probably in one of his happiest and, certainly, in one of his most
careless moods that Mr. Justice Denman conceived the idea of putting the
early history of Rome into doggerel verse for the benefit of a little boy
of the name of Jack. Poor Jack! He is still, we learn from the preface,
under six years of age, and it is sad to think of the future career of a
boy who is being brought up on bad history and worse poetry. Here is a
passage from the learned judge's account of Romulus:
Poor Tatius by some unknown hand
Was soon assassinated,
Some said by Romulus' command;
I know not--but 'twas fated.
Sole King again, this Romulus
Play'd some fantastic tricks,
Lictors he had, who hatchets bore
Bound up with rods of sticks.
He treated all who thwarted him
No better than a dog,
Sometimes 'twas 'Heads off, Lictors, there!'
Sometimes 'Ho! Lictors, flog!'
Then he created Senators,
And gave them rings of gold;
Old soldiers all; their name deriv'd
From 'Senex' which means 'old.'
Knights, too, he made, good horsemen all,
Who always were at hand
To execute immediately
Whate'er he might command.
But these were of Patrician rank,
Plebeians all the rest;
Remember this distinction, Jack!
For 'tis a useful test.
The reign of Tullius Hostilius opens with a very wicked rhyme:
As Numa, dying, only left
A daughter, named Pompilia,
The Senate had to choose a King.
They choose one sadly _sillier_.
If Jack goes to the bad, Mr. Justice Denman will have much to answer for.
After such a terrible example from the Bench, it is pleasant to turn to
the seats reserved for Queen's Counsel. Mr. Cooper Willis's Tales and
Legends, if somewhat boisterous in manner, is still very spirited and
clever. The Prison of the Danes is not at all a bad poem, and there is a
great deal of eloquent, strong writing in the passage beginning:
The dying star-song of the night sinks in the dawning day,
And the dark-blue sheen is changed to green, and the green fades into
grey,
And the sleepers are roused from their slumbers, and at last the
Danesmen know
How few of all their numbers are left them by the foe.
Not much can be said of a poet who exclaims:
Oh, for the power of Byron or of Moore,
To glow with one, and with the latter soar.
And yet Mr. Moodie is one of the best of those South African poets whose
works have been collected and arranged by Mr. Wilmot. Pringle, the
'father of South African verse,' comes first, of course, and his best
poem is, undoubtedly, Afar in the Desert:
Afar in the desert I love to ride,
With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side:
Away, away, from the dwelling of men
By the wild-deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen:
By valleys remote where the oribi plays,
Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
And the kudu and eland unhunted recline
By the skirts of grey forests o'erhung with wild vine,
Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will
In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.
It is not, however, a very remarkable production.
The Smouse, by Fannin, has the modern merit of incomprehensibility. It
reads like something out of The Hunting of the Snark:
I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse in the wilderness wide,
The veld is my home, and the wagon's my pride:
The crack of my 'voerslag' shall sound o'er the lea,
I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!
I heed not the Governor, I fear not his law,
I care not for civilisation one straw,
And ne'er to 'Ompanda'--'Umgazis' I'll throw
While my arm carries fist, or my foot bears a toe!
'Trek,' 'trek,' ply the whip--touch the fore oxen's skin,
I'll warrant we'll 'go it' through thick and through thin--
Loop! loop ye oud skellums! ot Vikmaan trek jy;
I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!
The South African poets, as a class, are rather behind the age. They
seem to think that 'Aurora' is a very novel and delightful epithet for
the dawn. On the whole they depress us.
Chess, by Mr. Louis Tylor, is a sort of Christmas masque in which the
dramatis personae consist of some unmusical carollers, a priggish young
man called Eric, and the chessmen off the board. The White Queen's
Knight begins a ballad and the Black King's Bishop completes it. The
Pawns sing in chorus and the Castles converse with each other. The
silliness of the form makes it an absolutely unreadable book.
Mr. Williamson's Poems of Nature and Life are as orthodox in spirit as
they are commonplace in form. A few harmless heresies of art and thought
would do this poet no harm. Nearly everything that he says has been said
before and said better. The only original thing in the volume is the
description of Mr. Robert Buchanan's 'grandeur of mind.' This is
decidedly new.
