notice in the Preface!' is the golden rule laid down for the guidance of
authors by Mr. Brander Matthews in an amusing essay on the art of preface-
writing and, true to his own theory, he announces his volume as 'the most
interesting, the most entertaining, and the most instructive book of the
decade.' Entertaining it certainly is in parts. The essay on Poker, for
instance, is very brightly and pleasantly written. Mr. Proctor objected
to Poker on the somewhat trivial ground that it was a form of lying, and
on the more serious ground that it afforded special opportunities for
cheating; and, indeed, he regarded the mere existence of the game outside
gambling dens as 'one of the most portentous phenomena of American
civilisation.' Mr. Brander Matthews points out, in answer to these grave
charges, that Bluffing is merely a suppressio veri and that it requires a
great deal of physical courage on the part of the player. As for the
cheating, he claims that Poker affords no more opportunities for the
exercise of this art than either Whist or Ecarte, though he admits that
the proper attitude towards an opponent whose good luck is unduly
persistent is that of the German-American who, finding four aces in his
hand, was naturally about to bet heavily, when a sudden thought struck
him and he inquired, 'Who dole dem carts?' 'Jakey Einstein' was the
answer. 'Jakey Einstein?' he repeated, laying down his hand; 'den I pass
out.'
The history of the game will be found very interesting by all
card-lovers. Like most of the distinctly national products of America,
it seems to have been imported from abroad and can be traced back to an
Italian game in the fifteenth century. Euchre was probably acclimatised
on the Mississippi by the Canadian voyageurs, being a form of the French
game of Triomphe. It was a Kentucky citizen who, desiring to give his
sons a few words of solemn advice for their future guidance in life, had
them summoned to his deathbed and said to them, 'Boys, when you go down
the river to Orleens jest you beware of a game called Yucker where the
jack takes the ace;--it's unchristian!'--after which warning he lay back
and died in peace. And 'it was Euchre which the two gentlemen were
playing in a boat on the Missouri River when a bystander, shocked by the
frequency with which one of the players turned up the jack, took the
liberty of warning the other player that the winner was dealing from the
bottom, to which the loser, secure in his power of self-protection,
answered gruffly, "Well, suppose he is--it's his deal, isn't it?"'
The chapter On the Antiquity of Jests, with its suggestion of an
International Exhibition of Jokes, is capital. Such an exhibition, Mr.
Matthews remarks, would at least dispel any lingering belief in the old
saying that there are only thirty-eight good stories in existence and
that thirty-seven of these cannot be told before ladies; and the
Retrospective Section would certainly be the constant resort of any true
folklorist. For most of the good stories of our time are really
folklore, myth survivals, echoes of the past. The two well-known
American proverbs, 'We have had a hell of a time' and 'Let the other man
walk' are both traced back by Mr. Matthews: the first to Walpole's
letters, and the other to a story Poggio tells of an inhabitant of
Perugia who walked in melancholy because he could not pay his debts.
'Vah, stulte,' was the advice given to him, 'leave anxiety to your
creditors!' and even Mr. William M. Evart's brilliant repartee when he
was told that Washington once threw a dollar across the Natural Bridge in
Virginia, 'In those days a dollar went so much farther than it does now!'
seems to be the direct descendant of a witty remark of Foote's, though we
must say that in this case we prefer the child to the father. The essay
On the French Spoken by Those who do not Speak French is also cleverly
written and, indeed, on every subject, except literature, Mr. Matthews is
well worth reading.
On literature and literary subjects he is certainly 'sadly to seek.' The
essay on The Ethics of Plagiarism, with its laborious attempt to
rehabilitate Mr. Rider Haggard and its foolish remarks on Poe's admirable
paper Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists, is extremely dull and
commonplace and, in the elaborate comparison that he draws between Mr.
Frederick Locker and Mr. Austin Dobson, the author of Pen and Ink shows
that he is quite devoid of any real critical faculty or of any fine sense
of the difference between ordinary society verse and the exquisite work
of a very perfect artist in poetry. We have no objection to Mr. Matthews
likening Mr. Locker to Mr. du Maurier, and Mr. Dobson to Randolph
Caldecott and Mr. Edwin Abbey. Comparisons of this kind, though
extremely silly, do not do much harm. In fact, they mean nothing and are
probably not intended to mean anything. Upon the other hand, we really
must protest against Mr. Matthews' efforts to confuse the poetry of
Piccadilly with the poetry of Parnassus. To tell us, for instance, that
Mr. Austin Dobson's verse 'has not the condensed clearness nor the
incisive vigor of Mr. Locker's' is really too bad even for Transatlantic
criticism. Nobody who lays claim to the slightest knowledge of
literature and the forms of literature should ever bring the two names
into conjunction. Mr. Locker has written some pleasant vers de societe,
some tuneful trifles in rhyme admirably suited for ladies' albums and for
magazines. But to mention Herrick and Suckling and Mr. Austin Dobson in
connection with him is absurd. He is not a poet. Mr. Dobson, upon the
other hand, has produced work that is absolutely classical in its
exquisite beauty of form. Nothing more artistically perfect in its way
than the Lines to a Greek Girl has been written in our time. This little
poem will be remembered in literature as long as Thyrsis is remembered,
and Thyrsis will never be forgotten. Both have that note of distinction
that is so rare in these days of violence, exaggeration and rhetoric. Of
course, to suggest, as Mr. Matthews does, that Mr. Dobson's poems belong
to 'the literature of power' is ridiculous. Power is not their aim, nor
is it their effect. They have other qualities, and in their own
delicately limited sphere they have no contemporary rivals; they have
none even second to them. However, Mr. Matthews is quite undaunted and
tries to drag poor Mr. Locker out of Piccadilly, where he was really
quite in his element, and to set him on Parnassus where he has no right
to be and where he would not claim to be. He praises his work with the
recklessness of an eloquent auctioneer. These very commonplace and
slightly vulgar lines on A Human Skull:
It may have held (to shoot some random shots)
Thy brains, Eliza Fry! or Baron Byron's;
The wits of Nelly Gwynne or Doctor Watts--
Two quoted bards. Two philanthropic sirens.
But this, I trust, is clearly understood,
If man or woman, if adored or hated--
Whoever own'd this Skull was not so good
Nor quite so bad as many may have stated;
are considered by him to be 'sportive and brightsome' and full of
'playful humor,' and 'two things especially are to be noted in
them--individuality and directness of expression.' Individuality and
directness of expression! We wonder what Mr. Matthews thinks these words
mean.
Unfortunate Mr. Locker with his uncouth American admirer! How he must
blush to read these heavy panegyrics! Indeed, Mr. Matthews himself has
at least one fit of remorse for his attempt to class Mr. Locker's work
with the work of Mr. Austin Dobson, but like most fits of remorse it
leads to nothing. On the very next page we have the complaint that Mr.
Dobson's verse has not 'the condensed clearness' and the 'incisive vigor'
of Mr. Locker's. Mr. Matthews should confine himself to his clever
journalistic articles on Euchre, Poker, bad French and old jokes. On
these subjects he can, to use an expression of his own, 'write funny.' He
'writes funny,' too, upon literature, but the fun is not quite so
amusing.
Pen and Ink: Papers on Subjects of More or Less Importance. By Brander
Matthews. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES--III
(Woman's World, March 1889.)
Miss Nesbit has already made herself a name as a writer of graceful and
charming verse, and though her last volume, Leaves of Life, does not show
any distinct advance on her former work, it still fully maintains the
high standard already achieved, and justifies the reputation of the
author. There are some wonderfully pretty poems in it, poems full of
quick touches of fancy, and of pleasant ripples of rhyme; and here and
there a poignant note of passion flashes across the song, as a scarlet
thread flashes through the shuttlerace of a loom, giving a new value to
the delicate tints, and bringing the scheme of colour to a higher and
more perfect key. In Miss Nesbit's earlier volume, the Lays and Legends,
as it was called, there was an attempt to give poetic form to
humanitarian dreams and socialistic aspirations; but the poems that dealt
with these subjects were, on the whole, the least successful of the
collection; and with the quick, critical instinct of an artist, Miss
Nesbit seems to have recognised this. In the present volume, at any
rate, such poems are rare, and these few felicitous verses give us the
poet's defence:
A singer sings of rights and wrongs,
Of world's ideals vast and bright,
And feels the impotence of songs
To scourge the wrong or help the right;
And only writhes to feel how vain
Are songs as weapons for his fight;
And so he turns to love again,
And sings of love for heart's delight.
For heart's delight the singers bind
The wreath of roses round the head,
And will not loose it lest they find
Time victor, and the roses dead.
'Man can but sing of what he knows--
I saw the roses fresh and red!'
And so they sing the deathless rose,
With withered roses garlanded.
And some within their bosom hide
Their rose of love still fresh and fair,
And walk in silence, satisfied
To keep its folded fragrance rare.
And some--who bear a flag unfurled--
Wreathe with their rose the flag they bear,
And sing their banner for the world,
And for their heart the roses there.
Yet thus much choice in singing is;
We sing the good, the true, the just,
Passionate duty turned to bliss,
And honour growing out of trust.
Freedom we sing, and would not lose
Her lightest footprint in life's dust.
We sing of her because we choose,
We sing of love because we must.
Certainly Miss Nesbit is at her best when she sings of love and nature.
Here she is close to her subject, and her temperament gives colour and
form to the various dramatic moods that are either suggested by Nature
herself or brought to Nature for interpretation. This, for instance, is
very sweet and graceful:
When all the skies with snow were grey,
And all the earth with snow was white,
I wandered down a still wood way,
And there I met my heart's delight
Slow moving through the silent wood,
The spirit of its solitude:
The brown birds and the lichened tree
Seemed less a part of it than she.
Where pheasants' feet and rabbits' feet
Had marked the snow with traces small,
I saw the footprints of my sweet--
The sweetest woodland thing of all.
With Christmas roses in her hand,
One heart-beat's space I saw her stand;
And then I let her pass, and stood
Lone in an empty world of wood.
And though by that same path I've passed
Down that same woodland every day,
That meeting was the first and last,
And she is hopelessly away.
I wonder was she really there--
Her hands, and eyes, and lips, and hair?
Or was it but my dreaming sent
Her image down the way I went?
Empty the woods are where we met--
They will be empty in the spring;
The cowslip and the violet
Will die without her gathering.
But dare I dream one radiant day
Red rose-wreathed she will pass this way
Across the glad and honoured grass;
And then--I will not let her pass.
And this Dedication, with its tender silver-grey notes of colour, is
charming:
In any meadow where your feet may tread,
In any garland that your love may wear,
May be the flower whose hidden fragrance shed
Wakes some old hope or numbs some old despair,
And makes life's grief not quite so hard to bear,
And makes life's joy more poignant and more dear
Because of some delight dead many a year.
Or in some cottage garden there may be
The flower whose scent is memory for you;
The sturdy southern-wood, the frail sweet-pea,
Bring back the swallow's cheep, the pigeon's coo,
And youth, and hope, and all the dreams they knew,
The evening star, the hedges grey with mist,
The silent porch where Love's first kiss was kissed.
So in my garden may you chance to find
Or royal rose or quiet meadow flower,
Whose scent may be with some dear dream entwined,
And give you back the ghost of some sweet hour,
As lilies fragrant from an August shower,
Or airs of June that over bean-fields blow,
Bring back the sweetness of my long ago.
All through the volume we find the same dexterous refining of old themes,
which is indeed the best thing that our lesser singers can give us, and a
thing always delightful. There is no garden so well tilled but it can
bear another blossom, and though the subject-matter of Miss Nesbit's book
is as the subject-matter of almost all books of poetry, she can certainly
lend a new grace and a subtle sweetness to almost everything on which she
writes.
The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems is from the clever pen of Mr. W.
B. Yeats, whose charming anthology of Irish fairy-tales I had occasion to
notice in a recent number of the Woman's World. {437} It is, I believe,
the first volume of poems that Mr. Yeats has published, and it is
certainly full of promise. It must be admitted that many of the poems
are too fragmentary, too incomplete. They read like stray scenes out of
unfinished plays, like things only half remembered, or, at best, but
dimly seen. But the architectonic power of construction, the power to
build up and make perfect a harmonious whole, is nearly always the
latest, as it certainly is the highest, development of the artistic
temperament. It is somewhat unfair to expect it in early work. One
quality Mr. Yeats has in a marked degree, a quality that is not common in
the work of our minor poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to
us--I mean the romantic temper. He is essentially Celtic, and his verse,
at its best, is Celtic also. Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to
study how to 'load every rift with ore,' yet is more fascinated by the
beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music. The spirit that
dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual
poem or particular passage, but this from The Wanderings of Oisin is
worth quoting. It describes the ride to the Island of Forgetfulness:
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow light,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world
and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was
one;
Till the horse gave a whinny; for cumbrous with stems of the hazel and
oak,
Of hollies, and hazels, and oak-trees, a valley was sloping away
From his hoofs in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk,
Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they
lay.
More comely than man may make them, inlaid with silver and gold,
Were arrow and shield and war-axe, arrow and spear and blade,
And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollows a child of three years old
Could sleep on a couch of rushes, round and about them laid.
And this, which deals with the old legend of the city lying under the
waters of a lake, is strange and interesting:
The maker of the stars and worlds
Sat underneath the market cross,
And the old men were walking, walking,
And little boys played pitch-and-toss.
'The props,' said He, 'of stars and worlds
Are prayers of patient men and good.'
The boys, the women, and old men,
Listening, upon their shadows stood.
A grey professor passing cried,
'How few the mind's intemperance rule!
What shallow thoughts about deep things!
The world grows old and plays the fool.'
The mayor came, leaning his left ear--
There were some talking of the poor--
And to himself cried, 'Communist!'
And hurried to the guardhouse door.
The bishop came with open book,
Whispering along the sunny path;
There was some talking of man's God,
His God of stupor and of wrath.
The bishop murmured, 'Atheist!
How sinfully the wicked scoff!'
And sent the old men on their way,
And drove the boys and women off.
The place was empty now of people;
A cock came by upon his toes;
An old horse looked across the fence,
And rubbed along the rail his nose.
The maker of the stars and worlds
To His own house did Him betake,
And on that city dropped a tear,
And now that city is a lake.
Mr. Yeats has a great deal of invention, and some of the poems in his
book, such as Mosada, Jealousy, and The Island of Statues, are very
finely conceived. It is impossible to doubt, after reading his present
volume, that he will some day give us work of high import. Up to this he
has been merely trying the strings of his instrument, running over the
keys.
* * * * *
Lady Munster's Dorinda is an exceedingly clever novel. The heroine is a
sort of well-born Becky Sharp, only much more beautiful than Becky, or at
least than Thackeray's portraits of her, which, however, have always
seemed to me rather ill-natured. I feel sure that Mrs. Rawdon Crawley
was extremely pretty, and I have never understood how it was that
Thackeray could caricature with his pencil so fascinating a creation of
his pen. In the first chapter of Lady Munster's novel we find Dorinda at
a fashionable school, and the sketches of the three old ladies who
preside over the select seminary are very amusing. Dorinda is not very
popular, and grave suspicions rest upon her of having stolen a cheque.
This is a startling debut for a heroine, and I was a little afraid at
first that Dorinda, after undergoing endless humiliations, would be
proved innocent in the last chapter. It was quite a relief to find that
Dorinda was guilty. In fact, Dorinda is a kleptomaniac; that is to say,
she is a member of the upper classes who spends her time in collecting
works of art that do not belong to her. This, however, is only one of
her accomplishments, and it does not occupy any important place in the
story till the last volume is reached. Here we find Dorinda married to a
Styrian Prince, and living in the luxury for which she had always longed.
Unfortunately, while staying in the house of a friend she is detected
stealing some rare enamels. Her punishment, as described by Lady
Munster, is extremely severe; and when she finally commits suicide,
maddened by the imprisonment to which her husband had subjected her, it
is difficult not to feel a good deal of pity for her. Lady Munster
writes a very clever, bright style, and has a wonderful faculty of
drawing in a few sentences the most lifelike portraits of social types
and social exceptions. Sir Jasper Broke and his sister, the Duke and
Duchess of Cheviotdale, Lord and Lady Glenalmond, and Lord Baltimore, are
all admirably drawn. The 'novel of high life,' as it used to be called,
has of late years fallen into disrepute. Instead of duchesses in
Mayfair, we have philanthropic young ladies in Whitechapel; and the
fashionable and brilliant young dandies, in whom Disraeli and Bulwer
Lytton took such delight, have been entirely wiped out as heroes of
fiction by hardworking curates in the East End. The aim of most of our
modern novelists seems to be, not to write good novels, but to write
novels that will do good; and I am afraid that they are under the
impression that fashionable life is not an edifying subject. They wish
to reform the morals, rather than to portray the manners of their age.
They have made the novel the mode of propaganda. It is possible,
however, that Dorinda points to some coming change, and certainly it
would be a pity if the Muse of Fiction confined her attention entirely to
the East End.
* * * * *
The four remarkable women whom Mrs. Walford has chosen as the subjects of
her Four Biographies from 'Blackwood' are Jane Taylor, Elizabeth Fry,
Hannah More, and Mary Somerville. Perhaps it is too much to say that
Jane Taylor is remarkable. In her day she was said to have been 'known
to four continents,' and Sir Walter Scott described her as 'among the
first women of her time'; but no one now cares to read Essays in Rhyme,
or Display, though the latter is really a very clever novel and full of
capital things. Elizabeth Fry is, of course, one of the great
personalities of this century, at any rate in the particular sphere to
which she devoted herself, and ranks with the many uncanonised saints
whom the world has loved, and whose memory is sweet. Mrs. Walford gives
a most interesting account of her. We see her first a gay, laughing,
flaxen-haired girl, 'mightily addicted to fun,' pleased to be finely
dressed and sent to the opera to see the 'Prince,' and be seen by him;
pleased to exhibit her pretty figure in a becoming scarlet riding-habit,
and to be looked at with obvious homage by the young officers quartered
hard by, as she rode along the Norfolk lanes; 'dissipated' by simply
hearing their band play in the square, and made giddy by the veriest
trifle: 'an idle, flirting, worldly girl,' to use her own words. Then
came the eventful day when 'in purple boots laced with scarlet' she went
to hear William Savery preach at the Meeting House. This was the turning-
point of her life, her psychological moment, as the phrase goes. After
it came the era of 'thees' and 'thous,' of the drab gown and the beaver
hat, of the visits to Newgate and the convict ships, of the work of
rescuing the outcast and seeking the lost. Mrs. Walford quotes the
following interesting account of the famous interview with Queen
Charlotte at the Mansion-House:
Inside the Egyptian Hall there was a subject for Hayter--the
diminutive stature of the Queen, covered with diamonds, and her
countenance lighted up with the kindest benevolence; Mrs. Fry, her
simple Quaker's dress adding to the height of her figure--though a
little flushed--preserving her wonted calmness of look and manner;
several of the bishops standing near; the platform crowded with waving
feathers, jewels, and orders; the hall lined with spectators, gaily
and nobly clad, and the centre filled with hundreds of children,
brought there from their different schools to be examined. A murmur
of applause ran through the assemblage as the Queen took Mrs. Fry by
the hand. The murmur was followed by a clap and a shout, which was
taken up by the multitudes without till it died away in the distance.
Those who regard Hannah More as a prim maiden lady of the conventional
type, with a pious and literary turn of mind, will be obliged to change
their views should they read Mrs. Walford's admirable sketch of the
authoress of Percy. Hannah More was a brilliant wit, a femme d'esprit,
passionately fond of society, and loved by society in return. When the
serious-minded little country girl, who at the age of eight had covered a
whole quire of paper with letters seeking to reform imaginary depraved
characters, and with return epistles full of contrition and promises of
amendment, paid her first visit to London, she became at once the
intimate friend of Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick, and most
of the distinguished people of the day, delighting them by her charm, and
grace, and wit. 'I dined at the Adelphi yesterday,' she writes in one of
her letters. 'Garrick was the very soul of the company, and I never saw
Johnson in more perfect good-humour. After all had risen to go we stood
round them for above an hour, laughing, in defiance of every rule of
decorum and Chesterfield. I believe we should never have thought of
sitting down, nor of parting, had not an impertinent watchman been
saucily vociferating. Johnson outstaid them all, and sat with me for
half an hour.' The following is from her sister's pen: