palaces should be furnished more sumptuously than those of an Eastern
fairy-tale. Colbert did not care chiefly to inquire, when organising
art administration, what were the institutions best fitted to foster
the proper interests of art; he asked, in the first place, what would
most contribute to swell the national importance. Even so, in
surrounding the King with the treasures of luxury, his object was
twofold--their possession should, indeed, illustrate the Crown, but
should also be a unique source of advantage to the people.
Glass-workers were brought from Venice, and lace-makers from Flanders,
that they might yield to France the secrets of their skill. Palaces
and public buildings were to afford commissions for French artists,
and a means of technical and artistic education for all those employed
upon them. The royal collections were but a further instrument in
educating the taste and increasing the knowledge of the working
classes. The costly factories of the Savonnerie and the Gobelins were
practical schools, in which every detail of every branch of all those
industries which contribute to the furnishing and decoration of houses
were brought to perfection; whilst a band of chosen apprentices were
trained in the adjoining schools. To Colbert is due the honour of
having foreseen, not only that the interests of the modern State were
inseparably bound up with those of industry, but also that the
interests of industry could not, without prejudice, be divorced from
art.
Mr. Bret Harte has never written anything finer than Cressy. It is one
of his most brilliant and masterly productions, and will take rank with
the best of his Californian stories. Hawthorne re-created for us the
America of the past with the incomparable grace of a very perfect artist,
but Mr. Bret Harte's emphasised modernity has, in its own sphere, won
equal, or almost equal, triumphs. Wit, pathos, humour, realism,
exaggeration, and romance are in this marvellous story all blended
together, and out of the very clash and chaos of these things comes life
itself. And what a curious life it is, half civilised and half
barbarous, naive and corrupt, chivalrous and commonplace, real and
improbable! Cressy herself is the most tantalising of heroines. She is
always eluding one's grasp. It is difficult to say whether she
sacrifices herself on the altar of romance, or is merely a girl with an
extraordinary sense of humour. She is intangible, and the more we know
of her, the more incomprehensible she becomes. It is pleasant to come
across a heroine who is not identified with any great cause, and
represents no important principle, but is simply a wonderful nymph from
American backwoods, who has in her something of Artemis, and not a little
of Aphrodite.
* * * * *
It is always a pleasure to come across an American poet who is not
national, and who tries to give expression to the literature that he
loves rather than to the land in which he lives. The Muses care so
little for geography! Mr. Richard Day's Poems have nothing distinctively
American about them. Here and there in his verse one comes across a
flower that does not bloom in our meadows, a bird to which our woodlands
have never listened. But the spirit that animates the verse is simple
and human, and there is hardly a poem in the volume that English lips
might not have uttered. Sounds of the Temple has much in it that is
interesting in metre as well as in matter:--
Then sighed a poet from his soul:
'The clouds are blown across the stars,
And chill have grown my lattice bars;
I cannot keep my vigil whole
By the lone candle of my soul.
'This reed had once devoutest tongue,
And sang as if to its small throat
God listened for a perfect note;
As charily this lyre was strung:
God's praise is slow and has no tongue.'
But the best poem is undoubtedly the Hymn to the Mountain:--
Within the hollow of thy hand--
This wooded dell half up the height,
Where streams take breath midway in flight--
Here let me stand.
Here warbles not a lowland bird,
Here are no babbling tongues of men;
Thy rivers rustling through the glen
Alone are heard.
Above no pinion cleaves its way,
Save when the eagle's wing, as now,
With sweep imperial shades thy brow
Beetling and grey.
What thoughts are thine, majestic peak?
And moods that were not born to chime
With poets' ineffectual rhyme
And numbers weak?
The green earth spreads thy gaze before,
And the unfailing skies are brought
Within the level of thy thought.
There is no more.
The stars salute thy rugged crown
With syllables of twinkling fire;
Like choral burst from distant choir,
Their psalm rolls down.
And I within this temple niche,
Like statue set where prophets talk,
Catch strains they murmur as they walk,
And I am rich.
Miss Ella Curtis's A Game of Chance is certainly the best novel that this
clever young writer has as yet produced. If it has a fault, it is that
it is crowded with too much incident, and often surrenders the study of
character to the development of plot. Indeed, it has many plots, each of
which, in more economical hands, would have served as the basis of a
complete story. We have as the central incident the career of a clever
lady's-maid who personifies her mistress, and is welcomed by Sir John
Erskine, an English country gentleman, as the widow of his dead son. The
real husband of the adventuress tracks his wife to England, and claims
her. She pretends that he is insane, and has him removed. Then he tries
to murder her, and when she recovers, she finds her beauty gone and her
secret discovered. There is quite enough sensation here to interest even
the jaded City man, who is said to have grown quite critical of late on
the subject of what is really a thrilling plot. But Miss Curtis is not
satisfied. The lady's-maid has an extremely handsome brother, who is a
wonderful musician, and has a divine tenor voice. With him the stately
Lady Judith falls wildly in love, and this part of the story is treated
with a great deal of subtlety and clever analysis. However, Lady Judith
does not marry her rustic Orpheus, so the social convenances are
undisturbed. The romance of the Rector of the Parish, who falls in love
with a charming school-teacher, is a good deal overshadowed by Lady
Judith's story, but it is pleasantly told. A more important episode is
the marriage between the daughter of the Tory squire and the Radical
candidate for the borough. They separate on their wedding-day, and are
not reconciled till the third volume. No one could say that Miss
Curtis's book is dull. In fact, her style is very bright and amusing. It
is impossible, perhaps, not to be a little bewildered by the amount of
characters, and by the crowded incidents; but, on the whole, the scheme
of the construction is clear, and certainly the decoration is admirable.
(1) Wordsworthiana: A Selection from Papers read to the Wordsworth
Society. Edited by William Knight. (Macmillan and Co.)
(2) Mary Myles. By E. M. Edmonds. (Remington and Co.)
(3) Art in the Modern State. By Lady Dilke. (Chapman and Hall.)
(4) Cressy. By Bret Harte. (Macmillan and Co.)
(5) Poems. By Richard Day. (New York: Cassell and Co.)
(6) A Game of Chance. By Ella Curtis. (Hurst and Blackett.)
MR. FROUDE'S BLUE-BOOK
(Pall Mall Gazette, April 13, 1889.)
Blue-books are generally dull reading, but Blue-books on Ireland have
always been interesting. They form the record of one of the great
tragedies of modern Europe. In them England has written down her
indictment against herself and has given to the world the history of her
shame. If in the last century she tried to govern Ireland with an
insolence that was intensified by race hatred and religious prejudice,
she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is
aggravated by good intentions. The last of these Blue-books, Mr.
Froude's heavy novel, has appeared, however, somewhat too late. The
society that he describes has long since passed away. An entirely new
factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this
factor is the Irish-American and his influence. To mature its powers, to
concentrate its actions, to learn the secret of its own strength and of
England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic.
At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a
strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses.
What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. America and
American influence has educated them. Their first practical leader is an
Irish-American.
But while Mr. Froude's book has no practical relation to modern Irish
politics, and does not offer any solution of the present question, it has
a certain historical value. It is a vivid picture of Ireland in the
latter half of the eighteenth century, a picture often false in its
lights and exaggerated in its shadows, but a picture none the less. Mr.
Froude admits the martyrdom of Ireland but regrets that the martyrdom was
not more completely carried out. His ground of complaint against the
Executioner is not his trade but his bungling. It is the bluntness not
the cruelty of the sword that he objects to. Resolute government, that
shallow shibboleth of those who do not understand how complex a thing the
art of government is, is his posthumous panacea for past evils. His
hero, Colonel Goring, has the words Law and Order ever on his lips,
meaning by the one the enforcement of unjust legislation, and implying by
the other the suppression of every fine national aspiration. That the
government should enforce iniquity and the governed submit to it, seems
to Mr. Froude, as it certainly is to many others, the true ideal of
political science. Like most penmen he overrates the power of the sword.
Where England has had to struggle she has been wise. Where physical
strength has been on her side, as in Ireland, she has been made unwieldy
by that strength. Her own strong hands have blinded her. She has had
force but no direction.
There is, of course, a story in Mr. Froude's novel. It is not simply a
political disquisition. The interest of the tale, such as it is, centres
round two men, Colonel Goring and Morty Sullivan, the Cromwellian and the
Celt. These men are enemies by race and creed and feeling. The first
represents Mr. Froude's cure for Ireland. He is a resolute 'Englishman,
with strong Nonconformist tendencies,' who plants an industrial colony on
the coast of Kerry, and has deep-rooted objections to that illicit trade
with France which in the last century was the sole method by which the
Irish people were enabled to pay their rents to their absentee landlords.
Colonel Goring bitterly regrets that the Penal Laws against the Catholics
are not rigorously carried out. He is a '_Police_ at any price' man.
'And this,' said Goring scornfully, 'is what you call governing
Ireland, hanging up your law like a scarecrow in the garden till every
sparrow has learnt to make a jest of it. Your Popery Acts! Well, you
borrowed them from France. The French Catholics did not choose to
keep the Hugonots among them, and recalled the Edict of Nantes. As
they treated the Hugonots, so you said to all the world that you would
treat the Papists. You borrowed from the French the very language of
your Statute, but they are not afraid to stand by their law, and you
are afraid to stand by yours. You let the people laugh at it, and in
teaching them to despise one law, you teach them to despise all
laws--God's and man's alike. I cannot say how it will end; but I can
tell you this, that you are training up a race with the education
which you are giving them that will astonish mankind by and bye.'
Mr. Froude's resume of the history of Ireland is not without power though
it is far from being really accurate. 'The Irish,' he tells us, 'had
disowned the facts of life, and the facts of life had proved the
strongest.' The English, unable to tolerate anarchy so near their
shores, 'consulted the Pope. The Pope gave them leave to interfere, and
the Pope had the best of the bargain. For the English brought him in,
and the Irish . . . kept him there.' England's first settlers were
Norman nobles. They became more Irish than the Irish, and England found
herself in this difficulty: 'To abandon Ireland would be discreditable,
to rule it as a province would be contrary to English traditions.' She
then 'tried to rule by dividing,' and failed. The Pope was too strong
for her. At last she made her great political discovery. What Ireland
wanted was evidently an entirely new population 'of the same race and the
same religion as her own.' The new policy was partly carried out:
Elizabeth first and then James and then Cromwell replanted the Island,
introducing English, Scots, Hugonots, Flemings, Dutch, tens of
thousands of families of vigorous and earnest Protestants, who brought
their industries along with them. Twice the Irish . . . tried . . .
to drive out this new element . . . They failed. . . . [But] England
. . . had no sooner accomplished her long task than she set herself to
work to spoil it again. She destroyed the industries of her colonists
by her trade laws. She set the Bishops to rob them of their religion.
. . . [As for the gentry,] The purpose for which they had been
introduced into Ireland was unfulfilled. They were but alien
intruders, who did nothing, who were allowed to do nothing. The time
would come when an exasperated population would demand that the land
should be given back to them, and England would then, perhaps, throw
the gentry to the wolves, in the hope of a momentary peace. But her
own turn would follow. She would be face to face with the old
problem, either to make a new conquest or to retire with disgrace.
Political disquisitions of this kind, and prophecies after the event, are
found all through Mr. Froude's book, and on almost every second page we
come across aphorisms on the Irish character, on the teachings of Irish
history and on the nature of England's mode of government. Some of them
represent Mr. Froude's own views, others are entirely dramatic and
introduced for the purpose of characterisation. We append some
specimens. As epigrams they are not very felicitous, but they are
interesting from some points of view.
Irish Society grew up in happy recklessness. Insecurity added zest to
enjoyment.
We Irish must either laugh or cry, and if we went in for crying, we
should all hang ourselves.
Too close a union with the Irish had produced degeneracy both of
character and creed in all the settlements of English.
We age quickly in Ireland with the whiskey and the broken heads.
The Irish leaders cannot fight. They can make the country
ungovernable, and keep an English army occupied in watching them.
No nation can ever achieve a liberty that will not be a curse to them,
except by arms in the field.
[The Irish] are taught from their cradles that English rule is the
cause of all their miseries. They were as ill off under their own
chiefs; but they would bear from their natural leaders what they will
not bear from us, and if we have not made their lot more wretched we
have not made it any better.
'Patriotism? Yes! Patriotism of the Hibernian order. The country
has been badly treated, and is poor and miserable. This is the
patriot's stock in trade. Does he want it mended? Not he. His own
occupation would be gone.'
Irish corruption is the twin-brother of Irish eloquence.
England will not let us break the heads of our scoundrels; she will
not break them herself; we are a free country, and must take the
consequences.
The functions of the Anglo-Irish Government were to do what ought not
to be done, and to leave undone what ought to be done.
The Irish race have always been noisy, useless and ineffectual. They
have produced nothing, they have done nothing, which it is possible to
admire. What they are, that they have always been, and the only hope
for them is that their ridiculous Irish nationality should be buried
and forgotten.
The Irish are the best actors in the world.
Order is an exotic in Ireland. It has been imported from England, but
it will not grow. It suits neither soil, nor climate. If the English
wanted order in Ireland, they should have left none of us alive.
When ruling powers are unjust, nature reasserts her rights.
Even anarchy has its advantages.
Nature keeps an accurate account. . . . The longer a bill is left
unpaid, the heavier the accumulation of interest.
You cannot live in Ireland without breaking laws on one side or
another. Pecca fortiter, therefore, as . . . Luther said.
The animal spirits of the Irish remained when all else was gone, and
if there was no purpose in their lives, they could at least enjoy
themselves.
The Irish peasants can make the country hot for the Protestant
gentleman, but that is all they are fit for.
As we said before, if Mr. Froude intended his book to help the Tory
Government to solve the Irish question he has entirely missed his aim.
The Ireland of which he writes has disappeared. As a record, however, of
the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own
wish, his book is not without value. It is dull, but dull books are very
popular at present; and as people have grown a little tired of talking
about Robert Elsmere, they will probably take to discussing The Two
Chiefs of Dunboy. There are some who will welcome with delight the idea
of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people. There
are others who will remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries,
and that we have now to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but
in the New.
The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: or An Irish Romance of the Last Century. By J.
A. Froude. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES--V
(Woman's World, May 1889.)
Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald's volume of poems, Venetia Victrix, is
dedicated to Mr. Robert Browning, and in the poem that gives its title to
the book it is not difficult to see traces of Mr. Browning's influence.
Venetia Victrix is a powerful psychological study of a man's soul, a
vivid presentation of a terrible, fiery-coloured moment in a marred and
incomplete life. It is sometimes complex and intricate in expression,
but then the subject itself is intricate and complex. Plastic simplicity
of outline may render for us the visible aspect of life; it is different
when we come to deal with those secrets which self-consciousness alone
contains, and which self-consciousness itself can but half reveal. Action
takes place in the sunlight, but the soul works in the dark.
There is something curiously interesting in the marked tendency of modern
poetry to become obscure. Many critics, writing with their eyes fixed on
the masterpieces of past literature, have ascribed this tendency to
wilfulness and to affectation. Its origin is rather to be found in the
complexity of the new problems, and in the fact that self-consciousness
is not yet adequate to explain the contents of the Ego. In Mr.
Browning's poems, as in life itself which has suggested, or rather
necessitated, the new method, thought seems to proceed not on logical
lines, but on lines of passion. The unity of the individual is being
expressed through its inconsistencies and its contradictions. In a
strange twilight man is seeking for himself, and when he has found his
own image, he cannot understand it. Objective forms of art, such as
sculpture and the drama, sufficed one for the perfect presentation of
life; they can no longer so suffice.
The central motive of Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald's psychological poem is
the study of a man who to do a noble action wrecks his own soul, sells it
to evil, and to the spirit of evil. Many martyrs have for a great cause
sacrificed their physical life; the sacrifice of the spiritual life has a
more poignant and a more tragic note. The story is supposed to be told
by a French doctor, sitting at his window in Paris one evening:
How far off Venice seems to-night! How dim
The still-remembered sunsets, with the rim
Of gold round the stone haloes, where they stand,
Those carven saints, and look towards the land,
Right Westward, perched on high, with palm in hand,
Completing the peaked church-front. Oh how clear
And dark against the evening splendour! Steer
Between the graveyard island and the quay,
Where North-winds dash the spray on Venice;--see
The rosy light behind dark dome and tower,
Or gaunt smoke-laden chimney;--mark the power
Of Nature's gentleness, in rise or fall
Of interlinked beauty, to recall
Earth's majesty in desecration's place,
Lending yon grimy pile that dream-like face
Of evening beauty;--note yon rugged cloud,
Red-rimmed and heavy, drooping like a shroud
Over Murano in the dying day.
I see it now as then--so far away!
The face of a boy in the street catches his eye. He seems to see in it
some likeness to a dead friend. He begins to think, and at last
remembers a hospital ward in Venice:
'Twas an April day,
The year Napoleon's troops took Venice--say
The twenty-fifth of April. All alone
Walking the ward, I heard a sick man moan,
In tones so piteous, as his heart would break:
'Lost, lost, and lost again--for Venice' sake!'
I turned. There lay a man no longer young,
Wasted with fever. I had marked, none hung
About his bed, as friends, with tenderness,
And, when the priest went by, he spared to bless,
Glancing perplexed--perhaps mere sullenness.
I stopped and questioned: 'What is lost, my friend?'
'My soul is lost, and now draws near the end.
My soul is surely lost. Send me no priest!
They sing and solemnise the marriage feast
Of man's salvation in the house of love,
And I in Hell, and God in Heaven above,
And Venice safe and fair on earth between--
No love of mine--mere service--for my Queen.'
He was a seaman, and the tale he tells the doctor before he dies is
strange and not a little terrible. Wild rage against a foster-brother
who had bitterly wronged him, and who was one of the ten rulers over
Venice, drives him to make a mad oath that on the day when he does
anything for his country's good he will give his soul to Satan. That
night he sails for Dalmatia, and as he is keeping the watch, he sees a
phantom boat with seven fiends sailing to Venice:
I heard the fiends' shrill cry: 'For Venice' good!
Rival thine ancient foe in gratitude,
Then come and make thy home with us in Hell!'
I knew it must be so. I knew the spell
Of Satan on my soul. I felt the power
Granted by God to serve Him one last hour,
Then fall for ever as the curse had wrought.
I climbed aloft. My brain had grown one thought,
One hope, one purpose. And I heard the hiss
Of raging disappointment, loth to miss
Its prey--I heard the lapping of the flame,
That through the blanched figures went and came,
Darting in frenzy to the devils' yell.
I set that cross on high, and cried: 'To Hell
My soul for ever, and my deed to God!
Once Venice guarded safe, let this vile clod
Drift where fate will.'
And then (the hideous laugh
Of fiends in full possession, keen to quaff
The wine of one new soul not weak with tears,
Pealing like ruinous thunder in mine ears)
I fell, and heard no more. The pale day broke
Through lazar-windows, when once more I woke,
Remembering I might no more dare to pray.
The idea of the story is extremely powerful, and Venetia Victrix is
certainly the best poem in the volume--better than Ophelion, which is
vague, and than A Friar's Story, which is pretty but ordinary. It shows
that we have in Miss Fitz Gerald a new singer of considerable ability and
vigour of mind, and it serves to remind us of the splendid dramatic
possibilities extant in life, which are ready for poetry, and unsuitable
for the stage. What is really dramatic is not necessarily that which is
fitting for presentation in a theatre. The theatre is an accident of the
dramatic form. It is not essential to it. We have been deluded by the
name of action. To think is to act.
Of the shorter poems collected here, this Hymn to Persephone is, perhaps,
the best:
Oh, fill my cup, Persephone,
With dim red wine of Spring,
And drop therein a faded leaf
Plucked from the Autumn's bearded sheaf,
Whence, dread one, I may quaff to thee,
While all the woodlands ring.
Oh, fill my heart, Persephone,
With thine immortal pain,
That lingers round the willow bowers
In memories of old happy hours,
When thou didst wander fair and free
O'er Enna's blooming plain.
Oh, fill my soul, Persephone,
With music all thine own!
Teach me some song thy childhood knew,
Lisped in the meadow's morning dew,
Or chant on this high windy lea,
Thy godhead's ceaseless moan.
But this Venetian Song also has a good deal of charm:
Leaning between carved stone and stone,
As glossy birds peer from a nest
Scooped in the crumbling trunk where rest
Their freckled eggs, I pause alone
And linger in the light awhile,
Waiting for joy to come to me--
Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
Only the sunlight on the sea.
I gaze--then turn and ply my loom,
Or broider blossoms close beside;
The morning world lies warm and wide,
But here is dim, cool silent gloom,
Gold crust and crimson velvet pile,
And not one face to smile on me--
Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
Only the sunlight on the sea.
Over the world the splendours break
Of morning light and noontide glow,
And when the broad red sun sinks low,
And in the wave long shadows shake,
Youths, maidens, glad with song and wile,
Glide and are gone, and leave with me
Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
Only the sunlight on the sea.