In the sand
The gold prow-griffin claws a hold,
or--
The spires
Shine and are changed,
and many other graceful or fanciful lines, even 'the green sky's minor
thirds' being perfectly right in its place, and a very refreshing bit of
affectation in a volume where there is so much that is natural.
However, Mr. Henley is not to be judged by samples. Indeed, the most
attractive thing in the book is no single poem that is in it, but the
strong humane personality that stands behind both flawless and faulty
work alike, and looks out through many masks, some of them beautiful, and
some grotesque, and not a few misshapen. In the case with most of our
modern poets, when we have analysed them down to an adjective, we can go
no further, or we care to go no further; but with this book it is
different. Through these reeds and pipes blows the very breath of life.
It seems as if one could put one's hand upon the singer's heart and count
its pulsations. There is something wholesome, virile and sane about the
man's soul. Anybody can be reasonable, but to be sane is not common; and
sane poets are as rare as blue lilies, though they may not be quite so
delightful.
Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,
Or the gold weather round us mellow slow;
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare,
And we can conquer, though we may not share
In the rich quiet of the afterglow,
What is to come,
is the concluding stanza of the last rondeau--indeed, of the last poem in
the collection, and the high, serene temper displayed in these lines
serves at once as keynote and keystone to the book. The very lightness
and slightness of so much of the work, its careless moods and casual
fancies, seem to suggest a nature that is not primarily interested in
art--a nature, like Sordello's, passionately enamoured of life, one to
which lyre and lute are things of less importance. From this mere joy of
living, this frank delight in experience for its own sake, this lofty
indifference, and momentary unregretted ardours, come all the faults and
all the beauties of the volume. But there is this difference between
them--the faults are deliberate, and the result of much study; the
beauties have the air of fascinating impromptus. Mr. Henley's healthy,
if sometimes misapplied, confidence in the myriad suggestions of life
gives him his charm. He is made to sing along the highways, not to sit
down and write. If he took himself more seriously, his work would become
trivial.
_A Book of Verses_. By William Ernest Henley. (David Nutt.)
SOME LITERARY LADIES
(_Woman's World_, January 1889.)
In a recent article on _English Poetesses_, I ventured to suggest that
our women of letters should turn their attention somewhat more to prose
and somewhat less to poetry. Women seem to me to possess just what our
literature wants--a light touch, a delicate hand, a graceful mode of
treatment, and an unstudied felicity of phrase. We want some one who
will do for our prose what Madame de Sevigne did for the prose of France.
George Eliot's style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Bronte's too
exaggerated. However, one must not forget that amongst the women of
England there have been some charming letter-writers, and certainly no
book can be more delightful reading than Mrs. Ross's _Three Generations
of English Women_, which has recently appeared. The three Englishwomen
whose memoirs and correspondence Mrs. Ross has so admirably edited are
Mrs. John Taylor, Mrs. Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon, all of them
remarkable personalities, and two of them women of brilliant wit and
European reputation. Mrs. Taylor belonged to that great Norwich family
about whom the Duke of Sussex remarked that they reversed the ordinary
saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man, and was for many years
one of the most distinguished figures in the famous society of her native
town. Her only daughter married John Austin, the great authority on
jurisprudence, and her _salon_ in Paris was the centre of the intellect
and culture of her day. Lucie Duff Gordon, the only child of John and
Sarah Austin, inherited the talents of her parents. A beauty, a _femme
d'esprit_, a traveller, and clever writer, she charmed and fascinated her
age, and her premature death in Egypt was really a loss to our
literature. It is to her daughter that we owe this delightful volume of
memoirs.
