proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
companionship with permanent natural objects, he was able to appreciate
passion in the lowly. He chooses to depict people from humble life,
because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on the whole more
impassioned, certainly [102] more direct in their expression of
passion, than other men; it is for this direct expression of passion
that he values their humble words. In much that he said in exaltation
of rural life he was but pleading indirectly for that sincerity, that
perfect fidelity to one's own inward presentations, to the precise
features of the picture within, without which any profound poetry is
impossible. It was not for their tameness, but for their impassioned
sincerity, that he chose incidents and situations from common life,
"related in a selection of language really used by men." He constantly
endeavours to bring his language nearer to the real language of men;
but it is to the real language of men, not on the dead level of their
ordinary intercourse, but in certain select moments of vivid sensation,
when this language is winnowed and ennobled by sentiment. There are
poets who have chosen rural life for their subject for the sake of its
passionless repose; and there are times when Wordsworth himself extols
the mere calm and dispassionate survey of things as the highest aim of
poetical culture. But it was not for such passionless calm that he
preferred the scenes of [103] pastoral life; and the meditative poet,
sheltering himself from the agitations of the outward world, is in
reality only clearing the scene for the exhibition of great emotions,
and what he values most is the almost elementary expression of
elementary feelings.
In Wordsworth's prefatory advertisement to the first edition of The
Prelude, published in 1850, it is stated that that work was intended to
be introductory to The Recluse: and that The Recluse, if completed,
would have consisted of three parts. The second part is The Excursion.
The third part was only planned; but the first book of the first part
was left in manuscript by Wordsworth--though in manuscript, it is said,
in no great condition of forwardness for the printers. This book, now
for the first time printed in extenso (a very noble passage from it
found place in that prose advertisement to The Excursion), is the great
novelty of this latest edition of Wordsworth's poetic works. It was
well worth adding to the poet's great bequest to English literature.
The true student of his work, who has formulated for himself what he
supposes to be the leading characteristics [104] of Wordsworth's
genius, will feel, we think, a lively interest in putting them to test
by the many and various striking passages in what is there presented
for the first time.
17th February 1889
VII. MR. GOSSE'S POEMS
On Viol and Flute. By Edmund Gosse.
[107] PERHAPS no age of literature, certainly no age of literature in
England, has been so rich as ours in excellent secondary poetry; and it
is with our poetry (in a measure) as with our architecture, constrained
by the nature of the case to be imitative. Our generation, quite
reasonably, is not very proud of its architectural creations; confesses
that it knows too much--knows, but cannot do. And yet we could name
certain modern churches in London, for instance, to which posterity may
well look back puzzled.--Could these exquisitely pondered buildings
have been indeed works of the nineteenth century? Were they not the
subtlest creations of the age in which Gothic art was spontaneous? In
truth, we have had instances of workmen, who, through long, large,
[108] devoted study of the handiwork of the past, have done the thing
better, with a more fully enlightened consciousness, with full
intelligence of what those early workmen only guessed at. And
something like this is true of some of our best secondary poetry. It
is the least that is true--the least that can fairly be said in praise
of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund Gosse.
Of course there can be no exact parallel between arts so different as
architecture and poetic composition: But certainly in the poetry of our
day also, though it has been in some instances powerfully initiative
and original, there is great scholarship, a large comparative
acquaintance with the poetic methods of earlier workmen, and a very
subtle intelligence of their charm. Of that fine scholarship in this
matter there is no truer example than Mr. Gosse. It is manifested
especially in the even finish of his varied work, in the equality of
his level--a high level--in species of composition so varied as the
three specimens which follow.
Far away, in late spring, "by the sea in the south," the swallows are
still lingering around "white Algiers." In Mr. Gosse's "Return of
[109] the Swallows," the northern birds--lark and thrush--have long
been calling to them:--
And something awoke in the slumbering heart
Of the alien birds in their African air,
And they paused, and alighted, and twittered apart,
And met in the broad white dreamy square,
And the sad slave woman, who lifted up
From the fountain her broad-lipped earthen cup,
Said to herself, with a weary sigh,
"To-morrow the swallows will northward fly."
Compare the following stanzas, from a kind of palinode, "1870-1871,"
years of the Franco-German war and the Parisian Commune:--
The men who sang that pain was sweet
Shuddered to see the mask of death
Storm by with myriad thundering feet;
The sudden truth caught up our breath
Our throats like pulses beat.
The songs of pale emaciate hours,
The fungus-growth of years of peace,
Withered before us like mown flowers;
We found no pleasure more in these
When bullets fell in showers.
For men whose robes are dashed with blood,
What joy to dream of gorgeous stairs,
Stained with the torturing interlude
That soothed a Sultan's midday prayers,
In old days harsh and rude?
[110]
For men whose lips are blanched and white,
With aching wounds and torturing thirst,
What charm in canvas shot with light,
And pale with faces cleft and curst,
Past life and life's delight?
And then Mr. Gosse's purely descriptive power, his aptitude for
still-life and landscape, is unmistakably vivid and sound. Take, for
an instance, this description of high-northern summer:--
The ice-white mountains clustered all around us,
But arctic summer blossomed at our feet;
The perfume of the creeping sallows found us,
The cranberry-flowers were sweet.
Below us through the valley crept a river,
Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay;
Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour
The mountain snows away.
There is no night-time in the northern summer,
But golden shimmer fills the hours of sleep,
And sunset fades not, till the bright new-comer,
Red sunrise, smites the deep.
But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser
Across the peaks against the golden sky,
And on the hills the knots of deer grew denser,
And raised their tender cry,
[111]
And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,
We knew our long sweet day was nearly spent,
And slowly, with our hearts within us swelling,
Our homeward steps we bent.
"Sunshine before Sunrise!" There's a novelty in that, for poetic use
at least, so far as we know, though we remember one fine paragraph
about it in Sartor Resartus. The grim poetic sage of Chelsea, however,
had never seen what he describes: not so Mr. Gosse, whose acquaintance
with northern lands and northern literature is special. We have indeed
picked out those stanzas from a quiet personal record of certain
amorous hours of early youth in that quaint arctic land, Mr. Gosse's
description of which, like his pretty poem on Lübeck, made one think
that what the accomplished group of poets to which he belongs requires
is, above all, novelty of motive, of subject.
He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their
old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions of
thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice. He seems to
possess complete command of the technique of poetry--every form of what
may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in [112] him the
final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance his work
presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both matter and
form. The memories of a large range of poetic reading are blent into
one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes seem almost
simple. Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern lyre, he has,
perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also, the "spasmodic"
and other lapses, which from age to age, in successive changes of
taste, have been the "defects" of excellent good "qualities." He is
certainly not the--
Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing,
as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree,
Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song.
In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from
poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a
further and finer reach of literary art. And with the perfect grace of
an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the
faculty of structure, the logic of poetry. "The New Endymion" is a
good instance of such sustained [113] power. Poetic scholar!--If we
must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that
humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr. Gosse.
His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the academic shape
of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply felt consciousness
of modern life, of the modern world as it is. His poetry, according
with the best intellectual instincts of our critical age, is as pointed
out recently by a clever writer in the Nineteenth Century, itself a
kind of exquisite, finally revised criticism.
Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly,
but so carefully educated, strike one more. The sense of his
originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one
sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be
original. In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat," giving
his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that position,
reasons on and justifies it. Yet there is a clear note of originality
(so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly personal
compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us of the
soul, the life, of the [114] nineteenth century. Far greater, we
think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such as
the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of those
pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of
colour-change, classic forms and associations into those--say! of
Thames-side--pieces which, though in manner or subject promising a
classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.--No! after all,
it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present
world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the
land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:--
There is no amaranth, no pomegranate here,
But can your heart forget the Christmas rose,
The crocuses and snowdrops once so dear?
Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture,
although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most
successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the
considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:--
When age comes by and lays his frosty hands
So lightly on mine eyes, that, scarce aware
[115]
Of what an endless weight of gloom they bear,
I pause, unstirred, and wait for his commands.
When time has bound these limbs of mine with bands,
And hushed mine ears, and silvered all my hair,
May sorrow come not, nor a vain despair
Trouble my soul that meekly girdled stands.
As silent rivers into silent lakes,
Through hush of reeds that not a murmur breaks,
Wind, mindful of the poppies whence they came,
So may my life, and calmly burn away,
As ceases in a lamp at break of day
The flagrant remnant of memorial flame.
Euthanasia!--Yet Mr. Gosse, with all his accomplishment, is still a
young man. His youthful confidence in the perpetuity of poetry, of the
poetical interests in life, creed-less as he may otherwise seem to be,
is, we think, a token, though certainly an unconscious token, of the
spontaneous originality of his muse. For a writer of his peculiar
philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in truth, must
seem irretrievably old or even decadent.
Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also
returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth in
Greece, in Italy:--
[116]
Nor seems it strange indeed
To hold the happy creed
That all fair things that bloom and die
Have conscious life as well as I.
Then let me joy to be
Alive with bird and tree,
And have no haughtier aim than this,
To be a partner in their bliss.
Convinced, eloquent,--again and again the notes of Epicurean philosophy
fall almost unconsciously from his lips. With poetry at hand, he
appears to feel no misgivings. A large faith he might seem to have in
what is called "natural optimism," the beauty and benignity of nature,
if let alone, in her mechanical round of changes with man and beast and
flower. Her method, however, certainly involves forgetfulness for the
individual; and to this, to the prospect of oblivion, poetry, too, may
help to brace us, if, unlike so genial and cheerful a poet as Mr.
Gosse, we need bracing thereto:--
Now, giant-like, the tall young ploughmen go
Between me and the sunset, footing slow;
My spirit, as an uninvited guest,
Goes with them, wondering what desire, what aim,
May stir their hearts and mine with common flame,
Or, thoughtless, do their hands suffice their soul?
[117]
I know not, care not, for I deem no shame
To hold men, flowers, and trees and stars the same,
Myself, as these, one atom in the whole.
That is from one of those half-Greek, half-English idylls, reminding
one of Frederick Walker's "Ploughman," of Mason's "Evening Hymn," in
which Mr. Gosse is at his best. A favourite motive, he has treated it
even more melodiously in "Lying in the Grass":--
I do not hunger for a well-stored mind,
I only wish to live my life, and find
My heart in unison with all mankind.
My life is like the single dewy star
That trembles on the horizon's primrose-bar,--
A microcosm where all things living are.
And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death
Should come behind and take away my breath,
I should not rise as one who sorroweth;
For I should pass, but all the world would be
Full of desire and young delight and glee,
And why should men be sad through loss of me?
The light is flying; in the silver-blue
The young moon shines from her bright window through:
The mowers are all gone, and I go too.
A vein of thought as modern as it is old! More not less depressing,
certainly, to our over-meditative [118], susceptible, nervous, modern
age, than to that antiquity which was indeed the genial youth of the
world, but, sweetly attuned by his skill of touch, it is the sum of
what Mr. Gosse has to tell us of the experience of life. Or is it,
after all, to quote him once more, that beyond those ever-recurring
pagan misgivings, those pale pagan consolations, our generation feels
yet cannot adequately express--
The passion and the stress
Of thoughts too tender and too sad to be
Enshrined in any melody she knows?
29th October 1890
VIII. FERDINAND FABRE
[NORINE]: AN IDYLL OF THE CEVENNES
[121] A FRENCH novelist who, with much of Zola's undoubted power,
writes always in the interest of that high type of Catholicism which
still prevails in the remote provinces of France, of that high type of
morality of which the French clergy have nobly maintained the ideal, is
worth recommending to the more serious class of English readers.
Something of the gift of François Millet, whose peasants are veritable
priests, of those older religious painters who could portray saintly
heads so sweetly and their merely human protégés so truly, seems indeed
to have descended to M. Ferdinand Fabre. In the Abbé Tigrane, in
Lucifer, and elsewhere, he has delineated, with wonderful power and
patience, a strictly ecclesiastical portraiture-- [122] shrewd,
passionate, somewhat melancholy heads, which, though they are often of
peasant origin, are never by any chance undignified. The passions he
treats of in priests are, indeed, strictly clerical, most often their
ambitions--not the errant humours of the mere man in the priest, but
movements of spirit properly incidental to the clerical type itself.
Turning to the secular brothers and sisters of these peasant
ecclesiastics, at first sight so strongly contrasted with them, M.
Fabre shows a great acquaintance with the sources, the effects, of
average human feeling; but still in contact--in contact, as its
conscience, its better mind, its ideal--with the institutions of
religion. What constitutes his distinguishing note as a writer is the
recognition of the religious, the Catholic, ideal, intervening
masterfully throughout the picture he presents of life, as the only
mode of poetry realizable by the poor; and although, of course, it does
a great deal more beside, certainly doing the high work of poetry
effectively. For his background he has chosen, has made his own and
conveys very vividly to his readers, a district of France, gloomy, in
spite of its almonds, its [123] oil and wine, but certainly grandiose.
The large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape of the
Cevennes, are for his books what the Rhineland is to those delightful
authors, Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian. In Les Courbezon, the French Vicar
of Wakefield, as Sainte-Beuve declared, with this imposing background,
the Church and the world, as they shape themselves in the Cevennes, the
priest and the peasant, occupy about an equal share of interest.
Sometimes, as in the charming little book we wish now to introduce,
unclerical human nature occupies the foreground almost exclusively;
though priestly faces will still be found gazing upon us from time to
time.
In form, the book is a bundle of letters from a Parisian littérateur to
the friend of his boyhood, now the curé of one of those mountain
villages. He is refreshing himself, in the midst of dusty,
sophisticated Paris, with memories of their old, delightful
existence--vagabonde, libre, agreste, pastorale--in their upland
valley. He can appeal safely to the aged curé's friendly justice, even
in exposing delicacies of sentiment which most men conceal:--
[124] "As for you, frank, certain of your own mind, joyous of heart,
methinks scarce understanding those whose religion makes their souls
tremble instead of fortifying them--you, I am sure, take things by the
large and kindly side of human life."
The story our Parisian has to tell is simple enough, and we have no
intention of betraying it, but only to note some of the faces, the
scenes, that peep out in the course of it.
