very charming, and though, as a whole, Love's Widowhood is tedious and
prolix, still it contains some very felicitous touches. We wish,
however, that Mr. Austin would not write such lines as
Pippins of every sort, and _codlins manifold_.
'Codlins manifold' is a monstrous expression.
Mr. W. J. Linton's fame as a wood-engraver has somewhat obscured the
merits of his poetry. His Claribel and Other Poems, published in 1865,
is now a scarce book, and far more scarce is the collection of lyrics
which he printed in 1887 at his own press and brought out under the title
of Love-Lore. The large and handsome volume that now lies before us
contains nearly all these later poems as well as a selection from
Claribel and many renderings, in the original metre, of French poems
ranging from the thirteenth century to our own day. A portrait of Mr.
Linton is prefixed, and the book is dedicated 'To William Bell Scott, my
friend for nearly fifty years.' As a poet Mr. Linton is always fanciful
with a studied fancifulness, and often felicitous with a chance felicity.
He is fascinated by our seventeenth-century singers, and has, here and
there, succeeded in catching something of their quaintness and not a
little of their charm. There is a pleasant flavour about his verse. It
is entirely free from violence and from vagueness, those two besetting
sins of so much modern poetry. It is clear in outline and restrained in
form, and, at its best, has much that is light and lovely about it. How
graceful, for instance, this is!
BARE FEET
O fair white feet! O dawn-white feet
Of Her my hope may claim!
Bare-footed through the dew she came
Her Love to meet.
Star-glancing feet, the windflowers sweet
Might envy, without shame,
As through the grass they lightly came,
Her Love to meet.
O Maiden sweet, with flower-kiss'd feet!
My heart your footstool name!
Bare-footed through the dew she came,
Her Love to meet.
'Vindicate Gemma!' was Longfellow's advice to Miss Heloise Durant when
she proposed to write a play about Dante. Longfellow, it may be
remarked, was always on the side of domesticity. It was the secret of
his popularity. We cannot say, however, that Miss Durant has made us
like Gemma better. She is not exactly the Xantippe whom Boccaccio
describes, but she is very boring, for all that:
GEMMA. The more thou meditat'st, more mad art thou.
Clowns, with their love, can cheer poor wives' hearts more
O'er black bread and goat's cheese than thou canst mine
O'er red Vernaccia, spite of all thy learning!
Care I how tortured spirits feel in hell?
DANTE. Thou tortur'st mine.
GEMMA. Or how souls sing in heaven?
DANTE. Would I were there.
GEMMA. All folly, naught but folly.
DANTE. Thou canst not understand the mandates given
To poets by their goddess Poesy. . . .
GEMMA. Canst ne'er speak prose? Why daily clothe thy thoughts
In strangest garb, as if thy wits played fool
At masquerade, where no man knows a maid
From matron? Fie on poets' mutterings!
DANTE (to himself). If, then, the soul absorbed at last to whole--
GEMMA. Fie! fie! I say. Art thou bewitched?
DANTE. O! peace.
GEMMA. Dost thou deem me deaf and dumb?
DANTE. O! that thou wert.
Dante is certainly rude, but Gemma is dreadful. The play is well meant
but it is lumbering and heavy, and the blank verse has absolutely no
merit.
Father O'Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics, by Mr. A. P. Graves, is a
collection of poems in the style of Lover. Most of them are written in
dialect, and, for the benefit of English readers, notes are appended in
which the uninitiated are informed that 'brogue' means a boot, that
'mavourneen' means my dear, and that 'astore' is a term of affection.
Here is a specimen of Mr. Graves's work:
'Have you e'er a new song,
My Limerick Poet,
To help us along
Wid this terrible boat,
Away over to Tork?'
'Arrah I understand;
For all of your work,
'Twill tighten you, boys,
To cargo that sand
To the overside strand,
Wid the current so strong
Unless you've a song--
A song to lighten and brighten you, boys. . . . '
It is a very dreary production and does not 'lighten and brighten' us a
bit. The whole volume should be called The Lucubrations of a Stage
Irishman.
The anonymous author of The Judgment of the City is a sort of bad Blake.
So at least his prelude seems to suggest:
Time, the old viol-player,
For ever thrills his ancient strings
With the flying bow of Fate, and thence
Much discord, but some music, brings.
His ancient strings are truth,
Love, hate, hope, fear;
And his choicest melody
Is the song of the faithful seer.
As he progresses, however, he develops into a kind of inferior Clough and
writes heavy hexameters upon modern subjects:
Here for a moment stands in the light at the door of a playhouse,
One who is dignified, masterly, hard in the pride of his station;
Here too, the stateliest of matrons, sour in the pride of her station;
With them their daughter, sad-faced and listless, half-crushed to
their likeness.
He has every form of sincerity except the sincerity of the artist, a
defect that he shares with most of our popular writers.
(1) Love's Widowhood and Other Poems. By Alfred Austin. (Macmillan and
Co.)
(2) Poems and Translations. By W. J. Linton. (Nimmo.)
(3) Dante: a Dramatic Poem. By Heloise Durant. (Kegan Paul.)
(4) Father O'Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics. By A. P. Graves. (Swan
Sonnenschein and Co.)
(5) The Judgment of the City and Other Poems. (Swan Sonnenschein and
Co.)
MR. SWINBURNE'S LAST VOLUME
(Pall Mall Gazette, June 27, 1889.)
Mr. Swinburne once set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and
very poisonous poetry. Then he became revolutionary and pantheistic, and
cried out against those that sit in high places both in heaven and on
earth. Then he invented Marie Stuart and laid upon us the heavy burden
of Bothwell. Then he retired to the nursery and wrote poems about
children of a somewhat over-subtle character. He is now extremely
patriotic, and manages to combine with his patriotism a strong affection
for the Tory party. He has always been a great poet. But he has his
limitations, the chief of which is, curiously enough, the entire lack of
any sense of limit. His song is nearly always too loud for his subject.
His magnificent rhetoric, nowhere more magnificent than in the volume
that now lies before us, conceals rather than reveals. It has been said
of him, and with truth, that he is a master of language, but with still
greater truth it may be said that Language is his master. Words seem to
dominate him. Alliteration tyrannises over him. Mere sound often
becomes his lord. He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes
unreal.
Let us turn to the poem on the Armada:
The wings of the south-west wind are widened; the breath of his
fervent lips,
More keen than a sword's edge, fiercer than fire, falls full on the
plunging ships.
The pilot is he of the northward flight, their stay and their
steersman he;
A helmsman clothed with the tempest, and girdled with strength to
constrain the sea.
And the host of them trembles and quails, caught fast in his hand as a
bird in the toils;
For the wrath and the joy that fulfil him are mightier than man's,
whom he slays and spoils.
And vainly, with heart divided in sunder, and labour of wavering will,
The lord of their host takes counsel with hope if haply their star
shine still.
Somehow we seem to have heard all this before. Does it come from the
fact that of all the poets who ever lived Mr. Swinburne is the one who is
the most limited in imagery? It must be admitted that he is so. He has
wearied us with his monotony. 'Fire' and the 'Sea' are the two words
ever on his lips. We must confess also that this shrill
singing--marvellous as it is--leaves us out of breath. Here is a passage
from a poem called A Word with the Wind:
Be the sunshine bared or veiled, the sky superb or shrouded,
Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and foiled,
Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed with fire or clouded,
Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents coiled.
Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with wrath and weary,
Blown for ever back by winds that rock the bird:
Winds that seamews breast subdue the sea, and bid the dreary
Waves be weak as hearts made sick with hope deferred.
Let the clarion sound from westward, let the south bear token
How the glories of thy godhead sound and shine:
Bid the land rejoice to see the land-wind's broad wings broken,
Bid the sea take comfort, bid the world be thine.
Verse of this kind may be justly praised for the sustained strength and
vigour of its metrical scheme. Its purely technical excellence is
extraordinary. But is it more than an oratorical tour de force? Does it
really convey much? Does it charm? Could we return to it again and
again with renewed pleasure? We think not. It seems to us empty.
Of course, we must not look to these poems for any revelation of human
life. To be at one with the elements seems to be Mr. Swinburne's aim. He
seeks to speak with the breath of wind and wave. The roar of the fire is
ever in his ears. He puts his clarion to the lips of Spring and bids her
blow, and the Earth wakes from her dreams and tells him her secret. He
is the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of
his own personality, and he has succeeded. We hear the song, but we
never know the singer. We never even get near to him. Out of the
thunder and splendour of words he himself says nothing. We have often
had man's interpretation of Nature; now we have Nature's interpretation
of man, and she has curiously little to say. Force and Freedom form her
vague message. She deafens us with her clangours.
But Mr. Swinburne is not always riding the whirlwind and calling out of
the depths of the sea. Romantic ballads in Border dialect have not lost
their fascination for him, and this last volume contains some very
splendid examples of this curious artificial kind of poetry. The amount
of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament.
To say 'mither' instead of 'mother' seems to many the acme of romance.
There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of
provincialisms. There is, however, no doubt of Mr. Swinburne's mastery
over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not. The Weary
Wedding has the concentration and colour of a great drama, and the
quaintness of its style lends it something of the power of a grotesque.
The ballad of The Witch-Mother, a mediaeval Medea who slays her children
because her lord is faithless, is worth reading on account of its
horrible simplicity. The Bride's Tragedy, with its strange refrain of
In, in, out and in,
Blaws the wind and whirls the whin:
The Jacobite's Exile--
O lordly flow the Loire and Seine,
And loud the dark Durance:
But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne
Than a' the fields of France;
And the waves of Till that speak sae still
Gleam goodlier where they glance:
The Tyneside Widow and A Reiver's Neck-verse are all poems of fine
imaginative power, and some of them are terrible in their fierce
intensity of passion. There is no danger of English poetry narrowing
itself to a form so limited as the romantic ballad in dialect. It is of
too vital a growth for that. So we may welcome Mr. Swinburne's masterly
experiments with the hope that things which are inimitable will not be
imitated. The collection is completed by a few poems on children, some
sonnets, a threnody on John William Inchbold, and a lovely lyric entitled
The Interpreters.
In human thought have all things habitation;
Our days
Laugh, lower, and lighten past, and find no station
That stays.
But thought and faith are mightier things than time
Can wrong,
Made splendid once by speech, or made sublime
By song.
Remembrance, though the tide of change that rolls
Wax hoary,
Gives earth and heaven, for song's sake and the soul's,
Their glory.
Certainly, 'for song's sake' we should love Mr. Swinburne's work, cannot,
indeed, help loving it, so marvellous a music-maker is he. But what of
the soul? For the soul we must go elsewhere.
Poems and Ballads. Third Series. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Chatto
and Windus.)
THREE NEW POETS
(Pall Mall Gazette, July 12, 1889.)
Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are
never met. Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so
far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating
temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author. Such
a book Mr. Yeats's Wanderings of Oisin certainly is. Here we find
nobility of treatment and nobility of subject-matter, delicacy of poetic
instinct and richness of imaginative resource. Unequal and uneven much
of the work must be admitted to be. Mr. Yeats does not try to 'out-baby'
Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in
'out-glittering' Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across
strange crudities and irritating conceits. But when he is at his best he
is very good. If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he
has at least something of the largeness of vision that belongs to the
epical temper. He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of
Celtic mythology. He is very naive and very primitive and speaks of his
giants with the air of a child. Here is a characteristic passage from
the account of Oisin's return from the Island of Forgetfulness:
And I rode by the plains of the sea's edge, where all is barren and
grey,
Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.
Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,
Snatching the bird in secret, nor knew I, embosomed apart,
When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,
For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my
heart.
Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-winds
brown.
If I were as I once was, the gold hooves crushing the sand and the
shells,
Coming forth from the sea like the morning with red lips murmuring a
song,
Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the
bells,
I would leave no Saint's head on his body, though spacious his lands
were and strong.
Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path,
Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattle and woodwork made,
Thy bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the
earth,
And a small and feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade.
In one or two places the music is faulty, the construction is sometimes
too involved, and the word 'populace' in the last line is rather
infelicitous; but, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel in
these stanzas the presence of the true poetic spirit.
A young lady who seeks for a 'song surpassing sense,' and tries to
reproduce Mr. Browning's mode of verse for our edification, may seem to
be in a somewhat parlous state. But Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald's work is
better than her aim. Venetia Victrix is in many respects a fine poem. It
shows vigour, intellectual strength, and courage. The story is a strange
one. A certain Venetian, hating one of the Ten who had wronged him and
identifying his enemy with Venice herself, abandons his native city and
makes a vow that, rather than lift a hand for her good, he will give his
soul to Hell. As he is sailing down the Adriatic at night, his ship is
suddenly becalmed and he sees a huge galley
where sate
Like counsellors on high, exempt, elate,
The fiends triumphant in their fiery state,
on their way to Venice. He has to choose between his own ruin and the
ruin of his city. After a struggle, he determines to sacrifice himself
to his rash oath.
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 blenched 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.
Venetia Victrix is followed by Ophelion, a curious lyrical play whose
dramatis personae consist of Night, Death, Dawn and a Scholar. It is
intricate rather than musical, but some of the songs are graceful--notably
one beginning
Lady of heaven most pure and holy,
Artemis, fleet as the flying deer,
Glide through the dusk like a silver shadow,
Mirror thy brow in the lonely mere.
Miss Fitz Gerald's volume is certainly worth reading.
Mr. Richard Le Gallienne's little book, Volumes in Folio as he quaintly
calls it, is full of dainty verse and delicate fancy. Lines such as
And lo! the white face of the dawn
Yearned like a ghost's against the pane,
A sobbing ghost amid the rain;
Or like a chill and pallid rose
Slowly upclimbing from the lawn,
strike, with their fantastic choice of metaphors, a pleasing note. At
present Mr. Le Gallienne's muse seems to devote herself entirely to the
worship of books, and Mr. Le Gallienne himself is steeped in literary
traditions, making Keats his model and seeking to reproduce something of
Keats's richness and affluence of imagery. He is keenly conscious how
derivative his inspiration is:
Verse of my own! why ask so poor a thing,
When I might gather from the garden-ways
Of sunny memory fragrant offering
Of deathless blooms and white unwithering sprays?
Shakspeare had given me an English rose,
And honeysuckle Spenser sweet as dew,
Or I had brought you from that dreamy close
Keats' passion-blossom, or the mystic blue
Star-flower of Shelley's song, or shaken gold
From lilies of the Blessed Damosel,
Or stolen fire from out the scarlet fold
Of Swinburne's poppies. . . .
Yet now that he has played his prelude with so sensitive and so graceful
a touch, we have no doubt that he will pass to larger themes and nobler
subject-matter, and fulfil the hope he expresses in this sextet:
For if perchance some music should be mine,
I would fling forth its notes like a fierce sea,
To wash away the piles of tyranny,
To make love free and faith unbound of creed.
O for some power to fill my shrunken line,
And make a trumpet of my oaten reed.
(1) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan
Paul.)
(2) Venetia Victrix. By Caroline Fitz Gerald. (Macmillan and Co.)
(3) Volumes in Folio. By Richard Le Gallienne. (Elkin Mathews.)
A CHINESE SAGE
(Speaker, February 8, 1890.)
A eminent Oxford theologian once remarked that his only objection to
modern progress was that it progressed forward instead of backward--a
view that so fascinated a certain artistic undergraduate that he promptly
wrote an essay upon some unnoticed analogies between the development of
ideas and the movements of the common sea-crab. I feel sure the Speaker
will not be suspected even by its most enthusiastic friends of holding
this dangerous heresy of retrogression. But I must candidly admit that I
have come to the conclusion that the most caustic criticism of modern
life I have met with for some time is that contained in the writings of
the learned Chuang Tzu, recently translated into the vulgar tongue by Mr.
Herbert Giles, Her Majesty's Consul at Tamsui.
The spread of popular education has no doubt made the name of this great
thinker quite familiar to the general public, but, for the sake of the
few and the over-cultured, I feel it my duty to state definitely who he
was, and to give a brief outline of the character of his philosophy.
Chuang Tzu, whose name must carefully be pronounced as it is not written,
was born in the fourth century before Christ, by the banks of the Yellow
River, in the Flowery Land; and portraits of the wonderful sage seated on
the flying dragon of contemplation may still be found on the simple tea-
trays and pleasing screens of many of our most respectable suburban
households. The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt
often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed
over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If
they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tzu spent
his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out
the uselessness of all useful things. 'Do nothing, and everything will
be done,' was the doctrine which he inherited from his great master Lao
Tzu. To resolve action into thought, and thought into abstraction, was
his wicked transcendental aim. Like the obscure philosopher of early
Greek speculation, he believed in the identity of contraries; like Plato,
he was an idealist, and had all the idealist's contempt for utilitarian
systems; he was a mystic like Dionysius, and Scotus Erigena, and Jacob
Bohme, and held, with them and with Philo, that the object of life was to
get rid of self-consciousness, and to become the unconscious vehicle of a
higher illumination. In fact, Chuang Tzu may be said to have summed up
in himself almost every mood of European metaphysical or mystical
thought, from Heraclitus down to Hegel. There was something in him of
the Quietist also; and in his worship of Nothing he may be said to have
in some measure anticipated those strange dreamers of mediaeval days who,
like Tauler and Master Eckhart, adored the purum nihil and the Abyss. The
great middle classes of this country, to whom, as we all know, our
prosperity, if not our civilisation, is entirely due, may shrug their
shoulders over all this and ask, with a certain amount of reason, what is
the identity of contraries to them, and why they should get rid of that
self-consciousness which is their chief characteristic. But Chuang Tzu
was something more than a metaphysician and an illuminist. He sought to
destroy society, as we know it, as the middle classes know it; and the
sad thing is that he combines with the passionate eloquence of a Rousseau
the scientific reasoning of a Herbert Spencer. There is nothing of the
sentimentalist in him. He pities the rich more than the poor, if he ever
pities at all, and prosperity seems to him as tragic a thing as
suffering. He has nothing of the modern sympathy with failures, nor does
he propose that the prizes should always be given on moral grounds to
those who come in last in the race. It is the race itself that he
objects to; and as for active sympathy, which has become the profession
of so many worthy people in our own day, he thinks that trying to make
others good is as silly an occupation as 'beating a drum in a forest in
order to find a fugitive.' It is a mere waste of energy. That is all.
While, as for a thoroughly sympathetic man, he is, in the eyes of Chuang
Tzu, simply a man who is always trying to be somebody else, and so misses
the only possible excuse for his own existence.