ELVIRA (_after long silence_, _leaving the harp_, _steps to Hugo_,
_and seeks his gaze_).
HUGO (_softly_). Though I made sacrifice of thy sweet life, the
Father has forgiven. Can the wife--forgive?
ELVIRA (_on his breast_). She can!
HUGO (_with all the warmth of love_). Dear wife!
ELVIRA (_after a pause_, _in deep sorrow_). Must it be so, beloved
one?
HUGO (_sorry to have betrayed himself_). What?
The Renaissance had for its object the development of great
personalities. The perfect freedom of the temperament in matters of art,
the perfect freedom of the intellect in intellectual matters, the full
development of the individual, were the things it aimed at. As we study
its history we find it full of great anarchies. It solved no political
or social problems; it did not seek to solve them. The ideal of the
'Grand Siecle,' and of Richelieu, in whom the forces of that great age
were incarnate, was different. The ideas of citizenship, of the building
up of a great nation, of the centralization of forces, of collective
action, of ethnic unity of purpose, came before the world.
The creation of a formal tradition upon classical lines is never without
its danger, and it is sad to find the provincial towns of France, once so
varied and individual in artistic expression, writing to Paris for
designs and advice. And yet, through Colbert's great centralizing scheme
of State supervision and State aid, France was the one country in Europe,
and has remained the one country in Europe, where the arts are not
divorced from industry.
Hawthorne re-created for us the America of the past with the incomparable
grace of a very perfect artist, but Mr. Bret Harte's emphasized modernity
has, in its own sphere, won equal, or almost equal, triumphs.
It is pleasant to come across a heroine [Bret Harte's _Cressy_] who is
not identified with any great cause, and represents no important
principle, but is simply a wonderful nymph from American backwoods, who
has in her something of Artemis, and not a little of Aphrodite.
It is always a pleasure to come across an American poet who is not
national, and who tries to give expression to the literature that he
loves rather than to the land in which he lives. The Muses care so
little for geography!
Blue-books are generally dull reading, but Blue-books on Ireland have
always been interesting. They form the record of one of the great
tragedies of modern Europe. In them England has written down her
indictment against herself and has given to the world the history of her
shame. If in the last century she tried to govern Ireland with an
insolence that was intensified by race hatred and religious prejudice,
she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is
aggravated by good intentions.
Like most penmen he [Froude] overrates the power of the sword. Where
England has had to struggle she has been wise. Where physical strength
has been on her side, as in Ireland, she has been made unwieldy by that
strength. Her own strong hands have blinded her. She has had force but
no direction.
There are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the
Irish question by doing away with the Irish people. There are others who
will remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries, and that we have
now to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but in the New.
Plastic simplicity of outline may render for us the visible aspect of
life; it is different when we come to deal with those secrets which
self-consciousness alone contains, and which self-consciousness itself
can but half reveal. Action takes place in the sunlight, but the soul
works in the dark. There is something curiously interesting in the
marked tendency of modern poetry to become obscure. Many critics,
writing with their eyes fixed on the masterpieces of past literature,
have ascribed this tendency to wilfulness and to affectation. Its origin
is rather to be found in the complexity of the new problems, and in the
fact that self-consciousness is not yet adequate to explain the contents
of the Ego. In Mr. Browning's poems, as in life itself, which has
suggested, or rather necessitated, the new method, thought seems to
proceed not on logical lines, but on lines of passion. The unity of the
individual is being expressed through its inconsistencies and its
contradictions. In a strange twilight man is seeking for himself, and
when he has found his own image, he cannot understand it. Objective
forms of art, such as sculpture and the drama, sufficed one for the
perfect presentation of life; they can no longer so suffice.
As he is not a genius he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion.
Certainly dialect is dramatic. It is a vivid method of re-creating a
past that never existed. It is something between 'A Return to Nature'
and 'A Return to the Glossary.' It is so artificial that it is really
naive. From the point of view of mere music, much may be said for it.
Wonderful diminutives lend new notes of tenderness to the song. There
are possibilities of fresh rhymes, and in search for a fresh rhyme poets
may be excused if they wander from the broad highroad of classical
utterance into devious byways and less-trodden paths. Sometimes one is
tempted to look on dialect as expressing simply the pathos of
provincialisms, but there is more in it than mere mispronunciation. With
that revival of an antique form, often comes the revival of an antique
spirit. Through limitations that are sometimes uncouth, and always
narrow, comes Tragedy herself; and though she may stammer in her
utterance, and deck herself in cast-off weeds and trammelling raiment,
still we must hold ourselves in readiness to accept her, so rare are her
visits to us now, so rare her presence in an age that demands a happy
ending from every play, and that sees in the theatre merely a source of
amusement.
There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards.
The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins
with the catastrophe or the _denoument_ one feels on pleasant terms of
equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a
theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the
hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved.
He has every form of sincerity except the sincerity of the artist, a
defect that he shares with most of our popular writers.
On the whole _Primavera_ is a pleasant little book, and we are glad to
welcome it. It is charmingly 'got up,' and undergraduates might read it
with advantage during lecture hours.
* * * * *
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
Footnotes:
{2} Reverently some well-meaning persons have placed a marble slab on
the wall of the cemetery with a medallion-profile of Keats on it and some
mediocre lines of poetry. The face is ugly, and rather hatchet-shaped,
with thick sensual lips, and is utterly unlike the poet himself, who was
very beautiful to look upon. 'His countenance,' says a lady who saw him
at one of Hazlitt's lectures, 'lives in my mind as one of singular beauty
and brightness; it had the expression as if he had been looking on some
glorious sight.' And this is the idea which Severn's picture of him
gives. Even Haydon's rough pen-and-ink sketch of him is better than this
'marble libel,' which I hope will soon be taken down. I think the best
representation of the poet would be a coloured bust, like that of the
young Rajah of Koolapoor at Florence, which is a lovely and lifelike work
of art.
{5} 'Make' is of course a mere printer's error for 'mock,' and was
subsequently corrected by Lord Houghton. The sonnet as given in _The
Garden_ of _Florence_ reads 'orbs for 'those.'
{63} _The Margravine of Baireuth and Voltaire_. (David Stott, 1888.)
{115} September 1888.
{116} See _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, chapter xi., page 222.
{157} From Lady Wilde' _Ancient Legends of Ireland_.