quite excellent. He ranks him with the giants rather than with the gods,
with those who compel our admiration by their untiring energy and huge
strength of intellectual muscle, not with those 'who share the divine
gifts of creative imagination and inevitable instinct.' Here he is
right. Pelion more than Parnassus was Jonson's home. His art has too
much effort about it, too much definite intention. His style lacks the
charm of chance. Mr. Symonds is right also in the stress he lays on the
extraordinary combination in Jonson's work of the most concentrated
realism with encyclopaedic erudition. In Jonson's comedies London slang
and learned scholarship go hand in hand. Literature was as living a
thing to him as life itself. He used his classical lore not merely to
give form to his verse, but to give flesh and blood to the persons of his
plays. He could build up a breathing creature out of quotations. He
made the poets of Greece and Rome terribly modern, and introduced them to
the oddest company. His very culture is an element in his coarseness.
There are moments when one is tempted to liken him to a beast that has
fed off books.
We cannot, however, agree with Mr. Symonds when he says that Jonson
'rarely touched more than the outside of character,' that his men and
women are 'the incarnations of abstract properties rather than living
human beings,' that they are in fact mere 'masqueraders and mechanical
puppets.' Eloquence is a beautiful thing but rhetoric ruins many a
critic, and Mr. Symonds is essentially rhetorical. When, for instance,
he tells us that 'Jonson made masks,' while 'Dekker and Heywood created
souls,' we feel that he is asking us to accept a crude judgment for the
sake of a smart antithesis. It is, of course, true that we do not find
in Jonson the same growth of character that we find in Shakespeare, and
we may admit that most of the characters in Jonson's plays are, so to
speak, ready-made. But a ready-made character is not necessarily either
mechanical or wooden, two epithets Mr. Symonds uses constantly in his
criticism.
We cannot tell, and Shakespeare himself does not tell us, why Iago is
evil, why Regan and Goneril have hard hearts, or why Sir Andrew Aguecheek
is a fool. It is sufficient that they are what they are, and that nature
gives warrant for their existence. If a character in a play is lifelike,
if we recognise it as true to nature, we have no right to insist on the
author explaining its genesis to us. We must accept it as it is: and in
the hands of a good dramatist mere presentation can take the place of
analysis, and indeed is often a more dramatic method, because a more
direct one. And Jonson's characters are true to nature. They are in no
sense abstractions; they are types. Captain Bobadil and Captain Tucca,
Sir John Daw and Sir Amorous La Foole, Volpone and Mosca, Subtle and Sir
Epicure Mammon, Mrs. Purecraft and the Rabbi Busy are all creatures of
flesh and blood, none the less lifelike because they are labelled. In
this point Mr. Symonds seems to us unjust towards Jonson.
We think, also, that a special chapter might have been devoted to Jonson
as a literary critic. The creative activity of the English Renaissance
is so great that its achievements in the sphere of criticism are often
overlooked by the student. Then, for the first time, was language
treated as an art. The laws of expression and composition were
investigated and formularised. The importance of words was recognised.
Romanticism, Realism and Classicism fought their first battles. The
dramatists are full of literary and art criticisms, and amused the public
with slashing articles on one another in the form of plays.
Mr. Symonds, of course, deals with Jonson in his capacity as a critic,
and always with just appreciation, but the whole subject is one that
deserves fuller and more special treatment.
Some small inaccuracies, too, should be corrected in the second edition.
Dryden, for instance, was not 'Jonson's successor on the laureate's
throne,' as Mr. Symonds eloquently puts it, for Sir William Davenant came
between them, and when one remembers the predominance of rhyme in
Shakespeare's early plays, it is too much to say that 'after the
production of the first part of Tamburlaine blank verse became the
regular dramatic metre of the public stage.' Shakespeare did not accept
blank verse at once as a gift from Marlowe's hand, but himself arrived at
it after a long course of experiments in rhyme. Indeed, some of Mr.
Symonds' remarks on Marlowe are very curious. To say of his Edward II.,
for instance, that it 'is not at all inferior to the work of
Shakespeare's younger age,' is very niggardly and inadequate praise, and
comes strangely from one who has elsewhere written with such appreciation
of Marlowe's great genius; while to call Marlowe Jonson's 'master' is to
make for him an impossible claim. In comedy Marlowe has nothing whatever
to teach Jonson; in tragedy Jonson sought for the classical not the
romantic form.
