A prison is a convent without God--
Poverty, Chastity, Obedience
Its precepts are:
is very fine; and this, written just after entering the gaol, is
powerful:
Naked I came into the world of pleasure,
And naked come I to this house of pain.
Here at the gate I lay down my life's treasure,
My pride, my garments and my name with men.
The world and I henceforth shall be as twain,
No sound of me shall pierce for good or ill
These walls of grief. Nor shall I hear the vain
Laughter and tears of those who love me still.
Within, what new life waits me! Little ease,
Cold lying, hunger, nights of wakefulness,
Harsh orders given, no voice to soothe or please,
Poor thieves for friends, for books rules meaningless;
This is the grave--nay, hell. Yet, Lord of Might,
Still in Thy light my spirit shall see light.
But, indeed, all the sonnets are worth reading, and _The Canon of
Aughrim_, the longest poem in the book, is a most masterly and dramatic
description of the tragic life of the Irish peasant. Literature is not
much indebted to Mr. Balfour for his sophistical _Defence of Philosophic
Doubt_, which is one of the dullest books we know, but it must be
admitted that by sending Mr. Blunt to gaol he has converted a clever
rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet. The narrow confines of a
prison cell seem to suit the 'sonnet's scanty plot of ground,' and an
unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the
nature.
_In Vinculis_. By Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Author of _The Wind and the
Whirlwind_, _The Love Sonnets of Proteus_, _etc. etc._ (Kegan Paul.)
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WALT WHITMAN
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, January 25, 1889.)
'No one will get to my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary
performance . . . or as aiming mainly towards art and aestheticism.'
'_Leaves of Grass_ . . . has mainly been the outcropping of my own
emotional and other personal nature--an attempt, from first to last, to
put _a Person_, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the
Nineteenth Century in America,) freely, fully and truly on record. I
could not find any similar personal record in current literature that
satisfied me.' In these words Walt Whitman gives us the true attitude we
should adopt towards his work, having, indeed, a much saner view of the
value and meaning of that work than either his eloquent admirers or noisy
detractors can boast of possessing. His last book, _November Boughs_, as
he calls it, published in the winter of the old man's life, reveals to
us, not indeed a soul's tragedy, for its last note is one of joy and
hope, and noble and unshaken faith in all that is fine and worthy of such
faith, but certainly the drama of a human soul, and puts on record with a
simplicity that has in it both sweetness and strength the record of his
spiritual development, and of the aim and motive both of the manner and
the matter of his work. His strange mode of expression is shown in these
pages to have been the result of deliberate and self-conscious choice.
The 'barbaric yawp' which he sent over 'the roofs of the world' so many
years ago, and which wrung from Mr. Swinburne's lip such lofty panegyric
in song and such loud clamorous censure in prose, appears here in what
will be to many an entirely new light. For in his very rejection of art
Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by
certain means and he succeeded. There is much method in what many have
termed his madness, too much method, indeed, some may be tempted to
fancy.
In the story of his life, as he tells it to us, we find him at the age of
sixteen beginning a definite and philosophical study of literature:
Summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a
stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island's seashores--there,
in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old
and New Testaments, and absorb'd (probably to better advantage for me
than in any library or indoor room--it makes such difference _where_
you read) Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get
of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient
Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them.
As it happen'd, I read the latter mostly in an old wood. The _Iliad_
. . . I read first thoroughly on the peninsula of Orient, northeast
end of Long Island, in a shelter'd hollow of rock and sand, with the
sea on each side. (I have wonder'd since why I was not overwhelm'd
by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described,
in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading
landscapes and vistas, or the sea rolling in.)
Edgar Allan Poe's amusing bit of dogmatism that, for our occasions and
our day, 'there can be no such thing as a long poem,' fascinated him.
'The same thought had been haunting my mind before,' he said, 'but Poe's
argument . . . work'd the sum out, and proved it to me,' and the English
translation of the Bible seems to have suggested to him the possibility
of a poetic form which, while retaining the spirit of poetry, would still
be free from the trammels of rhyme and of a definite metrical system.
Having thus, to a certain degree, settled upon what one might call the
'technique' of Whitmanism, he began to brood upon the nature of that
spirit which was to give life to the strange form. The central point of
the poetry of the future seemed to him to be necessarily 'an identical
body and soul, a personality,' in fact, which personality, he tells us
frankly, 'after many considerations and ponderings I deliberately settled
should be myself.' However, for the true creation and revealing of this
personality, at first only dimly felt, a new stimulus was needed. This
came from the Civil War. After describing the many dreams and passions
of his boyhood and early manhood, he goes on to say:
These, however, and much more might have gone on and come to naught
(almost positively would have come to naught,) if a sudden, vast,
terrible, direct and indirect stimulus for new and national
declamatory expression had not been given to me. It is certain, I
say, that although I had made a start before, only from the
occurrence of the Secession War, and what it show'd me as by flashes
of lightning, with the emotional depths it sounded and arous'd (of
course, I don't mean in my own heart only, I saw it just as plainly
in others, in millions)--that only from the strong flare and
provocation of that war's sights and scenes the final
reasons-for-being of an autochthonic and passionate song definitely
came forth.
