplace, but The Flight
of Calliope has many charming passages.  It is a pity that Mr. Kelly has
included the poems written before the age of nineteen.  Youth is rarely
original.

Andiatorocte is the title of a volume of poems by the Rev. Clarence
Walworth, of Albany, N.Y.  It is a word borrowed from the Indians, and
should, we think, be returned to them as soon as possible.  The most
curious poem of the book is called Scenes at the Holy Home:

   Jesus and Joseph at work!  Hurra!
   Sight never to see again,
   A prentice Deity plies the saw,
   While the Master ploughs with the plane.

Poems of this kind were popular in the Middle Ages when the cathedrals of
every Christian country served as its theatres.  They are anachronisms
now, and it is odd that they should come to us from the United States.  In
matters of this kind we should have some protection.

(1) Lays and Legends.  By E. Nesbit.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(2) Rebecca the Witch and Other Tales.  By David Skaats Foster.  (G. P.
Putnam's Sons.)

(3) Poems and Songs.  By John Renton Denning.  (Bombay: Education
Society's Press.)

(4) Poems.  By Joseph McKim.  (Kegan Paul.)

(5) In the Watches of the Night.  Poems in eighteen volumes.  By Mrs.
Horace Dobell.  Vol. xvii.  (Remington and Co.)

(6) Poems.  By James Kelly.  (Glasgow: Reid and Coghill.)

(7) Andiatorocte.  By the Rev. Clarence A. Walworth.  (G. P. Putnam's
Sons.)




A NOTE ON SOME MODERN POETS


(Woman's World, December 1888.)

'If I were king,' says Mr. Henley, in one of his most modest rondeaus,

   'Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear;
   Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather;
   And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere,
         If I were king.'

And these lines contain, if not the best criticism of his own work,
certainly a very complete statement of his aim and motive as a poet.  His
little Book of Verses reveals to us an artist who is seeking to find new
methods of expression and has not merely a delicate sense of beauty and a
brilliant, fantastic wit, but a real passion also for what is horrible,
ugly, or grotesque.  No doubt, everything that is worthy of existence is
worthy also of art--at least, one would like to think so--but while echo
or mirror can repeat for us a beautiful thing, to render artistically a
thing that is ugly requires the most exquisite alchemy of form, the most
subtle magic of transformation.  To me there is more of the cry of
Marsyas than of the singing of Apollo in the earlier poems of Mr.
Henley's volume, In Hospital: Rhymes and Rhythms, as he calls them.  But
it is impossible to deny their power.  Some of them are like bright,
vivid pastels; others like charcoal drawings, with dull blacks and murky
whites; others like etchings with deeply-bitten lines, and abrupt
contrasts, and clever colour-suggestions.  In fact, they are like
anything and everything, except perfected poems--that they certainly are
not.  They are still in the twilight.  They are preludes, experiments,
inspired jottings in a note-book, and should be heralded by a design of
'Genius Making Sketches.'  Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to
verse; it gives that delightful sense of limitation which in all the arts
is so pleasurable, and is, indeed, one of the secrets of perfection; it
will whisper, as a French critic has said, 'things unexpected and
charming, things with strange and remote relations to each other,' and
bind them together in indissoluble bonds of beauty; and in his constant
rejection of rhyme, Mr. Henley seems to me to have abdicated half his
power.  He is a roi en exil who has thrown away some of the strings of
his lute; a poet who has forgotten the fairest part of his kingdom.

However, all work criticises itself.  Here is one of Mr. Henley's
inspired jottings.  According to the temperament of the reader, it will
serve either as a model or as the reverse:

   As with varnish red and glistening
      Dripped his hair; his feet were rigid;
      Raised, he settled stiffly sideways:
      You could see the hurts were spinal.

   He had fallen from an engine,
      And been dragged along the metals.
      It was hopeless, and they knew it;
      So they covered him, and left him.

   As he lay, by fits half sentient,
      Inarticulately moaning,
      With his stockinged feet protruded
      Sharp and awkward from the blankets,

   To his bed there came a woman,
      Stood and looked and sighed a little,
      And departed without speaking,
      As himself a few hours after.

   I was told she was his sweetheart.
      They were on the eve of marriage.
      She was quiet as a statue,
      But her lip was gray and writhen.

In this poem, the rhythm and the music, such as it is, are
obvious--perhaps a little too obvious.  In the following I see nothing
but ingeniously printed prose.  It is a description--and a very accurate
one--of a scene in a hospital ward.  The medical students are supposed to
be crowding round the doctor.  What I quote is only a fragment, but the
poem itself is a fragment:

   So shows the ring
   Seen, from behind, round a conjuror
   Doing his pitch in the street.
   High shoulders, low shoulders, broad shoulders, narrow ones,
   Round, square, and angular, serry and shove;
   While from within a voice,
   Gravely and weightily fluent,
   Sounds; and then ceases; and suddenly
   (Look at the stress of the shoulders!)
   Out of a quiver of silence,
   Over the hiss of the spray,
   Comes a low cry, and the sound
   Of breath quick intaken through teeth
   Clenched in resolve.  And the master
   Breaks from the crowd, and goes,
   Wiping his hands,
   To the next bed, with his pupils
   Flocking and whispering behind him.

   Now one can see.
   Case Number One
   Sits (rather pale) with his bedclothes
   Stripped up, and showing his foot
   (Alas, for God's image!)
   Swaddled in wet white lint
   Brilliantly hideous with red.

Theophile Gautier once said that Flaubert's style was meant to be read,
and his own style to be looked at.  Mr. Henley's unrhymed rhythms form
very dainty designs, from a typographical point of view.  From the point
of view of literature, they are a series of vivid, concentrated
impressions, with a keen grip of fact, a terrible actuality, and an
almost masterly power of picturesque presentation.  But the poetic
form--what of that?

Well, let us pass to the later poems, to the rondels and rondeaus, the
sonnets and quatorzains, the echoes and the ballades.  How brilliant and
fanciful this is!  The Toyokuni colour-print that suggested it could not
be more delightful.  It seems to have kept all the wilful fantastic charm
of the original:

   Was I a Samurai renowned,
   Two-sworded, fierce, immense of bow?
   A histrion angular and profound?
   A priest? a porter?--Child, although
   I have forgotten clean, I know
   That in the shade of Fujisan,
   What time the cherry-orchards blow,
   I loved you once in old Japan.

   As here you loiter, flowing-gowned
   And hugely sashed, with pins a-row
   Your quaint head as with flamelets crowned,
   Demure, inviting--even so,
   When merry maids in Miyako
   To feel the sweet o' the year began,
   And green gardens to overflow,
   I loved you once in old Japan.

   Clear shine the hills; the rice-fields round
   Two cranes are circling; sleepy and slow,
   A blue canal the lake's blue bound
   Breaks at the bamboo bridge; and lo!
   Touched with the sundown's spirit and glow,
   I see you turn, with flirted fan,
   Against the plum-tree's bloomy snow . . .
   I loved you once in old Japan!

   ENVOY.

   Dear, 'twas a dozen lives ago;
   But that I was a lucky man
   The Toyokuni here will show:
   I loved you--once--in old Japan!

This rondel, too--how light it is, and graceful!--

   We'll to the woods and gather may
   Fresh from the footprints of the rain.
   We'll to the woods, at every vein
   To drink the spirit of the day.

   The winds of spring are out at play,
   The needs of spring in heart and brain.
   We'll to the woods and gather may
   Fresh from the footprints of the rain.

   The world's too near her end, you say?
   Hark to the blackbird's mad refrain!
   It waits for her, the vast Inane?
   Then, girls, to help her on the way
   We'll to the woods and gather may.

There are fine verses, also, scattered through this little book; some of
them very strong, as--

   Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the pit from pole to pole,
   I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul.

   It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
   I am the master of my fate:
      I am the captain of my soul.

Others with a true touch of romance, as--

   Or ever the knightly years were gone
      With the old world to the grave,
   I was a king in Babylon,
      And you were a Christian slave.

And here and there we come across such felicitous phrases as--

         In the sand
   The gold prow-griffin claws a hold,

or--

         The spires
   Shine and are changed,

and many other graceful or fanciful lines, even 'the green sky's minor
thirds' being perfectly right in its place, and a very refreshing bit of
affectation in a volume where there is so much that is natural.

However, Mr. Henley is not to be judged by samples.  Indeed, the most
attractive thing in the book is no single poem that is in it, but the
strong humane personality that stands behind both flawless and faulty
work alike, and looks out through many masks, some of them beautiful, and
some grotesque, and not a few misshapen.  In the case with most of our
modern poets, when we have analysed them down to an adjective, we can go
no further, or we care to go no further; but with this book it is
different.  Through these reeds and pipes blows the very breath of life.
It seems as if one could put one's hand upon the singer's heart and count
its pulsations.  There is something wholesome, virile and sane about the
man's soul.  Anybody can be reasonable, but to be sane is not common; and
sane poets are as rare as blue lilies, though they may not be quite so
delightful.

   Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,
   Or the gold weather round us mellow slow;
   We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare,
   And we can conquer, though we may not share
   In the rich quiet of the afterglow,
         What is to come,

is the concluding stanza of the last rondeau--indeed, of the last poem in
the collection, and the high, serene temper displayed in these lines
serves at once as keynote and keystone to the book.  The very lightness
and slightness of so much of the work, its careless moods and casual
fancies, seem to suggest a nature that is not primarily interested in
art--a nature, like Sordello's, passionately enamoured of life, one to
which lyre and lute are things of less importance.  From this mere joy of
living, this frank delight in experience for its own sake, this lofty
indifference, and momentary unregretted ardours, come all the faults and
all the beauties of the volume.  But there is this difference between
them--the faults are deliberate, and the result of much study; the
beauties have the air of fascinating impromptus.  Mr. Henley's healthy,
if sometimes misapplied, confidence in the myriad suggestions of life
gives him his charm.  He is made to sing along the highways, not to sit
down and write.  If he took himself more seriously, his work would become
trivial.

* * * * *

Mr. William Sharp takes himself very seriously and has written a preface
to his Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy, which is, on the whole,
the most interesting part of his volume.  We are all, it seems, far too
cultured, and lack robustness.  'There are those amongst us,' says Mr.
Sharp, 'who would prefer a dexterously-turned triolet to such apparently
uncouth measures as Thomas the Rhymer, or the ballad of Clerk Saunders:
who would rather listen to the drawing-room music of the Villanelle than
to the wild harp-playing by the mill-dams o' Binnorie, or the sough of
the night-wind o'er drumly Annan water.'  Such an expression as 'the
drawing-room music of the Villanelle' is not very happy, and I cannot
imagine any one with the smallest pretensions to culture preferring a
dexterously turned triolet to a fine imaginative ballad, as it is only
the Philistine who ever dreams of comparing works of art that are
absolutely different in motive, in treatment, and in form.  If English
Poetry is in danger--and, according to Mr. Sharp, the poor nymph is in a
very critical state--what she has to fear is not the fascination of
dainty metre or delicate form, but the predominance of the intellectual
spirit over the spirit of beauty.  Lord Tennyson dethroned Wordsworth as
a literary influence, and later on Mr. Swinburne filled all the mountain
valleys with echoes of his own song.  The influence to-day is that of Mr.
Browning.  And as for the triolets, and the rondels, and the careful
study of metrical subtleties, these things are merely the signs of a
desire for perfection in small things and of the recognition of poetry as
an art.  They have had certainly one good result--they have made our
minor poets readable, and have not left us entirely at the mercy of
geniuses.

But, says Mr. Sharp, every one is far too literary; even Rossetti is too
literary.  What we want is simplicity and directness of utterance; these
should be the dominant characteristics of poetry.  Well, is that quite so
certain?  Are simplicity and directness of utterance absolute essentials
for poetry?  I think not.  They may be admirable for the drama, admirable
for all those imitative forms of literature that claim to mirror life in
its externals and its accidents, admirable for quiet narrative, admirable
in their place; but their place is not everywhere.  Poetry has many modes
of music; she does not blow through one pipe alone.  Directness of
utterance is good, but so is the subtle recasting of thought into a new
and delightful form.  Simplicity is good, but complexity, mystery,
strangeness, symbolism, obscurity even, these have their value.  Indeed,
properly speaking, there is no such thing as Style; there are merely
styles, that is all.

One cannot help feeling also that everything that Mr. Sharp says in his
preface was said at the beginning of the century by Wordsworth, only
where Wordsworth called us back to nature, Mr. Sharp invites us to woo
romance.  Romance, he tells us, is 'in the air.'  A new romantic movement
is imminent; 'I anticipate,' he says, 'that many of our poets, especially
those of the youngest generation, will shortly turn towards the "ballad"
as a poetic vehicle: and that the next year or two will see much romantic
poetry.'

The ballad!  Well, Mr. Andrew Lang, some months ago, signed the death-
warrant of the ballade, and--though I hope that in this respect Mr. Lang
resembles the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, whose bloodthirsty orders
were by general consent never carried into execution--it must be admitted
that the number of ballades given to us by some of our poets was,
perhaps, a little excessive.  But the ballad?  Sir Patrick Spens, Clerk
Saunders, Thomas the Rhymer--are these to be our archetypes, our models,
the sources of our inspiration?  They are certainly great imaginative
poems.  In Chatterton's Ballad of Charity, Coleridge's Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner, the La Belle Dame sans Merci of Keats, the Sister Helen
of Rossetti, we can see what marvellous works of art the spirit of old
romance may fashion.  But to preach a spirit is one thing, to propose a
form is another.  It is true that Mr. Sharp warns the rising generation
against imitation.  A ballad, he reminds them, does not necessarily
denote a poem in quatrains and in antique language.  But his own poems,
as I think will be seen later, are, in their way, warnings, and show the
danger of suggesting any definite 'poetic vehicle.'  And, further, are
simplicity and directness of utterance really the dominant
characteristics of these old imaginative ballads that Mr. Sharp so
enthusiastically, and, in some particulars, so wisely praises?  It does
not seem to me to be so.  We are always apt to think that the voices
which sang at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural
than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and
through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and
could pass, almost without changing, into song.  The snow lies thick now
upon Olympus, and its scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we
fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in
the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the
vale.  But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or
think we desire, for our own.  Our historical sense is at fault.  Every
century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the
work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its time is
probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort.  For
Nature is always behind the age.  It takes a great artist to be
thoroughly modern.

Let us turn to the poems, which have really only the preface to blame for
their somewhat late appearance.  The best is undoubtedly The Weird of
Michael Scott, and these stanzas are a fair example of its power:

   Then Michael Scott laughed long and loud:
   'Whan shone the mune ahint yon cloud
      I speered the towers that saw my birth--
   Lang, lang, sall wait my cauld grey shroud,
      Lang cauld and weet my bed o' earth!'

   But as by Stair he rode full speed
   His horse began to pant and bleed;
      'Win hame, win hame, my bonnie mare,
   Win hame if thou wouldst rest and feed,
      Win hame, we're nigh the House of Stair!'

   But, with a shrill heart-bursten yell
   The white horse stumbled, plunged, and fell,
      And loud a summoning voice arose,
   'Is't White-Horse Death that rides frae Hell,
      Or Michael Scott that hereby goes?'

   'Ah, Laird of Stair, I ken ye weel!
   Avaunt, or I your saul sall steal,
      An' send ye howling through the wood
   A wild man-wolf--aye, ye maun reel
      An' cry upon your Holy Rood!'

There is a good deal of vigour, no doubt, in these lines; but one cannot
help asking whether this is to be the common tongue of the future
Renaissance of Romance.  Are we all to talk Scotch, and to speak of the
moon as the 'mune,' and the soul as the 'saul'?  I hope not.  And yet if
this Renaissance is to be a vital, living thing, it must have its
linguistic side.  Just as the spiritual development of music, and the
artistic development of painting, have always been accompanied, if not
occasioned, by the discovery of some new instrument or some fresh medium,
so, in the case of any important literary movement, half of its strength
resides in its language.  If it does not bring with it a rich and novel
mode of expression, it is doomed either to sterility or to imitation.
Dialect, archaisms and the like, will not do.  Take, for instance,
another poem of Mr. Sharp's, a poem which he calls The Deith-Tide:

   The weet saut wind is blawing
      Upon the misty shore:
   As, like a stormy snawing,
      The deid go streaming o'er:--
         The wan drown'd deid sail wildly
            Frae out each drumly wave:
         It's O and O for the weary sea,
            And O for a quiet grave.

This is simply a very clever pastiche, nothing more, and our language is
not likely to be permanently enriched by such words as 'weet,' 'saut,'
'blawing,' and 'snawing.'  Even 'drumly,' an adjective of which Mr. Sharp
is so fond that he uses it both in prose and verse, seems to me to be
hardly an adequate basis for a new romantic movement.

However, Mr. Sharp does not always write in dialect.  The Son of Allan
can be read without any difficulty, and Phantasy can be read with
pleasure.  They are both very charming poems in their way, and none the
less charming because the cadences of the one recall Sister Helen, and
the motive of the other reminds us of La Belle Dame sans Merci.  But
those who wish thoroughly to enjoy Mr. Sharp's poems should not read his
preface; just as those who approve of the preface should avoid reading
the poems.  I cannot help saying that I think the preface a great
mistake.  The work that follows it is quite inadequate, and there seems
little use in heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and proclaiming a
Renaissance whose first-fruits, if we are to judge them by any high
standard of perfection, are of so ordinary a character.

* * * * *

Miss Mary Robinson has also written a preface to her little volume,
Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play, but the preface is not very serious,
and does not propose any drastic change or any immediate revolution in
English literature.  Miss Robinson's poems have always the charm of
delicate music and graceful expression; but they are, perhaps, weakest
where they try to be strong, and certainly least satisfying where they
seek to satisfy.  Her fanciful flower-crowned Muse, with her tripping
steps and pretty, wilful ways, should not write Antiphons to the
Unknowable, or try to grapple with abstract intellectual problems.  Hers
is not the hand to unveil mysteries, nor hers the strength for the
solving of secrets.  She should never leave her garden, and as for her
wandering out into the desert to ask the Sphinx questions, that should be
sternly forbidden to her.  Durer's Melancolia, that serves as the
frontispiece to this dainty book, looks sadly out of place.  Her seat is
with the sibyls, not with the nymphs.  What has she to do with
shepherdesses piping about Darwinism and 'The Eternal Mind'?

However, if the Songs of the Inner Life are not very successful, the
Spring Songs are delightful.  They follow each other like wind-blown
petals, and make one feel how much more charming flower is than fruit,
apple-blossom than apple.  There are some artistic temperaments that
should never come to maturity, that should always remain in the region of
promise and should dread autumn with its harvesting more than winter with
its frosts.  Such seems to me the temperament that this volume reveals.
The first poem of the second series, La Belle au Bois Dormant, is worth
all the more serious and thoughtful work, and has far more chance of
being remembered.  It is not always to high aim and lofty ambition that
the prize is given.  If Daphne had gone to meet Apollo, she would never
have known what laurels are.

From these fascinating spring lyrics and idylls we pass to the romantic
ballads.  One artistic faculty Miss Robinson certainly possesses--the
faculty of imitation.  There is an element of imitation in all the arts;
it is to be found in literature as much as in painting, and the danger of
valuing it too little is almost as great as the danger of setting too
high a value upon it.  To catch, by dainty mimicry, the very mood and
manner of antique work, and yet to retain that touch of modern passion
without which the old form would be dull and empty; to win from
long-silent lips some faint echo of their music, and to add to it a music
of one's own; to take the mode and fashion of a bygone age, and to
experiment with it, and search curiously for its possibilities; there is
a pleasure in all this.  It is a kind of literary acting, and has
something of the charm of the art of the stage-player.  And how well, on
the whole, Miss Robinson does it!  Here is the opening of the ballad of
Rudel:

   There was in all the world of France
      No singer half so sweet:
   The first note of his viol brought
      A crowd into the street.

   He stepped as young, and bright, and glad
      As Angel Gabriel.
   And only when we heard him sing
      Our eyes forgot Rudel.

   And as he sat in Avignon,
      With princes at their wine,
   In all that lusty company
      Was none so fresh and fine.

   His kirtle's of the Arras-blue,
      His cap of pearls and green;
   His golden curls fall tumbling round
      The fairest face I've seen.

How Gautier would have liked this from the same poem!--

   Hew the timbers of sandal-wood,
      And planks of ivory;
   Rear up the shining masts of gold,
      And let us put to sea.

   Sew the sails with a silken thread
      That all are silken too;
   Sew them with scarlet pomegranates
      Upon a sheet of blue.

   Rig the ship with a rope of gold
      And let us put to sea.
   And now, good-bye to good Marseilles,
      And hey for Tripoli!

The ballad of the Duke of Gueldres's wedding is very clever:

   'O welcome, Mary Harcourt,
      Thrice welcome, lady mine;
   There's not a knight in all the world
      Shall be as true as thine.

   'There's venison in the aumbry, Mary,
      There's claret in the vat;
   Come in, and breakfast in the hall
      Where once my mother sat!'

   O red, red is the wine that flows,
      And sweet the minstrel's play,
   But white is Mary Harcourt
      Upon her wedding-day.

   O many are the wedding guests
      That sit on either side;
   But pale below her crimson flowers
      And homesick is the bride.

Miss Robinson's critical sense is at once too sound and too subtle to
allow her to think that any great Renaissance of Romance will necessarily
follow from the adoption of the ballad-form in poetry; but her work in
this style is very pretty and charming, and The Tower of St. Maur, which
tells of the father who built up his little son in the wall of his castle
in order that the foundations should stand sure, is admirable in its way.
The few touches of archaism in language that she introduces are quite
sufficient for their purpose, and though she fully appreciates the
importance of the Celtic spirit in literature, she does not consider it
necessary to talk of 'blawing' and 'snawing.'  As for the garden play,
Our Lady of the Broken Heart, as it is called, the bright, birdlike
snatches of song that break in here and there--as the singing does in
Pippa Passes--form a very welcome relief to the somewhat ordinary
movement of the blank verse, and suggest to us again where Miss
Robinson's real power lies.  Not a poet in the true creative sense, she
is still a very perfect artist in poetry, using language as one might use
a very precious material, and producing her best work by the rejection of
the great themes and large intellectual motives that belong to fuller and
richer song.  When she essays such themes, she certainly fails.  Her
instrument is the reed, not the lyre.  Only those should sing of Death
whose song is stronger than Death is.

* * * * *

The collected poems of the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, have a
pathetic interest as the artistic record of a very gracious and comely
life.  They bring us back to the days when Philip Bourke Marston was
young--'Philip, my King,' as she called him in the pretty poem of that
name; to the days of the Great Exhibition, with the universal piping
about peace; to those later terrible Crimean days, when Alma and
Balaclava were words on the lips of our poets; and to days when Leonora
was considered a very romantic name.

   Leonora, Leonora,
   How the word rolls--Leonora.
   Lion-like in full-mouthed sound,
   Marching o'er the metric ground,
   With a tawny tread sublime.
   So your name moves, Leonora,
   Down my desert rhyme.

Mrs. Craik's best poems are, on the whole, those that are written in
blank verse; and these, though not prosaic, remind one that prose was her
true medium of expression.  But some of the rhymed poems have
considerable merit.  These may serve as examples of Mrs. Craik's style:

   A SKETCH

   Dost thou thus love me, O thou all beloved,
   In whose large store the very meanest coin
   Would out-buy my whole wealth?  Yet here thou comest
   Like a kind heiress from her purple and down
   Uprising, who for pity cannot sleep,
   But goes forth to the stranger at her gate--
   The beggared stranger at her beauteous gate--
   And clothes and feeds; scarce blest till she has blest.

   But dost thou love me, O thou pure of heart,
   Whose very looks are prayers?  What couldst thou see
   In this forsaken pool by the yew-wood's side,
   To sit down at its bank, and dip thy hand,
   Saying, 'It is so clear!'--and lo! ere long,
   Its blackness caught the shimmer of thy wings,
   Its slimes slid downward from thy stainless palm,
   Its depths grew still, that there thy form might rise.

   THE NOVICE

   It is near morning.  Ere the next night fall
      I shall be made the bride of heaven.  Then home
      To my still marriage-chamber I shall come,
   And spouseless, childless, watch the slow years crawl.

   These lips will never meet a softer touch
      Than the stone crucifix I kiss; no child
      Will clasp this neck.  Ah, virgin-mother mild,
   Thy painted bliss will mock me overmuch.

   This is the last time I shall twist the hair
      My mother's hand wreathed, till in dust she lay:
      The name, her name given on my baptism day,
   This is the last time I shall ever bear.

   O weary world, O heavy life, farewell!
      Like a tired child that creeps into the dark
      To sob itself asleep, where none will mark,--
   So creep I to my silent convent cell.

   Friends, lovers whom I loved not, kindly hearts
      Who grieve that I should enter this still door,
      Grieve not.  Closing behind me evermore,
   Me from all anguish, as all joy, it parts.

The volume chronicles the moods of a sweet and thoughtful nature, and
though many things in it may seem somewhat old-fashioned, it is still
very pleasant to read, and has a faint perfume of withered rose-leaves
about it.

(1) A Book of Verses.  By William Ernest Henley.  (David Nutt.)

(2) Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy.  By William Sharp.  (Walter
Scott.)

(3) Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play.  By A. Mary F. Robinson.  (Fisher
Unwin.)

(4) Poems.  By the Author of John Halifax, Gentleman.  (Macmillan and
Co.)




SIR EDWIN ARNOLD'S LAST VOLUME


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 11, 1888.)

Writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets.  They may crowd their
page with gorgeous epithet and resplendent phrase, may pile Pelions of
adjectives upon Ossas of descriptions, may abandon themselves to highly
coloured diction and rich luxuriance of imagery, but if their verse lacks
the true rhythmical life of verse, if their method is devoid of the self-
restraint of the real artist, all their efforts are of very little avail.
'Asiatic' prose is possibly useful for journalistic purposes, but
'Asiatic' poetry is not to be encouraged.  Indeed, poetry may be said to
need far more self-restraint than prose.  Its conditions are more
exquisite.  It produces its effects by more subtle means.  It must not be
allowed to degenerate into mere rhetoric or mere eloquence.  It is, in
one sense, the most self-conscious of all the arts, as it is never a
means to an end but always an end in itself.  Sir Edwin Arnold has a very
picturesque or, perhaps we should say, a very pictorial style.  He knows
India better than any living Englishman knows it, and Hindoostanee better
than any English writer should know it.  If his descriptions lack
distinction, they have at least the merit of being true, and when he does
not interlard his pages with an interminable and intolerable series of
foreign words he is pleasant enough.  But he is not a poet.  He is simply
a poetical writer--that is all.

However, poetical writers have their uses, and there is a good deal in
Sir Edwin Arnold's last volume that will repay perusal.  The scene of the
story is placed in a mosque attached to the monument of the Taj-Mahal,
and a group composed of a learned Mirza, two singing girls with their
attendant, and an Englishman, is supposed to pass the night there reading
the chapter of Sa'di upon 'Love,' and conversing upon that theme with
accompaniments of music and dancing.  The Englishman is, of course, Sir
Edwin Arnold himself:

         lover of India,
   Too much her lover! for his heart lived there
   How far soever wandered thence his feet.

Lady Dufferin appears as

   Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen's Vice-queen!

which is really one of the most dreadful blank-verse lines that we have
come across for some time past.  M. Renan is 'a priest of Frangestan,'
who writes in 'glittering French'; Lord Tennyson is

         One we honour for his songs--
   Greater than Sa'di's self--

and the Darwinians appear as the 'Mollahs of the West,' who

         hold Adam's sons
   Sprung of the sea-slug.

All this is excellent fooling in its way, a kind of play-acting in
literature; but the best parts of the book are the descriptions of the
Taj itself, which are extremely elaborate, and the various translations
from Sa'di with which the volume is interspersed.  The great monument
Shah Jahan built for Arjamand is

   Instinct with loveliness--not masonry!
   Not architecture! as all others are,
   But the proud passion of an Emperor's love
   Wrought into living stone, which gleams and soars
   With body of beauty shrining soul and thought,
   Insomuch that it haps as when some face
   Divinely fair unveils before our eyes--
   Some woman beautiful unspeakably--
   And the blood quickens, and the spirit leaps,
   And will to worship bends the half-yielded knees,
   Which breath forgets to breathe: so is the Taj;
   You see it with the heart, before the eyes
   Have scope to gaze.  All white! snow white! cloud white!

We cannot say much in praise of the sixth line:

   Insomuch that it haps as when some face:

it is curiously awkward and unmusical.  But this passage from Sa'di is
remarkable:

   When Earth, bewildered, shook in earthquake-throes,
   With mountain-roots He bound her borders close;
      Turkis and ruby in her rocks He stored,
   And on her green branch hung His crimson rose.

   He shapes dull seed to fair imaginings;
   Who paints with moisture as He painteth things?
      Look! from the cloud He sheds one drop on ocean,
   As from the Father's loins one drop He brings;--

   And out of that He forms a peerless pearl,
   And, out of this, a cypress boy or girl;
      Utterly wotting all their innermosts,
   For all to Him is visible!  Uncurl

   Your cold coils, Snakes!  Creep forth, ye thrifty Ants!
   Handless and strengthless He provides your wants
      Who from the 'Is not' planned the 'Is to be,'
   And Life in non-existent void implants.

Sir Edwin Arnold suffers, of course, from the inevitable comparison that
one cannot help making between his work and the work of Edward
Fitzgerald, and certainly Fitzgerald could never have written such a line
as 'utterly wotting all their innermosts,' but it is interesting to read
almost any translation of those wonderful Oriental poets with their
strange blending of philosophy and sensuousness, of simple parable or
fable and obscure mystic utterance.  What we regret most in Sir Edwin
Arnold's book is his habit of writing in what really amounts to a sort of
'pigeon English.'  When we are told that 'Lady Duffreen, the mighty
Queen's Vice-queen,' paces among the charpoys of the ward 'no whit afraid
of sitla, or of tap'; when the Mirza explains--

         ag lejao!
   To light the kallians for the Saheb and me,

and the attendant obeys with 'Achcha!  Achcha!' when we are invited to
listen to 'the Vina and the drum' and told about ekkas, Byragis, hamals
and Tamboora, all that we can say is that to such ghazals we are not
prepared to say either Shamash or Afrin.  In English poetry we do not
want

      chatkis for the toes,
   Jasams for elbow-bands, and gote and har,
   Bala and mala.

This is not local colour; it is a sort of local discoloration.  It does
not add anything to the vividness of the scene.  It does not bring the
Orient more clearly before us.  It is simply an inconvenience to the
reader and a mistake on the part of the writer.  It may be difficult for
a poet to find English synonyms for Asiatic expressions, but even if it
were impossible it is none the less a poet's duty to find them.  We are
sorry that a scholar and a man of culture like Sir Edwin Arnold should
have been guilty of what is really an act of treason against our
literature.  But for this error, his book, though not in any sense a work
of genius or even of high artistic merit, would still have been of some
enduring value.  As it is, Sir Edwin Arnold has translated Sa'di and some
one must translate Sir Edwin Arnold.

With Sa'di in the Garden; or The Book of Love.  By Sir Edwin Arnold,
M.A., K.C.I.E., Author of The Light of Asia, etc.  (Trubner and Co.)




AUSTRALIAN POETS


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 14, 1888.)

Mr. Sladen dedicates his anthology (or, perhaps, we should say his
herbarium) of Australian song to Mr. Edmund Gosse, 'whose exquisite
critical faculty is,' he tells us, 'as conspicuous in his poems as in his
lectures on poetry.'  After so graceful a compliment Mr. Gosse must
certainly deliver a series of discourses upon Antipodean art before the
Cambridge undergraduates, who will, no doubt, be very much interested on
hearing about Gordon, Kendall and Domett, to say nothing of the
extraordinary collection of mediocrities whom Mr. Sladen has somewhat
ruthlessly dragged from their modest and well-merited obscurity.  Gordon,
however, is very badly represented in Mr. Sladen's book, the only three
specimens of his work that are included being an unrevised fragment, his
Valedictory Poem and An Exile's Farewell.  The latter is, of course,
touching, but then the commonplace always touches, and it is a great pity
that Mr. Sladen was unable to come to any financial arrangement with the
holders of Gordon's copyright.  The loss to the volume that now lies
before us is quite irreparable.  Through Gordon Australia found her first
fine utterance in song.

Still, there are some other singers here well worth studying, and it is
interesting to read about poets who lie under the shadow of the gum-tree,
gather wattle blossoms and buddawong and sarsaparilla for their loves,
and wander through the glades of Mount Baw-baw listening to the careless
raptures of the mopoke.  To them November is

      The wonder with the golden wings,
   Who lays one hand in Summer's, one in Spring's:

January is full of 'breaths of myrrh, and subtle hints of rose-lands';

   She is the warm, live month of lustre--she
   Makes glad the land and lulls the strong sad sea;

while February is 'the true Demeter,' and

   With rich warm vine-blood splashed from heel to knee,
   Comes radiant through the yellow woodlands.

Each month, as it passes, calls for new praise and for music different
from our own.  July is a 'lady, born in wind and rain'; in August

   Across the range, by every scarred black fell,
   Strong Winter blows his horn of wild farewell;

while October is 'the queen of all the year,' the 'lady of the yellow
hair,' who strays 'with blossom-trammelled feet' across the
'haughty-featured hills,' and brings the Spring with her.  We must
certainly try to accustom ourselves to the mopoke and the sarsaparilla
plant, and to make the gum-tree and the buddawong as dear to us as the
olives and the narcissi of white Colonus.  After all, the Muses are great
travellers, and the same foot that stirred the Cumnor cowslips may some
day brush the fallen gold of the wattle blossoms and tread delicately
over the tawny bush-grass.

Mr. Sladen has, of course, a great belief in the possibilities of
Australian poetry.  There are in Australia, he tells us, far more writers
capable of producing good work than has been assumed.  It is only
natural, he adds, that this should be so, 'for Australia has one of those
delightful climates conducive to rest in the open air.  The middle of the
day is so hot that it is really more healthful to lounge about than to
take stronger exercise.'  Well, lounging in the open air is not a bad
school for poets, but it largely depends on the lounger.  What strikes
one on reading over Mr. Sladen's collection is the depressing
provinciality of mood and manner in almost every writer.  Page follows
page, and we find nothing but echoes without music, reflections without
beauty, second-rate magazine verses and third-rate verses for Colonial
newspapers.  Poe seems to have had some influence--at least, there are
several parodies of his method--and one or two writers have read Mr.
Swinburne; but, on the whole, we have artless Nature in her most
irritating form.  Of course Australia is young, younger even than America
whose youth is now one of her oldest and most hallowed traditions, but
the entire want of originality of treatment is curious.  And yet not so
curious, perhaps, after all.  Youth is rarely original.

There are, however, some exceptions.  Henry Clarence Kendall had a true
poetic gift.  The series of poems on the Austral months, from which we
have already quoted, is full of beautiful things; Landor's Rose Aylmer is
a classic in its way, but Kendall's Rose Lorraine is in parts not
unworthy to be mentioned after it; and the poem entitled Beyond Kerguelen
has a marvellous music about it, a wonderful rhythm of words and a real
richness of utterance.  Some of the lines are strangely powerful, and,
indeed, in spite of its exaggerated alliteration, or perhaps in
consequence of it, the whole poem is a most remarkable work of art.

   Down in the South, by the waste without sail on it--
      Far from the zone of the blossom and tree--
   Lieth, with winter and whirlwind and wail on it,
      Ghost of a land by the ghost of a sea.
   Weird is the mist from the summit to base of it;
      Sun of its heaven is wizened and grey;
   Phantom of light is the light on the face of it--
      Never is night on it, never is day!
   Here is the shore without flower or bird on it;
      Here is no litany sweet of the springs--
   Only the haughty, harsh thunder is heard on it,
      Only the storm, with a roar in its wings!

   Back in the dawn of this beautiful sphere, on it--
      Land of the dolorous, desolate face--
   Beamed the blue day; and the beautiful year on it
      Fostered the leaf and the blossom of grace.
   Grand were the lights of its midsummer noon on it--
      Mornings of majesty shone on its seas;
   Glitter of star and the glory of moon on it
      Fell, in the march of the musical breeze.
   Valleys and hills, with the whisper of wing in them,
      Dells of the daffodil--spaces impearled,
   Flowered and flashed with the splendour of spring in them,
      Back in the morn of this wonderful world.

Mr. Sladen speaks of Alfred Domett as 'the author of one of the great
poems of a century in which Shelley and Keats, Byron and Scott,
Wordsworth and Tennyson have all flourished,' but the extracts he gives
from Ranolf and Amohia hardly substantiate this claim, although the song
of the Tree-God in the fourth book is clever but exasperating.

A Midsummer's Noon, by Charles Harpur, 'the grey forefather of Australian
poetry,' is pretty and graceful, and Thomas Henry's Wood-Notes and Miss
Veel's Saturday Night are worth reading; but, on the whole, the
Australian poets are extremely dull and prosaic.  There seem to be no
sirens in the New World.  As for Mr. Sladen himself, he has done his work
very conscientiously.  Indeed, in one instance he almost re-writes an
entire poem in consequence of the manuscript having reached him in a
mutilated condition.

   A pleasant land is the land of dreams
      _At the back of the shining air_!
   It hath _sunnier_ skies and _sheenier_ streams,
      And gardens _than Earth's more_ fair,

is the first verse of this lucubration, and Mr. Sladen informs us with
justifiable pride that the parts printed in italics are from his own pen!
This is certainly editing with a vengeance, and we cannot help saying
that it reflects more credit on Mr. Sladen's good nature than on his
critical or his poetical powers.  The appearance, also, in a volume of
'poems produced in Australia,' of selections from Horne's Orion cannot be
defended, especially as we are given no specimen of the poetry Horne
wrote during the time that he actually was in Australia, where he held
the office of 'Warden of the Blue Mountains'--a position which, as far as
the title goes, is the loveliest ever given to any poet, and would have
suited Wordsworth admirably: Wordsworth, that is to say, at his best, for
he not infrequently wrote like the Distributor of Stamps.  However, Mr.
Sladen has shown great energy in the compilation of this bulky volume
which, though it does not contain much that is of any artistic value, has
a certain historical interest, especially for those who care to study the
conditions of intellectual life in the colonies of a great empire.  The
biographical notices of the enormous crowd of verse-makers which is
included in this volume are chiefly from the pen of Mr. Patchett Martin.
Some of them are not very satisfactory.  'Formerly of West Australia, now
residing at Boston, U.S.  Has published several volumes of poetry,' is a
ludicrously inadequate account of such a man as John Boyle O'Reilly,
while in 'poet, essayist, critic, and journalist, one of the most
prominent figures in literary London,' few will recognise the industrious
Mr. William Sharp.

Still, on the whole, we should be grateful for a volume that has given us
specimens of Kendall's work, and perhaps Mr. Sladen will some day produce
an anthology of Australian poetry, not a herbarium of Australian verse.
His present book has many good qualities, but it is almost unreadable.

Australian Poets, 1788-1888.  Edited by Douglas B. W. Sladen, B.A.  Oxon.
(Griffith, Farran and Co.)




SOME LITERARY NOTES--I


(Woman's World, January 1889.)

In a recent article on English Poetesses, {374} I ventured to suggest
that our women of letters should turn their attention somewhat more to
prose and somewhat less to poetry.  Women seem to me to possess just what
our literature wants--a light touch, a delicate hand, a graceful mode of
treatment, and an unstudied felicity of phrase.  We want some one who
will do for our prose what Madame de Sevigne did for the prose of France.
George Eliot's style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Bronte's too
exaggerated.  However, one must not forget that amongst the women of
England there have been some charming letter-writers, and certainly no
book can be more delightful reading than Mrs. Ross's Three Generations of
English Women, which has recently appeared.  The three Englishwomen whose
memoirs and correspondence Mrs. Ross has so admirably edited are Mrs.
John Taylor, Mrs. Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon, all of them
remarkable personalities, and two of them women of brilliant wit and
European reputation.  Mrs. Taylor belonged to that great Norwich family
about whom the Duke of Sussex remarked that they reversed the ordinary
saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man, and was for many years
one of the most distinguished figures in the famous society of her native
town.  Her only daughter married John Austin, the great authority on
jurisprudence, and her salon in Paris was the centre of the intellect and
culture of her day.  Lucie Duff Gordon, the only child of John and Sarah
Austin, inherited the talents of her parents.  A beauty, a femme
d'esprit, a traveller, and clever writer, she charmed and fascinated her
age, and her premature death in Egypt was really a loss to our
literature.  It is to her daughter that we owe this delightful volume of
memoirs.

First we are introduced to Mrs. Ross's great-grandmother, Mrs. Taylor,
who 'was called, by her intimate friends, "Madame Roland of Norwich,"
from her likeness to the portraits of the handsome and unfortunate
Frenchwoman.'  We hear of her darning her boy's grey worsted stockings
while holding her own with Southey and Brougham, and dancing round the
Tree of Liberty with Dr. Parr when the news of the fall of the Bastille
was first known.  Amongst her friends were Sir James Mackintosh, the most
popular man of the day, 'to whom Madame de Stael wrote, "Il n'y a pas de
societe sans vous."  "C'est tres ennuyeux de diner sans vous; la societe
ne va pas quand vous n'etes pas la";' Sir James Smith, the botanist;
Crabb Robinson; the Gurneys; Mrs. Barbauld; Dr. Alderson and his charming
daughter, Amelia Opie; and many other well-known people.  Her letters are
extremely sensible and thoughtful.  'Nothing at present,' she says in one
of them, 'suits my taste so well as Susan's Latin lessons, and her
philosophical old master . . . When we get to Cicero's discussions on the
nature of the soul, or Virgil's fine descriptions, my mind is filled up.
Life is either a dull round of eating, drinking, and sleeping, or a spark
of ethereal fire just kindled. . . .  The character of girls must depend
upon their reading as much as upon the company they keep.  Besides the
intrinsic pleasure to be derived from solid knowledge, a woman ought to
consider it as her best resource against poverty.'  This is a somewhat
caustic aphorism: 'A romantic woman is a troublesome friend, as she
expects you to be as imprudent as herself, and is mortified at what she
calls coldness and insensibility.'  And this is admirable: 'The art of
life is not to estrange oneself from society, and yet not to pay too dear
for it.'  This, too, is good: 'Vanity, like curiosity, is wanted as a
stimulus to exertion; indolence would certainly get the better of us if
it were not for these two powerful principles'; and there is a keen touch
of humour in the following: 'Nothing is so gratifying as the idea that
virtue and philanthropy are becoming fashionable.'  Dr. James Martineau,
in a letter to Mrs. Ross, gives us a pleasant picture of the old lady
returning from market 'weighted by her huge basket, with the shank of a
leg of mutton thrust out to betray its contents,' and talking divinely
about philosophy, poets, politics, and every intellectual topic of the
day.  She was a woman of admirable good sense, a type of Roman matron,
and quite as careful as were the Roman matrons to keep up the purity of
her native tongue.

Mrs. Taylor, however, was more or less limited to Norwich.  Mrs. Austin
was for the world.  In London, Paris, and Germany, she ruled and
dominated society, loved by every one who knew her.  'She is "My best and
brightest" to Lord Jeffrey; "Dear, fair and wise" to Sydney Smith; "My
great ally" to Sir James Stephen; "Sunlight through waste weltering
chaos" to Thomas Carlyle (while he needed her aid); "La petite mere du
genre humain" to Michael Chevalier; "Liebes Mutterlein" to John Stuart
Mill; and "My own Professorin" to Charles Buller, to whom she taught
German, as well as to the sons of Mr. James Mill.'  Jeremy Bentham, when
on his deathbed, gave her a ring with his portrait and some of his hair
let in behind.  'There, my dear,' he said, 'it is the only ring I ever
gave a woman.'  She corresponded with Guizot, Barthelemy de St. Hilaire,
the Grotes, Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, Nassau Senior, the
Duchesse d'Orleans, Victor Cousin, and many other distinguished people.
Her translation of Ranke's History of the Popes is admirable; indeed, all
her literary work was thoroughly well done, and her edition of her
husband's Province of Jurisprudence deserves the very highest praise.  Two
people more unlike than herself and her husband it would have been
difficult to find.  He was habitually grave and despondent; she was
brilliantly handsome, fond of society, in which she shone, and 'with an
almost superabundance of energy and animal spirits,' Mrs. Ross tells us.
She married him because she thought him perfect, but he never produced
the work of which he was worthy, and of which she knew him to be worthy.
Her estimate of him in the preface to the Jurisprudence is wonderfully
striking and simple.  'He was never sanguine.  He was intolerant of any
imperfection.  He was always under the control of severe love of truth.
He lived and died a poor man.'  She was terribly disappointed in him, but
she loved him.  Some years after his death, she wrote to M. Guizot:

   In the intervals of my study of his works I read his letters to
   me--_forty-five years of love-letters_, the last as tender and
   passionate as the first.  And how full of noble sentiments!  The
   midday of our lives was clouded and stormy, full of cares and
   disappointments; but the sunset was bright and serene--as bright as
   the morning, and _more_ serene.  Now it is night with me, and must
   remain so till the dawn of another day.  I am always alone--that is,
   _I live with him_.

The most interesting letters in the book are certainly those to M.
Guizot, with whom she maintained the closest intellectual friendship; but
there is hardly one of them that does not contain something clever, or
thoughtful, or witty, while those addressed to her, in turn, are very
interesting.  Carlyle writes her letters full of lamentations, the wail
of a Titan in pain, superbly exaggerated for literary effect.

   Literature, one's sole craft and staff of life, lies broken in
   abeyance; what room for music amid the braying of innumerable
   jackasses, the howling of innumerable hyaenas whetting the tooth to
   eat them up?  Alas for it! it is a sick disjointed time; neither shall
   we ever mend it; at best let us hope to mend ourselves.  I declare I
   sometimes think of throwing down the Pen altogether as a worthless
   weapon; and leading out a colony of these poor starving Drudges to the
   waste places of their old Mother Earth, when for sweat of their brow
   bread _will_ rise for them; it were perhaps the worthiest service that
   at this moment could be rendered our old world to throw open for it
   the doors of the New.  Thither must they come at last, 'bursts of
   eloquence' will do nothing; men are starving and will try many things
   before they die.  But poor I, ach Gott!  I am no Hengist or Alaric;
   only a writer of Articles in bad prose; stick to thy last, O Tutor;
   the Pen is not worthless, it is omnipotent to those who have Faith.

Henri Beyle (Stendhal), the great, I am often tempted to think the
greatest of French novelists, writes her a charming letter about nuances.
'It seems to me,' he says, 'that except when they read Shakespeare,
Byron, or Sterne, no Englishman understands "nuances"; we adore them.  A
fool says to a woman, "I love you"; the words mean nothing, he might as
well say "Olli Batachor"; it is the nuance which gives force to the
meaning.'  In 1839 Mrs. Austin writes to Victor Cousin: 'I have seen
young Gladstone, a distinguished Tory who wants to re-establish education
based on the Church in quite a Catholic form'; and we find her
corresponding with Mr. Gladstone on the subject of education.  'If you
are strong enough to provide motives and checks,' she says to him, 'you
may do two blessed acts--reform your clergy and teach your people.  As it
is, how few of them conceive what it is to teach a people'!  Mr.
Gladstone replies at great length, and in many letters, from which we may
quote this passage:

   You are for pressing and urging the people to their profit against
   their inclination: so am I.  You set little value upon all merely
   technical instruction, upon all that fails to touch the inner nature
   of man: so do I.  And here I find ground of union broad and deep-laid
   . . .

   I more than doubt whether your idea, namely that of raising man to
   social sufficiency and morality, can be accomplished, except through
   the ancient religion of Christ; . . . or whether, the principles of
   eclecticism are legitimately applicable to the Gospel; or whether, if
   we find ourselves in a state of incapacity to work through the Church,
   we can remedy the defect by the adoption of principles contrary to
   hers . . .

   But indeed I am most unfit to pursue the subject; private
   circumstances of no common interest are upon me, as I have become very
   recently engaged to Miss Glynne, and I hope your recollections will
   enable you in some degree to excuse me.

Lord Jeffrey has a very curious and suggestive letter on popular
education, in which he denies, or at least doubts, the effect of this
education on morals.  He, however, supports it on the ground 'that it
will increase the enjoyment of individuals,' which is certainly a very
sensible claim.  Humboldt writes to her about an old Indian language
which was preserved by a parrot, the tribe who spoke it having been
exterminated, and about 'young Darwin,' who had just published his first
book.  Here are some extracts from her own letters:

   I heard from Lord Lansdowne two or three days ago. . . .  I think he
   is ce que nous avons de mieux.  He wants only the energy that great
   ambition gives.  He says, 'We shall have a parliament of railway
   kings' . . . what can be worse than that?--The deification of money by
   a whole people.  As Lord Brougham says, we have no right to give
   ourselves pharisaical airs.  I must give you a story sent to me.  Mrs.
   Hudson, the railway queen, was shown a bust of Marcus Aurelius at Lord
   Westminster's, on which she said, 'I suppose that is not the present
   Marquis.'  To gouter this, you must know that the extreme vulgar
   (hackney coachmen, etc.) in England pronounce 'marquis' very like
   'Marcus.'

   Dec, 11th.--Went to Savigny's.  Nobody was there but W. Grimm and his
   wife and a few men.  Grimm told me he had received two volumes of
   Norwegian fairy-tales, and that they were delightful.  Talking of
   them, I said, 'Your children appear to be the happiest in the world;
   they live in the midst of fairytales.'  'Ah,' said he, 'I must tell
   you about that.  When we were at Gottingen, somebody spoke to my
   little son about his father's Mahrchen.  He had read them, but never
   thought of their being mine.  He came running to me, and said with an
   offended air, "Father, they say you wrote those fairy-tales; surely
   you never invented such silly rubbish?"  He thought it below my
   dignity.'

   Savigny told a Volksmahrchen too:

   'St. Anselm was grown old and infirm, and lay on the ground among
   thorns and thistles.  Der liebe Gott said to him, "You are very badly
   lodged there; why don't you build yourself a house?"  "Before I take
   the trouble," said Anselm, "I should like to know how long I have to
   live."  "About thirty years," said Der liebe Gott.  "Oh, for so short
   a time," replied he, "it's not worth while," and turned himself round
   among the thistles.'

   Dr. Franck told me a story of which I had never heard before.  Voltaire
   had for some reason or other taken a grudge against the prophet
   Habakkuk, and affected to find in him things he never wrote.  Somebody
   took the Bible and began to demonstrate to him that he was mistaken.
   'C'est egal,' he said, impatiently, 'Habakkuk etait capable de tout!'

   Oct. 30, 1853.

   I am not in love with the Richtung (tendency) of our modern novelists.
   There is abundance of talent; but writing a pretty, graceful,
   touching, yet pleasing story is the last thing our writers nowadays
   think of.  Their novels are party pamphlets on political or social
   questions, like Sybil, or Alton Locke, or Mary Barton, or Uncle Tom;
   or they are the most minute and painful dissections of the least
   agreeable and beautiful parts of our nature, like those of Miss
   Bronte--Jane Eyre and Villette; or they are a kind of martyrology,
   like Mrs. Marsh's Emilia Wyndham, which makes you almost doubt whether
   any torments the heroine would have earned by being naughty could
   exceed those she incurred by her virtue.

   Where, oh! where is the charming, humane, gentle spirit that dictated
   the Vicar of Wakefield--the spirit which Goethe so justly calls
   versohnend (reconciling), with all the weaknesses and woes of
   humanity? . . .  Have you read Thackeray's Esmond?  It is a curious
   and very successful attempt to imitate the style of our old novelists.
   . . .  Which of Mrs. Gore's novels are translated?  They are very
   clever, lively, worldly, bitter, disagreeable, and entertaining. . . .
   Miss Austen's--are they translated?  They are not new, and are Dutch
   paintings of every-day people--very clever, very true, very
   _unaesthetic_, but amusing.  I have not seen Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell.  I
   hear it much admired--and blamed.  It is one of the many proofs of the
   desire women now have to friser questionable topics, and to poser
   insoluble moral problems.  George Sand has turned their heads in that
   direction.  I think a few _broad_ scenes or hearty jokes a la Fielding
   were very harmless in comparison.  They _confounded_ nothing. . . .

   The Heir of Redcliffe I have not read. . . .  I am not worthy of
   superhuman flights of virtue--in a novel.  I want to see how people
   act and suffer who are as good-for-nothing as I am myself.  Then I
   have the sinful pretension to be amused, whereas all our novelists
   want to reform us, and to show us what a hideous place this world is:
   Ma foi, je ne le sais que trap, without their help.

   The Head of the Family has some merits . . . But there is too much
   affliction and misery and frenzy.  The heroine is one of those
   creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird tied
   to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be 'shyed' at
   (i.e. pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the end of
   all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is never the
   worse for all the blows it has had--nay, the better--and that now,
   with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body, it is going
   to be quite happy.  No, fair ladies, you know that it is not
   so--_resigned_, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness out
   of such wrecks.

In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory.  Radicalism she
detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as
moribund.  'The Radical party is evidently effete,' she writes to M.
Victor Cousin; the probable 'leader of the Tory party' is Mr. Gladstone.
'The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short,
governed,' she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says
that the state of things in France fills 'me with the deepest anxiety on
one point,--the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our
salvation as a nation turn.  Are our higher classes able to keep the lead
of the rest?  If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear
Charles Buller--_our_ turn must come.  Now Cambridge and Oxford must
really look to this.'  The belief in the power of the Universities to
stem the current of democracy is charming.  She grew to regard Carlyle as
'one of the dissolvents of the age--as mischievous as his extravagances
will let him be'; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as 'pernicious'; and
talks of John Stuart Mill as a 'demagogue.'  She was no doctrinaire.  'One
ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed.  It is no use to
give the meat before you give the hunger.'  She was delighted at a letter
of St. Hilaire's, in which he said, 'We have a system and no results; you
have results and no system.'  Yet she had a deep sympathy with the wants
of the people.  She was horrified at something Babbage told her of the
population of some of the manufacturing towns who are _worked out_ before
they attain to thirty years of age.  'But I am persuaded that the remedy
will not, cannot come from the people,' she adds.  Many of her letters
are concerned with the question of the higher education of women.  She
discusses Buckle's lecture on 'The Influence of Women upon the Progress
of Knowledge,' admits to M. Guizot that women's intellectual life is
largely coloured by the emotions, but adds: 'One is not precisely a fool
because one's opinions are greatly influenced by one's affections.  The
opinions of men are often influenced by worse things.'  Dr. Whewell
consults her about lecturing women on Plato, being slightly afraid lest
people should think it ridiculous; Comte writes her elaborate letters on
the relation of women to progress; and Mr. Gladstone promises that Mrs.
Gladstone will carry out at Hawarden the suggestions contained in one of
her pamphlets.  She was always very practical, and never lost her
admiration for plain sewing.

All through the book we come across interesting and amusing things.  She
gets St. Hilaire to order a large, sensible bonnet for her in Paris,
which was at once christened the 'Aristotelian,' and was supposed to be
the only useful bonnet in England.  Grote has to leave Paris after the
coup d'etat, he tells her, because he cannot bear to see the
establishment of a Greek tyrant.  Alfred de Vigny, Macaulay, John
Stirling, Southey, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hallam, and Jean Jacques Ampere
all contribute to these pleasant pages.  She seems to have inspired the
warmest feelings of friendship in those who knew her.  Guizot writes to
her: 'Madame de Stael used to say that the best thing in the world was a
serious Frenchman.  I turn the compliment, and say that the best thing in
the world is an affectionate Englishman.  How much more an Englishwoman!
Given equal qualities, a woman is always more charming than a man.'

Lucie Austin, afterwards Lady Duff Gordon, was born in 1821.  Her chief
playfellow was John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham's garden was her
playground.  She was a lovely, romantic child, who was always wanting the
flowers to talk to her, and used to invent the most wonderful stories
about animals, of whom she was passionately fond.  In 1834 Mrs. Austin
decided on leaving England, and Sydney Smith wrote his immortal letter to
the little girl:

   Lucie, Lucie, my dear child, don't tear your frock: tearing frocks is
   not of itself a proof of genius.  But write as your mother writes, act
   as your mother acts: be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest,
   and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little import.  And
   Lucie, dear child, mind your arithmetic.  You know in the first sum of
   yours I ever saw there was a mistake.  You had carried two (as a cab
   is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucie, to have carried but
   one.  Is this a trifle?  What would life be without arithmetic but a
   scene of horrors?  You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts,
   peopled by men who have never understood arithmetic.  By the time you
   return, I shall probably have received my first paralytic stroke, and
   shall have lost all recollection of you.  Therefore I now give you my
   parting advice--don't marry anybody who has not a tolerable
   understanding and a thousand a year.  And God bless you, dear child.

At Boulogne she sat next Heine at table d'hote.  'He heard me speak
German to my mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then said, "When
you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen
Heinrich Heine."  I replied, "And who is Heinrich Heine?"  He laughed
heartily and took no offence at my ignorance; and we used to lounge on
the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish,
mermaids, water-sprites and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle
were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very
often pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings
from the "Nord See."  He was . . . so kind to me and so sarcastic to
every one else.'  Twenty years afterwards the little girl whose 'braune
Augen' Heine had celebrated in his charming poem Wenn ich an deinem
Hause, used to go and see the dying poet in Paris.  'It does one good,'
he said to her, 'to see a woman who does not carry about a broken heart,
to be mended by all sorts of men, like the women here, who do not see
that a total want of heart is their real failing.'  On another occasion
he said to her: 'I have now made peace with the whole world, and at last
also with God, who sends thee to me as a beautiful angel of death: I
shall certainly soon die.'  Lady Duff Gordon said to him: 'Poor Poet, do
you still retain such splendid illusions, that you transform a travelling
Englishwoman into Azrael?  That used not to be the case, for you always
disliked us.'  He answered: 'Yes, I do not know what possessed me to
dislike the English, . . . it really was only petulance; I never hated
them, indeed, I never knew them.  I was only once in England, but knew no
one, and found London very dreary, and the people and the streets odious.
But England has revenged herself well; she has sent me most excellent
friends--thyself and Milnes, that good Milnes.'

There are delightful letters from Dicky Doyle here, with the most amusing
drawings, one of the present Sir Robert Peel as he made his maiden speech
in the House being excellent; and the various descriptions of Hassan's
performances are extremely amusing.  Hassan was a black boy, who had been
turned away by his master because he was going blind, and was found by
Lady Duff Gordon one night sitting on her doorstep.  She took care of
him, and had him cured, and he seems to have been a constant source of
delight to every one.  On one occasion, 'when Prince Louis Napoleon (the
late Emperor of the French) came in unexpectedly, he gravely said:
"Please, my Lady, I ran out and bought twopenny worth of sprats for the
Prince, and for the honour of the house."'  Here is an amusing letter
from Mrs. Norton:

   MY DEAR LUCIE,--We have never thanked you for the red Pots, which no
   early Christian should be without, and which add that finishing stroke
   to the splendour of our demesne, which was supposed to depend on a
   roc's egg, in less intelligent times.  We have now a warm Pompeian
   appearance, and the constant contemplation of these classical objects
   favours the beauty of the facial line; for what can be deduced from
   the great fact, apparent in all the states of antiquity, that
   _straight noses_ were the ancient custom, but the logical assumption
   that the constant habit of turning up the nose at unsightly
   objects--such as the National Gallery and other offensive and
   obtrusive things--has produced the modern divergence from the true and
   proper line of profile?  I rejoice to think that we ourselves are
   exempt.  I attribute this to our love of Pompeian Pots (on account of
   the beauty and distinction of this Pot's shape I spell it with a big
   P), which has kept us straight in a world of crookedness.  The pursuit
   of profiles under difficulties--how much more rare than a pursuit of
   knowledge!  Talk of setting good examples before our children!  Bah!
   let us set good Pompeian Pots before our children, and when they grow
   up they will not depart from them.

Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from the Cape, and her brilliant translation
of The Amber Witch, are, of course, well known.  The latter book was,
with Lady Wilde's translation of Sidonia the Sorceress, my favourite
romantic reading when a boy.  Her letters from Egypt are wonderfully
vivid and picturesque.  Here is an interesting bit of art criticism:

   Sheykh Yoosuf laughed so heartily over a print in an illustrated paper
   from a picture of Hilton's of Rebekah at the well, with the old
   'wekeel' of 'Sidi Ibraheem' (Abraham's chief servant) _kneeling_
   before the girl he was sent to fetch, like an old fool without his
   turban, and Rebekah and the other girls in queer fancy dresses, and
   the camels with snouts like pigs.  'If the painter could not go into
   "Es Sham" to see how the Arab really look,' said Sheykh Yoosuf, 'why
   did he not paint a well in England, with girls like English
   peasants--at least it would have looked natural to English people? and
   the wekeel would not seem so like a madman if he had taken off a hat!'
   I cordially agree with Yoosuf's art criticism.  _Fancy_ pictures of
   Eastern things are hopelessly absurd.

Mrs. Ross has certainly produced a most fascinating volume, and her book
is one of the books of the season.  It is edited with tact and judgment.

* * * * *

Caroline, by Lady Lindsay, is certainly Lady Lindsay's best work.  It is
written in a very clever modern style, and is as full of esprit and wit
as it is of subtle psychological insight.  Caroline is an heiress, who,
coming downstairs at a Continental hotel, falls into the arms of a
charming, penniless young man.  The hero of the novel is the young man's
friend, Lord Lexamont, who makes the 'great renunciation,' and succeeds
in being fine without being priggish, and Quixotic without being
ridiculous.  Miss Ffoulkes, the elderly spinster, is a capital character,
and, indeed, the whole book is cleverly written.  It has also the
advantage of being in only one volume.  The influence of Mudie on
literature, the baneful influence of the circulating library, is clearly
on the wane.  The gain to literature is incalculable.  English novels
were becoming very tedious with their three volumes of padding--at least,
the second volume was always padding--and extremely indigestible.  A
reckless punster once remarked to me, apropos of English novels, that
'the proof of the padding is in the eating,' and certainly English
fiction has been very heavy--heavy with the best intentions.  Lady
Lindsay's book is a sign that better things are in store for us.  She is
brief and bright.

* * * * *

What are the best books to give as Christmas presents to good girls who
are always pretty, or to pretty girls who are occasionally good?  People
are so fond of giving away what they do not want themselves, that charity
is largely on the increase.  But with this kind of charity I have not
much sympathy.  If one gives away a book, it should be a charming book--so
charming, that one regrets having given it, and would not take it back.
Looking over the Christmas books sent to me by various publishers, I find
that these are the best and the most pleasing: Gleanings from the
'Graphic,' by Randolph Caldecott, a most fascinating volume full of
sketches that have real wit and humour of line, and are not simply
dependent on what the French call the legende, the literary explanation;
Meg's Friend, by Alice Corkran, one of our most delicate and graceful
prose-writers in the sphere of fiction, and one whose work has the rare
artistic qualities of refinement and simplicity; Under False Colours, by
Sarah Doudney, an excellent story; The Fisherman's Daughter, by Florence
Montgomery, the author of Misunderstood, a tale with real charm of idea
and treatment; Under a Cloud, by the author of The Atelier du Lys, and
quite worthy of its author; The Third Miss St. Quentin, by Mrs.
Molesworth, and A Christmas Posy from the same fascinating pen, and with
delightful illustrations by Walter Crane.  Miss Rosa Mulholland's
Giannetta and Miss Agnes Giberne's Ralph Hardcastle's Will are also
admirable books for presents, and the bound volume of Atalanta has much
that is delightful both in art and in literature.

The prettiest, indeed the most beautiful, book from an artistic point of
view is undoubtedly Mr. Walter Crane's Flora's Feast.  It is an
imaginative Masque of Flowers, and as lovely in colour as it is exquisite
in design.  It shows us the whole pomp and pageant of the year, the
Snowdrops like white-crested knights, the little naked Crocus kneeling to
catch the sunlight in his golden chalice, the Daffodils blowing their
trumpets like young hunters, the Anemones with their wind-blown raiment,
the green-kirtled Marsh-marigolds, and the 'Lady-smocks all
silver-white,' tripping over the meadows like Arcadian milk-maids.
Buttercups are here, and the white-plumed Thorn in spiky armour, and the
Crown-imperial borne in stately procession, and red-bannered Tulips, and
Hyacinths with their spring bells, and Chaucer's Daisy--

      small and sweet,
   Si douce est la Marguerite.

Gorgeous Peonies, and Columbines 'that drew the car of Venus,' and the
Rose with her lover, and the stately white-vestured Lilies, and wide
staring Ox-eyes, and scarlet Poppies pass before us.  There are Primroses
and Corncockles, Chrysanthemums in robes of rich brocade, Sunflowers and
tall Hollyhocks, and pale Christmas Roses.  The designs for the
Daffodils, the wild Roses, the Convolvulus, and the Hollyhock are
admirable, and would be beautiful in embroidery or in any precious
material.  Indeed, any one who wishes to find beautiful designs cannot do
better than get the book.  It is, in its way, a little masterpiece, and
its grace and fancy, and beauty of line and colour, cannot be
over-estimated.  The Greeks gave human form to wood and stream, and saw
Nature best in Naiad or in Dryad.  Mr. Crane, with something of Gothic
fantasy, has caught the Greek feeling, the love of personification, the
passion for representing things under the conditions of the human form.
The flowers are to him so many knights and ladies, page-boys or shepherd-
boys, divine nymphs or simple girls, and in their fair bodies or fanciful
raiment one can see the flower's very form and absolute essence, so that
one loves their artistic truth no less than their artistic beauty.  This
book contains some of the best work Mr. Crane has ever done.  His art is
never so successful as when it is entirely remote from life.  The
slightest touch of actuality seems to kill it.  It lives, or should live,
in a world of its own fashioning.  It is decorative in its complete
subordination of fact to beauty of effect, in the grandeur of its curves
and lines, in its entirely imaginative treatment.  Almost every page of
this book gives a suggestion for some rich tapestry, some fine screen,
some painted cassone, some carving in wood or ivory.

* * * * *

From Messrs. Hildesheimer and Faulkner I have received a large collection
of Christmas cards and illustrated books.  One of the latter, an edition
de luxe of Sheridan's Here's to the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen, is very
cleverly illustrated by Miss Alice Havers and Mr. Ernest Wilson.  It
seems to me, however, that there is a danger of modern illustration
becoming too pictorial.  What we need is good book-ornament, decorative
ornament that will go with type and printing, and give to each page a
harmony and unity of effect.  Merely dotting a page with reproductions of
water-colour drawings will not do.  It is true that Japanese art, which
is essentially decorative, is pictorial also.  But the Japanese have the
most wonderful delicacy of touch, and with a science so subtle that it
gives the effect of exquisite accident, they can by mere placing make an
undecorated space decorative.  There is also an intimate connection
between their art and their handwriting or printed characters.  They both
go together, and show the same feeling for form and line.  Our aim should
be to discover some mode of illustration that will harmonise with the
shapes of our letters.  At present there is a discord between our
pictorial illustrations and our unpictorial type.  The former are too
essentially imitative in character, and often disturb a page instead of
decorating it.  However, I suppose we must regard most of these Christmas
books merely as books of pictures, with a running accompaniment of
explanatory text.  As the text, as a rule, consists of poetry, this is
putting the poet in a very subordinate position; but the poetry in the
books of this kind is not, as a rule, of a very high order of excellence.

(1) Three Generations of English Women.  Memoirs and Correspondence of
Susannah Taylor, Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon.  By Janet Ross,
Author of Italian Sketches, Land of Manfred, etc.  (Fisher Unwin.)

(2) Caroline.  By Lady Lindsay.  (Bentley and Son.)

(3) Gleanings from the 'Graphic.'  By Randolph Caldecott.  (Routledge and
Sons.)

(4) Meg's Friend.  By Alice Corkran.  (Blackie and Sons.)

(5) Under False Colours.  By Sarah Doudney.  (Blackie and Sons.)

(6) The Fisherman's Daughter.  By Florence Montgomery.  (Hatchards.)

(7) Under a Cloud.  By the Author of The Atelier du Lys.  (Hatchards.)

(8) The Third Miss St. Quentin.  By Mrs. Molesworth.  (Hatchards.)

(9) A Christmas Posy.  By Mrs. Molesworth.  Illustrated by Walter Crane.
(Hatchards.)

(10) Giannetta.  A Girl's Story of Herself.  By Rosa Mulholland.  (Blackie
and Sons.)

(11) Ralph Hardcastle's Will.  By Agnes Giberne.  (Hatchards.)

(12) Flora's Feast.  A Masque of Flowers.  Penned and Pictured by Walter
Crane.  (Cassell and Co.)

(13) Here's to the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen.  By Richard Brinsley
Sheridan.  Illustrated by Alice Havers and Ernest Wilson.  (Hildesheimer
and Faulkner.)




POETRY AND PRISON


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 3, 1889.)

Prison has had an admirable effect on Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as a poet.  The
Love Sonnets of Proteus, in spite of their clever Musset-like modernities
and their swift brilliant wit, were but affected or fantastic at best.
They were simply the records of passing moods and moments, of which some
were sad and others sweet, and not a few shameful.  Their subject was not
of high or serious import.  They contained much that was wilful and weak.
In Vinculis, upon the other hand, is a book that stirs one by its fine
sincerity of purpose, its lofty and impassioned thought, its depth and
ardour of intense feeling.  'Imprisonment,' says Mr. Blunt in his
preface, 'is a reality of discipline most useful to the modern soul,
lapped as it is in physical sloth and self-indulgence.  Like a sickness
or a spiritual retreat it purifies and ennobles; and the soul emerges
from it stronger and more self-contained.'  To him, certainly, it has
been a mode of purification.  The opening sonnets, composed in the bleak
cell of Galway Gaol, and written down on the fly-leaves of the prisoner's
prayer-book, are full of things nobly conceived and nobly uttered, and
show that though Mr. Balfour may enforce 'plain living' by his prison
regulations, he cannot prevent 'high thinking' or in any way limit or
constrain the freedom of a man's soul.  They are, of course, intensely
personal in expression.  They could not fail to be so.  But the
personality that they reveal has nothing petty or ignoble about it.  The
petulant cry of the shallow egoist which was the chief characteristic of
the Love Sonnets of Proteus is not to be found here.  In its place we
have wild grief and terrible scorn, fierce rage and flame-like passion.
Such a sonnet as the following comes out of the very fire of heart and
brain:

   God knows, 'twas not with a fore-reasoned plan
      I left the easeful dwellings of my peace,
   And sought this combat with ungodly Man,
      And ceaseless still through years that do not cease
      Have warred with Powers and Principalities.
   My natural soul, ere yet these strifes began,
      Was as a sister diligent to please
   And loving all, and most the human clan.

   God knows it.  And He knows how the world's tears
      Touched me.  And He is witness of my wrath,
   How it was kindled against murderers
      Who slew for gold, and how upon their path
   I met them.  Since which day the World in arms
   Strikes at my life with angers and alarms.

And this sonnet has all the strange strength of that despair which is but
the prelude to a larger hope:

   I thought to do a deed of chivalry,
      An act of worth, which haply in her sight
   Who was my mistress should recorded be
      And of the nations.  And, when thus the fight
      Faltered and men once bold with faces white
   Turned this and that way in excuse to flee,
      I only stood, and by the foeman's might
   Was overborne and mangled cruelly.

   Then crawled I to her feet, in whose dear cause
      I made this venture, and 'Behold,' I said,
   'How I am wounded for thee in these wars.'
      But she, 'Poor cripple, would'st thou I should wed
   A limbless trunk?' and laughing turned from me.
   Yet she was fair, and her name 'Liberty.'

The sonnet beginning

   A prison is a convent without God--
      Poverty, Chastity, Obedience
   Its precepts are:

is very fine; and this, written just after entering the gaol, is
powerful:

   Naked I came into the world of pleasure,
      And naked come I to this house of pain.
   Here at the gate I lay down my life's treasure,
      My pride, my garments and my name with men.
      The world and I henceforth shall be as twain,
   No sound of me shall pierce for good or ill
      These walls of grief.  Nor shall I hear the vain
   Laughter and tears of those who love me still.

   Within, what new life waits me!  Little ease,
      Cold lying, hunger, nights of wakefulness,
   Harsh orders given, no voice to soothe or please,
      Poor thieves for friends, for books rules meaningless;
   This is the grave--nay, hell.  Yet, Lord of Might,
   Still in Thy light my spirit shall see light.

But, indeed, all the sonnets are worth reading, and The Canon of Aughrim,
the longest poem in the book, is a most masterly and dramatic description
of the tragic life of the Irish peasant.  Literature is not much indebted
to Mr. Balfour for his sophistical Defence of Philosophic Doubt which is
one of the dullest books we know, but it must be admitted that by sending
Mr. Blunt to gaol he has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and
deep-thinking poet.  The narrow confines of the prison cell seem to suit
the 'sonnet's scanty plot of ground,' and an unjust imprisonment for a
noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.

In Vinculis.  By Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Author of The Wind and the
Whirlwind, The Love Sonnets of Proteus, etc. etc.  (Kegan Paul.)




THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WALT WHITMAN


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 25, 1889.)

'No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary
performance . . . or as aiming mainly toward art and aestheticism.'
'Leaves of Grass . . . has mainly been the outcropping of my own
emotional and other personal nature--an attempt, from first to last, to
put _a Person_, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the
Nineteenth Century in America,) freely, fully and truly on record.  I
could not find any similar personal record in current literature that
satisfied me.'  In these words Walt Whitman gives us the true attitude we
should adopt towards his work, having, indeed, a much saner view of the
value and meaning of that work than either his eloquent admirers or noisy
detractors can boast of possessing.  His last book, November Boughs, as
he calls it, published in the winter of the old man's life, reveals to
us, not indeed a soul's tragedy, for its last note is one of joy and
hope, and noble and unshaken faith in all that is fine and worthy of such
faith, but certainly the drama of a human soul, and puts on record with a
simplicity that has in it both sweetness and strength the record of his
spiritual development, and of the aim and motive both of the manner and
the matter of his work.  His strange mode of expression is shown in these
pages to have been the result of deliberate and self-conscious choice.
The 'barbaric yawp' which he sent over 'the roofs of the world' so many
years ago, and which wrung from Mr. Swinburne's lip such lofty panegyric
in song and such loud clamorous censure in prose, appears here in what
will be to many an entirely new light.  For in his very rejection of art
Walt Whitman is an artist.  He tried to produce a certain effect by
certain means and he succeeded.  There is much method in what many have
termed his madness, too much method, indeed, some may be tempted to
fancy.

In the story of his life, as he tells it to us, we find him at the age of
sixteen beginning a definite and philosophical study of literature:

   Summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a
   stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island's seashores--there, in
   the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and
   New Testaments, and absorb'd (probably to better advantage for me than
   in any library or indoor room--it makes such difference _where_ you
   read) Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of
   Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient
   Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them.
   As it happened, I read the latter mostly in an old wood.  The Iliad
   . . . I read first thoroughly on the peninsula of Orient, northeast end
   of Long Island, in a sheltered hollow of rock and sand, with the sea
   on each side.  (I have wonder'd since why I was not overwhelmed by
   those mighty masters.  Likely because I read them, as described, in
   the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading
   landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.)

Edgar Allan Poe's amusing bit of dogmatism that, for our occasions and
our day, 'there can be no such thing as a long poem,' fascinated him.
'The same thought had been haunting my mind before,' he said, 'but Poe's
argument . . . work'd the sum out, and proved it to me,' and the English
translation of the Bible seems to have suggested to him the possibility
of a poetic form which, while retaining the spirit of poetry, would still
be free from the trammels of rhyme and of a definite metrical system.
Having thus, to a certain degree, settled upon what one might call the
'technique' of Whitmanism, he began to brood upon the nature of that
spirit which was to give life to the strange form.  The central point of
the poetry of the future seemed to him to be necessarily 'an identical
body and soul, a personality,' in fact, which personality, he tells us
frankly, 'after many considerations and ponderings I deliberately settled
should be myself.'  However, for the true creation and revealing of this
personality, at first only dimly felt, a new stimulus was needed.  This
came from the Civil War.  After describing the many dreams and passions
of his boyhood and early manhood, he goes on to say:

   These, however, and much more might have gone on and come to naught
   (almost positively would have come to naught,) if a sudden, vast,
   terrible, direct and indirect stimulus for new and national
   declamatory expression had not been given to me.  It is certain, I
   say, that although I had made a start before, only from the occurrence
   of the Secession War, and what it show'd me as by flashes of
   lightning, with the emotional depths it sounded and arous'd (of
   course, I don't mean in my own heart only, I saw it just as plainly in
   others, in millions)--that only from the strong flare and provocation
   of that war's sights and scenes the final reasons-for-being of an
   autochthonic and passionate song definitely came forth.

   I went down to the war fields of Virginia . . . lived thenceforward in
   camp--saw great battles and the days and nights afterward--partook of
   all the fluctuations, gloom, despair, hopes again arous'd, courage
   evoked--death readily risk'd--_the cause_, too--along and filling
   those agonistic and lurid following years . . . the real parturition
   years . . . of this henceforth homogeneous Union.  Without those three
   or four years and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not
   now be existing.

Having thus obtained the necessary stimulus for the quickening and
awakening of the personal self, some day to be endowed with universality,
he sought to find new notes of song, and, passing beyond the mere passion
for expression, he aimed at 'Suggestiveness' first.

   I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently
   with my scheme.  The reader will have his or her part to do, just as
   much as I have had mine.  I seek less to state or display any theme or
   thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the
   theme or thought--there to pursue your own flight.

Another 'impetus-word' is Comradeship, and other 'word-signs' are Good
Cheer, Content and Hope.  Individuality, especially, he sought for:

   I have allowed the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear
   upon American individuality and assist it--not only because that is a
   great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalising laws, but as
   counterpoise to the leveling tendencies of Democracy--and for other
   reasons.  Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I
   avowedly chant 'the great pride of man in himself,' and permit it to
   be more or less a motif of nearly all my verse.  I think this pride
   indispensable to an American.  I think it not inconsistent with
   obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning.

A new theme also was to be found in the relation of the sexes, conceived
in a natural, simple and healthy form, and he protests against poor Mr.
William Rossetti's attempt to Bowdlerise and expurgate his song.

   From another point of view Leaves of Grass is avowedly the song of Sex
   and Amativeness, and even Animality--though meanings that do not
   usually go along with these words are behind all, and will duly
   emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different light and
   atmosphere.  Of this feature, intentionally palpable in a few lines, I
   shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives breath
   to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been
   left unwritten were those lines omitted. . . .

   Universal as are certain facts and symptoms of communities . . . there
   is nothing so rare in modern conventions and poetry as their normal
   recognizance.  Literature is always calling in the doctor for
   consultation and confession, and always giving evasions and swathing
   suppressions in place of that 'heroic nudity,' on which only a genuine
   diagnosis . . . can be built.  And in respect to editions of Leaves of
   Grass in time to come (if there should be such) I take occasion now to
   confirm those lines with the settled convictions and deliberate
   renewals of thirty years, and to hereby prohibit, as far as word of
   mine can do so, any elision of them.

But beyond all these notes and moods and motives is the lofty spirit of a
grand and free acceptance of all things that are worthy of existence.  He
desired, he says, 'to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should
directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom,
health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every
human or other existence, not only consider'd from the point of view of
all, but of each.'  His two final utterances are that 'really great
poetry is always . . . the result of a national spirit, and not the
privilege of a polish'd and select few'; and that 'the strongest and
sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.'

Such are the views contained in the opening essay A Backward Glance O'er
Travel'd Roads, as he calls it; but there are many other essays in this
fascinating volume, some on poets such as Burns and Lord Tennyson, for
whom Walt Whitman has a profound admiration; some on old actors and
singers, the elder Booth, Forrest, Alboni and Mario being his special
favourites; others on the native Indians, on the Spanish element in
American nationality, on Western slang, on the poetry of the Bible, and
on Abraham Lincoln.  But Walt Whitman is at his best when he is analysing
his own work and making schemes for the poetry of the future.  Literature,
to him, has a distinctly social aim.  He seeks to build up the masses by
'building up grand individuals.'  And yet literature itself must be
preceded by noble forms of life.  'The best literature is always the
result of something far greater than itself--not the hero but the
portrait of the hero.  Before there can be recorded history or poem there
must be the transaction.'  Certainly, in Walt Whitman's views there is a
largeness of vision, a healthy sanity and a fine ethical purpose.  He is
not to be placed with the professional litterateurs of his country,
Boston novelists, New York poets and the like.  He stands apart, and the
chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance.  He
has begun a prelude to larger themes.  He is the herald to a new era.  As
a man he is the precursor of a fresh type.  He is a factor in the heroic
and spiritual evolution of the human being.  If Poetry has passed him by,
Philosophy will take note of him.

November Boughs.  By Walt Whitman.  (Alexander Gardner.)




THE NEW PRESIDENT


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 26, 1889.)

In a little book that he calls The Enchanted Island Mr. Wyke Bayliss, the
new President of the Royal Society of British Artists, has given his
gospel of art to the world.  His predecessor in office had also a gospel
of art but it usually took the form of an autobiography.  Mr. Whistler
always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital 'I.'
However, he was never dull.  His brilliant wit, his caustic satire, and
his amusing epigrams, or, perhaps, we should say epitaphs, on his
contemporaries, made his views on art as delightful as they were
misleading and as fascinating as they were unsound.  Besides, he
introduced American humour into art criticism, and for this, if for no
other reason, he deserves to be affectionately remembered.  Mr. Wyke
Bayliss, upon the other hand, is rather tedious.  The last President
never said much that was true, but the present President never says
anything that is new; and, if art be a fairy-haunted wood or an enchanted
island, we must say that we prefer the old Puck to the fresh Prospero.
Water is an admirable thing--at least, the Greeks said it was--and Mr.
Ruskin is an admirable writer; but a combination of both is a little
depressing.

Still, it is only right to add that Mr. Wyke Bayliss, at his best, writes
very good English.  Mr. Whistler, for some reason or other, always
adopted the phraseology of the minor prophets.  Possibly it was in order
to emphasise his well-known claims to verbal inspiration, or perhaps he
thought with Voltaire that Habakkuk etait capable de tout, and wished to
shelter himself under the shield of a definitely irresponsible writer
none of whose prophecies, according to the French philosopher, has ever
been fulfilled.  The idea was clever enough at the beginning, but
ultimately the manner became monotonous.  The spirit of the Hebrews is
excellent but their mode of writing is not to be imitated, and no amount
of American jokes will give it that modernity which is essential to a
good literary style.  Admirable as are Mr. Whistler's fireworks on
canvas, his fireworks in prose are abrupt, violent and exaggerated.
However, oracles, since the days of the Pythia, have never been
remarkable for style, and the modest Mr. Wyke Bayliss is as much Mr.
Whistler's superior as a writer as he is his inferior as a painter and an
artist.  Indeed, some of the passages in this book are so charmingly
written and with such felicity of phrase that we cannot help feeling that
the President of the British Artists, like a still more famous President
of our day, can express himself far better through the medium of
literature than he can through the medium of line and colour.  This,
however, applies only to Mr. Wyke Bayliss's prose.  His poetry is very
bad, and the sonnets at the end of the book are almost as mediocre as the
drawings that accompany them.  As we read them we cannot but regret that,
in this point at any rate, Mr. Bayliss has not imitated the wise example
of his predecessor who, with all his faults, was never guilty of writing
a line of poetry, and is, indeed, quite incapable of doing anything of
the kind.

As for the matter of Mr. Bayliss's discourses, his views on art must be
admitted to be very commonplace and old-fashioned.  What is the use of
telling artists that they should try and paint Nature as she really is?
What Nature really is, is a question for metaphysics not for art.  Art
deals with appearances, and the eye of the man who looks at Nature, the
vision, in fact, of the artist, is far more important to us than what he
looks at.  There is more truth in Corot's aphorism that a landscape is
simply 'the mood of a man's mind' than there is in all Mr. Bayliss's
laborious disquisitions on naturalism.  Again, why does Mr. Bayliss waste
a whole chapter in pointing out real or supposed resemblances between a
book of his published twelve years ago and an article by Mr. Palgrave
which appeared recently in the Nineteenth Century?  Neither the book nor
the article contains anything of real interest, and as for the hundred or
more parallel passages which Mr. Wyke Bayliss solemnly prints side by
side, most of them are like parallel lines and never meet.  The only
original proposal that Mr. Bayliss has to offer us is that the House of
Commons should, every year, select some important event from national and
contemporary history and hand it over to the artists who are to choose
from among themselves a man to make a picture of it.  In this way Mr.
Bayliss believes that we could have the historic art, and suggests as
examples of what he means a picture of Florence Nightingale in the
hospital at Scutari, a picture of the opening of the first London Board-
school, and a picture of the Senate House at Cambridge with the girl
graduate receiving a degree 'that shall acknowledge her to be as wise as
Merlin himself and leave her still as beautiful as Vivien.'  This
proposal is, of course, very well meant, but, to say nothing of the
danger of leaving historic art at the mercy of a majority in the House of
Commons, who would naturally vote for its own view of things, Mr. Bayliss
does not seem to realise that a great event is not necessarily a
pictorial event.  'The decisive events of the world,' as has been well
said, 'take place in the intellect,' and as for Board-schools, academic
ceremonies, hospital wards and the like, they may well be left to the
artists of the illustrated papers, who do them admirably and quite as
well as they need be done.  Indeed, the pictures of contemporary events,
Royal marriages, naval reviews and things of this kind that appear in the
Academy every year, are always extremely bad; while the very same
subjects treated in black and white in the Graphic or the London News are
excellent.  Besides, if we want to understand the history of a nation
through the medium of art, it is to the imaginative and ideal arts that
we have to go and not to the arts that are definitely imitative.  The
visible aspect of life no longer contains for us the secret of life's
spirit.  Probably it never did contain it.  And, if Mr. Barker's Waterloo
Banquet and Mr. Frith's Marriage of the Prince of Wales are examples of
healthy historic art, the less we have of such art the better.  However,
Mr. Bayliss is full of the most ardent faith and speaks quite gravely of
genuine portraits of St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul dating from the
first century, and of the establishment by the Israelites of a school of
art in the wilderness under the now little appreciated Bezaleel.  He is a
pleasant, picturesque writer, but he should not speak about art.  Art is
a sealed book to him.

The Enchanted Island.  By Wyke Bayliss, F.S.A., President of the Royal
Society of British Artists.  (Allen and Co.)




SOME LITERARY NOTES--II


(Woman's World, February 1889.)

'The various collectors of Irish folk-lore,' says Mr. W. B. Yeats in his
charming little book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 'have,
from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of
others, one great fault.'

   They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us
   of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of
   mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after.  To
   be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales in
   forms like grocers' bills--item the fairy king, item the queen.
   Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the
   very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.
   Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility,
   saw everything humorised.  The impulse of the Irish literature of
   their time came from a class that did not--mainly for political
   reasons--take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a
   humorist's Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew
   nothing of.  What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified
   an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen, carmen, and
   gentlemen's servants, into the type of a whole nation, and created the
   stage Irishman.  The writers of 'Forty-eight, and the famine combined,
   burst their bubble.  Their work had the dash as well as the
   shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is touched
   everywhere with beauty--a gentle Arcadian beauty.  Carleton, a peasant
   born, has in many of his stories, . . . more especially in his ghost
   stories, a much more serious way with him, for all his humour.
   Kennedy, an old bookseller in Dublin, who seems to have had a
   something of genuine belief in the fairies, comes next in time.  He
   has far less literary faculty, but is wonderfully accurate, giving
   often the very words the stories were told in.  But the best book
   since Croker is Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends.  The humour has all
   given way to pathos and tenderness.  We have here the innermost heart
   of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through years of
   persecution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams, and hearing
   fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and on the dead.
   Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt dreaming.

Into a volume of very moderate dimensions, and of extremely moderate
price, Mr. Yeats has collected together the most characteristic of our
Irish folklore stories, grouping them together according to subject.
First come The Trooping Fairies.  The peasants say that these are 'fallen
angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost';
but the Irish antiquarians see in them 'the gods of pagan Ireland,' who,
'when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the
popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.'  Their chief
occupations are feasting, fighting, making love, and playing the most
beautiful music.  'They have only one industrious person amongst them,
the lepra-caun--the shoemaker.'  It is his duty to repair their shoes
when they wear them out with dancing.  Mr. Yeats tells us that 'near the
village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven
years.  When she came home she had no toes--she had danced them off.'  On
May Eve, every seventh year, they fight for the harvest, for the best
ears of grain belong to them.  An old man informed Mr. Yeats that he saw
them fight once, and that they tore the thatch off a house.  'Had any one
else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling
everything into the air as it passed.'  When the wind drives the leaves
and straws before it, 'that is the fairies, and the peasants take off
their hats and say "God bless them."'  When they are gay, they sing.  Many
of the most beautiful tunes of Ireland 'are only their music, caught up
by eavesdroppers.'  No prudent peasant would hum The Pretty Girl Milking
the Cow near a fairy rath, 'for they are jealous, and do not like to hear
their songs on clumsy mortal lips.'  Blake once saw a fairy's funeral.
But this, as Mr. Yeats points out, must have been an English fairy, for
the Irish fairies never die; they are immortal.

Then come The Solitary Fairies, amongst whom we find the little Lepracaun
mentioned above.  He has grown very rich, as he possesses all the
treasure-crocks buried in war-time.  In the early part of this century,
according to Croker, they used to show in Tipperary a little shoe
forgotten by the fairy shoemaker.  Then there are two rather disreputable
little fairies--the Cluricaun, who gets intoxicated in gentlemen's
cellars, and the Red Man, who plays unkind practical jokes.  'The Fear-
Gorta (Man of Hunger) is an emaciated phantom that goes through the land
in famine time, begging an alms and bringing good luck to the giver.'  The
Water-sheerie is 'own brother to the English Jack-o'-Lantern.'  'The
Leanhaun Shee (fairy mistress) seeks the love of mortals.  If they
refuse, she must be their slave; if they consent, they are hers, and can
only escape by finding another to take their place.  The fairy lives on
their life, and they waste away.  Death is no escape from her.  She is
the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she persecutes.  The
Gaelic poets die young, for she is restless, and will not let them remain
long on earth.'  The Pooka is essentially an animal spirit, and some have
considered him the forefather of Shakespeare's 'Puck.'  He lives on
solitary mountains, and among old ruins 'grown monstrous with much
solitude,' and 'is of the race of the nightmare.'  'He has many shapes--is
now a horse, . . . now a goat, now an eagle.  Like all spirits, he is
only half in the world of form.'  The banshee does not care much for our
democratic levelling tendencies; she loves only old families, and
despises the parvenu or the nouveau riche.  When more than one banshee is
present, and they wail and sing in chorus, it is for the death of some
holy or great one.  An omen that sometimes accompanies the banshee is '.
. . an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless
horses driven by a Dullahan.'  A Dullahan is the most terrible thing in
the world.  In 1807 two of the sentries stationed outside St. James's
Park saw one climbing the railings, and died of fright.  Mr. Yeats
suggests that they are possibly 'descended from that Irish giant who swam
across the Channel with his head in his teeth.'

Then come the stories of ghosts, of saints and priests, and of giants.
The ghosts live in a state intermediary between this world and the next.
They are held there by some earthly longing or affection, or some duty
unfulfilled, or anger against the living; they are those who are too good
for hell, and too bad for heaven.  Sometimes they 'take the forms of
insects, especially of butterflies.'  The author of the Parochial Survey
of Ireland 'heard a woman say to a child who was chasing a butterfly,
"How do you know it is not the soul of your grandfather?"  On November
eve they are abroad, and dance with the fairies.'  As for the saints and
priests, 'there are no martyrs in the stories.'  That ancient chronicler
Giraldus Cambrensis 'taunted the Archbishop of Cashel, because no one in
Ireland had received the crown of martyrdom.  "Our people may be
barbarous," the prelate answered, "but they have never lifted their hands
against God's saints; but now that a people have come amongst us who know
how to make them (it was just after the English invasion), we shall have
martyrs plentifully."'  The giants were the old pagan heroes of Ireland,
who grew bigger and bigger, just as the gods grew smaller and smaller.
The fact is they did not wait for offerings; they took them vi et armis.

Some of the prettiest stories are those that cluster round Tir-na-n-Og.
This is the Country of the Young, 'for age and death have not found it;
neither tears nor loud laughter have gone near it.'  'One man has gone
there and returned.  The bard, Oisen, who wandered away on a white horse,
moving on the surface of the foam with his fairy Niamh lived there three
hundred years, and then returned looking for his comrades.  The moment
his foot touched the earth his three hundred years fell on him, and he
was bowed double, and his beard swept the ground.  He described his
sojourn in the Land of Youth to Patrick before he died.'  Since then,
according to Mr. Yeats, 'many have seen it in many places; some in the
depths of lakes, and have heard rising therefrom a vague sound of bells;
more have seen it far off on the horizon, as they peered out from the
western cliffs.  Not three years ago a fisherman imagined that he saw
it.'

Mr. Yeats has certainly done his work very well.  He has shown great
critical capacity in his selection of the stories, and his little
introductions are charmingly written.  It is delightful to come across a
collection of purely imaginative work, and Mr. Yeats has a very quick
instinct in finding out the best and the most beautiful things in Irish
folklore.  I am also glad to see that he has not confined himself
entirely to prose, but has included Allingham's lovely poem on The
Fairies:

   Up the airy mountain,
      Down the rushy glen,
   We daren't go a-hunting
      For fear of little men;
   Wee folk, good folk,
      Trooping all together;
   Green jacket, red cap,
      And white owl's feather!

   Down along the rocky shore
      Some make their home,
   They live on crispy pancakes
      Of yellow tide-foam;
   Some in the reeds
      Of the black mountain lake,
   With frogs for their watch-dogs
      All night awake.

   High on the hill-top
      The old King sits;
   He is now so old and gray
      He's nigh lost his wits.
   With a bridge of white mist
      Columbkill he crosses,
   On his stately journeys
      From Slieveleague to Rosses;
   Or going up with music,
      On cold starry nights,
   To sup with the Queen
      Of the gay Northern Lights.

All lovers of fairy tales and folklore should get this little book.  The
Horned Women, The Priest's Soul, {411} and Teig O'Kane, are really
marvellous in their way; and, indeed, there is hardly a single story that
is not worth reading and thinking over.

The wittiest writer in France at present is a woman.  That clever, that
spirituelle grande dame, who has adopted the pseudonym of 'Gyp,' has in
her own country no rival.  Her wit, her delicate and delightful esprit,
her fascinating modernity, and her light, happy touch, give her a unique
position in that literary movement which has taken for its object the
reproduction of contemporary life.  Such books as Autour du Mariage,
Autour du Divorce, and Le Petit Bob, are, in their way, little playful
masterpieces, and the only work in England that we could compare with
them is Violet Fane's Edwin and Angelina Papers.  To the same brilliant
pen which gave us these wise and witty studies of modern life we owe now
a more serious, more elaborate production.  Helen Davenant is as
earnestly wrought out as it is cleverly conceived.  If it has a fault, it
is that it is too full of matter.  Out of the same material a more
economical writer would have made two novels and half a dozen
psychological studies for publication in American magazines.  Thackeray
once met Bishop Wilberforce at dinner at Dean Stanley's, and, after
listening to the eloquent prelate's extraordinary flow and fund of
stories, remarked to his neighbour, 'I could not afford to spend at that
rate.'  Violet Fane is certainly lavishly extravagant of incident, plot,
and character.  But we must not quarrel with richness of subject-matter
at a time when tenuity of purpose and meagreness of motive seem to be
becoming the dominant notes of contemporary fiction.  The side-issues of
the story are so complex that it is difficult, almost impossible, to
describe the plot in any adequate manner.  The interest centres round a
young girl, Helen Davenant by name, who contracts a private and
clandestine marriage with one of those mysterious and fascinating foreign
noblemen who are becoming so invaluable to writers of fiction, either in
narrative or dramatic form.  Shortly after the marriage her husband is
arrested for a terrible murder committed some years before in Russia,
under the evil influence of occult magic and mesmerism.  The crime was
done in a hypnotic state, and, as described by Violet Fane, seems much
more probable than the actual hypnotic experiments recorded in scientific
publications.  This is the supreme advantage that fiction possesses over
fact.  It can make things artistically probable; can call for imaginative
and realistic credence; can, by force of mere style, compel us to
believe.  The ordinary novelists, by keeping close to the ordinary
incidents of commonplace life, seem to me to abdicate half their power.
Romance, at any rate, welcomes what is wonderful; the temper of wonder is
part of her own secret; she loves what is strange and curious.  But
besides the marvels of occultism and hypnotism, there are many other
things in Helen Davenant that are worthy of study.  Violet Fane writes an
admirable style.  The opening chapter of the book, with its terrible
poignant tragedy, is most powerfully written, and I cannot help wondering
that the clever authoress cared to abandon, even for a moment, the superb
psychological opportunity that this chapter affords.  The touches of
nature, the vivid sketches of high life, the subtle renderings of the
phases and fancies of society, are also admirably done.  Helen Davenant
is certainly clever, and shows that Violet Fane can write prose that is
as good as her verse, and can look at life not merely from the point of
view of the poet, but also from the standpoint of the philosopher, the
keen observer, the fine social critic.  To be a fine social critic is no
small thing, and to be able to incorporate in a work of fiction the
results of such careful observation is to achieve what is out of the
reach of many.  The difficulty under which the novelists of our day
labour seems to me to be this: if they do not go into society, their
books are unreadable; and if they do go into society, they have no time
left for writing.  However, Violet Fane has solved the problem.

   The chronicles which I am about to present to the reader are not the
   result of any conscious effort of the imagination.  They are, as the
   title-page indicates, records of dreams occurring at intervals during
   the last ten years, and transcribed, pretty nearly in the order of
   their occurrence, from my diary.  Written down as soon as possible
   after awaking from the slumber during which they presented themselves,
   these narratives, necessarily unstudied in style, and wanting in
   elegance of diction, have at least the merit of fresh and vivid
   colour; for they were committed to paper at a moment when the effect
   and impress of each successive vision were strong and forceful on the
   mind. . . .

   The most remarkable features of the experiences I am about to record
   are the methodical consecutiveness of their sequences, and the
   intelligent purpose disclosed alike in the events witnessed and in the
   words heard or read. . . .  I know of no parallel to this phenomenon,
   unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton's romance entitled The Pilgrims
   of the Rhine, in which is related the story of a German student
   endowed with so marvellous a faculty of dreaming, that for him the
   normal conditions of sleeping and waking became reversed; his true
   life was that which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of
   wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive
   intervals of arrest, occurring in an existence of intense and vivid
   interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. . . .

   During the whole period covered by these dreams I have been busily and
   almost continuously engrossed with scientific and literary pursuits,
   demanding accurate judgment and complete self-possession and rectitude
   of mind.  At the time when many of the most vivid and remarkable
   visions occurred I was following my course as a student at the Paris
   Faculty of Medicine, preparing for examinations, daily visiting
   hospital wards as dresser, and attending lectures.  Later, when I had
   taken my degree, I was engaged in the duties of my profession and in
   writing for the Press on scientific subjects.  Neither had I ever
   taken opium, haschish, or other dream-producing agent.  A cup of tea
   or coffee represents the extent of my indulgences in this direction.  I
   mention these details in order to guard against inferences which might
   otherwise be drawn as to the genesis of my faculty.

   It may, perhaps, be worthy of notice that by far the larger number of
   the dreams set down in this volume occurred towards dawn; sometimes
   even, after sunrise, during a 'second sleep.'  A condition of fasting,
   united possibly with some subtle magnetic or other atmospheric state,
   seems, therefore, to be that most open to impressions of the kind.

This is the account given by the late Dr. Anna Kingsford of the genesis
of her remarkable volume, Dreams and Dream-Stories; and certainly some of
the stories, especially those entitled Steepside, Beyond the Sunset, and
The Village of Seers, are well worth reading, though not intrinsically
finer, either in motive or idea, than the general run of magazine
stories.  No one who had the privilege of knowing Mrs. Kingsford, who was
one of the brilliant women of our day, can doubt for a single moment that
these tales came to her in the way she describes; but to me the result is
just a little disappointing.  Perhaps, however, I expect too much.  There
is no reason whatsoever why the imagination should be finer in hours of
dreaming than in its hours of waking.  Mrs. Kingsford quotes a letter
written by Jamblichus to Agathocles, in which he says: 'The soul has a
twofold life, a lower and a higher.  In sleep the soul is liberated from
the constraint of the body, and enters, as an emancipated being, on its
divine life of intelligence.  The nobler part of the mind is thus united
by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom
and foreknowledge of the gods. . . .  The night-time of the body is the
day-time of the soul.'  But the great masterpieces of literature and the
great secrets of wisdom have not been communicated in this way; and even
in Coleridge's case, though Kubla Khan is wonderful, it is not more
wonderful, while it is certainly less complete, than the Ancient Mariner.

As for the dreams themselves, which occupy the first portion of the book,
their value, of course, depends chiefly on the value of the truths or
predictions which they are supposed to impart.  I must confess that most
modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless
knowledge in a form that no one can understand.  Allegory, parable, and
vision have their high artistic uses, but their philosophical and
scientific uses are very small.  However, here is one of Mrs. Kingsford's
dreams.  It has a pleasant quaintness about it:

   THE WONDERFUL SPECTACLES

   I was walking alone on the sea-shore.  The day was singularly clear
   and sunny.  Inland lay the most beautiful landscape ever seen; and far
   off were ranges of tall hills, the highest peaks of which were white
   with glittering snows.  Along the sands by the sea came towards me a
   man accoutred as a postman.  He gave me a letter.  It was from you.  It
   ran thus:

   'I have got hold of the earliest and most precious book extant.  It
   was written before the world began.  The text is easy enough to read;
   but the notes, which are very copious and numerous, are in such minute
   and obscure characters that I cannot make them out.  I want you to get
   for me the spectacles which Swedenborg used to wear; not the smaller
   pair--those he gave to Hans Christian Andersen--but the large pair,
   and these seem to have got mislaid.  I think they are Spinoza's make.
   You know, he was an optical-glass maker by profession, and the best we
   ever had.  See if you can get them for me.'

   When I looked up after reading this letter I saw the postman hastening
   away across the sands, and I cried out to him, 'Stop! how am I to send
   the answer?  Will you not wait for it?'

   He looked round, stopped, and came back to me.

   'I have the answer here,' he said, tapping his letter-bag, 'and I
   shall deliver it immediately.'

   'How can you have the answer before I have written it?' I asked.  'You
   are making a mistake.'

   'No,' he said.  'In the city from which I come the replies are all
   written at the office, and sent out with the letters themselves.  Your
   reply is in my bag.'

   'Let me see it,' I said.  He took another letter from his wallet, and
   gave it to me.  I opened it, and read, in my own handwriting, this
   answer, addressed to you:

   'The spectacles you want can be bought in London; but you will not be
   able to use them at once, for they have not been worn for many years,
   and they sadly want cleaning.  This you will not be able to do
   yourself in London, because it is too dark there to see well, and
   because your fingers are not small enough to clean them properly.
   Bring them here to me, and I will do it for you.'

   I gave this letter back to the postman.  He smiled and nodded at me;
   and then I perceived, to my astonishment, that he wore a camel's-hair
   tunic round his waist.  I had been on the point of addressing him--I
   know not why--as Hermes.  But I now saw that he must be John the
   Baptist; and in my fright at having spoken to so great a Saint I
   awoke.

Mr. Maitland, who edits the present volume, and who was joint-author with
Mrs. Kingsford of that curious book The Perfect Way, states in a footnote
that in the present instance the dreamer knew nothing of Spinoza at the
time, and was quite unaware that he was an optician; and the
interpretation of the dream, as given by him, is that the spectacles in
question were intended to represent Mrs. Kingsford's remarkable faculty
of intuitional and interpretative perception.  For a spiritual message
fraught with such meaning, the mere form of this dream seems to me
somewhat ignoble, and I cannot say that I like the blending of the
postman with St. John the Baptist.  However, from a psychological point
of view, these dreams are interesting, and Mrs. Kingsford's book is
undoubtedly a valuable addition to the literature of the mysticism of the
nineteenth century.

* * * * *

The Romance of a Shop, by Miss Amy Levy, is a more mundane book, and
deals with the adventures of some young ladies who open a photographic
studio in Baker Street to the horror of some of their fashionable
relatives.  It is so brightly and pleasantly written that the sudden
introduction of a tragedy into it seems violent and unnecessary.  It
lacks the true tragic temper, and without this temper in literature all
misfortunes and miseries seem somewhat mean and ordinary.  With this
exception the book is admirably done, and the style is clever and full of
quick observation.  Observation is perhaps the most valuable faculty for
a writer of fiction.  When novelists reflect and moralise, they are, as a
rule, dull.  But to observe life with keen vision and quick intellect, to
catch its many modes of expression, to seize upon the subtlety, or
satire, or dramatic quality of its situations, and to render life for us
with some spirit of distinction and fine selection--this, I fancy, should
be the aim of the modern realistic novelist.  It would be, perhaps, too
much to say that Miss Levy has distinction; this is the rarest quality in
modern literature, though not a few of its masters are modern; but she
has many other qualities which are admirable.

* * * * *

Faithful and Unfaithful is a powerful but not very pleasing novel.
However, the object of most modern fiction is not to give pleasure to the
artistic instinct, but rather to portray life vividly for us, to draw
attention to social anomalies, and social forms of injustice.  Many of
our novelists are really pamphleteers, reformers masquerading as story-
tellers, earnest sociologists seeking to mend as well as to mirror life.
The heroine, or rather martyr, of Miss Margaret Lee's story is a very
noble and graciously Puritanic American girl, who is married at the age
of eighteen to a man whom she insists on regarding as a hero.  Her
husband cannot live in the high rarefied atmosphere of idealism with
which she surrounds him; her firm and fearless faith in him becomes a
factor in his degradation.  'You are too good for me,' he says to her in
a finely conceived scene at the end of the book; 'we have not an idea, an
inclination, or a passion in common.  I'm sick and tired of seeming to
live up to a standard that is entirely beyond my reach and my desire.  We
make each other miserable!  I can't pull you down, and for ten years you
have been exhausting yourself in vain efforts to raise me to your level.
The thing must end!'  He asks her to divorce him, but she refuses.  He
then abandons her, and availing himself of those curious facilities for
breaking the marriage-tie that prevail in the United States, succeeds in
divorcing her without her consent, and without her knowledge.  The book
is certainly characteristic of an age so practical and so literary as
ours, an age in which all social reforms have been preceded and have been
largely influenced by fiction.  Faithful and Unfaithful seems to point to
some coming change in the marriage-laws of America.

(1) Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry.  Edited and Selected by
W. B. Yeats.  (Walter Scott.)

(2) Helen Davenant.  By Violet Fane.  (Chapman and Hall.)

(3) Dreams and Dream-Stories.  By Dr. Anna Kingsford.  (Redway.)

(4) The Romance of a Shop.  By Amy Levy.  (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) Faithful and Unfaithful.  By Margaret Lee.  (Macmillan and Co.)




ONE OF THE BIBLES OF THE WORLD


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 12, 1889.)

The Kalevala is one of those poems that Mr. William Morris once described
as 'The Bibles of the World.'  It takes its place as a national epic
beside the Homeric poems, the Niebelunge, the Shahnameth and the
Mahabharata, and the admirable translation just published by Mr. John
Martin Crawford is sure to be welcomed by all scholars and lovers of
primitive poetry.  In his very interesting preface Mr. Crawford claims
for the Finns that they began earlier than any other European nation to
collect and preserve their ancient folklore.  In the seventeenth century
we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and
interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North.
But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of
our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot.  Both were
practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent contact
with the people of Finland.  Topelius, who collected eighty epical
fragments of the Kalevala, spent the last eleven years of his life in
bed, afflicted with a fatal disease.  This misfortune, however, did not
damp his enthusiasm.  Mr. Crawford tells us that he used to invite the
wandering Finnish merchants to his bedside and induce them to sing their
heroic poems which he copied down as soon as they were uttered, and that
whenever he heard of a renowned Finnish minstrel he did all in his power
to bring the song-man to his house in order that he might gather new
fragments of the national epic.  Lonnrot travelled over the whole
country, on horseback, in reindeer sledges and in canoes, collecting the
old poems and songs from the hunters, the fishermen and the shepherds.
The people gave him every assistance, and he had the good fortune to come
across an old peasant, one of the oldest of the runolainen in the Russian
province of Wuokinlem, who was by far the most renowned song-man of the
country, and from him he got many of the most splendid runes of the poem.
And certainly the Kalevala, as it stands, is one of the world's great
poems.  It is perhaps hardly accurate to describe it as an epic.  It
lacks the central unity of a true epic in our sense of the word.  It has
many heroes beside Wainomoinen and is, properly speaking, a collection of
folk-songs and ballads.  Of its antiquity there is no doubt.  It is
thoroughly pagan from beginning to end, and even the legend of the Virgin
Mariatta to whom the Sun tells where 'her golden babe lies hidden'--

   Yonder is thy golden infant,
   There thy holy babe lies sleeping
   Hidden to his belt in water,
   Hidden in the reeds and rushes--

is, according to all scholars, essentially pre-Christian in origin.  The
gods are chiefly gods of air and water and forest.  The highest is the
sky-god Ukks who is 'The Father of the Breezes,' 'The Shepherd of the
Lamb-Clouds'; the lightning is his sword, the rainbow is his bow; his
skirt sparkles with fire, his stockings are blue and his shoes crimson-
coloured.  The daughters of the Sun and Moon sit on the scarlet rims of
the clouds and weave the rays of light into a gleaming web.  Untar
presides over fogs and mists, and passes them through a silver sieve
before sending them to the earth.  Ahto, the wave-god, lives with 'his
cold and cruel-hearted spouse,' Wellamo, at the bottom of the sea in the
chasm of the Salmon-Rocks, and possesses the priceless treasure of the
Sampo, the talisman of success.  When the branches of the primitive oak-
trees shut out the light of the sun from the Northland, Pikku-Mies (the
Pygmy) emerged from the sea in a suit of copper, with a copper hatchet in
his belt, and having grown to a giant's stature felled the huge oak with
the third stroke of his axe.  Wirokannas is 'The Green-robed Priest of
the Forest,' and Tapio, who has a coat of tree-moss and a high-crowned
hat of fir-leaves, is 'The Gracious God of the Woodlands.'  Otso, the
bear, is the 'Honey-Paw of the Mountains,' the 'Fur-robed Forest Friend.'
In everything, visible and invisible, there is God, a divine presence.
There are three worlds, and they are all peopled with divinities.

As regards the poem itself, it is written in trochaic eight-syllabled
lines with alliteration and the part-line echo, the metre which
Longfellow adopted for Hiawatha.  One of its distinguishing
characteristics is its wonderful passion for nature and for the beauty of
natural objects.  Lemenkainen says to Tapio:

   Sable-bearded God of forests,
   In thy hat and coat of ermine,
   Robe thy trees in finest fibres,
   Deck thy groves in richest fabrics,
   Give the fir-trees shining silver,
   Deck with gold the slender balsams,
   Give the spruces copper-belting,
   And the pine-trees silver girdles,
   Give the birches golden flowers,
   Deck their stems with silver fretwork,
   This their garb in former ages
   When the days and nights were brighter,
   When the fir-trees shone like sunlight,
   And the birches like the moonbeams;
   Honey breathe throughout the forest,
   Settled in the glens and highlands,
   Spices in the meadow-borders,
   Oil outpouring from the lowlands.

All handicrafts and art-work are, as in Homer, elaborately described:

   Then the smiter Ilmarinen
   The eternal artist-forgeman,
   In the furnace forged an eagle
   From the fire of ancient wisdom,
   For this giant bird of magic
   Forged he talons out of iron,
   And his beak of steel and copper;
   Seats himself upon the eagle,
   On his back between the wing-bones
   Thus addresses he his creature,
   Gives the bird of fire this order.
   Mighty eagle, bird of beauty,
   Fly thou whither I direct thee,
   To Tuoni's coal-black river,
   To the blue-depths of the Death-stream,
   Seize the mighty fish of Mana,
   Catch for me this water-monster.

And Wainamoinen's boat-building is one of the great incidents of the
poem:

   Wainamoinen old and skilful,
   The eternal wonder-worker,
   Builds his vessel with enchantment,
   Builds his boat by art and magic,
   From the timber of the oak-tree,
   Forms its posts and planks and flooring.
   Sings a song and joins the framework;
   Sings a second, sets the siding;
   Sings a third time, sets the rowlocks;
   Fashions oars, and ribs, and rudder,
   Joins the sides and ribs together.

   . . . . .

   Now he decks his magic vessel,
   Paints the boat in blue and scarlet,
   Trims in gold the ship's forecastle,
   Decks the prow in molten silver;
   Sings his magic ship down gliding,
   On the cylinders of fir-tree;
   Now erects the masts of pine-wood,
   On each mast the sails of linen,
   Sails of blue, and white, and scarlet,
   Woven into finest fabric.

All the characteristics of a splendid antique civilisation are mirrored
in this marvellous poem, and Mr. Crawford's admirable translation should
make the wonderful heroes of Suomi song as familiar if not as dear to our
people as the heroes of the great Ionian epic.

The Kalevala, the Epic Poem of Finland.  Translated into English by John
Martin Crawford.  (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)




POETICAL SOCIALISTS


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1889.)

Mr. Stopford Brooke said some time ago that Socialism and the socialistic
spirit would give our poets nobler and loftier themes for song, would
widen their sympathies and enlarge the horizon of their vision and would
touch, with the fire and fervour of a new faith, lips that had else been
silent, hearts that but for this fresh gospel had been cold.  What Art
gains from contemporary events is always a fascinating problem and a
problem that is not easy to solve.  It is, however, certain that
Socialism starts well equipped.  She has her poets and her painters, her
art lecturers and her cunning designers, her powerful orators and her
clever writers.  If she fails it will not be for lack of expression.  If
she succeeds her triumph will not be a triumph of mere brute force.  The
first thing that strikes one, as one looks over the list of contributors
to Mr. Edward Carpenter's Chants of Labour, is the curious variety of
their several occupations, the wide differences of social position that
exist between them, and the strange medley of men whom a common passion
has for the moment united.  The editor is a 'Science lecturer'; he is
followed by a draper and a porter; then we have two late Eton masters and
then two bootmakers; and these are, in their turn, succeeded by an ex-
Lord Mayor of Dublin, a bookbinder, a photographer, a steel-worker and an
authoress.  On one page we have a journalist, a draughtsman and a music-
teacher: and on another a Civil servant, a machine fitter, a medical
student, a cabinet-maker and a minister of the Church of Scotland.
Certainly, it is no ordinary movement that can bind together in close
brotherhood men of such dissimilar pursuits, and when we mention that Mr.
William Morris is one of the singers, and that Mr. Walter Crane has
designed the cover and frontispiece of the book, we cannot but feel that,
as we pointed out before, Socialism starts well equipped.

As for the songs themselves, some of them, to quote from the editor's
preface, are 'purely revolutionary, others are Christian in tone; there
are some that might be called merely material in their tendency, while
many are of a highly ideal and visionary character.'  This is, on the
whole, very promising.  It shows that Socialism is not going to allow
herself to be trammelled by any hard and fast creed or to be stereotyped
into an iron formula.  She welcomes many and multiform natures.  She
rejects none and has room for all.  She has the attraction of a wonderful
personality and touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and
draws this man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith
in the future, and a third, it may be, by his love of art or by his wild
worship of a lost and buried past.  And all of this is well.  For, to
make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great
thing.

They are not of any very high literary value, these poems that have been
so dexterously set to music.  They are meant to be sung, not to be read.
They are rough, direct and vigorous, and the tunes are stirring and
familiar.  Indeed, almost any mob could warble them with ease.  The
transpositions that have been made are rather amusing.  'Twas in
Trafalgar Square is set to the tune of 'Twas in Trafalgar's Bay; Up, Ye
People! a very revolutionary song by Mr. John Gregory, boot-maker, with a
refrain of

   Up, ye People! or down into your graves!
      Cowards ever will be slaves!

is to be sung to the tune of Rule, Britannia! the old melody of The Vicar
of Bray is to accompany the new Ballade of Law and Order--which, however,
is not a ballade at all--and to the air of Here's to the Maiden of
Bashful Fifteen the democracy of the future is to thunder forth one of
Mr. T. D. Sullivan's most powerful and pathetic lyrics.  It is clear that
the Socialists intend to carry on the musical education of the people
simultaneously with their education in political science and, here as
elsewhere, they seem to be entirely free from any narrow bias or formal
prejudice.  Mendelssohn is followed by Moody and Sankey; the Wacht am
Rhein stands side by side with the Marseillaise; Lillibulero, a chorus
from Norma, John Brown and an air from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are all
equally delightful to them.  They sing the National Anthem in Shelley's
version and chant William Morris's Voice of Toil to the flowing numbers
of Ye Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon.  Victor Hugo talks somewhere of the
terrible cry of 'Le Tigre Populaire,' but it is evident from Mr.
Carpenter's book that should the Revolution ever break out in England we
shall have no inarticulate roar but, rather, pleasant glees and graceful
part-songs.  The change is certainly for the better.  Nero fiddled while
Rome was burning--at least, inaccurate historians say he did; but it is
for the building up of an eternal city that the Socialists of our day are
making music, and they have complete confidence in the art instincts of
the people.

   They say that the people are brutal--
      That their instincts of beauty are dead--
   Were it so, shame on those who condemn them
      To the desperate struggle for bread.
   But they lie in their throats when they say it,
      For the people are tender at heart,
   And a wellspring of beauty lies hidden
      Beneath their life's fever and smart,

is a stanza from one of the poems in this volume, and the feeling
expressed in these words is paramount everywhere.  The Reformation gained
much from the use of popular hymn-tunes, and the Socialists seem
determined to gain by similar means a similar hold upon the people.
However, they must not be too sanguine about the result.  The walls of
Thebes rose up to the sound of music, and Thebes was a very dull city
indeed.

Chants of Labour: A Song-Book of the People.  With Music.  Edited by
Edward Carpenter.  With Designs by Walter Crane.  (Swan Sonnenschein and
Co.)




MR. BRANDER MATTHEWS' ESSAYS


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 27, 1889.)

'If you to have your book criticized favorably, give yourself a good
notice in the Preface!' is the golden rule laid down for the guidance of
authors by Mr. Brander Matthews in an amusing essay on the art of preface-
writing and, true to his own theory, he announces his volume as 'the most
interesting, the most entertaining, and the most instructive book of the
decade.'  Entertaining it certainly is in parts.  The essay on Poker, for
instance, is very brightly and pleasantly written.  Mr. Proctor objected
to Poker on the somewhat trivial ground that it was a form of lying, and
on the more serious ground that it afforded special opportunities for
cheating; and, indeed, he regarded the mere existence of the game outside
gambling dens as 'one of the most portentous phenomena of American
civilisation.'  Mr. Brander Matthews points out, in answer to these grave
charges, that Bluffing is merely a suppressio veri and that it requires a
great deal of physical courage on the part of the player.  As for the
cheating, he claims that Poker affords no more opportunities for the
exercise of this art than either Whist or Ecarte, though he admits that
the proper attitude towards an opponent whose good luck is unduly
persistent is that of the German-American who, finding four aces in his
hand, was naturally about to bet heavily, when a sudden thought struck
him and he inquired, 'Who dole dem carts?'  'Jakey Einstein' was the
answer.  'Jakey Einstein?' he repeated, laying down his hand; 'den I pass
out.'

The history of the game will be found very interesting by all
card-lovers.  Like most of the distinctly national products of America,
it seems to have been imported from abroad and can be traced back to an
Italian game in the fifteenth century.  Euchre was probably acclimatised
on the Mississippi by the Canadian voyageurs, being a form of the French
game of Triomphe.  It was a Kentucky citizen who, desiring to give his
sons a few words of solemn advice for their future guidance in life, had
them summoned to his deathbed and said to them, 'Boys, when you go down
the river to Orleens jest you beware of a game called Yucker where the
jack takes the ace;--it's unchristian!'--after which warning he lay back
and died in peace.  And 'it was Euchre which the two gentlemen were
playing in a boat on the Missouri River when a bystander, shocked by the
frequency with which one of the players turned up the jack, took the
liberty of warning the other player that the winner was dealing from the
bottom, to which the loser, secure in his power of self-protection,
answered gruffly, "Well, suppose he is--it's his deal, isn't it?"'

The chapter On the Antiquity of Jests, with its suggestion of an
International Exhibition of Jokes, is capital.  Such an exhibition, Mr.
Matthews remarks, would at least dispel any lingering belief in the old
saying that there are only thirty-eight good stories in existence and
that thirty-seven of these cannot be told before ladies; and the
Retrospective Section would certainly be the constant resort of any true
folklorist.  For most of the good stories of our time are really
folklore, myth survivals, echoes of the past.  The two well-known
American proverbs, 'We have had a hell of a time' and 'Let the other man
walk' are both traced back by Mr. Matthews: the first to Walpole's
letters, and the other to a story Poggio tells of an inhabitant of
Perugia who walked in melancholy because he could not pay his debts.
'Vah, stulte,' was the advice given to him, 'leave anxiety to your
creditors!' and even Mr. William M. Evart's brilliant repartee when he
was told that Washington once threw a dollar across the Natural Bridge in
Virginia, 'In those days a dollar went so much farther than it does now!'
seems to be the direct descendant of a witty remark of Foote's, though we
must say that in this case we prefer the child to the father.  The essay
On the French Spoken by Those who do not Speak French is also cleverly
written and, indeed, on every subject, except literature, Mr. Matthews is
well worth reading.

On literature and literary subjects he is certainly 'sadly to seek.'  The
essay on The Ethics of Plagiarism, with its laborious attempt to
rehabilitate Mr. Rider Haggard and its foolish remarks on Poe's admirable
paper Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists, is extremely dull and
commonplace and, in the elaborate comparison that he draws between Mr.
Frederick Locker and Mr. Austin Dobson, the author of Pen and Ink shows
that he is quite devoid of any real critical faculty or of any fine sense
of the difference between ordinary society verse and the exquisite work
of a very perfect artist in poetry.  We have no objection to Mr. Matthews
likening Mr. Locker to Mr. du Maurier, and Mr. Dobson to Randolph
Caldecott and Mr. Edwin Abbey.  Comparisons of this kind, though
extremely silly, do not do much harm.  In fact, they mean nothing and are
probably not intended to mean anything.  Upon the other hand, we really
must protest against Mr. Matthews' efforts to confuse the poetry of
Piccadilly with the poetry of Parnassus.  To tell us, for instance, that
Mr. Austin Dobson's verse 'has not the condensed clearness nor the
incisive vigor of Mr. Locker's' is really too bad even for Transatlantic
criticism.  Nobody who lays claim to the slightest knowledge of
literature and the forms of literature should ever bring the two names
into conjunction.  Mr. Locker has written some pleasant vers de societe,
some tuneful trifles in rhyme admirably suited for ladies' albums and for
magazines.  But to mention Herrick and Suckling and Mr. Austin Dobson in
connection with him is absurd.  He is not a poet.  Mr. Dobson, upon the
other hand, has produced work that is absolutely classical in its
exquisite beauty of form.  Nothing more artistically perfect in its way
than the Lines to a Greek Girl has been written in our time.  This little
poem will be remembered in literature as long as Thyrsis is remembered,
and Thyrsis will never be forgotten.  Both have that note of distinction
that is so rare in these days of violence, exaggeration and rhetoric.  Of
course, to suggest, as Mr. Matthews does, that Mr. Dobson's poems belong
to 'the literature of power' is ridiculous.  Power is not their aim, nor
is it their effect.  They have other qualities, and in their own
delicately limited sphere they have no contemporary rivals; they have
none even second to them.  However, Mr. Matthews is quite undaunted and
tries to drag poor Mr. Locker out of Piccadilly, where he was really
quite in his element, and to set him on Parnassus where he has no right
to be and where he would not claim to be.  He praises his work with the
recklessness of an eloquent auctioneer.  These very commonplace and
slightly vulgar lines on A Human Skull:

   It may have held (to shoot some random shots)
      Thy brains, Eliza Fry! or Baron Byron's;
   The wits of Nelly Gwynne or Doctor Watts--
      Two quoted bards.  Two philanthropic sirens.

   But this, I trust, is clearly understood,
      If man or woman, if adored or hated--
   Whoever own'd this Skull was not so good
      Nor quite so bad as many may have stated;

are considered by him to be 'sportive and brightsome' and full of
'playful humor,' and 'two things especially are to be noted in
them--individuality and directness of expression.'  Individuality and
directness of expression!  We wonder what Mr. Matthews thinks these words
mean.

Unfortunate Mr. Locker with his uncouth American admirer!  How he must
blush to read these heavy panegyrics!  Indeed, Mr. Matthews himself has
at least one fit of remorse for his attempt to class Mr. Locker's work
with the work of Mr. Austin Dobson, but like most fits of remorse it
leads to nothing.  On the very next page we have the complaint that Mr.
Dobson's verse has not 'the condensed clearness' and the 'incisive vigor'
of Mr. Locker's.  Mr. Matthews should confine himself to his clever
journalistic articles on Euchre, Poker, bad French and old jokes.  On
these subjects he can, to use an expression of his own, 'write funny.'  He
'writes funny,' too, upon literature, but the fun is not quite so
amusing.

Pen and Ink: Papers on Subjects of More or Less Importance.  By Brander
Matthews.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)




SOME LITERARY NOTES--III


(Woman's World, March 1889.)

Miss Nesbit has already made herself a name as a writer of graceful and
charming verse, and though her last volume, Leaves of Life, does not show
any distinct advance on her former work, it still fully maintains the
high standard already achieved, and justifies the reputation of the
author.  There are some wonderfully pretty poems in it, poems full of
quick touches of fancy, and of pleasant ripples of rhyme; and here and
there a poignant note of passion flashes across the song, as a scarlet
thread flashes through the shuttlerace of a loom, giving a new value to
the delicate tints, and bringing the scheme of colour to a higher and
more perfect key.  In Miss Nesbit's earlier volume, the Lays and Legends,
as it was called, there was an attempt to give poetic form to
humanitarian dreams and socialistic aspirations; but the poems that dealt
with these subjects were, on the whole, the least successful of the
collection; and with the quick, critical instinct of an artist, Miss
Nesbit seems to have recognised this.  In the present volume, at any
rate, such poems are rare, and these few felicitous verses give us the
poet's defence:

   A singer sings of rights and wrongs,
      Of world's ideals vast and bright,
   And feels the impotence of songs
      To scourge the wrong or help the right;
   And only writhes to feel how vain
      Are songs as weapons for his fight;
   And so he turns to love again,
      And sings of love for heart's delight.

   For heart's delight the singers bind
      The wreath of roses round the head,
   And will not loose it lest they find
      Time victor, and the roses dead.
   'Man can but sing of what he knows--
      I saw the roses fresh and red!'
   And so they sing the deathless rose,
      With withered roses garlanded.

   And some within their bosom hide
      Their rose of love still fresh and fair,
   And walk in silence, satisfied
      To keep its folded fragrance rare.
   And some--who bear a flag unfurled--
      Wreathe with their rose the flag they bear,
   And sing their banner for the world,
      And for their heart the roses there.

   Yet thus much choice in singing is;
      We sing the good, the true, the just,
   Passionate duty turned to bliss,
      And honour growing out of trust.
   Freedom we sing, and would not lose
      Her lightest footprint in life's dust.
   We sing of her because we choose,
      We sing of love because we must.

Certainly Miss Nesbit is at her best when she sings of love and nature.
Here she is close to her subject, and her temperament gives colour and
form to the various dramatic moods that are either suggested by Nature
herself or brought to Nature for interpretation.  This, for instance, is
very sweet and graceful:

   When all the skies with snow were grey,
      And all the earth with snow was white,
   I wandered down a still wood way,
      And there I met my heart's delight
   Slow moving through the silent wood,
   The spirit of its solitude:
      The brown birds and the lichened tree
      Seemed less a part of it than she.

   Where pheasants' feet and rabbits' feet
      Had marked the snow with traces small,
   I saw the footprints of my sweet--
      The sweetest woodland thing of all.
   With Christmas roses in her hand,
   One heart-beat's space I saw her stand;
      And then I let her pass, and stood
      Lone in an empty world of wood.

   And though by that same path I've passed
      Down that same woodland every day,
   That meeting was the first and last,
      And she is hopelessly away.
   I wonder was she really there--
   Her hands, and eyes, and lips, and hair?
      Or was it but my dreaming sent
      Her image down the way I went?

   Empty the woods are where we met--
      They will be empty in the spring;
   The cowslip and the violet
      Will die without her gathering.
   But dare I dream one radiant day
   Red rose-wreathed she will pass this way
      Across the glad and honoured grass;
      And then--I will not let her pass.

And this Dedication, with its tender silver-grey notes of colour, is
charming:

   In any meadow where your feet may tread,
      In any garland that your love may wear,
   May be the flower whose hidden fragrance shed
      Wakes some old hope or numbs some old despair,
      And makes life's grief not quite so hard to bear,
   And makes life's joy more poignant and more dear
   Because of some delight dead many a year.

   Or in some cottage garden there may be
      The flower whose scent is memory for you;
   The sturdy southern-wood, the frail sweet-pea,
      Bring back the swallow's cheep, the pigeon's coo,
      And youth, and hope, and all the dreams they knew,
   The evening star, the hedges grey with mist,
   The silent porch where Love's first kiss was kissed.

   So in my garden may you chance to find
      Or royal rose or quiet meadow flower,
   Whose scent may be with some dear dream entwined,
      And give you back the ghost of some sweet hour,
      As lilies fragrant from an August shower,
   Or airs of June that over bean-fields blow,
   Bring back the sweetness of my long ago.

All through the volume we find the same dexterous refining of old themes,
which is indeed the best thing that our lesser singers can give us, and a
thing always delightful.  There is no garden so well tilled but it can
bear another blossom, and though the subject-matter of Miss Nesbit's book
is as the subject-matter of almost all books of poetry, she can certainly
lend a new grace and a subtle sweetness to almost everything on which she
writes.

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems is from the clever pen of Mr. W.
B. Yeats, whose charming anthology of Irish fairy-tales I had occasion to
notice in a recent number of the Woman's World. {437}  It is, I believe,
the first volume of poems that Mr. Yeats has published, and it is
certainly full of promise.  It must be admitted that many of the poems
are too fragmentary, too incomplete.  They read like stray scenes out of
unfinished plays, like things only half remembered, or, at best, but
dimly seen.  But the architectonic power of construction, the power to
build up and make perfect a harmonious whole, is nearly always the
latest, as it certainly is the highest, development of the artistic
temperament.  It is somewhat unfair to expect it in early work.  One
quality Mr. Yeats has in a marked degree, a quality that is not common in
the work of our minor poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to
us--I mean the romantic temper.  He is essentially Celtic, and his verse,
at its best, is Celtic also.  Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to
study how to 'load every rift with ore,' yet is more fascinated by the
beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music.  The spirit that
dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual
poem or particular passage, but this from The Wanderings of Oisin is
worth quoting.  It describes the ride to the Island of Forgetfulness:

   And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow light,
      For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world
   and the sun,
   Ceased on our hands and faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
      And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was
   one;

   Till the horse gave a whinny; for cumbrous with stems of the hazel and
   oak,
      Of hollies, and hazels, and oak-trees, a valley was sloping away
   From his hoofs in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk,
      Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they
   lay.

   More comely than man may make them, inlaid with silver and gold,
      Were arrow and shield and war-axe, arrow and spear and blade,
   And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollows a child of three years old
      Could sleep on a couch of rushes, round and about them laid.

And this, which deals with the old legend of the city lying under the
waters of a lake, is strange and interesting:

   The maker of the stars and worlds
      Sat underneath the market cross,
   And the old men were walking, walking,
      And little boys played pitch-and-toss.

   'The props,' said He, 'of stars and worlds
      Are prayers of patient men and good.'
   The boys, the women, and old men,
      Listening, upon their shadows stood.

   A grey professor passing cried,
      'How few the mind's intemperance rule!
   What shallow thoughts about deep things!
      The world grows old and plays the fool.'

   The mayor came, leaning his left ear--
      There were some talking of the poor--
   And to himself cried, 'Communist!'
      And hurried to the guardhouse door.

   The bishop came with open book,
      Whispering along the sunny path;
   There was some talking of man's God,
      His God of stupor and of wrath.

   The bishop murmured, 'Atheist!
      How sinfully the wicked scoff!'
   And sent the old men on their way,
      And drove the boys and women off.

   The place was empty now of people;
      A cock came by upon his toes;
   An old horse looked across the fence,
      And rubbed along the rail his nose.

   The maker of the stars and worlds
      To His own house did Him betake,
   And on that city dropped a tear,
      And now that city is a lake.

Mr. Yeats has a great deal of invention, and some of the poems in his
book, such as Mosada, Jealousy, and The Island of Statues, are very
finely conceived.  It is impossible to doubt, after reading his present
volume, that he will some day give us work of high import.  Up to this he
has been merely trying the strings of his instrument, running over the
keys.

* * * * *

Lady Munster's Dorinda is an exceedingly clever novel.  The heroine is a
sort of well-born Becky Sharp, only much more beautiful than Becky, or at
least than Thackeray's portraits of her, which, however, have always
seemed to me rather ill-natured.  I feel sure that Mrs. Rawdon Crawley
was extremely pretty, and I have never understood how it was that
Thackeray could caricature with his pencil so fascinating a creation of
his pen.  In the first chapter of Lady Munster's novel we find Dorinda at
a fashionable school, and the sketches of the three old ladies who
preside over the select seminary are very amusing.  Dorinda is not very
popular, and grave suspicions rest upon her of having stolen a cheque.
This is a startling debut for a heroine, and I was a little afraid at
first that Dorinda, after undergoing endless humiliations, would be
proved innocent in the last chapter.  It was quite a relief to find that
Dorinda was guilty.  In fact, Dorinda is a kleptomaniac; that is to say,
she is a member of the upper classes who spends her time in collecting
works of art that do not belong to her.  This, however, is only one of
her accomplishments, and it does not occupy any important place in the
story till the last volume is reached.  Here we find Dorinda married to a
Styrian Prince, and living in the luxury for which she had always longed.
Unfortunately, while staying in the house of a friend she is detected
stealing some rare enamels.  Her punishment, as described by Lady
Munster, is extremely severe; and when she finally commits suicide,
maddened by the imprisonment to which her husband had subjected her, it
is difficult not to feel a good deal of pity for her.  Lady Munster
writes a very clever, bright style, and has a wonderful faculty of
drawing in a few sentences the most lifelike portraits of social types
and social exceptions.  Sir Jasper Broke and his sister, the Duke and
Duchess of Cheviotdale, Lord and Lady Glenalmond, and Lord Baltimore, are
all admirably drawn.  The 'novel of high life,' as it used to be called,
has of late years fallen into disrepute.  Instead of duchesses in
Mayfair, we have philanthropic young ladies in Whitechapel; and the
fashionable and brilliant young dandies, in whom Disraeli and Bulwer
Lytton took such delight, have been entirely wiped out as heroes of
fiction by hardworking curates in the East End.  The aim of most of our
modern novelists seems to be, not to write good novels, but to write
novels that will do good; and I am afraid that they are under the
impression that fashionable life is not an edifying subject.  They wish
to reform the morals, rather than to portray the manners of their age.
They have made the novel the mode of propaganda.  It is possible,
however, that Dorinda points to some coming change, and certainly it
would be a pity if the Muse of Fiction confined her attention entirely to
the East End.

* * * * *

The four remarkable women whom Mrs. Walford has chosen as the subjects of
her Four Biographies from 'Blackwood' are Jane Taylor, Elizabeth Fry,
Hannah More, and Mary Somerville.  Perhaps it is too much to say that
Jane Taylor is remarkable.  In her day she was said to have been 'known
to four continents,' and Sir Walter Scott described her as 'among the
first women of her time'; but no one now cares to read Essays in Rhyme,
or Display, though the latter is really a very clever novel and full of
capital things.  Elizabeth Fry is, of course, one of the great
personalities of this century, at any rate in the particular sphere to
which she devoted herself, and ranks with the many uncanonised saints
whom the world has loved, and whose memory is sweet.  Mrs. Walford gives
a most interesting account of her.  We see her first a gay, laughing,
flaxen-haired girl, 'mightily addicted to fun,' pleased to be finely
dressed and sent to the opera to see the 'Prince,' and be seen by him;
pleased to exhibit her pretty figure in a becoming scarlet riding-habit,
and to be looked at with obvious homage by the young officers quartered
hard by, as she rode along the Norfolk lanes; 'dissipated' by simply
hearing their band play in the square, and made giddy by the veriest
trifle: 'an idle, flirting, worldly girl,' to use her own words.  Then
came the eventful day when 'in purple boots laced with scarlet' she went
to hear William Savery preach at the Meeting House.  This was the turning-
point of her life, her psychological moment, as the phrase goes.  After
it came the era of 'thees' and 'thous,' of the drab gown and the beaver
hat, of the visits to Newgate and the convict ships, of the work of
rescuing the outcast and seeking the lost.  Mrs. Walford quotes the
following interesting account of the famous interview with Queen
Charlotte at the Mansion-House:

   Inside the Egyptian Hall there was a subject for Hayter--the
   diminutive stature of the Queen, covered with diamonds, and her
   countenance lighted up with the kindest benevolence; Mrs. Fry, her
   simple Quaker's dress adding to the height of her figure--though a
   little flushed--preserving her wonted calmness of look and manner;
   several of the bishops standing near; the platform crowded with waving
   feathers, jewels, and orders; the hall lined with spectators, gaily
   and nobly clad, and the centre filled with hundreds of children,
   brought there from their different schools to be examined.  A murmur
   of applause ran through the assemblage as the Queen took Mrs. Fry by
   the hand.  The murmur was followed by a clap and a shout, which was
   taken up by the multitudes without till it died away in the distance.

Those who regard Hannah More as a prim maiden lady of the conventional
type, with a pious and literary turn of mind, will be obliged to change
their views should they read Mrs. Walford's admirable sketch of the
authoress of Percy.  Hannah More was a brilliant wit, a femme d'esprit,
passionately fond of society, and loved by society in return.  When the
serious-minded little country girl, who at the age of eight had covered a
whole quire of paper with letters seeking to reform imaginary depraved
characters, and with return epistles full of contrition and promises of
amendment, paid her first visit to London, she became at once the
intimate friend of Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick, and most
of the distinguished people of the day, delighting them by her charm, and
grace, and wit.  'I dined at the Adelphi yesterday,' she writes in one of
her letters.  'Garrick was the very soul of the company, and I never saw
Johnson in more perfect good-humour.  After all had risen to go we stood
round them for above an hour, laughing, in defiance of every rule of
decorum and Chesterfield.  I believe we should never have thought of
sitting down, nor of parting, had not an impertinent watchman been
saucily vociferating.  Johnson outstaid them all, and sat with me for
half an hour.'  The following is from her sister's pen:

   On Tuesday evening we drank tea at Sir Joshua's with Dr. Johnson.
   Hannah is certainly a great favourite.  She was placed next him, and
   they had the entire conversation to themselves.  They were both in
   remarkably high spirits, and it was certainly her lucky night; I never
   heard her say so many good things.  The old genius was as jocular as
   the young one was pleasant.  You would have imagined we were at some
   comedy had you heard our peals of laughter.  They certainly tried
   which could 'pepper the highest,' and it is not clear to me that the
   lexicographer was really the highest seasoner.

Hannah More was certainly, as Mrs. Walford says, 'the feted and caressed
idol of society.'  The theatre at Bristol vaunted, 'Boast we not a More?'
and the learned cits at Oxford inscribed their acknowledgment of her
authority.  Horace Walpole sat on the doorstep--or threatened to do
so--till she promised to go down to Strawberry Hill; Foster quoted her;
Mrs. Thrale twined her arms about her; Wilberforce consulted her and
employed her.  When The Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World
was published anonymously, 'Aut Morus, aut Angelus,' exclaimed the Bishop
of London, before he had read six pages.  Of her village stories and
ballads two million copies were sold during the first year.  Caelebs in
Search of a Wife ran into thirty editions.  Mrs. Barbauld writes to tell
her about 'a good and sensible woman' of her acquaintance, who, on being
asked how she contrived to divert herself in the country, replied, 'I
have my spinning-wheel and my Hannah More.  When I have spun one pound of
flax I put on another, and when I have finished my book I begin it again.
_I want no other amusement_.'  How incredible it all sounds!  No wonder
that Mrs. Walford exclaims, 'No other amusement!  Good heavens!  Breathes
there a man, woman, or child with soul so quiescent nowadays as to be
satisfied with reels of flax and yards of Hannah More?  Give us Hannah's
company, but not--not her writings!'  It is only fair to say that Mrs.
Walford has thoroughly carried out the views she expresses in this
passage, for she gives us nothing of Hannah More's grandiloquent literary
productions, and yet succeeds in making us know her thoroughly.  The
whole book is well written, but the biography of Hannah More is a
wonderfully brilliant sketch, and deserves great praise.

* * * * *

Miss Mabel Wotton has invented a new form of picture-gallery.  Feeling
that the visible aspect of men and women can be expressed in literature
no less than through the medium of line and colour, she has collected
together a series of Word Portraits of Famous Writers extending from
Geoffrey Chaucer to Mrs. Henry Wood.  It is a far cry from the author of
the Canterbury Tales to the authoress of East Lynne; but as a beauty, at
any rate, Mrs. Wood deserved to be described, and we hear of the pure
oval of her face, of her perfect mouth, her 'dazzling' complexion, and
the extraordinary youth by which 'she kept to the last the . . .
freshness of a young girl.'  Many of the 'famous writers' seem to have
been very ugly.  Thomson, the poet, was of a dull countenance, and a
gross, unanimated, uninviting appearance; Richardson looked 'like a plump
white mouse in a wig.'  Pope is described in the Guardian, in 1713, as 'a
lively little creature, with long arms and legs: a spider is no ill
emblem of him.  He has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.'
Charles Kingsley appears as 'rather tall, very angular, surprisingly
awkward, with thin staggering legs, a hatchet face adorned with scraggy
gray whiskers, a faculty for falling into the most ungainly attitudes,
and making the most hideous contortions of visage and frame; with a rough
provincial accent and an uncouth way of speaking which would be set down
for absurd caricature on the boards of a comic theatre.'  Lamb is
described by Carlyle as 'the leanest of mankind; tiny black breeches
buttoned to the knee-cap and no further, surmounting spindle legs also in
black, face and head fineish, black, bony, lean, and of a Jew type
rather'; and Talfourd says that the best portrait of him is his own
description of Braham--'a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the
angel.'  William Godwin was 'short and stout, his clothes loosely and
carelessly put on, and usually old and worn; his hands were generally in
his pockets; he had a remarkably large, bald head, and a weak voice;
seeming generally half asleep when he walked, and even when he talked.'
Lord Charlemont spoke of David Hume as more like a 'turtle-eating
alderman' than 'a refined philosopher.'  Mary Russell Mitford was ill-
naturedly described by L.E.L. as 'Sancho Panza in petticoats!'; and as
for poor Rogers, who was somewhat cadaverous, the descriptions given of
him are quite dreadful.  Lord Dudley once asked him 'why, now that he
could afford it, he did not set up his hearse,' and it is said that
Sydney Smith gave him mortal offence by recommending him 'when he sat for
his portrait to be drawn saying his prayers, with his face hidden in his
hands,' christened him the 'Death dandy,' and wrote underneath a picture
of him, 'Painted in his lifetime.'  We must console ourselves--if not
with Mr. Hardy's statement that 'ideal physical beauty is incompatible
with mental development, and a full recognition of the evil of things'--at
least with the pictures of those who had some comeliness, and grace, and
charm.  Dr. Grosart says of a miniature of Edmund Spenser, 'It is an
exquisitely beautiful face.  The brow is ample, the lips thin but mobile,
the eyes a grayish-blue, the hair and beard a golden red (as of "red
monie" of the ballads) or goldenly chestnut, the nose with
semi-transparent nostril and keen, the chin firm-poised, the expression
refined and delicate.  Altogether just such "presentment" of the Poet of
Beauty par excellence, as one would have imagined.'  Antony Wood
describes Sir Richard Lovelace as being, at the age of sixteen, 'the most
amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld.'  Nor need we wonder
at this when we remember the portrait of Lovelace that hangs at Dulwich
College.  Barry Cornwall, described himself by S. C. Hall as 'a decidedly
rather pretty little fellow,' said of Keats: 'His countenance lives in my
mind as one of singular beauty and brightness,--it had an expression as
if he had been looking on some glorious sight.'  Chatterton and Byron
were splendidly handsome, and beauty of a high spiritual order may be
claimed both for Milton and Shelley, though an industrious gentleman
lately wrote a book in two volumes apparently for the purpose of proving
that the latter of these two poets had a snub nose.  Hazlitt once said
that 'A man's life may be a lie to himself and others, and yet a picture
painted of him by a great artist would probably stamp his character.'  Few
of the word-portraits in Miss Wotton's book can be said to have been
drawn by a great artist, but they are all interesting, and Miss Wotton
has certainly shown a wonderful amount of industry in collecting her
references and in grouping them.  It is not a book to be read through
from beginning to end, but it is a delightful book to glance at, and by
its means one can raise the ghosts of the dead, at least as well as the
Psychical Society can.

(1) Leaves of Life.  By E. Nesbit.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)

(2) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.  By W. B. Yeats.  (Kegan
Paul.)

(3) Dorinda.  By Lady Munster.  (Hurst and Blackett.)

(4) Four Biographies from 'Blackwood.'  By Mrs. Walford.  (Blackwood and
Sons.)

(5) Word Portraits of Famous Writers.  Edited by Mabel Wotton.  (Bentley
and Son.)




MR. WILLIAM MORRIS'S LAST BOOK


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 2, 1889.)

Mr. Morris's last book is a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning
to end, and the very remoteness of its style from the common language and
ordinary interests of our day gives to the whole story a strange beauty
and an unfamiliar charm.  It is written in blended prose and verse, like
the mediaeval 'cante-fable,' and tells the tale of the House of the
Wolfings in its struggles against the legionaries of Rome then advancing
into Northern Germany.  It is a kind of Saga, and the language in which
the folk-epic, as we may call it, is set forth recalls the antique
dignity and directness of our English tongue four centuries ago.  From an
artistic point of view it may be described as an attempt to return by a
self-conscious effort to the conditions of an earlier and a fresher age.
Attempts of this kind are not uncommon in the history of art.  From some
such feeling came the Pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day and the
archaistic movement of later Greek sculpture.  When the result is
beautiful the method is justified, and no shrill insistence upon a
supposed necessity for absolute modernity of form can prevail against the
value of work that has the incomparable excellence of style.  Certainly,
Mr. Morris's work possesses this excellence.  His fine harmonies and rich
cadences create in the reader that spirit by which alone can its own
spirit be interpreted, awake in him something of the temper of romance
and, by taking him out of his own age, place him in a truer and more
vital relation to the great masterpieces of all time.  It is a bad thing
for an age to be always looking in art for its own reflection.  It is
well that, now and then, we are given work that is nobly imaginative in
its method and purely artistic in its aim.  As we read Mr. Morris's story
with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative and
descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and adventurous
themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from the ignoble
fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day.  We breathe a
purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind of poetical
quality of its own, and was simple and stately and complete.

The tragic interest of The House of the Wolfings centres round the figure
of Thiodolf, the great hero of the tribe.  The goddess who loves him
gives him, as he goes to battle against the Romans, a magical hauberk on
which rests this strange fate: that he who wears it shall save his own
life and destroy the life of his land.  Thiodolf, finding out this
secret, brings the hauberk back to the Wood-Sun, as she is called, and
chooses death for himself rather than the ruin of his cause, and so the
story ends.

But Mr. Morris has always preferred romance to tragedy, and set the
development of action above the concentration of passion.  His story is
like some splendid old tapestry crowded with stately images and enriched
with delicate and delightful detail.  The impression it leaves on us is
not of a single central figure dominating the whole, but rather of a
magnificent design to which everything is subordinated, and by which
everything becomes of enduring import.  It is the whole presentation of
the primitive life that really fascinates.  What in other hands would
have been mere archaeology is here transformed by quick artistic instinct
and made wonderful for us, and human and full of high interest.  The
ancient world seems to have come to life again for our pleasure.

Of a work so large and so coherent, completed with no less perfection
than it is conceived, it is difficult by mere quotation to give any
adequate idea.  This, however, may serve as an example of its narrative
power.  The passage describes the visit of Thiodolf to the Wood-Sun:

   The moonlight lay in a great flood on the grass without, and the dew
   was falling in the coldest hour of the night, and the earth smelled
   sweetly: the whole habitation was asleep now, and there was no sound
   to be known as the sound of any creature, save that from the distant
   meadow came the lowing of a cow that had lost her calf, and that a
   white owl was flitting about near the eaves of the Roof with her wild
   cry that sounded like the mocking of merriment now silent.  Thiodolf
   turned toward the wood, and walked steadily through the scattered
   hazel-trees, and thereby into the thick of the beech-trees, whose
   boles grew smooth and silver-grey, high and close-set: and so on and
   on he went as one going by a well-known path, though there was no
   path, till all the moonlight was quenched under the close roof of the
   beech-leaves, though yet for all the darkness, no man could go there
   and not feel that the roof was green above him.  Still he went on in
   despite of the darkness, till at last there was a glimmer before him,
   that grew greater till he came unto a small wood-lawn whereon the turf
   grew again, though the grass was but thin, because little sunlight got
   to it, so close and thick were the tall trees round about it. . . .
   Nought looked Thiodolf either at the heavens above, or the trees, as
   he strode from off the husk-strewn floor of the beech wood on to the
   scanty grass of the lawn, but his eyes looked straight before him at
   that which was amidmost of the lawn: and little wonder was that; for
   there on a stone chair sat a woman exceeding fair, clad in glittering
   raiment, her hair lying as pale in the moonlight on the grey stone as
   the barley acres in the August night before the reaping-hook goes in
   amongst them.  She sat there as though she were awaiting some one, and
   he made no stop nor stay, but went straight up to her, and took her in
   his arms, and kissed her mouth and her eyes, and she him again; and
   then he sat himself down beside her.

As an example of the beauty of the verse we would take this from the song
of the Wood-Sun.  It at least shows how perfectly the poetry harmonises
with the prose, and how natural the transition is from the one to the
other:

   In many a stead Doom dwelleth, nor sleepeth day nor night:
   The rim of the bowl she kisseth, and beareth the chambering light
   When the kings of men wend happy to the bride-bed from the board.
   It is little to say that she wendeth the edge of the grinded sword,
   When about the house half builded she hangeth many a day;
   The ship from the strand she shoveth, and on his wonted way
   By the mountain hunter fareth where his foot ne'er failed before:
   She is where the high bank crumbles at last on the river's shore:
   The mower's scythe she whetteth; and lulleth the shepherd to sleep
   Where the deadly ling-worm wakeneth in the desert of the sheep.
   Now we that come of the God-kin of her redes for ourselves we wot,
   But her will with the lives of men-folk and their ending know we not.
   So therefore I bid thee not fear for thyself of Doom and her deed,
   But for me: and I bid thee hearken to the helping of my need.
   Or else--Art thou happy in life, or lusteth thou to die
   In the flower of thy days, when thy glory and thy longing bloom on
   high?

The last chapter of the book in which we are told of the great feast made
for the dead is so finely written that we cannot refrain from quoting
this passage:

   Now was the glooming falling upon the earth; but the Hall was bright
   within even as the Hall-Sun had promised.  Therein was set forth the
   Treasure of the Wolfings; fair cloths were hung on the walls, goodly
   broidered garments on the pillars: goodly brazen cauldrons and fair-
   carven chests were set down in nooks where men could see them well,
   and vessels of gold and silver were set all up and down the tables of
   the feast.  The pillars also were wreathed with flowers, and flowers
   hung garlanded from the walls over the precious hangings; sweet gums
   and spices were burning in fair-wrought censers of brass, and so many
   candles were alight under the Roof, that scarce had it looked more
   ablaze when the Romans had litten the faggots therein for its burning
   amidst the hurry of the Morning Battle.

   There then they fell to feasting, hallowing in the high-tide of their
   return with victory in their hands: and the dead corpses of Thiodolf
   and Otter, clad in precious glittering raiment, looked down on them
   from the High-seat, and the kindreds worshipped them and were glad;
   and they drank the Cup to them before any others, were they Gods or
   men.

In days of uncouth realism and unimaginative imitation, it is a high
pleasure to welcome work of this kind.  It is a work in which all lovers
of literature cannot fail to delight.

A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the Kindreds of the Mark.
Written in Prose and in Verse by William Morris.  (Reeves and Turner.)




ADAM LINDSAY GORDON


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 25, 1889.)

A critic recently remarked of Adam Lindsay Gordon that through him
Australia had found her first fine utterance in song. {452}  This,
however, is an amiable error.  There is very little of Australia in
Gordon's poetry.  His heart and mind and fancy were always preoccupied
with memories and dreams of England and such culture as England gave him.
He owed nothing to the land of his adoption.  Had he stayed at home he
would have done much better work.  In a few poems such as The Sick
Stockrider, From the Wreck, and Wolf and Hound there are notes of
Australian influences, and these Swinburnian stanzas from the dedication
to the Bush Ballads deserve to be quoted, though the promise they hold
out was never fulfilled:

   They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
      Of sound than of words,
   In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
      And songless bright birds;
   Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
   Insatiable summer oppresses
   Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
      And faint flocks and herds.

   Whence gather'd?--The locust's grand chirrup
      May furnish a stave;
   The ring of a rowel and stirrup,
      The wash of a wave.
   The chaunt of the marsh frog in rushes,
   That chimes through the pauses and hushes
      Of nightfall, the torrent that gushes,
   The tempests that rave.

      In the gathering of night gloom o'erhead, in
   The still silent change,
      All fire-flushed when forest trees redden
   On slopes of the range.
   When the gnarl'd, knotted trunks Eucalyptian
   Seem carved, like weird columns Egyptian,
   With curious device--quaint inscription,
      And hieroglyph strange;

   In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles
      'Twixt shadow and shine,
   When each dew-laden air draught resembles
      A long draught of wine;
   When the sky-line's blue burnish'd resistance
      Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,
   Some song in all hearts hath existence,--
      Such songs have been mine.

As a rule, however, Gordon is distinctly English, and the landscapes he
describes are always the landscapes of our own country.  He writes about
mediaeval lords and ladies in his Rhyme of Joyous Garde, about Cavaliers
and Roundheads in The Romance of Britomarte, and Ashtaroth, his longest
and most ambitious poem, deals with the adventures of the Norman barons
and Danish knights of ancient days.  Steeped in Swinburne and bewildered
with Browning, he set himself to reproduce the marvellous melody of the
one and the dramatic vigour and harsh strength of the other.  From the
Wreck is a sort of Australian edition of the Ride to Ghent.  These are
the first three stanzas of one of the so-called Bush Ballads:

   On skies still and starlit
      White lustres take hold,
   And grey flashes scarlet,
      And red flashes gold.
   And sun-glories cover
   The rose, shed above her,
   Like lover and lover
      They flame and unfold.

   . . . . .

   Still bloom in the garden
      Green grass-plot, fresh lawn,
   Though pasture lands harden
      And drought fissures yawn.
   While leaves, not a few fall,
   Let rose-leaves for you fall,
   Leaves pearl-strung with dewfall,
      And gold shot with dawn.

   Does the grass-plot remember
      The fall of your feet
   In Autumn's red ember
      When drought leagues with heat,
   When the last of the roses
   Despairingly closes
   In the lull that reposes
      Ere storm winds wax fleet?

And the following verses show that the Norman Baron of Ashtaroth had read
Dolores just once too often:

   Dead priests of Osiris, and Isis,
      And Apis! that mystical lore,
   Like a nightmare, conceived in a crisis
      Of fever, is studied no more;
   Dead Magian! yon star-troop that spangles
      The arch of yon firmament vast
   Looks calm, like a host of white angels
      On dry dust of votaries past.

   On seas unexplored can the ship shun
      Sunk rocks?  Can man fathom life's links,
   Past or future, unsolved by Egyptian
      Or Theban, unspoken by Sphynx?
   The riddle remains yet, unravell'd
      By students consuming night oil.
   O earth! we have toil'd, we have travailed:
      How long shall we travail and toil?

By the classics Gordon was always very much fascinated.  He loved what he
calls 'the scroll that is godlike and Greek,' though he is rather
uncertain about his quantities, rhyming 'Polyxena' to 'Athena' and
'Aphrodite' to 'light,' and occasionally makes very rash statements, as
when he represents Leonidas exclaiming to the three hundred at
Thermopylae:

   'Ho! comrades let us gaily dine--
      This night with Plato we shall sup,'

if this be not, as we hope it is, a printer's error.  What the
Australians liked best were his spirited, if somewhat rough, horse-racing
and hunting poems.  Indeed, it was not till he found that How We Beat the
Favourite was on everybody's lips that he consented to forego his
anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a verse-writer,
having up to that time produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps
of paper, and sent them unsigned to the local magazines.  The fact is
that the social atmosphere of Melbourne was not favourable to poets, and
the worthy colonials seem to have shared Audrey's doubts as to whether
poetry was a true and honest thing.  It was not till Gordon won the Cup
Steeplechase for Major Baker in 1868 that he became really popular, and
probably there were many who felt that to steer Babbler to the winning-
post was a finer achievement than 'to babble o'er green fields.'

On the whole, it is impossible not to regret that Gordon ever emigrated.
His literary power cannot be denied, but it was stunted in uncongenial
surroundings and marred by the rude life he was forced to lead.  Australia
has converted many of our failures into prosperous and admirable
mediocrities, but she certainly spoiled one of our poets for us.  Ovid at
Tomi is not more tragic than Gordon driving cattle or farming an
unprofitable sheep-ranch.

That Australia, however, will some day make amends by producing a poet of
her own we cannot doubt, and for him there will be new notes to sound and
new wonders to tell of.  The description, given by Mr. Marcus Clarke in
the preface to this volume, of the aspect and spirit of Nature in
Australia is most curious and suggestive.  The Australian forests, he
tells us, are funereal and stern, and 'seem to stifle, in their black
gorges, a story of sullen despair.'  No leaves fall from the trees, but
'from the melancholy gum strips of white bark hang and rustle.  Great
grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass.  Flights of
cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls.  The sun suddenly sinks
and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter.'
The aborigines aver that, when night comes, from the bottomless depth of
some lagoon a misshapen monster rises, dragging his loathsome length
along the ooze.  From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant,
and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons.  All is
fear-inspiring and gloomy.  No bright fancies are linked with the
memories of the mountains.  Hopeless explorers have named them out of
their sufferings--Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair.

   In Australia alone (says Mr. Clarke) is to be found the Grotesque, the
   Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write.  But
   the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of the
   fantastic land of monstrosities.  He becomes familiar with the beauty
   of loneliness.  Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness,
   he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the
   hieroglyphs of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted
   with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern
   Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue.  The phantasmagoria of
   that wild dream-land termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet
   of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his
   heritage of desert sand better than all the bountiful richness of
   Egypt.

Here, certainly, is new material for the poet, here is a land that is
waiting for its singer.  Such a singer Gordon was not.  He remained
thoroughly English, and the best that we can say of him is that he wrote
imperfectly in Australia those poems that in England he might have made
perfect.

Poems.  By Adam Lindsay Gordon.  (Samuel Mullen.)




THE POETS' CORNER--IX


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 30, 1889.)

Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments, and it was
probably in one of his happiest and, certainly, in one of his most
careless moods that Mr. Justice Denman conceived the idea of putting the
early history of Rome into doggerel verse for the benefit of a little boy
of the name of Jack.  Poor Jack!  He is still, we learn from the preface,
under six years of age, and it is sad to think of the future career of a
boy who is being brought up on bad history and worse poetry.  Here is a
passage from the learned judge's account of Romulus:

   Poor Tatius by some unknown hand
      Was soon assassinated,
   Some said by Romulus' command;
      I know not--but 'twas fated.

   Sole King again, this Romulus
      Play'd some fantastic tricks,
   Lictors he had, who hatchets bore
      Bound up with rods of sticks.

   He treated all who thwarted him
      No better than a dog,
   Sometimes 'twas 'Heads off, Lictors, there!'
      Sometimes 'Ho!  Lictors, flog!'

   Then he created Senators,
      And gave them rings of gold;
   Old soldiers all; their name deriv'd
      From 'Senex' which means 'old.'

   Knights, too, he made, good horsemen all,
      Who always were at hand
   To execute immediately
      Whate'er he might command.

   But these were of Patrician rank,
      Plebeians all the rest;
   Remember this distinction, Jack!
      For 'tis a useful test.

The reign of Tullius Hostilius opens with a very wicked rhyme:

   As Numa, dying, only left
      A daughter, named Pompilia,
   The Senate had to choose a King.
      They choose one sadly _sillier_.

If Jack goes to the bad, Mr. Justice Denman will have much to answer for.

After such a terrible example from the Bench, it is pleasant to turn to
the seats reserved for Queen's Counsel.  Mr. Cooper Willis's Tales and
Legends, if somewhat boisterous in manner, is still very spirited and
clever.  The Prison of the Danes is not at all a bad poem, and there is a
great deal of eloquent, strong writing in the passage beginning:

   The dying star-song of the night sinks in the dawning day,
   And the dark-blue sheen is changed to green, and the green fades into
   grey,
   And the sleepers are roused from their slumbers, and at last the
   Danesmen know
   How few of all their numbers are left them by the foe.

Not much can be said of a poet who exclaims:

   Oh, for the power of Byron or of Moore,
   To glow with one, and with the latter soar.

And yet Mr. Moodie is one of the best of those South African poets whose
works have been collected and arranged by Mr. Wilmot.  Pringle, the
'father of South African verse,' comes first, of course, and his best
poem is, undoubtedly, Afar in the Desert:

   Afar in the desert I love to ride,
   With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side:
   Away, away, from the dwelling of men
   By the wild-deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen:
   By valleys remote where the oribi plays,
   Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
   And the kudu and eland unhunted recline
   By the skirts of grey forests o'erhung with wild vine,
   Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
   And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
   And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will
   In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.

It is not, however, a very remarkable production.

The Smouse, by Fannin, has the modern merit of incomprehensibility.  It
reads like something out of The Hunting of the Snark:

   I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse in the wilderness wide,
   The veld is my home, and the wagon's my pride:
   The crack of my 'voerslag' shall sound o'er the lea,
   I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!
   I heed not the Governor, I fear not his law,
   I care not for civilisation one straw,
   And ne'er to 'Ompanda'--'Umgazis' I'll throw
   While my arm carries fist, or my foot bears a toe!
   'Trek,' 'trek,' ply the whip--touch the fore oxen's skin,
   I'll warrant we'll 'go it' through thick and through thin--
   Loop! loop ye oud skellums! ot Vikmaan trek jy;
   I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!

The South African poets, as a class, are rather behind the age.  They
seem to think that 'Aurora' is a very novel and delightful epithet for
the dawn.  On the whole they depress us.

Chess, by Mr. Louis Tylor, is a sort of Christmas masque in which the
dramatis personae consist of some unmusical carollers, a priggish young
man called Eric, and the chessmen off the board.  The White Queen's
Knight begins a ballad and the Black King's Bishop completes it.  The
Pawns sing in chorus and the Castles converse with each other.  The
silliness of the form makes it an absolutely unreadable book.

Mr. Williamson's Poems of Nature and Life are as orthodox in spirit as
they are commonplace in form.  A few harmless heresies of art and thought
would do this poet no harm.  Nearly everything that he says has been said
before and said better.  The only original thing in the volume is the
description of Mr. Robert Buchanan's 'grandeur of mind.'  This is
decidedly new.

Dr. Cockle tells us that Mullner's Guilt and The Ancestress of
Grillparzer are the masterpieces of German fate-tragedy.  His translation
of the first of these two masterpieces does not make us long for any
further acquaintance with the school.  Here is a specimen from the fourth
act of the fate-tragedy.

   SCENE VIII.

   ELVIRA.  HUGO.

   ELVIRA (after long silence, leaving the harp, steps to Hugo, and seeks
   his gaze).

   HUGO (softly).  Though I made sacrifice of thy sweet life.  The Father
   has forgiven.  Can the wife--Forgive?

   ELVIRA (on his breast).  She can!

   HUGO (with all the warmth of love).  Dear wife!

   ELVIRA (after a pause, in deep sorrow).  Must it be so, beloved one?

   HUGO (sorry to have betrayed himself).  What?

In his preface to The Circle of Seasons, a series of hymns and verses for
the seasons of the Church, the Rev. T. B. Dover expresses a hope that
this well-meaning if somewhat tedious book 'may be of value to those many
earnest people to whom the subjective aspect of truth is helpful.'  The
poem beginning

   Lord, in the inn of my poor worthless heart
      Guests come and go; but there is room for Thee,

has some merit and might be converted into a good sonnet.  The majority
of the poems, however, are quite worthless.  There seems to be some
curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.

Lord Henry Somerset's verse is not so good as his music.  Most of the
Songs of Adieu are marred by their excessive sentimentality of feeling
and by the commonplace character of their weak and lax form.  There is
nothing that is new and little that is true in verse of this kind:

   The golden leaves are falling,
      Falling one by one,
   Their tender 'Adieux' calling
      To the cold autumnal sun.
   The trees in the keen and frosty air
      Stand out against the sky,
   'Twould seem they stretch their branches bare
      To Heaven in agony.

It can be produced in any quantity.  Lord Henry Somerset has too much
heart and too little art to make a good poet, and such art as he does
possess is devoid of almost every intellectual quality and entirely
lacking in any intellectual strength.  He has nothing to say and says it.

Mrs. Cora M. Davis is eloquent about the splendours of what the authoress
of The Circle of Seasons calls 'this earthly ball.'

   Let's sing the beauties of this grand old earth,

she cries, and proceeds to tell how

   Imagination paints old Egypt's former glory,
   Of mighty temples reaching heavenward,
   Of grim, colossal statues, whose barbaric story
   The caustic pens of erudition still record,
   Whose ancient cities of glittering minarets
   Reflect the gold of Afric's gorgeous sunsets.

'The caustic pens of erudition' is quite delightful and will be
appreciated by all Egyptologists.  There is also a charming passage in
the same poem on the pictures of the Old Masters:

      the mellow richness of whose tints impart,
   By contrast, greater delicacy still to modern art.

This seems to us the highest form of optimism we have ever come across in
art criticism.  It is American in origin, Mrs. Davis, as her biographer
tells us, having been born in Alabama, Genesee co., N.Y.

(1) The Story of the Kings of Rome in Verse.  By the Hon. G. Denman,
Judge of the High Court of Justice.  (Trubner and Co.)

(2) Tales and Legends in Verse.  By E. Cooper Willis, Q.C.  (Kegan Paul.)

(3) The Poetry of South Africa.  Collected and arranged by A. Wilmot.
(Sampson Low and Co.)

(4) Chess.  A Christmas Masque.  By Louis Tylor.  (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) Poems of Nature and Life.  By David R. Williamson.  (Blackwood.)

(6) Guilt.  Translated from the German by J. Cockle, M.D.  (Williams and
Norgate.)

(7) The Circle of Seasons.  By K. E. V.  (Elliot Stock.)

(8) Songs of Adieu.  By Lord Henry Somerset.  (Chatto and Windus.)

(9) Immortelles.  By Cora M. Davis.  (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)




SOME LITERARY NOTES--IV


(Woman's World, April 1889.)

'In modern life,' said Matthew Arnold once, 'you I cannot well enter a
monastery; but you can enter the Wordsworth Society.'  I fear that this
will sound to many a somewhat uninviting description of this admirable
and useful body, whose papers and productions have been recently
published by Professor Knight, under the title of Wordsworthiana.  'Plain
living and high thinking' are not popular ideals.  Most people prefer to
live in luxury, and to think with the majority.  However, there is really
nothing in the essays and addresses of the Wordsworth Society that need
cause the public any unnecessary alarm; and it is gratifying to note
that, although the society is still in the first blush of enthusiasm, it
has not yet insisted upon our admiring Wordsworth's inferior work.  It
praises what is worthy of praise, reverences what should be reverenced,
and explains what does not require explanation.  One paper is quite
delightful; it is from the pen of Mr. Rawnsley, and deals with such
reminiscences of Wordsworth as still linger among the peasantry of
Westmoreland.  Mr. Rawnsley grew up, he tells us, in the immediate
vicinity of the present Poet-Laureate's old home in Lincolnshire, and had
been struck with the swiftness with which,

   As year by year the labourer tills
   His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,

the memories of the poet of the Somersby Wold had 'faded from off the
circle of the hills'--had, indeed, been astonished to note how little
real interest was taken in him or his fame, and how seldom his works were
met with in the houses of the rich or poor in the very neighbourhood.
Accordingly, when he came to reside in the Lake Country, he endeavoured
to find out what of Wordsworth's memory among the men of the Dales still
lingered on--how far he was still a moving presence among them--how far
his works had made their way into the cottages and farmhouses of the
valleys.  He also tried to discover how far the race of Westmoreland and
Cumberland farm-folk--the 'Matthews' and the 'Michaels' of the poet, as
described by him--were real or fancy pictures, or how far the characters
of the Dalesmen had been altered in any remarkable manner by tourist
influences during the thirty-two years that have passed since the Lake
poet was laid to rest.

With regard to the latter point, it will be remembered that Mr. Ruskin,
writing in 1876, said that 'the Border peasantry, painted with absolute
fidelity by Scott and Wordsworth,' are, as hitherto, a scarcely injured
race; that in his fields at Coniston he had men who might have fought
with Henry V. at Agincourt without being distinguished from any of his
knights; that he could take his tradesmen's word for a thousand pounds,
and need never latch his garden gate; and that he did not fear
molestation, in wood or on moor, for his girl guests.  Mr. Rawnsley,
however, found that a certain beauty had vanished which the simple
retirement of old valley days fifty years ago gave to the men among whom
Wordsworth lived.  'The strangers,' he says, 'with their gifts of gold,
their vulgarity, and their requirements, have much to answer for.'  As
for their impressions of Wordsworth, to understand them one must
understand the vernacular of the Lake District.  'What was Mr. Wordsworth
like in personal appearance?' said Mr. Rawnsley once to an old retainer,
who still lives not far from Rydal Mount.  'He was a ugly-faaced man, and
a mean liver,' was the answer; but all that was really meant was that he
was a man of marked features, and led a very simple life in matters of
food and raiment.  Another old man, who believed that Wordsworth 'got
most of his poetry out of Hartley,' spoke of the poet's wife as 'a very
onpleasant woman, very onpleasant indeed.  A close-fisted woman, that's
what she was.'  This, however, seems to have been merely a tribute to
Mrs. Wordsworth's admirable housekeeping qualities.

The first person interviewed by Mr. Rawnsley was an old lady who had been
once in service at Rydal Mount, and was, in 1870, a lodging-house keeper
at Grasmere.  She was not a very imaginative person, as may be gathered
from the following anecdote:--Mr. Rawnsley's sister came in from a late
evening walk, and said, 'O Mrs. D---, have you seen the wonderful
sunset?'  The good lady turned sharply round and, drawing herself to her
full height, as if mortally offended, answered: 'No, miss; I'm a tidy
cook, I know, and "they say" a decentish body for a landlady, but I don't
knaw nothing about sunsets or them sort of things, they've never been in
my line.'  Her reminiscence of Wordsworth was as worthy of tradition as
it was explanatory, from her point of view, of the method in which
Wordsworth composed, and was helped in his labours by his enthusiastic
sister.  'Well, you know,' she said, 'Mr. Wordsworth went humming and
booing about, and she, Miss Dorothy, kept close behint him, and she
picked up the bits as he let 'em fall, and tak' 'em down, and put 'em
together on paper for him.  And you may be very well sure as how she
didn't understand nor make sense out of 'em, and I doubt that he didn't
know much about them either himself, but, howivver, there's a great many
folk as do, I dare say.'  Of Wordsworth's habit of talking to himself,
and composing aloud, we hear a great deal.  'Was Mr. Wordsworth a
sociable man?' asked Mr. Rawnsley of a Rydal farmer.  'Wudsworth, for a'
he had noa pride nor nowt,' was the answer, 'was a man who was quite one
to hissel, ye kna.  He was not a man as folks could crack wi', nor not a
man as could crack wi' folks.  But there was another thing as kep' folk
off, he had a ter'ble girt deep voice, and ye might see his faace agaan
for long enuff.  I've knoan folks, village lads and lasses, coming over
by old road above, which runs from Grasmere to Rydal, flayt a'most to
death there by Wishing Gaate to hear the girt voice a groanin' and
mutterin' and thunderin' of a still evening.  And he had a way of
standin' quite still by the rock there in t' path under Rydal, and folks
could hear sounds like a wild beast coming from the rocks, and childer
were scared fit to be dead a'most.'

Wordsworth's description of himself constantly recurs to one:

   And who is he with modest looks,
      And clad in sober russet gown?
   He murmurs by the running brooks,
      A music sweeter than their own;
   He is retired as noontide dew,
   Or fountain in a noonday grove.

But the corroboration comes in strange guise.  Mr. Rawnsley asked one of
the Dalesmen about Wordsworth's dress and habits.  This was the reply:
'Wudsworth wore a Jem Crow, never seed him in a boxer in my life,--a Jem
Crow and an old blue cloak was his rig, and _as for his habits, he had
noan_; niver knew him with a pot i' his hand, or a pipe i' his mouth.  But
he was a great skater, for a' that--noan better in these parts--why, he
could cut his own naame upo' the ice, could Mr. Wudsworth.'  Skating
seems to have been Wordsworth's one form of amusement.  He was 'over
feckless i' his hands'--could not drive or ride--'not a bit of fish in
him,' and 'nowt of a mountaineer.'  But he could skate.  The rapture of
the time when, as a boy, on Esthwaite's frozen lake, he had

      wheeled about,
   Proud and exulting like an untired horse
   That cares not for his home, and, shod with steel,
   Had hissed along the polished ice,

was continued, Mr. Rawnsley tells us, into manhood's later day; and Mr.
Rawnsley found many proofs that the skill the poet had gained, when

   Not seldom from the uproar he retired,
   Into a silent bay, or sportively
   Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
   To cut across the reflex of a star,

was of such a kind as to astonish the natives among whom he dwelt.  The
recollection of a fall he once had, when his skate caught on a stone,
still lingers in the district.  A boy had been sent to sweep the snow
from the White Moss Tarn for him.  'Did Mr. Wudsworth gie ye owt?' he was
asked, when he returned from his labour.  'Na, but I seed him tumlle,
though!' was the answer.  'He was a ter'ble girt skater, was Wudsworth
now,' says one of Mr. Rawnsley's informants; 'he would put one hand i'
his breast (he wore a frill shirt i' them days), and t'other hand i' his
waistband, same as shepherds does to keep their hands warm, and he would
stand up straight and sway and swing away grandly.'

Of his poetry they did not think much, and whatever was good in it they
ascribed to his wife, his sister, and Hartley Coleridge.  He wrote
poetry, they said, 'because he couldn't help it--because it was his
hobby'--for sheer love, and not for money.  They could not understand his
doing work 'for nowt,' and held his occupation in somewhat light esteem
because it did not bring in 'a deal o' brass to the pocket.'  'Did you
ever read his poetry, or see any books about in the farmhouses?' asked
Mr. Rawnsley.  The answer was curious: 'Ay, ay, time or two.  But ya're
weel aware there's potry and potry.  There's potry wi' a li'le bit
pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer
understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what's said,
and a deal of Wudsworth's was this sort, ye kna.  You could tell fra the
man's faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it.  His potry was
quite different work from li'le Hartley.  Hartley 'ud goa running along
beside o' the brooks and mak his, and goa in the first oppen door and
write what he had got upo' paper.  But Wudsworth's potry was real hard
stuff, and bided a deal of makking, and he'd keep it in his head for long
enough.  Eh, but it's queer, mon, different ways folks hes of making
potry now . . . Not but what Mr. Wudsworth didn't stand very high, and
was a well-spoken man enough.'  The best criticism on Wordsworth that Mr.
Rawnsley heard was this: 'He was an open-air man, and a great critic of
trees.'

There are many useful and well-written essays in Professor Knight's
volume, but Mr. Rawnsley's is far the most interesting of all.  It gives
us a graphic picture of the poet as he appeared in outward semblance and
manner to those about whom he wrote.

* * * * *

Mary Myles is Mrs. Edmonds's first attempt at writing fiction.  Mrs.
Edmonds is well known as an authority on modern Greek literature, and her
style has often a very pleasant literary flavour, though in her dialogues
she has not as yet quite grasped the difference between la langue parlee
and la langue ecrite.  Her heroine is a sort of Nausicaa from Girton, who
develops into the Pallas Athena of a provincial school.  She has her love-
romance, like her Homeric prototype, and her Odysseus returns to her at
the close of the book.  It is a nice story.

* * * * *

Lady Dilke's Art in the Modern State is a book that cannot fail to
interest deeply every one who cares either for art or for history.  The
'modern State' which gives its title to the book is that political and
social organisation of our day that comes to us from the France of
Richelieu and Colbert, and is the direct outcome of the 'Grand Siecle,'
the true greatness of which century, as Lady Dilke points out, consists
not in its vain wars, and formal stage and stilted eloquence, and pompous
palaces, but in the formation and working out of the political and social
system of which these things were the first-fruits.  To the question that
naturally rises on one's lips, 'How can one dwell on the art of the
seventeenth century?--it has no charm,' Lady Dilke answers that this art
presents in its organisation, from the point of view of social polity,
problems of the highest intellectual interest.  Throughout all its
phases--to quote her own words--'the life of France wears, during the
seventeenth century, a political aspect.  The explanation of all changes
in the social system, in letters, in the arts, in fashions even, has to
be sought in the necessities of the political position; and the seeming
caprices of taste take their rise from the same causes which went to
determine the making of a treaty or the promulgation of an edict.  This
seems all the stranger because, in times preceding, letters and the arts,
at least, appeared to flourish in conditions as far removed from the
action of statecraft as if they had been a growth of fairyland.  In the
Middle Ages they were devoted to a virgin image of Virtue; they framed,
in the shade of the sanctuary, an ideal shining with the beauty born of
self-renunciation, of resignation to self-enforced conditions of moral
and physical suffering.  By the queenly Venus of the Renaissance they
were consecrated to the joys of life, and the world saw that through
their perfect use men might renew their strength, and behold virtue and
beauty with clear eyes.  It was, however, reserved for the rulers of
France in the seventeenth century fully to realise the political function
of letters and the arts in the modern State, and their immense importance
in connection with the prosperity of a commercial nation.'

The whole subject is certainly extremely fascinating.  The Renaissance
had for its object the development of great personalities.  The perfect
freedom of the temperament in matters of art, the perfect freedom of the
intellect in intellectual matters, the full development of the
individual, were the things it aimed at.  As we study its history we find
it full of great anarchies.  It solved no political or social problems;
it did not seek to solve them.  The ideal of the 'Grand Siecle,' and of
Richelieu, in whom the forces of that great age were incarnate, was
different.  The ideas of citizenship, of the building up of a great
nation, of the centralisation of forces, of collective action, of ethnic
unity of purpose, came before the world.  It was inevitable that they
should have done so, and Lady Dilke, with her keen historic sense and her
wonderful power of grouping facts, has told us the story of their
struggle and their victory.  Her book is, from every point of view, a
most remarkable work.  Her style is almost French in its clearness, its
sobriety, its fine and, at times, ascetic simplicity.  The whole ground-
plan and intellectual-conception is admirable.

It is, of course, easy to see how much Art lost by having a new mission
forced upon her.  The creation of a formal tradition upon classical lines
is never without its danger, and it is sad to find the provincial towns
of France, once so varied and individual in artistic expression, writing
to Paris for designs and advice.  And yet, through Colbert's great
centralising scheme of State supervision and State aid, France was the
one country in Europe, and has remained the one country in Europe, where
the arts are not divorced from industry.  The Academy of Painting and
Sculpture and the School of Architecture were not, to quote Lady Dilke's
words, called into being in order that royal palaces should be raised
surpassing all others in magnificence:

   Bievrebache and the Savonnerie were not established only that such
   palaces should be furnished more sumptuously than those of an Eastern
   fairy-tale.  Colbert did not care chiefly to inquire, when organising
   art administration, what were the institutions best fitted to foster
   the proper interests of art; he asked, in the first place, what would
   most contribute to swell the national importance.  Even so, in
   surrounding the King with the treasures of luxury, his object was
   twofold--their possession should, indeed, illustrate the Crown, but
   should also be a unique source of advantage to the people.
   Glass-workers were brought from Venice, and lace-makers from Flanders,
   that they might yield to France the secrets of their skill.  Palaces
   and public buildings were to afford commissions for French artists,
   and a means of technical and artistic education for all those employed
   upon them.  The royal collections were but a further instrument in
   educating the taste and increasing the knowledge of the working
   classes.  The costly factories of the Savonnerie and the Gobelins were
   practical schools, in which every detail of every branch of all those
   industries which contribute to the furnishing and decoration of houses
   were brought to perfection; whilst a band of chosen apprentices were
   trained in the adjoining schools.  To Colbert is due the honour of
   having foreseen, not only that the interests of the modern State were
   inseparably bound up with those of industry, but also that the
   interests of industry could not, without prejudice, be divorced from
   art.

Mr. Bret Harte has never written anything finer than Cressy.  It is one
of his most brilliant and masterly productions, and will take rank with
the best of his Californian stories.  Hawthorne re-created for us the
America of the past with the incomparable grace of a very perfect artist,
but Mr. Bret Harte's emphasised modernity has, in its own sphere, won
equal, or almost equal, triumphs.  Wit, pathos, humour, realism,
exaggeration, and romance are in this marvellous story all blended
together, and out of the very clash and chaos of these things comes life
itself.  And what a curious life it is, half civilised and half
barbarous, naive and corrupt, chivalrous and commonplace, real and
improbable!  Cressy herself is the most tantalising of heroines.  She is
always eluding one's grasp.  It is difficult to say whether she
sacrifices herself on the altar of romance, or is merely a girl with an
extraordinary sense of humour.  She is intangible, and the more we know
of her, the more incomprehensible she becomes.  It is pleasant to come
across a heroine who is not identified with any great cause, and
represents no important principle, but is simply a wonderful nymph from
American backwoods, who has in her something of Artemis, and not a little
of Aphrodite.

* * * * *

It is always a pleasure to come across an American poet who is not
national, and who tries to give expression to the literature that he
loves rather than to the land in which he lives.  The Muses care so
little for geography!  Mr. Richard Day's Poems have nothing distinctively
American about them.  Here and there in his verse one comes across a
flower that does not bloom in our meadows, a bird to which our woodlands
have never listened.  But the spirit that animates the verse is simple
and human, and there is hardly a poem in the volume that English lips
might not have uttered.  Sounds of the Temple has much in it that is
interesting in metre as well as in matter:--

   Then sighed a poet from his soul:
      'The clouds are blown across the stars,
      And chill have grown my lattice bars;
   I cannot keep my vigil whole
   By the lone candle of my soul.

   'This reed had once devoutest tongue,
      And sang as if to its small throat
      God listened for a perfect note;
   As charily this lyre was strung:
   God's praise is slow and has no tongue.'

But the best poem is undoubtedly the Hymn to the Mountain:--

   Within the hollow of thy hand--
      This wooded dell half up the height,
      Where streams take breath midway in flight--
   Here let me stand.

   Here warbles not a lowland bird,
      Here are no babbling tongues of men;
      Thy rivers rustling through the glen
   Alone are heard.

   Above no pinion cleaves its way,
      Save when the eagle's wing, as now,
      With sweep imperial shades thy brow
   Beetling and grey.

   What thoughts are thine, majestic peak?
      And moods that were not born to chime
      With poets' ineffectual rhyme
   And numbers weak?

   The green earth spreads thy gaze before,
      And the unfailing skies are brought
      Within the level of thy thought.
   There is no more.

   The stars salute thy rugged crown
      With syllables of twinkling fire;
      Like choral burst from distant choir,
   Their psalm rolls down.

   And I within this temple niche,
      Like statue set where prophets talk,
      Catch strains they murmur as they walk,
   And I am rich.

Miss Ella Curtis's A Game of Chance is certainly the best novel that this
clever young writer has as yet produced.  If it has a fault, it is that
it is crowded with too much incident, and often surrenders the study of
character to the development of plot.  Indeed, it has many plots, each of
which, in more economical hands, would have served as the basis of a
complete story.  We have as the central incident the career of a clever
lady's-maid who personifies her mistress, and is welcomed by Sir John
Erskine, an English country gentleman, as the widow of his dead son.  The
real husband of the adventuress tracks his wife to England, and claims
her.  She pretends that he is insane, and has him removed.  Then he tries
to murder her, and when she recovers, she finds her beauty gone and her
secret discovered.  There is quite enough sensation here to interest even
the jaded City man, who is said to have grown quite critical of late on
the subject of what is really a thrilling plot.  But Miss Curtis is not
satisfied.  The lady's-maid has an extremely handsome brother, who is a
wonderful musician, and has a divine tenor voice.  With him the stately
Lady Judith falls wildly in love, and this part of the story is treated
with a great deal of subtlety and clever analysis.  However, Lady Judith
does not marry her rustic Orpheus, so the social convenances are
undisturbed.  The romance of the Rector of the Parish, who falls in love
with a charming school-teacher, is a good deal overshadowed by Lady
Judith's story, but it is pleasantly told.  A more important episode is
the marriage between the daughter of the Tory squire and the Radical
candidate for the borough.  They separate on their wedding-day, and are
not reconciled till the third volume.  No one could say that Miss
Curtis's book is dull.  In fact, her style is very bright and amusing.  It
is impossible, perhaps, not to be a little bewildered by the amount of
characters, and by the crowded incidents; but, on the whole, the scheme
of the construction is clear, and certainly the decoration is admirable.

(1) Wordsworthiana: A Selection from Papers read to the Wordsworth
Society.  Edited by William Knight.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(2) Mary Myles.  By E. M. Edmonds.  (Remington and Co.)

(3) Art in the Modern State.  By Lady Dilke.  (Chapman and Hall.)

(4) Cressy.  By Bret Harte.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(5) Poems.  By Richard Day.  (New York: Cassell and Co.)

(6) A Game of Chance.  By Ella Curtis.  (Hurst and Blackett.)




MR. FROUDE'S BLUE-BOOK


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 13, 1889.)

Blue-books are generally dull reading, but Blue-books on Ireland have
always been interesting.  They form the record of one of the great
tragedies of modern Europe.  In them England has written down her
indictment against herself and has given to the world the history of her
shame.  If in the last century she tried to govern Ireland with an
insolence that was intensified by race hatred and religious prejudice,
she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is
aggravated by good intentions.  The last of these Blue-books, Mr.
Froude's heavy novel, has appeared, however, somewhat too late.  The
society that he describes has long since passed away.  An entirely new
factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this
factor is the Irish-American and his influence.  To mature its powers, to
concentrate its actions, to learn the secret of its own strength and of
England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic.
At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a
strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses.
What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish.  America and
American influence has educated them.  Their first practical leader is an
Irish-American.

But while Mr. Froude's book has no practical relation to modern Irish
politics, and does not offer any solution of the present question, it has
a certain historical value.  It is a vivid picture of Ireland in the
latter half of the eighteenth century, a picture often false in its
lights and exaggerated in its shadows, but a picture none the less.  Mr.
Froude admits the martyrdom of Ireland but regrets that the martyrdom was
not more completely carried out.  His ground of complaint against the
Executioner is not his trade but his bungling.  It is the bluntness not
the cruelty of the sword that he objects to.  Resolute government, that
shallow shibboleth of those who do not understand how complex a thing the
art of government is, is his posthumous panacea for past evils.  His
hero, Colonel Goring, has the words Law and Order ever on his lips,
meaning by the one the enforcement of unjust legislation, and implying by
the other the suppression of every fine national aspiration.  That the
government should enforce iniquity and the governed submit to it, seems
to Mr. Froude, as it certainly is to many others, the true ideal of
political science.  Like most penmen he overrates the power of the sword.
Where England has had to struggle she has been wise.  Where physical
strength has been on her side, as in Ireland, she has been made unwieldy
by that strength.  Her own strong hands have blinded her.  She has had
force but no direction.

There is, of course, a story in Mr. Froude's novel.  It is not simply a
political disquisition.  The interest of the tale, such as it is, centres
round two men, Colonel Goring and Morty Sullivan, the Cromwellian and the
Celt.  These men are enemies by race and creed and feeling.  The first
represents Mr. Froude's cure for Ireland.  He is a resolute 'Englishman,
with strong Nonconformist tendencies,' who plants an industrial colony on
the coast of Kerry, and has deep-rooted objections to that illicit trade
with France which in the last century was the sole method by which the
Irish people were enabled to pay their rents to their absentee landlords.
Colonel Goring bitterly regrets that the Penal Laws against the Catholics
are not rigorously carried out.  He is a '_Police_ at any price' man.

   'And this,' said Goring scornfully, 'is what you call governing
   Ireland, hanging up your law like a scarecrow in the garden till every
   sparrow has learnt to make a jest of it.  Your Popery Acts!  Well, you
   borrowed them from France.  The French Catholics did not choose to
   keep the Hugonots among them, and recalled the Edict of Nantes.  As
   they treated the Hugonots, so you said to all the world that you would
   treat the Papists.  You borrowed from the French the very language of
   your Statute, but they are not afraid to stand by their law, and you
   are afraid to stand by yours.  You let the people laugh at it, and in
   teaching them to despise one law, you teach them to despise all
   laws--God's and man's alike.  I cannot say how it will end; but I can
   tell you this, that you are training up a race with the education
   which you are giving them that will astonish mankind by and bye.'

Mr. Froude's resume of the history of Ireland is not without power though
it is far from being really accurate.  'The Irish,' he tells us, 'had
disowned the facts of life, and the facts of life had proved the
strongest.'  The English, unable to tolerate anarchy so near their
shores, 'consulted the Pope.  The Pope gave them leave to interfere, and
the Pope had the best of the bargain.  For the English brought him in,
and the Irish . . . kept him there.'  England's first settlers were
Norman nobles.  They became more Irish than the Irish, and England found
herself in this difficulty: 'To abandon Ireland would be discreditable,
to rule it as a province would be contrary to English traditions.'  She
then 'tried to rule by dividing,' and failed.  The Pope was too strong
for her.  At last she made her great political discovery.  What Ireland
wanted was evidently an entirely new population 'of the same race and the
same religion as her own.'  The new policy was partly carried out:

   Elizabeth first and then James and then Cromwell replanted the Island,
   introducing English, Scots, Hugonots, Flemings, Dutch, tens of
   thousands of families of vigorous and earnest Protestants, who brought
   their industries along with them.  Twice the Irish . . . tried . . .
   to drive out this new element . . .  They failed. . . . [But] England
   . . . had no sooner accomplished her long task than she set herself to
   work to spoil it again.  She destroyed the industries of her colonists
   by her trade laws.  She set the Bishops to rob them of their religion.
   . . . [As for the gentry,] The purpose for which they had been
   introduced into Ireland was unfulfilled.  They were but alien
   intruders, who did nothing, who were allowed to do nothing.  The time
   would come when an exasperated population would demand that the land
   should be given back to them, and England would then, perhaps, throw
   the gentry to the wolves, in the hope of a momentary peace.  But her
   own turn would follow.  She would be face to face with the old
   problem, either to make a new conquest or to retire with disgrace.

Political disquisitions of this kind, and prophecies after the event, are
found all through Mr. Froude's book, and on almost every second page we
come across aphorisms on the Irish character, on the teachings of Irish
history and on the nature of England's mode of government.  Some of them
represent Mr. Froude's own views, others are entirely dramatic and
introduced for the purpose of characterisation.  We append some
specimens.  As epigrams they are not very felicitous, but they are
interesting from some points of view.

   Irish Society grew up in happy recklessness.  Insecurity added zest to
   enjoyment.

   We Irish must either laugh or cry, and if we went in for crying, we
   should all hang ourselves.

   Too close a union with the Irish had produced degeneracy both of
   character and creed in all the settlements of English.

   We age quickly in Ireland with the whiskey and the broken heads.

   The Irish leaders cannot fight.  They can make the country
   ungovernable, and keep an English army occupied in watching them.

   No nation can ever achieve a liberty that will not be a curse to them,
   except by arms in the field.

   [The Irish] are taught from their cradles that English rule is the
   cause of all their miseries.  They were as ill off under their own
   chiefs; but they would bear from their natural leaders what they will
   not bear from us, and if we have not made their lot more wretched we
   have not made it any better.

   'Patriotism?  Yes!  Patriotism of the Hibernian order.  The country
   has been badly treated, and is poor and miserable.  This is the
   patriot's stock in trade.  Does he want it mended?  Not he.  His own
   occupation would be gone.'

   Irish corruption is the twin-brother of Irish eloquence.

   England will not let us break the heads of our scoundrels; she will
   not break them herself; we are a free country, and must take the
   consequences.

   The functions of the Anglo-Irish Government were to do what ought not
   to be done, and to leave undone what ought to be done.

   The Irish race have always been noisy, useless and ineffectual.  They
   have produced nothing, they have done nothing, which it is possible to
   admire.  What they are, that they have always been, and the only hope
   for them is that their ridiculous Irish nationality should be buried
   and forgotten.

   The Irish are the best actors in the world.

   Order is an exotic in Ireland.  It has been imported from England, but
   it will not grow.  It suits neither soil, nor climate.  If the English
   wanted order in Ireland, they should have left none of us alive.

   When ruling powers are unjust, nature reasserts her rights.

   Even anarchy has its advantages.

   Nature keeps an accurate account. . . .  The longer a bill is left
   unpaid, the heavier the accumulation of interest.

   You cannot live in Ireland without breaking laws on one side or
   another.  Pecca fortiter, therefore, as . . .  Luther said.

   The animal spirits of the Irish remained when all else was gone, and
   if there was no purpose in their lives, they could at least enjoy
   themselves.

   The Irish peasants can make the country hot for the Protestant
   gentleman, but that is all they are fit for.

As we said before, if Mr. Froude intended his book to help the Tory
Government to solve the Irish question he has entirely missed his aim.
The Ireland of which he writes has disappeared.  As a record, however, of
the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own
wish, his book is not without value.  It is dull, but dull books are very
popular at present; and as people have grown a little tired of talking
about Robert Elsmere, they will probably take to discussing The Two
Chiefs of Dunboy.  There are some who will welcome with delight the idea
of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people.  There
are others who will remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries,
and that we have now to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but
in the New.

The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: or An Irish Romance of the Last Century.  By J.
A. Froude.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)




SOME LITERARY NOTES--V


(Woman's World, May 1889.)

Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald's volume of poems, Venetia Victrix, is
dedicated to Mr. Robert Browning, and in the poem that gives its title to
the book it is not difficult to see traces of Mr. Browning's influence.
Venetia Victrix is a powerful psychological study of a man's soul, a
vivid presentation of a terrible, fiery-coloured moment in a marred and
incomplete life.  It is sometimes complex and intricate in expression,
but then the subject itself is intricate and complex.  Plastic simplicity
of outline may render for us the visible aspect of life; it is different
when we come to deal with those secrets which self-consciousness alone
contains, and which self-consciousness itself can but half reveal.  Action
takes place in the sunlight, but the soul works in the dark.

There is something curiously interesting in the marked tendency of modern
poetry to become obscure.  Many critics, writing with their eyes fixed on
the masterpieces of past literature, have ascribed this tendency to
wilfulness and to affectation.  Its origin is rather to be found in the
complexity of the new problems, and in the fact that self-consciousness
is not yet adequate to explain the contents of the Ego.  In Mr.
Browning's poems, as in life itself which has suggested, or rather
necessitated, the new method, thought seems to proceed not on logical
lines, but on lines of passion.  The unity of the individual is being
expressed through its inconsistencies and its contradictions.  In a
strange twilight man is seeking for himself, and when he has found his
own image, he cannot understand it.  Objective forms of art, such as
sculpture and the drama, sufficed one for the perfect presentation of
life; they can no longer so suffice.

The central motive of Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald's psychological poem is
the study of a man who to do a noble action wrecks his own soul, sells it
to evil, and to the spirit of evil.  Many martyrs have for a great cause
sacrificed their physical life; the sacrifice of the spiritual life has a
more poignant and a more tragic note.  The story is supposed to be told
by a French doctor, sitting at his window in Paris one evening:

   How far off Venice seems to-night!  How dim
   The still-remembered sunsets, with the rim
   Of gold round the stone haloes, where they stand,
   Those carven saints, and look towards the land,
   Right Westward, perched on high, with palm in hand,
   Completing the peaked church-front.  Oh how clear
   And dark against the evening splendour!  Steer
   Between the graveyard island and the quay,
   Where North-winds dash the spray on Venice;--see
   The rosy light behind dark dome and tower,
   Or gaunt smoke-laden chimney;--mark the power
   Of Nature's gentleness, in rise or fall
   Of interlinked beauty, to recall
   Earth's majesty in desecration's place,
   Lending yon grimy pile that dream-like face
   Of evening beauty;--note yon rugged cloud,
   Red-rimmed and heavy, drooping like a shroud
   Over Murano in the dying day.
   I see it now as then--so far away!

The face of a boy in the street catches his eye.  He seems to see in it
some likeness to a dead friend.  He begins to think, and at last
remembers a hospital ward in Venice:

      'Twas an April day,
   The year Napoleon's troops took Venice--say
   The twenty-fifth of April.  All alone
   Walking the ward, I heard a sick man moan,
   In tones so piteous, as his heart would break:
   'Lost, lost, and lost again--for Venice' sake!'
   I turned.  There lay a man no longer young,
   Wasted with fever.  I had marked, none hung
   About his bed, as friends, with tenderness,
   And, when the priest went by, he spared to bless,
   Glancing perplexed--perhaps mere sullenness.
   I stopped and questioned: 'What is lost, my friend?'
   'My soul is lost, and now draws near the end.
   My soul is surely lost.  Send me no priest!
   They sing and solemnise the marriage feast
   Of man's salvation in the house of love,
   And I in Hell, and God in Heaven above,
   And Venice safe and fair on earth between--
   No love of mine--mere service--for my Queen.'

He was a seaman, and the tale he tells the doctor before he dies is
strange and not a little terrible.  Wild rage against a foster-brother
who had bitterly wronged him, and who was one of the ten rulers over
Venice, drives him to make a mad oath that on the day when he does
anything for his country's good he will give his soul to Satan.  That
night he sails for Dalmatia, and as he is keeping the watch, he sees a
phantom boat with seven fiends sailing to Venice:

   I heard the fiends' shrill cry: 'For Venice' good!
   Rival thine ancient foe in gratitude,
   Then come and make thy home with us in Hell!'
   I knew it must be so.  I knew the spell
   Of Satan on my soul.  I felt the power
   Granted by God to serve Him one last hour,
   Then fall for ever as the curse had wrought.
   I climbed aloft.  My brain had grown one thought,
   One hope, one purpose.  And I heard the hiss
   Of raging disappointment, loth to miss
   Its prey--I heard the lapping of the flame,
   That through the blanched figures went and came,
   Darting in frenzy to the devils' yell.
   I set that cross on high, and cried: 'To Hell
   My soul for ever, and my deed to God!
   Once Venice guarded safe, let this vile clod
   Drift where fate will.'
         And then (the hideous laugh
   Of fiends in full possession, keen to quaff
   The wine of one new soul not weak with tears,
   Pealing like ruinous thunder in mine ears)
   I fell, and heard no more.  The pale day broke
   Through lazar-windows, when once more I woke,
   Remembering I might no more dare to pray.

The idea of the story is extremely powerful, and Venetia Victrix is
certainly the best poem in the volume--better than Ophelion, which is
vague, and than A Friar's Story, which is pretty but ordinary.  It shows
that we have in Miss Fitz Gerald a new singer of considerable ability and
vigour of mind, and it serves to remind us of the splendid dramatic
possibilities extant in life, which are ready for poetry, and unsuitable
for the stage.  What is really dramatic is not necessarily that which is
fitting for presentation in a theatre.  The theatre is an accident of the
dramatic form.  It is not essential to it.  We have been deluded by the
name of action.  To think is to act.

Of the shorter poems collected here, this Hymn to Persephone is, perhaps,
the best:

   Oh, fill my cup, Persephone,
      With dim red wine of Spring,
         And drop therein a faded leaf
         Plucked from the Autumn's bearded sheaf,
   Whence, dread one, I may quaff to thee,
      While all the woodlands ring.

   Oh, fill my heart, Persephone,
      With thine immortal pain,
         That lingers round the willow bowers
         In memories of old happy hours,
   When thou didst wander fair and free
      O'er Enna's blooming plain.

   Oh, fill my soul, Persephone,
      With music all thine own!
         Teach me some song thy childhood knew,
         Lisped in the meadow's morning dew,
   Or chant on this high windy lea,
      Thy godhead's ceaseless moan.

But this Venetian Song also has a good deal of charm:

   Leaning between carved stone and stone,
      As glossy birds peer from a nest
      Scooped in the crumbling trunk where rest
   Their freckled eggs, I pause alone
         And linger in the light awhile,
            Waiting for joy to come to me--
         Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
            Only the sunlight on the sea.

   I gaze--then turn and ply my loom,
      Or broider blossoms close beside;
      The morning world lies warm and wide,
   But here is dim, cool silent gloom,
         Gold crust and crimson velvet pile,
            And not one face to smile on me--
         Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
            Only the sunlight on the sea.

   Over the world the splendours break
      Of morning light and noontide glow,
      And when the broad red sun sinks low,
   And in the wave long shadows shake,
         Youths, maidens, glad with song and wile,
            Glide and are gone, and leave with me
         Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
            Only the sunlight on the sea.

Darwinism and Politics, by Mr. David Ritchie, of Jesus College, Oxford,
contains some very interesting speculations on the position and the
future of women in the modern State.  The one objection to the equality
of the sexes that he considers deserves serious attention is that made by
Sir James Stephen in his clever attack on John Stuart Mill.  Sir James
Stephen points out in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, that women may
suffer more than they have done, if plunged into a nominally equal but
really unequal contest in the already overcrowded labour market.  Mr.
Ritchie answers that, while the conclusion usually drawn from this
argument is a sentimental reaction in favour of the old family ideal, as,
for instance, in Mr. Besant's books, there is another alternative, and
that is the resettling of the labour question.  'The elevation of the
status of women and the regulation of the conditions of labour are
ultimately,' he says, 'inseparable questions.  On the basis of
individualism, I cannot see how it is possible to answer the objections
of Sir James Stephen.'  Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his Sociology, expresses
his fear that women, if admitted now to political life, might do mischief
by introducing the ethics of the family into the State.  'Under the
ethics of the family the greatest benefits must be given where the merits
are smallest; under the ethics of the State the benefits must be
proportioned to the merits.'  In answer to this, Mr. Ritchie asks whether
in any society we have ever seen people so get benefits in proportion to
their merits, and protests against Mr. Spencer's separation of the ethics
of the family from those of the State.  If something is right in a
family, it is difficult to see why it is therefore, without any further
reason, wrong in the State.  If the participation of women in politics
means that as a good family educates all its members, so must a good
State, what better issue could there be?  The family ideal of the State
may be difficult of attainment, but as an ideal it is better than the
policeman theory.  It would mean the moralisation of politics.  The
cultivation of separate sorts of virtues and separate ideals of duty in
men and women has led to the whole social fabric being weaker and
unhealthier than it need be.  As for the objection that in countries
where it is considered necessary to have compulsory military service for
all men, it would be unjust and inexpedient that women should have a
voice in political matters, Mr. Ritchie meets it, or tries to meet it, by
proposing that all women physically fitted for such purpose should be
compelled to undergo training as nurses, and should be liable to be
called upon to serve as nurses in time of war.  This training, he
remarks, 'would be more useful to them and to the community in time of
peace than his military training is to the peasant or artisan.'  Mr.
Ritchie's little book is extremely suggestive, and full of valuable ideas
for the philosophic student of sociology.

* * * * *

Mr. Alan Cole's lecture on Irish lace, delivered recently before the
Society of Arts, contains some extremely useful suggestions as to the
best method of securing an immediate connection between the art schools
of a country and the country's ordinary manufactures.  In 1883, Mr. Cole
was deputed by the Department of Science and Art to lecture at Cork and
at Limerick on the subject of lace-making, and to give a history of its
rise and development in other countries, as well as a review of the many
kinds of ornamental patterns used from the sixteenth century to modern
times.  In order to make these lectures of practical value, Mr. Cole
placed typical specimens of Irish laces beside Italian, Flemish, and
French laces, which seem to be the prototypes of the lace of Ireland.  The
public interest was immediately aroused.  Some of the newspapers stoutly
maintained that the ornament and patterns of Irish lace were of such a
national character that it was wrong to asperse them on that score.
Others took a different view, and came to the conclusion that Irish lace
could be vastly improved in all respects, if some systematic action could
be taken to induce the lace-makers to work from more intelligently
composed patterns than those in general use.  There was a consensus of
opinion that the workmanship of Irish laces was good, and that it could
be applied to better materials than those ordinarily used, and that its
methods were suited to render a greater variety of patterns than those
usually attempted.

These and other circumstances seem to have prompted the promoters of the
Cork Exhibition to further efforts in the cause of lace-making.  Towards
the close of the year 1883 they made fresh representations to Government,
and inquired what forms of State assistance could be given.  A number of
convents in the neighbourhood of Cork was engaged in giving instruction
to children under their care in lace and crochet making.  At some, rooms
were allotted for the use of grown-up workers who made laces under the
supervision of the nuns.  These convents obviously were centres where
experiments in reform could be tried.  The convents, however, lacked
instruction in the designing of patterns for laces.  An excellent School
of Art was at work at Cork, but the students there had not been
instructed in specially designing for lace.  If the convents with their
workrooms could be brought into relation with this School of Art, it
seemed possible that something of a serious character might be done to
benefit lace-makers, and also to open up a new field in ornamental design
for the students at the School of Art.  The rules of the Department of
Science and Art were found to be adapted to aid in meeting such wants as
those sketched out by the promoters at Cork.  As the nuns in the
different lace-making convents had not been able to attend in Cork to
hear Mr. Cole's lectures, they asked that he should visit them and repeat
them at the convents.  This Mr. Cole did early in 1884, the masters of
the local Schools of Art accompanying him on his visits.  Negotiations
were forthwith opened for connecting the convents with the art schools.
By the end of 1885 some six or seven different lace-making convents had
placed themselves in connection with Schools of Art at Cork and
Waterford.  These convents were attended not only by the nuns but by
outside pupils also; and, at the request of the convents, Mr. Cole has
visited them twice a year, lecturing and giving advice upon designs for
lace.  The composition of new patterns for lace was attempted, and old
patterns which had degenerated were revised and redrawn for the use of
the workers connected with the convents.  There are now twelve convents,
Mr. Cole tells us, where instruction in drawing and in the composition of
patterns is given, and some of the students have won some of the higher
prizes offered by the Department of Science and Art for designing lace-
patterns.

The Cork School of Art then acquired a collection of finely-patterned old
laces, selections from which are freely circulated through the different
convents connected with that school.  They have also the privilege of
borrowing similar specimens of old lace from the South Kensington Museum.
So successful has been the system of education pursued by Mr. Brennan,
the head-master of the Cork School of Art, that two female students of
his school last year gained the gold and silver medals for their designs
for laces and crochets at the national competition which annually takes
place in London between all the Schools of Art in the United Kingdom.  As
for the many lace-makers who were not connected either with the convents
or with the art schools, in order to assist them, a committee of ladies
and gentlemen interested in Irish lace-making raised subscriptions, and
offered prizes to be competed for by designers generally.  The best
designs were then placed out with lace-makers, and carried into
execution.  It is, of course, often said that the proper person to make
the design is the lace-maker.  Mr. Cole, however, points out that from
the sixteenth century forward the patterns for ornamental laces have
always been designed by decorative artists having knowledge of the
composition of ornament, and of the materials for which they were called
upon to design.  Lace pattern books were published in considerable
quantity in Italy, France and Germany during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and from these the lace-makers worked.  Many lace-
makers would, no doubt, derive benefit from practice in drawing, in
discriminating between well and badly shaped forms.  But the skill they
are primarily required to show and to develop is one of fine fingers in
reproducing beautiful forms in threads.  The conception, arrangement, and
drawing of beautiful forms for a design, have to be undertaken by
decorative artists acquainted with the limitations of those materials and
methods which the ultimate expression of the design involves.

This lovely Irish art of lace-making is very much indebted to Mr. Cole,
who has really re-created it, given it new life, and shown it the true
artistic lines on which to progress.  Hardly 20,000 pounds a year is
spent by England upon Irish laces, and almost all of this goes upon the
cheaper and commoner kinds.  And yet, as Mr. Cole points out, it is
possible to produce Irish laces of as high artistic quality as almost any
foreign laces.  The Queen, Lady Londonderry, Lady Dorothy Nevill, Mrs.
Alfred Morrison, and others, have done much to encourage the Irish
workers, and it rests largely with the ladies of England whether this
beautiful art lives or dies.  The real good of a piece of lace, says Mr.
Ruskin, is 'that it should show, first, that the designer of it had a
pretty fancy; next, that the maker of it had fine fingers; lastly, that
the wearer of it has worthiness or dignity enough to obtain what is
difficult to obtain, and common-sense enough not to wear it on all
occasions.'

* * * * *

The High-Caste Hindu Woman is an interesting book.  It is from the pen of
the Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati, and the introduction is written by Miss
Rachel Bodley, M.D., the Dean of the Woman's Medical College of
Pennsylvania.  The story of the parentage of this learned lady is very
curious.  A certain Hindu, being on a religious pilgrimage with his
family, which consisted of his wife and two daughters, one nine and the
other seven years of age, stopped in a town to rest for a day or two.  One
morning the Hindu was bathing in the sacred river Godavari, near the
town, when he saw a fine-looking man coming there to bathe also.  After
the ablution and the morning prayers were over, the father inquired of
the stranger who he was and whence he came.  On learning his caste, and
clan, and dwelling-place, and also that he was a widower, he offered him
his little daughter of nine in marriage.  All things were settled in an
hour or so; next day the marriage was concluded, and the little girl
placed in the possession of the stranger, who took her nearly nine
hundred miles away from her home, and gave her into the charge of his
mother.  The stranger was the learned Ananta Shastri, a Brahman pundit,
who had very advanced views on the subject of woman's education, and he
determined that he would teach his girl-wife Sanskrit, and give her the
intellectual culture that had been always denied to women in India.  Their
daughter was the Pundita Ramabai, who, after the death of her parents,
travelled all over India advocating the cause of female education, and to
whom seems to be due the first suggestion for the establishment of the
profession of women doctors.  In 1866, Miss Mary Carpenter made a short
tour in India for the purpose of finding out some way by which women's
condition in that country might be improved.  She at once discovered that
the chief means by which the desired end could be accomplished was by
furnishing women teachers for the Hindu Zenanas.  She suggested that the
British Government should establish normal schools for training women
teachers, and that scholarships should be awarded to girls in order to
prolong their school-going period, and to assist indigent women who would
otherwise be unable to pursue their studies.

In response to Miss Carpenter's appeal, upon her return to England, the
English Government founded several schools for women in India, and a few
'Mary Carpenter Scholarships' were endowed by benevolent persons.  These
schools were open to women of every caste; but while they have
undoubtedly been of use, they have not realised the hopes of their
founders, chiefly through the impossibility of keeping caste rules in
them.  Ramabai, in a very eloquent chapter, proposes to solve the problem
in a different way.  Her suggestion is that houses should be opened for
the young and high-caste child-widows, where they can take shelter
without the fear of losing their caste, or of being disturbed in their
religious belief, and where they may have entire freedom of action as
regards caste rules.  The whole account given by the Pundita of the life
of the high-caste Hindu lady is full of suggestion for the social
reformer and the student of progress, and her book, which is wonderfully
well written, is likely to produce a radical change in the educational
schemes that at present prevail in India.

(1) Venetia Victrix.  By Caroline Fitz Gerald.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(2) Darwinism and Politics.  By David Ritchie, Jesus College, Oxford.
(Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)

(3) The High-Caste Hindu Woman.  By the Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati.  (Bell
and Sons.)




OUIDA'S NEW NOVEL


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 17, 1889.)

Ouida is the last of the romantics.  She belongs to the school of Bulwer
Lytton and George Sand, though she may lack the learning of the one and
the sincerity of the other.  She tries to make passion, imagination, and
poetry part of fiction.  She still believes in heroes and in heroines.
She is florid and fervent and fanciful.  Yet even she, the high priestess
of the impossible, is affected by her age.  Her last book, Guilderoy as
she calls it, is an elaborate psychological study of modern temperaments.
For her, it is realistic, and she has certainly caught much of the tone
and temper of the society of our day.  Her people move with ease and
grace and indolence.  The book may be described as a study of the peerage
from a poetical point of view.  Those who are tired of mediocre young
curates who have doubts, of serious young ladies who have missions, and
of the ordinary figureheads of most of the English fiction of our time,
might turn with pleasure, if not with profit, to this amazing romance.  It
is a resplendent picture of our aristocracy.  No expense has been spared
in gilding.  For the comparatively small sum of 1 pound, 11s. 6d. one is
introduced to the best society.  The central figures are exaggerated, but
the background is admirable.  In spite of everything, it gives one a
sense of something like life.

What is the story?  Well, we must admit that we have a faint suspicion
that Ouida has told it to us before.  Lord Guilderoy, 'whose name was as
old as the days of Knut,' falls madly in love, or fancies that he falls
madly in love, with a rustic Perdita, a provincial Artemis who has 'a
Gainsborough face, with wide-opened questioning eyes and tumbled auburn
hair.'  She is poor but well-born, being the only child of Mr. Vernon of
Llanarth, a curious recluse, who is half a pedant and half Don Quixote.
Guilderoy marries her and, tiring of her shyness, her lack of power to
express herself, her want of knowledge of fashionable life, returns to an
old passion for a wonderful creature called the Duchess of Soria.  Lady
Guilderoy becomes ice; the Duchess becomes fire; at the end of the book
Guilderoy is a pitiable object.  He has to submit to be forgiven by one
woman, and to endure to be forgotten by the other.  He is thoroughly
weak, thoroughly worthless, and the most fascinating person in the whole
story.  Then there is his sister Lady Sunbury, who is very anxious for
Guilderoy to marry, and is quite determined to hate his wife.  She is
really a capital sketch.  Ouida describes her as 'one of those admirably
virtuous women who are more likely to turn men away from the paths of
virtue than the wickedest of sirens.'  She irritates herself, alienates
her children, and infuriates her husband:

   'You are perfectly right; I know you are always right; I admit you
   are; but it is just that which makes you so damnably odious!' said
   Lord Sunbury once, in a burst of rage, in his town house, speaking in
   such stentorian tones that the people passing up Grosvenor Street
   looked up at his open windows, and a crossing-sweeper said to a match-
   seller, 'My eye! ain't he giving it to the old gal like blazes.'

The noblest character in the book is Lord Aubrey.  As he is not a genius
he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion.  He begins by pitying
the neglected Lady Guilderoy, and ends by loving her, but he makes the
great renunciation with considerable effect, and, having induced Lady
Guilderoy to receive back her husband, he accepts 'a distant and arduous
Viceroyalty.'  He is Ouida's ideal of the true politician, for Ouida has
apparently taken to the study of English politics.  A great deal of her
book is devoted to political disquisitions.  She believes that the proper
rulers of a country like ours are the aristocrats.  Oligarchy has great
fascinations for her.  She thinks meanly of the people and adores the
House of Lords and Lord Salisbury.  Here are some of her views.  We will
not call them ideas:

   The House of Lords wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is
   the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people's needs and
   resources.  It has never withstood the real desire of the country: it
   has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent
   follies.

   A democracy cannot understand honour; how should it?  The Caucus is
   chiefly made up of men who sand their sugar, put alum in their bread,
   forge bayonets and girders which bend like willow-wands, send bad
   calico to India, and insure vessels at Lloyd's which they know will go
   to the bottom before they have been ten days at sea.

   Lord Salisbury has often been accused of arrogance; people have never
   seen that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, candid
   consciousness of a great noble that he is more capable of leading the
   country than most men composing it would be.

   Democracy, after having made everything supremely hideous and
   uncomfortable for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat tails
   of some successful general.

   The prosperous politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a
   questionable quality.  The moment that a thing is a metier, it is
   wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the pursuit of
   it.  To the professional politician national affairs are a manufacture
   into which he puts his audacity and his time, and out of which he
   expects to make so much percentage for his lifetime.

   There is too great a tendency to govern the world by noise.

Ouida's aphorisms on women, love, and modern society are somewhat more
characteristic:

   Women speak as though the heart were to be treated at will like a
   stone, or a bath.
   Half the passions of men die early, because they are expected to be
   eternal.
   It is the folly of life that lends charm to it.
   What is the cause of half the misery of women?  That their love is so
   much more tenacious than the man's: it grows stronger as his grows
   weaker.
   To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity
   of Wordsworth's mind, and boots and stockings as homely.
   It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into
   the habit of saying what is not true.  Wise is the woman who never
   insists on an explanation.
   Love can make its own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot.
   Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous; often even
   polyandrous.
   Moralists say that a soul should resist passion.  They might as well
   say that a house should resist an earthquake.
   The whole world is just now on its knees before the poorer classes:
   all the cardinal virtues are taken for granted in them, and it is only
   property of any kind which is the sinner.
   Men are not merciful to women's tears as a rule; and when it is a
   woman belonging to them who weeps, they only go out, and slam the door
   behind them.
   Men always consider women unjust to them, when they fail to deify
   their weaknesses.
   No passion, once broken, will ever bear renewal.
   Feeling loses its force and its delicacy if we put it under the
   microscope too often.
   Anything which is not flattery seems injustice to a woman.
   When society is aware that you think it a flock of geese, it revenges
   itself by hissing loudly behind your back.

Of descriptions of scenery and art we have, of course, a large number,
and it is impossible not to recognise the touch of the real Ouida manner
in the following:

   It was an old palace: lofty, spacious, magnificent, and dull.  Busts
   of dusky yellow marble, weird bronzes stretching out gaunt arms into
   the darkness, ivories brown with age, worn brocades with gold threads
   gleaming in them, and tapestries with strange and pallid figures of
   dead gods, were all half revealed and half obscured in the twilight.
   As he moved through them, a figure which looked almost as pale as the
   Adonis of the tapestry and was erect and motionless like the statue of
   the wounded Love, came before his sight out of the darkness.  It was
   that of Gladys.

It is a manner full of exaggeration and overemphasis, but with some
remarkable rhetorical qualities and a good deal of colour.  Ouida is fond
of airing a smattering of culture, but she has a certain intrinsic
insight into things and, though she is rarely true, she is never dull.
Guilderoy, with all its faults, which are great, and its absurdities,
which are greater, is a book to be read.

Guilderoy.  By Ouida.  (Chatto and Windus.)




SOME LITERARY NOTES--VI


(Woman's World, June 1889.)

A writer in the Quarterly Review for January 1874 says:

   No literary event since the war has excited anything like such a
   sensation in Paris as the publication of the Lettres a une Inconnue.
   Even politics became a secondary consideration for the hour, and
   academicians or deputies of opposite parties might be seen eagerly
   accosting each other in the Chamber or the street to inquire who this
   fascinating and perplexing 'unknown' could be.  The statement in the
   Revue des Deux Mondes that she was an Englishwoman, moving in
   brilliant society, was not supported by evidence; and M. Blanchard,
   the painter, from whom the publisher received the manuscripts, died
   most provokingly at the very commencement of the inquiry, and made no
   sign.  Some intimate friends of Merimee, rendered incredulous by
   wounded self-love at not having been admitted to his confidence,
   insisted that there was no secret to tell; their hypothesis being that
   the Inconnue was a myth, and the letters a romance, with which some
   petty details of actual life had been interwoven to keep up the
   mystification.

But an artist like Merimee would not have left his work in so unformed a
state, so defaced by repetitions, or with such a want of proportion
between the parts.  The Inconnue was undoubtedly a real person, and her
letters in answer to those of Merimee have just been published by Messrs.
Macmillan under the title of An Author's Love.

Her letters?  Well, they are such letters as she might have written.  'By
the tideless sea at Cannes on a summer day,' says their anonymous author,
'I had fallen asleep, and the plashing of the waves upon the shore had
doubtless made me dream.  When I awoke the yellow paper-covered volumes
of Prosper Merimee's Lettres a une Inconnue lay beside me; I had been
reading the book before I fell asleep, but the answers--had they ever
been written, or had I only dreamed?'  The invention of the love-letters
of a curious and unknown personality, the heroine of one of the great
literary flirtations of our age, was a clever idea, and certainly the
author has carried out his scheme with wonderful success; with such
success indeed that it is said that one of our statesmen, whose name
occurs more than once in the volume, was for a moment completely taken in
by what is really a jeu-d'esprit, the first serious joke perpetrated by
Messrs. Macmillan in their publishing capacity.  Perhaps it is too much
to call it a joke.  It is a fine, delicate piece of fiction, an
imaginative attempt to complete a real romance.  As we had the letters of
the academic Romeo, it was obviously right that we should pretend we had
the answers of the clever and somewhat mondaine Juliet.  Or is it Juliet
herself, in her little Paris boudoir, looking over these two volumes with
a sad, cynical smile?  Well, to be put into fiction is always a tribute
to one's reality.

As for extracts from these fascinating forgeries, the letters should be
read in conjunction with those of Merimee himself.  It is difficult to
judge of them by samples.  We find the Inconnue first in London, probably
in 1840.

   Little (she writes) can you imagine the storm of indignation you
   aroused in me by your remark that your feelings for me were those
   suitable for a fourteen-year-old niece.  Merci.  Anything less like a
   respectable uncle than yourself I cannot well imagine.  The role would
   never suit you, believe me, so do not try it.

   Now in return for your story of the phlegmatic musical animal who
   called forth such stormy devotion in a female breast, and who, himself
   cold and indifferent, was loved to the extent of a watery grave being
   sought by his inamorata as solace for his indifference, let _me_ ask
   the question why the women who torment men with their uncertain
   tempers, drive them wild with jealousy, laugh contemptuously at their
   humble entreaties, and fling their money to the winds, have twice the
   hold upon their affections that the patient, long-suffering, domestic,
   frugal Griseldas have, whose existences are one long penance of
   unsuccessful efforts to please?  Answer this comprehensively, and you
   will have solved a riddle which has puzzled women since Eve asked
   questions in Paradise.

Later on she writes:

   Why should all natures be alike?  It would make the old saws useless
   if they were, and deprive us of one of the truest of them all,
   'Variety is the spice of life.'  How terribly monotonous it would be
   if all the flowers were roses, every woman a queen, and each man a
   philosopher.  My private opinion is that it takes at least six men
   such as one meets every day to make one really valuable one.  I like
   so many men for one particular quality which they possess, and so few
   men for all.  Comprenez-vous?

In another place:

   Is it not a trifle dangerous, this experiment we are trying of a
   friendship in pen and ink and paper?  A letter.  What thing on earth
   more dangerous to confide in?  Written at blood heat, it may reach its
   destination when the recipient's mental thermometer counts zero, and
   the burning words and thrilling sentences may turn to ice and be
   congealed as they are read. . . .  A letter; the most uncertain thing
   in a world of uncertainties, the best or the worst thing devised by
   mortals.

Again:

   Surely it was for you, mon cher, that the description given of a
   friend of mine was originally intended.  He is a trifle cynical, this
   friend, and decidedly pessimistic, and of him it was reported that he
   never believed in anything until he saw it, and then he was convinced
   that it was an optical illusion.  The accuracy of the description
   struck me.

They seem to have loved each other best when they were parted.

   I think I cannot bear it much longer, this incessant quarrelling when
   we meet, and your unkindness during the short time that you are with
   me.  Why not let it all end? it would be better for both of us.  I do
   not love you less when I write these words; if you could know the
   sadness which they echo in my heart you would believe this.  No, I
   think I love you more, but I cannot understand you.  As you have often
   said, our natures must be very different, entirely different; if so,
   what is this curious bond between them?  To me you seem possessed with
   some strange restlessness and morbid melancholy which utterly spoils
   your life, and in return you never see me without overwhelming me with
   reproaches, if not for one thing, for another.  I tell you I cannot,
   will not, bear it longer.  If you love me, then in God's name cease
   tormenting me as well as yourself with these wretched doubts and
   questionings and complaints.  I have been ill, seriously ill, and
   there is nothing to account for my illness save the misery of this
   apparently hopeless state of things existing between us.  You have
   made me weep bitter tears of alternate self-reproach and indignation,
   and finally of complete miserable bewilderment as to this unhappy
   condition of affairs.  Believe me, tears like these are not good to
   mingle with love, they are too bitter, too scorching, they blister
   love's wings and fall too heavily on love's heart.  I feel worn out
   with a dreary sort of hopelessness; if you know a cure for pain like
   this send it to me quickly.

Yet, in the very next letter, she says to him:

   Although I said good-bye to you less than an hour ago, I cannot
   refrain from writing to tell you that a happy calm which seems to
   penetrate my whole being seems also to have wiped out all remembrance
   of the misery and unhappiness which has overwhelmed me lately.  Why
   cannot it always be so, or would life perhaps be then too blessed, too
   wholly happy for it to be life?  I know that you are free to-night,
   will you not write to me, that the first words my eyes fall upon to-
   morrow shall prove that to-day has not been a dream?  Yes, write to
   me.

