a new formula for the composition of titles. After J. S.; or,
Trivialities there is no reason why we should not have A. B.; or,
Platitudes, M.N.; or, Sentimentalisms, Y.Z.; or, Inanities. There are
many books which these simple titles would characterise much more aptly
than any high-flown phrases--as aptly, in fact, as Mr. Bouverie's title
characterises the volume before us. It sets forth the uninteresting
fortunes of an insignificant person, one John Stiles, a briefless
barrister. The said John falls in love with a young lady, inherits a
competence, omits to tell his love, and is killed by the bursting of a
fowling-piece--that is all. The only point of interest presented by the
book is the problem as to how it ever came to be written. We can
scarcely find the solution in Mr. Bouverie's elaborately smart style
which cannot be said to transmute his 'trivialities' into 'flies in
amber.'
Mr. Swinburne once proposed that it should be a penal offence against
literature for any writer to affix a proverb, a phrase or a quotation to
a novel, by way of tag or title. We wonder what he would say to the
title of 'Pen Oliver's' last book! Probably he would empty on it the
bitter vial of his scorn and satire. All But is certainly an intolerable
name to give to any literary production. The story, however, is quite an
interesting one. At Laxenford Hall live Lord and Lady Arthur Winstanley.
Lady Arthur has two children by her first marriage, the elder of whom,
Walter Hope-Kennedy by name, is heir to the broad acres. Walter is a
pleasant English boy, fonder of cricket than of culture, healthy, happy
and susceptible. He falls in love with Fanny Taylor, a pretty village
girl; is thrown out of his dog-cart one night through the machinations of
a jealous rival, breaks one of his ribs and gets a violent fever. His
stepfather tries to murder him by subcutaneous injections of morphia but
is detected by the local doctor, and Walter recovers. However, he does
not marry Fanny after all, and the story ends ineffectually. To say of a
dress that 'it was rather under than over adorned' is not very pleasing
English, and such a phrase as 'almost always, but by no means
invariably,' is quite detestable. Still we must not expect the master of
the scalpel to be the master of the stilus as well. All But is a very
charming tale, and the sketches of village life are quite admirable. We
recommend it to all who are tired of the productions of Mr. Hugh Conway's
dreadful disciples.
(1) 'Twixt Love and Duty: A Novel. By Tighe Hopkins. (Chatto and
Windus.)
(2) Jenny Jennet: A Tale Without a Murder. By A. Gallenga. (Chapman and
Hall.)
(3) A Life's Mistake: A Novel. By Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron. (Ward and
Downey.)
(4) J. S.; or, Trivialities: A Novel. By Edward Oliver
Pleydell-Bouverie. (Griffith, Farren and Co.)
(5) All But: A Chronicle of Laxenford Life. By Pen Oliver, F.R.C.S.
(Kegan Paul.)
A LITERARY PILGRIM
(Pall Mall Gazette, April 17, 1886.)
Antiquarian books, as a rule, are extremely dull reading. They give us
facts without form, science without style, and learning without life. An
exception, however, must be made for M. Gaston Boissier's Promenades
Archeologiques. M. Boissier is a most pleasant and picturesque writer,
and is really able to give his readers useful information without ever
boring them, an accomplishment which is entirely unknown in Germany, and
in England is extremely rare.
The first essay in his book is on the probable site of Horace's country-
house, a subject that has interested many scholars from the Renaissance
down to our own day. M. Boissier, following the investigations of Signor
Rosa, places it on a little hill over-looking the Licenza, and his theory
has a great deal to recommend it. The plough still turns up on the spot
the bricks and tiles of an old Roman villa; a spring of clear water, like
that of which the poet so often sang, 'breaks babbling from the hollow
rock,' and is still called by the peasants Fonte dell' Oratini, some
faint echo possibly of the singer's name; the view from the hill is just
what is described in the epistles, 'Continui montes nisi dissocientur
opaca valle'; hard by is the site of the ruined temple of Vacuna, where
Horace tells us he wrote one of his poems, and the local rustics still go
to Varia (Vicovaro) on market days as they used to do when the graceful
Roman lyrist sauntered through his vines and played at being a country
gentleman.
M. Boissier, however, is not content merely with identifying the poet's
house; he also warmly defends him from the charge that has been brought
against him of servility in accepting it. He points out that it was only
after the invention of printing that literature became a money-making
profession, and that, as there was no copyright law at Rome to prevent
books being pirated, patrons had to take the place that publishers hold,
or should hold, nowadays. The Roman patron, in fact, kept the Roman poet
alive, and we fancy that many of our modern bards rather regret the old
system. Better, surely, the humiliation of the sportula than the
indignity of a bill for printing! Better to accept a country-house as a
gift than to be in debt to one's landlady! On the whole, the patron was
an excellent institution, if not for poetry at least for the poets; and
though he had to be propitiated by panegyrics, still are we not told by
our most shining lights that the subject is of no importance in a work of
art? M. Boissier need not apologise for Horace: every poet longs for a
Maecenas.
An essay on the Etruscan tombs at Corneto follows, and the remainder of
the volume is taken up by a most fascinating article called Le Pays de
l'Eneide. M. Boissier claims for Virgil's descriptions of scenery an
absolute fidelity of detail. 'Les poetes anciens,' he says, 'ont le gout
de la precision et de la fidelite: ils n'imaginent guere de paysages en
l'air,' and with this view he visited every place in Italy and Sicily
that Virgil has mentioned. Sometimes, it is true, modern civilisation,
or modern barbarism, has completely altered the aspect of the scene; the
'desolate shore of Drepanum,' for instance ('Drepani illaetabilis ora')
is now covered with thriving manufactories and stucco villas, and the
'bird-haunted forest' through which the Tiber flowed into the sea has
long ago disappeared. Still, on the whole, the general character of the
Italian landscape is unchanged, and M. Boissier's researches show very
clearly how personal and how vivid were Virgil's impressions of nature.
The subject is, of course, a most interesting one, and those who love to
make pilgrimages without stirring from home cannot do better than spend
three shillings on the French Academician's Promenades Archeologiques.
Nouvelles Promenades Archeologiques, Horace et Virgile. By Gaston
Boissier. (Hachette.)
BERANGER IN ENGLAND
(Pall Mall Gazette, April 21, 1886.)
A philosophic politician once remarked that the best possible form of
government is an absolute monarchy tempered by street ballads. Without
at all agreeing with this aphorism we still cannot but regret that the
new democracy does not use poetry as a means for the expression of
political opinion. The Socialists, it is true, have been heard singing
the later poems of Mr. William Morris, but the street ballad is really
dead in England. The fact is that most modern poetry is so artificial in
its form, so individual in its essence and so literary in its style, that
the people as a body are little moved by it, and when they have
grievances against the capitalist or the aristocrat they prefer strikes
to sonnets and rioting to rondels.
Possibly, Mr. William Toynbee's pleasant little volume of translations
from Beranger may be the herald of a new school. Beranger had all the
qualifications for a popular poet. He wrote to be sung more than to be
read; he preferred the Pont Neuf to Parnassus; he was patriotic as well
as romantic, and humorous as well as humane. Translations of poetry as a
rule are merely misrepresentations, but the muse of Beranger is so simple
and naive that she can wear our English dress with ease and grace, and
Mr. Toynbee has kept much of the mirth and music of the original. Here
and there, undoubtedly, the translation could be improved upon; 'rapiers'
for instance is an abominable rhyme to 'forefathers'; 'the hated arms of
Albion' in the same poem is a very feeble rendering of 'le leopard de
l'Anglais,' and such a verse as
'Mid France's miracles of art,
Rare trophies won from art's own land,
I've lived to see with burning heart
The fog-bred poor triumphant stand,
reproduces very inadequately the charm of the original:
Dans nos palais, ou, pres de la victoire,
Brillaient les arts, doux fruits des beaux climats,
J'ai vu du Nord les peuplades sans gloire,
De leurs manteaux secouer les frimas.