I went down to the war fields of Virginia . . . lived thenceforward
in camp--saw great battles and the days and nights afterward--partook
of all the fluctuations, gloom, despair, hopes again arous'd, courage
evoked--death readily risk'd--_the cause_, too--along and filling
those agonistic and lurid following years . . . the real parturition
years . . . of this henceforth homogeneous Union. Without those
three or four years and the experiences they gave, _Leaves of Grass_
would not now be existing.
Having thus obtained the necessary stimulus for the quickening and
awakening of the personal self, some day to be endowed with universality,
he sought to find new notes of song, and, passing beyond the mere passion
for expression, he aimed at 'Suggestiveness' first.
I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently
with my scheme. The reader will have his or her part to do, just as
much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme
or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the
theme or thought--there to pursue your own flight.
Another 'impetus-word' is Comradeship, and other 'word-signs' are Good
Cheer, Content and Hope. Individuality, especially, he sought for:
I have allow'd the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear
upon American individuality and assist it--not only because that is a
great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalizing laws, but as
counterpoise to the leveling tendencies of Democracy--and for other
reasons. Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I
avowedly chant 'the great pride of man in himself,' and permit it to
be more or less a _motif_ of nearly all my verse. I think this pride
is indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with
obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning.
A new theme also was to be found in the relation of the sexes, conceived
in a natural, simple and healthy form, and he protests against poor Mr.
William Rossetti's attempt to Bowdlerise and expurgate his song.
From another point of view _Leaves of Grass_ is avowedly the song of
Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality--though meanings that do not
usually go along with these words are behind all, and will duly
emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different light and
atmosphere. Of this feature, intentionally palpable in a few lines,
I shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives
breath to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well
have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. . . .
Universal as are certain facts and symptoms of communities . . .
there is nothing so rare in modern conventions and poetry as their
normal recognizance. Literature is always calling in the doctor for
consultation and confession, and always giving evasions and swathing
suppressions in place of that 'heroic nudity' on which only a genuine
diagnosis . . . can be built. And in respect to editions of _Leaves
of Grass_ in time to come (if there should be such) I take occasion
now to confirm those lines with the settled convictions and
deliberate renewals of thirty years, and to hereby prohibit, as far
as word of mine can do so, any elision of them.
But beyond all these notes and moods and motives is the lofty spirit of a
grand and free acceptance of all things that are worthy of existence. He
desired, he says, 'to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should
directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom,
health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every
human or other existence, not only consider'd from the point of view of
all, but of each.' His two final utterances are that 'really great
poetry is always . . . the result of a national spirit, and not the
privilege of a polish'd and select few'; and that 'the strongest and
sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.'
Such are the views contained in the opening essay _A Backward Glance O'er
Travel'd Roads_, as he calls it; but there are many other essays in this
fascinating volume, some on poets such as Burns and Lord Tennyson, for
whom Walt Whitman has a profound admiration; some on old actors and
singers, the elder Booth, Forrest, Alboni and Mario being his special
favourites; others on the native Indians, on the Spanish element in
American nationality, on Western slang, on the poetry of the Bible, and
on Abraham Lincoln. But Walt Whitman is at his best when he is analysing
his own work and making schemes for the poetry of the future.
Literature, to him, has a distinctly social aim. He seeks to build up
the masses by 'building up grand individuals.' And yet literature itself
must be preceded by noble forms of life. 'The best literature is always
the result of something far greater than itself--not the hero but the
portrait of the hero. Before there can be recorded history or poem there
must be the transaction.' Certainly, in Walt Whitman's views there is a
largeness of vision, a healthy sanity and a fine ethical purpose. He is
not to be placed with the professional litterateurs of his country,
Boston novelists, New York poets and the like. He stands apart, and the
chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He
has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As
a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic
and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by,
Philosophy will take note of him.
_November Boughs_. By Walt Whitman. (Alexander Gardner.)
IRISH FAIRY TALES
(_Woman's World_, February 1889.)
'The various collectors of Irish folk-lore,' says Mr. W. B. Yeats in his
charming little book _Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry_,
'have, from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of
view of others, one great fault.'
They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us
of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of
mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after. To
be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales
in forms like grocers' bills--item the fairy king, item the queen.
Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the
very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.
Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility,
saw everything humorized. The impulse of the Irish literature of
their time came from a class that did not--mainly for political
reasons--take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a
humorist's Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew
nothing of. What they did was not wholly false; they merely
magnified an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen,
carmen, and gentlemen's servants, into the type of a whole nation,
and created the stage Irishman. The writers of 'Forty-eight, and the
famine combined, burst their bubble. Their work had the dash as well
as the shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is
touched everywhere with beauty--a gentle Arcadian beauty. Carleton,
a peasant born, has in many of his stories, . . . more especially in
his ghost stories, a much more serious way with him, for all his
humour. Kennedy, an old bookseller in Dublin, who seems to have had
a something of genuine belief in the fairies, comes next in time. He
has far less literary faculty, but is wonderfully accurate, giving
often the very words the stories were told in. But the best book
since Croker is Lady Wilde's _Ancient __Legends_. The humour has all
given way to pathos and tenderness. We have here the innermost heart
of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through years of
persecution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams, and hearing
fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and on the dead.
Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt dreaming.
Into a volume of very moderate dimensions, and of extremely moderate
price, Mr. Yeats has collected together the most characteristic of our
Irish folklore stories, grouping them together according to subject.
First come _The Trooping Fairies_. The peasants say that these are
'fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be
lost'; but the Irish antiquarians see in them 'the gods of pagan
Ireland,' who, 'when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings,
dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans
high.' Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, making love, and
playing the most beautiful music. 'They have only one industrious person
amongst them, the _lepra-caun_--the shoemaker.' It is his duty to repair
their shoes when they wear them out with dancing. Mr. Yeats tells us
that 'near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst
them seven years. When she came home she had no toes--she had danced
them off.' On May Eve, every seventh year, they fight for the harvest,
for the best ears of grain belong to them. An old man informed Mr. Yeats
that he saw them fight once, and that they tore the thatch off a house.
'Had any one else been near they would merely have seen a great wind
whirling everything into the air as it passed.' When the wind drives the
leaves and straws before it, 'that is the fairies, and the peasants take
off their hats and say "God bless them."' When they are gay, they sing.
Many of the most beautiful tunes of Ireland 'are only their music, caught
up by eavesdroppers.' No prudent peasant would hum _The Pretty Girl
Milking the Cow_ near a fairy rath, 'for they are jealous, and do not
like to hear their songs on clumsy mortal lips.' Blake once saw a
fairy's funeral. But this, as Mr. Yeats points out, must have been an
English fairy, for the Irish fairies never die; they are immortal.
Then come _The Solitary Fairies_, amongst whom we find the little
_Lepracaun_ mentioned above. He has grown very rich, as he possesses all
the treasure-crocks buried in war-time. In the early part of this
century, according to Croker, they used to show in Tipperary a little
shoe forgotten by the fairy shoemaker. Then there are two rather
disreputable little fairies--the _Cluricaun_, who gets intoxicated in
gentlemen's cellars, and the Red Man, who plays unkind practical jokes.
'The _Fear-Gorta_ (Man of Hunger) is an emaciated phantom that goes
through the land in famine time, begging an alms and bringing good luck
to the giver.' The _Water-sheerie_ is 'own brother to the English
Jack-o'-Lantern.' '_The Leanhaun Shee_ (fairy mistress) seeks the love
of mortals. If they refuse, she must be their slave; if they consent,
they are hers, and can only escape by finding another to take their
place. The fairy lives on their life, and they waste away. Death is no
escape from her. She is the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to
those she persecutes. The Gaelic poets die young, for she is restless,
and will not let them remain long on earth.' The _Pooka_ is essentially
an animal spirit, and some have considered him the forefather of
Shakespeare's 'Puck.' He lives on solitary mountains, and among old
ruins 'grown monstrous with much solitude,' and 'is of the race of the
nightmare.' 'He has many shapes--is now a horse, . . . now a goat, now
an eagle. Like all spirits, he is only half in the world of form.' The
_banshee_ does not care much for our democratic levelling tendencies; she
loves only old families, and despises the _parvenu_ or the _nouveau
riche_. When more than one banshee is present, and they wail and sing in
chorus, it is for the death of some holy or great one. An omen that
sometimes accompanies the banshee is '. . . an immense black coach,
mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless horses driven by a
_Dullahan_.' A _Dullahan_ is the most terrible thing in the world. In
1807 two of the sentries stationed outside St. James's Park saw one
climbing the railings, and died of fright. Mr. Yeats suggests that they
are possibly 'descended from that Irish giant who swam across the Channel
with his head in his teeth.'
Then come the stories of ghosts, of saints and priests, and of giants.
The ghosts live in a state intermediary between this world and the next.
They are held there by some earthly longing or affection, or some duty
unfulfilled, or anger against the living; they are those who are too good
for hell, and too bad for heaven. Sometimes they 'take the forms of
insects, especially of butterflies.' The author of the _Parochial Survey
of Ireland_ 'heard a woman say to a child who was chasing a butterfly,
"How do you know it is not the soul of your grandfather?" On November
eve they are abroad, and dance with the fairies.' As for the saints and
priests, 'there are no martyrs in the stories.' That ancient chronicler
Giraldus Cambrensis 'taunted the Archbishop of Cashel, because no one in
Ireland had received the crown of martyrdom. "Our people may be
barbarous," the prelate answered, "but they have never lifted their hands
against God's saints; but now that a people have come amongst us who know
how to make them (it was just after the English invasion), we shall have
martyrs plentifully."' The giants were the old pagan heroes of Ireland,
who grew bigger and bigger, just as the gods grew smaller and smaller.
The fact is they did not wait for offerings; they took them _vi et
armis_.
Some of the prettiest stories are those that cluster round _Tir-na-n-Og_.
This is the Country of the Young, 'for age and death have not found it;
neither tears nor loud laughter have gone near it.' 'One man has gone
there and returned. The bard, Oisen, who wandered away on a white horse,
moving on the surface of the foam with his fairy Niamh, lived there three
hundred years, and then returned looking for his comrades. The moment
his foot touched the earth his three hundred years fell on him, and he
was bowed double, and his beard swept the ground. He described his
sojourn in the Land of Youth to Patrick before he died.' Since then,
according to Mr. Yeats, 'many have seen it in many places; some in the
depths of lakes, and have heard rising therefrom a vague sound of bells;
more have seen it far off on the horizon, as they peered out from the
western cliffs. Not three years ago a fisherman imagined that he saw
it.'