First we are introduced to Mrs. Ross's great-grandmother, Mrs. Taylor,
who 'was called, by her intimate friends, "Madame Roland of Norwich,"
from her likeness to the portraits of the handsome and unfortunate
Frenchwoman.' We hear of her darning her boy's grey worsted stockings
while holding her own with Southey and Brougham, and dancing round the
Tree of Liberty with Dr. Parr when the news of the fall of the Bastille
was first known. Amongst her friends were Sir James Mackintosh, the most
popular man of the day, 'to whom Madame de Stael wrote, "Il n'y a pas de
societe sans vous." "C'est tres ennuyeux de diner sans vous; la societe
ne va pas quand vous n'etes pas la";' Sir James Smith, the botanist;
Crabb Robinson; the Gurneys; Mrs. Barbauld; Dr. Alderson and his charming
daughter, Amelia Opie; and many other well-known people. Her letters are
extremely sensible and thoughtful. 'Nothing at present,' she says in one
of them, 'suits my taste so well as Susan's Latin lessons, and her
philosophical old master. . . . When we get to Cicero's discussions on
the nature of the soul, or Virgil's fine descriptions, my mind is filled
up. Life is either a dull round of eating, drinking, and sleeping, or a
spark of ethereal fire just kindled. . . . The character of girls must
depend upon their reading as much as upon the company they keep. Besides
the intrinsic pleasure to be derived from solid knowledge, a woman ought
to consider it as her best resource against poverty.' This is a somewhat
caustic aphorism: 'A romantic woman is a troublesome friend, as she
expects you to be as impudent as herself, and is mortified at what she
calls coldness and insensibility.' And this is admirable: 'The art of
life is not to estrange oneself from society, and yet not to pay too dear
for it.' This, too, is good: 'Vanity, like curiosity, is wanted as a
stimulus to exertion; indolence would certainly get the better of us if
it were not for these two powerful principles'; and there is a keen touch
of humour in the following: 'Nothing is so gratifying as the idea that
virtue and philanthropy are becoming fashionable.' Dr. James Martineau,
in a letter to Mrs. Ross, gives us a pleasant picture of the old lady
returning from market 'weighted by her huge basket, with the shank of a
leg of mutton thrust out to betray its contents,' and talking divinely
about philosophy, poets, politics, and every intellectual topic of the
day. She was a woman of admirable good sense, a type of Roman matron,
and quite as careful as were the Roman matrons to keep up the purity of
her native tongue.
Mrs. Taylor, however, was more or less limited to Norwich. Mrs. Austin
was for the world. In London, Paris, and Germany, she ruled and
dominated society, loved by every one who knew her. 'She is "My best and
brightest" to Lord Jeffrey; "Dear, fair and wise" to Sydney Smith; "My
great ally" to Sir James Stephen; "Sunlight through waste weltering
chaos" to Thomas Carlyle (while he needed her aid); "La petite mere du
genre humain" to Michael Chevalier; "Liebes Mutterlein" to John Stuart
Mill; and "My own Professorin" to Charles Buller, to whom she taught
German, as well as to the sons of Mr. James Mill.' Jeremy Bentham, when
on his deathbed, gave her a ring with his portrait and some of his hair
let in behind. 'There, my dear,' he said, 'it is the only ring I ever
gave a woman.' She corresponded with Guizot, Barthelemy de St. Hilaire,
the Grotes, Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, Nassau Senior, the
Duchesse d'Orleans, Victor Cousin, and many other distinguished people.
Her translation of Ranke's _History of the Popes_ is admirable; indeed,
all her literary work was thoroughly well done, and her edition of her
husband's _Province of Jurisprudence_ deserves the very highest praise.
Two people more unlike than herself and her husband it would have been
difficult to find. He was habitually grave and despondent; she was
brilliantly handsome, fond of society, in which she shone, and 'with an
almost superabundance of energy and animal spirits,' Mrs. Ross tells us.
She married him because she thought him perfect, but he never produced
the work of which he was worthy, and of which she knew him to be worthy.
Her estimate of him in the preface to the _Jurisprudence_ is wonderfully
striking and simple. 'He was never sanguine. He was intolerant of any
imperfection. He was always under the control of severe love of truth.