As for Mr. Symonds' style, it is, as usual, very fluent, very picturesque
and very full of colour. Here and there, however, it is really
irritating. Such a sentence as 'the tavern had the defects of its
quality' is an awkward Gallicism; and when Mr. Symonds, after genially
comparing Jonson's blank verse to the front of Whitehall (a comparison,
by the way, that would have enraged the poet beyond measure) proceeds to
play a fantastic aria on the same string, and tells us that 'Massinger
reminds us of the intricacies of Sansovino, Shakespeare of Gothic aisles
or heaven's cathedral . . . Ford of glittering Corinthian colonnades,
Webster of vaulted crypts, . . . Marlowe of masoned clouds, and Marston,
in his better moments, of the fragmentary vigour of a Roman ruin,' one
begins to regret that any one ever thought of the unity of the arts.
Similes such as these obscure; they do not illumine. To say that Ford is
like a glittering Corinthian colonnade adds nothing to our knowledge of
either Ford or Greek architecture. Mr. Symonds has written some charming
poetry, but his prose, unfortunately, is always poetical prose, never the
prose of a poet. Still, the volume is worth reading, though decidedly
Mr. Symonds, to use one of his own phrases, has 'the defects of his
quality.'
'English Worthies.' Edited by Andrew Lang. Ben Jonson. By John
Addington Symonds. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
THE POETS' CORNER--I
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1886.)
Among the social problems of the nineteenth century the tramp has always
held an important position, but his appearance among the
nineteenth-century poets is extremely remarkable. Not that a tramp's
mode of life is at all unsuited to the development of the poetic faculty.
Far from it! He, if any one, should possess that freedom of mood which
is so essential to the artist, for he has no taxes to pay and no
relations to worry him. The man who possesses a permanent address, and
whose name is to be found in the Directory, is necessarily limited and
localised. Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living. Was not Homer
himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a caravan? It is then
with feelings of intense expectation that we open the little volume that
lies before us. It is entitled Low Down, by Two Tramps, and is
marvellous even to look at. It is clear that art has at last reached the
criminal classes. The cover is of brown paper like the covers of Mr.
Whistler's brochures. The printing exhibits every fantastic variation of
type, and the pages range in colour from blue to brown, from grey to sage
green and from rose pink to chrome yellow. The Philistines may sneer at
this chromatic chaos, but we do not. As the painters are always
pilfering from the poets, why should not the poet annex the domain of the
painter and use colour for the expression of his moods and music: blue
for sentiment, and red for passion, grey for cultured melancholy, and
green for descriptions? The book, then, is a kind of miniature rainbow,
and with all its varied sheets is as lovely as an advertisement hoarding.
As for the peripatetics--alas! they are not nightingales. Their note is
harsh and rugged, Mr. G. R. Sims is the god of their idolatry, their
style is the style of the Surrey Theatre, and we are sorry to see that
that disregard of the rights of property which always characterises the
able-bodied vagrant is extended by our tramps from the defensible
pilfering from hen-roosts to the indefensible pilfering from poets. When
we read such lines as:
And builded him a pyramid, four square,
Open to all the sky and every wind,
we feel that bad as poultry-snatching is, plagiarism is worse. Facilis
descensus Averno! From highway robbery and crimes of violence one sinks
gradually to literary petty larceny. However, there are coarsely
effective poems in the volume, such as A Super's Philosophy, Dick
Hewlett, a ballad of the Californian school, and Gentleman Bill; and
there is one rather pretty poem called The Return of Spring:
When robins hop on naked boughs,
And swell their throats with song,
When lab'rers trudge behind their ploughs,
And blithely whistle their teams along;
When glints of summer sunshine chase
Park shadows on the distant hills,
And scented tufts of pansies grace
Moist grots that 'scape rude Borean chills.
The last line is very disappointing. No poet, nowadays, should write of
'rude Boreas'; he might just as well call the dawn 'Aurora,' or say that
'Flora decks the enamelled meads.' But there are some nice touches in
the poem, and it is pleasant to find that tramps have their harmless
moments. On the whole, the volume, if it is not quite worth reading, is
at least worth looking at. The fool's motley in which it is arrayed is
extremely curious and extremely characteristic.
Mr. Irwin's muse comes to us more simply clad, and more gracefully. She
gains her colour-effect from the poet, not from the publisher. No
cockneyism or colloquialism mars the sweetness of her speech. She finds
music for every mood, and form for every feeling. In art as in life the
law of heredity holds good. On est toujours fits de quelqu'un. And so
it is easy to see that Mr. Irwin is a fervent admirer of Mr. Matthew
Arnold. But he is in no sense a plagiarist. He has succeeded in
studying a fine poet without stealing from him--a very difficult thing to
do--and though many of the reeds through which he blows have been touched
by other lips, yet he is able to draw new music from them. Like most of
our younger poets, Mr. Irwin is at his best in his sonnets, and those
entitled The Seeker after God and The Pillar of the Empire are really
remarkable. All through this volume, however, one comes across good
work, and the descriptions of Indian scenery are excellent. India, in
fact, is the picturesque background to these poems, and her monstrous
beasts, strange flowers and fantastic birds are used with much subtlety
for the production of artistic effect. Perhaps there is a little too
much about the pipal-tree, but when we have a proper sense of Imperial
unity, no doubt the pipal-tree will be as dear and as familiar to us as
the oaks and elms of our own woodlands.
(1) Low Down: Wayside Thoughts in Ballad and Other Verse. By Two Tramps.
(Redway.)
(2) Rhymes and Renderings. By H. C. Irwin. (David Stott.)
A RIDE THROUGH MOROCCO
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 8, 1886.)
Morocco is a sort of paradox among countries, for though it lies westward
of Piccadilly yet it is purely Oriental in character, and though it is
but three hours' sail from Europe yet it makes you feel (to use the
forcible expression of an American writer) as if you had been 'taken up
by the scruff of the neck and set down in the Old Testament.' Mr. Hugh
Stutfield has ridden twelve hundred miles through it, penetrated to Fez
and Wazan, seen the lovely gate at Mequinez and the Hassen Tower by
Rabat, feasted with sheikhs and fought with robbers, lived in an
atmosphere of Moors, mosques and mirages, visited the city of the lepers
and the slave-market of Sus, and played loo under the shadow of the Atlas
Mountains. He is not an Herodotus nor a Sir John Mandeville, but he
tells his stories very pleasantly. His book, on the whole, is delightful
reading, for though Morocco is picturesque he does not weary us with word-
painting; though it is poor he does not bore us with platitudes. Now and
then he indulges in a traveller's licence and thrills the simple reader
with statements as amazing as they are amusing. The Moorish coinage, he
tells us, is so cumbersome that if a man gives you change for
half-a-crown you have to hire a donkey to carry it away; the Moorish
language is so guttural that no one can ever hope to pronounce it aright
who has not been brought up within hearing of the grunting of camels, a
steady course of sneezing being, consequently, the only way by which a
European can acquire anything like the proper accent; the Sultan does not
know how much he is married, but he unquestionably is so to a very large
extent: on the principle that you cannot have too much of a good thing a
woman is valued in proportion to her stoutness, and so far from there
being any reduction made in the marriage-market for taking a quantity,
you must pay so much per pound; the Arabs believe the Shereef of Wazan to
be such a holy man that, if he is guilty of taking champagne, the
forbidden wine is turned into milk as he quaffs it, and if he gets
extremely drunk he is merely in a mystical trance.
Mr. Stutfield, however, has his serious moments, and his account of the
commerce, government and social life of the Moors is extremely
interesting. It must be confessed that the picture he draws is in many
respects a very tragic one. The Moors are the masters of a beautiful
country and of many beautiful arts, but they are paralysed by their
fatalism and pillaged by their rulers. Few races, indeed, have had a
more terrible fall than these Moors. Of the great intellectual
civilisation of the Arabs no trace remains. The names of Averroes and
Almaimon, of Al Abbas and Ben Husa are quite unknown. Fez, once the
Athens of Africa, the cradle of the sciences, is now a mere commercial
caravansary. Its universities have vanished, its library is almost
empty. Freedom of thought has been killed by the Koran, freedom of
living by bad government. But Mr. Stutfield is not without hopes for the
future. So far from agreeing with Lord Salisbury that 'Morocco may go
her own way,' he strongly supports Captain Warren's proposition that we
should give up Gibraltar to Spain in exchange for Ceuta, and thereby
prevent the Mediterranean from becoming a French lake, and give England a
new granary for corn. The Moorish Empire, he warns us, is rapidly
breaking up, and if in the 'general scramble for Africa' that has already
begun, the French gain possession of Morocco, he points out that our
supremacy over the Straits will be lost. Whatever may be thought of Mr.