Mr. Yeats has certainly done his work very well. He has shown great
critical capacity in his selection of the stories, and his little
introductions are charmingly written. It is delightful to come across a
collection of purely imaginative work, and Mr. Yeats has a very quick
instinct in finding out the best and the most beautiful things in Irish
folklore.
I am also glad to see that he has not confined himself entirely to prose,
but has included Allingham's lovely poem on _The Fairies_:
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs
All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He's nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music,
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
All lovers of fairy tales and folklore should get this little book. _The
Horned Women_, _The Priest's Soul_, {157} and _Teig O'Kane_, are really
marvellous in their way; and, indeed, there is hardly a single story that
is not worth reading and thinking over.
_Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry_. Edited and Selected by W.
B. Yeats. (Walter Scott.)
MR. W. B. YEATS
(_Woman's World_, March 1889.)
'_The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems_ is, I believe, the first
volume of poems that Mr. Yeats has published, and it is certainly full of
promise. It must be admitted that many of the poems are too fragmentary,
too incomplete. They read like stray scenes out of unfinished plays,
like things only half remembered, or, at best, but dimly seen. But the
architectonic power of construction, the power to build up and make
perfect a harmonious whole, is nearly always the latest, as it certainly
is the highest, development of the artistic temperament. It is somewhat
unfair to expect it in early work. One quality Mr. Yeats has in a marked
degree, a quality that is not common in the work of our minor poets, and
is therefore all the more welcome to us--I mean the romantic temper. He
is essentially Celtic, and his verse, at its best, is Celtic also.
Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to study how to 'load every rift
with ore,' yet is more fascinated by the beauty of words than by the
beauty of metrical music. The spirit that dominates the whole book is
perhaps more valuable than any individual poem or particular passage, but
this from _The Wanderings of Oisin_ is worth quoting. It describes the
ride to the Island of Forgetfulness:
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow light,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world
and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world
was one;
Till the horse gave a whinny; for cumbrous with stems of the hazel
and oak,
Of hollies, and hazels, and oak-trees, a valley was sloping away
From his hoofs in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk,
Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they
lay.
More comely than man may make them, inlaid with silver and gold,
Were arrow and shield and war-axe, arrow and spear and blade,
And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollows a child of three years old
Could sleep on a couch of rushes, round and about them laid.
And this, which deals with the old legend of the city lying under the
waters of a lake, is strange and interesting:
The maker of the stars and worlds
Sat underneath the market cross,
And the old men were walking, walking,
And little boys played pitch-and-toss.
'The props,' said He, 'of stars and worlds
Are prayers of patient men and good.
The boys, the women, and old men,
Listening, upon their shadows stood.
A grey professor passing cried,
'How few the mind's intemperance rule!
What shallow thoughts about deep things!
The world grows old and plays the fool.'
The mayor came, leaning his left ear--
There were some talking of the poor--
And to himself cried, 'Communist!'
And hurried to the guardhouse door.
The bishop came with open book,
Whispering along the sunny path;
There was some talking of man's God,
His God of stupor and of wrath.
The bishop murmured, 'Atheist!
How sinfully the wicked scoff!'
And sent the old men on their way,
And drove the boys and women off.
The place was empty now of people;
A cock came by upon his toes;
An old horse looked across the fence,
And rubbed along the rail his nose.
The maker of the stars and worlds
To His own house did Him betake,
And on that city dropped a tear,
And now that city is a lake.
Mr. Yeats has a great deal of invention, and some of the poems in his
book, such as _Mosada_, _Jealousy_, and _The Island of Statues_, are very
finely conceived. It is impossible to doubt, after reading his present
volume, that he will some day give us work of high import. Up to this he
has been merely trying the strings of his instrument, running over the
keys.
_The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems_. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan
Paul.)
MR. YEATS'S _WANDERINGS OF OISIN_
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, July 12, 1889.)
Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are
never met. Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so
far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating
temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author. Such
a book Mr. Yeats's _Wanderings of Oisin_ certainly is. Here we find
nobility of treatment and nobility of subject-matter, delicacy of poetic
instinct and richness of imaginative resource. Unequal and uneven much
of the work must be admitted to be. Mr. Yeats does not try to 'out-baby'
Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in
'out-glittering' Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across
strange crudities and irritating conceits. But when he is at his best he
is very good. If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he
has at least something of the largeness of vision that belongs to the
epical temper. He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of
Celtic mythology. He is very naive and very primitive and speaks of his
giants with the air of a child. Here is a characteristic passage from
the account of Oisin's return from the Island of Forgetfulness:
And I rode by the plains of the sea's edge, where all is barren and
grey,
Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping
trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the
seas.
Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,
Snatching the bird in secret, nor knew I, embosomed apart,
When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,
For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my
heart.
Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell
down;
Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-winds
brown.
If I were as I once was, the gold hooves crushing the sand and the
shells,
Coming forth from the sea like the morning with red lips murmuring
a song,
Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the
bells,
I would leave no Saint's head on his body, though spacious his
lands were and strong.
Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path,
Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattle and woodwork made,
Thy bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the
earth,
And a small and feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade.
In one or two places the music is faulty, the construction is sometimes
too involved, and the word 'populace' in the last line is rather
infelicitous; but, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel in
these stanzas the presence of the true poetic spirit.
_The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems_. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan
Paul.)
MR. WILLIAM MORRIS'S LAST BOOK
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, March 2, 1889.)
Mr. Morris's last book is a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning
to end, and the very remoteness of its style from the common language and
ordinary interests of our day gives to the whole story a strange beauty
and an unfamiliar charm. It is written in blended prose and verse, like
the mediaeval 'cante-fable,' and tells the tale of the House of the
Wolfings in its struggles against the legionaries of Rome then advancing
into Northern Germany. It is a kind of Saga, and the language in which
the folk-epic, as we may call it, is set forth recalls the antique
dignity and directness of our English tongue four centuries ago. From an
artistic point of view it may be described as an attempt to return by a
self-conscious effort to the conditions of an earlier and a fresher age.
Attempts of this kind are not uncommon in the history of art. From some
such feeling came the Pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day and the
archaistic movement of later Greek sculpture. When the result is
beautiful the method is justified, and no shrill insistence upon a
supposed necessity for absolute modernity of form can prevail against the
value of work that has the incomparable excellence of style. Certainly,
Mr. Morris's work possesses this excellence. His fine harmonies and rich
cadences create in the reader that spirit by which alone can its own
spirit be interpreted, awake in him something of the temper of romance
and, by taking him out of his own age, place him in a truer and more
vital relation to the great masterpieces of all time. It is a bad thing
for an age to be always looking in art for its own reflection. It is
well that, now and then, we are given work that is nobly imaginative in
its method and purely artistic in its aim. As we read Mr. Morris's story
with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative and
descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and adventurous
themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from the ignoble
fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day. We breathe a
purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind of poetical
quality of its own, and was simple and stately and complete.
The tragic interest of _The House of the Wolfings_ centres round the
figure of Thiodolf, the great hero of the tribe. The goddess who loves
him gives him, as he goes to battle against the Romans, a magical hauberk
on which rests this strange fate: that he who wears it shall save his own
life and destroy the life of his land. Thiodolf, finding out this
secret, brings the hauberk back to the Wood-Sun, as she is called, and
chooses death for himself rather than the ruin of his cause, and so the
story ends.
But Mr. Morris has always preferred romance to tragedy, and set the
development of action above the concentration of passion. His story is
like some splendid old tapestry crowded with stately images and enriched
with delicate and delightful detail. The impression it leaves on us is
not of a single central figure dominating the whole, but rather of a
magnificent design to which everything is subordinated, and by which
everything becomes of enduring import. It is the whole presentation of
the primitive life that really fascinates. What in other hands would
have been mere archaeology is here transformed by quick artistic instinct
and made wonderful for us, and human and full of high interest. The
ancient world seems to have come to life again for our pleasure.
Of a work so large and so coherent, completed with no less perfection
than it is conceived, it is difficult by mere quotation to give any
adequate idea. This, however, may serve as an example of its narrative
power. The passage describes the visit of Thiodolf to the Wood-Sun:
The moonlight lay in a great flood on the grass without, and the dew
was falling in the coldest hour of the night, and the earth smelled
sweetly: the whole habitation was asleep now, and there was no sound
to be known as the sound of any creature, save that from the distant
meadow came the lowing of a cow that had lost her calf, and that a
white owl was flitting about near the eaves of the Roof with her wild
cry that sounded like the mocking of merriment now silent. Thiodolf
turned toward the wood, and walked steadily through the scattered
hazel-trees, and thereby into the thick of the beech-trees, whose
boles grew smooth and silver-grey, high and close-set: and so on and
on he went as one going by a well-known path, though there was no
path, till all the moonlight was quenched under the close roof of the
beech-leaves, though yet for all the darkness, no man could go there
and not feel that the roof was green above him. Still he went on in
despite of the darkness, till at last there was a glimmer before him,
that grew greater till he came unto a small wood-lawn whereon the
turf grew again, though the grass was but thin, because little
sunlight got to it, so close and thick were the tall trees round
about it. . . . Nought looked Thiodolf either at the heavens above,
or the trees, as he strode from off the husk-strewn floor of the
beech wood on to the scanty grass of the lawn, but his eyes looked
straight before him at that which was amidmost of the lawn: and
little wonder was that; for there on a stone chair sat a woman
exceeding fair, clad in glittering raiment, her hair lying as pale in
the moonlight on the grey stone as the barley acres in the August
night before the reaping-hook goes in amongst them. She sat there as
though she were awaiting some one, and he made no stop nor stay, but
went straight up to her, and took her in his arms, and kissed her
mouth and her eyes, and she him again; and then he sat himself down
beside her.
As an example of the beauty of the verse we would take this from the song
of the Wood-Sun. It at least shows how perfectly the poetry harmonizes
with the prose, and how natural the transition is from the one to the
other:
In many a stead Doom dwelleth, nor sleepeth day nor night:
The rim of the bowl she kisseth, and beareth the chambering light
When the kings of men wend happy to the bride-bed from the board.