The letter that immediately follows is one of six words only:

   Let me dream--Let me dream.

In the following there are interesting touches of actuality:

   Did you ever try a cup of tea (the national beverage, by the way) at
   an English railway station?  If you have not, I would advise you, as a
   friend, to continue to abstain!  The names of the American drinks are
   rather against them, the straws are, I think, about the best part of
   them.  You do not tell me what you think of Mr. Disraeli.  I once met
   him at a ball at the Duke of Sutherland's in the long picture gallery
   of Stafford House.  I was walking with Lord Shrewsbury, and without a
   word of warning he stopped and introduced him, mentioning with
   reckless mendacity that I had read every book he had written and
   admired them all, then he coolly walked off and left me standing face
   to face with the great statesman.  He talked to me for some time, and
   I studied him carefully.  I should say he was a man with one steady
   aim: endless patience, untiring perseverance, iron concentration;
   marking out one straight line before him so unbending that despite
   themselves men stand aside as it is drawn straightly and steadily on.
   A man who believes that determination brings strength, strength brings
   endurance, and endurance brings success.  You know how often in his
   novels he speaks of the influence of women, socially, morally, and
   politically, yet his manner was the least interested or deferential in
   talking that I have ever met with in a man of his class.  He certainly
   thought this particular woman of singularly small account, or else the
   brusque and tactless allusion to his books may perhaps have annoyed
   him as it did me; but whatever the cause, when he promptly left me at
   the first approach of a mutual acquaintance, I felt distinctly
   snubbed.  Of the two men, Mr. Gladstone was infinitely more agreeable
   in his manner, he left one with the pleasant feeling of measuring a
   little higher in cubic inches than one did before, than which I know
   no more delightful sensation.  A Paris, bientot.

Elsewhere, we find cleverly-written descriptions of life in Italy, in
Algiers, at Hombourg, at French boarding-houses; stories about Napoleon
III., Guizot, Prince Gortschakoff, Montalembert, and others; political
speculations, literary criticisms, and witty social scandal; and
everywhere a keen sense of humour, a wonderful power of observation.  As
reconstructed in these letters, the Inconnue seems to have been not
unlike Merimee himself.  She had the same restless, unyielding,
independent character.  Each desired to analyse the other.  Each, being a
critic, was better fitted for friendship than for love.  'We are so
different,' said Merimee once to her, 'that we can hardly understand each
other.'  But it was because they were so alike that each remained a
mystery to the other.  Yet they ultimately attained to a high altitude of
loyal and faithful friendship, and from a purely literary point of view
these fictitious letters give the finishing touch to the strange romance
that so stirred Paris fifteen years ago.  Perhaps the real letters will
be published some day.  When they are, how interesting to compare them!

The Bird-Bride, by Graham R. Tomson, is a collection of romantic ballads,
delicate sonnets, and metrical studies in foreign fanciful forms.  The
poem that gives its title to the book is the lament of an Eskimo hunter
over the loss of his wife and children.

   Years agone, on the flat white strand,
      I won my sweet sea-girl:
   Wrapped in my coat of the snow-white fur,
   I watched the wild birds settle and stir,
      The grey gulls gather and whirl.

   One, the greatest of all the flock,
      Perched on an ice-floe bare,
   Called and cried as her heart were broke,
   And straight they were changed, that fleet bird-folk,
      To women young and fair.

   Swift I sprang from my hiding-place
      And held the fairest fast;
   I held her fast, the sweet, strange thing:
   Her comrades skirled, but they all took wing,
      And smote me as they passed.

   I bore her safe to my warm snow house;
      Full sweetly there she smiled;
   And yet, whenever the shrill winds blew,
   She would beat her long white arms anew,
      And her eyes glanced quick and wild.

   But I took her to wife, and clothed her warm
      With skins of the gleaming seal;
   Her wandering glances sank to rest
   When she held a babe to her fair, warm breast,
      And she loved me dear and leal.

   Together we tracked the fox and the seal,
      And at her behest I swore
   That bird and beast my bow might slay
   For meat and for raiment, day by day,
      But never a grey gull more.

Famine comes upon the land, and the hunter, forgetting his oath, slays
four sea-gulls for food.  The bird-wife 'shrilled out in a woful cry,'
and taking the plumage of the dead birds, she makes wings for her
children and for herself, and flies away with them.

   'Babes of mine, of the wild wind's kin,
      Feather ye quick, nor stay.
   Oh, oho! but the wild winds blow!
   Babes of mine, it is time to go:
      Up, dear hearts, and away!'

   And lo! the grey plumes covered them all,
      Shoulder and breast and brow.
   I felt the wind of their whirling flight:
   Was it sea or sky? was it day or night?
      It is always night-time now.

   Dear, will you never relent, come back?
      I loved you long and true.
   O winged white wife, and our children three,
   Of the wild wind's kin though you surely be,
      Are ye not of my kin too?

   Ay, ye once were mine, and, till I forget,
      Ye are mine forever and aye,
   Mine, wherever your wild wings go,
   While shrill winds whistle across the snow
      And the skies are blear and grey.

Some powerful and strong ballads follow, many of which, such as The Cruel
Priest, Deid Folks' Ferry, and Marchen, are in that curious combination
of Scotch and Border dialect so much affected now by our modern poets.
Certainly dialect is dramatic.  It is a vivid method of re-creating a
past that never existed.  It is something between 'A Return to Nature'
and 'A Return to the Glossary.'  It is so artificial that it is really
naive.  From the point of view of mere music, much may be said for it.
Wonderful diminutives lend new notes of tenderness to the song.  There
are possibilities of fresh rhymes, and in search for a fresh rhyme poets
may be excused if they wander from the broad highroad of classical
utterance into devious byways and less-trodden paths.  Sometimes one is
tempted to look on dialect as expressing simply the pathos of
provincialisms, but there is more in it than mere mispronunciations.  With
the revival of an antique form, often comes the revival of an antique
spirit.  Through limitations that are sometimes uncouth, and always
narrow, comes Tragedy herself; and though she may stammer in her
utterance, and deck herself in cast-off weeds and trammelling raiment,
still we must hold ourselves in readiness to accept her, so rare are her
visits to us now, so rare her presence in an age that demands a happy
ending from every play, and that sees in the theatre merely a source of
amusement.  The form, too, of the ballad--how perfect it is in its
dramatic unity!  It is so perfect that we must forgive it its dialect, if
it happens to speak in that strange tongue.

   Then by cam' the bride's company
      Wi' torches burning bright.
   'Tak' up, tak' up your bonny bride
      A' in the mirk midnight!'

   Oh, wan, wan was the bridegroom's face
      And wan, wan was the bride,
   But clay-cauld was the young mess-priest
      That stood them twa beside!

   Says, 'Rax me out your hand, Sir Knight,
      And wed her wi' this ring';
   And the deid bride's hand it was as cauld
      As ony earthly thing.

   The priest he touched that lady's hand,
      And never a word he said;
   The priest he touched that lady's hand,
      And his ain was wet and red.

   The priest he lifted his ain right hand,
      And the red blood dripped and fell.
   Says, 'I loved ye, lady, and ye loved me;
      Sae I took your life mysel'.'

   . . . . .

   Oh! red, red was the dawn o' day,
      And tall was the gallows-tree:
   The Southland lord to his ain has fled
      And the mess-priest's hangit hie!

Of the sonnets, this To Herodotus is worth quoting:

   Far-travelled coaster of the midland seas,
      What marvels did those curious eyes behold!
      Winged snakes, and carven labyrinths of old;
   The emerald column raised to Heracles;
   King Perseus' shrine upon the Chemmian leas;
      Four-footed fishes, decked with gems and gold:
      But thou didst leave some secrets yet untold,
   And veiled the dread Osirian mysteries.

   And now the golden asphodels among
      Thy footsteps fare, and to the lordly dead
      Thou tellest all the stories left unsaid
   Of secret rites and runes forgotten long,
      Of that dark folk who ate the Lotus-bread
   And sang the melancholy Linus-song.

Mrs. Tomson has certainly a very refined sense of form.  Her verse,
especially in the series entitled New Words to Old Tunes, has grace and
distinction.  Some of the shorter poems are, to use a phrase made
classical by Mr. Pater, 'little carved ivories of speech.'  She is one of
our most artistic workers in poetry, and treats language as a fine
material.

(1) An Author's Love: Being the Unpublished Letters of Prosper Merimee's
'Inconnue.'  (Macmillan and Co.)

(2) The Bird-Bride: A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets.  By Graham R.
Tomson.  (Longmans, Green and Co.)




A THOUGHT-READER'S NOVEL


(Pall Mall Gazette, June 5, 1889.)

There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards.
The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins
with the catastrophe or the denoument one feels on pleasant terms of
equality with the author.  It is like going behind the scenes of a
theatre.  One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the
hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved.
One knows the jealously-guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at
the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider
it their duty to display.  In the case of Mr. Stuart Cumberland's novel,
The Vasty Deep, as he calls it, the last page is certainly thrilling and
makes us curious to know more about 'Brown, the medium.'

Scene, a padded room in a mad-house in the United States.

A gibbering lunatic discovered dashing wildly about the chamber as if in
the act of chasing invisible forms.

'This is our worst case,' says a doctor opening the cell to one of the
visitors in lunacy.  'He was a spirit medium and he is hourly haunted by
the creations of his fancy.  We have to carefully watch him, for he has
developed suicidal tendencies.'

The lunatic makes a dash at the retreating form of his visitors, and, as
the door closes upon him, sinks with a yell upon the floor.

A week later the lifeless body of Brown, the medium, is found suspended
from the gas bracket in his cell.

How clearly one sees it all!  How forcible and direct the style is!  And
what a thrilling touch of actuality the simple mention of the 'gas
bracket' gives us!  Certainly The Vasty Deep is a book to be read.

And we have read it; read it with great care.  Though it is largely
autobiographical, it is none the less a work of fiction and, though some
of us may think that there is very little use in exposing what is already
exposed and revealing the secrets of Polichinelle, no doubt there are
many who will be interested to hear of the tricks and deceptions of
crafty mediums, of their gauze masks, telescopic rods and invisible silk
threads, and of the marvellous raps they can produce simply by displacing
the peroneus longus muscle!  The book opens with a description of the
scene by the death-bed of Alderman Parkinson.  Dr. Josiah Brown, the
eminent medium, is in attendance and tries to comfort the honest merchant
by producing noises on the bedpost.  Mr. Parkinson, however, being
extremely anxious to revisit Mrs. Parkinson, in a materialised form after
death, will not be satisfied till he has received from his wife a solemn
promise that she will not marry again, such a marriage being, in his
eyes, nothing more nor less than bigamy.  Having received an assurance to
this effect from her, Mr. Parkinson dies, his soul, according to the
medium, being escorted to the spheres by 'a band of white-robed spirits.'
This is the prologue.  The next chapter is entitled 'Five Years After.'
Violet Parkinson, the Alderman's only child, is in love with Jack Alston,
who is 'poor, but clever.'  Mrs. Parkinson, however, will not hear of any
marriage till the deceased Alderman has materialised himself and given
his formal consent.  A seance is held at which Jack Alston unmasks the
medium and shows Dr. Josiah Brown to be an impostor--a foolish act, on
his part, as he is at once ordered to leave the house by the infuriated
Mrs. Parkinson, whose faith in the Doctor is not in the least shaken by
the unfortunate exposure.

The lovers are consequently parted.  Jack sails for Newfoundland, is
shipwrecked and carefully, somewhat too carefully, tended by 'La-ki-wa,
or the Star that shines,' a lovely Indian maiden who belongs to the tribe
of the Micmacs.  She is a fascinating creature who wears 'a necklace
composed of thirteen nuggets of pure gold,' a blanket of English
manufacture and trousers of tanned leather.  In fact, as Mr. Stuart
Cumberland observes, she looks 'the embodiment of fresh dewy morn.'  When
Jack, on recovering his senses, sees her, he naturally inquires who she
is.  She answers, in the simple utterance endeared to us by Fenimore
Cooper, 'I am La-ki-wa.  I am the only child of my father, Tall Pine,
chief of the Dildoos.'  She talks, Mr. Cumberland informs us, very good
English.  Jack at once entrusts her with the following telegram which he
writes on the back of a five-pound note:--

   Miss Violet Parkinson, Hotel Kronprinz, Franzensbad, Austria.--Safe.
   JACK.

But La-ki-wa, we regret to say, says to herself, 'He belongs to Tall
Pine, to the Dildoos, and to me,' and never sends the telegram.
Subsequently, La-ki-wa proposes to Jack who promptly rejects her and,
with the usual callousness of men, offers her a brother's love.  La-ki-wa,
naturally, regrets the premature disclosure of her passion and weeps.  'My
brother,' she remarks, 'will think that I have the timid heart of a deer
with the crying voice of a papoose.  I, the daughter of Tall Pine--I a
Micmac, to show the grief that is in my heart.  O, my brother, I am
ashamed.'  Jack comforts her with the hollow sophistries of a civilised
being and gives her his photograph.  As he is on his way to the steamer
he receives from Big Deer a soiled piece of a biscuit bag.  On it is
written La-ki-wa's confession of her disgraceful behaviour about the
telegram.  'His thoughts,' Mr. Cumberland tells us, 'were bitter towards
La-ki-wa, but they gradually softened when he remembered what he owed
her.'

Everything ends happily.  Jack arrives in England just in time to prevent
Dr. Josiah Brown from mesmerising Violet whom the cunning doctor is
anxious to marry, and he hurls his rival out of the window.  The victim
is discovered 'bruised and bleeding among the broken flower-pots' by a
comic policeman.  Mrs. Parkinson still believes in spiritualism, but
refuses to have anything to do with Brown as she discovers that the
deceased Alderman's 'materialised beard' was made only of 'horrid, coarse
horsehair.'  Jack and Violet are married at last and Jack is horrid
enough to send to 'La-ki-wa' another photograph.  The end of Dr. Brown is
chronicled above.  Had we not known what was in store for him we should
hardly have got through the book.  There is a great deal too much padding
in it about Dr. Slade and Dr. Bartram and other mediums, and the
disquisitions on the commercial future of Newfoundland seem endless and
are intolerable.  However, there are many publics, and Mr. Stuart
Cumberland is always sure of an audience.  His chief fault is a tendency
to low comedy; but some people like low comedy in fiction.

The Vasty Deep: A Strange Story of To-day.  By Stuart Cumberland.
(Sampson Low and Co.)




THE POETS' CORNER--X


(Pall Mall Gazette, June 24, 1889.)

Is Mr. Alfred Austin among the Socialists?  Has somebody converted the
respectable editor of the respectable National Review?  Has even dulness
become revolutionary?  From a poem in Mr. Austin's last volume this would
seem to be the case.  It is perhaps unfair to take our rhymers too
seriously.  Between the casual fancies of a poet and the callous facts of
prose there is, or at least there should be, a wide difference.  But
since the poem in question, Two Visions, as Mr. Austin calls it, was
begun in 1863 and revised in 1889 we may regard it as fully
representative of Mr. Austin's mature views.  He gives us, at any rate,
in its somewhat lumbering and pedestrian verses, his conception of the
perfect state:

   Fearless, unveiled, and unattended
      Strolled maidens to and fro:
   Youths looked respect, but never bended
      Obsequiously low.

   And each with other, sans condition,
      Held parley brief or long,
   Without provoking _coarse suspicion
      Of marriage_, or of wrong.

   All were well clad, and none were better,
      And gems beheld I none,
   Save where there hung a jewelled fetter,
      Symbolic, in the sun.

   I saw a noble-looking maiden
      Close Dante's solemn book,
   And go, with crate of linen laden
      And wash it in the brook.

   Anon, a broad-browed _poet, dragging
      A load of logs along_,
   To warm his hearth, withal not flagging
      In current of his song.

   Each one some handicraft attempted
      Or helped to till the soil:
   None but the aged were exempted
      From communistic toil.

Such an expression as 'coarse suspicion of marriage' is not very
fortunate; the log-rolling poet of the fifth stanza is an ideal that we
have already realised and one in which we had but little comfort, and the
fourth stanza leaves us in doubt whether Mr. Austin means that
washerwomen are to take to reading Dante, or that students of Italian
literature are to wash their own clothes.  But, on the whole, though Mr.
Austin's vision of the citta divina of the future is not very
inspiriting, it is certainly extremely interesting as a sign of the
times, and it is evident from the two concluding lines of the following
stanzas that there will be no danger of the intellect being overworked:

   Age lorded not, nor rose the hectic
      Up to the cheek of youth;
   But reigned throughout their dialectic
      Sobriety of truth.

   And if a long-held contest tended
      To ill-defined result,
   _It was by calm consent suspended
      As over-difficult_.

Mr. Austin, however, has other moods, and, perhaps, he is at his best
when he is writing about flowers.  Occasionally he wearies the reader by
tedious enumerations of plants, lacking indeed reticence and tact and
selection in many of his descriptions, but, as a rule, he is very
pleasant when he is babbling of green fields.  How pretty these stanzas
from the dedication are!

   When vines, just newly burgeoned, link
      Their hands to join the dance of Spring,
   Green lizards glisten from cleft and chink,
   And almond blossoms rosy pink
      Cluster and perch, ere taking wing;

   Where over strips of emerald wheat
      Glimmer red peach and snowy pear,
   And nightingales all day long repeat
   Their love-song, not less glad than sweet
      They chant in sorrow and gloom elsewhere;

   Where purple iris-banners scale
      Defending walls and crumbling ledge,
   And virgin windflowers, lithe and frail,
   Now mantling red, now trembling pale,
      Peep out from furrow and hide in hedge.

Some of the sonnets also (notably, one entitled When Acorns Fall) are
very charming, and though, as a whole, Love's Widowhood is tedious and
prolix, still it contains some very felicitous touches.  We wish,
however, that Mr. Austin would not write such lines as

   Pippins of every sort, and _codlins manifold_.

'Codlins manifold' is a monstrous expression.

Mr. W. J. Linton's fame as a wood-engraver has somewhat obscured the
merits of his poetry.  His Claribel and Other Poems, published in 1865,
is now a scarce book, and far more scarce is the collection of lyrics
which he printed in 1887 at his own press and brought out under the title
of Love-Lore.  The large and handsome volume that now lies before us
contains nearly all these later poems as well as a selection from
Claribel and many renderings, in the original metre, of French poems
ranging from the thirteenth century to our own day.  A portrait of Mr.
Linton is prefixed, and the book is dedicated 'To William Bell Scott, my
friend for nearly fifty years.'  As a poet Mr. Linton is always fanciful
with a studied fancifulness, and often felicitous with a chance felicity.
He is fascinated by our seventeenth-century singers, and has, here and
there, succeeded in catching something of their quaintness and not a
little of their charm.  There is a pleasant flavour about his verse.  It
is entirely free from violence and from vagueness, those two besetting
sins of so much modern poetry.  It is clear in outline and restrained in
form, and, at its best, has much that is light and lovely about it.  How
graceful, for instance, this is!

   BARE FEET

   O fair white feet!  O dawn-white feet
      Of Her my hope may claim!
   Bare-footed through the dew she came
      Her Love to meet.

   Star-glancing feet, the windflowers sweet
      Might envy, without shame,
   As through the grass they lightly came,
      Her Love to meet.

   O Maiden sweet, with flower-kiss'd feet!
      My heart your footstool name!
   Bare-footed through the dew she came,
      Her Love to meet.

'Vindicate Gemma!' was Longfellow's advice to Miss Heloise Durant when
she proposed to write a play about Dante.  Longfellow, it may be
remarked, was always on the side of domesticity.  It was the secret of
his popularity.  We cannot say, however, that Miss Durant has made us
like Gemma better.  She is not exactly the Xantippe whom Boccaccio
describes, but she is very boring, for all that:

   GEMMA.  The more thou meditat'st, more mad art thou.
   Clowns, with their love, can cheer poor wives' hearts more
   O'er black bread and goat's cheese than thou canst mine
   O'er red Vernaccia, spite of all thy learning!
   Care I how tortured spirits feel in hell?
   DANTE.  Thou tortur'st mine.
   GEMMA.  Or how souls sing in heaven?
   DANTE.  Would I were there.
   GEMMA.  All folly, naught but folly.
   DANTE.  Thou canst not understand the mandates given
   To poets by their goddess Poesy. . . .
   GEMMA.  Canst ne'er speak prose?  Why daily clothe thy thoughts
   In strangest garb, as if thy wits played fool
   At masquerade, where no man knows a maid
   From matron?  Fie on poets' mutterings!
   DANTE (to himself).  If, then, the soul absorbed at last to whole--
   GEMMA.  Fie! fie!  I say.  Art thou bewitched?
   DANTE.  O! peace.
   GEMMA.  Dost thou deem me deaf and dumb?
   DANTE.  O! that thou wert.

Dante is certainly rude, but Gemma is dreadful.  The play is well meant
but it is lumbering and heavy, and the blank verse has absolutely no
merit.

Father O'Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics, by Mr. A. P. Graves, is a
collection of poems in the style of Lover.  Most of them are written in
dialect, and, for the benefit of English readers, notes are appended in
which the uninitiated are informed that 'brogue' means a boot, that
'mavourneen' means my dear, and that 'astore' is a term of affection.
Here is a specimen of Mr. Graves's work:

   'Have you e'er a new song,
      My Limerick Poet,
   To help us along
      Wid this terrible boat,
   Away over to Tork?'
      'Arrah I understand;
   For all of your work,
      'Twill tighten you, boys,
   To cargo that sand
   To the overside strand,
      Wid the current so strong
      Unless you've a song--
   A song to lighten and brighten you, boys. . . . '

It is a very dreary production and does not 'lighten and brighten' us a
bit.  The whole volume should be called The Lucubrations of a Stage
Irishman.

The anonymous author of The Judgment of the City is a sort of bad Blake.
So at least his prelude seems to suggest:

      Time, the old viol-player,
      For ever thrills his ancient strings
   With the flying bow of Fate, and thence
   Much discord, but some music, brings.

      His ancient strings are truth,
      Love, hate, hope, fear;
      And his choicest melody
      Is the song of the faithful seer.

As he progresses, however, he develops into a kind of inferior Clough and
writes heavy hexameters upon modern subjects:

   Here for a moment stands in the light at the door of a playhouse,
   One who is dignified, masterly, hard in the pride of his station;
   Here too, the stateliest of matrons, sour in the pride of her station;
   With them their daughter, sad-faced and listless, half-crushed to
   their likeness.

He has every form of sincerity except the sincerity of the artist, a
defect that he shares with most of our popular writers.

(1) Love's Widowhood and Other Poems.  By Alfred Austin.  (Macmillan and
Co.)

(2) Poems and Translations.  By W. J. Linton.  (Nimmo.)

(3) Dante: a Dramatic Poem.  By Heloise Durant.  (Kegan Paul.)

(4) Father O'Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics.  By A. P. Graves.  (Swan
Sonnenschein and Co.)

(5) The Judgment of the City and Other Poems.  (Swan Sonnenschein and
Co.)




MR. SWINBURNE'S LAST VOLUME


(Pall Mall Gazette, June 27, 1889.)

Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and
very poisonous poetry.  Then he became revolutionary and pantheistic, and
cried out against those that sit in high places both in heaven and on
earth.  Then he invented Marie Stuart and laid upon us the heavy burden
of Bothwell.  Then he retired to the nursery and wrote poems about
children of a somewhat over-subtle character.  He is now extremely
patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection
for the Tory party.  He has always been a great poet.  But he has his
limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, the entire lack of
any sense of limit.  His song is nearly always too loud for his subject.
His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume
that now lies before us, conceals rather than reveals.  It has been said
of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still
greater truth it may be said that Language is his master.  Words seem to
dominate him.  Alliteration tyrannises over him.  Mere sound often
becomes his lord.  He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes
unreal.

Let us turn to the poem on the Armada:

   The wings of the south-west wind are widened; the breath of his
   fervent lips,
   More keen than a sword's edge, fiercer than fire, falls full on the
   plunging ships.
   The pilot is he of the northward flight, their stay and their
   steersman he;
   A helmsman clothed with the tempest, and girdled with strength to
   constrain the sea.
   And the host of them trembles and quails, caught fast in his hand as a
   bird in the toils;
   For the wrath and the joy that fulfil him are mightier than man's,
   whom he slays and spoils.
   And vainly, with heart divided in sunder, and labour of wavering will,
   The lord of their host takes counsel with hope if haply their star
   shine still.

Somehow we seem to have heard all this before.  Does it come from the
fact that of all the poets who ever lived Mr. Swinburne is the one who is
the most limited in imagery?  It must be admitted that he is so.  He has
wearied us with his monotony.  'Fire' and the 'Sea' are the two words
ever on his lips.  We must confess also that this shrill
singing--marvellous as it is--leaves us out of breath.  Here is a passage
from a poem called A Word with the Wind:

   Be the sunshine bared or veiled, the sky superb or shrouded,
      Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and foiled,
   Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed with fire or clouded,
      Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents coiled.
   Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with wrath and weary,
      Blown for ever back by winds that rock the bird:
   Winds that seamews breast subdue the sea, and bid the dreary
      Waves be weak as hearts made sick with hope deferred.
   Let the clarion sound from westward, let the south bear token
      How the glories of thy godhead sound and shine:
   Bid the land rejoice to see the land-wind's broad wings broken,
      Bid the sea take comfort, bid the world be thine.

Verse of this kind may be justly praised for the sustained strength and
vigour of its metrical scheme.  Its purely technical excellence is
extraordinary.  But is it more than an oratorical tour de force?  Does it
really convey much?  Does it charm?  Could we return to it again and
again with renewed pleasure?  We think not.  It seems to us empty.

Of course, we must not look to these poems for any revelation of human
life.  To be at one with the elements seems to be Mr. Swinburne's aim.  He
seeks to speak with the breath of wind and wave.  The roar of the fire is
ever in his ears.  He puts his clarion to the lips of Spring and bids her
blow, and the Earth wakes from her dreams and tells him her secret.  He
is the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of
his own personality, and he has succeeded.  We hear the song, but we
never know the singer.  We never even get near to him.  Out of the
thunder and splendour of words he himself says nothing.  We have often
had man's interpretation of Nature; now we have Nature's interpretation
of man, and she has curiously little to say.  Force and Freedom form her
vague message.  She deafens us with her clangours.

But Mr. Swinburne is not always riding the whirlwind and calling out of
the depths of the sea.  Romantic ballads in Border dialect have not lost
their fascination for him, and this last volume contains some very
splendid examples of this curious artificial kind of poetry.  The amount
of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament.
To say 'mither' instead of 'mother' seems to many the acme of romance.
There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of
provincialisms.  There is, however, no doubt of Mr. Swinburne's mastery
over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not.  The Weary
Wedding has the concentration and colour of a great drama, and the
quaintness of its style lends it something of the power of a grotesque.
The ballad of The Witch-Mother, a mediaeval Medea who slays her children
because her lord is faithless, is worth reading on account of its
horrible simplicity.  The Bride's Tragedy, with its strange refrain of

   In, in, out and in,
   Blaws the wind and whirls the whin:

The Jacobite's Exile--

   O lordly flow the Loire and Seine,
      And loud the dark Durance:
   But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne
      Than a' the fields of France;
   And the waves of Till that speak sae still
   Gleam goodlier where they glance:

The Tyneside Widow and A Reiver's Neck-verse are all poems of fine
imaginative power, and some of them are terrible in their fierce
intensity of passion.  There is no danger of English poetry narrowing
itself to a form so limited as the romantic ballad in dialect.  It is of
too vital a growth for that.  So we may welcome Mr. Swinburne's masterly
experiments with the hope that things which are inimitable will not be
imitated.  The collection is completed by a few poems on children, some
sonnets, a threnody on John William Inchbold, and a lovely lyric entitled
The Interpreters.

   In human thought have all things habitation;
      Our days
   Laugh, lower, and lighten past, and find no station
      That stays.
   But thought and faith are mightier things than time
      Can wrong,
   Made splendid once by speech, or made sublime
      By song.
   Remembrance, though the tide of change that rolls
      Wax hoary,
   Gives earth and heaven, for song's sake and the soul's,
      Their glory.

Certainly, 'for song's sake' we should love Mr. Swinburne's work, cannot,
indeed, help loving it, so marvellous a music-maker is he.  But what of
the soul?  For the soul we must go elsewhere.

Poems and Ballads.  Third Series.  By Algernon Charles Swinburne.  (Chatto
and Windus.)




THREE NEW POETS


(Pall Mall Gazette, July 12, 1889.)

Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are
never met.  Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so
far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating
temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author.  Such
a book Mr. Yeats's Wanderings of Oisin certainly is.  Here we find
nobility of treatment and nobility of subject-matter, delicacy of poetic
instinct and richness of imaginative resource.  Unequal and uneven much
of the work must be admitted to be.  Mr. Yeats does not try to 'out-baby'
Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in
'out-glittering' Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across
strange crudities and irritating conceits.  But when he is at his best he
is very good.  If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he
has at least something of the largeness of vision that belongs to the
epical temper.  He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of
Celtic mythology.  He is very naive and very primitive and speaks of his
giants with the air of a child.  Here is a characteristic passage from
the account of Oisin's return from the Island of Forgetfulness:

   And I rode by the plains of the sea's edge, where all is barren and
   grey,
   Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
   Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
   Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

   Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,
   Snatching the bird in secret, nor knew I, embosomed apart,
   When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,
   For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my
   heart.

   Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
   Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
   Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
   From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-winds
   brown.

   If I were as I once was, the gold hooves crushing the sand and the
   shells,
   Coming forth from the sea like the morning with red lips murmuring a
   song,
   Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the
   bells,
   I would leave no Saint's head on his body, though spacious his lands
   were and strong.

   Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path,
   Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattle and woodwork made,
   Thy bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the
   earth,
   And a small and feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade.

In one or two places the music is faulty, the construction is sometimes
too involved, and the word 'populace' in the last line is rather
infelicitous; but, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel in
these stanzas the presence of the true poetic spirit.

A young lady who seeks for a 'song surpassing sense,' and tries to
reproduce Mr. Browning's mode of verse for our edification, may seem to
be in a somewhat parlous state.  But Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald's work is
better than her aim.  Venetia Victrix is in many respects a fine poem.  It
shows vigour, intellectual strength, and courage.  The story is a strange
one.  A certain Venetian, hating one of the Ten who had wronged him and
identifying his enemy with Venice herself, abandons his native city and
makes a vow that, rather than lift a hand for her good, he will give his
soul to Hell.  As he is sailing down the Adriatic at night, his ship is
suddenly becalmed and he sees a huge galley

      where sate
   Like counsellors on high, exempt, elate,
   The fiends triumphant in their fiery state,

on their way to Venice.  He has to choose between his own ruin and the
ruin of his city.  After a struggle, he determines to sacrifice himself
to his rash oath.

   I climbed aloft.  My brain had grown one thought,
   One hope, one purpose.  And I heard the hiss
   Of raging disappointment, loth to miss
   Its prey--I heard the lapping of the flame,
   That through the blenched figures went and came,
   Darting in frenzy to the devils' yell.
   I set that cross on high, and cried: 'To hell
   My soul for ever, and my deed to God!
   Once Venice guarded safe, let this vile clod
   Drift where fate will!'
         And then (the hideous laugh
   Of fiends in full possession, keen to quaff
   The wine of one new soul not weak with tears,
   Pealing like ruinous thunder in mine ears)
   I fell, and heard no more.  The pale day broke
   Through lazar-windows, when once more I woke,
   Remembering I might no more dare to pray.

Venetia Victrix is followed by Ophelion, a curious lyrical play whose
dramatis personae consist of Night, Death, Dawn and a Scholar.  It is
intricate rather than musical, but some of the songs are graceful--notably
one beginning

   Lady of heaven most pure and holy,
      Artemis, fleet as the flying deer,
   Glide through the dusk like a silver shadow,
      Mirror thy brow in the lonely mere.

Miss Fitz Gerald's volume is certainly worth reading.

Mr. Richard Le Gallienne's little book, Volumes in Folio as he quaintly
calls it, is full of dainty verse and delicate fancy.  Lines such as

   And lo! the white face of the dawn
      Yearned like a ghost's against the pane,
      A sobbing ghost amid the rain;
   Or like a chill and pallid rose
   Slowly upclimbing from the lawn,

strike, with their fantastic choice of metaphors, a pleasing note.  At
present Mr. Le Gallienne's muse seems to devote herself entirely to the
worship of books, and Mr. Le Gallienne himself is steeped in literary
traditions, making Keats his model and seeking to reproduce something of
Keats's richness and affluence of imagery.  He is keenly conscious how
derivative his inspiration is:

   Verse of my own! why ask so poor a thing,
      When I might gather from the garden-ways
   Of sunny memory fragrant offering
      Of deathless blooms and white unwithering sprays?

   Shakspeare had given me an English rose,
      And honeysuckle Spenser sweet as dew,
   Or I had brought you from that dreamy close
      Keats' passion-blossom, or the mystic blue

   Star-flower of Shelley's song, or shaken gold
      From lilies of the Blessed Damosel,
   Or stolen fire from out the scarlet fold
      Of Swinburne's poppies. . . .

Yet now that he has played his prelude with so sensitive and so graceful
a touch, we have no doubt that he will pass to larger themes and nobler
subject-matter, and fulfil the hope he expresses in this sextet:

   For if perchance some music should be mine,
      I would fling forth its notes like a fierce sea,
   To wash away the piles of tyranny,
      To make love free and faith unbound of creed.
   O for some power to fill my shrunken line,
      And make a trumpet of my oaten reed.

(1) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.  By W. B. Yeats.  (Kegan
Paul.)

(2) Venetia Victrix.  By Caroline Fitz Gerald.  (Macmillan and Co.)

(3) Volumes in Folio.  By Richard Le Gallienne.  (Elkin Mathews.)




A CHINESE SAGE


(Speaker, February 8, 1890.)

A eminent Oxford theologian once remarked that his only objection to
modern progress was that it progressed forward instead of backward--a
view that so fascinated a certain artistic undergraduate that he promptly
wrote an essay upon some unnoticed analogies between the development of
ideas and the movements of the common sea-crab.  I feel sure the Speaker
will not be suspected even by its most enthusiastic friends of holding
this dangerous heresy of retrogression.  But I must candidly admit that I
have come to the conclusion that the most caustic criticism of modern
life I have met with for some time is that contained in the writings of
the learned Chuang Tzu, recently translated into the vulgar tongue by Mr.
Herbert Giles, Her Majesty's Consul at Tamsui.

The spread of popular education has no doubt made the name of this great
thinker quite familiar to the general public, but, for the sake of the
few and the over-cultured, I feel it my duty to state definitely who he
was, and to give a brief outline of the character of his philosophy.

Chuang Tzu, whose name must carefully be pronounced as it is not written,
was born in the fourth century before Christ, by the banks of the Yellow
River, in the Flowery Land; and portraits of the wonderful sage seated on
the flying dragon of contemplation may still be found on the simple tea-
trays and pleasing screens of many of our most respectable suburban
households.  The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt
often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed
over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him.  If
they really knew who he was, they would tremble.  For Chuang Tzu spent
his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out
the uselessness of all useful things.  'Do nothing, and everything will
be done,' was the doctrine which he inherited from his great master Lao
Tzu.  To resolve action into thought, and thought into abstraction, was
his wicked transcendental aim.  Like the obscure philosopher of early
Greek speculation, he believed in the identity of contraries; like Plato,
he was an idealist, and had all the idealist's contempt for utilitarian
systems; he was a mystic like Dionysius, and Scotus Erigena, and Jacob
Bohme, and held, with them and with Philo, that the object of life was to
get rid of self-consciousness, and to become the unconscious vehicle of a
higher illumination.  In fact, Chuang Tzu may be said to have summed up
in himself almost every mood of European metaphysical or mystical
thought, from Heraclitus down to Hegel.  There was something in him of
the Quietist also; and in his worship of Nothing he may be said to have
in some measure anticipated those strange dreamers of mediaeval days who,
like Tauler and Master Eckhart, adored the purum nihil and the Abyss.  The
great middle classes of this country, to whom, as we all know, our
prosperity, if not our civilisation, is entirely due, may shrug their
shoulders over all this and ask, with a certain amount of reason, what is
the identity of contraries to them, and why they should get rid of that
self-consciousness which is their chief characteristic.  But Chuang Tzu
was something more than a metaphysician and an illuminist.  He sought to
destroy society, as we know it, as the middle classes know it; and the
sad thing is that he combines with the passionate eloquence of a Rousseau
the scientific reasoning of a Herbert Spencer.  There is nothing of the
sentimentalist in him.  He pities the rich more than the poor, if he ever
pities at all, and prosperity seems to him as tragic a thing as
suffering.  He has nothing of the modern sympathy with failures, nor does
he propose that the prizes should always be given on moral grounds to
those who come in last in the race.  It is the race itself that he
objects to; and as for active sympathy, which has become the profession
of so many worthy people in our own day, he thinks that trying to make
others good is as silly an occupation as 'beating a drum in a forest in
order to find a fugitive.'  It is a mere waste of energy.  That is all.
While, as for a thoroughly sympathetic man, he is, in the eyes of Chuang
Tzu, simply a man who is always trying to be somebody else, and so misses
the only possible excuse for his own existence.

Yes; incredible as it may seem, this curious thinker looked back with a
sigh of regret to a certain Golden Age when there were no competitive
examinations, no wearisome educational systems, no missionaries, no penny
dinners for the people, no Established Churches, no Humanitarian
Societies, no dull lectures about one's duty to one's neighbour, and no
tedious sermons about any subject at all.  In those ideal days, he tells
us, people loved each other without being conscious of charity, or
writing to the newspapers about it.  They were upright, and yet they
never published books upon Altruism.  As every man kept his knowledge to
himself, the world escaped the curse of scepticism; and as every man kept
his virtues to himself, nobody meddled in other people's business.  They
lived simple and peaceful lives, and were contented with such food and
raiment as they could get.  Neighbouring districts were in sight, and
'the cocks and dogs of one could be heard in the other,' yet the people
grew old and died without ever interchanging visits.  There was no
chattering about clever men, and no laudation of good men.  The
intolerable sense of obligation was unknown.  The deeds of humanity left
no trace, and their affairs were not made a burden for posterity by
foolish historians.

In an evil moment the Philanthropist made his appearance, and brought
with him the mischievous idea of Government.  'There is such a thing,'
says Chuang Tzu, 'as leaving mankind alone: there has never been such a
thing as governing mankind.'  All modes of government are wrong.  They
are unscientific, because they seek to alter the natural environment of
man; they are immoral because, by interfering with the individual, they
produce the most aggressive forms of egotism; they are ignorant, because
they try to spread education; they are self-destructive, because they
engender anarchy.  'Of old,' he tells us, 'the Yellow Emperor first
caused charity and duty to one's neighbour to interfere with the natural
goodness of the heart of man.  In consequence of this, Yao and Shun wore
the hair off their legs in endeavouring to feed their people.  They
disturbed their internal economy in order to find room for artificial
virtues.  They exhausted their energies in framing laws, and they were
failures.'  Man's heart, our philosopher goes on to say, may be 'forced
down or stirred up,' and in either case the issue is fatal.  Yao made the
people too happy, so they were not satisfied.  Chieh made them too
wretched, so they grew discontented.  Then every one began to argue about
the best way of tinkering up society.  'It is quite clear that something
must be done,' they said to each other, and there was a general rush for
knowledge.  The results were so dreadful that the Government of the day
had to bring in Coercion, and as a consequence of this 'virtuous men
sought refuge in mountain caves, while rulers of state sat trembling in
ancestral halls.'  Then, when everything was in a state of perfect chaos,
the Social Reformers got up on platforms, and preached salvation from the
ills that they and their system had caused.  The poor Social Reformers!
'They know not shame, nor what it is to blush,' is the verdict of Chuang
Tzuu upon them.

The economic question, also, is discussed by this almond-eyed sage at
great length, and he writes about the curse of capital as eloquently as
Mr. Hyndman.  The accumulation of wealth is to him the origin of evil.  It
makes the strong violent, and the weak dishonest.  It creates the petty
thief, and puts him in a bamboo cage.  It creates the big thief, and sets
him on a throne of white jade.  It is the father of competition, and
competition is the waste, as well as the destruction, of energy.  The
order of nature is rest, repetition, and peace.  Weariness and war are
the results of an artificial society based upon capital; and the richer
this society gets, the more thoroughly bankrupt it really is, for it has
neither sufficient rewards for the good nor sufficient punishments for
the wicked.  There is also this to be remembered--that the prizes of the
world degrade a man as much as the world's punishments.  The age is
rotten with its worship of success.  As for education, true wisdom can
neither be learnt nor taught.  It is a spiritual state, to which he who
lives in harmony with nature attains.  Knowledge is shallow if we compare
it with the extent of the unknown, and only the unknowable is of value.
Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than
another.  That is the only result of School Boards.  Besides, of what
possible philosophic importance can education be, when it serves simply
to make each man differ from his neighbour?  We arrive ultimately at a
chaos of opinions, doubt everything, and fall into the vulgar habit of
arguing; and it is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.  Look at
Hui Tzu.  'He was a man of many ideas.  His works would fill five carts.
But his doctrines were paradoxical.'  He said that there were feathers in
an egg, because there were feathers on a chicken; that a dog could be a
sheep, because all names were arbitrary; that there was a moment when a
swiftly-flying arrow was neither moving nor at rest; that if you took a
stick a foot long, and cut it in half every day, you would never come to
the end of it; and that a bay horse and a dun cow were three, because
taken separately they were two, and taken together they were one, and one
and two made up three.  'He was like a man running a race with his own
shadow, and making a noise in order to drown the echo.  He was a clever
gadfly, that was all.  What was the use of him?'

Morality is, of course, a different thing.  It went out of fashion, says
Chuang Tzu, when people began to moralise.  Men ceased then to be
spontaneous and to act on intuition.  They became priggish and
artificial, and were so blind as to have a definite purpose in life.  Then
came Governments and Philanthropists, those two pests of the age.  The
former tried to coerce people into being good, and so destroyed the
natural goodness of man.  The latter were a set of aggressive busybodies
who caused confusion wherever they went.  They were stupid enough to have
principles, and unfortunate enough to act up to them.  They all came to
bad ends, and showed that universal altruism is as bad in its results as
universal egotism.  They 'tripped people up over charity, and fettered
them with duties to their neighbours.'  They gushed over music, and
fussed over ceremonies.  As a consequence of all this, the world lost its
equilibrium, and has been staggering ever since.

Who, then, according to Chuang Tzu, is the perfect man?  And what is his
manner of life?  The perfect man does nothing beyond gazing at the
universe.  He adopts no absolute position.  'In motion, he is like water.
At rest, he is like a mirror.  And, like Echo, he answers only when he is
called upon.'  He lets externals take care of themselves.  Nothing
material injures him; nothing spiritual punishes him.  His mental
equilibrium gives him the empire of the world.  He is never the slave of
objective existences.  He knows that, 'just as the best language is that
which is never spoken, so the best action is that which is never done.'
He is passive, and accepts the laws of life.  He rests in inactivity, and
sees the world become virtuous of itself.  He does not try to 'bring
about his own good deeds.'  He never wastes himself on effort.  He is not
troubled about moral distinctions.  He knows that things are what they
are, and that their consequences will be what they will be.  His mind is
the 'speculum of creation,' and he is ever at peace.

All this is of course excessively dangerous, but we must remember that
Chuang Tzu lived more than two thousand years ago, and never had the
opportunity of seeing our unrivalled civilisation.  And yet it is
possible that, were he to come back to earth and visit us, he might have
something to say to Mr. Balfour about his coercion and active
misgovernment in Ireland; he might smile at some of our philanthropic
ardours, and shake his head over many of our organised charities; the
School Board might not impress him, nor our race for wealth stir his
admiration; he might wonder at our ideals, and grow sad over what we have
realised.  Perhaps it is well that Chuang Tzu cannot return.

Meanwhile, thanks to Mr. Giles and Mr. Quaritch, we have his book to
console us, and certainly it is a most fascinating and delightful volume.
Chuang Tzu is one of the Darwinians before Darwin.  He traces man from
the germ, and sees his unity with nature.  As an anthropologist he is
excessively interesting, and he describes our primitive arboreal ancestor
living in trees through his terror of animals stronger than himself, and
knowing only one parent, the mother, with all the accuracy of a lecturer
at the Royal Society.  Like Plato, he adopts the dialogue as his mode of
expression, 'putting words into other people's mouths,' he tells us, 'in
order to gain breadth of view.'  As a story-teller he is charming.  The
account of the visit of the respectable Confucius to the great Robber Che
is most vivid and brilliant, and it is impossible not to laugh over the
ultimate discomfiture of the sage, the barrenness of whose moral
platitudes is ruthlessly exposed by the successful brigand.  Even in his
metaphysics, Chuang Tzu is intensely humorous.  He personifies his
abstractions, and makes them act plays before us.  The Spirit of the
Clouds, when passing eastward through the expanse of air, happened to
fall in with the Vital Principle.  The latter was slapping his ribs and
hopping about: whereupon the Spirit of the Clouds said, 'Who are you, old
man, and what are you doing?'  'Strolling!' replied the Vital Principle,
without stopping, for all activities are ceaseless.  'I want to _know_
something,' continued the Spirit of the Clouds.  'Ah!' cried the Vital
Principle, in a tone of disapprobation, and a marvellous conversation
follows, that is not unlike the dialogue between the Sphinx and the
Chimera in Flaubert's curious drama.  Talking animals, also, have their
place in Chuang Tzu's parables and stories, and through myth and poetry
and fancy his strange philosophy finds musical utterance.

Of course it is sad to be told that it is immoral to be consciously good,
and that doing anything is the worst form of idleness.  Thousands of
excellent and really earnest philanthropists would be absolutely thrown
upon the rates if we adopted the view that nobody should be allowed to
meddle in what does not concern him.  The doctrine of the uselessness of
all useful things would not merely endanger our commercial supremacy as a
nation, but might bring discredit upon many prosperous and serious-minded
members of the shop-keeping classes.  What would become of our popular
preachers, our Exeter Hall orators, our drawing-room evangelists, if we
said to them, in the words of Chuang Tzu, 'Mosquitoes will keep a man
awake all night with their biting, and just in the same way this talk of
charity and duty to one's neighbour drives us nearly crazy.  Sirs, strive
to keep the world to its own original simplicity, and, as the wind
bloweth where it listeth, so let Virtue establish itself.  Wherefore this
undue energy?'  And what would be the fate of governments and
professional politicians if we came to the conclusion that there is no
such thing as governing mankind at all?  It is clear that Chuang Tzu is a
very dangerous writer, and the publication of his book in English, two
thousand years after his death, is obviously premature, and may cause a
great deal of pain to many thoroughly respectable and industrious
persons.  It may be true that the ideal of self-culture and
self-development, which is the aim of his scheme of life, and the basis
of his scheme of philosophy, is an ideal somewhat needed by an age like
ours, in which most people are so anxious to educate their neighbours
that they have actually no time left in which to educate themselves.  But
would it be wise to say so?  It seems to me that if we once admitted the
force of any one of Chuang Tzu's destructive criticisms we should have to
put some check on our national habit of self-glorification; and the only
thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise
he always gives himself for doing them.  There may, however, be a few who
have grown wearied of that strange modern tendency that sets enthusiasm
to do the work of the intellect.  To these, and such as these, Chuang Tzu
will be welcome.  But let them only read him.  Let them not talk about
him.  He would be disturbing at dinner-parties, and impossible at
afternoon teas, and his whole life was a protest against platform
speaking.  'The perfect man ignores self; the divine man ignores action;
the true sage ignores reputation.'  These are the principles of Chuang
Tzu.

Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer.  Translated from the
Chinese by Herbert A. Giles, H.B.M.'s Consul at Tamsui.  (Bernard
Quaritch.)




MR. PATER'S LAST VOLUME


(Speaker, March 22, 1890.)

When I first had the privilege--and I count it a very high one--of
meeting Mr. Walter Pater, he said to me, smiling, 'Why do you always
write poetry?  Why do you not write prose?  Prose is so much more
difficult.'

It was during my undergraduate days at Oxford; days of lyrical ardour and
of studious sonnet-writing; days when one loved the exquisite intricacy
and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its
linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one
solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should
be written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far
more rhyme than reason.

I may frankly confess now that at the time I did not quite comprehend
what Mr. Pater really meant; and it was not till I had carefully studied
his beautiful and suggestive essays on the Renaissance that I fully
realised what a wonderful self-conscious art the art of English prose-
writing really is, or may be made to be.  Carlyle's stormy rhetoric,
Ruskin's winged and passionate eloquence, had seemed to me to spring from
enthusiasm rather than from art.  I do not think I knew then that even
prophets correct their proofs.  As for Jacobean prose, I thought it too
exuberant; and Queen Anne prose appeared to me terribly bald, and
irritatingly rational.  But Mr. Pater's essays became to me 'the golden
book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.'  They are still this
to me.  It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them.  I
certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no
love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.  It is only
about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really
unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed
opinion is always valueless.

But I must not allow this brief notice of Mr. Pater's new volume to
degenerate into an autobiography.  I remember being told in America that
whenever Margaret Fuller wrote an essay upon Emerson the printers had
always to send out to borrow some additional capital 'I's,' and I feel it
right to accept this transatlantic warning.

Appreciations, in the fine Latin sense of the word, is the title given by
Mr. Pater to his book, which is an exquisite collection of exquisite
essays, of delicately wrought works of art--some of them being almost
Greek in their purity of outline and perfection of form, others mediaeval
in their strangeness of colour and passionate suggestion, and all of them
absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the term modernity.  For he to
whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the
age in which he lives.  To realise the nineteenth century one must
realise every century that has preceded it, and that has contributed to
its making.  To know anything about oneself, one must know all about
others.  There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead
mode of life that one cannot make alive.  The legacies of heredity may
make us alter our views of moral responsibility, but they cannot but
intensify our sense of the value of Criticism; for the true critic is he
who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad
generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional
impulse obscure.

Perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the least successful, of the
essays contained in the present volume is that on Style.  It is the most
interesting because it is the work of one who speaks with the high
authority that comes from the noble realisation of things nobly
conceived.  It is the least successful, because the subject is too
abstract.  A true artist like Mr. Pater is most felicitous when he deals
with the concrete, whose very limitations give him finer freedom, while
they necessitate more intense vision.  And yet what a high ideal is
contained in these few pages!  How good it is for us, in these days of
popular education and facile journalism, to be reminded of the real
scholarship that is essential to the perfect writer, who, 'being a true
lover of words for their own sake, a minute and constant observer of
their physiognomy,' will avoid what is mere rhetoric, or ostentatious
ornament, or negligent misuse of terms, or ineffective surplusage, and
will be known by his tact of omission, by his skilful economy of means,
by his selection and self-restraint, and perhaps above all by that
conscious artistic structure which is the expression of mind in style.  I
think I have been wrong in saying that the subject is too abstract.  In
Mr. Pater's hands it becomes very real to us indeed, and he shows us how,
behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's
soul.

As one passes to the rest of the volume, one finds essays on Wordsworth
and on Coleridge, on Charles Lamb and on Sir Thomas Browne, on some of
Shakespeare's plays and on the English kings that Shakespeare fashioned,
on Dante Rossetti, and on William Morris.  As that on Wordsworth seems to
be Mr. Pater's last work, so that on the singer of the Defence of
Guenevere is certainly his earliest, or almost his earliest, and it is
interesting to mark the change that has taken place in his style.  This
change is, perhaps, at first sight not very apparent.  In 1868 we find
Mr. Pater writing with the same exquisite care for words, with the same
studied music, with the same temper, and something of the same mode of
treatment.  But, as he goes on, the architecture of the style becomes
richer and more complex, the epithet more precise and intellectual.
Occasionally one may be inclined to think that there is, here and there,
a sentence which is somewhat long, and possibly, if one may venture to
say so, a little heavy and cumbersome in movement.  But if this be so, it
comes from those side-issues suddenly suggested by the idea in its
progress, and really revealing the idea more perfectly; or from those
felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central
scheme, and yet convey something of the charm of chance; or from a desire
to suggest the secondary shades of meaning with all their accumulating
effect, and to avoid, it may be, the violence and harshness of too
definite and exclusive an opinion.  For in matters of art, at any rate,
thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than
fixed, and, recognising its dependence upon moods and upon the passion of
fine moments, will not accept the rigidity of a scientific formula or a
theological dogma.  The critical pleasure, too, that we receive from
tracing, through what may seem the intricacies of a sentence, the working
of the constructive intelligence, must not be overlooked.  As soon as we
have realised the design, everything appears clear and simple.  After a
time, these long sentences of Mr. Pater's come to have the charm of an
elaborate piece of music, and the unity of such music also.

I have suggested that the essay on Wordsworth is probably the most recent
bit of work contained in this volume.  If one might choose between so
much that is good, I should be inclined to say it is the finest also.  The
essay on Lamb is curiously suggestive; suggestive, indeed, of a somewhat
more tragic, more sombre figure, than men have been wont to think of in
connection with the author of the Essays of Elia.  It is an interesting
aspect under which to regard Lamb, but perhaps he himself would have had
some difficulty in recognising the portrait given of him.  He had,
undoubtedly, great sorrows, or motives for sorrow, but he could console
himself at a moment's notice for the real tragedies of life by reading
any one of the Elizabethan tragedies, provided it was in a folio edition.
The essay on Sir Thomas Browne is delightful, and has the strange,
personal, fanciful charm of the author of the Religio Medici, Mr. Pater
often catching the colour and accent and tone of whatever artist, or work
of art, he deals with.  That on Coleridge, with its insistence on the
necessity of the cultivation of the relative, as opposed to the absolute
spirit in philosophy and in ethics, and its high appreciation of the
poet's true position in our literature, is in style and substance a very
blameless work.  Grace of expression and delicate subtlety of thought and
phrase, characterise the essays on Shakespeare.  But the essay on
Wordsworth has a spiritual beauty of its own.  It appeals, not to the
ordinary Wordsworthian with his uncritical temper, and his gross
confusion of ethical and aesthetical problems, but rather to those who
desire to separate the gold from the dross, and to reach at the true
Wordsworth through the mass of tedious and prosaic work that bears his
name, and that serves often to conceal him from us.  The presence of an
alien element in Wordsworth's art is, of course, recognised by Mr. Pater,
but he touches on it merely from the psychological point of view,
pointing out how this quality of higher and lower moods gives the effect
in his poetry 'of a power not altogether his own, or under his control';
a power which comes and goes when it wills, 'so that the old fancy which
made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems
almost true of him.'  Mr. Pater's earlier essays had their purpurei
panni, so eminently suitable for quotation, such as the famous passage on
Mona Lisa, and that other in which Botticelli's strange conception of the
Virgin is so strangely set forth.  From the present volume it is
difficult to select any one passage in preference to another as specially
characteristic of Mr. Pater's treatment.  This, however, is worth quoting
at length.  It contains a truth eminently suitable for our age:

   That the end of life is not action but contemplation--_being_ as
   distinct from _doing_--a certain disposition of the mind: is, in some
   shape or other, the principle of all the higher morality.  In poetry,
   in art, if you enter into their true spirit at all, you touch this
   principle in a measure; these, by their sterility, are a type of
   beholding for the mere joy of beholding.  To treat life in the spirit
   of art is to make life a thing in which means and ends are identified:
   to encourage such treatment, the true moral significance of art and
   poetry.  Wordsworth, and other poets who have been like him in ancient
   or more recent times, are the masters, the experts, in this art of
   impassioned contemplation.  Their work is not to teach lessons, or
   enforce rules, or even to stimulate us to noble ends, but to withdraw
   the thoughts for a while from the mere machinery of life, to fix them,
   with appropriate emotions, on the spectacle of those great facts in
   man's existence which no machinery affects, 'on the great and
   universal passions of men, the most general and interesting of their
   occupations, and the entire world of nature'--on 'the operations of
   the elements and the appearances of the visible universe, on storm and
   sunshine, on the revolutions of the seasons, on cold and heat, on loss
   of friends and kindred, on injuries and resentments, on gratitude and
   hope, on fear and sorrow.'  To witness this spectacle with appropriate
   emotions is the aim of all culture; and of these emotions poetry like
   Wordsworth's is a great nourisher and stimulant.  He sees nature full
   of sentiment and excitement; he sees men and women as parts of nature,
   passionate, excited, in strange grouping and connection with the
   grandeur and beauty of the natural world:--images, in his own words,
   'of men suffering, amid awful forms and powers.'

Certainly the real secret of Wordsworth has never been better expressed.
After having read and reread Mr. Pater's essay--for it requires
re-reading--one returns to the poet's work with a new sense of joy and
wonder, and with something of eager and impassioned expectation.  And
perhaps this might be roughly taken as the test or touchstone of the
finest criticism.

Finally, one cannot help noticing the delicate instinct that has gone to
fashion the brief epilogue that ends this delightful volume.  The
difference between the classical and romantic spirits in art has often,
and with much over-emphasis, been discussed.  But with what a light sure
touch does Mr. Pater write of it!  How subtle and certain are his
distinctions!  If imaginative prose be really the special art of this
century, Mr. Pater must rank amongst our century's most characteristic
artists.  In certain things he stands almost alone.  The age has produced
wonderful prose styles, turbid with individualism, and violent with
excess of rhetoric.  But in Mr. Pater, as in Cardinal Newman, we find the
union of personality with perfection.  He has no rival in his own sphere,
and he has escaped disciples.  And this, not because he has not been
imitated, but because in art so fine as his there is something that, in
its essence, is inimitable.

Appreciations, with an Essay on Style.  By Walter Pater, Fellow of
Brasenose College.  (Macmillan and Co.)




PRIMAVERA


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 24, 1890.)

In the summer term Oxford teaches the exquisite art of idleness, one of
the most important things that any University can teach, and possibly as
the first-fruits of the dreaming in grey cloister and silent garden,
which either makes or mars a man, there has just appeared in that lovely
city a dainty and delightful volume of poems by four friends.  These new
young singers are Mr. Laurence Binyon, who has just gained the Newdigate;
Mr. Manmohan Ghose, a young Indian of brilliant scholarship and high
literary attainments who gives some culture to Christ Church; Mr. Stephen
Phillips, whose recent performance of the Ghost in Hamlet at the Globe
Theatre was so admirable in its dignity and elocution; and Mr. Arthur
Cripps, of Trinity.  Particular interest attaches naturally to Mr.
Ghose's work.  Born in India, of purely Indian parentage, he has been
brought up entirely in England, and was educated at St. Paul's School,
and his verses show us how quick and subtle are the intellectual
sympathies of the Oriental mind, and suggest how close is the bond of
union that may some day bind India to us by other methods than those of
commerce and military strength.

There is something charming in finding a young Indian using our language
with such care for music and words as Mr. Ghose does.  Here is one of his
songs:

   Over thy head, in joyful wanderings
      Through heaven's wide spaces, free,
   Birds fly with music in their wings;
      _And from the blue, rough sea
      The fishes flash and leap_;
   There is a life of loveliest things
      O'er thee, so fast asleep.

   In the deep West the heavens grow heavenlier,
      Eve after eve; _and still
   The glorious stars remember to appear_;
      The roses on the hill
      Are fragrant as before:
   Only thy face, of all that's dear,
      I shall see nevermore!

It has its faults.  It has a great many faults.  But the lines we have
set in italics are lovely.  The temper of Keats, the moods of Matthew
Arnold, have influenced Mr. Ghose, and what better influence could a
beginner have?  Here are some stanzas from another of Mr. Ghose's poems:

   Deep-shaded will I lie, and deeper yet
      In night, where not a leaf its neighbour knows;
   Forget the shining of the stars, forget
      The vernal visitation of the rose;
   And, far from all delights, prepare my heart's repose.

   'O crave not silence thou! too soon, too sure,
      Shall Autumn come, and through these branches weep:
   Some birds shall cease, and flowers no more endure;
      And thou beneath the mould unwilling creep,
   And silent soon shalt be in that eternal sleep.

   'Green still it is, where that fair goddess strays;
      Then follow, till around thee all be sere.
   Lose not a vision of her passing face;
      Nor miss the sound of her soft robes, that here
   Sweep over the wet leaves of the fast-falling year.'

The second line is very beautiful, and the whole shows culture and taste
and feeling.  Mr. Ghose ought some day to make a name in our literature.

Mr. Stephen Phillips has a more solemn classical Muse.  His best work is
his Orestes:

   Me in far lands did Justice call, cold queen
   Among the dead, who, after heat and haste
   At length have leisure for her steadfast voice,
   That gathers peace from the great deeps of hell.
   She call'd me, saying: I heard a cry by night!
   Go thou, and question not; within thy halls
   My will awaits fulfilment.

   . . . . . .

      And she lies there,
   My mother! ay, my mother now; O hair
   That once I play'd with in these halls!  O eyes
   That for a moment knew me as I came,
   And lighten'd up, and trembled into love;
   The next were darkened by my hand!  Ah me!
   Ye will not look upon me in that world.
   Yet thou, perchance, art happier, if thou go'st
   Into some land of wind and drifting leaves,
   To sleep without a star; but as for me,
   Hell hungers, and the restless Furies wait.

Milton, and the method of Greek tragedy are Mr. Phillips's influences,
and again we may say, what better influences could a young singer have?
His verse is dignified, and has distinction.

* * * * *

Mr. Cripps is melodious at times, and Mr. Binyon, Oxford's latest
Laureate, shows us in his lyrical ode on Youth that he can handle a
difficult metre dexterously, and in this sonnet that he can catch the
sweet echoes that sleep in the sonnets of Shakespeare:

   I cannot raise my eyelids up from sleep,
   But I am visited with thoughts of you;
   Slumber has no refreshment half so deep
   As the sweet morn, that wakes my heart anew.

   I cannot put away life's trivial care,
   But you straightway steal on me with delight:
   My purest moments are your mirror fair;
   My deepest thought finds you the truth most bright

   You are the lovely regent of my mind,
   The constant sky to the unresting sea;
   Yet, since 'tis you that rule me, I but find
   A finer freedom in such tyranny.

   Were the world's anxious kingdoms govern'd so,
   Lost were their wrongs, and vanish'd half their woe!

On the whole Primavera is a pleasant little book, and we are glad to
welcome it.  It is charmingly 'got up,' and undergraduates might read it
with advantage during lecture hours.

Primavera: Poems.  By Four Authors.  (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell.)




INDEX OF AUTHORS AND BOOKS REVIEWED


AITCHISON, JAMES: The Chronicle of Mites

ANONYMOUS: An Author's Love
Annals of the Life of Shakespeare
Miss Bayle's Romance
Rachel
Sturm und Drang
The Cross and the Grail
The Judgment of the City
Warring Angels

ARMSTRONG, GEORGE FRANCIS: Stories of Wicklow

ARNOLD, SIR EDWIN: With Sa'di in the Garden

ASHBY-STERRY, J.: The Lazy Minstrel

AUSTIN, ALFRED: Days of the Year
Love's Widowhood

Author of Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor: Ismay's Children

Author of Lucy: Tiff

Author of Mademoiselle Mori: A Child of the Revolution
Under a Cloud

Author of The White Africans: AEonial

BALZAC, HONORE DE: Cesar Birotteau
The Duchess of Langeais and Other Stories

BARKER, JOHN THOMAS: The Pilgrimage of Memory

BARR, AMELIA: A Daughter of Fife

BARRETT, FRANK: The Great Hesper

BAUCHE, EMILE: A Statesman's Love

BAYLISS, WYKE: The Enchanted Island

BEAUFORT, RAPHAEL LEDOS DE: Letters of George Sand

BELLAIRS, LADY: Gossips with Girls and Maidens

BLUNT, WILFRID SCAWEN: In Vinculis

BOISSIER, GASTON: Nouvelles Promenades Archeologiques

BOWEN, SIR CHARLES: Virgil in English Verse.  Eclogues and AEneid I.-VI.

BOWLING, E. W.: Sagittulae

BRODIE, E. H.: Lyrics of the Sea

BROUGHTON, RHODA: Betty's Visions

BROWNE, PHYLLIS: Mrs. Somerville and Mary Carpenter

BUCHAN, ALEXANDER: Joseph and His Brethren

BUCHANAN, ROBERT: That Winter Night

BURNS, DAWSON: Oliver Cromwell

CAINE, HALL: Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

CAIRNS, WILLIAM: A Day after the Pair

CALDECOTT, RANDOLPH: Gleanings from the Graphic

CAMERON, MRS. HENRY LOVETT: A Life's Mistake

CARNARVON, EARL OF: The Odyssey of Homer.  Books I.-XII.

CARPENTER, EDWARD: Chants of Labour

CATTY, CHARLES: Poems in the Modern Spirit

CESARESCO, COUNTESS EVELYN MARTINENGO: Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs

CHAPMAN, ELIZABETH RACHEL: The New Purgatory

CHETWYND, HON. MRS. HENRY: Mrs. Dorriman

CHRISTIAN, H. R. H. PRINCESS: Memoirs of Wilhelmine, Margravine of
Baireuth

COCKLE, J.: Guilt (Mullner)

COLE, ALAN: Embroidery and Lace (Ernest Lefebure)

COLERIDGE, HON. STEPHEN: Demetrius

COLLIER, HON. JOHN: A Manual of Oil Painting

COLVIN, SIDNEY: Keats

CONWAY, HUGH: A Cardinal Sin

COOPER, ELISE: The Queen's Innocent

CORKRAN, ALICE: Margery Morton's Girlhood
Meg's Friend

CRAIK, MRS.: Poems

CRANE, WALTER: Flora's Feast

CRAWFORD, JOHN MARTIN: The Kalevala, the Epic Poem of Finland

CUMBERLAND, STUART: The Vasty Deep

CURTIS, ELLA: A Game of Chance

CURZON, G.: Delamere

DALZIEL, GEORGE: Pictures in the Fire

DAVIS, CORA M.: Immortelles

DAY, RICHARD: Poems

DENMAN, HON. G.: The Story of the Kings of Rome in Verse

DENNING, JOHN RENTON: Poems and Songs

DILKE, LADY: Art in the Modern State

DIXON, CONSTANCE E.: The Chimneypiece of Bruges

DOBELL, MRS. HORACE: In the Watches of the Night

DOUDNEY, SARAH: Under False Colours

DOVETON, F. B.: Sketches in Prose and Verse

DUFFY, BELLA: Life of Madame de Stael

DURANT, HELOISE: Dante: a Dramatic Poem

DYER, REV. A. SAUNDERS: The Poems of Madame de la Mothe Guyon

EDMONDS, E. M.: Greek Lays, Idylls, Legends, etc.
Mary Myles

EVANS, W.: Caesar Borgia

EVELYN, JOHN: Life of Mrs. Godolphin

FANE, VIOLET: Helen Davenant

FENN, GEORGE MANVILLE: A Bag of Diamonds
The Master of the Ceremonies

FIELD, MICHAEL: Canute the Great

FITZ GERALD, CAROLINE: Venetia Victrix

FOSKET, EDWARD: Poems

FOSTER, DAVID SKAATS: Rebecca the Witch

FOUR AUTHORS: Primavera

FROUDE, J, A.: The Two Chiefs of Dunboy

FURLONG, ATHERTON: Echoes of Memory

GALLENGA, A.: Jenny Jennet

GIBERNE, AGNES: Ralph Hardcastle's Will

GILES, HERBERT A: Chuang Tzu

GLENESSA: The Discovery

GOODCHILD, JOHN A.: Somnia Medici.  Second Series

GORDON, ADAM LINDSAY: Poems

GRANT, JOHN CAMERON: Vanclin

GRAVES, A. P.: Father O'Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics

GRIFFIN, EDWIN ELLIS: Vortigern and Rowena

GRIFFITHS, WILLIAM: Sonnets and Other Poems

HAMILTON, IAN: The Ballad of Hadji

HARDINGE, W. M.: The Willow Garth

HARDY, A. J.: How to be Happy Though Married

HARRISON, CLIFFORD: In Hours of Leisure

HARTE, BRET: Cressy

HAYES, ALFRED: David Westren

HEARTSEASE: God's Garden

HENLEY, WILLIAM ERNEST: A Book of Verses

HEYWOOD, J. C.: Salome

HOLE, W. G.: Procris

HOPKINS, TIGHE: 'Twixt Love and Duty

HOUSTON, MRS.: A Heart on Fire

HUNT, MRS. ALFRED: That Other Person

IRWIN, H. C.: Rhymes and Renderings

KEENE, H. E.: Verses: Translated and Original

KELLY, JAMES: Poems

K. E. V.: The Circle of Saints
The Circle of Seasons

KINGSFORD, DR. ANNA.: Dreams and Dream-Stories

KNIGHT, JOSEPH: Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

KNIGHT, WILLIAM: Wordsworthiana

LAFFAN, MRS. DE COURCY: A Song of Jubilee

LANGRIDGE, REV. FREDERICK: Poor Folks' Lives

LAUDER, SIR THOMAS: The Wolfe of Badenoch

LEE, MARGARET: Faithful and Unfaithful

LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD: Volumes in Folio

LEVY, AMY: The Romance of a Shop

LINDSAY, LADY: Caroline

LINTON, W. J.: Poems and Translations

LLOYD, J. SALE: Scamp

LYALL, EDNA: In the Golden Days

MACEWEN, CONSTANCE: Soap

MACK, ROBERT ELLICE: Treasures of Art and Song

MACKENZIE, GEORGE: Highland Daydreams

MACQUOID, KATHERINE S.: Louisa

MAHAFFY, J. P.: Greek Life and Thought
The Principles of the Art of Conversation

MARTIN, FRANCES: Life of Elizabeth Gilbert

MARZIALS, FRANK T.: Life of Charles Dickens

MASSON, GUSTAVE: George Sand (Elme Caro)

MATTHEWS, BRANDER: Pen and Ink

MCKIM, JOSEPH: Poems

MOLESWORTH, MRS.: A Christmas Posy
The Third Miss St. Quentin

MONTGOMERY, FLORENCE: The Fisherman's Daughter

MORINE, GEORGE: Poems

MORRIS, WILLIAM: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings
The Odyssey of Homer done into English Verse

MOULTON, LOUISE CHANDLER: Ourselves and Our Neighbours

MULHOLLAND, ROSA: Gianetta
Marcella Grace

MUNSTER, LADY: Dorinda

NADEN, CONSTANCE: A Modern Apostle

NASH, CHARLES: The Story of the Cross

NESBIT, E.: Lays and Legends
Leaves of Life

NOEL, HON. RODEN: Essays on Poetry and Poets

NOEL, LADY AUGUSTA: Hithersea Mere

OLIPHANT, MRS.: Makers of Venice

OLIVER, PEN: All But

OUIDA: Guilderoy

OWEN, EVELYN: Driven Home

OXONIENSIS: Juvenal in Piccadilly

PATER, WALTER: Appreciations, with an Essay on Style
Imaginary Portraits

PEACOCK, THOMAS BOWER: Poems of the Plain and Songs of the Solitudes

PERKS, MRS. J. HARTLEY: From Heather Hills

PFEIFFER, EMILY: Women and Work

PHILLIMORE, MISS: Studies in Italian Literature

PIERCE, J.: Stanzas and Sonnets

PIMLICO, LORD: The Excellent Mystery

PLEYDELL-BOUVERIE, EDWARD OLIVER: J. S.; or, Trivialities

PRESTON, HARRIET WATERS: A Year in Eden

PREVOST, FRANCIS: Fires of Green Wood

QUILTER, HARRY: Sententiae Artis

RAFFALOVICH, MARK ANDRE: Tuberose and Meadowsweet

RISTORI, MADAME: Etudes et Souvenirs

RITCHIE, DAVID: Darwinism and Politics

ROBERTSON, ERIC S.: Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Children of the Poets

ROBERTSON, J. LOGIE: Poems by Allan Ramsay

ROBINS, G. M.: Keep My Secret

ROBINSON, A. MARY F.: Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play

ROBINSON, MABEL: The Plan of Campaign

RODD, RENNELL: The Unknown Madonna

ROSS, JAMES: Seymour's Inheritance
The Wind and Six Sonnets

ROSS, JANET: Three Generations of English Women

ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL: Life of John Keats

RUETE, PRINCESS EMILY: Memoirs of an Arabian Princess

SAFFORD, MARY J.: Aphrodite (Ernst Eckstein)

SAINTSBURY, GEORGE: George Borrow

SARASVATI, PUNDITA RAMABAI: The High-Caste Hindu Woman

SCHWARTZ, J. M. W.: Nivalis

SHARP, ISAAC: Saul of Tarsus

SHARP, MRS. WILLIAM: Women's Voices

SHARP, WILLIAM: Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy

SHERIDAN, RICHARD BRINSLEY: Here's to the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen

SHORE, ARABELLA: Dante for Beginners

SKIPSEY, JOSEPH: Carols from the Coal Fields

SLADEN, DOUGLAS B. W.: Australian Poets, 1788-1888

SMITH, ALEXANDER SKENE: Holiday Recreations

SOMERSET, LORD HENRY: Songs of Adieu

SPEIGHT, T. W.: A Barren Title

STAPFER, PAUL: Moliere et Shakespeare

STILLMAN, W. J.: On the Track of Ulysses

STOKES, MARGARET: Early Christian Art in Ireland

STREETS, FAUCET: A Marked Man

STUTFIELD, HUGH: El Magreb: Twelve Hundred Miles' Ride through Morocco

SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES: Poems and Ballads.  Third Series

SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON: Ben Jonson
Renaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction

THORNTON, CYRUS: Voices of the Street

TODHUNTER, JOHN: The Banshee

TOMSON, GRAHAM R.: The Bird Bride

TOYNBEE, WILLIAM: A Selection from the Songs of De Beranger in English
Verse

TURNER, C. GLADSTONE: Errata

TWO TRAMPS: Low Down

TYLOR, LOUIS: Chess: A Christmas Masque

TYRRELL, CHRISTINA: Her Son (E. Werner)

VEITCH, JOHN: The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry

VEITCH, SOPHIE: James Hepburn

VON LAUER, BARONESS: The Master of Tanagra (Ernst von Wildenbruch)

WALFORD, MRS.: Four Biographies from Blackwood

WALWORTH, REV. CLARENCE A.: Andiatorochte

WANDERER: Dinners and Dishes

WHISHAW, FREDERICK: Injury and Insult (Fedor Dostoieffski)

WHITMAN, WALT: November Boughs

WILLIAMS, F. HARALD: Women Must Weep

WILLIAMSON, DAVID R.: Poems of Nature and Life

WILLIS, E. COOPER: Tales and Legends in Verse

WILLS, W. G.: Melchior

WILMOT, A.: The Poetry of South Africa

WINTER, JOHN STRANGE: That Imp

WOODS, MARGARET L.: A Village Tragedy

WOTTON, MABEL: Word Portraits of Famous Writers

YEATS, W. B.: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry

The Wanderings of Oisin

YONGE, CHARLOTTE M., and others: Astray




Footnotes:


{119}  See A 'Jolly' Art Critic, page 112.

{189}  Shairp was Professor of Poetry at Oxford in Wilde's undergraduate
days.

{198}  The Margravine of Baireuth and Voltaire.  (David Stott, 1888.)

{289}  February 1888.

{334a}  September 1888.

{334b}  See The Picture of Dorian Gray, chapter XI., page 222.

{374}  The Queen, December 8, 1888.

{411}  From Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends of Ireland.

{437}  See page 406.

{452}  See Australian Poets, page 370.







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