Stutfield's political views, and his suggestions for 'multiple control'
and 'collective European action,' there is no doubt that in Morocco
England has interests to defend and a mission to pursue, and this part of
the book should be carefully studied. As for the general reader who, we
fear, is not as a rule interested in the question of 'multiple control,'
if he is a sportsman, he will find in El Magreb a capital account of pig-
sticking; if he is artistic, he will be delighted to know that the
importation of magenta into Morocco is strictly prohibited; if criminal
jurisprudence has any charms for him, he can examine a code that punishes
slander by rubbing cayenne pepper into the lips of the offender; and if
he is merely lazy, he can take a pleasant ride of twelve hundred miles in
Mr. Stutfield's company without stirring out of his armchair.
El Magreb: Twelve Hundred Miles' Ride through Morocco. By Hugh
Stutfield. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)
THE CHILDREN OF THE POETS
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886.)
The idea of this book is exceedingly charming. As children themselves
are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection of the best poems
written on children should be the most perfect of all anthologies. Yet,
the book itself is not by any means a success. Many of the loveliest
child-poems in our literature are excluded and not a few feeble and
trivial poems are inserted. The editor's work is characterised by sins
of omission and of commission, and the collection, consequently, is very
incomplete and very unsatisfactory. Andrew Marvell's exquisite poem The
Picture of Little T. C., for instance, does not appear in Mr. Robertson's
volume, nor the Young Love of the same author, nor the beautiful elegy
Ben Jonson wrote on the death of Salathiel Pavy, the little boy-actor of
his plays. Waller's verses also, To My Young Lady Lucy Sidney, deserve a
place in an anthology of this kind, and so do Mr. Matthew Arnold's lines
To a Gipsy Child, and Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee, a little lyric full
of strange music and strange romance. There is possibly much to be said
in favour of such a poem as that which ends with
And I thank my God with falling tears
For the things in the bottom drawer:
but how different it is from
_I_ was a child, and _she_ was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged Seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me
The selection from Blake, again, is very incomplete, many of the
loveliest poems being excluded, such as those on The Little Girl Lost and
The Little Girl Found, the Cradle Song, Infant Joy, and others; nor can
we find Sir Henry Wotton's Hymn upon the Birth of Prince Charles, Sir
William Jones's dainty four-line epigram on The Babe, or the delightful
lines To T. L. H., A Child, by Charles Lamb.
The gravest omission, however, is certainly that of Herrick. Not a
single poem of his appears in Mr. Robertson's collection. And yet no
English poet has written of children with more love and grace and
delicacy. His Ode on the Birth of Our Saviour, his poem To His Saviour,
A Child: A Present by a Child, his Graces for Children, and his many
lovely epitaphs on children are all of them exquisite works of art,
simple, sweet and sincere.
An English anthology of child-poems that excludes Herrick is as an
English garden without its roses and an English woodland without its
singing birds; and for one verse of Herrick we would gladly give in
exchange even those long poems by Mr. Ashby-Sterry, Miss Menella Smedley,
and Mr. Lewis Morris (of Penrhyn), to which Mr. Robertson has assigned a
place in his collection. Mr. Robertson, also, should take care when he
publishes a poem to publish it correctly. Mr. Bret Harte's Dickens in
Camp, for instance, is completely spoiled by two ridiculous misprints. In
the first line 'dimpling' is substituted for 'drifting' to the entire
ruin of rhyme and reason, and in the ninth verse 'the _pensive glory_
that fills the Kentish hills' appears as 'the Persian glory . . .' with a
large capital P! Mistakes such as these are quite unpardonable, and make
one feel that, perhaps, after all it was fortunate for Herrick that he
was left out. A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
As for Mr. Robertson's preface, like most of the prefaces in the
Canterbury Series, it is very carelessly written. Such a sentence as 'I
. . . believe that Mrs. Piatt's poems, in particular, will come to many
readers, fresh, as well as delightful contributions from across the
ocean,' is painful to read. Nor is the matter much better than the
manner. It is fantastic to say that Raphael's pictures of the Madonna
and Child dealt a deadly blow to the monastic life, and to say, with
reference to Greek art, that 'Cupid by the side of Venus enables us to
forget that most of her sighs are wanton' is a very crude bit of art
criticism indeed. Wordsworth, again, should hardly be spoken of as one
who 'was not, in the general, a man from whom human sympathies welled
profusely,' but this criticism is as nothing compared to the passage
where Mr. Robertson tells us that the scene between Arthur and Hubert in
King John is not true to nature because the child's pleadings for his
life are playful as well as piteous. Indeed, Mr. Robertson, forgetting
Mamillius as completely as he misunderstands Arthur, states very clearly
that Shakespeare has not given us any deep readings of child nature.
