of a voluminous epic, and of several other poems. He had the misfortune
to lose his wife Lyde, and, to beguile his sorrow, he composed a long
elegy in her honour. Of the far-reaching consequences of this act let
our author speak. “When Antimachus first sat down in his empty house at
Colophon to write an elegy to his dead wife, consciously or
unconsciously he was initiating the greatest artistic revolution that
the world has ever seen.” Asclepiades and Philetas followed him as
imitators, and the thing was done. Woman was at last “connected with
‘romance.’” Our author admits the difficulty of supposing that “any one
man could invent and popularize an entirely new emotion”; but suggests
that if we regard it as “simply due to the readjustment of an already
existing emotion,” that is παιδεραστια, such a supposition is
“no longer absurd.” It is not only absurd but monstrous.
The truth almost certainly is, that the love between man and woman in
ancient Greece differed very little from the love between man and woman
as it exists now. Marriage was, it is true, purely a matter of business;
most wives aspired to nothing more than the management of the nursery
and the household, and most women being without education, and living in
seclusion, could scarcely associate, intellectually at least, on equal
terms with their husbands or lovers. But this proves nothing more than
_mariages de convenance_, and love based on the fascination exercised by
sensuous attraction prove now. Then, as in our own time, there were
marriages and marriages, liaisons and liaisons. The story which Plutarch
tells of Callias (_Cimon._ iv.) shows that marriage was often based on
love. The pictures given of Hector and Andromache in the _Iliad_, of
Alcinous and Arete, of Ulysses and Penelope, of Menelaus and Helen in
the _Odyssey_, the charming account of Ischomachus and his young wife in
the _Œconomics_ of Xenophon, the noble and pathetic story of Pantheia
and Abradatas in the _Cyropædeia_, the story which, in his life of
Agis,[40] Plutarch tells of Chilonis, and, in the _Morals_, of
Camma,[41] and innumerable other legends, traditions, and anecdotes,
prove that women could inspire and return as pure and as chivalrous a
love as any of the heroines of chivalry. The poet who could write about
marriage as Homer does in the Sixth Odyssey would have had little to
learn from modern refinement.[42] The love which Critobulus describes
himself as having for Amandra, in the _Symposium_ of Xenophon, and the
remarks made by Socrates in that dialogue embody the most exalted
conceptions of the passion of love between the sexes. The sentiments of
Plutarch on this subject are indistinguishable from the most refined
notions of the modern world, as is abundantly illustrated in the
_Amatorius_, the _Conjugalia Præcepta_, and in the remarks on marriage
in the eighth chapter of the Essay on Moral Virtue. If Ajax and Hercules
became brutes, Tecmessa and Deianeira were not the only women who have
discovered that men are, too often, May when they woo, and December when
they wed. It is ridiculous to suppose that a people whose popular poetry
could present such types of womanhood as Arete, Antigone, Alcestis,
Deianeira, Electra, Macaria, Iphigenia, Evadne, and Polyxena, who could
boast such poetesses as Sappho, Erinna, Corinna, Myrtis, and Damophila,
and whose society was graced by such women as Aspasia, Diotima,
Gnathæna, Herpyllis, Metaneira, and Leontium, should have given
expression to passion, sentiment, and romance only in παιδικοι
ὑμνοι.
What the author of this book, and what others who are fond of
generalizing about the Greeks, forget, is, that of a once vast and
voluminous literature we have only fragments. That portion of their
poetry which would have thrown light on the subject here discussed has
perished. It is certain, for example, that of their lyric poetry a very
large portion was erotic, of that portion exactly one poem has survived
in its entirety, while a few hundred scattered lines, torn from their
context, represent the rest that has come down to us. We know, again,
that in some hundreds of their dramas, in the Middle and New Comedy that
is to say, the plots turned on love--of these dramas not a single one is
preserved. But the reflection of some twenty of them in Terence and
Plautus, and several scattered fragments, clearly indicate, that the
passion between the sexes involved as much sentiment and romance as it
does in our Elizabethan dramatists. In what respect do Charinus and
Pamphilus in the _Andria_ and Antipho in the _Phormio_--mere replicas,
of course, of Greek originals--differ from modern lovers? What could be
more romantic than the love story which formed the plot of the _Phasma_
of Menander? It is fair to our author to say that he fully admits this,
in the only tolerably satisfactory part of his book, the chapter on
Women in Greek Comedy. The great blot on Greek life, to which Mr.
Benecke gives so much prominence, has probably had far too much
importance attached to it, partly, perhaps, owing to its accentuation in
the writings of Plato, and partly owing to that rage for scandalous
tittle-tattle, so unhappily characteristic of ancient anecdote-mongers
from Ion to Athenæus.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 40: Agis, xvii., xviii.]
[Footnote 41: De Mulierum Virtutibus.]
[Footnote 42: See particularly lines 180-185.]
MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS’ POEMS[43]
[Footnote 43: _Poems._ By Stephen Phillips. London and New York John
Lane.]
The accent here is unmistakable, it is the accent of a new and a true
poet. Mr. Phillips gives us no mere variations on familiar melodies, no
clever copies of classical archetypes, and what is more, he has not
employed any illegitimate means of attracting attention and giving
distinction to his work. An audacious choice of subjects, the adoption
of the stones which the builders have rejected, and, it may be added,
disdained, has, when coupled with elaborate affectations and
eccentricities of treatment and style, often enabled mediocrity to pass,
temporarily at least, for genius, and the specious counterfeit of
originality for the thing itself. But these poems are marked by
simplicity, sincerity, spontaneity. If a discordant note is sometimes
struck, here in an over-strained conceit, and there in an incongruous
touch of preciosity or false sentiment, this is but an accident; in
essentials all is genuine. Nature and passion affect to be speaking, and
nature and passion really speak. A poet, of whom this may be said with
truth, has passed the line which divides talent from genius, the true
singer from the accomplished artist or imitator. He has taken his place,
wherever that place may be, among authentic poets. To that high honour
the present volume undoubtedly entitles Mr. Phillips. It would now,
perhaps, be premature to say more than “Ingens omen habet magni clarique
triumphi,” but we may predict with confidence that, if fate is kind and
his muse is true to him, he has a distinguished future before him. It
may be safely said that no poet has made his _début_ with a volume which
is at once of such extraordinary merit and so rich in promise.
Mr. Phillips is not a poet who has “one plain passage of few notes.” He
strikes many chords, and strikes them often with thrilling power. The
awful story narrated in _The Wife_ is conceived and embodied with really
Dantesque intensity and vividness; it has the master’s suggestive
reservation, smiting phrase, and clairvoyant picture wording, as “in the
red shawl _sacredly_ she burned,” “smiled at him with her lips, not with
her eyes”; while “Mother and child that food together ate” is, in
pregnancy of tragic suggestiveness, almost worthy to stand with the
“poscia, più che il dolor, poté il digiuno.” Equally distinguished,
though on another plane of interest, is _The woman with the dead Soul_,
the soul which could once “wonder, laugh, and weep,” but over which the
days began to fall “dismally, as rain on ocean blear,” till--
“Existence lean, in sky dead grey
Withholding steadily, starved it away.”
If the pathos in these poems is almost “too deep for tears,” it is
gentler in the second and third of the lyrics, which are as exquisite as
they are affecting. The idea in the lines _To Milton Blind_, is worthy
of Milton’s own sublime conceit, that the darkness which had fallen on
his eyes was but the shadow of God’s protecting wings. The whole poem,
indeed, is a beautiful paraphrase of the noble passage in the _Second
Defence of the People of England_: “For the Divine law”--we give it in
the English translation--“not only shields me from injury, but almost
renders me too sacred to attack, not indeed so much from the privation
of my sight as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem
to have occasioned this obscurity; and which, when occasioned, he is
wont to illuminate with an interior light more precious and more pure.”
In _The Lily_, which is a little obscure--a fault against which Mr.
Phillips would do well to guard, for he frequently offends in this
respect--we have the note of Petrarch, but Petrarch would not have ended
the poem so flatly. Tennyson is recalled, too nearly perhaps, in “By the
Sea,” but it is a poem of great charm and beauty. _The New De Profundis_
is, unhappily, the key to Mr. Phillips’ characteristic mood; it reminds
us of the curse imposed on the worldling in Browning’s _Easter Day_,
before he has learned the use of life and doubt.
Mr. Phillips’ two most ambitious poems are _Christ in Hades_ and
_Marpessa_. In _Christ in Hades_ he fails, as Mrs. Browning failed in
_The Drama of Exile_. He attempts a theme--a stupendous theme--to which
his genius is not equal, and which could only have been adequately
treated by such poets as Dante and Milton, in the maturity of their
powers. It has neither basis nor superstructure. It is what the Greeks
would call “meteoric” as distinguished from “sublime.” It is a weird,
wild, and chaotic dream; and yet for all this its appeal to the heart
and the imagination is piercing and direct. Like Tennyson, Mr. Phillips
has the art of unfolding the full significance of a few suggestive words
in a great classic; and nothing could be more effective than the use to
which he has applied the famous lines which Homer places in the mouth of
Achilles. Poetry has few things more pathetic than Homer’s picture of
Hades and the dead, and that pathos Mr. Phillips has given us in
quintessence, as few would question after reading the lines which
describe Persephone yearning for her return to the spring-illumined
world, the speech of the Athenian ghost, and the woman’s address to
Christ. If the world depicted has something of Horace’s artistic
monster, or, to change the image, something of the anarchy of dreams in
its composition, the vividness and picturesqueness with which particular
figures and scenes are flashed into light and definition is
extraordinarily impressive. It is so with the central figure, Christ;
it is so with Prometheus; and the contrast between these martyrs for man
has both pathos and grandeur.
There is more originality, more power in _Christ in Hades_ than in
_Marpessa_, but _Marpessa_ has more balance, more sanity, more of the
stuff out of which good and abiding poetry is made, than its
predecessor. The one savours of the spasmodic school, the productions of
which have rarely been found to have the principle of life, however rich
they may have been in promise; the other is a return to a school in
which most of those who have gained permanent fame have studied. And we
are glad to find a young poet there.
But it would be doing Mr. Phillips great injustice not to note that,
though he has had many predecessors in the semi-classical, semi-romantic
re-treatment of the Greek myths, notably Keats in _Hyperion_, Wordsworth
in _Dion_ and _Laodamia_, Landor in his _Hellenics_, and Tennyson in
_Ænone_ and _Tithonus_, he has treated his theme with a distinction
which is all his own, and has impressed on it an intense individuality.
In comparison with these masters he may be _pauper_, but he is _pauper
in suo ære_.
It would be easy to point to faults in Mr. Phillips’ work. His sense of
rhythm, even allowing for what are plainly deliberate experiments in
discord, seems often curiously defective. How stiff and limping, for
example, is the following:--
“O pity us,
For I would ask of thee only to look
Upon the wonderful sunlight and to smell
Earth in the rain. Is not the labourer
Returning heavy through the August sheaves
Against the setting sun, who gladly smells
His supper from the opening door--is he
Not happier than these melancholy kings?
How good it is to live, even at the worst!
God was so lavish to us once, but here
He hath repented, jealous of His beams.”
Lines, again, like “Pierced her, and odour full of arrows was,”
“Realizes all the uncoloured dawn,” “Yet followed a riddled memorable
flag,” are, no doubt, extreme instances, but they are typical of many
bad lines. Occasionally he falls flat on some harsh prosaic phrase, like
“beautiful indolence _was on our brains_.” Nor is he always happy in his
attempts at novelty in phraseology, as in his employment of the words
“liable,” “inaccurate,” “pungent”; and these faults in rhythm and
diction are the more remarkable, as the really subtle mastery over
rhythmic expression which he exhibits at times, and his singularly
felicitous epithets, turns, and phrases are among his most striking
gifts. Take a few out of very many: “A bleak magnificence of endless
hope,” “That common trivial face, of endless needs,” “The mystic river,
floating wan,” “And the moist evening fallow, richly dark,” “That palest
rose sweet on the night of life.” How noble is the rhythm and imagery of
the following:--
“All the dead
The melancholy attraction of Jesus felt:
And millions, like a sea, wave upon wave,
Heaved dreaming to that moonlight face, or ran
In wonderful long ripples, sorrow-charmed.
Toward him, in faded purple, pacing came
Dead emperors, and sad, unflattered kings;
Unlucky captains, listless armies led:
Poets with music frozen on their lips
Toward the pale brilliance sighed.”
And it would be easy to multiply illustrations from _Marpessa_ and _By
the Sea_. Occasionally there is a certain incongruity between the form
and the matter. A poem so essentially, so intensely realistic as _The
Wife_ should not have such quaintnesses as “palèd in her thought.” Nor
should we have
“The constable, with lifted hand,
Conducting the orchestral Strand”;
nor should a railway station be described as a “moonèd terminus.”
Nothing is so disenchanting as affectation.
One cannot but add that these poems, welcome as they are, would have
been more welcome still, had they been less profoundly melancholy. Their
monotonous sadness, the persistency with which they dwell on all those
grim and melancholy realities which poetry should help us to forget, or
cheer us in enduring, is not merely their leading, but their pervading
characteristic. This note will, we hope, change. Leopardi is immortal,
and could not be spared; but one Leopardi is enough for a single
century.
THE ILLUSTRIOUS OBSCURE[44]
[Footnote 44: _West Country Poets: Their Lives and Works, etc._
Illustrated with Portraits. By W. H. Kearley Wright, F.R.H.S. London:
Elliot Stock. 1896.]
Some nineteen hundred years ago Horace observed that there was one thing
which neither gods, nor men, nor bookstalls would tolerate in a
poet--and that was mediocrity. The verdict of gods, men, and the
bookstalls is probably still what it was then; but to such tribunals the
rhymesters of our time can afford to be quite indifferent. Paper and
printing are cheap; small poets and small critics are now so numerous
that they form a world, and a populous world, in themselves; and, well
understanding the truth of the old proverb, “Concordiâ, parvæ res
crescunt,” they mutually manufacture the wreaths with which they crown
each other’s modest vanity. There are hundreds of “poets” and “critics”
of whom the great world knows nothing, who are thus enabled, in their
little day, to taste all the sweets of fame, and “walk with inward glory
crown’d.” To wage serious war against such a tribe as this would be as
absurd as to break butterflies upon a wheel; but we really think it high
time that some protest should be made against the indefinite
multiplication of the rubbish for which these people and their patrons
are responsible, and still more against its importation into what
purports to be a contribution to serious literature. As long as these
geniuses confine themselves to their proper sphere, the poets’ corners
of provincial newspapers, we have nothing to say. But it becomes quite
another matter when the skill of an ingenious projector enables--we are
really sorry to have to speak so harshly--a rabble of poetasters to
figure side by side with poets of classical fame, and to appear in all
the dignity of contributors to a national anthology. Yet such is the
design of this volume, which was, it seems, published by subscription,
the subscribers being for the most part the various candidates for
poetical fame, who have obligingly sent their portraits and their
biographies for insertion in Mr. Kearley Wright’s “monumental work.” As
Mr. Kearley Wright’s collection begins with the fifteenth century, and
includes the really eminent poets who happen to have been born in the
West of England, many of his worthies are naturally _apud plures_, but
the majority, in whose honour the anthology appears to have been
compiled, adorn the living. And very gratifying it must be for these
gentlemen, and for Mr. Kearley Wright himself--for he also has a
niche--to find themselves side by side with Sir Walter Raleigh, Herrick,
Gay, and Coleridge.
Mr. Kearley Wright’s “company of makers” is certainly a motley one.
First comes among his living bards an inspired porter at the Teignmouth
railway station, who asks in rapture,--
“Along the glitt’ring streets of gold,
Amid the brilliant glare,
Shall we God’s banner there unfold,
His righteous helmet wear?”
At no great distance follows, with a portrait looking intensely
intellectual, “the manager of the Bristol and South Wales Railway Waggon
Company, Limited,” whose poems are described as “lacking here and there
logical sequence and literary method,” but “evincing undoubtedly a great
poetical disposition and philosophical drift.” The two poems which
illustrate this poet’s genius afford very little proof either of “a
great poetical disposition” or of “a philosophical drift,” but painfully
conclusive proof that much more is lacking than “logical sequence and
literary method,” the lack of which may certainly be conceded as well.
Next comes Mr. Jonas Coaker, “the landlord of the Warren House Inn,”
whose verses “disclose a poetic spirit, and, had he possessed the
advantages of education, would doubtless have attracted some attention.”
Mr. Coaker is in the main autobiographical.
“I drew my breath first on the moor,
There my forefathers dwelled;
Its hills and dales I’ve traversed o’er,
Its desert parts beheld.
* * * * *
It’s oft envelop’d in a fog,
Because it’s up so high.”
And Mr. Coaker continues in the same strain further than we care to
transcribe. Then we have Mr. John Goodwin, “formerly a coach-guard, who
sung of the days when there was such a thing, if we may so phrase it, as
the poetry of locomotion.” In his poetry, we are told, “there is a
genuine ring,” as here, for example:--
“I mind the time, when I was guard,
The lord, the duke, or squire
Would travel by the old stage-coach,
Or post-chaise they would hire.”
Mr. Charles Chorley, who is, we are informed, submanager of the Truro
Savings Bank, in verses which are presumably a parody of Sir William
Jones’ _Imitation of Alcæus_, inquires, not without a certain propriety,
“What constitutes a mine?” On a par with all these are the verses of the
bard who “in summer hawked gooseberries and in winter shoelaces,” and
those of the “uneducated journeyman woolcomber.”
Now, we need hardly say that the humble vocations of these poets are
neither derogatory to them nor in any way detrimental to merit where
merit exists; but there is no merit whatever in the poems assigned to
them in this volume; they are simply such poems as hawkers, woolcombers,
railway porters, and submanagers of provincial banks--“who pen a stanza
when they should engross”--might be expected to write. The same may be
said of almost every copy of verses, produced by amateurs, to be found
in this collection. We have scarcely noticed a single poem which rises
above mediocrity; a very large proportion are below even a mediocre
standard--they are simply rubbish. In one poet only, among those whose
names were not before known to us, do we discern genius, and that is in
Mr. John Dryden Hosken, whose poem, entitled _My Masters_, is really
excellent.
The editor of this anthology is plainly incompetent, both in point of
taste and critical discernment, and in point of knowledge, for the task
which he has undertaken. The first is proved by the extracts which he
has selected from the works of well-known poets. Coleridge, for example,
is represented by two comparatively inferior poems, _The Devil’s
Thoughts_ and _Fancy in Nubibus_; Thomas Carew, by two short poems, one
of which is probably the worst he ever wrote; Herrick, by two of his
very worst; Praed, by two of the feeblest and least characteristic of
his poems; Walcot, by mere trash. It is quite possible that their less
illustrious brethren may have suffered from the deplorable inability of
this editor to discern between what is good and what is bad. Certainly
Capern, who was a poet with a touch of genius, suffers, for the lyric
given is very far indeed from representing or illustrating his best or
even his characteristic work. In giving an account of Alexander Barclay,
who, by the way, is called Andrew in the Preface, Mr. Wright says
nothing about his most important poems--his Eclogues. If Eustace Budgell
is included among the poets, why are not his poems specified and
represented? Of Aaron Hill it is observed that “neither his reputation
as a poet nor his connexion with the county of Devon is sufficient to
warrant more than a mere notice of his name.” Aaron Hill was the author
of more than one poem of conspicuous merit. The verses attributed on
page 488 to Sir William Yonge were written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
But these are trifles. What we wish to protest against is the foisting
of such volumes as these on our libraries; and it is appalling to learn
that it is the intention of Mr. Kearley Wright, if he is sufficiently
encouraged by subscribers, to follow this with another similar
collection. If poets like these wish to gratify their vanity, let them
not gratify it to the detriment of serious literature; for, if the few
can discriminate, the many cannot, and the multiplication of works like
these must infallibly tend to lower the standard of current literature,
by furthering the disastrous “cult of the average man.” In our opinion
criticism can have no more imperative duty than to discountenance and
discourage in every way such projectors as Mr. Kearley Wright and such
poets as those for whose merits he and critics like him stand sponsors.
VIRGIL IN ENGLISH HEXAMETERS[45]
[Footnote 45: _The Eclogues of Virgil._ Translated into English
Hexameter Verse by the Right Hon. Sir George Osborne Morgan, Bart.,
Q.C., M.P. London.]