poetry,' is pretty and graceful, and Thomas Henry's Wood-Notes and Miss
Veel's Saturday Night are worth reading; but, on the whole, the
Australian poets are extremely dull and prosaic. There seem to be no
sirens in the New World. As for Mr. Sladen himself, he has done his work
very conscientiously. Indeed, in one instance he almost re-writes an
entire poem in consequence of the manuscript having reached him in a
mutilated condition.
A pleasant land is the land of dreams
_At the back of the shining air_!
It hath _sunnier_ skies and _sheenier_ streams,
And gardens _than Earth's more_ fair,
is the first verse of this lucubration, and Mr. Sladen informs us with
justifiable pride that the parts printed in italics are from his own pen!
This is certainly editing with a vengeance, and we cannot help saying
that it reflects more credit on Mr. Sladen's good nature than on his
critical or his poetical powers. The appearance, also, in a volume of
'poems produced in Australia,' of selections from Horne's Orion cannot be
defended, especially as we are given no specimen of the poetry Horne
wrote during the time that he actually was in Australia, where he held
the office of 'Warden of the Blue Mountains'--a position which, as far as
the title goes, is the loveliest ever given to any poet, and would have
suited Wordsworth admirably: Wordsworth, that is to say, at his best, for
he not infrequently wrote like the Distributor of Stamps. However, Mr.
Sladen has shown great energy in the compilation of this bulky volume
which, though it does not contain much that is of any artistic value, has
a certain historical interest, especially for those who care to study the
conditions of intellectual life in the colonies of a great empire. The
biographical notices of the enormous crowd of verse-makers which is
included in this volume are chiefly from the pen of Mr. Patchett Martin.
Some of them are not very satisfactory. 'Formerly of West Australia, now
residing at Boston, U.S. Has published several volumes of poetry,' is a
ludicrously inadequate account of such a man as John Boyle O'Reilly,
while in 'poet, essayist, critic, and journalist, one of the most
prominent figures in literary London,' few will recognise the industrious
Mr. William Sharp.
Still, on the whole, we should be grateful for a volume that has given us
specimens of Kendall's work, and perhaps Mr. Sladen will some day produce
an anthology of Australian poetry, not a herbarium of Australian verse.
His present book has many good qualities, but it is almost unreadable.
Australian Poets, 1788-1888. Edited by Douglas B. W. Sladen, B.A. Oxon.
(Griffith, Farran and Co.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES--I
(Woman's World, January 1889.)
In a recent article on English Poetesses, {374} I ventured to suggest
that our women of letters should turn their attention somewhat more to
prose and somewhat less to poetry. Women seem to me to possess just what
our literature wants--a light touch, a delicate hand, a graceful mode of
treatment, and an unstudied felicity of phrase. We want some one who
will do for our prose what Madame de Sevigne did for the prose of France.
George Eliot's style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Bronte's too
exaggerated. However, one must not forget that amongst the women of
England there have been some charming letter-writers, and certainly no
book can be more delightful reading than Mrs. Ross's Three Generations of
English Women, which has recently appeared. The three Englishwomen whose
memoirs and correspondence Mrs. Ross has so admirably edited are Mrs.
John Taylor, Mrs. Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon, all of them
remarkable personalities, and two of them women of brilliant wit and
European reputation. Mrs. Taylor belonged to that great Norwich family
about whom the Duke of Sussex remarked that they reversed the ordinary
saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man, and was for many years
one of the most distinguished figures in the famous society of her native
town. Her only daughter married John Austin, the great authority on
jurisprudence, and her salon in Paris was the centre of the intellect and
culture of her day. Lucie Duff Gordon, the only child of John and Sarah
Austin, inherited the talents of her parents. A beauty, a femme
d'esprit, a traveller, and clever writer, she charmed and fascinated her
age, and her premature death in Egypt was really a loss to our
literature. It is to her daughter that we owe this delightful volume of
memoirs.
First we are introduced to Mrs. Ross's great-grandmother, Mrs. Taylor,
who 'was called, by her intimate friends, "Madame Roland of Norwich,"
from her likeness to the portraits of the handsome and unfortunate
Frenchwoman.' We hear of her darning her boy's grey worsted stockings
while holding her own with Southey and Brougham, and dancing round the
Tree of Liberty with Dr. Parr when the news of the fall of the Bastille
was first known. Amongst her friends were Sir James Mackintosh, the most
popular man of the day, 'to whom Madame de Stael wrote, "Il n'y a pas de
societe sans vous." "C'est tres ennuyeux de diner sans vous; la societe
ne va pas quand vous n'etes pas la";' Sir James Smith, the botanist;
Crabb Robinson; the Gurneys; Mrs. Barbauld; Dr. Alderson and his charming
daughter, Amelia Opie; and many other well-known people. Her letters are
extremely sensible and thoughtful. 'Nothing at present,' she says in one
of them, 'suits my taste so well as Susan's Latin lessons, and her
philosophical old master . . . When we get to Cicero's discussions on the
nature of the soul, or Virgil's fine descriptions, my mind is filled up.
Life is either a dull round of eating, drinking, and sleeping, or a spark
of ethereal fire just kindled. . . . The character of girls must depend
upon their reading as much as upon the company they keep. Besides the
intrinsic pleasure to be derived from solid knowledge, a woman ought to
consider it as her best resource against poverty.' This is a somewhat
caustic aphorism: 'A romantic woman is a troublesome friend, as she
expects you to be as imprudent as herself, and is mortified at what she
calls coldness and insensibility.' And this is admirable: 'The art of
life is not to estrange oneself from society, and yet not to pay too dear
for it.' This, too, is good: 'Vanity, like curiosity, is wanted as a
stimulus to exertion; indolence would certainly get the better of us if
it were not for these two powerful principles'; and there is a keen touch
of humour in the following: 'Nothing is so gratifying as the idea that
virtue and philanthropy are becoming fashionable.' Dr. James Martineau,
in a letter to Mrs. Ross, gives us a pleasant picture of the old lady
returning from market 'weighted by her huge basket, with the shank of a
leg of mutton thrust out to betray its contents,' and talking divinely
about philosophy, poets, politics, and every intellectual topic of the
day. She was a woman of admirable good sense, a type of Roman matron,
and quite as careful as were the Roman matrons to keep up the purity of
her native tongue.
Mrs. Taylor, however, was more or less limited to Norwich. Mrs. Austin
was for the world. In London, Paris, and Germany, she ruled and
dominated society, loved by every one who knew her. 'She is "My best and
brightest" to Lord Jeffrey; "Dear, fair and wise" to Sydney Smith; "My
great ally" to Sir James Stephen; "Sunlight through waste weltering
chaos" to Thomas Carlyle (while he needed her aid); "La petite mere du
genre humain" to Michael Chevalier; "Liebes Mutterlein" to John Stuart
Mill; and "My own Professorin" to Charles Buller, to whom she taught
German, as well as to the sons of Mr. James Mill.' Jeremy Bentham, when
on his deathbed, gave her a ring with his portrait and some of his hair
let in behind. 'There, my dear,' he said, 'it is the only ring I ever
gave a woman.' She corresponded with Guizot, Barthelemy de St. Hilaire,
the Grotes, Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, Nassau Senior, the
Duchesse d'Orleans, Victor Cousin, and many other distinguished people.
Her translation of Ranke's History of the Popes is admirable; indeed, all
her literary work was thoroughly well done, and her edition of her
husband's Province of Jurisprudence deserves the very highest praise. Two
people more unlike than herself and her husband it would have been
difficult to find. He was habitually grave and despondent; she was
brilliantly handsome, fond of society, in which she shone, and 'with an
almost superabundance of energy and animal spirits,' Mrs. Ross tells us.
She married him because she thought him perfect, but he never produced
the work of which he was worthy, and of which she knew him to be worthy.
Her estimate of him in the preface to the Jurisprudence is wonderfully
striking and simple. 'He was never sanguine. He was intolerant of any
imperfection. He was always under the control of severe love of truth.
He lived and died a poor man.' She was terribly disappointed in him, but
she loved him. Some years after his death, she wrote to M. Guizot:
In the intervals of my study of his works I read his letters to
me--_forty-five years of love-letters_, the last as tender and
passionate as the first. And how full of noble sentiments! The
midday of our lives was clouded and stormy, full of cares and
disappointments; but the sunset was bright and serene--as bright as
the morning, and _more_ serene. Now it is night with me, and must
remain so till the dawn of another day. I am always alone--that is,
_I live with him_.
The most interesting letters in the book are certainly those to M.
Guizot, with whom she maintained the closest intellectual friendship; but
there is hardly one of them that does not contain something clever, or
thoughtful, or witty, while those addressed to her, in turn, are very
interesting. Carlyle writes her letters full of lamentations, the wail
of a Titan in pain, superbly exaggerated for literary effect.
Literature, one's sole craft and staff of life, lies broken in
abeyance; what room for music amid the braying of innumerable
jackasses, the howling of innumerable hyaenas whetting the tooth to
eat them up? Alas for it! it is a sick disjointed time; neither shall
we ever mend it; at best let us hope to mend ourselves. I declare I
sometimes think of throwing down the Pen altogether as a worthless
weapon; and leading out a colony of these poor starving Drudges to the
waste places of their old Mother Earth, when for sweat of their brow
bread _will_ rise for them; it were perhaps the worthiest service that
at this moment could be rendered our old world to throw open for it
the doors of the New. Thither must they come at last, 'bursts of
eloquence' will do nothing; men are starving and will try many things
before they die. But poor I, ach Gott! I am no Hengist or Alaric;
only a writer of Articles in bad prose; stick to thy last, O Tutor;
the Pen is not worthless, it is omnipotent to those who have Faith.
Henri Beyle (Stendhal), the great, I am often tempted to think the
greatest of French novelists, writes her a charming letter about nuances.
'It seems to me,' he says, 'that except when they read Shakespeare,
Byron, or Sterne, no Englishman understands "nuances"; we adore them. A
fool says to a woman, "I love you"; the words mean nothing, he might as
well say "Olli Batachor"; it is the nuance which gives force to the
meaning.' In 1839 Mrs. Austin writes to Victor Cousin: 'I have seen
young Gladstone, a distinguished Tory who wants to re-establish education
based on the Church in quite a Catholic form'; and we find her
corresponding with Mr. Gladstone on the subject of education. 'If you
are strong enough to provide motives and checks,' she says to him, 'you
may do two blessed acts--reform your clergy and teach your people. As it
is, how few of them conceive what it is to teach a people'! Mr.
Gladstone replies at great length, and in many letters, from which we may
quote this passage:
You are for pressing and urging the people to their profit against
their inclination: so am I. You set little value upon all merely
technical instruction, upon all that fails to touch the inner nature
of man: so do I. And here I find ground of union broad and deep-laid
. . .
I more than doubt whether your idea, namely that of raising man to
social sufficiency and morality, can be accomplished, except through
the ancient religion of Christ; . . . or whether, the principles of
eclecticism are legitimately applicable to the Gospel; or whether, if
we find ourselves in a state of incapacity to work through the Church,
we can remedy the defect by the adoption of principles contrary to
hers . . .
But indeed I am most unfit to pursue the subject; private
circumstances of no common interest are upon me, as I have become very
recently engaged to Miss Glynne, and I hope your recollections will
enable you in some degree to excuse me.
Lord Jeffrey has a very curious and suggestive letter on popular
education, in which he denies, or at least doubts, the effect of this
education on morals. He, however, supports it on the ground 'that it
will increase the enjoyment of individuals,' which is certainly a very
sensible claim. Humboldt writes to her about an old Indian language
which was preserved by a parrot, the tribe who spoke it having been
exterminated, and about 'young Darwin,' who had just published his first
book. Here are some extracts from her own letters:
I heard from Lord Lansdowne two or three days ago. . . . I think he
is ce que nous avons de mieux. He wants only the energy that great
ambition gives. He says, 'We shall have a parliament of railway
kings' . . . what can be worse than that?--The deification of money by
a whole people. As Lord Brougham says, we have no right to give
ourselves pharisaical airs. I must give you a story sent to me. Mrs.
Hudson, the railway queen, was shown a bust of Marcus Aurelius at Lord
Westminster's, on which she said, 'I suppose that is not the present
Marquis.' To gouter this, you must know that the extreme vulgar
(hackney coachmen, etc.) in England pronounce 'marquis' very like
'Marcus.'
Dec, 11th.--Went to Savigny's. Nobody was there but W. Grimm and his
wife and a few men. Grimm told me he had received two volumes of
Norwegian fairy-tales, and that they were delightful. Talking of
them, I said, 'Your children appear to be the happiest in the world;
they live in the midst of fairytales.' 'Ah,' said he, 'I must tell
you about that. When we were at Gottingen, somebody spoke to my
little son about his father's Mahrchen. He had read them, but never
thought of their being mine. He came running to me, and said with an
offended air, "Father, they say you wrote those fairy-tales; surely
you never invented such silly rubbish?" He thought it below my
dignity.'
Savigny told a Volksmahrchen too:
'St. Anselm was grown old and infirm, and lay on the ground among
thorns and thistles. Der liebe Gott said to him, "You are very badly
lodged there; why don't you build yourself a house?" "Before I take
the trouble," said Anselm, "I should like to know how long I have to
live." "About thirty years," said Der liebe Gott. "Oh, for so short
a time," replied he, "it's not worth while," and turned himself round
among the thistles.'
Dr. Franck told me a story of which I had never heard before. Voltaire
had for some reason or other taken a grudge against the prophet
Habakkuk, and affected to find in him things he never wrote. Somebody
took the Bible and began to demonstrate to him that he was mistaken.
'C'est egal,' he said, impatiently, 'Habakkuk etait capable de tout!'
Oct. 30, 1853.
I am not in love with the Richtung (tendency) of our modern novelists.
There is abundance of talent; but writing a pretty, graceful,
touching, yet pleasing story is the last thing our writers nowadays
think of. Their novels are party pamphlets on political or social
questions, like Sybil, or Alton Locke, or Mary Barton, or Uncle Tom;
or they are the most minute and painful dissections of the least
agreeable and beautiful parts of our nature, like those of Miss
Bronte--Jane Eyre and Villette; or they are a kind of martyrology,
like Mrs. Marsh's Emilia Wyndham, which makes you almost doubt whether
any torments the heroine would have earned by being naughty could
exceed those she incurred by her virtue.
Where, oh! where is the charming, humane, gentle spirit that dictated
the Vicar of Wakefield--the spirit which Goethe so justly calls
versohnend (reconciling), with all the weaknesses and woes of
humanity? . . . Have you read Thackeray's Esmond? It is a curious
and very successful attempt to imitate the style of our old novelists.
. . . Which of Mrs. Gore's novels are translated? They are very
clever, lively, worldly, bitter, disagreeable, and entertaining. . . .
Miss Austen's--are they translated? They are not new, and are Dutch
paintings of every-day people--very clever, very true, very
_unaesthetic_, but amusing. I have not seen Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell. I
hear it much admired--and blamed. It is one of the many proofs of the
desire women now have to friser questionable topics, and to poser
insoluble moral problems. George Sand has turned their heads in that
direction. I think a few _broad_ scenes or hearty jokes a la Fielding
were very harmless in comparison. They _confounded_ nothing. . . .
The Heir of Redcliffe I have not read. . . . I am not worthy of
superhuman flights of virtue--in a novel. I want to see how people
act and suffer who are as good-for-nothing as I am myself. Then I
have the sinful pretension to be amused, whereas all our novelists
want to reform us, and to show us what a hideous place this world is:
Ma foi, je ne le sais que trap, without their help.
The Head of the Family has some merits . . . But there is too much
affliction and misery and frenzy. The heroine is one of those
creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird tied
to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be 'shyed' at
(i.e. pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the end of
all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is never the
worse for all the blows it has had--nay, the better--and that now,
with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body, it is going
to be quite happy. No, fair ladies, you know that it is not
so--_resigned_, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness out
of such wrecks.
In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she
detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as
moribund. 'The Radical party is evidently effete,' she writes to M.
Victor Cousin; the probable 'leader of the Tory party' is Mr. Gladstone.
'The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short,
governed,' she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says
that the state of things in France fills 'me with the deepest anxiety on
one point,--the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our
salvation as a nation turn. Are our higher classes able to keep the lead
of the rest? If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear
Charles Buller--_our_ turn must come. Now Cambridge and Oxford must
really look to this.' The belief in the power of the Universities to
stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as
'one of the dissolvents of the age--as mischievous as his extravagances
will let him be'; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as 'pernicious'; and
talks of John Stuart Mill as a 'demagogue.' She was no doctrinaire. 'One
ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed. It is no use to
give the meat before you give the hunger.' She was delighted at a letter
of St. Hilaire's, in which he said, 'We have a system and no results; you
have results and no system.' Yet she had a deep sympathy with the wants
of the people. She was horrified at something Babbage told her of the
population of some of the manufacturing towns who are _worked out_ before
they attain to thirty years of age. 'But I am persuaded that the remedy
will not, cannot come from the people,' she adds. Many of her letters
are concerned with the question of the higher education of women. She
discusses Buckle's lecture on 'The Influence of Women upon the Progress
of Knowledge,' admits to M. Guizot that women's intellectual life is
largely coloured by the emotions, but adds: 'One is not precisely a fool
because one's opinions are greatly influenced by one's affections. The
opinions of men are often influenced by worse things.' Dr. Whewell
consults her about lecturing women on Plato, being slightly afraid lest
people should think it ridiculous; Comte writes her elaborate letters on
the relation of women to progress; and Mr. Gladstone promises that Mrs.
Gladstone will carry out at Hawarden the suggestions contained in one of
her pamphlets. She was always very practical, and never lost her
admiration for plain sewing.
All through the book we come across interesting and amusing things. She
gets St. Hilaire to order a large, sensible bonnet for her in Paris,
which was at once christened the 'Aristotelian,' and was supposed to be
the only useful bonnet in England. Grote has to leave Paris after the
coup d'etat, he tells her, because he cannot bear to see the
establishment of a Greek tyrant. Alfred de Vigny, Macaulay, John
Stirling, Southey, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hallam, and Jean Jacques Ampere
all contribute to these pleasant pages. She seems to have inspired the
warmest feelings of friendship in those who knew her. Guizot writes to
her: 'Madame de Stael used to say that the best thing in the world was a
serious Frenchman. I turn the compliment, and say that the best thing in
the world is an affectionate Englishman. How much more an Englishwoman!
Given equal qualities, a woman is always more charming than a man.'
Lucie Austin, afterwards Lady Duff Gordon, was born in 1821. Her chief
playfellow was John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham's garden was her
playground. She was a lovely, romantic child, who was always wanting the
flowers to talk to her, and used to invent the most wonderful stories
about animals, of whom she was passionately fond. In 1834 Mrs. Austin
decided on leaving England, and Sydney Smith wrote his immortal letter to
the little girl:
Lucie, Lucie, my dear child, don't tear your frock: tearing frocks is
not of itself a proof of genius. But write as your mother writes, act
as your mother acts: be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest,
and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little import. And
Lucie, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in the first sum of
yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab
is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucie, to have carried but
one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic but a
scene of horrors? You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts,
peopled by men who have never understood arithmetic. By the time you
return, I shall probably have received my first paralytic stroke, and
shall have lost all recollection of you. Therefore I now give you my
parting advice--don't marry anybody who has not a tolerable
understanding and a thousand a year. And God bless you, dear child.