It is little to say that she wendeth the edge of the grinded sword,
When about the house half builded she hangeth many a day;
The ship from the strand she shoveth, and on his wonted way
By the mountain hunter fareth where his foot ne'er failed before:
She is where the high bank crumbles at last on the river's shore:
The mower's scythe she whetteth; and lulleth the shepherd to sleep
Where the deadly ling-worm wakeneth in the desert of the sheep.
Now we that come of the God-kin of her redes for ourselves we wot,
But her will with the lives of men-folk and their ending know we not.
So therefore I bid thee not fear for thyself of Doom and her deed.
But for me: and I bid thee hearken to the helping of my need.
Or else--Art thou happy in life, or lusteth thou to die
In the flower of thy days, when thy glory and thy longing bloom on
high?
The last chapter of the book in which we are told of the great feast made
for the dead is so finely written that we cannot refrain from quoting
this passage:
Now was the glooming falling upon the earth; but the Hall was bright
within even as the Hall-Sun had promised. Therein was set forth the
Treasure of the Wolfings; fair cloths were hung on the walls, goodly
broidered garments on the pillars: goodly brazen cauldrons and
fair-carven chests were set down in nooks where men could see them
well, and vessels of gold and silver were set all up and down the
tables of the feast. The pillars also were wreathed with flowers,
and flowers hung garlanded from the walls over the precious hangings;
sweet gums and spices were burning in fair-wrought censers of brass,
and so many candles were alight under the Roof, that scarce had it
looked more ablaze when the Romans had litten the faggots therein for
its burning amidst the hurry of the Morning Battle.
There then they fell to feasting, hallowing in the high-tide of their
return with victory in their hands: and the dead corpses of Thiodolf
and Otter, clad in precious glittering raiment, looked down on them
from the High-seat, and the kindreds worshipped them and were glad;
and they drank the Cup to them before any others, were they Gods or
men.
In days of uncouth realism and unimaginative imitation, it is a high
pleasure to welcome work of this kind. It is a work in which all lovers
of literature cannot fail to delight.
_A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the Kindreds of the Mark_.
Written in Prose and in Verse by William Morris. (Reeves and Turner.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES
(_Woman's World_, April 1889.)
'In modern life,' said Matthew Arnold once, 'you cannot well enter a
monastery; but you can enter the Wordsworth Society.' I fear that this
will sound to many a somewhat uninviting description of this admirable
and useful body, whose papers and productions have been recently
published by Professor Knight, under the title of _Wordsworthiana_.
'Plain living and high thinking' are not popular ideals. Most people
prefer to live in luxury, and to think with the majority. However, there
is really nothing in the essays and addresses of the Wordsworth Society
that need cause the public any unnecessary alarm; and it is gratifying to
note that, although the society is still in the first blush of
enthusiasm, it has not yet insisted upon our admiring Wordsworth's
inferior work. It praises what is worthy of praise, reverences what
should be reverenced, and explains what does not require explanation.
One paper is quite delightful; it is from the pen of Mr. Rawnsley, and
deals with such reminiscences of Wordsworth as still linger among the
peasantry of Westmoreland. Mr. Rawnsley grew up, he tells us, in the
immediate vicinity of the present Poet-Laureate's old home in
Lincolnshire, and had been struck with the swiftness with which,
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,
the memories of the poet of the Somersby Wold had 'faded from off the
circle of the hills'--had, indeed, been astonished to note how little
real interest was taken in him or his fame, and how seldom his works were
met with in the houses of the rich or poor in the very neighbourhood.
Accordingly, when he came to reside in the Lake Country, he endeavoured
to find out what of Wordsworth's memory among the men of the Dales still
lingered on--how far he was still a moving presence among them--how far
his works had made their way into the cottages and farmhouses of the
valleys. He also tried to discover how far the race of Westmoreland and
Cumberland farm-folk--the 'Matthews' and the 'Michaels' of the poet, as
described by him--were real or fancy pictures, or how far the characters
of the Dalesmen had been altered in any remarkable manner by tourist
influences during the thirty-two years that have passed since the Lake
poet was laid to rest.
With regard to the latter point, it will be remembered that Mr. Ruskin,
writing in 1876, said that 'the Border peasantry, painted with absolute
fidelity by Scott and Wordsworth,' are, as hitherto, a scarcely injured
race; that in his fields at Coniston he had men who might have fought
with Henry V. at Agincourt without being distinguished from any of his
knights; that he could take his tradesmen's word for a thousand pounds,
and need never latch his garden gate; and that he did not fear
molestation, in wood or on moor, for his girl guests. Mr. Rawnsley,
however, found that a certain beauty had vanished which the simple
retirement of old valley days fifty years ago gave to the men among whom
Wordsworth lived. 'The strangers,' he says, 'with their gifts of gold,
their vulgarity, and their requirements, have much to answer for.' As
for their impressions of Wordsworth, to understand them one must
understand the vernacular of the Lake District. 'What was Mr. Wordsworth
like in personal appearance?' said Mr. Rawnsley once to an old retainer,
who still lives not far from Rydal Mount. 'He was a ugly-faaced man, and
a mean-liver,' was the answer; but all that was really meant was that he
was a man of marked features, and led a very simple life in matters of
food and raiment. Another old man, who believed that Wordsworth 'got
most of his poetry out of Hartley,' spoke of the poet's wife as 'a very
onpleasant woman, very onpleasant indeed. A close-fisted woman, that's
what she was.' This, however, seems to have been merely a tribute to
Mrs. Wordsworth's admirable housekeeping qualities.
The first person interviewed by Mr. Rawnsley was an old lady who had been
once in service at Rydal Mount, and was, in 1870, a lodging-house keeper
at Grasmere. She was not a very imaginative person, as may be gathered
from the following anecdote:--Mr. Rawnsley's sister came in from a late
evening walk, and said, 'O Mrs. D---, have you seen the wonderful
sunset?' The good lady turned sharply round and, drawing herself to her
full height, as if mortally offended, answered: 'No, miss; I'm a tidy
cook, I know, and "they say" a decentish body for a landlady, but I don't
knaw nothing about sunsets or them sort of things, they've never been in
my line.' Her reminiscence of Wordsworth was as worthy of tradition as
it was explanatory, from her point of view, of the method in which
Wordsworth composed, and was helped in his labours by his enthusiastic
sister. 'Well, you know,' she said, 'Mr. Wordsworth went humming and
booing about, and she, Miss Dorothy, kept close behint him, and she
picked up the bits as he let 'em fall, and tak' 'em down, and put 'em
together on paper for him. And you may be very well sure as how she
didn't understand nor make sense out of 'em, and I doubt that he didn't
know much about them either himself, but, howivver, there's a great many
folk as do, I dare say.' Of Wordsworth's habit of talking to himself,
and composing aloud, we hear a great deal. 'Was Mr. Wordsworth a
sociable man?' asked Mr. Rawnsley of a Rydal farmer. 'Wudsworth, for a'
he had noa pride nor nowt,' was the answer, 'was a man who was quite one
to hissel, ye kna. He was not a man as folks could crack wi', nor not a
man as could crack wi' folks. But there was another thing as kep' folk
off, he had a ter'ble girt deep voice, and ye might see his faace agaan
for long enuff. I've knoan folks, village lads and lasses, coming over
by old road above, which runs from Grasmere to Rydal, flayt a'most to
death there by Wishing Gaate to hear the girt voice a groanin' and
mutterin' and thunderin' of a still evening. And he had a way of
standin' quite still by the rock there in t' path under Rydal, and folks
could hear sounds like a wild beast coming from the rocks, and childer
were scared fit to be dead a'most.'
Wordsworth's description of himself constantly recurs to one:
And who is he with modest looks,
And clad in sober russet gown?
He murmurs by the running brooks,
A music sweeter than their own;
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noonday grove.
But the corroboration comes in strange guise. Mr. Rawnsley asked one of
the Dalesmen about Wordsworth's dress and habits. This was the reply:
'Wudsworth wore a Jem Crow, never seed him in a boxer in my life,--a Jem
Crow and an old blue cloak was his rig, and _as for his habits_, _he had
noan_; niver knew him with a pot i' his hand, or a pipe i' his mouth.
But he was a great skater, for a' that--noan better in these parts--why,
he could cut his own naame upo' the ice, could Mr. Wudsworth.' Skating
seems to have been Wordsworth's one form of amusement. He was 'over
feckless i' his hands'--could not drive or ride--'not a bit of fish in
him,' and 'nowt of a mountaineer.' But he could skate. The rapture of
the time when, as a boy, on Esthwaite's frozen lake, he had
wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home, and, shod with steel,
Had hissed along the polished ice,
was continued, Mr. Rawnsley tells us, into manhood's later day; and Mr.
Rawnsley found many proofs that the skill the poet had gained, when
Not seldom from the uproar he retired,
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideways, leaving the tumultuous throng
To cut across the reflex of a star,
was of such a kind as to astonish the natives among whom he dwelt. The
recollection of a fall he once had, when his skate caught on a stone,
still lingers in the district. A boy had been sent to sweep the snow
from the White Moss Tarn for him. 'Did Mr. Wudsworth gie ye owt?' he was
asked, when he returned from his labour. 'Na, but I seed him tumlle,
though!' was the answer. 'He was a ter'ble girt skater, was Wudsworth
now,' says one of Mr. Rawnsley's informants; 'he would put one hand i'
his breast (he wore a frill shirt i' them days), and t' other hand i' his
waistband, same as shepherds does to keep their hands warm, and he would
stand up straight and sway and swing away grandly.'
Of his poetry they did not think much, and whatever was good in it they
ascribed to his wife, his sister, and Hartley Coleridge. He wrote
poetry, they said, 'because he couldn't help it--because it was his
hobby'--for sheer love, and not for money. They could not understand his
doing work 'for nowt,' and held his occupation in somewhat light esteem
because it did not bring in 'a deal o' brass to the pocket.' 'Did you
ever read his poetry, or see any books about in the farmhouses?' asked
Mr. Rawnsley. The answer was curious: 'Ay, ay, time or two. But ya're
weel aware there's potry and potry. There's potry wi' a li'le bit
pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer
understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what's said,
and a deal of Wudsworth's was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the
man's faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it. His potry was
quite different work from li'le Hartley. Hartley 'ud goa running along
beside o' the brooks and mak his, and goa in the first oppen door and
write what he had got upo' paper. But Wudsworth's potry was real hard
stuff, and bided a deal of makking, and he'd keep it in his head for long
enough. Eh, but it's queer, mon, different ways folks hes of making
potry now. . . . Not but what Mr. Wudsworth didn't stand very high, and
was a well-spoken man enough.' The best criticism on Wordsworth that Mr.
Rawnsley heard was this: 'He was an open-air man, and a great critic of
trees.'
There are many useful and well-written essays in Professor Knight's
volume, but Mr. Rawnsley's is far the most interesting of all. It gives
us a graphic picture of the poet as he appeared in outward semblance and
manner to those about whom he wrote.
_Wordsworthiana_: _A Selection from Papers read to the Wordsworth
Society_. Edited by William Knight. (Macmillan and Co.)
MR. SWINBURNE'S _POEMS AND BALLADS_ (THIRD SERIES)
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, June 27, 1889.)
Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and
very poisonous poetry. Then he became revolutionary and pantheistic, and
cried out against those that sit in high places both in heaven and on
earth. Then he invented Marie Stuart and laid upon us the heavy burden
of _Bothwell_. Then he retired to the nursery and wrote poems about
children of a somewhat over-subtle character. He is now extremely
patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection
for the Tory party. He has always been a great poet. But he has his
limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, the entire lack of
any sense of limit. His song is nearly always too loud for his subject.
His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume
that now lies before us, conceals rather than reveals. It has been said
of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still
greater truth it may be said that Language is his master. Words seem to
dominate him. Alliteration tyrannizes over him. Mere sound often
becomes his lord. He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes
unreal.
Let us turn to the poem on the Armada:
The wings of the south-west wind are widened; the breath of his
fervent lips,
More keen than a sword's edge, fiercer than fire, falls full on the
plunging ships.
The pilot is he of the northward flight, their stay and their
steersman he;
A helmsman clothed with the tempest, and girdled with strength to
constrain the sea.
And the host of them trembles and quails, caught fast in his hand as
a bird in the toils:
For the wrath and the joy that fulfil him are mightier than man's,
whom he slays and spoils.
And vainly, with heart divided in sunder, and labour of wavering
will,
The lord of their host takes counsel with hope if haply their star
shine still.
Somehow we seem to have heard all this before. Does it come from the
fact that of all the poets who ever lived Mr. Swinburne is the one who is
the most limited in imagery? It must be admitted that he is so. He has
wearied us with his monotony. 'Fire' and the 'Sea' are the two words
ever on his lips. We must confess also that this shrill
singing--marvellous as it is--leaves us out of breath. Here is a passage
from a poem called _A Word with the Wind_:
Be the sunshine bared or veiled, the sky superb or shrouded,
Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and foiled,
Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed with fire or clouded,
Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents coiled.
Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with wrath and weary,
Blown for ever back by winds that rock the bird:
Winds that seamews breast subdue the sea, and bid the dreary
Waves be weak as hearts made sick with hope deferred.
Let the clarion sound from westward, let the south bear token
How the glories of thy godhead sound and shine:
Bid the land rejoice to see the land-wind's broad wings broken,
Bid the sea take comfort, bid the world be thine.
Verse of this kind may be justly praised for the sustained strength and
vigour of its metrical scheme. Its purely technical excellence is
extraordinary. But is it more than an oratorical _tour de force_? Does
it really convey much? Does it charm? Could we return to it again and
again with renewed pleasure? We think not. It seems to us empty.
Of course, we must not look to these poems for any revelation of human
life. To be at one with the elements seems to be Mr. Swinburne's aim.
He seeks to speak with the breath of wind and wave. The roar of the fire
is ever in his ears. He puts his clarion to the lips of Spring and bids
her blow, and the Earth wakes from her dreams and tells him her secret.
He is the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of
his own personality, and he has succeeded. We hear the song, but we
never know the singer. We never even get near to him. Out of the
thunder and splendour of words he himself says nothing. We have often
had man's interpretation of Nature; now we have Nature's interpretation
of man, and she has curiously little to say. Force and Freedom form her
vague message. She deafens us with her clangours.
But Mr. Swinburne is not always riding the whirlwind and calling out of
the depths of the sea. Romantic ballads in Border dialect have not lost
their fascination for him, and this last volume contains some very
splendid examples of this curious artificial kind of poetry. The amount
of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament.
To say 'mither' instead of 'mother' seems to many the acme of romance.
There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of
provincialism. There is, however, no doubt of Mr. Swinburne's mastery
over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not. _The __Weary
Wedding_ has the concentration and colour of a great drama, and the
quaintness of its style lends it something of the power of a grotesque.
The ballad of _The Witch-Mother_, a mediaeval Medea who slays her
children because her lord is faithless, is worth reading on account of
its horrible simplicity. _The Bride's Tragedy_, with its strange refrain
of
In, in, out and in,
Blaws the wind and whirls the whin: