write sonnets on the survival of the fittest and odes to Natural
Selection. Socialism, and the sympathy with those who are unfit, seem,
if we may judge from Miss Nesbit's remarkable volume, to be the new theme
of song, the fresh subject-matter for poetry. The change has some
advantages. Scientific laws are at once too abstract and too clearly
defined, and even the visible arts have not yet been able to translate
into any symbols of beauty the discoveries of modern science. At the
Arts and Crafts Exhibition we find the cosmogony of Moses, not the
cosmogony of Darwin. To Mr. Burne-Jones Man is still a fallen angel, not
a greater ape. Poverty and misery, upon the other hand, are terribly
concrete things. We find their incarnation everywhere and, as we are
discussing a matter of art, we have no hesitation in saying that they are
not devoid of picturesqueness. The etcher or the painter finds in them
'a subject made to his hand,' and the poet has admirable opportunities of
drawing weird and dramatic contrasts between the purple of the rich and
the rags of the poor. From Miss Nesbit's book comes not merely the voice
of sympathy but also the cry of revolution:
This is our vengeance day. Our masters made fat with our fasting
Shall fall before us like corn when the sickle for harvest is strong:
Old wrongs shall give might to our arm, remembrance of wrongs shall
make lasting
The graves we will dig for our tyrants we bore with too much and too
long.
The poem from which we take this stanza is remarkably vigorous, and the
only consolation that we can offer to the timid and the Tories is that as
long as so much strength is employed in blowing the trumpet, the sword,
so far as Miss Nesbit is concerned, will probably remain sheathed.
Personally, and looking at the matter from a purely artistic point of
view, we prefer Miss Nesbit's gentler moments. Her eye for Nature is
peculiarly keen. She has always an exquisite sense of colour and
sometimes a most delicate ear for music. Many of her poems, such as The
Moat House, Absolution, and The Singing of the Magnificat are true works
of art, and Vies Manquees is a little gem of song, with its dainty
dancing measure, its delicate and wilful fancy and the sharp poignant
note of passion that suddenly strikes across it, marring its light
laughter and lending its beauty a terrible and tragic meaning.
From the sonnets we take this at random:
Not Spring--too lavish of her bud and leaf--
But Autumn with sad eyes and brows austere,
When fields are bare, and woods are brown and sere,
And leaden skies weep their enchantless grief.
Spring is so much too bright, since Spring is brief,
And in our hearts is Autumn all the year,
Least sad when the wide pastures are most drear
And fields grieve most--robbed of the last gold sheaf.
These too, the opening stanzas of The Last Envoy, are charming:
The Wind, that through the silent woodland blows
O'er rippling corn and dreaming pastures goes
Straight to the garden where the heart of Spring
Faints in the heart of Summer's earliest rose.
Dimpling the meadow's grassy green and grey,
By furze that yellows all the common way,
Gathering the gladness of the common broom,
And too persistent fragrance of the may--
Gathering whatever is of sweet and dear,
The wandering wind has passed away from here,
Has passed to where within your garden waits
The concentrated sweetness of the year.
But Miss Nesbit is not to be judged by mere extracts. Her work is too
rich and too full for that.
Mr. Foster is an American poet who has read Hawthorne, which is wise of
him, and imitated Longfellow, which is not quite so commendable. His
Rebecca the Witch is a story of old Salem, written in the metre of
Hiawatha, with a few rhymes thrown in, and conceived in the spirit of the
author of The Scarlet Letter. The combination is not very satisfactory,
but the poem, as a piece of fiction, has many elements of interest. Mr.
Foster seems to be quite popular in America. The Chicago Times finds his
fancies 'very playful and sunny,' and the Indianapolis Journal speaks of
his 'tender and appreciative style.' He is certainly a clever
story-teller, and The Noah's Ark (which 'somehow had escaped the
sheriff's hand') is bright and amusing, and its pathos, like the pathos
of a melodrama, is a purely picturesque element not intended to be taken
too seriously. We cannot, however, recommend the definitely comic poems.
They are very depressing.
Mr. John Renton Denning dedicates his book to the Duke of Connaught, who
is Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade, in which regiment Mr. Denning
was once himself a private soldier. His poems show an ardent love of
Keats and a profligate luxuriance of adjectives:
And I will build a bower for thee, sweet,
A verdurous shelter from the noonday heat,
Thick rustling ivy, broad and green, and shining,
With honeysuckle creeping up and twining
Its nectared sweetness round thee; violets
And daisies with their fringed coronets
And the white bells of tiny valley lilies,
And golden-leaved narcissi--daffodillies
Shall grow around thy dwelling--luscious fare
Of fruit on which the sun has laughed;
this is the immature manner of Endymion with a vengeance and is not to be
encouraged. Still, Mr. Denning is not always so anxious to reproduce the
faults of his master. Sometimes he writes with wonderful grace and
charm. Sylvia, for instance, is an exceedingly pretty poem, and The
Exile has many powerful and picturesque lines. Mr. Denning should make a
selection of his poems and publish them in better type and on better
paper. The 'get-up' of his volume, to use the slang phrase of our young
poets, is very bad indeed, and reflects no credit on the press of the
Education Society of Bombay.
The best poem in Mr. Joseph McKim's little book is, undoubtedly, William
the Silent. It is written in the spirited Macaulay style:
Awake, awake, ye burghers brave! shout, shout for joy and sing!
With thirty thousand at his back comes forth your hero King.
Now shake for ever from your necks the servile yoke of Spain,
And raise your arms and end for aye false Alva's cruel reign.
Ho! Maestricht, Liege, Brussels fair! pour forth your warriors brave,
And join your hands with him who comes your hearths and homes to save.
Some people like this style.
Mrs. Horace Dobell, who has arrived at her seventeenth volume of poetry,
seems very angry with everybody, and writes poems to A Human Toad with
lurid and mysterious footnotes such as--'Yet some one, _not_ a friend of
--- _did_! on a certain occasion of a glib utterance of calumnies, by ---!
at Hampstead.' Here indeed is a Soul's Tragedy.
'In many cases I have deliberately employed alliteration, believing that
the music of a line is intensified thereby,' says Mr. Kelly in the
preface to his poems, and there is certainly no reason why Mr. Kelly
should not employ this 'artful aid.' Alliteration is one of the many
secrets of English poetry, and as long as it is kept a secret it is
admirable. Mr. Kelly, it must be admitted, uses it with becoming modesty
and reserve and never suffers it to trammel the white feet of his bright
and buoyant muse. His volume is, in many ways, extremely interesting.
Most minor poets are at their best in sonnets, but with him it is not so.
His sonnets are too narrative, too diffuse, and too lyrical. They lack
concentration, and concentration is the very essence of a sonnet. His
longer poems, on the other hand, have many good qualities. We do not
care for Psychossolles, which is elaborately commonplace, but The Flight
of Calliope has many charming passages. It is a pity that Mr. Kelly has
included the poems written before the age of nineteen. Youth is rarely
original.
Andiatorocte is the title of a volume of poems by the Rev. Clarence
Walworth, of Albany, N.Y. It is a word borrowed from the Indians, and
should, we think, be returned to them as soon as possible. The most
curious poem of the book is called Scenes at the Holy Home:
Jesus and Joseph at work! Hurra!
Sight never to see again,
A prentice Deity plies the saw,
While the Master ploughs with the plane.
Poems of this kind were popular in the Middle Ages when the cathedrals of
every Christian country served as its theatres. They are anachronisms
now, and it is odd that they should come to us from the United States. In
matters of this kind we should have some protection.
(1) Lays and Legends. By E. Nesbit. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
(2) Rebecca the Witch and Other Tales. By David Skaats Foster. (G. P.
Putnam's Sons.)
(3) Poems and Songs. By John Renton Denning. (Bombay: Education
Society's Press.)
(4) Poems. By Joseph McKim. (Kegan Paul.)
(5) In the Watches of the Night. Poems in eighteen volumes. By Mrs.
Horace Dobell. Vol. xvii. (Remington and Co.)
(6) Poems. By James Kelly. (Glasgow: Reid and Coghill.)
(7) Andiatorocte. By the Rev. Clarence A. Walworth. (G. P. Putnam's
Sons.)
A NOTE ON SOME MODERN POETS
(Woman's World, December 1888.)
'If I were king,' says Mr. Henley, in one of his most modest rondeaus,
'Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear;
Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather;
And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere,
If I were king.'
And these lines contain, if not the best criticism of his own work,
certainly a very complete statement of his aim and motive as a poet. His
little Book of Verses reveals to us an artist who is seeking to find new
methods of expression and has not merely a delicate sense of beauty and a
brilliant, fantastic wit, but a real passion also for what is horrible,
ugly, or grotesque. No doubt, everything that is worthy of existence is
worthy also of art--at least, one would like to think so--but while echo
or mirror can repeat for us a beautiful thing, to render artistically a
thing that is ugly requires the most exquisite alchemy of form, the most
subtle magic of transformation. To me there is more of the cry of
Marsyas than of the singing of Apollo in the earlier poems of Mr.
Henley's volume, In Hospital: Rhymes and Rhythms, as he calls them. But
it is impossible to deny their power. Some of them are like bright,
vivid pastels; others like charcoal drawings, with dull blacks and murky
whites; others like etchings with deeply-bitten lines, and abrupt
contrasts, and clever colour-suggestions. In fact, they are like
anything and everything, except perfected poems--that they certainly are
not. They are still in the twilight. They are preludes, experiments,
inspired jottings in a note-book, and should be heralded by a design of
'Genius Making Sketches.' Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to
verse; it gives that delightful sense of limitation which in all the arts
is so pleasurable, and is, indeed, one of the secrets of perfection; it
will whisper, as a French critic has said, 'things unexpected and
charming, things with strange and remote relations to each other,' and
bind them together in indissoluble bonds of beauty; and in his constant
rejection of rhyme, Mr. Henley seems to me to have abdicated half his
power. He is a roi en exil who has thrown away some of the strings of
his lute; a poet who has forgotten the fairest part of his kingdom.
However, all work criticises itself. Here is one of Mr. Henley's
inspired jottings. According to the temperament of the reader, it will
serve either as a model or as the reverse:
As with varnish red and glistening
Dripped his hair; his feet were rigid;
Raised, he settled stiffly sideways:
You could see the hurts were spinal.
He had fallen from an engine,
And been dragged along the metals.
It was hopeless, and they knew it;
So they covered him, and left him.
As he lay, by fits half sentient,
Inarticulately moaning,
With his stockinged feet protruded
Sharp and awkward from the blankets,
To his bed there came a woman,
Stood and looked and sighed a little,
And departed without speaking,
As himself a few hours after.
I was told she was his sweetheart.
They were on the eve of marriage.
She was quiet as a statue,
But her lip was gray and writhen.
In this poem, the rhythm and the music, such as it is, are
obvious--perhaps a little too obvious. In the following I see nothing
but ingeniously printed prose. It is a description--and a very accurate
one--of a scene in a hospital ward. The medical students are supposed to
be crowding round the doctor. What I quote is only a fragment, but the
poem itself is a fragment:
So shows the ring
Seen, from behind, round a conjuror
Doing his pitch in the street.
High shoulders, low shoulders, broad shoulders, narrow ones,
Round, square, and angular, serry and shove;
While from within a voice,
Gravely and weightily fluent,
Sounds; and then ceases; and suddenly
(Look at the stress of the shoulders!)
Out of a quiver of silence,
Over the hiss of the spray,
Comes a low cry, and the sound
Of breath quick intaken through teeth
Clenched in resolve. And the master
Breaks from the crowd, and goes,
Wiping his hands,
To the next bed, with his pupils
Flocking and whispering behind him.
Now one can see.
Case Number One
Sits (rather pale) with his bedclothes
Stripped up, and showing his foot
(Alas, for God's image!)
Swaddled in wet white lint
Brilliantly hideous with red.
Theophile Gautier once said that Flaubert's style was meant to be read,
and his own style to be looked at. Mr. Henley's unrhymed rhythms form
very dainty designs, from a typographical point of view. From the point
of view of literature, they are a series of vivid, concentrated
impressions, with a keen grip of fact, a terrible actuality, and an
almost masterly power of picturesque presentation. But the poetic
form--what of that?
Well, let us pass to the later poems, to the rondels and rondeaus, the
sonnets and quatorzains, the echoes and the ballades. How brilliant and
fanciful this is! The Toyokuni colour-print that suggested it could not
be more delightful. It seems to have kept all the wilful fantastic charm
of the original:
Was I a Samurai renowned,
Two-sworded, fierce, immense of bow?
A histrion angular and profound?
A priest? a porter?--Child, although
I have forgotten clean, I know
That in the shade of Fujisan,
What time the cherry-orchards blow,
I loved you once in old Japan.
As here you loiter, flowing-gowned
And hugely sashed, with pins a-row
Your quaint head as with flamelets crowned,
Demure, inviting--even so,
When merry maids in Miyako
To feel the sweet o' the year began,
And green gardens to overflow,
I loved you once in old Japan.
Clear shine the hills; the rice-fields round
Two cranes are circling; sleepy and slow,
A blue canal the lake's blue bound
Breaks at the bamboo bridge; and lo!
Touched with the sundown's spirit and glow,
I see you turn, with flirted fan,
Against the plum-tree's bloomy snow . . .
I loved you once in old Japan!
ENVOY.
Dear, 'twas a dozen lives ago;
But that I was a lucky man
The Toyokuni here will show:
I loved you--once--in old Japan!
This rondel, too--how light it is, and graceful!--
We'll to the woods and gather may
Fresh from the footprints of the rain.
We'll to the woods, at every vein
To drink the spirit of the day.
The winds of spring are out at play,
The needs of spring in heart and brain.
We'll to the woods and gather may
Fresh from the footprints of the rain.
The world's too near her end, you say?
Hark to the blackbird's mad refrain!
It waits for her, the vast Inane?
Then, girls, to help her on the way
We'll to the woods and gather may.
There are fine verses, also, scattered through this little book; some of
them very strong, as--
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Others with a true touch of romance, as--
Or ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon,
And you were a Christian slave.
And here and there we come across such felicitous phrases as--
In the sand
The gold prow-griffin claws a hold,
or--
The spires
Shine and are changed,
and many other graceful or fanciful lines, even 'the green sky's minor
thirds' being perfectly right in its place, and a very refreshing bit of
affectation in a volume where there is so much that is natural.
However, Mr. Henley is not to be judged by samples. Indeed, the most
attractive thing in the book is no single poem that is in it, but the
strong humane personality that stands behind both flawless and faulty
work alike, and looks out through many masks, some of them beautiful, and
some grotesque, and not a few misshapen. In the case with most of our
modern poets, when we have analysed them down to an adjective, we can go
no further, or we care to go no further; but with this book it is
different. Through these reeds and pipes blows the very breath of life.
It seems as if one could put one's hand upon the singer's heart and count
its pulsations. There is something wholesome, virile and sane about the
man's soul. Anybody can be reasonable, but to be sane is not common; and
sane poets are as rare as blue lilies, though they may not be quite so
delightful.
Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,
Or the gold weather round us mellow slow;
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare,
And we can conquer, though we may not share
In the rich quiet of the afterglow,
What is to come,
is the concluding stanza of the last rondeau--indeed, of the last poem in
the collection, and the high, serene temper displayed in these lines
serves at once as keynote and keystone to the book. The very lightness
and slightness of so much of the work, its careless moods and casual
fancies, seem to suggest a nature that is not primarily interested in
art--a nature, like Sordello's, passionately enamoured of life, one to
which lyre and lute are things of less importance. From this mere joy of
living, this frank delight in experience for its own sake, this lofty
indifference, and momentary unregretted ardours, come all the faults and
all the beauties of the volume. But there is this difference between
them--the faults are deliberate, and the result of much study; the
beauties have the air of fascinating impromptus. Mr. Henley's healthy,
if sometimes misapplied, confidence in the myriad suggestions of life
gives him his charm. He is made to sing along the highways, not to sit
down and write. If he took himself more seriously, his work would become
trivial.
* * * * *
Mr. William Sharp takes himself very seriously and has written a preface
to his Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy, which is, on the whole,
the most interesting part of his volume. We are all, it seems, far too
cultured, and lack robustness. 'There are those amongst us,' says Mr.
Sharp, 'who would prefer a dexterously-turned triolet to such apparently
uncouth measures as Thomas the Rhymer, or the ballad of Clerk Saunders:
who would rather listen to the drawing-room music of the Villanelle than
to the wild harp-playing by the mill-dams o' Binnorie, or the sough of
the night-wind o'er drumly Annan water.' Such an expression as 'the
drawing-room music of the Villanelle' is not very happy, and I cannot
imagine any one with the smallest pretensions to culture preferring a
dexterously turned triolet to a fine imaginative ballad, as it is only
the Philistine who ever dreams of comparing works of art that are
absolutely different in motive, in treatment, and in form. If English
Poetry is in danger--and, according to Mr. Sharp, the poor nymph is in a
very critical state--what she has to fear is not the fascination of
dainty metre or delicate form, but the predominance of the intellectual
spirit over the spirit of beauty. Lord Tennyson dethroned Wordsworth as
a literary influence, and later on Mr. Swinburne filled all the mountain
valleys with echoes of his own song. The influence to-day is that of Mr.
Browning. And as for the triolets, and the rondels, and the careful
study of metrical subtleties, these things are merely the signs of a
desire for perfection in small things and of the recognition of poetry as
an art. They have had certainly one good result--they have made our
minor poets readable, and have not left us entirely at the mercy of
geniuses.
But, says Mr. Sharp, every one is far too literary; even Rossetti is too
literary. What we want is simplicity and directness of utterance; these
should be the dominant characteristics of poetry. Well, is that quite so
certain? Are simplicity and directness of utterance absolute essentials
for poetry? I think not. They may be admirable for the drama, admirable
for all those imitative forms of literature that claim to mirror life in
its externals and its accidents, admirable for quiet narrative, admirable
in their place; but their place is not everywhere. Poetry has many modes
of music; she does not blow through one pipe alone. Directness of
utterance is good, but so is the subtle recasting of thought into a new
and delightful form. Simplicity is good, but complexity, mystery,
strangeness, symbolism, obscurity even, these have their value. Indeed,
properly speaking, there is no such thing as Style; there are merely
styles, that is all.
One cannot help feeling also that everything that Mr. Sharp says in his
preface was said at the beginning of the century by Wordsworth, only
where Wordsworth called us back to nature, Mr. Sharp invites us to woo
romance. Romance, he tells us, is 'in the air.' A new romantic movement
is imminent; 'I anticipate,' he says, 'that many of our poets, especially
those of the youngest generation, will shortly turn towards the "ballad"
as a poetic vehicle: and that the next year or two will see much romantic
poetry.'
The ballad! Well, Mr. Andrew Lang, some months ago, signed the death-
warrant of the ballade, and--though I hope that in this respect Mr. Lang
resembles the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, whose bloodthirsty orders
were by general consent never carried into execution--it must be admitted
that the number of ballades given to us by some of our poets was,
perhaps, a little excessive. But the ballad? Sir Patrick Spens, Clerk
Saunders, Thomas the Rhymer--are these to be our archetypes, our models,
the sources of our inspiration? They are certainly great imaginative
poems. In Chatterton's Ballad of Charity, Coleridge's Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner, the La Belle Dame sans Merci of Keats, the Sister Helen
of Rossetti, we can see what marvellous works of art the spirit of old
romance may fashion. But to preach a spirit is one thing, to propose a
form is another. It is true that Mr. Sharp warns the rising generation
against imitation. A ballad, he reminds them, does not necessarily
denote a poem in quatrains and in antique language. But his own poems,
as I think will be seen later, are, in their way, warnings, and show the
danger of suggesting any definite 'poetic vehicle.' And, further, are
simplicity and directness of utterance really the dominant
characteristics of these old imaginative ballads that Mr. Sharp so
enthusiastically, and, in some particulars, so wisely praises? It does
not seem to me to be so. We are always apt to think that the voices
which sang at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural
than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and
through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and
could pass, almost without changing, into song. The snow lies thick now
upon Olympus, and its scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we
fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in
the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the
vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or
think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every
century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the
work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its time is
probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort. For
Nature is always behind the age. It takes a great artist to be
thoroughly modern.
Let us turn to the poems, which have really only the preface to blame for
their somewhat late appearance. The best is undoubtedly The Weird of
Michael Scott, and these stanzas are a fair example of its power:
Then Michael Scott laughed long and loud:
'Whan shone the mune ahint yon cloud
I speered the towers that saw my birth--
Lang, lang, sall wait my cauld grey shroud,
Lang cauld and weet my bed o' earth!'
But as by Stair he rode full speed
His horse began to pant and bleed;
'Win hame, win hame, my bonnie mare,
Win hame if thou wouldst rest and feed,
Win hame, we're nigh the House of Stair!'