The gloom of the Cevennes is the impression M. Fabre most commonly
conveys. In this book it is rather the cheerful aspect of summer,
those upland valleys of the Cevennes presenting then a symphony in red,
so to call it--as in a land of cherries and goldfinches; and he has a
genial power certainly of making you really feel the sun on the backs
of the two boys out early for a long ramble, of old peasants resting
themselves a little, with spare enjoyment, ere the end:--
"As we turned a sharp elbow of the stream the aspect of the country
changed. It seemed to me entirely red. Cherries in enormous bunches
were hanging everywhere over our heads....
[125] "It was a hut, rather low, rather dark. A log of chestnut was
smouldering in a heap of ashes. Every object was in its place: the
table, the chairs, the plates ranged on the dresser. A fairy, in
truth, reigned there, and, by the touch of her wand, brought
cleanliness and order on every side.
"'Is it you, Norine?' asked a voice from a dark corner, three steps
from the fireplace.
"'Yes, mon grand, it is I! The heat was growing greater every moment,
and I have taken in the goats.'
"Norine unclosed the window. A broad light spread over the floor of
beaten earth, like a white cloth. The cottage was illuminated. I saw
an old man seated on a wooden stool in a recess, where an ample serge
curtain concealed a bed. He held himself slightly bent, the two hands
held forth, one over the other, on the knob of a knotty staff, highly
polished. In spite of eighty years, Norine's grandfather--le grand, as
they say up there--had not lost a hair: beautiful white locks fell over
his shoulders--crisp, thick, outspread. I thought of those fine wigs
of tow or hemp with which the distaff of [126] our Prudence was always
entangled. He was close shaved, after the manner of our peasants; and
the entire mask was to be seen disengaged, all its admirable lines
free, commanded by a full-sized nose, below which the good, thick lips
were smiling, full of kindness. The eyes, however, though still clear
and soft in expression, had a certain fixity which startled me. He
raised himself. His stature seemed to me beyond proportion. He was
really beautiful, with the contentment of his face, straight as the
trunk of a chestnut, his old velvet coat thrown back, his shirt of
coarse cloth open at the breast, so that one saw the play of the ribs.
"'Monsieur le neveu!' he cried; 'where are you? Come to me! I am
blind.'
"I approached. He felt me, with ten fingers, laying aside his staff.
"'And you would not take offence if a poor peasant like me embraced
you?'
"'Quick, Jalaguier!' I cried, throwing myself into his arms. 'Quick!'
He pressed me till the joints started. Leaned upon his broad chest, I
heard the beating of his heart. It beat under my ears with a burden
like our bell at [126] Camplong. What powerful vitality in Norine's
grand! 'It does an old man good:--a good hug!' he said, letting me go."
The boyish visitors are quite ready to sit down there to dinner:--
"With the peasant of the Cevennes (M. Fabre tells us) the meal is what
nature meant it to be--a few moments for self-recovery after fatigue, a
short space of silence of a quite elevated character, almost sacred.
The poor human creature has given the sweat of his brow to extort from
an ungrateful soil his daily bread; and now he eats that well-savoured
bread in silent self-respect.
"'It is a weary thing to be thinking always of one's work (says the
grand to the somewhat sparing Norine). We must also think of our
sustenance. You are too enduring, my child! it is a mistake to demand
so much of your arms. In truth, le bon Dieu has cut you out after the
pattern of your dead father. Every morning, in my prayers, I put in my
complaint thereanent. My poor boy died from going too fast. He could
never sit still when it was a question of gathering a few sous from the
[128] fields; and those fields took and consumed him.'"
The boy fancies that the blind eyes are turned towards a particular
spot in the landscape, as if they saw:--
"'I often turn my eyes in that direction (the old man explains) from
habit. One might suppose that a peasant had the scent of the earth on
which he has laboured. I have given so much of the sweat of my
brow--there--towards Rocaillet! Angélique, my dead wife, was of
Rocaillet; and when she married me, brought a few morsels of land in
her apron. What a state they're in now!--those poor morsels of land we
used to weed and rake and hoe, my boy and I! What superb crops of
vetches we mowed then, for feeding, in due time, our lambs, our calves!
All is gone to ruin since my blindness, and especially since Angélique
left me for the churchyard, never to come back.' He paused to my great
relief. For every one of those phrases he modulated under the
fig-trees more sadly than the Lamentations of Jeremiah on Jeudi Saint
overset me--was like death."
[129] That is good drawing, in its simple and quiet way! The actual
scene, however, is cheerful enough on this early summer day--a
symphony, as we said, in cherries and goldfinches, in which the higher
valleys of the Cevennes abound. In fact, the boys witness the
accordailles, the engagement, of Norine and Justin Lebasset. The
latter is calling the birds to sing good luck to the event:--