and Amativeness, and even Animality--though meanings that do not
usually go along with these words are behind all, and will duly
emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different light and
atmosphere. Of this feature, intentionally palpable in a few lines, I
shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives breath
to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been
left unwritten were those lines omitted. . . .
Universal as are certain facts and symptoms of communities . . . there
is nothing so rare in modern conventions and poetry as their normal
recognizance. Literature is always calling in the doctor for
consultation and confession, and always giving evasions and swathing
suppressions in place of that 'heroic nudity,' on which only a genuine
diagnosis . . . can be built. And in respect to editions of Leaves of
Grass in time to come (if there should be such) I take occasion now to
confirm those lines with the settled convictions and deliberate
renewals of thirty years, and to hereby prohibit, as far as word of
mine can do so, any elision of them.
But beyond all these notes and moods and motives is the lofty spirit of a
grand and free acceptance of all things that are worthy of existence. He
desired, he says, 'to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should
directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom,
health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every
human or other existence, not only consider'd from the point of view of
all, but of each.' His two final utterances are that 'really great
poetry is always . . . the result of a national spirit, and not the
privilege of a polish'd and select few'; and that 'the strongest and
sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.'
Such are the views contained in the opening essay A Backward Glance O'er
Travel'd Roads, as he calls it; but there are many other essays in this
fascinating volume, some on poets such as Burns and Lord Tennyson, for
whom Walt Whitman has a profound admiration; some on old actors and
singers, the elder Booth, Forrest, Alboni and Mario being his special
favourites; others on the native Indians, on the Spanish element in
American nationality, on Western slang, on the poetry of the Bible, and
on Abraham Lincoln. But Walt Whitman is at his best when he is analysing
his own work and making schemes for the poetry of the future. Literature,
to him, has a distinctly social aim. He seeks to build up the masses by
'building up grand individuals.' And yet literature itself must be
preceded by noble forms of life. 'The best literature is always the
result of something far greater than itself--not the hero but the
portrait of the hero. Before there can be recorded history or poem there
must be the transaction.' Certainly, in Walt Whitman's views there is a
largeness of vision, a healthy sanity and a fine ethical purpose. He is
not to be placed with the professional litterateurs of his country,
Boston novelists, New York poets and the like. He stands apart, and the
chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He
has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As
a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic
and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by,
Philosophy will take note of him.
November Boughs. By Walt Whitman. (Alexander Gardner.)
THE NEW PRESIDENT
(Pall Mall Gazette, January 26, 1889.)
In a little book that he calls The Enchanted Island Mr. Wyke Bayliss, the
new President of the Royal Society of British Artists, has given his
gospel of art to the world. His predecessor in office had also a gospel
of art but it usually took the form of an autobiography. Mr. Whistler
always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital 'I.'
However, he was never dull. His brilliant wit, his caustic satire, and
his amusing epigrams, or, perhaps, we should say epitaphs, on his
contemporaries, made his views on art as delightful as they were
misleading and as fascinating as they were unsound. Besides, he
introduced American humour into art criticism, and for this, if for no
other reason, he deserves to be affectionately remembered. Mr. Wyke
Bayliss, upon the other hand, is rather tedious. The last President
never said much that was true, but the present President never says
anything that is new; and, if art be a fairy-haunted wood or an enchanted
island, we must say that we prefer the old Puck to the fresh Prospero.
Water is an admirable thing--at least, the Greeks said it was--and Mr.
Ruskin is an admirable writer; but a combination of both is a little
depressing.
Still, it is only right to add that Mr. Wyke Bayliss, at his best, writes
very good English. Mr. Whistler, for some reason or other, always
adopted the phraseology of the minor prophets. Possibly it was in order
to emphasise his well-known claims to verbal inspiration, or perhaps he
thought with Voltaire that Habakkuk etait capable de tout, and wished to
shelter himself under the shield of a definitely irresponsible writer
none of whose prophecies, according to the French philosopher, has ever
been fulfilled. The idea was clever enough at the beginning, but
ultimately the manner became monotonous. The spirit of the Hebrews is
excellent but their mode of writing is not to be imitated, and no amount
of American jokes will give it that modernity which is essential to a
good literary style. Admirable as are Mr. Whistler's fireworks on
canvas, his fireworks in prose are abrupt, violent and exaggerated.
However, oracles, since the days of the Pythia, have never been
remarkable for style, and the modest Mr. Wyke Bayliss is as much Mr.
Whistler's superior as a writer as he is his inferior as a painter and an
artist. Indeed, some of the passages in this book are so charmingly
written and with such felicity of phrase that we cannot help feeling that
the President of the British Artists, like a still more famous President
of our day, can express himself far better through the medium of
literature than he can through the medium of line and colour. This,
however, applies only to Mr. Wyke Bayliss's prose. His poetry is very
bad, and the sonnets at the end of the book are almost as mediocre as the
drawings that accompany them. As we read them we cannot but regret that,
in this point at any rate, Mr. Bayliss has not imitated the wise example
of his predecessor who, with all his faults, was never guilty of writing
a line of poetry, and is, indeed, quite incapable of doing anything of
the kind.
As for the matter of Mr. Bayliss's discourses, his views on art must be
admitted to be very commonplace and old-fashioned. What is the use of
telling artists that they should try and paint Nature as she really is?
What Nature really is, is a question for metaphysics not for art. Art
deals with appearances, and the eye of the man who looks at Nature, the
vision, in fact, of the artist, is far more important to us than what he
looks at. There is more truth in Corot's aphorism that a landscape is
simply 'the mood of a man's mind' than there is in all Mr. Bayliss's
laborious disquisitions on naturalism. Again, why does Mr. Bayliss waste
a whole chapter in pointing out real or supposed resemblances between a
book of his published twelve years ago and an article by Mr. Palgrave
which appeared recently in the Nineteenth Century? Neither the book nor
the article contains anything of real interest, and as for the hundred or
more parallel passages which Mr. Wyke Bayliss solemnly prints side by
side, most of them are like parallel lines and never meet. The only
original proposal that Mr. Bayliss has to offer us is that the House of
Commons should, every year, select some important event from national and
contemporary history and hand it over to the artists who are to choose
from among themselves a man to make a picture of it. In this way Mr.
Bayliss believes that we could have the historic art, and suggests as
examples of what he means a picture of Florence Nightingale in the
hospital at Scutari, a picture of the opening of the first London Board-
school, and a picture of the Senate House at Cambridge with the girl
graduate receiving a degree 'that shall acknowledge her to be as wise as
Merlin himself and leave her still as beautiful as Vivien.' This
proposal is, of course, very well meant, but, to say nothing of the
danger of leaving historic art at the mercy of a majority in the House of
Commons, who would naturally vote for its own view of things, Mr. Bayliss
does not seem to realise that a great event is not necessarily a
pictorial event. 'The decisive events of the world,' as has been well
said, 'take place in the intellect,' and as for Board-schools, academic
ceremonies, hospital wards and the like, they may well be left to the
artists of the illustrated papers, who do them admirably and quite as
well as they need be done. Indeed, the pictures of contemporary events,
Royal marriages, naval reviews and things of this kind that appear in the
Academy every year, are always extremely bad; while the very same
subjects treated in black and white in the Graphic or the London News are
excellent. Besides, if we want to understand the history of a nation
through the medium of art, it is to the imaginative and ideal arts that
we have to go and not to the arts that are definitely imitative. The
visible aspect of life no longer contains for us the secret of life's
spirit. Probably it never did contain it. And, if Mr. Barker's Waterloo
Banquet and Mr. Frith's Marriage of the Prince of Wales are examples of
healthy historic art, the less we have of such art the better. However,
Mr. Bayliss is full of the most ardent faith and speaks quite gravely of
genuine portraits of St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul dating from the
first century, and of the establishment by the Israelites of a school of
art in the wilderness under the now little appreciated Bezaleel. He is a
pleasant, picturesque writer, but he should not speak about art. Art is
a sealed book to him.
The Enchanted Island. By Wyke Bayliss, F.S.A., President of the Royal
Society of British Artists. (Allen and Co.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES--II
(Woman's World, February 1889.)
'The various collectors of Irish folk-lore,' says Mr. W. B. Yeats in his
charming little book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 'have,
from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of
others, one great fault.'
They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us
of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of
mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after. To
be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales in
forms like grocers' bills--item the fairy king, item the queen.
Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the
very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.
Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility,
saw everything humorised. The impulse of the Irish literature of
their time came from a class that did not--mainly for political
reasons--take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a
humorist's Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew
nothing of. What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified
an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen, carmen, and
gentlemen's servants, into the type of a whole nation, and created the
stage Irishman. The writers of 'Forty-eight, and the famine combined,
burst their bubble. Their work had the dash as well as the
shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is touched
everywhere with beauty--a gentle Arcadian beauty. Carleton, a peasant
born, has in many of his stories, . . . more especially in his ghost
stories, a much more serious way with him, for all his humour.
Kennedy, an old bookseller in Dublin, who seems to have had a
something of genuine belief in the fairies, comes next in time. He
has far less literary faculty, but is wonderfully accurate, giving
often the very words the stories were told in. But the best book
since Croker is Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends. The humour has all
given way to pathos and tenderness. We have here the innermost heart
of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through years of
persecution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams, and hearing
fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and on the dead.
Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt dreaming.
Into a volume of very moderate dimensions, and of extremely moderate
price, Mr. Yeats has collected together the most characteristic of our
Irish folklore stories, grouping them together according to subject.
First come The Trooping Fairies. The peasants say that these are 'fallen
angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost';
but the Irish antiquarians see in them 'the gods of pagan Ireland,' who,
'when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the
popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.' Their chief
occupations are feasting, fighting, making love, and playing the most
beautiful music. 'They have only one industrious person amongst them,
the lepra-caun--the shoemaker.' It is his duty to repair their shoes
when they wear them out with dancing. Mr. Yeats tells us that 'near the
village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven
years. When she came home she had no toes--she had danced them off.' On
May Eve, every seventh year, they fight for the harvest, for the best
ears of grain belong to them. An old man informed Mr. Yeats that he saw
them fight once, and that they tore the thatch off a house. 'Had any one
else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling
everything into the air as it passed.' When the wind drives the leaves
and straws before it, 'that is the fairies, and the peasants take off
their hats and say "God bless them."' When they are gay, they sing. Many
of the most beautiful tunes of Ireland 'are only their music, caught up
by eavesdroppers.' No prudent peasant would hum The Pretty Girl Milking
the Cow near a fairy rath, 'for they are jealous, and do not like to hear
their songs on clumsy mortal lips.' Blake once saw a fairy's funeral.
But this, as Mr. Yeats points out, must have been an English fairy, for
the Irish fairies never die; they are immortal.
Then come The Solitary Fairies, amongst whom we find the little Lepracaun
mentioned above. He has grown very rich, as he possesses all the
treasure-crocks buried in war-time. In the early part of this century,
according to Croker, they used to show in Tipperary a little shoe
forgotten by the fairy shoemaker. Then there are two rather disreputable
little fairies--the Cluricaun, who gets intoxicated in gentlemen's
cellars, and the Red Man, who plays unkind practical jokes. 'The Fear-
Gorta (Man of Hunger) is an emaciated phantom that goes through the land
in famine time, begging an alms and bringing good luck to the giver.' The
Water-sheerie is 'own brother to the English Jack-o'-Lantern.' 'The
Leanhaun Shee (fairy mistress) seeks the love of mortals. If they
refuse, she must be their slave; if they consent, they are hers, and can
only escape by finding another to take their place. The fairy lives on
their life, and they waste away. Death is no escape from her. She is
the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she persecutes. The
Gaelic poets die young, for she is restless, and will not let them remain
long on earth.' The Pooka is essentially an animal spirit, and some have
considered him the forefather of Shakespeare's 'Puck.' He lives on
solitary mountains, and among old ruins 'grown monstrous with much
solitude,' and 'is of the race of the nightmare.' 'He has many shapes--is
now a horse, . . . now a goat, now an eagle. Like all spirits, he is
only half in the world of form.' The banshee does not care much for our
democratic levelling tendencies; she loves only old families, and
despises the parvenu or the nouveau riche. When more than one banshee is
present, and they wail and sing in chorus, it is for the death of some
holy or great one. An omen that sometimes accompanies the banshee is '.
. . an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless
horses driven by a Dullahan.' A Dullahan is the most terrible thing in
the world. In 1807 two of the sentries stationed outside St. James's
Park saw one climbing the railings, and died of fright. Mr. Yeats
suggests that they are possibly 'descended from that Irish giant who swam
across the Channel with his head in his teeth.'
Then come the stories of ghosts, of saints and priests, and of giants.
The ghosts live in a state intermediary between this world and the next.
They are held there by some earthly longing or affection, or some duty
unfulfilled, or anger against the living; they are those who are too good
for hell, and too bad for heaven. Sometimes they 'take the forms of
insects, especially of butterflies.' The author of the Parochial Survey
of Ireland 'heard a woman say to a child who was chasing a butterfly,
"How do you know it is not the soul of your grandfather?" On November
eve they are abroad, and dance with the fairies.' As for the saints and
priests, 'there are no martyrs in the stories.' That ancient chronicler
Giraldus Cambrensis 'taunted the Archbishop of Cashel, because no one in
Ireland had received the crown of martyrdom. "Our people may be
barbarous," the prelate answered, "but they have never lifted their hands
against God's saints; but now that a people have come amongst us who know
how to make them (it was just after the English invasion), we shall have
martyrs plentifully."' The giants were the old pagan heroes of Ireland,
who grew bigger and bigger, just as the gods grew smaller and smaller.
The fact is they did not wait for offerings; they took them vi et armis.
Some of the prettiest stories are those that cluster round Tir-na-n-Og.
This is the Country of the Young, 'for age and death have not found it;
neither tears nor loud laughter have gone near it.' 'One man has gone
there and returned. The bard, Oisen, who wandered away on a white horse,
moving on the surface of the foam with his fairy Niamh lived there three
hundred years, and then returned looking for his comrades. The moment
his foot touched the earth his three hundred years fell on him, and he
was bowed double, and his beard swept the ground. He described his
sojourn in the Land of Youth to Patrick before he died.' Since then,
according to Mr. Yeats, 'many have seen it in many places; some in the
depths of lakes, and have heard rising therefrom a vague sound of bells;
more have seen it far off on the horizon, as they peered out from the
western cliffs. Not three years ago a fisherman imagined that he saw
it.'
Mr. Yeats has certainly done his work very well. He has shown great
critical capacity in his selection of the stories, and his little
introductions are charmingly written. It is delightful to come across a
collection of purely imaginative work, and Mr. Yeats has a very quick
instinct in finding out the best and the most beautiful things in Irish
folklore. I am also glad to see that he has not confined himself
entirely to prose, but has included Allingham's lovely poem on The
Fairies:
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs
All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He's nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music,
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
All lovers of fairy tales and folklore should get this little book. The
Horned Women, The Priest's Soul, {411} and Teig O'Kane, are really
marvellous in their way; and, indeed, there is hardly a single story that
is not worth reading and thinking over.
The wittiest writer in France at present is a woman. That clever, that
spirituelle grande dame, who has adopted the pseudonym of 'Gyp,' has in
her own country no rival. Her wit, her delicate and delightful esprit,
her fascinating modernity, and her light, happy touch, give her a unique
position in that literary movement which has taken for its object the
reproduction of contemporary life. Such books as Autour du Mariage,
Autour du Divorce, and Le Petit Bob, are, in their way, little playful
masterpieces, and the only work in England that we could compare with
them is Violet Fane's Edwin and Angelina Papers. To the same brilliant
pen which gave us these wise and witty studies of modern life we owe now
a more serious, more elaborate production. Helen Davenant is as
earnestly wrought out as it is cleverly conceived. If it has a fault, it
is that it is too full of matter. Out of the same material a more
economical writer would have made two novels and half a dozen
psychological studies for publication in American magazines. Thackeray
once met Bishop Wilberforce at dinner at Dean Stanley's, and, after
listening to the eloquent prelate's extraordinary flow and fund of
stories, remarked to his neighbour, 'I could not afford to spend at that
rate.' Violet Fane is certainly lavishly extravagant of incident, plot,
and character. But we must not quarrel with richness of subject-matter
at a time when tenuity of purpose and meagreness of motive seem to be
becoming the dominant notes of contemporary fiction. The side-issues of
the story are so complex that it is difficult, almost impossible, to
describe the plot in any adequate manner. The interest centres round a
young girl, Helen Davenant by name, who contracts a private and
clandestine marriage with one of those mysterious and fascinating foreign
noblemen who are becoming so invaluable to writers of fiction, either in
narrative or dramatic form. Shortly after the marriage her husband is
arrested for a terrible murder committed some years before in Russia,
under the evil influence of occult magic and mesmerism. The crime was
done in a hypnotic state, and, as described by Violet Fane, seems much
more probable than the actual hypnotic experiments recorded in scientific
publications. This is the supreme advantage that fiction possesses over
fact. It can make things artistically probable; can call for imaginative
and realistic credence; can, by force of mere style, compel us to
believe. The ordinary novelists, by keeping close to the ordinary
incidents of commonplace life, seem to me to abdicate half their power.
Romance, at any rate, welcomes what is wonderful; the temper of wonder is
part of her own secret; she loves what is strange and curious. But
besides the marvels of occultism and hypnotism, there are many other
things in Helen Davenant that are worthy of study. Violet Fane writes an
admirable style. The opening chapter of the book, with its terrible
poignant tragedy, is most powerfully written, and I cannot help wondering
that the clever authoress cared to abandon, even for a moment, the superb
psychological opportunity that this chapter affords. The touches of
nature, the vivid sketches of high life, the subtle renderings of the
phases and fancies of society, are also admirably done. Helen Davenant
is certainly clever, and shows that Violet Fane can write prose that is
as good as her verse, and can look at life not merely from the point of
view of the poet, but also from the standpoint of the philosopher, the
keen observer, the fine social critic. To be a fine social critic is no
small thing, and to be able to incorporate in a work of fiction the
results of such careful observation is to achieve what is out of the
reach of many. The difficulty under which the novelists of our day
labour seems to me to be this: if they do not go into society, their
books are unreadable; and if they do go into society, they have no time
left for writing. However, Violet Fane has solved the problem.