William Sharp, written in that involved and affected style which is Mr.
Sharp's distinguishing characteristic, and displaying that intimate
acquaintance with Sappho's lost poems which is the privilege only of
those who are not acquainted with Greek literature. As a criticism it is
not of much value, but as an advertisement it is quite excellent. Indeed,
Mr. Sharp hints mysteriously at secret political influence, and tells us
that though Mr. Austin 'sings with Tityrus' yet he 'has conversed with
AEneas,' which, we suppose, is a euphemistic method of alluding to the
fact that Mr. Austin once lunched with Lord Beaconsfield. It is for the
poet, however, not for the politician, that Mr. Sharp reserves his
loftiest panegyric and, in his anxiety to smuggle the author of Leszko
the Bastard and Grandmother's Teaching into the charmed circle of the
Immortals, he leaves no adjective unturned, quoting and misquoting Mr.
Austin with a recklessness that is absolutely fatal to the cause he
pleads. For mediocre critics are usually safe in their generalities; it
is in their reasons and examples that they come so lamentably to grief.
When, for instance, Mr. Sharp tells us that lines with the 'natural
magic' of Shakespeare, Keats and Coleridge are 'far from infrequent' in
Mr. Austin's poems, all that we can say is that we have never come across
any lines of the kind in Mr. Austin's published works, but it is
difficult to help smiling when Mr. Sharp gravely calls upon us to note
'the illuminative significance' of such a commonplace verse as
My manhood keeps the dew of morn,
And what have I to give;
Being right glad that I was born,
And thankful that I live.
Nor do Mr. Sharp's constant misquotations really help him out of his
difficulties. Such a line as
A meadow ribbed with _drying_ swathes of hay,
has at least the merit of being a simple, straightforward description of
an ordinary scene in an English landscape, but not much can be said in
favour of
A meadow ribbed with _dying_ swathes of hay,
which is Mr. Sharp's own version, and one that he finds 'delightfully
suggestive.' It is indeed suggestive, but only of that want of care that
comes from want of taste.
On the whole, Mr. Sharp has attempted an impossible task. Mr. Austin is
neither an Olympian nor a Titan, and all the puffing in Paternoster Row
cannot set him on Parnassus.
His verse is devoid of all real rhythmical life; it may have the metre of
poetry, but it has not often got its music, nor can there be any true
delicacy in the ear that tolerates such rhymes as 'chord' and 'abroad.'
Even the claim that Mr. Sharp puts forward for him, that his muse takes
her impressions directly from nature and owes nothing to books, cannot be
sustained for a moment. Wordsworth is a great poet, but bad echoes of
Wordsworth are extremely depressing, and when Mr. Austin calls the cuckoo a
Voyaging voice
and tells us that
The stockdove _broods_
Low to itself,
we must really enter a protest against such silly plagiarisms.
Perhaps, however, we are treating Mr. Sharp too seriously. He admits
himself that it was at the special request of the compiler of the
Calendar that he wrote the preface at all, and though he courteously adds
that the task is agreeable to him, still he shows only too clearly that
he considers it a task and, like a clever lawyer or a popular clergyman,
tries to atone for his lack of sincerity by a pleasing over-emphasis. Nor
is there any reason why this Calendar should not be a great success. If
published as a broad-sheet, with a picture of Mr. Austin 'conversing with
AEneas,' it might gladden many a simple cottage home and prove a source
of innocent amusement to the Conservative working-man.
Days of the Year: A Poetic Calendar from the Works of Alfred Austin.
Selected and edited by A. S. With Introduction by William Sharp. (Walter
Scott.)
THE POETS' CORNER--II
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 8, 1837.)
A little schoolboy was once asked to explain the difference between prose
and poetry. After some consideration he replied, '"blue violets" is
prose, and "violets blue" is poetry.' The distinction, we admit, is not
exhaustive, but it seems to be the one that is extremely popular with our
minor poets. Opening at random The Queens Innocent we come across
passages like this:
Full gladly would I sit
Of such a potent magus at the feet,
and this:
The third, while yet a youth,
Espoused a lady noble but not royal,
_One only son who gave him_--Pharamond--
lines that, apparently, rest their claim to be regarded as poetry on
their unnecessary and awkward inversions. Yet this poem is not without
beauty, and the character of Nardi, the little prince who is treated as
the Court fool, shows a delicate grace of fancy, and is both tender and
true. The most delightful thing in the whole volume is a little lyric
called April, which is like a picture set to music.
The Chimneypiece of Bruges is a narrative poem in blank verse, and tells
us of a young artist who, having been unjustly convicted of his wife's
murder, spends his life in carving on the great chimneypiece of the
prison the whole story of his love and suffering. The poem is full of
colour, but the blank verse is somewhat heavy in movement. There are
some pretty things in the book, and a poet without hysterics is rare.
Dr. Dawson Burns's Oliver Cromwell is a pleasant panegyric on the
Protector, and reads like a prize poem by a nice sixth-form boy. The
verses on The Good Old Times should be sent as a leaflet to all Tories of
Mr. Chaplin's school, and the lines on Bunker's Hill, beginning,
I stand on Bunker's towering pile,
are sure to be popular in America.
K. E. V.'s little volume is a series of poems on the Saints. Each poem
is preceded by a brief biography of the Saint it celebrates--which is a
very necessary precaution, as few of them ever existed. It does not
display much poetic power, and such lines as these on St. Stephen,--
Did ever man before so fall asleep?
A cruel shower of stones his only bed,
For lullaby the curses loud and deep,
His covering with blood red--
may be said to add another horror to martyrdom. Still it is a thoroughly
well-intentioned book and eminently suitable for invalids.
Mr. Foskett's poems are very serious and deliberate. One of the best of
them, Harold Glynde, is a Cantata for Total Abstainers, and has already
been set to music. A Hindoo Tragedy is the story of an enthusiastic
Brahmin reformer who tries to break down the prohibition against widows
marrying, and there are other interesting tales. Mr. Foskett has
apparently forgotten to insert the rhymes in his sonnet to Wordsworth;
but, as he tells us elsewhere that 'Poesy is uninspired by Art,' perhaps
he is only heralding a new and formless form. He is always sincere in
his feelings, and his apostrophe to Canon Farrar is equalled only by his
apostrophe to Shakespeare.
The Pilgrimage of Memory suffers a good deal by being printed as poetry,
and Mr. Barker should republish it at once as a prose work. Take, for
instance, this description of a lady on a runaway horse:--
Her screams alarmed the Squire, who seeing the peril of his daughter,
rode frantic after her. I saw at once the danger, and stepping from
the footpath, show'd myself before the startled animal, which
forthwith slackened pace, and darting up adroitly, I seized the rein,
and in another moment, had released the maiden's foot, and held her,
all insensible, within my arms. Poor girl, her head and face were
sorely bruised, and I tried hard to staunch the blood which flowed
from many a scalp-wound, and wipe away the dust that disfigured her
lovely features. In another moment the Squire was by my side. 'Poor
child,' he cried, alarmed, 'is she dead?' 'No, sir; not dead, I
think,' said I, 'but sorely bruised and injured.'
There is clearly nothing to be gained by dividing the sentences of this
simple and straightforward narrative into lines of unequal length, and
Mr. Barker's own arrangement of the metre,
In another moment,
The Squire was by my side.
'Poor child,' he cried, alarmed, 'is she dead?'
'No, sir; not dead, I think,' said I,
'But sorely bruised and injured,'
seems to us to be quite inferior to ours. We beg that the second edition
of The Pilgrimage of Memory may be issued as a novel in prose.
Mr. Gladstone Turner believes that we are on the verge of a great social
cataclysm, and warns us that our _cradles_ are even now being rocked by
_slumbering volcanoes_! We hope that there is no truth in this
statement, and that it is merely a startling metaphor introduced for the
sake of effect, for elsewhere in the volume there is a great deal of
beauty which we should be sorry to think was doomed to immediate
extinction. The Choice, for instance, is a charming poem, and the sonnet
on Evening would be almost perfect if it were not for an unpleasant
assonance in the fifth line. Indeed, so good is much of Mr. Gladstone
Turner's work that we trust he will give up rhyming 'real' to 'steal' and
'feel,' as such bad habits are apt to grow on careless poets and to blunt
their ear for music.
Nivalis is a five-act tragedy in blank verse. Most plays that are
written to be read, not to be acted, miss that condensation and
directness of expression which is one of the secrets of true dramatic
diction, and Mr. Schwartz's tragedy is consequently somewhat verbose.
Still, it is full of fine lines and noble scenes. It is essentially a
work of art, and though, as far as language is concerned, the personages
all speak through the lips of the poet, yet in passion and purpose their
characters are clearly differentiated, and the Queen Nivalis and her
lover Giulio are drawn with real psychological power. We hope that some
day Mr. Schwartz will write a play for the stage, as he has the dramatic
instinct and the dramatic imagination, and can make life pass into
literature without robbing it of its reality.
(1) The Queen's Innocent, with Other Poems. By Elise Cooper. (David
Stott.)
(2) The Chimneypiece of Bruges and Other Poems. By Constance E. Dixon.
(Elliot Stock.)
(3) Oliver Cromwell and Other Poems. By Dawson Burns, D.D. (Partridge
and Co.)
(4) The Circle of Saints. By K. E. V. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)
(5) Poems. By Edward Foskett. (Kegan Paul.)
(6) The Pilgrimage of Memory. By John Thomas Barker. (Simpkin, Marshall
and Co.)
(7) Errata. By G. Gladstone Turner. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
(8) Nivalis. By J. M. W. Schwartz. (Kegan Paul.)
GREAT WRITERS BY LITTLE MEN
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 28, 1887.)
In an introductory note prefixed to the initial volume of 'Great
Writers,' a series of literary monographs now being issued by Mr. Walter
Scott, the publisher himself comes forward in the kindest manner possible
to give his authors the requisite 'puff preliminary,' and ventures to
express the modest opinion that such original and valuable works 'have
never before been produced in any part of the world at a price so low as
a shilling a volume.' Far be it from us to make any heartless allusion
to the fact that Shakespeare's Sonnets were brought out at fivepence, or
that for fourpence-halfpenny one could have bought a Martial in ancient
Rome. Every man, a cynical American tells us, has the right to beat a
drum before his booth. Still, we must acknowledge that Mr. Walter Scott
would have been much better employed in correcting some of the more
obvious errors that appear in his series. When, for instance, we come
across such a phrase as 'the brotherly liberality of the brothers
Wedgewood,' the awkwardness of the expression is hardly atoned for by the
fact that the name of the great potter is misspelt; Longfellow is so
essentially poor in rhymes that it is unfair to rob him even of one, and
the misquotation on page 77 is absolutely unkind; the joke Coleridge
himself made upon the subject should have been sufficient to remind any
one that 'Comberbach' (sic) was not the name under which he enlisted, and
no real beauty is added to the first line of his pathetic Work Without
Hope by printing 'lare' (sic) instead of 'lair.' The truth is that all
premature panegyrics bring their own punishment upon themselves and, in
the present case, though the series has only just entered upon existence,
already a great deal of the work done is careless, disappointing, unequal
and tedious.
Mr. Eric Robertson's Longfellow is a most depressing book. No one
survives being over-estimated, nor is there any surer way of destroying
an author's reputation than to glorify him without judgment and to praise
him without tact. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the first true
men of letters America produced, and as such deserves a high place in any
history of American civilisation. To a land out of breath in its greed
for gain he showed the example of a life devoted entirely to the study of
literature; his lectures, though not by any means brilliant, were still
productive of much good; he had a most charming and gracious personality,
and he wrote some pretty poems. But his poems are not of the kind that
call for intellectual analysis or for elaborate description or, indeed,
for any serious discussion at all. They are as unsuited for panegyric as
they are unworthy of censure, and it is difficult to help smiling when
Mr. Robertson gravely tells us that few modern poets have given utterance
to a faith so comprehensive as that expressed in the Psalm of Life, or
that Evangeline should confer on Longfellow the title of
'Golden-mouthed,' and that the style of metre adopted 'carries the ear
back to times in the world's history when grand simplicities were sung.'
Surely Mr. Robertson does not believe that there is any connection at all
between Longfellow's unrhymed dactylics and the hexameter of Greece and
Rome, or that any one reading Evangeline would be reminded of Homer's or
Virgil's line? Where also lies the advantage of confusing popularity
with poetic power? Though the Psalm of Life be shouted from Maine to
California, that would not make it true poetry. Why call upon us to
admire a bad misquotation from the Midnight Mass for the Dying Year, and
why talk of Longfellow's 'hundreds of imitators'? Longfellow has no
imitators, for of echoes themselves there are no echoes and it is only
style that makes a school.