On the whole, however, Mr. Toynbee's work is good; Les Champs, for
example, is very well translated, and so are the two delightful poems
Rosette and Ma Republique; and there is a good deal of spirit in Le
Marquis de Carabas:
Whom have we here in conqueror's role?
Our grand old Marquis, bless his soul!
Whose grand old charger (mark his bone!)
Has borne him back to claim his own.
Note, if you please, the grand old style
In which he nears his grand old pile;
With what an air of grand old state
He waves that blade immaculate!
Hats off, hats off, for my lord to pass,
The grand old Marquis of Carabas!--
though 'that blade immaculate' has hardly got the sting of 'un sabre
innocent'; and in the fourth verse of the same poem, 'Marquise, you'll
have the bed-chamber' does not very clearly convey the sense of the line
'La Marquise a le tabouret.' The best translation in the book is The
Court Suit (L'Habit de Cour), and if Mr. Toynbee will give us some more
work as clever as this we shall be glad to see a second volume from his
pen. Beranger is not nearly well enough known in England, and though it
is always better to read a poet in the original, still translations have
their value as echoes have their music.
A Selection from the Songs of De Beranger in English Verse. By William
Toynbee. (Kegan Paul.)
THE POETRY OF THE PEOPLE
(Pall Mall Gazette, May 13, 1886.)
The Countess Martinengo deserves well of all poets, peasants and
publishers. Folklore is so often treated nowadays merely from the point
of view of the comparative mythologist, that it is really delightful to
come across a book that deals with the subject simply as literature. For
the Folk-tale is the father of all fiction as the Folk-song is the mother
of all poetry; and in the games, the tales and the ballads of primitive
people it is easy to see the germs of such perfected forms of art as the
drama, the novel and the epic. It is, of course, true that the highest
expression of life is to be found not in the popular songs, however
poetical, of any nation, but in the great masterpieces of self-conscious
Art; yet it is pleasant sometimes to leave the summit of Parnassus to
look at the wild-flowers in the valley, and to turn from the lyre of
Apollo to listen to the reed of Pan. We can still listen to it. To this
day, the vineyard dressers of Calabria will mock the passer-by with
satirical verses as they used to do in the old pagan days, and the
peasants of the olive woods of Provence answer each other in amoebaean
strains. The Sicilian shepherd has not yet thrown his pipe aside, and
the children of modern Greece sing the swallow-song through the villages
in spring-time, though Theognis is more than two thousand years dead. Nor
is this popular poetry merely the rhythmic expression of joy and sorrow;
it is in the highest degree imaginative; and taking its inspiration
directly from nature it abounds in realistic metaphor and in picturesque
and fantastic imagery. It must, of course, be admitted that there is a
conventionality of nature as there is a conventionality of art, and that
certain forms of utterance are apt to become stereotyped by too constant
use; yet, on the whole, it is impossible not to recognise in the Folk-
songs that the Countess Martinengo has brought together one strong
dominant note of fervent and flawless sincerity. Indeed, it is only in
the more terrible dramas of the Elizabethan age that we can find any
parallel to the Corsican voceri with their shrill intensity of passion,
their awful frenzies of grief and hate. And yet, ardent as the feeling
is, the form is nearly always beautiful. Now and then, in the poems of
the extreme South one meets with a curious crudity of realism, but, as a
rule, the sense of beauty prevails.
Some of the Folk-poems in this book have all the lightness and loveliness
of lyrics, all of them have that sweet simplicity of pure song by which
mirth finds its own melody and mourning its own music, and even where
there are conceits of thought and expression they are conceits born of
fancy not of affectation. Herrick himself might have envied that
wonderful love-song of Provence:
If thou wilt be the falling dew
And fall on me alway,
Then I will be the white, white rose
On yonder thorny spray.
