A Critic in Pall Mall: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies

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 realize 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 littérateur, 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, François 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 Secrétaire 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 Château des Désertes of acting; in Les Maîtres Mosaïstes of mosaic work; in Le Château 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 pavé de Paris.’

George SandBy the late Elmé Marie Caro.Translated by Gustave Masson, B.A., Assistant Master, Harrow School.‘Great French Writers’ Series.(Routledge and Sons.)

A FASCINATING BOOK
(Woman’s World, November 1888.)

Mr. Alan Cole’s carefully-edited translation of M. Lefébure’s history of Embroidery and Lace is one of the most fascinating books that has appeared on this delightful subject. M. Lefébure is one of the administrators of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs 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. Lefébure’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-needlework, 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 recognized than it is—that rich embroidery on hangings and curtains, portières, 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 real good—school that South Kensington has produced). It is pleasant to note on turning over the leaves of M. Lefébure’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. Lefébure suggests, the same as that mentioned in the inventory of the Bayeux Cathedral, where, after the entry relating to the broderie à 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 à 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 localized 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. Lefébure tells us of Persian embroidery penetrating as far as Andalusia; and Almeria, like Palermo, had its Hôtel des Tiraz, which rivalled the Hôtel 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 (aumônières sarrasinoises), 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 fêtes that followed the capture of Constantinople. The thirteenth century, as M. Lefébure 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. Lefébure 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. Lefébure 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. Lefébure’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. [115]  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. [116]  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 Ferté 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.  Lefébure 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.  Lefébure 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 characterized by the introduction of large flowery patterns, with pomegranates and other fruits with fine foliage.

The second part of M. Lefébure’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. Lefébure 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 recognize 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.Lefébure 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 réseuil, or lacis, and it is recorded that ‘the girls and servants of her household consumed much time in making squares of réseuil.’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. Lefébure 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. Lefébure 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’Alençon, 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 Fénelon, 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.Alençon 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.Lefébure 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 DayTranslated and enlarged by Alan S.Cole from the French of Ernest Lefébure.(Grevel and Co.)

HENLEY’S POEMS
(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 criticizes 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.

Théophile 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.

A Book of VersesBy William Ernest Henley.(David Nutt.)

SOME LITERARY LADIES
(Woman’s World, January 1889.)

In a recent article on English Poetesses, 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 Sévigné did for the prose of France. George Eliot’s style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Brontë’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 Staël wrote, “Il n’y a pas de société sans vous.” “C’est très ennuyeux de dîner sans vous; la société ne va pas quand vous n’êtes pas là”;’ 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 impudent 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 mère du genre humain” to Michael Chevalier; “Liebes Mütterlein” 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’Orléans, 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 hyænas 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 goûter this, you must know that the extreme vulgar (hackney coachmen, etc.) in England pronounce ‘marquis’ very like ‘Marcus.’

Dec. 17th. —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 fairy-tales.’ ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘I must tell you about that. When we were at Göttingen, somebody spoke to my little son about his father’s MährchenHe 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 Volksmährchen 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 égal,’ he said impatiently, ‘Habakkuk était 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 Brontë—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 versöhnend (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 unæsthetic, 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 à 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 trop, 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’état, 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 Ampère 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 Staël 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’hôte. ‘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 ick 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 twopennyworth 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 deducted 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.

Three Generations of English Women.    Memoirs and Correspondence of Susannah Taylor, Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff GordonBy Janet Ross, author of Italian Sketches, Land of Manfred, etc.  (Fisher Unwin.)

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 flyleaves 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 a 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 to my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance . . .or as aiming mainly towards art and æstheticism.’‘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 happen’d, 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 shelter’d hollow of rock and sand, with the sea on each side. (I have wonder’d since why I was not overwhelm’d by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described, in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading landscapes 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 allow’d 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 generalizing 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 is 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 littérateurs 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 BoughsBy Walt Whitman.(Alexander Gardner.)

IRISH FAIRY TALES
(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 humorized. 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 LegendsThe 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 Tír-na-n-OgThis 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, [157] 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.

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish PeasantryEdited and Selected by W.B.Yeats.(Walter Scott.)

MR. W.B.YEATS
(Woman’s World, March 1889.)

‘The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems 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.

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other PoemsBy W.B.Yeats.(Kegan Paul.)

MR. YEATS’S WANDERINGS OF OISIN
(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 naïve 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.

The Wanderings of Oisin and other PoemsBy W.B.Yeats.(Kegan Paul.)

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 mediæval ‘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 archæology 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 harmonizes 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 MarkWritten in Prose and in Verse by William Morris.(Reeves and Turner.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES
(Woman’s World, April 1889.)

‘In modern life,’ said Matthew Arnold once, ‘you 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-faäced man, and a meän-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 greät skater, for a’ that—noan better in these parts—why, he could cut his own naäme 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 sideways, 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.

Wordsworthiana: A Selection from Papers read to the Wordsworth SocietyEdited by William Knight.(Macmillan and Co.)

MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS AND BALLADS (third series)
(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 tyrannizes 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 provincialism.  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 mediæval 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 BalladsThird Series.By Algernon Charles Swinburne.(Chatto and Windus.)

A CHINESE SAGE
(Speaker, February 8, 1890.)

An 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 Tzŭ, 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 Tzŭ, 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. Chuang Tzŭ 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 Tzŭ. 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 Böhme, 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 Tzŭ 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 mediæval 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 civilization, 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 Tzŭ 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 even 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 Tzŭ, 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 prosperity 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 Tzŭ, ‘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 Tzŭ 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 work 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 swift-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 Tzŭ, when people began to moralize.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 Tzŭ, 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 Tzŭ lived more than two thousand years ago, and never had the opportunity of seeing our unrivalled civilization.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 organized 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 realized.Perhaps it is well that Chuang Tzŭ 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 Tzŭ 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 Chê 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 Tzŭ 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 Tzŭ’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 Tzŭ, ‘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 Tzŭ 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 Tzŭ’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 Tzŭ 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 Tzŭ.

Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social ReformerTranslated from the Chinese by Herbert A.Giles, H.B.M.’s Consul at Tamsui.(Bernard Quaritch.)

MR. PATER’S APPRECIATIONS
(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 realized 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 mediæval 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 realize the nineteenth century one must realize 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 sympathize, 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 realization 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, recognizing its dependence upon the 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 realized 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 recognizing 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, characterize 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 æsthetical 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, recognized 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 StyleBy Walter Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College.(Macmillan and Co.)

SENTENTIAE
(Extracted from Reviews)

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.

A young writer can gain more from the study of a literary poet than from the study of a lyrist.

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.

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.

Life remains eternally unchanged; it is art which, by presenting it to us under various forms, enables us to realize 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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps in this century we are too altruistic to be really artistic.

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 archæology becomes art.A fine theatre is a temple where all the muses may meet, a second Parnassus.

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 recognize it as part of his duties to buy every new book of verse that appears.

A fifteen-line sonnet is as bad a monstrosity as a sonnet in dialogue.

Antiquarian books, as a rule, are extremely dull reading.They give us facts without form, science without style, and learning without life.

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; . . . every poet longs for a Mæcenas.

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.

One should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their culture.

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 localized.Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living.Was not Homer himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a caravan?

In art as in life the law of heredity holds good.    On est toujours fils de quelqu’un

He has succeeded in studying a fine poet without stealing from him—a very difficult thing to do.

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.

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.

No English poet has written of children with more love and grace and delicacy [than Herrick]. 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.

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.

There are two ways of misunderstanding a poem.One is to misunderstand it and the other to praise it for qualities it does not possess.

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.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.

Even the most uninteresting poet cannot survive bad editing.

Prefixed to the Calendar is an introductory note . . .displaying that intimate acquaintance with Sappho’s lost poems which is the privilege only of those who are not acquainted with Greek literature.

Mediocre critics are usually safe in their generalities; it is in their reasons and examples that they come so lamentably to grief.

All premature panegyrics bring their own punishment upon themselves.

No one survives being over-estimated.

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 civilization.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.

Though the Psalm of Life be shouted from Maine to California, that would not make it true poetry.

Longfellow has no imitators, for of echoes themselves there are no echoes and it is only style that makes a school.

Poe’s marvellous lines To Helen, a poem as beautiful as a Greek gem and as musical as Apollo’s lute.

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.

No age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor.

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.

They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

Rossetti’s was a great personality, and personalities such as his do not easily survive shilling primers.

We are sorry 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.

Biographies of this kind 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.

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.

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.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history.In novels they are detestable.

Shilling literature is always making demands on our credulity without ever appealing to our imagination.

Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters.

It is only mediocrities and old maids who consider it a grievance to be misunderstood.

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.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

Such novels as Scamp are possibly more easy to write than they are to read.

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.

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.

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.

The Æneid 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, Æneas is no less a failure than Arthur.

There is always a certain amount of danger in any attempt to cultivate impossible virtues.

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.

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.

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 Brontës 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.

George Meredith’s 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 Œdipus solve his secret.

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.

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 brutalize.

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.

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.

There is a wide difference between the beautiful Tuscan city and the sea-city of the Adriatic. Florence 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 mediæval 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 idealized 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.

To realize 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.

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.

It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern.Nature is always a little behind the age.

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.

Mr. Foster is an American poet who has read Hawthorne, which is wise of him, and imitated Longfellow, which is not quite so commendable.

Andiatoroctè 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.

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.

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.

Writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets.

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.

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.As it is, Sir Edwin Arnold has translated Sa’di and some one must translate Sir Edwin Arnold.

Lounging in the open air is not a bad school for poets, but it largely depends on the lounger.

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.

Mr. Whistler, for some reason or other, always adopted the phraseology of the minor prophets. Possibly it was in order to emphasize his well-known claims to verbal inspiration, or perhaps he thought with Voltaire that Habakkuk était 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.

‘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 be well 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 and 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.

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.

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. Dobson 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.

The heroine is a sort of well-worn 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.

A critic recently remarked of Adam Lindsay Gordon that through him Australia had found her first fine utterance in song.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.

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 best that we can say of him is that he wrote imperfectly in Australia those poems that in England he might have made perfect.

Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments.

There seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.

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.

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 Müllner’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?

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 Siècle,’ 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 centralization of forces, of collective action, of ethnic unity of purpose, came before the world.

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 centralizing 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.

Hawthorne re-created for us the America of the past with the incomparable grace of a very perfect artist, but Mr. Bret Harte’s emphasized modernity has, in its own sphere, won equal, or almost equal, triumphs.

It is pleasant to come across a heroine [Bret Harte’s Cressy] 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!

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.

Like most penmen he [Froude] 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 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.

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.

As he is not a genius he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion.

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 naïve. 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 mispronunciation. With that 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.

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 dénoûment 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.

He has every form of sincerity except the sincerity of the artist, a defect that he shares with most of our popular writers.

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.