The Project Gutenberg eBook, Reviews, by Oscar Wilde, Edited by Robert Ross


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Title: Reviews

Author: Oscar Wilde

Release Date: December 2, 2004  [eBook #14240]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


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



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





REVIEWS


To Mrs. CAREW

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

ROBERT ROSS

May 12th, 1908.




INTRODUCTION


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

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

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

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

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

ROBERT ROSS
REFORM CLUB,
May 12th, 1908




DINNERS AND DISHES


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 7, 1885.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A MODERN EPIC


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 13, 1885.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




SHAKESPEARE ON SCENERY


(Dramatic Review, March 14, 1885.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A BEVY OF POETS


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 27, 1885.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

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

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

   Like clouds above the flower from which they rose.

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

ANDRE RAFFALOVICH.
March 28.




PARNASSUS VERSUS PHILOLOGY


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 1, 1885.)

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

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

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

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

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




HAMLET AT THE LYCEUM


(Dramatic Review, May 9, 1885.)

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

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

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

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




TWO NEW NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 15, 1885.)

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

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

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

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




HENRY THE FOURTH AT OXFORD


(Dramatic Review, May 23, 1885.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




MODERN GREEK POETRY


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 27, 1885.)

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

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

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

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

   There _cometh_ from the West
   The timid starry _bands_,

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

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




OLIVIA AT THE LYCEUM


(Dramatic Review, May 30, 1885.)

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

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

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

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




AS YOU LIKE IT AT COOMBE HOUSE


(Dramatic Review, June 6, 1885.)

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

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

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

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

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

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




A HANDBOOK TO MARRIAGE


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 18, 1885.)

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

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

'Yes,' incautiously answered Mabel.

'Then pull off my boots.'

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

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

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




HALF-HOURS WITH THE WORST AUTHORS


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 15, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9.  He certainly was an _unfriend_ to Whiggery.

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

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

12.  The capital _and_ full-length portraits.

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

14.  _Constantly right in general_.

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

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

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




ONE OF MR. CONWAY'S REMAINDERS


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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




TO READ OR NOT TO READ


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 8, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




TWELFTH NIGHT AT OXFORD


(Dramatic Review, February 20, 1886.)

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

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




THE LETTERS OF A GREAT WOMAN


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 6, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




NEWS FROM PARNASSUS


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




SOME NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A LITERARY PILGRIM


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 17, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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




BERANGER IN ENGLAND


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 21, 1886.)

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

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

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

reproduces very inadequately the charm of the original:

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

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

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

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

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




THE POETRY OF THE PEOPLE


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 13, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or this from Roumania:

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

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

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

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

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




THE CENCI


(Dramatic Review, May 15, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




HELENA IN TROAS


(Dramatic Review, May 22, 1880.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




PLEASING AND PRATTLING


(Pall Mall Gazette, August 4, 1880.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




BALZAC IN ENGLISH


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 13, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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




TWO NEW NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 16, 1880.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




BEN JONSON


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 20, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE POETS' CORNER--I


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A RIDE THROUGH MOROCCO


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 8, 1886.)

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

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

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




THE CHILDREN OF THE POETS


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886.)

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

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

but how different it is from

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




NEW NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 28, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A POLITICIAN'S POETRY


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 3, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




MR. SYMONDS' HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 10, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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




A 'JOLLY' ART CRITIC


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 18, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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

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




A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH LITERATURE


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 1, 1886.)

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

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

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

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

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




COMMON-SENSE IN ART


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 8, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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




MINER AND MINOR POETS


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1887.)

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

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

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

How exquisite and fanciful this stray lyric:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A NEW CALENDAR


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 17, 1887.)

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

   Graves are a _mother's dimples_
      When we complain,

or

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

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

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

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

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

   A meadow ribbed with _drying_ swathes of hay,

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

   A meadow ribbed with _dying_ swathes of hay,

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

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

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

   Voyaging voice

and tells us that

      The stockdove _broods_
   Low to itself,

we must really enter a protest against such silly plagiarisms.

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

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




THE POETS' CORNER--II


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 8, 1837.)

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

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

and this:

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

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

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

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

   I stand on Bunker's towering pile,

are sure to be popular in America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




GREAT WRITERS BY LITTLE MEN


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 28, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A NEW BOOK ON DICKENS


(Pall Mall Gazette, March 31, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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




OUR BOOK-SHELF


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A CHEAP EDITION OF A GREAT MAN


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 18, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

   What glints there like a lance that flees?

appears as:

   What glints there like a _glance_ that flees?

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

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

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

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




MR. MORRIS'S ODYSSEY


(Pall Mall Gazette, April 26, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

It may be objected by some that the line

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

is a rather fanciful version of

   [Greek text]

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

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

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

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

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




A BATCH OF NOVELS


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 2, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




SOME NOVELS


(Saturday Review, May 7, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE POETS' CORNER--III


(Pall Mall Gazette, May 30, 1887.)

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

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

but such scenes as--

   Enter ADAM.

   ADAM (excitedly).  Eve, where art thou?

   EVE (surprised).  Oh!

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

or--

   Enter ADAM and EVE.

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

   ADAM (distracted).  It is--

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

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

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

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

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

is very dainty and musical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




MR. PATER'S IMAGINARY PORTRAITS


(Pall Mall Gazette, June 11, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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




A GOOD HISTORICAL NOVEL


(Pall Mall Gazette, August 8, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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




NEW NOVELS


(Saturday Review, August 20, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




TWO BIOGRAPHIES OF KEATS


(Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




A SCOTCHMAN ON SCOTTISH POETRY


(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1887.)

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

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

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

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




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--I


(Woman's World, November 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

   * * * * *

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

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

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

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

   * * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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




MR. MAHAFFY'S NEW BOOK


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 9, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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




MR. MORRIS'S COMPLETION OF THE ODYSSEY


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 24, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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




SIR CHARLES BOWEN'S VIRGIL


(Pall Mall Gazette, November 30, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this from the sixth book is worth quoting:

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

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

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

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




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--II


(Woman's World, December 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this sonnet is full of suggestion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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




ARISTOTLE AT AFTERNOON TEA


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 16, 1887.)

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

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

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

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

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

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




EARLY CHRISTIAN ART IN IRELAND


(Pall Mall Gazette, December 17, 1887.)

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

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

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

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




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--III


(Woman's World, January 1888.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

   * * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE POETS' CORNER--IV


(Pall Mall Gazette, January 20, 1888.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   2ND.--semi-chorus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




LITERARY AND OTHER NOTES--IV


(Woman's World, February 1888.)

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

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

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

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

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

and that

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

   DENMARK HILL, 2nd September 1871.

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(4) Warring Angels.  (Fisher Unwin.)

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

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

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




THE POETS' CORNER--V


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1888.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VENUS OR VICTORY


(Pall Mall Gazette, February 24, 1888.)

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

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