Hannah is certainly a great favourite. She was placed next him, and
they had the entire conversation to themselves. They were both in
remarkably high spirits, and it was certainly her lucky night; I never
heard her say so many good things. The old genius was as jocular as
the young one was pleasant. You would have imagined we were at some
comedy had you heard our peals of laughter. They certainly tried
which could 'pepper the highest,' and it is not clear to me that the
lexicographer was really the highest seasoner.
Hannah More was certainly, as Mrs. Walford says, 'the feted and caressed
idol of society.' The theatre at Bristol vaunted, 'Boast we not a More?'
and the learned cits at Oxford inscribed their acknowledgment of her
authority. Horace Walpole sat on the doorstep--or threatened to do
so--till she promised to go down to Strawberry Hill; Foster quoted her;
Mrs. Thrale twined her arms about her; Wilberforce consulted her and
employed her. When The Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World
was published anonymously, 'Aut Morus, aut Angelus,' exclaimed the Bishop
of London, before he had read six pages. Of her village stories and
ballads two million copies were sold during the first year. Caelebs in
Search of a Wife ran into thirty editions. Mrs. Barbauld writes to tell
her about 'a good and sensible woman' of her acquaintance, who, on being
asked how she contrived to divert herself in the country, replied, 'I
have my spinning-wheel and my Hannah More. When I have spun one pound of
flax I put on another, and when I have finished my book I begin it again.
_I want no other amusement_.' How incredible it all sounds! No wonder
that Mrs. Walford exclaims, 'No other amusement! Good heavens! Breathes
there a man, woman, or child with soul so quiescent nowadays as to be
satisfied with reels of flax and yards of Hannah More? Give us Hannah's
company, but not--not her writings!' It is only fair to say that Mrs.
Walford has thoroughly carried out the views she expresses in this
passage, for she gives us nothing of Hannah More's grandiloquent literary
productions, and yet succeeds in making us know her thoroughly. The
whole book is well written, but the biography of Hannah More is a
wonderfully brilliant sketch, and deserves great praise.
* * * * *
Miss Mabel Wotton has invented a new form of picture-gallery. Feeling
that the visible aspect of men and women can be expressed in literature
no less than through the medium of line and colour, she has collected
together a series of Word Portraits of Famous Writers extending from
Geoffrey Chaucer to Mrs. Henry Wood. It is a far cry from the author of
the Canterbury Tales to the authoress of East Lynne; but as a beauty, at
any rate, Mrs. Wood deserved to be described, and we hear of the pure
oval of her face, of her perfect mouth, her 'dazzling' complexion, and
the extraordinary youth by which 'she kept to the last the . . .
freshness of a young girl.' Many of the 'famous writers' seem to have
been very ugly. Thomson, the poet, was of a dull countenance, and a
gross, unanimated, uninviting appearance; Richardson looked 'like a plump
white mouse in a wig.' Pope is described in the Guardian, in 1713, as 'a
lively little creature, with long arms and legs: a spider is no ill
emblem of him. He has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.'
Charles Kingsley appears as 'rather tall, very angular, surprisingly
awkward, with thin staggering legs, a hatchet face adorned with scraggy
gray whiskers, a faculty for falling into the most ungainly attitudes,
and making the most hideous contortions of visage and frame; with a rough
provincial accent and an uncouth way of speaking which would be set down
for absurd caricature on the boards of a comic theatre.' Lamb is
described by Carlyle as 'the leanest of mankind; tiny black breeches
buttoned to the knee-cap and no further, surmounting spindle legs also in
black, face and head fineish, black, bony, lean, and of a Jew type
rather'; and Talfourd says that the best portrait of him is his own
description of Braham--'a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the
angel.' William Godwin was 'short and stout, his clothes loosely and
carelessly put on, and usually old and worn; his hands were generally in
his pockets; he had a remarkably large, bald head, and a weak voice;
seeming generally half asleep when he walked, and even when he talked.'
Lord Charlemont spoke of David Hume as more like a 'turtle-eating
alderman' than 'a refined philosopher.' Mary Russell Mitford was ill-
naturedly described by L.E.L. as 'Sancho Panza in petticoats!'; and as
for poor Rogers, who was somewhat cadaverous, the descriptions given of
him are quite dreadful. Lord Dudley once asked him 'why, now that he
could afford it, he did not set up his hearse,' and it is said that
Sydney Smith gave him mortal offence by recommending him 'when he sat for
his portrait to be drawn saying his prayers, with his face hidden in his
hands,' christened him the 'Death dandy,' and wrote underneath a picture
of him, 'Painted in his lifetime.' We must console ourselves--if not
with Mr. Hardy's statement that 'ideal physical beauty is incompatible
with mental development, and a full recognition of the evil of things'--at
least with the pictures of those who had some comeliness, and grace, and
charm. Dr. Grosart says of a miniature of Edmund Spenser, 'It is an
exquisitely beautiful face. The brow is ample, the lips thin but mobile,
the eyes a grayish-blue, the hair and beard a golden red (as of "red
monie" of the ballads) or goldenly chestnut, the nose with
semi-transparent nostril and keen, the chin firm-poised, the expression
refined and delicate. Altogether just such "presentment" of the Poet of
Beauty par excellence, as one would have imagined.' Antony Wood
describes Sir Richard Lovelace as being, at the age of sixteen, 'the most
amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld.' Nor need we wonder
at this when we remember the portrait of Lovelace that hangs at Dulwich
College. Barry Cornwall, described himself by S. C. Hall as 'a decidedly
rather pretty little fellow,' said of Keats: 'His countenance lives in my
mind as one of singular beauty and brightness,--it had an expression as
if he had been looking on some glorious sight.' Chatterton and Byron
were splendidly handsome, and beauty of a high spiritual order may be
claimed both for Milton and Shelley, though an industrious gentleman
lately wrote a book in two volumes apparently for the purpose of proving
that the latter of these two poets had a snub nose. Hazlitt once said
that 'A man's life may be a lie to himself and others, and yet a picture
painted of him by a great artist would probably stamp his character.' Few
of the word-portraits in Miss Wotton's book can be said to have been
drawn by a great artist, but they are all interesting, and Miss Wotton
has certainly shown a wonderful amount of industry in collecting her
references and in grouping them. It is not a book to be read through
from beginning to end, but it is a delightful book to glance at, and by
its means one can raise the ghosts of the dead, at least as well as the
Psychical Society can.
(1) Leaves of Life. By E. Nesbit. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
(2) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan
Paul.)
(3) Dorinda. By Lady Munster. (Hurst and Blackett.)
(4) Four Biographies from 'Blackwood.' By Mrs. Walford. (Blackwood and
Sons.)
(5) Word Portraits of Famous Writers. Edited by Mabel Wotton. (Bentley
and Son.)
MR. WILLIAM MORRIS'S LAST BOOK
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 2, 1889.)
Mr. Morris's last book is a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning
to end, and the very remoteness of its style from the common language and
ordinary interests of our day gives to the whole story a strange beauty
and an unfamiliar charm. It is written in blended prose and verse, like
the mediaeval 'cante-fable,' and tells the tale of the House of the
Wolfings in its struggles against the legionaries of Rome then advancing
into Northern Germany. It is a kind of Saga, and the language in which
the folk-epic, as we may call it, is set forth recalls the antique
dignity and directness of our English tongue four centuries ago. From an
artistic point of view it may be described as an attempt to return by a
self-conscious effort to the conditions of an earlier and a fresher age.
Attempts of this kind are not uncommon in the history of art. From some
such feeling came the Pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day and the
archaistic movement of later Greek sculpture. When the result is
beautiful the method is justified, and no shrill insistence upon a
supposed necessity for absolute modernity of form can prevail against the
value of work that has the incomparable excellence of style. Certainly,
Mr. Morris's work possesses this excellence. His fine harmonies and rich
cadences create in the reader that spirit by which alone can its own
spirit be interpreted, awake in him something of the temper of romance
and, by taking him out of his own age, place him in a truer and more
vital relation to the great masterpieces of all time. It is a bad thing
for an age to be always looking in art for its own reflection. It is
well that, now and then, we are given work that is nobly imaginative in
its method and purely artistic in its aim. As we read Mr. Morris's story
with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative and
descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and adventurous
themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from the ignoble
fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day. We breathe a
purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind of poetical
quality of its own, and was simple and stately and complete.
The tragic interest of The House of the Wolfings centres round the figure
of Thiodolf, the great hero of the tribe. The goddess who loves him
gives him, as he goes to battle against the Romans, a magical hauberk on
which rests this strange fate: that he who wears it shall save his own
life and destroy the life of his land. Thiodolf, finding out this
secret, brings the hauberk back to the Wood-Sun, as she is called, and
chooses death for himself rather than the ruin of his cause, and so the
story ends.
But Mr. Morris has always preferred romance to tragedy, and set the
development of action above the concentration of passion. His story is
like some splendid old tapestry crowded with stately images and enriched
with delicate and delightful detail. The impression it leaves on us is
not of a single central figure dominating the whole, but rather of a
magnificent design to which everything is subordinated, and by which
everything becomes of enduring import. It is the whole presentation of
the primitive life that really fascinates. What in other hands would
have been mere archaeology is here transformed by quick artistic instinct
and made wonderful for us, and human and full of high interest. The
ancient world seems to have come to life again for our pleasure.
Of a work so large and so coherent, completed with no less perfection
than it is conceived, it is difficult by mere quotation to give any
adequate idea. This, however, may serve as an example of its narrative
power. The passage describes the visit of Thiodolf to the Wood-Sun:
The moonlight lay in a great flood on the grass without, and the dew
was falling in the coldest hour of the night, and the earth smelled
sweetly: the whole habitation was asleep now, and there was no sound
to be known as the sound of any creature, save that from the distant
meadow came the lowing of a cow that had lost her calf, and that a
white owl was flitting about near the eaves of the Roof with her wild
cry that sounded like the mocking of merriment now silent. Thiodolf
turned toward the wood, and walked steadily through the scattered
hazel-trees, and thereby into the thick of the beech-trees, whose
boles grew smooth and silver-grey, high and close-set: and so on and
on he went as one going by a well-known path, though there was no
path, till all the moonlight was quenched under the close roof of the
beech-leaves, though yet for all the darkness, no man could go there
and not feel that the roof was green above him. Still he went on in
despite of the darkness, till at last there was a glimmer before him,
that grew greater till he came unto a small wood-lawn whereon the turf
grew again, though the grass was but thin, because little sunlight got
to it, so close and thick were the tall trees round about it. . . .
Nought looked Thiodolf either at the heavens above, or the trees, as
he strode from off the husk-strewn floor of the beech wood on to the
scanty grass of the lawn, but his eyes looked straight before him at
that which was amidmost of the lawn: and little wonder was that; for
there on a stone chair sat a woman exceeding fair, clad in glittering
raiment, her hair lying as pale in the moonlight on the grey stone as
the barley acres in the August night before the reaping-hook goes in
amongst them. She sat there as though she were awaiting some one, and
he made no stop nor stay, but went straight up to her, and took her in
his arms, and kissed her mouth and her eyes, and she him again; and
then he sat himself down beside her.
As an example of the beauty of the verse we would take this from the song
of the Wood-Sun. It at least shows how perfectly the poetry harmonises
with the prose, and how natural the transition is from the one to the
other:
In many a stead Doom dwelleth, nor sleepeth day nor night:
The rim of the bowl she kisseth, and beareth the chambering light
When the kings of men wend happy to the bride-bed from the board.
It is little to say that she wendeth the edge of the grinded sword,
When about the house half builded she hangeth many a day;
The ship from the strand she shoveth, and on his wonted way
By the mountain hunter fareth where his foot ne'er failed before:
She is where the high bank crumbles at last on the river's shore:
The mower's scythe she whetteth; and lulleth the shepherd to sleep
Where the deadly ling-worm wakeneth in the desert of the sheep.
Now we that come of the God-kin of her redes for ourselves we wot,
But her will with the lives of men-folk and their ending know we not.
So therefore I bid thee not fear for thyself of Doom and her deed,
But for me: and I bid thee hearken to the helping of my need.
Or else--Art thou happy in life, or lusteth thou to die
In the flower of thy days, when thy glory and thy longing bloom on
high?
The last chapter of the book in which we are told of the great feast made
for the dead is so finely written that we cannot refrain from quoting
this passage:
Now was the glooming falling upon the earth; but the Hall was bright
within even as the Hall-Sun had promised. Therein was set forth the
Treasure of the Wolfings; fair cloths were hung on the walls, goodly
broidered garments on the pillars: goodly brazen cauldrons and fair-
carven chests were set down in nooks where men could see them well,
and vessels of gold and silver were set all up and down the tables of
the feast. The pillars also were wreathed with flowers, and flowers
hung garlanded from the walls over the precious hangings; sweet gums
and spices were burning in fair-wrought censers of brass, and so many
candles were alight under the Roof, that scarce had it looked more
ablaze when the Romans had litten the faggots therein for its burning
amidst the hurry of the Morning Battle.
There then they fell to feasting, hallowing in the high-tide of their
return with victory in their hands: and the dead corpses of Thiodolf
and Otter, clad in precious glittering raiment, looked down on them
from the High-seat, and the kindreds worshipped them and were glad;
and they drank the Cup to them before any others, were they Gods or
men.
In days of uncouth realism and unimaginative imitation, it is a high
pleasure to welcome work of this kind. It is a work in which all lovers
of literature cannot fail to delight.
A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the Kindreds of the Mark.
Written in Prose and in Verse by William Morris. (Reeves and Turner.)
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 25, 1889.)
A critic recently remarked of Adam Lindsay Gordon that through him
Australia had found her first fine utterance in song. {452} This,
however, is an amiable error. There is very little of Australia in
Gordon's poetry. His heart and mind and fancy were always preoccupied
with memories and dreams of England and such culture as England gave him.
He owed nothing to the land of his adoption. Had he stayed at home he
would have done much better work. In a few poems such as The Sick
Stockrider, From the Wreck, and Wolf and Hound there are notes of
Australian influences, and these Swinburnian stanzas from the dedication
to the Bush Ballads deserve to be quoted, though the promise they hold
out was never fulfilled:
They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds;
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.
Whence gather'd?--The locust's grand chirrup
May furnish a stave;
The ring of a rowel and stirrup,
The wash of a wave.
The chaunt of the marsh frog in rushes,
That chimes through the pauses and hushes
Of nightfall, the torrent that gushes,
The tempests that rave.
In the gathering of night gloom o'erhead, in
The still silent change,
All fire-flushed when forest trees redden
On slopes of the range.
When the gnarl'd, knotted trunks Eucalyptian
Seem carved, like weird columns Egyptian,
With curious device--quaint inscription,
And hieroglyph strange;
In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles
'Twixt shadow and shine,
When each dew-laden air draught resembles
A long draught of wine;
When the sky-line's blue burnish'd resistance
Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,
Some song in all hearts hath existence,--
Such songs have been mine.
As a rule, however, Gordon is distinctly English, and the landscapes he
describes are always the landscapes of our own country. He writes about
mediaeval lords and ladies in his Rhyme of Joyous Garde, about Cavaliers
and Roundheads in The Romance of Britomarte, and Ashtaroth, his longest
and most ambitious poem, deals with the adventures of the Norman barons
and Danish knights of ancient days. Steeped in Swinburne and bewildered
with Browning, he set himself to reproduce the marvellous melody of the
one and the dramatic vigour and harsh strength of the other. From the
Wreck is a sort of Australian edition of the Ride to Ghent. These are
the first three stanzas of one of the so-called Bush Ballads:
On skies still and starlit
White lustres take hold,
And grey flashes scarlet,
And red flashes gold.
And sun-glories cover
The rose, shed above her,
Like lover and lover
They flame and unfold.
. . . . .
Still bloom in the garden
Green grass-plot, fresh lawn,
Though pasture lands harden
And drought fissures yawn.
While leaves, not a few fall,
Let rose-leaves for you fall,
Leaves pearl-strung with dewfall,
And gold shot with dawn.
Does the grass-plot remember
The fall of your feet
In Autumn's red ember
When drought leagues with heat,
When the last of the roses
Despairingly closes
In the lull that reposes
Ere storm winds wax fleet?
And the following verses show that the Norman Baron of Ashtaroth had read
Dolores just once too often:
Dead priests of Osiris, and Isis,
And Apis! that mystical lore,
Like a nightmare, conceived in a crisis
Of fever, is studied no more;
Dead Magian! yon star-troop that spangles
The arch of yon firmament vast
Looks calm, like a host of white angels
On dry dust of votaries past.
On seas unexplored can the ship shun
Sunk rocks? Can man fathom life's links,
Past or future, unsolved by Egyptian
Or Theban, unspoken by Sphynx?
The riddle remains yet, unravell'd
By students consuming night oil.
O earth! we have toil'd, we have travailed:
How long shall we travail and toil?
By the classics Gordon was always very much fascinated. He loved what he
calls 'the scroll that is godlike and Greek,' though he is rather
uncertain about his quantities, rhyming 'Polyxena' to 'Athena' and
'Aphrodite' to 'light,' and occasionally makes very rash statements, as
when he represents Leonidas exclaiming to the three hundred at
Thermopylae:
'Ho! comrades let us gaily dine--
This night with Plato we shall sup,'
if this be not, as we hope it is, a printer's error. What the
Australians liked best were his spirited, if somewhat rough, horse-racing
and hunting poems. Indeed, it was not till he found that How We Beat the
Favourite was on everybody's lips that he consented to forego his
anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a verse-writer,
having up to that time produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps
of paper, and sent them unsigned to the local magazines. The fact is
that the social atmosphere of Melbourne was not favourable to poets, and
the worthy colonials seem to have shared Audrey's doubts as to whether
poetry was a true and honest thing. It was not till Gordon won the Cup
Steeplechase for Major Baker in 1868 that he became really popular, and
probably there were many who felt that to steer Babbler to the winning-
post was a finer achievement than 'to babble o'er green fields.'
On the whole, it is impossible not to regret that Gordon ever emigrated.
His literary power cannot be denied, but it was stunted in uncongenial
surroundings and marred by the rude life he was forced to lead. Australia
has converted many of our failures into prosperous and admirable
mediocrities, but she certainly spoiled one of our poets for us. Ovid at
Tomi is not more tragic than Gordon driving cattle or farming an
unprofitable sheep-ranch.
That Australia, however, will some day make amends by producing a poet of
her own we cannot doubt, and for him there will be new notes to sound and
new wonders to tell of. The description, given by Mr. Marcus Clarke in
the preface to this volume, of the aspect and spirit of Nature in
Australia is most curious and suggestive. The Australian forests, he
tells us, are funereal and stern, and 'seem to stifle, in their black
gorges, a story of sullen despair.' No leaves fall from the trees, but
'from the melancholy gum strips of white bark hang and rustle. Great
grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of
cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks
and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter.'
The aborigines aver that, when night comes, from the bottomless depth of
some lagoon a misshapen monster rises, dragging his loathsome length
along the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant,
and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is
fear-inspiring and gloomy. No bright fancies are linked with the
memories of the mountains. Hopeless explorers have named them out of
their sufferings--Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair.
In Australia alone (says Mr. Clarke) is to be found the Grotesque, the
Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write. But
the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of the
fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty
of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness,
he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the
hieroglyphs of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted
with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern
Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of
that wild dream-land termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet
of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his
heritage of desert sand better than all the bountiful richness of
Egypt.
Here, certainly, is new material for the poet, here is a land that is
waiting for its singer. Such a singer Gordon was not. He remained
thoroughly English, and the best that we can say of him is that he wrote
imperfectly in Australia those poems that in England he might have made
perfect.
Poems. By Adam Lindsay Gordon. (Samuel Mullen.)
THE POETS' CORNER--IX
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 30, 1889.)