Now and then, however, Mr. Robertson considers it necessary to assume a
critical attitude. He tells us, for instance, that whether or not
Longfellow was a genius of the first order, it must be admitted that he
loved social pleasures and was a good eater and judge of wines, admiring
'Bass's ale' more than anything else he had seen in England! The remarks
on Excelsior are even still more amazing. Excelsior, says Mr. Robertson,
is not a ballad because a ballad deals either with real or with
supernatural people, and the hero of the poem cannot be brought under
either category. For, 'were he of human flesh, his madcap notion of
scaling a mountain with the purpose of getting to the sky would be simply
drivelling lunacy,' to say nothing of the fact that the peak in question
is much frequented by tourists, while, on the other hand, 'it would be
absurd to suppose him a spirit . . . for no spirit would be so silly as
climb a snowy mountain for nothing'! It is really painful to have to
read such preposterous nonsense, and if Mr. Walter Scott imagines that
work of this kind is 'original and valuable' he has much to learn. Nor
are Mr. Robertson's criticisms upon other poets at all more felicitous.
The casual allusion to Herrick's 'confectioneries of verse' is, of
course, quite explicable, coming as it does from an editor who excluded
Herrick from an anthology of the child-poems of our literature in favour
of Mr. Ashby-Sterry and Mr. William Sharp, but when Mr. Robertson tells
us that Poe's 'loftiest flights of imagination in verse . . . rise into
no more empyreal realm than the fantastic,' we can only recommend him to
read as soon as possible the marvellous lines To Helen, a poem as
beautiful as a Greek gem and as musical as Apollo's lute. The remarks,
too, on Poe's critical estimate of his own work show that Mr. Robertson
has never really studied the poet on whom he pronounces such glib and
shallow judgments, and exemplify very clearly the fact that even
dogmatism is no excuse for ignorance.
After reading Mr. Hall Caine's Coleridge we are irresistibly reminded of
what Wordsworth once said about a bust that had been done of himself.
After contemplating it for some time, he remarked, 'It is not a bad
Wordsworth, but it is not the real Wordsworth; it is not Wordsworth the
poet, it is the sort of Wordsworth who might be Chancellor of the
Exchequer.' Mr. Caine's Coleridge is certainly not the sort of Coleridge
who might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the author of
Christabel was not by any means remarkable as a financier; but, for all
that, it is not the real Coleridge, it is not Coleridge the poet. The
incidents of the life are duly recounted; the gunpowder plot at
Cambridge, the egg-hot and oronokoo at the little tavern in Newgate
Street, the blue coat and white waistcoat that so amazed the worthy
Unitarians, and the terrible smoking experiment at Birmingham are all
carefully chronicled, as no doubt they should be in every popular
biography; but of the spiritual progress of the man's soul we hear
absolutely nothing. Never for one single instant are we brought near to
Coleridge; the magic of that wonderful personality is hidden from us by a
cloud of mean details, an unholy jungle of facts, and the 'critical
history' promised to us by Mr. Walter Scott in his unfortunate preface is
conspicuous only by its absence.
Carlyle once proposed in jest to write a life of Michael Angelo without
making any reference to his art, and Mr. Caine has shown that such a
project is perfectly feasible. He has written the life of a great
peripatetic philosopher and chronicled only the peripatetics. He has
tried to tell us about a poet, and his book might be the biography of the
famous tallow-chandler who would not appreciate the Watchman. The real
events of Coleridge's life are not his gig excursions and his walking
tours; they are his thoughts, dreams and passions, his moments of
creative impulse, their source and secret, his moods of imaginative joy,
their marvel and their meaning, and not his moods merely but the music
and the melancholy that they brought him; the lyric loveliness of his
voice when he sang, the sterile sorrow of the years when he was silent.
It is said that every man's life is a Soul's Tragedy. Coleridge's
certainly was so, and though we may not be able to pluck out the heart of
his mystery, still let us recognise that mystery is there; and that the
goings-out and comings-in of a man, his places of sojourn and his roads
of travel are but idle things to chronicle, if that which is the man be
left unrecorded. So mediocre is Mr. Caine's book that even accuracy
could not make it better.
On the whole, then, Mr. Walter Scott cannot be congratulated on the
success of his venture so far, The one really admirable feature of the
series is the bibliography that is appended to each volume. These
bibliographies are compiled by Mr. Anderson, of the British Museum, and
are so valuable to the student, as well as interesting in themselves,
that it is much to be regretted that they should be accompanied by such
tedious letterpress.
(1) Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By Eric S. Robertson.
(2) Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By Hall Caine. 'Great Writers'
Series. (Walter Scott.)
A NEW BOOK ON DICKENS
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 31, 1887.)