Dr. Cockle tells us that Mullner's Guilt and The Ancestress of
Grillparzer are the masterpieces of German fate-tragedy. His translation
of the first of these two masterpieces does not make us long for any
further acquaintance with the school. Here is a specimen from the fourth
act of the fate-tragedy.
SCENE VIII.
ELVIRA. HUGO.
ELVIRA (after long silence, leaving the harp, steps to Hugo, and seeks
his gaze).
HUGO (softly). Though I made sacrifice of thy sweet life. The Father
has forgiven. Can the wife--Forgive?
ELVIRA (on his breast). She can!
HUGO (with all the warmth of love). Dear wife!
ELVIRA (after a pause, in deep sorrow). Must it be so, beloved one?
HUGO (sorry to have betrayed himself). What?
In his preface to The Circle of Seasons, a series of hymns and verses for
the seasons of the Church, the Rev. T. B. Dover expresses a hope that
this well-meaning if somewhat tedious book 'may be of value to those many
earnest people to whom the subjective aspect of truth is helpful.' The
poem beginning
Lord, in the inn of my poor worthless heart
Guests come and go; but there is room for Thee,
has some merit and might be converted into a good sonnet. The majority
of the poems, however, are quite worthless. There seems to be some
curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.
Lord Henry Somerset's verse is not so good as his music. Most of the
Songs of Adieu are marred by their excessive sentimentality of feeling
and by the commonplace character of their weak and lax form. There is
nothing that is new and little that is true in verse of this kind:
The golden leaves are falling,
Falling one by one,
Their tender 'Adieux' calling
To the cold autumnal sun.
The trees in the keen and frosty air
Stand out against the sky,
'Twould seem they stretch their branches bare
To Heaven in agony.
It can be produced in any quantity. Lord Henry Somerset has too much
heart and too little art to make a good poet, and such art as he does
possess is devoid of almost every intellectual quality and entirely
lacking in any intellectual strength. He has nothing to say and says it.
Mrs. Cora M. Davis is eloquent about the splendours of what the authoress
of The Circle of Seasons calls 'this earthly ball.'
Let's sing the beauties of this grand old earth,
she cries, and proceeds to tell how
Imagination paints old Egypt's former glory,
Of mighty temples reaching heavenward,
Of grim, colossal statues, whose barbaric story
The caustic pens of erudition still record,
Whose ancient cities of glittering minarets
Reflect the gold of Afric's gorgeous sunsets.
'The caustic pens of erudition' is quite delightful and will be
appreciated by all Egyptologists. There is also a charming passage in
the same poem on the pictures of the Old Masters:
the mellow richness of whose tints impart,
By contrast, greater delicacy still to modern art.
This seems to us the highest form of optimism we have ever come across in
art criticism. It is American in origin, Mrs. Davis, as her biographer
tells us, having been born in Alabama, Genesee co., N.Y.
(1) The Story of the Kings of Rome in Verse. By the Hon. G. Denman,
Judge of the High Court of Justice. (Trubner and Co.)
(2) Tales and Legends in Verse. By E. Cooper Willis, Q.C. (Kegan Paul.)
(3) The Poetry of South Africa. Collected and arranged by A. Wilmot.
(Sampson Low and Co.)
(4) Chess. A Christmas Masque. By Louis Tylor. (Fisher Unwin.)
(5) Poems of Nature and Life. By David R. Williamson. (Blackwood.)
(6) Guilt. Translated from the German by J. Cockle, M.D. (Williams and
Norgate.)
(7) The Circle of Seasons. By K. E. V. (Elliot Stock.)
(8) Songs of Adieu. By Lord Henry Somerset. (Chatto and Windus.)
(9) Immortelles. By Cora M. Davis. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES--IV
(Woman's World, April 1889.)