He lived and died a poor man.' She was terribly disappointed in him, but
she loved him. Some years after his death, she wrote to M. Guizot:
In the intervals of my study of his works I read his letters to
me--_forty-five years of love-letters_, the last as tender and
passionate as the first. And how full of noble sentiments! The
midday of our lives was clouded and stormy, full of cares and
disappointments; but the sunset was bright and serene--as bright as
the morning, and _more_ serene. Now it is night with me, and must
remain so till the dawn of another day. I am always alone--that is,
_I live with him_.
The most interesting letters in the book are certainly those to M.
Guizot, with whom she maintained the closest intellectual friendship; but
there is hardly one of them that does not contain something clever, or
thoughtful, or witty, while those addressed to her, in turn, are very
interesting. Carlyle writes her letters full of lamentations, the wail
of a Titan in pain, superbly exaggerated for literary effect.
Literature, one's sole craft and staff of life, lies broken in
abeyance; what room for music amid the braying of innumerable
jackasses, the howling of innumerable hyaenas whetting the tooth to
eat them up? Alas for it! it is a sick disjointed time; neither
shall we ever mend it; at best let us hope to mend ourselves. I
declare I sometimes think of throwing down the Pen altogether as a
worthless weapon; and leading out a colony of these poor starving
Drudges to the waste places of their old Mother Earth, when for sweat
of their brow bread _will_ rise for them; it were perhaps the
worthiest service that at this moment could be rendered our old world
to throw open for it the doors of the New. Thither must they come at
last, 'bursts of eloquence' will do nothing; men are starving and
will try many things before they die. But poor I, _ach Gott_! I am
no Hengist or Alaric; only a writer of Articles in bad prose; stick
to thy last, O Tutor; the Pen is not worthless, it is omnipotent to
those who have Faith.
Henri Beyle (Stendhal), the great, I am often tempted to think the
greatest of French novelists, writes her a charming letter about
_nuances_. 'It seems to me,' he says, 'that except when they read
Shakespeare, Byron, or Sterne, no Englishman understands "_nuances_"; we
adore them. A fool says to a woman "I love you"; the words mean nothing,
he might as well say "Olli Batachor"; it is the _nuance_ which gives
force to the meaning.' In 1839 Mrs. Austin writes to Victor Cousin: 'I
have seen young Gladstone, a distinguished Tory who wants to re-establish
education based on the Church in quite a Catholic form'; and we find her
corresponding with Mr. Gladstone on the subject of education. 'If you
are strong enough to provide motives and checks,' she says to him, 'you
may do two blessed acts--reform your clergy and teach your people. As it
is, how few of them conceive what it is to teach a people'! Mr.
Gladstone replies at great length, and in many letters, from which we may
quote this passage:
You are for pressing and urging the people to their profit against
their inclination: so am I. You set little value upon all merely
technical instruction, upon all that fails to touch the inner nature
of man: so do I. And here I find ground of union broad and
deep-laid. . . .
I more than doubt whether your idea, namely that of raising man to
social sufficiency and morality, can be accomplished, except through
the ancient religion of Christ; . . . or whether, the principles of
eclecticism are legitimately applicable to the Gospel; or whether, if
we find ourselves in a state of incapacity to work through the
Church, we can remedy the defect by the adoption of principles
contrary to hers. . . .
But indeed I am most unfit to pursue the subject; private
circumstances of no common interest are upon me, as I have become
very recently engaged to Miss Glynne, and I hope your recollections
will enable you in some degree to excuse me.
Lord Jeffrey has a very curious and suggestive letter on popular
education, in which he denies, or at least doubts, the effect of this
education on morals. He, however, supports it on the ground 'that it
will increase the enjoyment of individuals,' which is certainly a very
sensible claim. Humboldt writes to her about an old Indian language
which was preserved by a parrot, the tribe who spoke it having been
exterminated, and about 'young Darwin,' who had just published his first
book. Here are some extracts from her own letters:
I heard from Lord Lansdowne two or three days ago. . . . I think he
is _ce que nous avons de mieux_. He wants only the energy that great
ambition gives. He says, 'We shall have a parliament of railway
kings' . . . what can be worse than that?--The deification of money
by a whole people. As Lord Brougham says, we have no right to give
ourselves pharisaical airs. I must give you a story sent to me.
Mrs. Hudson, the railway queen, was shown a bust of Marcus Aurelius
at Lord Westminster's, on which she said, 'I suppose that is not the
present Marquis.' To _gouter_ this, you must know that the extreme
vulgar (hackney coachmen, etc.) in England pronounce 'marquis' very
like 'Marcus.'
_Dec._ 17_th_.--Went to Savigny's. Nobody was there but W. Grimm and
his wife and a few men. Grimm told me he had received two volumes of
Norwegian fairy-tales, and that they were delightful. Talking of
them, I said, 'Your children appear to be the happiest in the world;
they live in the midst of fairy-tales.' 'Ah,' said he, 'I must tell
you about that. When we were at Gottingen, somebody spoke to my
little son about his father's _Mahrchen_. He had read them but never
thought of their being mine. He came running to me, and said with an
offended air, "Father, they say you wrote those fairy-tales; surely
you never invented such silly rubbish?" He thought it below my
dignity.'
Savigny told a _Volksmahrchen_ too:
'St. Anselm was grown old and infirm, and lay on the ground among
thorns and thistles. _Der liebe Gott_ said to him, "You are very
badly lodged there; why don't you build yourself a house?" "Before I
take the trouble," said Anselm, "I should like to know how long I
have to live." "About thirty years," said _Der liebe Gott_. "Oh,
for so short a time," replied he, "it's not worth while," and turned
himself round among the thistles.'
Dr. Franck told me a story of which I had never heard before.
Voltaire had for some reason or other taken a grudge against the
prophet Habakkuk, and affected to find in him things he never wrote.
Somebody took the Bible and began to demonstrate to him that he was
mistaken. '_C'est egal_,' he said impatiently, '_Habakkuk etait
capable de tout_!'
_Oct._ 30, 1853.
I am not in love with the _Richtung_ (tendency) of our modern
novelists. There is abundance of talent; but writing a pretty,
graceful, touching, yet pleasing story is the last thing our writers
nowadays think of. Their novels are party pamphlets on political or
social questions, like _Sybil_, or _Alton Locke_, or _Mary Barton_,
or _Uncle Tom_; or they are the most minute and painful dissections
of the least agreeable and beautiful parts of our nature, like those
of Miss Bronte--_Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_; or they are a kind of
martyrology, like Mrs. Marsh's _Emilia Wyndham_, which makes you
almost doubt whether any torments the heroine would have earned by
being naughty could exceed those she incurred by her virtue.
Where, oh! where is the charming, humane, gentle spirit that dictated
the _Vicar of Wakefield_--the spirit which Goethe so justly calls
_versohnend_ (reconciling), with all the weaknesses and woes of
humanity? . . . Have you read Thackeray's _Esmond_? It is a curious
and very successful attempt to imitate the style of our old
novelists. . . . Which of Mrs. Gore's novels are translated? They
are very clever, lively, worldly, bitter, disagreeable, and
entertaining. . . . Miss Austen's--are they translated? They are
not new, and are Dutch paintings of every-day people--very clever,
very true, very _unaesthetic_, but amusing. I have not seen _Ruth_,
by Mrs. Gaskell. I hear it much admired--and blamed. It is one of
the many proofs of the desire women now have to _friser_ questionable
topics, and to _poser_ insoluble moral problems. George Sand has
turned their heads in that direction. I think a few _broad_ scenes
or hearty jokes _a la_ Fielding were very harmless in comparison.
They _confounded_ nothing. . . .
The _Heir of Redcliffe_ I have not read. . . . I am not worthy of
superhuman flights of virtue--in a novel. I want to see how people
act and suffer who are as good-for-nothing as I am myself. Then I
have the sinful pretension to be amused, whereas all our novelists
want to reform us, and to show us what a hideous place this world is:
_Ma foi_, _je ne le sais que trop_, without their help.
The _Head of the Family_ has some merits. . . . But there is too much
affliction and misery and frenzy. The heroine is one of those
creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird
tied to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be 'shyed'
at (_i.e._ pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the
end of all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is
never the worse for all the blows it has had--nay, the better--and
that now, with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body,
it is going to be quite happy. No, fair ladies, you know that it is
not so--_resigned_, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness
out of such wrecks.
In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she
detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as
moribund. 'The Radical party is evidently effete,' she writes to M.
Victor Cousin; the probable 'leader of the Tory party' is Mr. Gladstone.
'The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short,
governed,' she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says
that the state of things in France fills 'me with the deepest anxiety on
one point,--the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our
salvation as a nation turn. Are our higher classes able to keep the lead
of the rest? If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear
Charles Buller--_our_ turn must come. Now Cambridge and Oxford must
really look to this.' The belief in the power of the Universities to
stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as
'one of the dissolvents of the age--as mischievous as his extravagances
will let him be'; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as 'pernicious'; and
talks of John Stuart Mill as a 'demagogue.' She was no _doctrinaire_.
'One ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed. It is no use
to give the meat before you give the hunger.' She was delighted at a
letter of St. Hilaire's, in which he said, 'We have a system and no
results; you have results and no system.' Yet she had a deep sympathy
with the wants of the people. She was horrified at something Babbage
told her of the population of some of the manufacturing towns who are
_worked out_ before they attain to thirty years of age. 'But I am
persuaded that the remedy will not, cannot come from the people,' she
adds. Many of her letters are concerned with the question of the higher
education of women. She discusses Buckle's lecture on 'The Influence of
Women upon the Progress of Knowledge,' admits to M. Guizot that women's
intellectual life is largely coloured by the emotions, but adds: 'One is
not precisely a fool because one's opinions are greatly influenced by
one's affections. The opinions of men are often influenced by worse
things.' Dr. Whewell consults her about lecturing women on Plato, being
slightly afraid lest people should think it ridiculous; Comte writes her
elaborate letters on the relation of women to progress; and Mr. Gladstone
promises that Mrs. Gladstone will carry out at Hawarden the suggestions
contained in one of her pamphlets. She was always very practical, and
never lost her admiration for plain sewing.
All through the book we come across interesting and amusing things. She
gets St. Hilaire to order a large, sensible bonnet for her in Paris,
which was at once christened the 'Aristotelian,' and was supposed to be
the only useful bonnet in England. Grote has to leave Paris after the
_coup d'etat_, he tells her, because he cannot bear to see the
establishment of a Greek tyrant. Alfred de Vigny, Macaulay, John
Stirling, Southey, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hallam, and Jean Jacques Ampere
all contribute to these pleasant pages. She seems to have inspired the
warmest feelings of friendship in those who knew her. Guizot writes to
her: 'Madame de Stael used to say that the best thing in the world was a
serious Frenchman. I turn the compliment, and say that the best thing in
the world is an affectionate Englishman. How much more an Englishwoman!
Given equal qualities, a woman is always more charming than a man.'
Lucie Austin, afterwards Lady Duff Gordon, was born in 1821. Her chief
playfellow was John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham's garden was her
playground. She was a lovely, romantic child, who was always wanting the
flowers to talk to her, and used to invent the most wonderful stories
about animals, of whom she was passionately fond. In 1834 Mrs. Austin
decided on leaving England, and Sydney Smith wrote his immortal letter to
the little girl:
Lucie, Lucie, my dear child, don't tear your frock: tearing frocks is
not of itself a proof of genius. But write as your mother writes,
act as your mother acts: be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple,
honest, and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little
import. And Lucie, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in
the first sum of yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had
carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucie,
to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be
without arithmetic but a scene of horrors? You are going to
Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who have never understood
arithmetic. By the time you return, I shall probably have received
my first paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection of
you. Therefore I now give you my parting advice--don't marry anybody
who has not a tolerable understanding and a thousand a year. And God
bless you, dear child.
At Boulogne she sat next Heine at _table d'hote_. 'He heard me speak
German to my mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then said, "When
you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen
Heinrich Heine." I replied, "And who is Heinrich Heine?" He laughed
heartily and took no offence at my ignorance; and we used to lounge on
the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish,
mermaids, water-sprites and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle
were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very
often pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings
from the "Nord See." He was . . . so kind to me and so sarcastic to
every one else.' Twenty years afterwards the little girl whose 'braune
Augen' Heine had celebrated in his charming poem _Wenn ick an deinem
Hause_, used to go and see the dying poet in Paris. 'It does one good,'
he said to her, 'to see a woman who does not carry about a broken heart,
to be mended by all sorts of men, like the women here, who do not see
that a total want of heart is their real failing.' On another occasion
he said to her: 'I have now made peace with the whole world, and at last
also with God, who sends thee to me as a beautiful angel of death: I
shall certainly soon die.' Lady Duff Gordon said to him: 'Poor Poet, do
you still retain such splendid illusions, that you transform a travelling
Englishwoman into Azrael? That used not to be the case, for you always
disliked us.' He answered: 'Yes, I do not know what possessed me to
dislike the English, . . . it really was only petulance; I never hated
them, indeed, I never knew them. I was only once in England, but knew no
one, and found London very dreary, and the people and the streets odious.
But England has revenged herself well; she has sent me most excellent
friends--thyself and Milnes, that good Milnes.'
There are delightful letters from Dicky Doyle here, with the most amusing
drawings, one of the present Sir Robert Peel as he made his maiden speech
in the House being excellent; and the various descriptions of Hassan's
performances are extremely amusing. Hassan was a black boy, who had been
turned away by his master because he was going blind, and was found by
Lady Duff Gordon one night sitting on her doorstep. She took care of
him, and had him cured, and he seems to have been a constant source of
delight to every one. On one occasion, 'when Prince Louis Napoleon (the
late Emperor of the French) came in unexpectedly, he gravely said:
"Please, my lady, I ran out and bought twopennyworth of sprats for the
Prince, and for the honour of the house."' Here is an amusing letter
from Mrs. Norton:
MY DEAR LUCIE,--We have never thanked you for the _red Pots_, which
no early Christian should be without, and which add that finishing
stroke to the splendour of our demesne, which was supposed to depend
on a roc's egg, in less intelligent times. We have now a warm
_Pompeian_ appearance, and the constant contemplation of these
classical objects favours the beauty of the facial line; for what can
be deducted from the great fact, apparent in all the states of
antiquity, that _straight noses_ were the ancient custom, but the
logical assumption that the constant habit of turning up the nose at
unsightly objects--such as the National Gallery and other offensive
and obtrusive things--has produced the modern divergence from the
true and proper line of profile? I rejoice to think that we
ourselves are exempt. I attribute this to our love of Pompeian Pots
(on account of the beauty and distinction of this Pot's shape I spell
it with a big P), which has kept us straight in a world of
crookedness. The pursuit of profiles under difficulties--how much
more rare than a pursuit of knowledge! Talk of setting good examples
before our children! Bah! let us set good Pompeian Pots before our
children, and when they grow up they will not depart from them.