Paradoxes are always charming, but judgments such as these are not
paradoxical; they are merely provincial.
On the whole, Mr. Robertson's book will not do. It is, we fully admit,
an industrious compilation, but it is not an anthology, it is not a
selection of the best, for it lacks the discrimination and good taste
which is the essence of selection, and for the want of which no amount of
industry can atone. The child-poems of our literature have still to be
edited.
The Children of the Poets: An Anthology from English and American Writers
of Three Generations. Edited, with an Introduction, by Eric S.
Robertson. (Walter Scott.)
NEW NOVELS
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 28, 1886.)
Astray: A Tale of a Country Town, is a very serious volume. It has taken
four people to write it, and even to read it requires assistance. Its
dulness is premeditated and deliberate and comes from a laudable desire
to rescue fiction from flippancy. It is, in fact, tedious from the
noblest motives and wearisome through its good intentions. Yet the story
itself is not an uninteresting one. Quite the contrary. It deals with
the attempt of a young doctor to build up a noble manhood on the ruins of
a wasted youth. Burton King, while little more than a reckless lad,
forges the name of a dying man, is arrested and sent to penal servitude
for seven years. On his discharge he comes to live with his sisters in a
little country town and finds that his real punishment begins when he is
free, for prison has made him a pariah. Still, through the nobility and
self-sacrifice of his life, he gradually wins himself a position, and
ultimately marries the prettiest girl in the book. His character is, on
the whole, well drawn, and the authors have almost succeeded in making
him good without making him priggish. The method, however, by which the
story is told is extremely tiresome. It consists of an interminable
series of long letters by different people and of extracts from various
diaries. The book consequently is piecemeal and unsatisfactory. It
fails in producing any unity of effect. It contains the rough material
for a story, but is not a completed work of art. It is, in fact, more of
a notebook than a novel. We fear that too many collaborators are like
too many cooks and spoil the dinner. Still, in this tale of a country
town there are certain solid qualities, and it is a book that one can
with perfect safety recommend to other people.
Miss Rhoda Broughton belongs to a very different school. No one can ever
say of her that she has tried to separate flippancy from fiction, and
whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her
sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes
the whole world kin. We are sorry, however, to see from a perusal of
Betty's Visions that Miss Broughton has been attending the meetings of
the Psychical Society in search of copy. Mysticism is not her mission,
and telepathy should be left to Messrs. Myers and Gurney. In Philistia
lies Miss Broughton's true sphere, and to Philistia she should return.
She knows more about the vanities of this world than about this world's
visions, and a possible garrison town is better than an impossible ghost-
land.
That Other Person, who gives Mrs. Alfred Hunt the title for her three-
volume novel, is a young girl, by name Hester Langdale, who for the sake
of Mr. Godfrey Daylesford sacrifices everything a woman can sacrifice,
and, on his marrying some one else, becomes a hospital nurse. The
hospital nurse idea is perhaps used by novelists a little too often in
cases of this kind; still, it has an artistic as well as an ethical
value. The interest of the story centres, however, in Mr. Daylesford,
who marries not for love but for ambition, and is rather severely
punished for doing so. Mrs. Daylesford has a sister called Polly who
develops, according to the approved psychological method, from a
hobbledehoy girl into a tender sweet woman. Polly is delightfully drawn,
but the most attractive character in the book, strangely enough, is Mr.
Godfrey Daylesford. He is very weak, but he is very charming. So
charming indeed is he, that it is only when one closes the book that one
thinks of censuring him. While we are in direct contact with him we are
fascinated. Such a character has at any rate the morality of truth about
it. Here literature has faithfully followed life. Mrs. Hunt writes a
very pleasing style, bright and free from affectation. Indeed,
everything in her work is clever except the title.