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 65.
RUSSIAN NOVELISTS
(_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 modern 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_.
_Injury and Insult_. By Fedor Dostoieffski. Translated from the Russian
by Frederick Whishaw. (Vizetelly and Co.)
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
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 realize 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 well-nigh 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_ symbolizes 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 art 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 GERMAN PRINCESS
(_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. {63}
_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.)