Lady Duff Gordon's _Letters from the Cape_, and her brilliant translation
of _The Amber Witch_, are, of course, well known. The latter book was,
with Lady Wilde's translation of _Sidonia the Sorceress_, my favourite
romantic reading when a boy. Her letters from Egypt are wonderfully
vivid and picturesque. Here is an interesting bit of art criticism:
Sheykh Yoosuf laughed so heartily over a print in an illustrated
paper from a picture of Hilton's of Rebekah at the well, with the old
'wekeel' of 'Sidi Ibraheem' (Abraham's chief servant) _kneeling_
before the girl he was sent to fetch, like an old fool without his
turban, and Rebekah and the other girls in queer fancy dresses, and
the camels with snouts like pigs. 'If the painter could not go into
"Es Sham" to see how the Arab really look,' said Sheykh Yoosuf, 'why
did he not paint a well in England, with girls like English
peasants--at least it would have looked natural to English people?
and the wekeel would not seem so like a madman if he had taken off a
hat!' I cordially agree with Yoosuf's art criticism. _Fancy_
pictures of Eastern things are hopelessly absurd.
Mrs. Ross has certainly produced a most fascinating volume, and her book
is one of the books of the season. It is edited with tact and judgment.
_Three Generations of English Women_. _Memoirs and Correspondence of
Susannah Taylor_, _Sarah Austin_, _and Lady Duff Gordon_. By Janet Ross,
author of Italian Sketches, Land of Manfred, etc. (Fisher Unwin.)
POETRY AND PRISON
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, January 3, 1889.)
Prison has had an admirable effect on Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as a poet. The
_Love Sonnets of Proteus_, in spite of their clever Musset-like
modernities and their swift brilliant wit, were but affected or fantastic
at best. They were simply the records of passing moods and moments, of
which some were sad and others sweet, and not a few shameful. Their
subject was not of high or serious import. They contained much that was
wilful and weak. In _Vinculis_, upon the other hand, is a book that
stirs one by its fine sincerity of purpose, its lofty and impassioned
thought, its depth and ardour of intense feeling. 'Imprisonment,' says
Mr. Blunt in his preface, 'is a reality of discipline most useful to the
modern soul, lapped as it is in physical sloth and self-indulgence. Like
a sickness or a spiritual retreat it purifies and ennobles; and the soul
emerges from it stronger and more self-contained.' To him, certainly, it
has been a mode of purification. The opening sonnets, composed in the
bleak cell of Galway Gaol, and written down on the flyleaves of the
prisoner's prayer-book, are full of things nobly conceived and nobly
uttered, and show that though Mr. Balfour may enforce 'plain living' by
his prison regulations, he cannot prevent 'high thinking' or in any way
limit or constrain the freedom of a man's soul. They are, of course,
intensely personal in expression. They could not fail to be so. But the
personality that they reveal has nothing petty or ignoble about it. The
petulant cry of the shallow egoist which was the chief characteristic of
the _Love Sonnets of Proteus_ is not to be found here. In its place we
have wild grief and terrible scorn, fierce rage and flame-like passion.
Such a sonnet as the following comes out of the very fire of heart and
brain:
God knows, 'twas not with a fore-reasoned plan
I left the easeful dwellings of my peace,
And sought this combat with ungodly Man,
And ceaseless still through years that do not cease
Have warred with Powers and Principalities.
My natural soul, ere yet these strifes began,
Was as a sister diligent to please
And loving all, and most the human clan.
God knows it. And He knows how the world's tears
Touched me. And He is witness of my wrath,
How it was kindled against murderers
Who slew for gold, and how upon their path
I met them. Since which day the World in arms
Strikes at my life with angers and alarms.
And this sonnet has all the strange strength of that despair which is but
the prelude to a larger hope:
I thought to do a deed of chivalry,
An act of worth, which haply in her sight
Who was my mistress should recorded be
And of the nations. And, when thus the fight
Faltered and men once bold with faces white
Turned this and that way in excuse to flee,
I only stood, and by the foeman's might
Was overborne and mangled cruelly.
Then crawled I to her feet, in whose dear cause
I made this venture, and 'Behold,' I said,
'How I am wounded for thee in these wars.'
But she, 'Poor cripple, would'st thou I should wed
A limbless trunk?' and laughing turned from me.
Yet she was fair, and her name 'Liberty.'