Mr. Marzials' Dickens is a great improvement on the Longfellow and
Coleridge of his predecessors. It is certainly a little sad to find our
old friend the manager of the Theatre Royal, Portsmouth, appearing as
'Mr. Vincent Crumules' (sic), but such misprints are not by any means
uncommon in Mr. Walter Scott's publications, and, on the whole, this is a
very pleasant book indeed. It is brightly and cleverly written,
admirably constructed, and gives a most vivid and graphic picture of that
strange modern drama, the drama of Dickens's life. The earlier chapters
are quite excellent, and, though the story of the famous novelist's
boyhood has been often told before, Mr. Marzials shows that it can be
told again without losing any of the charm of its interest, while the
account of Dickens in the plenitude of his glory is most appreciative and
genial. We are really brought close to the man with his indomitable
energy, his extraordinary capacity for work, his high spirits, his
fascinating, tyrannous personality. The description of his method of
reading is admirable, and the amazing stump-campaign in America attains,
in Mr. Marzials' hands, to the dignity of a mock-heroic poem. One side
of Dickens's character, however, is left almost entirely untouched, and
yet it is one in every way deserving of close study. That Dickens should
have felt bitterly towards his father and mother is quite explicable, but
that, while feeling so bitterly, he should have caricatured them for the
amusement of the public, with an evident delight in his own humour, has
always seemed to us a most curious psychological problem. We are far
from complaining that he did so. Good novelists are much rarer than good
sons, and none of us would part readily with Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby.
Still, the fact remains that a man who was affectionate and loving to his
children, generous and warm-hearted to his friends, and whose books are
the very bacchanalia of benevolence, pilloried his parents to make the
groundlings laugh, and this fact every biographer of Dickens should face
and, if possible, explain.
As for Mr. Marzials' critical estimate of Dickens as a writer, he tells
us quite frankly that he believes that Dickens at his best was 'one of
the greatest masters of pathos who ever lived,' a remark that seems to us
an excellent example of what novelists call 'the fine courage of
despair.' Of course, no biographer of Dickens could say anything else,
just at present. A popular series is bound to express popular views, and
cheap criticisms may be excused in cheap books. Besides, it is always
open to every one to accept G. H. Lewes's unfortunate maxim that any
author who makes one cry possesses the gift of pathos and, indeed, there
is something very flattering in being told that one's own emotions are
the ultimate test of literature. When Mr. Marzials discusses Dickens's
power of drawing human nature we are upon somewhat safer ground, and we
cannot but admire the cleverness with which he passes over his hero's
innumerable failures. For, in some respects, Dickens might be likened to
those old sculptors of our Gothic cathedrals who could give form to the
most fantastic fancy, and crowd with grotesque monsters a curious world
of dreams, but saw little of the grace and dignity of the men and women
among whom they lived, and whose art, lacking sanity, was therefore
incomplete. Yet they at least knew the limitations of their art, while
Dickens never knew the limitations of his. When he tries to be serious
he succeeds only in being dull, when he aims at truth he reaches merely
platitude. Shakespeare could place Ferdinand and Miranda by the side of
Caliban, and Life recognises them all as her own, but Dickens's Mirandas
are the young ladies out of a fashion-book, and his Ferdinands the
walking gentlemen of an unsuccessful company of third-rate players. So
little sanity, indeed, had Dickens's art that he was never able even to
satirise: he could only caricature; and so little does Mr. Marzials
realise where Dickens's true strength and weakness lie, that he actually
complains that Cruikshank's illustrations are too much exaggerated and
that he could never draw either a lady or a gentleman.
The latter was hardly a disqualification for illustrating Dickens as few
such characters occur in his books, unless we are to regard Lord
Frederick Verisopht and Sir Mulberry Hawk as valuable studies of high
life; and, for our own part, we have always considered that the greatest
injustice ever done to Dickens has been done by those who have tried to
illustrate him seriously.
In conclusion, Mr. Marzials expresses his belief that a century hence
Dickens will be read as much as we now read Scott, and says rather
prettily that as long as he is read 'there will be one gentle and
humanising influence the more at work among men,' which is always a
useful tag to append to the life of any popular author. Remembering that
of all forms of error prophecy is the most gratuitous, we will not take
upon ourselves to decide the question of Dickens's immortality. If our
descendants do not read him they will miss a great source of amusement,
and if they do, we hope they will not model their style upon his. Of
this, however, there is but little danger, for no age ever borrows the
slang of its predecessor. As for 'the gentle and humanising influence,'
this is taking Dickens just a little too seriously.
Life of Charles Dickens. By Frank T. Marzials. 'Great Writers' Series.
(Walter Scott.)
OUR BOOK-SHELF
(Pall Mall Gazette, April 12, 1887.)