The white horse stumbled, plunged, and fell,
And loud a summoning voice arose,
'Is't White-Horse Death that rides frae Hell,
Or Michael Scott that hereby goes?'
'Ah, Laird of Stair, I ken ye weel!
Avaunt, or I your saul sall steal,
An' send ye howling through the wood
A wild man-wolf--aye, ye maun reel
An' cry upon your Holy Rood!'
There is a good deal of vigour, no doubt, in these lines; but one cannot
help asking whether this is to be the common tongue of the future
Renaissance of Romance. Are we all to talk Scotch, and to speak of the
moon as the 'mune,' and the soul as the 'saul'? I hope not. And yet if
this Renaissance is to be a vital, living thing, it must have its
linguistic side. Just as the spiritual development of music, and the
artistic development of painting, have always been accompanied, if not
occasioned, by the discovery of some new instrument or some fresh medium,
so, in the case of any important literary movement, half of its strength
resides in its language. If it does not bring with it a rich and novel
mode of expression, it is doomed either to sterility or to imitation.
Dialect, archaisms and the like, will not do. Take, for instance,
another poem of Mr. Sharp's, a poem which he calls The Deith-Tide:
The weet saut wind is blawing
Upon the misty shore:
As, like a stormy snawing,
The deid go streaming o'er:--
The wan drown'd deid sail wildly
Frae out each drumly wave:
It's O and O for the weary sea,
And O for a quiet grave.
This is simply a very clever pastiche, nothing more, and our language is
not likely to be permanently enriched by such words as 'weet,' 'saut,'
'blawing,' and 'snawing.' Even 'drumly,' an adjective of which Mr. Sharp
is so fond that he uses it both in prose and verse, seems to me to be
hardly an adequate basis for a new romantic movement.
However, Mr. Sharp does not always write in dialect. The Son of Allan
can be read without any difficulty, and Phantasy can be read with
pleasure. They are both very charming poems in their way, and none the
less charming because the cadences of the one recall Sister Helen, and
the motive of the other reminds us of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But
those who wish thoroughly to enjoy Mr. Sharp's poems should not read his
preface; just as those who approve of the preface should avoid reading
the poems. I cannot help saying that I think the preface a great
mistake. The work that follows it is quite inadequate, and there seems
little use in heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and proclaiming a
Renaissance whose first-fruits, if we are to judge them by any high
standard of perfection, are of so ordinary a character.
* * * * *
Miss Mary Robinson has also written a preface to her little volume,
Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play, but the preface is not very serious,
and does not propose any drastic change or any immediate revolution in
English literature. Miss Robinson's poems have always the charm of
delicate music and graceful expression; but they are, perhaps, weakest
where they try to be strong, and certainly least satisfying where they
seek to satisfy. Her fanciful flower-crowned Muse, with her tripping
steps and pretty, wilful ways, should not write Antiphons to the
Unknowable, or try to grapple with abstract intellectual problems. Hers
is not the hand to unveil mysteries, nor hers the strength for the
solving of secrets. She should never leave her garden, and as for her
wandering out into the desert to ask the Sphinx questions, that should be
sternly forbidden to her. Durer's Melancolia, that serves as the
frontispiece to this dainty book, looks sadly out of place. Her seat is
with the sibyls, not with the nymphs. What has she to do with
shepherdesses piping about Darwinism and 'The Eternal Mind'?
However, if the Songs of the Inner Life are not very successful, the
Spring Songs are delightful. They follow each other like wind-blown
petals, and make one feel how much more charming flower is than fruit,
apple-blossom than apple. There are some artistic temperaments that
should never come to maturity, that should always remain in the region of
promise and should dread autumn with its harvesting more than winter with
its frosts. Such seems to me the temperament that this volume reveals.
The first poem of the second series, La Belle au Bois Dormant, is worth
all the more serious and thoughtful work, and has far more chance of
being remembered. It is not always to high aim and lofty ambition that
the prize is given. If Daphne had gone to meet Apollo, she would never
have known what laurels are.
From these fascinating spring lyrics and idylls we pass to the romantic
ballads. One artistic faculty Miss Robinson certainly possesses--the
faculty of imitation. There is an element of imitation in all the arts;
it is to be found in literature as much as in painting, and the danger of
valuing it too little is almost as great as the danger of setting too
high a value upon it. To catch, by dainty mimicry, the very mood and
manner of antique work, and yet to retain that touch of modern passion
without which the old form would be dull and empty; to win from
long-silent lips some faint echo of their music, and to add to it a music
of one's own; to take the mode and fashion of a bygone age, and to
experiment with it, and search curiously for its possibilities; there is
a pleasure in all this. It is a kind of literary acting, and has
something of the charm of the art of the stage-player. And how well, on
the whole, Miss Robinson does it! Here is the opening of the ballad of
Rudel:
There was in all the world of France
No singer half so sweet:
The first note of his viol brought
A crowd into the street.
He stepped as young, and bright, and glad
As Angel Gabriel.
And only when we heard him sing
Our eyes forgot Rudel.
And as he sat in Avignon,
With princes at their wine,
In all that lusty company
Was none so fresh and fine.
His kirtle's of the Arras-blue,
His cap of pearls and green;
His golden curls fall tumbling round
The fairest face I've seen.
How Gautier would have liked this from the same poem!--
Hew the timbers of sandal-wood,
And planks of ivory;
Rear up the shining masts of gold,
And let us put to sea.
Sew the sails with a silken thread
That all are silken too;
Sew them with scarlet pomegranates
Upon a sheet of blue.
Rig the ship with a rope of gold
And let us put to sea.
And now, good-bye to good Marseilles,
And hey for Tripoli!
The ballad of the Duke of Gueldres's wedding is very clever:
'O welcome, Mary Harcourt,
Thrice welcome, lady mine;
There's not a knight in all the world
Shall be as true as thine.
'There's venison in the aumbry, Mary,
There's claret in the vat;
Come in, and breakfast in the hall
Where once my mother sat!'
O red, red is the wine that flows,
And sweet the minstrel's play,
But white is Mary Harcourt
Upon her wedding-day.
O many are the wedding guests
That sit on either side;
But pale below her crimson flowers
And homesick is the bride.
Miss Robinson's critical sense is at once too sound and too subtle to
allow her to think that any great Renaissance of Romance will necessarily
follow from the adoption of the ballad-form in poetry; but her work in
this style is very pretty and charming, and The Tower of St. Maur, which
tells of the father who built up his little son in the wall of his castle
in order that the foundations should stand sure, is admirable in its way.
The few touches of archaism in language that she introduces are quite
sufficient for their purpose, and though she fully appreciates the
importance of the Celtic spirit in literature, she does not consider it
necessary to talk of 'blawing' and 'snawing.' As for the garden play,
Our Lady of the Broken Heart, as it is called, the bright, birdlike
snatches of song that break in here and there--as the singing does in
Pippa Passes--form a very welcome relief to the somewhat ordinary
movement of the blank verse, and suggest to us again where Miss
Robinson's real power lies. Not a poet in the true creative sense, she
is still a very perfect artist in poetry, using language as one might use
a very precious material, and producing her best work by the rejection of
the great themes and large intellectual motives that belong to fuller and
richer song. When she essays such themes, she certainly fails. Her
instrument is the reed, not the lyre. Only those should sing of Death
whose song is stronger than Death is.
* * * * *
The collected poems of the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, have a
pathetic interest as the artistic record of a very gracious and comely
life. They bring us back to the days when Philip Bourke Marston was
young--'Philip, my King,' as she called him in the pretty poem of that
name; to the days of the Great Exhibition, with the universal piping
about peace; to those later terrible Crimean days, when Alma and
Balaclava were words on the lips of our poets; and to days when Leonora
was considered a very romantic name.
Leonora, Leonora,
How the word rolls--Leonora.
Lion-like in full-mouthed sound,
Marching o'er the metric ground,
With a tawny tread sublime.
So your name moves, Leonora,
Down my desert rhyme.
Mrs. Craik's best poems are, on the whole, those that are written in
blank verse; and these, though not prosaic, remind one that prose was her
true medium of expression. But some of the rhymed poems have
considerable merit. These may serve as examples of Mrs. Craik's style:
A SKETCH
Dost thou thus love me, O thou all beloved,
In whose large store the very meanest coin
Would out-buy my whole wealth? Yet here thou comest
Like a kind heiress from her purple and down
Uprising, who for pity cannot sleep,
But goes forth to the stranger at her gate--
The beggared stranger at her beauteous gate--
And clothes and feeds; scarce blest till she has blest.
But dost thou love me, O thou pure of heart,
Whose very looks are prayers? What couldst thou see
In this forsaken pool by the yew-wood's side,
To sit down at its bank, and dip thy hand,
Saying, 'It is so clear!'--and lo! ere long,
Its blackness caught the shimmer of thy wings,
Its slimes slid downward from thy stainless palm,
Its depths grew still, that there thy form might rise.
THE NOVICE
It is near morning. Ere the next night fall
I shall be made the bride of heaven. Then home
To my still marriage-chamber I shall come,
And spouseless, childless, watch the slow years crawl.
These lips will never meet a softer touch
Than the stone crucifix I kiss; no child
Will clasp this neck. Ah, virgin-mother mild,
Thy painted bliss will mock me overmuch.
This is the last time I shall twist the hair
My mother's hand wreathed, till in dust she lay:
The name, her name given on my baptism day,
This is the last time I shall ever bear.
O weary world, O heavy life, farewell!
Like a tired child that creeps into the dark
To sob itself asleep, where none will mark,--
So creep I to my silent convent cell.
Friends, lovers whom I loved not, kindly hearts
Who grieve that I should enter this still door,
Grieve not. Closing behind me evermore,
Me from all anguish, as all joy, it parts.
The volume chronicles the moods of a sweet and thoughtful nature, and
though many things in it may seem somewhat old-fashioned, it is still
very pleasant to read, and has a faint perfume of withered rose-leaves
about it.
(1) A Book of Verses. By William Ernest Henley. (David Nutt.)
(2) Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy. By William Sharp. (Walter
Scott.)
(3) Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play. By A. Mary F. Robinson. (Fisher
Unwin.)
(4) Poems. By the Author of John Halifax, Gentleman. (Macmillan and
Co.)
SIR EDWIN ARNOLD'S LAST VOLUME
(Pall Mall Gazette, December 11, 1888.)
Writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets. They may crowd their
page with gorgeous epithet and resplendent phrase, may pile Pelions of
adjectives upon Ossas of descriptions, may abandon themselves to highly
coloured diction and rich luxuriance of imagery, but if their verse lacks
the true rhythmical life of verse, if their method is devoid of the self-
restraint of the real artist, all their efforts are of very little avail.
'Asiatic' prose is possibly useful for journalistic purposes, but
'Asiatic' poetry is not to be encouraged. Indeed, poetry may be said to
need far more self-restraint than prose. Its conditions are more
exquisite. It produces its effects by more subtle means. It must not be
allowed to degenerate into mere rhetoric or mere eloquence. It is, in
one sense, the most self-conscious of all the arts, as it is never a
means to an end but always an end in itself. Sir Edwin Arnold has a very
picturesque or, perhaps we should say, a very pictorial style. He knows
India better than any living Englishman knows it, and Hindoostanee better
than any English writer should know it. If his descriptions lack
distinction, they have at least the merit of being true, and when he does
not interlard his pages with an interminable and intolerable series of
foreign words he is pleasant enough. But he is not a poet. He is simply
a poetical writer--that is all.
However, poetical writers have their uses, and there is a good deal in
Sir Edwin Arnold's last volume that will repay perusal. The scene of the
story is placed in a mosque attached to the monument of the Taj-Mahal,
and a group composed of a learned Mirza, two singing girls with their
attendant, and an Englishman, is supposed to pass the night there reading
the chapter of Sa'di upon 'Love,' and conversing upon that theme with
accompaniments of music and dancing. The Englishman is, of course, Sir
Edwin Arnold himself:
lover of India,
Too much her lover! for his heart lived there
How far soever wandered thence his feet.
Lady Dufferin appears as
Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen's Vice-queen!
which is really one of the most dreadful blank-verse lines that we have
come across for some time past. M. Renan is 'a priest of Frangestan,'
who writes in 'glittering French'; Lord Tennyson is
One we honour for his songs--
Greater than Sa'di's self--
and the Darwinians appear as the 'Mollahs of the West,' who
hold Adam's sons
Sprung of the sea-slug.
All this is excellent fooling in its way, a kind of play-acting in
literature; but the best parts of the book are the descriptions of the
Taj itself, which are extremely elaborate, and the various translations
from Sa'di with which the volume is interspersed. The great monument
Shah Jahan built for Arjamand is
Instinct with loveliness--not masonry!
Not architecture! as all others are,
But the proud passion of an Emperor's love
Wrought into living stone, which gleams and soars
With body of beauty shrining soul and thought,
Insomuch that it haps as when some face
Divinely fair unveils before our eyes--
Some woman beautiful unspeakably--
And the blood quickens, and the spirit leaps,
And will to worship bends the half-yielded knees,
Which breath forgets to breathe: so is the Taj;
You see it with the heart, before the eyes
Have scope to gaze. All white! snow white! cloud white!
We cannot say much in praise of the sixth line:
Insomuch that it haps as when some face:
it is curiously awkward and unmusical. But this passage from Sa'di is
remarkable:
When Earth, bewildered, shook in earthquake-throes,
With mountain-roots He bound her borders close;
Turkis and ruby in her rocks He stored,
And on her green branch hung His crimson rose.
He shapes dull seed to fair imaginings;
Who paints with moisture as He painteth things?
Look! from the cloud He sheds one drop on ocean,
As from the Father's loins one drop He brings;--
And out of that He forms a peerless pearl,
And, out of this, a cypress boy or girl;
Utterly wotting all their innermosts,
For all to Him is visible! Uncurl
Your cold coils, Snakes! Creep forth, ye thrifty Ants!
Handless and strengthless He provides your wants
Who from the 'Is not' planned the 'Is to be,'
And Life in non-existent void implants.
Sir Edwin Arnold suffers, of course, from the inevitable comparison that
one cannot help making between his work and the work of Edward
Fitzgerald, and certainly Fitzgerald could never have written such a line
as 'utterly wotting all their innermosts,' but it is interesting to read
almost any translation of those wonderful Oriental poets with their
strange blending of philosophy and sensuousness, of simple parable or
fable and obscure mystic utterance. What we regret most in Sir Edwin
Arnold's book is his habit of writing in what really amounts to a sort of
'pigeon English.' When we are told that 'Lady Duffreen, the mighty
Queen's Vice-queen,' paces among the charpoys of the ward 'no whit afraid
of sitla, or of tap'; when the Mirza explains--
ag lejao!
To light the kallians for the Saheb and me,
and the attendant obeys with 'Achcha! Achcha!' when we are invited to
listen to 'the Vina and the drum' and told about ekkas, Byragis, hamals
and Tamboora, all that we can say is that to such ghazals we are not
prepared to say either Shamash or Afrin. In English poetry we do not
want
chatkis for the toes,
Jasams for elbow-bands, and gote and har,
Bala and mala.
This is not local colour; it is a sort of local discoloration. It does
not add anything to the vividness of the scene. It does not bring the
Orient more clearly before us. It is simply an inconvenience to the
reader and a mistake on the part of the writer. It may be difficult for
a poet to find English synonyms for Asiatic expressions, but even if it
were impossible it is none the less a poet's duty to find them. We are
sorry that a scholar and a man of culture like Sir Edwin Arnold should
have been guilty of what is really an act of treason against our
literature. But for this error, his book, though not in any sense a work
of genius or even of high artistic merit, would still have been of some
enduring value. As it is, Sir Edwin Arnold has translated Sa'di and some
one must translate Sir Edwin Arnold.
With Sa'di in the Garden; or The Book of Love. By Sir Edwin Arnold,
M.A., K.C.I.E., Author of The Light of Asia, etc. (Trubner and Co.)
AUSTRALIAN POETS
(Pall Mall Gazette, December 14, 1888.)
Mr. Sladen dedicates his anthology (or, perhaps, we should say his
herbarium) of Australian song to Mr. Edmund Gosse, 'whose exquisite
critical faculty is,' he tells us, 'as conspicuous in his poems as in his
lectures on poetry.' After so graceful a compliment Mr. Gosse must
certainly deliver a series of discourses upon Antipodean art before the
Cambridge undergraduates, who will, no doubt, be very much interested on
hearing about Gordon, Kendall and Domett, to say nothing of the
extraordinary collection of mediocrities whom Mr. Sladen has somewhat
ruthlessly dragged from their modest and well-merited obscurity. Gordon,
however, is very badly represented in Mr. Sladen's book, the only three
specimens of his work that are included being an unrevised fragment, his
Valedictory Poem and An Exile's Farewell. The latter is, of course,
touching, but then the commonplace always touches, and it is a great pity
that Mr. Sladen was unable to come to any financial arrangement with the
holders of Gordon's copyright. The loss to the volume that now lies
before us is quite irreparable. Through Gordon Australia found her first
fine utterance in song.
Still, there are some other singers here well worth studying, and it is
interesting to read about poets who lie under the shadow of the gum-tree,
gather wattle blossoms and buddawong and sarsaparilla for their loves,
and wander through the glades of Mount Baw-baw listening to the careless
raptures of the mopoke. To them November is
The wonder with the golden wings,
Who lays one hand in Summer's, one in Spring's:
January is full of 'breaths of myrrh, and subtle hints of rose-lands';
She is the warm, live month of lustre--she
Makes glad the land and lulls the strong sad sea;
while February is 'the true Demeter,' and
With rich warm vine-blood splashed from heel to knee,
Comes radiant through the yellow woodlands.
Each month, as it passes, calls for new praise and for music different
from our own. July is a 'lady, born in wind and rain'; in August
Across the range, by every scarred black fell,
Strong Winter blows his horn of wild farewell;
while October is 'the queen of all the year,' the 'lady of the yellow
hair,' who strays 'with blossom-trammelled feet' across the
'haughty-featured hills,' and brings the Spring with her. We must
certainly try to accustom ourselves to the mopoke and the sarsaparilla
plant, and to make the gum-tree and the buddawong as dear to us as the
olives and the narcissi of white Colonus. After all, the Muses are great
travellers, and the same foot that stirred the Cumnor cowslips may some
day brush the fallen gold of the wattle blossoms and tread delicately
over the tawny bush-grass.
Mr. Sladen has, of course, a great belief in the possibilities of
Australian poetry. There are in Australia, he tells us, far more writers
capable of producing good work than has been assumed. It is only
natural, he adds, that this should be so, 'for Australia has one of those
delightful climates conducive to rest in the open air. The middle of the
day is so hot that it is really more healthful to lounge about than to
take stronger exercise.' Well, lounging in the open air is not a bad
school for poets, but it largely depends on the lounger. What strikes
one on reading over Mr. Sladen's collection is the depressing
provinciality of mood and manner in almost every writer. Page follows
page, and we find nothing but echoes without music, reflections without
beauty, second-rate magazine verses and third-rate verses for Colonial
newspapers. Poe seems to have had some influence--at least, there are
several parodies of his method--and one or two writers have read Mr.
Swinburne; but, on the whole, we have artless Nature in her most
irritating form. Of course Australia is young, younger even than America
whose youth is now one of her oldest and most hallowed traditions, but
the entire want of originality of treatment is curious. And yet not so
curious, perhaps, after all. Youth is rarely original.
There are, however, some exceptions. Henry Clarence Kendall had a true
poetic gift. The series of poems on the Austral months, from which we
have already quoted, is full of beautiful things; Landor's Rose Aylmer is
a classic in its way, but Kendall's Rose Lorraine is in parts not
unworthy to be mentioned after it; and the poem entitled Beyond Kerguelen
has a marvellous music about it, a wonderful rhythm of words and a real
richness of utterance. Some of the lines are strangely powerful, and,
indeed, in spite of its exaggerated alliteration, or perhaps in
consequence of it, the whole poem is a most remarkable work of art.
Down in the South, by the waste without sail on it--
Far from the zone of the blossom and tree--
Lieth, with winter and whirlwind and wail on it,
Ghost of a land by the ghost of a sea.
Weird is the mist from the summit to base of it;
Sun of its heaven is wizened and grey;
Phantom of light is the light on the face of it--
Never is night on it, never is day!
Here is the shore without flower or bird on it;
Here is no litany sweet of the springs--
Only the haughty, harsh thunder is heard on it,
Only the storm, with a roar in its wings!
Back in the dawn of this beautiful sphere, on it--
Land of the dolorous, desolate face--
Beamed the blue day; and the beautiful year on it
Fostered the leaf and the blossom of grace.
Grand were the lights of its midsummer noon on it--
Mornings of majesty shone on its seas;
Glitter of star and the glory of moon on it
Fell, in the march of the musical breeze.
Valleys and hills, with the whisper of wing in them,
Dells of the daffodil--spaces impearled,
Flowered and flashed with the splendour of spring in them,
Back in the morn of this wonderful world.
Mr. Sladen speaks of Alfred Domett as 'the author of one of the great
poems of a century in which Shelley and Keats, Byron and Scott,
Wordsworth and Tennyson have all flourished,' but the extracts he gives
from Ranolf and Amohia hardly substantiate this claim, although the song
of the Tree-God in the fourth book is clever but exasperating.