His Qualities.
Mr. Locker's verse has charmed so wisely and so long that it has
travelled the full circle of compliment and exhausted one part of the
lexicon of eulogy. As you turn his pages you feel as freshly as ever the
sweet, old-world elegance, the courtly amiability, the mannerly
restraint, the measured and accomplished ease. True, they are
colourless, and in these days we are deboshed with colour; but then they
are so luminously limpid and serene, they are so sprightly and graceful
and gay! In the gallantry they affect there is a something at once
exquisite and paternal. If they pun, 'tis with an air: even thus might
Chesterfield have stooped to folly. And then, how clean the English, how
light yet vigorous the touch, the manner how elegant and how staid! There
is wit in them, and that so genial and unassuming that as like as not it
gets leave to beam on unperceived. There is humour too, but humour so
polite as to look half-unconscious, so dandified that it leaves you in
doubt as to whether you should laugh or only smile. And withal there is
a vein of well-bred wisdom never breathed but to the delight no less than
to the profit of the student. And for those of them that are touched
with passion, as in _The Unrealized Ideal_ and that lovely odelet to
Mabel's pearls, why, these are, I think, the best and the least
approachable of all.
His Effect.
For as English as she is, indeed, his muse is not to be touched off save
in French. To think of her is to reflect that she is _delicate_,
_spirituelle_, _semillante_--_une fine mouche_, _allez_! The _salon_ has
disappeared,--'Iran, indeed, is gone, and all his rose'; but she was born
with the trick of it. You make your bow to her in her Sheraton chair, a
buckle shoe engagingly discovered; and she rallies you with an
incomparable ease, a delicate malice, in a dialect itself a distinction;
and when she smiles it is behind or above a fan that points while it
dissembles, that assists effect as delightfully as it veils intention. At
times she is sensitive and tender, but her graver mood has no more of
violence or mawkishness than has her gallant roguery (or enchanting
archness) of viciousness or spite. Best of all, she is her poet's very
own. You may woo her and pursue her as you will; but the end is
invariable. 'I follow, follow still, but I shall never see her face.'
Even as in her master's finest song.