If thou wilt be the white, white rose
On yonder thorny spray,
Then I will be the honey-bee
And kiss thee all the day.
If thou wilt be the honey-bee
And kiss me all the day,
Then I will be in yonder heaven
The star of brightest ray.
If thou wilt be in yonder heaven
The star of brightest ray,
Then I will be the dawn, and we
Shall meet at break of day.
How charming also is this lullaby by which the Corsican mother sings her
babe to sleep!
Gold and pearls my vessel lade,
Silk and cloth the cargo be,
All the sails are of brocade
Coming from beyond the sea;
And the helm of finest gold,
Made a wonder to behold.
Fast awhile in slumber lie;
Sleep, my child, and hushaby.
After you were born full soon,
You were christened all aright;
Godmother she was the moon,
Godfather the sun so bright.
All the stars in heaven told
Wore their necklaces of gold.
Fast awhile in slumber lie;
Sleep, my child, and hushaby.
Or this from Roumania:
Sleep, my daughter, sleep an hour;
Mother's darling gilliflower.
Mother rocks thee, standing near,
She will wash thee in the clear
Waters that from fountains run,
To protect thee from the sun.
Sleep, my darling, sleep an hour,
Grow thou as the gilliflower.
As a tear-drop be thou white,
As a willow tall and slight;
Gentle as the ring-doves are,
And be lovely as a star!
We hardly know what poems are sung to English babies, but we hope they
are as beautiful as these two. Blake might have written them.
The Countess Martinengo has certainly given us a most fascinating book.
In a volume of moderate dimensions, not too long to be tiresome nor too
brief to be disappointing, she has collected together the best examples
of modern Folk-songs, and with her as a guide the lazy reader lounging in
his armchair may wander from the melancholy pine-forests of the North to
Sicily's orange-groves and the pomegranate gardens of Armenia, and listen
to the singing of those to whom poetry is a passion, not a profession,
and whose art, coming from inspiration and not from schools, if it has
the limitations, at least has also the loveliness of its origin, and is
one with blowing grasses and the flowers of the field.
Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs. By the Countess Evelyn Martinengo
Cesaresco. (Redway.)
THE CENCI
(Dramatic Review, May 15, 1886.)
The production of The Cenci last week at the Grand Theatre, Islington,
may be said to have been an era in the literary history of this century,
and the Shelley Society deserves the highest praise and warmest thanks of
all for having given us an opportunity of seeing Shelley's play under the
conditions he himself desired for it. For The Cenci was written
absolutely with a view to theatric presentation, and had Shelley's own
wishes been carried out it would have been produced during his lifetime
at Covent Garden, with Edmund Kean and Miss O'Neill in the principal
parts. In working out his conception, Shelley had studied very carefully
the aesthetics of dramatic art. He saw that the essence of the drama is
disinterested presentation, and that the characters must not be merely
mouthpieces for splendid poetry but must be living subjects for terror
and for pity. 'I have endeavoured,' he says, 'as nearly as possible to
represent the characters as they probably were, and have sought to avoid
the error of making them actuated by my own conception of right or wrong,
false or true: thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the
sixteenth century into cold impersonations of my own mind. . . .
'I have avoided with great care the introduction of what is commonly
called mere poetry, and I imagine there will scarcely be found a detached
simile or a single isolated description, unless Beatrice's description of
the chasm appointed for her father's murder should be judged to be of
that nature.'
He recognised that a dramatist must be allowed far greater freedom of
expression than what is conceded to a poet. 'In a dramatic composition,'
to use his own words, 'the imagery and the passion should interpenetrate
one another, the former being reserved simply for the full development
and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the immortal God which
should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion. It is thus
that the most remote and the most familiar imagery may alike be fit for
dramatic purposes when employed in the illustration of strong feeling,
which raises what is low, and levels to the apprehension that which is
lofty, casting over all the shadow of its own greatness. In other
respects I have written more carelessly, that is, without an
over-fastidious and learned choice of words. In this respect I entirely
agree with those modern critics who assert that in order to move men to
true sympathy we must use the familiar language of men.'
He knew that if the dramatist is to teach at all it must be by example,
not by precept.
'The highest moral purpose,' he remarks, 'aimed at in the highest species
of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and
antipathies, the knowledge of itself; in proportion to the possession of
which knowledge every human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and
kind. If dogmas can do more it is well: but a drama is no fit place for
the enforcement of them.' He fully realises that it is by a conflict
between our artistic sympathies and our moral judgment that the greatest
dramatic effects are produced. 'It is in the restless and anatomising
casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel
that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious
horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge,
that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered consists.'
In fact no one has more clearly understood than Shelley the mission of
the dramatist and the meaning of the drama.
And yet I hardly think that the production of The Cenci, its absolute
presentation on the stage, can be said to have added anything to its
beauty, its pathos, or even its realism. Not that the principal actors
were at all unworthy of the work of art they interpreted; Mr. Hermann
Vezin's Cenci was a noble and magnificent performance; Miss Alma Murray
stands now in the very first rank of our English actresses as a mistress
of power and pathos; and Mr. Leonard Outram's Orsino was most subtle and
artistic; but that The Cenci needs for the production of its perfect
effect no interpretation at all. It is, as we read it, a complete work
of art--capable, indeed, of being acted, but not dependent on theatric
presentation; and the impression produced by its exhibition on the stage
seemed to me to be merely one of pleasure at the gratification of an
intellectual curiosity of seeing how far Melpomene could survive the
wagon of Thespis.
In producing the play, however, the members of the Shelley Society were
merely carrying out the poet's own wishes, and they are to be
congratulated on the success of their experiment--a success due not to
any gorgeous scenery or splendid pageant, but to the excellence of the
actors who aided them.
HELENA IN TROAS
(Dramatic Review, May 22, 1880.)
One might have thought that to have produced As You Like It in an English
forest would have satisfied the most ambitious spirit; but Mr. Godwin has
not contented himself with his sylvan triumphs. From Shakespeare he has
passed to Sophocles, and has given us the most perfect exhibition of a
Greek dramatic performance that has as yet been seen in this country.
For, beautiful as were the productions of the Agamemnon at Oxford and the
Eumenides at Cambridge, their effects were marred in no small or
unimportant degree by the want of a proper orchestra for the chorus with
its dance and song, a want that was fully supplied in Mr. Godwin's
presentation by the use of the arena of a circus.
In the centre of this circle, which was paved with the semblance of
tesselated marble, stood the altar of Dionysios, and beyond it rose the
long, shallow stage, faced with casts from the temple of Bassae; and
bearing the huge portal of the house of Paris and the gleaming
battlements of Troy. Over the portal hung a great curtain, painted with
crimson lions, which, when drawn aside, disclosed two massive gates of
bronze; in front of the house was placed a golden image of Aphrodite, and
across the ramparts on either hand could be seen a stretch of blue waters
and faint purple hills. The scene was lovely, not merely in the harmony
of its colour but in the exquisite delicacy of its architectural
proportions. No nation has ever felt the pure beauty of mere
construction so strongly as the Greeks, and in this respect Mr. Godwin
has fully caught the Greek feeling.
The play opened by the entrance of the chorus, white vestured and gold
filleted, under the leadership of Miss Kinnaird, whose fine gestures and
rhythmic movements were quite admirable. In answer to their appeal the
stage curtains slowly divided, and from the house of Paris came forth
Helen herself, in a robe woven with all the wonders of war, and broidered
with the pageant of battle. With her were her two handmaidens--one in
white and yellow and one in green; Hecuba followed in sombre grey of
mourning, and Priam in kingly garb of gold and purple, and Paris in
Phrygian cap and light archer's dress; and when at sunset the lover of
Helen was borne back wounded from the field, down from the oaks of Ida
stole OEnone in the flowing drapery of the daughter of a river-god, every
fold of her garments rippling like dim water as she moved.