the tideless sea at Cannes on a summer day,' says their anonymous author,
'I had fallen asleep, and the plashing of the waves upon the shore had
doubtless made me dream. When I awoke the yellow paper-covered volumes
of Prosper Merimee's Lettres a une Inconnue lay beside me; I had been
reading the book before I fell asleep, but the answers--had they ever
been written, or had I only dreamed?' The invention of the love-letters
of a curious and unknown personality, the heroine of one of the great
literary flirtations of our age, was a clever idea, and certainly the
author has carried out his scheme with wonderful success; with such
success indeed that it is said that one of our statesmen, whose name
occurs more than once in the volume, was for a moment completely taken in
by what is really a jeu-d'esprit, the first serious joke perpetrated by
Messrs. Macmillan in their publishing capacity. Perhaps it is too much
to call it a joke. It is a fine, delicate piece of fiction, an
imaginative attempt to complete a real romance. As we had the letters of
the academic Romeo, it was obviously right that we should pretend we had
the answers of the clever and somewhat mondaine Juliet. Or is it Juliet
herself, in her little Paris boudoir, looking over these two volumes with
a sad, cynical smile? Well, to be put into fiction is always a tribute
to one's reality.
As for extracts from these fascinating forgeries, the letters should be
read in conjunction with those of Merimee himself. It is difficult to
judge of them by samples. We find the Inconnue first in London, probably
in 1840.
Little (she writes) can you imagine the storm of indignation you
aroused in me by your remark that your feelings for me were those
suitable for a fourteen-year-old niece. Merci. Anything less like a
respectable uncle than yourself I cannot well imagine. The role would
never suit you, believe me, so do not try it.
Now in return for your story of the phlegmatic musical animal who
called forth such stormy devotion in a female breast, and who, himself
cold and indifferent, was loved to the extent of a watery grave being
sought by his inamorata as solace for his indifference, let _me_ ask
the question why the women who torment men with their uncertain
tempers, drive them wild with jealousy, laugh contemptuously at their
humble entreaties, and fling their money to the winds, have twice the
hold upon their affections that the patient, long-suffering, domestic,
frugal Griseldas have, whose existences are one long penance of
unsuccessful efforts to please? Answer this comprehensively, and you
will have solved a riddle which has puzzled women since Eve asked
questions in Paradise.
Later on she writes:
Why should all natures be alike? It would make the old saws useless
if they were, and deprive us of one of the truest of them all,
'Variety is the spice of life.' How terribly monotonous it would be
if all the flowers were roses, every woman a queen, and each man a
philosopher. My private opinion is that it takes at least six men
such as one meets every day to make one really valuable one. I like
so many men for one particular quality which they possess, and so few
men for all. Comprenez-vous?
In another place:
Is it not a trifle dangerous, this experiment we are trying of a
friendship in pen and ink and paper? A letter. What thing on earth
more dangerous to confide in? Written at blood heat, it may reach its
destination when the recipient's mental thermometer counts zero, and
the burning words and thrilling sentences may turn to ice and be
congealed as they are read. . . . A letter; the most uncertain thing
in a world of uncertainties, the best or the worst thing devised by
mortals.
Again:
Surely it was for you, mon cher, that the description given of a
friend of mine was originally intended. He is a trifle cynical, this
friend, and decidedly pessimistic, and of him it was reported that he
never believed in anything until he saw it, and then he was convinced
that it was an optical illusion. The accuracy of the description
struck me.
They seem to have loved each other best when they were parted.
I think I cannot bear it much longer, this incessant quarrelling when
we meet, and your unkindness during the short time that you are with
me. Why not let it all end? it would be better for both of us. I do
not love you less when I write these words; if you could know the
sadness which they echo in my heart you would believe this. No, I
think I love you more, but I cannot understand you. As you have often
said, our natures must be very different, entirely different; if so,
what is this curious bond between them? To me you seem possessed with
some strange restlessness and morbid melancholy which utterly spoils
your life, and in return you never see me without overwhelming me with
reproaches, if not for one thing, for another. I tell you I cannot,
will not, bear it longer. If you love me, then in God's name cease
tormenting me as well as yourself with these wretched doubts and
questionings and complaints. I have been ill, seriously ill, and
there is nothing to account for my illness save the misery of this
apparently hopeless state of things existing between us. You have
made me weep bitter tears of alternate self-reproach and indignation,
and finally of complete miserable bewilderment as to this unhappy
condition of affairs. Believe me, tears like these are not good to
mingle with love, they are too bitter, too scorching, they blister
love's wings and fall too heavily on love's heart. I feel worn out
with a dreary sort of hopelessness; if you know a cure for pain like
this send it to me quickly.
Yet, in the very next letter, she says to him:
Although I said good-bye to you less than an hour ago, I cannot
refrain from writing to tell you that a happy calm which seems to
penetrate my whole being seems also to have wiped out all remembrance
of the misery and unhappiness which has overwhelmed me lately. Why
cannot it always be so, or would life perhaps be then too blessed, too
wholly happy for it to be life? I know that you are free to-night,
will you not write to me, that the first words my eyes fall upon to-
morrow shall prove that to-day has not been a dream? Yes, write to
me.
The letter that immediately follows is one of six words only:
Let me dream--Let me dream.
In the following there are interesting touches of actuality:
Did you ever try a cup of tea (the national beverage, by the way) at
an English railway station? If you have not, I would advise you, as a
friend, to continue to abstain! The names of the American drinks are
rather against them, the straws are, I think, about the best part of
them. You do not tell me what you think of Mr. Disraeli. I once met
him at a ball at the Duke of Sutherland's in the long picture gallery
of Stafford House. I was walking with Lord Shrewsbury, and without a
word of warning he stopped and introduced him, mentioning with
reckless mendacity that I had read every book he had written and
admired them all, then he coolly walked off and left me standing face
to face with the great statesman. He talked to me for some time, and
I studied him carefully. I should say he was a man with one steady
aim: endless patience, untiring perseverance, iron concentration;
marking out one straight line before him so unbending that despite
themselves men stand aside as it is drawn straightly and steadily on.
A man who believes that determination brings strength, strength brings
endurance, and endurance brings success. You know how often in his
novels he speaks of the influence of women, socially, morally, and
politically, yet his manner was the least interested or deferential in
talking that I have ever met with in a man of his class. He certainly
thought this particular woman of singularly small account, or else the
brusque and tactless allusion to his books may perhaps have annoyed
him as it did me; but whatever the cause, when he promptly left me at
the first approach of a mutual acquaintance, I felt distinctly
snubbed. Of the two men, Mr. Gladstone was infinitely more agreeable
in his manner, he left one with the pleasant feeling of measuring a
little higher in cubic inches than one did before, than which I know
no more delightful sensation. A Paris, bientot.
Elsewhere, we find cleverly-written descriptions of life in Italy, in
Algiers, at Hombourg, at French boarding-houses; stories about Napoleon
III., Guizot, Prince Gortschakoff, Montalembert, and others; political
speculations, literary criticisms, and witty social scandal; and
everywhere a keen sense of humour, a wonderful power of observation. As
reconstructed in these letters, the Inconnue seems to have been not
unlike Merimee himself. She had the same restless, unyielding,
independent character. Each desired to analyse the other. Each, being a
critic, was better fitted for friendship than for love. 'We are so
different,' said Merimee once to her, 'that we can hardly understand each
other.' But it was because they were so alike that each remained a
mystery to the other. Yet they ultimately attained to a high altitude of
loyal and faithful friendship, and from a purely literary point of view
these fictitious letters give the finishing touch to the strange romance
that so stirred Paris fifteen years ago. Perhaps the real letters will
be published some day. When they are, how interesting to compare them!
The Bird-Bride, by Graham R. Tomson, is a collection of romantic ballads,
delicate sonnets, and metrical studies in foreign fanciful forms. The
poem that gives its title to the book is the lament of an Eskimo hunter
over the loss of his wife and children.
Years agone, on the flat white strand,
I won my sweet sea-girl:
Wrapped in my coat of the snow-white fur,
I watched the wild birds settle and stir,
The grey gulls gather and whirl.
One, the greatest of all the flock,
Perched on an ice-floe bare,
Called and cried as her heart were broke,
And straight they were changed, that fleet bird-folk,
To women young and fair.
Swift I sprang from my hiding-place
And held the fairest fast;
I held her fast, the sweet, strange thing:
Her comrades skirled, but they all took wing,
And smote me as they passed.
I bore her safe to my warm snow house;
Full sweetly there she smiled;
And yet, whenever the shrill winds blew,
She would beat her long white arms anew,
And her eyes glanced quick and wild.
But I took her to wife, and clothed her warm
With skins of the gleaming seal;
Her wandering glances sank to rest
When she held a babe to her fair, warm breast,
And she loved me dear and leal.
Together we tracked the fox and the seal,
And at her behest I swore
That bird and beast my bow might slay
For meat and for raiment, day by day,
But never a grey gull more.
Famine comes upon the land, and the hunter, forgetting his oath, slays
four sea-gulls for food. The bird-wife 'shrilled out in a woful cry,'
and taking the plumage of the dead birds, she makes wings for her
children and for herself, and flies away with them.
'Babes of mine, of the wild wind's kin,
Feather ye quick, nor stay.
Oh, oho! but the wild winds blow!
Babes of mine, it is time to go:
Up, dear hearts, and away!'
And lo! the grey plumes covered them all,
Shoulder and breast and brow.
I felt the wind of their whirling flight:
Was it sea or sky? was it day or night?
It is always night-time now.
Dear, will you never relent, come back?
I loved you long and true.
O winged white wife, and our children three,
Of the wild wind's kin though you surely be,
Are ye not of my kin too?
Ay, ye once were mine, and, till I forget,
Ye are mine forever and aye,
Mine, wherever your wild wings go,
While shrill winds whistle across the snow
And the skies are blear and grey.
Some powerful and strong ballads follow, many of which, such as The Cruel
Priest, Deid Folks' Ferry, and Marchen, are in that curious combination
of Scotch and Border dialect so much affected now by our modern poets.
Certainly dialect is dramatic. It is a vivid method of re-creating a
past that never existed. It is something between 'A Return to Nature'
and 'A Return to the Glossary.' It is so artificial that it is really
naive. From the point of view of mere music, much may be said for it.
Wonderful diminutives lend new notes of tenderness to the song. There
are possibilities of fresh rhymes, and in search for a fresh rhyme poets
may be excused if they wander from the broad highroad of classical
utterance into devious byways and less-trodden paths. Sometimes one is
tempted to look on dialect as expressing simply the pathos of
provincialisms, but there is more in it than mere mispronunciations. With
the revival of an antique form, often comes the revival of an antique
spirit. Through limitations that are sometimes uncouth, and always
narrow, comes Tragedy herself; and though she may stammer in her
utterance, and deck herself in cast-off weeds and trammelling raiment,
still we must hold ourselves in readiness to accept her, so rare are her
visits to us now, so rare her presence in an age that demands a happy
ending from every play, and that sees in the theatre merely a source of
amusement. The form, too, of the ballad--how perfect it is in its
dramatic unity! It is so perfect that we must forgive it its dialect, if
it happens to speak in that strange tongue.
Then by cam' the bride's company
Wi' torches burning bright.
'Tak' up, tak' up your bonny bride
A' in the mirk midnight!'
Oh, wan, wan was the bridegroom's face
And wan, wan was the bride,
But clay-cauld was the young mess-priest
That stood them twa beside!
Says, 'Rax me out your hand, Sir Knight,
And wed her wi' this ring';
And the deid bride's hand it was as cauld
As ony earthly thing.
The priest he touched that lady's hand,
And never a word he said;
The priest he touched that lady's hand,
And his ain was wet and red.
The priest he lifted his ain right hand,
And the red blood dripped and fell.
Says, 'I loved ye, lady, and ye loved me;
Sae I took your life mysel'.'
. . . . .
Oh! red, red was the dawn o' day,
And tall was the gallows-tree:
The Southland lord to his ain has fled
And the mess-priest's hangit hie!
Of the sonnets, this To Herodotus is worth quoting:
Far-travelled coaster of the midland seas,
What marvels did those curious eyes behold!
Winged snakes, and carven labyrinths of old;
The emerald column raised to Heracles;
King Perseus' shrine upon the Chemmian leas;
Four-footed fishes, decked with gems and gold:
But thou didst leave some secrets yet untold,
And veiled the dread Osirian mysteries.
And now the golden asphodels among
Thy footsteps fare, and to the lordly dead
Thou tellest all the stories left unsaid
Of secret rites and runes forgotten long,
Of that dark folk who ate the Lotus-bread
And sang the melancholy Linus-song.
Mrs. Tomson has certainly a very refined sense of form. Her verse,
especially in the series entitled New Words to Old Tunes, has grace and
distinction. Some of the shorter poems are, to use a phrase made
classical by Mr. Pater, 'little carved ivories of speech.' She is one of
our most artistic workers in poetry, and treats language as a fine
material.
(1) An Author's Love: Being the Unpublished Letters of Prosper Merimee's
'Inconnue.' (Macmillan and Co.)
(2) The Bird-Bride: A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets. By Graham R.
Tomson. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
A THOUGHT-READER'S NOVEL
(Pall Mall Gazette, June 5, 1889.)
There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards.
The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins
with the catastrophe or the denoument one feels on pleasant terms of
equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a
theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the
hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved.
One knows the jealously-guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at
the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider
it their duty to display. In the case of Mr. Stuart Cumberland's novel,
The Vasty Deep, as he calls it, the last page is certainly thrilling and
makes us curious to know more about 'Brown, the medium.'
Scene, a padded room in a mad-house in the United States.
A gibbering lunatic discovered dashing wildly about the chamber as if in
the act of chasing invisible forms.
'This is our worst case,' says a doctor opening the cell to one of the
visitors in lunacy. 'He was a spirit medium and he is hourly haunted by
the creations of his fancy. We have to carefully watch him, for he has
developed suicidal tendencies.'
The lunatic makes a dash at the retreating form of his visitors, and, as
the door closes upon him, sinks with a yell upon the floor.
A week later the lifeless body of Brown, the medium, is found suspended
from the gas bracket in his cell.
How clearly one sees it all! How forcible and direct the style is! And
what a thrilling touch of actuality the simple mention of the 'gas
bracket' gives us! Certainly The Vasty Deep is a book to be read.
And we have read it; read it with great care. Though it is largely
autobiographical, it is none the less a work of fiction and, though some
of us may think that there is very little use in exposing what is already
exposed and revealing the secrets of Polichinelle, no doubt there are
many who will be interested to hear of the tricks and deceptions of
crafty mediums, of their gauze masks, telescopic rods and invisible silk
threads, and of the marvellous raps they can produce simply by displacing
the peroneus longus muscle! The book opens with a description of the
scene by the death-bed of Alderman Parkinson. Dr. Josiah Brown, the
eminent medium, is in attendance and tries to comfort the honest merchant
by producing noises on the bedpost. Mr. Parkinson, however, being
extremely anxious to revisit Mrs. Parkinson, in a materialised form after
death, will not be satisfied till he has received from his wife a solemn
promise that she will not marry again, such a marriage being, in his
eyes, nothing more nor less than bigamy. Having received an assurance to
this effect from her, Mr. Parkinson dies, his soul, according to the
medium, being escorted to the spheres by 'a band of white-robed spirits.'
This is the prologue. The next chapter is entitled 'Five Years After.'
Violet Parkinson, the Alderman's only child, is in love with Jack Alston,
who is 'poor, but clever.' Mrs. Parkinson, however, will not hear of any
marriage till the deceased Alderman has materialised himself and given
his formal consent. A seance is held at which Jack Alston unmasks the
medium and shows Dr. Josiah Brown to be an impostor--a foolish act, on
his part, as he is at once ordered to leave the house by the infuriated
Mrs. Parkinson, whose faith in the Doctor is not in the least shaken by
the unfortunate exposure.
The lovers are consequently parted. Jack sails for Newfoundland, is
shipwrecked and carefully, somewhat too carefully, tended by 'La-ki-wa,
or the Star that shines,' a lovely Indian maiden who belongs to the tribe
of the Micmacs. She is a fascinating creature who wears 'a necklace
composed of thirteen nuggets of pure gold,' a blanket of English
manufacture and trousers of tanned leather. In fact, as Mr. Stuart
Cumberland observes, she looks 'the embodiment of fresh dewy morn.' When
Jack, on recovering his senses, sees her, he naturally inquires who she
is. She answers, in the simple utterance endeared to us by Fenimore
Cooper, 'I am La-ki-wa. I am the only child of my father, Tall Pine,
chief of the Dildoos.' She talks, Mr. Cumberland informs us, very good
English. Jack at once entrusts her with the following telegram which he
writes on the back of a five-pound note:--
Miss Violet Parkinson, Hotel Kronprinz, Franzensbad, Austria.--Safe.
JACK.
But La-ki-wa, we regret to say, says to herself, 'He belongs to Tall
Pine, to the Dildoos, and to me,' and never sends the telegram.
Subsequently, La-ki-wa proposes to Jack who promptly rejects her and,
with the usual callousness of men, offers her a brother's love. La-ki-wa,
naturally, regrets the premature disclosure of her passion and weeps. 'My
brother,' she remarks, 'will think that I have the timid heart of a deer
with the crying voice of a papoose. I, the daughter of Tall Pine--I a
Micmac, to show the grief that is in my heart. O, my brother, I am
ashamed.' Jack comforts her with the hollow sophistries of a civilised
being and gives her his photograph. As he is on his way to the steamer
he receives from Big Deer a soiled piece of a biscuit bag. On it is
written La-ki-wa's confession of her disgraceful behaviour about the
telegram. 'His thoughts,' Mr. Cumberland tells us, 'were bitter towards
La-ki-wa, but they gradually softened when he remembered what he owed
her.'
Everything ends happily. Jack arrives in England just in time to prevent
Dr. Josiah Brown from mesmerising Violet whom the cunning doctor is
anxious to marry, and he hurls his rival out of the window. The victim
is discovered 'bruised and bleeding among the broken flower-pots' by a
comic policeman. Mrs. Parkinson still believes in spiritualism, but
refuses to have anything to do with Brown as she discovers that the
deceased Alderman's 'materialised beard' was made only of 'horrid, coarse
horsehair.' Jack and Violet are married at last and Jack is horrid
enough to send to 'La-ki-wa' another photograph. The end of Dr. Brown is
chronicled above. Had we not known what was in store for him we should
hardly have got through the book. There is a great deal too much padding
in it about Dr. Slade and Dr. Bartram and other mediums, and the
disquisitions on the commercial future of Newfoundland seem endless and
are intolerable. However, there are many publics, and Mr. Stuart
Cumberland is always sure of an audience. His chief fault is a tendency
to low comedy; but some people like low comedy in fiction.
The Vasty Deep: A Strange Story of To-day. By Stuart Cumberland.
(Sampson Low and Co.)
THE POETS' CORNER--X
(Pall Mall Gazette, June 24, 1889.)
Is Mr. Alfred Austin among the Socialists? Has somebody converted the
respectable editor of the respectable National Review? Has even dulness
become revolutionary? From a poem in Mr. Austin's last volume this would
seem to be the case. It is perhaps unfair to take our rhymers too
seriously. Between the casual fancies of a poet and the callous facts of
prose there is, or at least there should be, a wide difference. But
since the poem in question, Two Visions, as Mr. Austin calls it, was
begun in 1863 and revised in 1889 we may regard it as fully
representative of Mr. Austin's mature views. He gives us, at any rate,
in its somewhat lumbering and pedestrian verses, his conception of the
perfect state:
Fearless, unveiled, and unattended
Strolled maidens to and fro:
Youths looked respect, but never bended
Obsequiously low.
And each with other, sans condition,
Held parley brief or long,
Without provoking _coarse suspicion
Of marriage_, or of wrong.
All were well clad, and none were better,
And gems beheld I none,
Save where there hung a jewelled fetter,
Symbolic, in the sun.
I saw a noble-looking maiden
Close Dante's solemn book,
And go, with crate of linen laden
And wash it in the brook.
Anon, a broad-browed _poet, dragging
A load of logs along_,
To warm his hearth, withal not flagging
In current of his song.
Each one some handicraft attempted
Or helped to till the soil:
None but the aged were exempted
From communistic toil.
Such an expression as 'coarse suspicion of marriage' is not very
fortunate; the log-rolling poet of the fifth stanza is an ideal that we
have already realised and one in which we had but little comfort, and the
fourth stanza leaves us in doubt whether Mr. Austin means that
washerwomen are to take to reading Dante, or that students of Italian
literature are to wash their own clothes. But, on the whole, though Mr.
Austin's vision of the citta divina of the future is not very
inspiriting, it is certainly extremely interesting as a sign of the
times, and it is evident from the two concluding lines of the following
stanzas that there will be no danger of the intellect being overworked:
Age lorded not, nor rose the hectic
Up to the cheek of youth;
But reigned throughout their dialectic
Sobriety of truth.
And if a long-held contest tended
To ill-defined result,
_It was by calm consent suspended
As over-difficult_.
Mr. Austin, however, has other moods, and, perhaps, he is at his best
when he is writing about flowers. Occasionally he wearies the reader by
tedious enumerations of plants, lacking indeed reticence and tact and
selection in many of his descriptions, but, as a rule, he is very
pleasant when he is babbling of green fields. How pretty these stanzas
from the dedication are!
When vines, just newly burgeoned, link
Their hands to join the dance of Spring,
Green lizards glisten from cleft and chink,
And almond blossoms rosy pink
Cluster and perch, ere taking wing;
Where over strips of emerald wheat
Glimmer red peach and snowy pear,
And nightingales all day long repeat
Their love-song, not less glad than sweet
They chant in sorrow and gloom elsewhere;
Where purple iris-banners scale
Defending walls and crumbling ledge,
And virgin windflowers, lithe and frail,
Now mantling red, now trembling pale,
Peep out from furrow and hide in hedge.