'In modern life,' said Matthew Arnold once, 'you I cannot well enter a
monastery; but you can enter the Wordsworth Society.' I fear that this
will sound to many a somewhat uninviting description of this admirable
and useful body, whose papers and productions have been recently
published by Professor Knight, under the title of Wordsworthiana. 'Plain
living and high thinking' are not popular ideals. Most people prefer to
live in luxury, and to think with the majority. However, there is really
nothing in the essays and addresses of the Wordsworth Society that need
cause the public any unnecessary alarm; and it is gratifying to note
that, although the society is still in the first blush of enthusiasm, it
has not yet insisted upon our admiring Wordsworth's inferior work. It
praises what is worthy of praise, reverences what should be reverenced,
and explains what does not require explanation. One paper is quite
delightful; it is from the pen of Mr. Rawnsley, and deals with such
reminiscences of Wordsworth as still linger among the peasantry of
Westmoreland. Mr. Rawnsley grew up, he tells us, in the immediate
vicinity of the present Poet-Laureate's old home in Lincolnshire, and had
been struck with the swiftness with which,
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,
the memories of the poet of the Somersby Wold had 'faded from off the
circle of the hills'--had, indeed, been astonished to note how little
real interest was taken in him or his fame, and how seldom his works were
met with in the houses of the rich or poor in the very neighbourhood.
Accordingly, when he came to reside in the Lake Country, he endeavoured
to find out what of Wordsworth's memory among the men of the Dales still
lingered on--how far he was still a moving presence among them--how far
his works had made their way into the cottages and farmhouses of the
valleys. He also tried to discover how far the race of Westmoreland and
Cumberland farm-folk--the 'Matthews' and the 'Michaels' of the poet, as
described by him--were real or fancy pictures, or how far the characters
of the Dalesmen had been altered in any remarkable manner by tourist
influences during the thirty-two years that have passed since the Lake
poet was laid to rest.
With regard to the latter point, it will be remembered that Mr. Ruskin,
writing in 1876, said that 'the Border peasantry, painted with absolute
fidelity by Scott and Wordsworth,' are, as hitherto, a scarcely injured
race; that in his fields at Coniston he had men who might have fought
with Henry V. at Agincourt without being distinguished from any of his
knights; that he could take his tradesmen's word for a thousand pounds,
and need never latch his garden gate; and that he did not fear
molestation, in wood or on moor, for his girl guests. Mr. Rawnsley,
however, found that a certain beauty had vanished which the simple
retirement of old valley days fifty years ago gave to the men among whom
Wordsworth lived. 'The strangers,' he says, 'with their gifts of gold,
their vulgarity, and their requirements, have much to answer for.' As
for their impressions of Wordsworth, to understand them one must
understand the vernacular of the Lake District. 'What was Mr. Wordsworth
like in personal appearance?' said Mr. Rawnsley once to an old retainer,
who still lives not far from Rydal Mount. 'He was a ugly-faaced man, and
a mean liver,' was the answer; but all that was really meant was that he
was a man of marked features, and led a very simple life in matters of
food and raiment. Another old man, who believed that Wordsworth 'got
most of his poetry out of Hartley,' spoke of the poet's wife as 'a very
onpleasant woman, very onpleasant indeed. A close-fisted woman, that's
what she was.' This, however, seems to have been merely a tribute to
Mrs. Wordsworth's admirable housekeeping qualities.
The first person interviewed by Mr. Rawnsley was an old lady who had been
once in service at Rydal Mount, and was, in 1870, a lodging-house keeper
at Grasmere. She was not a very imaginative person, as may be gathered
from the following anecdote:--Mr. Rawnsley's sister came in from a late
evening walk, and said, 'O Mrs. D---, have you seen the wonderful
sunset?' The good lady turned sharply round and, drawing herself to her
full height, as if mortally offended, answered: 'No, miss; I'm a tidy
cook, I know, and "they say" a decentish body for a landlady, but I don't
knaw nothing about sunsets or them sort of things, they've never been in
my line.' Her reminiscence of Wordsworth was as worthy of tradition as
it was explanatory, from her point of view, of the method in which
Wordsworth composed, and was helped in his labours by his enthusiastic
sister. 'Well, you know,' she said, 'Mr. Wordsworth went humming and
booing about, and she, Miss Dorothy, kept close behint him, and she
picked up the bits as he let 'em fall, and tak' 'em down, and put 'em
together on paper for him. And you may be very well sure as how she
didn't understand nor make sense out of 'em, and I doubt that he didn't
know much about them either himself, but, howivver, there's a great many
folk as do, I dare say.' Of Wordsworth's habit of talking to himself,
and composing aloud, we hear a great deal. 'Was Mr. Wordsworth a
sociable man?' asked Mr. Rawnsley of a Rydal farmer. 'Wudsworth, for a'
he had noa pride nor nowt,' was the answer, 'was a man who was quite one
to hissel, ye kna. He was not a man as folks could crack wi', nor not a
man as could crack wi' folks. But there was another thing as kep' folk
off, he had a ter'ble girt deep voice, and ye might see his faace agaan
for long enuff. I've knoan folks, village lads and lasses, coming over
by old road above, which runs from Grasmere to Rydal, flayt a'most to
death there by Wishing Gaate to hear the girt voice a groanin' and
mutterin' and thunderin' of a still evening. And he had a way of
standin' quite still by the rock there in t' path under Rydal, and folks
could hear sounds like a wild beast coming from the rocks, and childer
were scared fit to be dead a'most.'
Wordsworth's description of himself constantly recurs to one:
And who is he with modest looks,
And clad in sober russet gown?
He murmurs by the running brooks,
A music sweeter than their own;
He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noonday grove.
But the corroboration comes in strange guise. Mr. Rawnsley asked one of
the Dalesmen about Wordsworth's dress and habits. This was the reply:
'Wudsworth wore a Jem Crow, never seed him in a boxer in my life,--a Jem
Crow and an old blue cloak was his rig, and _as for his habits, he had
noan_; niver knew him with a pot i' his hand, or a pipe i' his mouth. But
he was a great skater, for a' that--noan better in these parts--why, he
could cut his own naame upo' the ice, could Mr. Wudsworth.' Skating
seems to have been Wordsworth's one form of amusement. He was 'over
feckless i' his hands'--could not drive or ride--'not a bit of fish in
him,' and 'nowt of a mountaineer.' But he could skate. The rapture of
the time when, as a boy, on Esthwaite's frozen lake, he had
wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home, and, shod with steel,
Had hissed along the polished ice,
was continued, Mr. Rawnsley tells us, into manhood's later day; and Mr.
Rawnsley found many proofs that the skill the poet had gained, when
Not seldom from the uproar he retired,
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
To cut across the reflex of a star,
was of such a kind as to astonish the natives among whom he dwelt. The
recollection of a fall he once had, when his skate caught on a stone,
still lingers in the district. A boy had been sent to sweep the snow
from the White Moss Tarn for him. 'Did Mr. Wudsworth gie ye owt?' he was
asked, when he returned from his labour. 'Na, but I seed him tumlle,
though!' was the answer. 'He was a ter'ble girt skater, was Wudsworth
now,' says one of Mr. Rawnsley's informants; 'he would put one hand i'
his breast (he wore a frill shirt i' them days), and t'other hand i' his
waistband, same as shepherds does to keep their hands warm, and he would
stand up straight and sway and swing away grandly.'
Of his poetry they did not think much, and whatever was good in it they
ascribed to his wife, his sister, and Hartley Coleridge. He wrote
poetry, they said, 'because he couldn't help it--because it was his
hobby'--for sheer love, and not for money. They could not understand his
doing work 'for nowt,' and held his occupation in somewhat light esteem
because it did not bring in 'a deal o' brass to the pocket.' 'Did you
ever read his poetry, or see any books about in the farmhouses?' asked
Mr. Rawnsley. The answer was curious: 'Ay, ay, time or two. But ya're
weel aware there's potry and potry. There's potry wi' a li'le bit
pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer
understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what's said,
and a deal of Wudsworth's was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the
man's faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it. His potry was
quite different work from li'le Hartley. Hartley 'ud goa running along
beside o' the brooks and mak his, and goa in the first oppen door and
write what he had got upo' paper. But Wudsworth's potry was real hard
stuff, and bided a deal of makking, and he'd keep it in his head for long
enough. Eh, but it's queer, mon, different ways folks hes of making
potry now . . . Not but what Mr. Wudsworth didn't stand very high, and
was a well-spoken man enough.' The best criticism on Wordsworth that Mr.
Rawnsley heard was this: 'He was an open-air man, and a great critic of
trees.'
There are many useful and well-written essays in Professor Knight's
volume, but Mr. Rawnsley's is far the most interesting of all. It gives
us a graphic picture of the poet as he appeared in outward semblance and
manner to those about whom he wrote.
* * * * *
Mary Myles is Mrs. Edmonds's first attempt at writing fiction. Mrs.
Edmonds is well known as an authority on modern Greek literature, and her
style has often a very pleasant literary flavour, though in her dialogues
she has not as yet quite grasped the difference between la langue parlee
and la langue ecrite. Her heroine is a sort of Nausicaa from Girton, who
develops into the Pallas Athena of a provincial school. She has her love-
romance, like her Homeric prototype, and her Odysseus returns to her at
the close of the book. It is a nice story.
* * * * *
Lady Dilke's Art in the Modern State is a book that cannot fail to
interest deeply every one who cares either for art or for history. The
'modern State' which gives its title to the book is that political and
social organisation of our day that comes to us from the France of
Richelieu and Colbert, and is the direct outcome of the 'Grand Siecle,'
the true greatness of which century, as Lady Dilke points out, consists
not in its vain wars, and formal stage and stilted eloquence, and pompous
palaces, but in the formation and working out of the political and social
system of which these things were the first-fruits. To the question that
naturally rises on one's lips, 'How can one dwell on the art of the
seventeenth century?--it has no charm,' Lady Dilke answers that this art
presents in its organisation, from the point of view of social polity,
problems of the highest intellectual interest. Throughout all its
phases--to quote her own words--'the life of France wears, during the
seventeenth century, a political aspect. The explanation of all changes
in the social system, in letters, in the arts, in fashions even, has to
be sought in the necessities of the political position; and the seeming
caprices of taste take their rise from the same causes which went to
determine the making of a treaty or the promulgation of an edict. This
seems all the stranger because, in times preceding, letters and the arts,
at least, appeared to flourish in conditions as far removed from the
action of statecraft as if they had been a growth of fairyland. In the
Middle Ages they were devoted to a virgin image of Virtue; they framed,
in the shade of the sanctuary, an ideal shining with the beauty born of
self-renunciation, of resignation to self-enforced conditions of moral
and physical suffering. By the queenly Venus of the Renaissance they
were consecrated to the joys of life, and the world saw that through
their perfect use men might renew their strength, and behold virtue and
beauty with clear eyes. It was, however, reserved for the rulers of
France in the seventeenth century fully to realise the political function
of letters and the arts in the modern State, and their immense importance
in connection with the prosperity of a commercial nation.'
The whole subject is certainly extremely fascinating. The Renaissance
had for its object the development of great personalities. The perfect
freedom of the temperament in matters of art, the perfect freedom of the
intellect in intellectual matters, the full development of the
individual, were the things it aimed at. As we study its history we find
it full of great anarchies. It solved no political or social problems;
it did not seek to solve them. The ideal of the 'Grand Siecle,' and of
Richelieu, in whom the forces of that great age were incarnate, was
different. The ideas of citizenship, of the building up of a great
nation, of the centralisation of forces, of collective action, of ethnic
unity of purpose, came before the world. It was inevitable that they
should have done so, and Lady Dilke, with her keen historic sense and her
wonderful power of grouping facts, has told us the story of their
struggle and their victory. Her book is, from every point of view, a
most remarkable work. Her style is almost French in its clearness, its
sobriety, its fine and, at times, ascetic simplicity. The whole ground-
plan and intellectual-conception is admirable.
It is, of course, easy to see how much Art lost by having a new mission
forced upon her. The creation of a formal tradition upon classical lines
is never without its danger, and it is sad to find the provincial towns
of France, once so varied and individual in artistic expression, writing
to Paris for designs and advice. And yet, through Colbert's great
centralising scheme of State supervision and State aid, France was the
one country in Europe, and has remained the one country in Europe, where
the arts are not divorced from industry. The Academy of Painting and
Sculpture and the School of Architecture were not, to quote Lady Dilke's
words, called into being in order that royal palaces should be raised
surpassing all others in magnificence: