has just received a Doctor's degree from his University, and read
whatever you will of his, you quit the page with respect and liking for
the author. You will, indeed, go far to find books or articles which
more plainly bear the stamp of manliness, kindliness, intelligence, and
wide reading. These are some of the most necessary qualities of a
critic, whether of life or literature, and most of them are of especial
value in historical criticism. _That_ has lately taken up with
principles and methods not very favourable to the just appreciation of
such a book as Mr. Bayne's last, "The Chief Actors in the Puritan
Revolution;" and it struck some of us that the best points in that work
were missed by too many of its reviewers. A venture of a very different
kind is _Lessons from my Masters: Carlyle, Tennyson, and Ruskin_ (James
Clarke & Co.). This large volume has grown out of articles which were
originally published in the _Literary World_, but these have now been
much elaborated by Dr. Bayne, and have received considerable additions.
The essay on Carlyle is beyond dispute the most valuable of the three
studies, but they all belong to a class of writing which is sure of a
welcome. We feel quite certain, however, that Dr. Bayne imposed upon
himself a little, or more than a little, when he undertook his task. He
tells the reader plainly he found, as he went on with it, that he could
not maintain the attitude of mere pupil, as he had fancied he might. Of
coarse not; and he need not have apologized even indirectly for the
freedom of his criticisms, which might well have been much bolder. The
real attraction of the work he undertook was, that it _would_ give him
scope for widely-ranging comment; and it is the inevitable, by no means
inartistic or unhealthy discursiveness of the treatment which makes it
difficult to do justice to it. But we will venture upon a point or two
nearly at random.
In discussing "Model Prisons," or rather the assumptions of that
Latter-day Pamphlet, Mr. Bayne takes a view of our duty to criminals
with which we agree, and he quotes the fact that the majority of those
who belong to the criminal class are found to have abnormal brains and
often diseased bodies. He also treats just in the way we might expect
the _dictum_ that stupidity means badness. The last meaning of that, we
almost fear, Mr. Bayne has not quite caught; as John Bunyan meant it,
and as Carlyle means it, it is surely true. Again, it seems doubtful if
Mr. Bayne, in taking up Kant's complaint that, while there is so much
kindness in the world, there is so little justice, has put the complaint
in the right place. It is awfull true, and not to be hidden from any
honest and acute observer, that the love of justice and truth is very
weak in most human beings; while the instinct of kindness is
comparatively strong. Again, Dr. Bayne nearly surprises us by adopting
the commonplace that great talents bring with them an increase of moral
responsibility. Well, we all know the insuperable difficulties of the
subject, how they all run up at last into one final problem of which the
most plausible-looking solutions turn out to be only paradoxes. But,
after all, can it be maintained that there is really any final
difference in the degree of moral responsibility to be assigned to a man
with a constitution like Byron's or Edgar Poe's, and that which is to be
assigned to one of those criminals with abnormal brains? Shelley's
grandfather was crazed; the father, Sir Timothy, was _half_-crazed; what
Shelley was we know. And can we consistently say that his faults (we do
not speak of any particular act) were one shade less the natural result
of the constitution of his brain than are those of any of Mr. Carlyle's
"dog-faced" criminals? Is there any sense in suggesting that the
splendid powers of such a man ought to be expected to act as breakwaters
against the force of his special temptations? Of course we know how the
enlightened British juryman would answer such a question, and equally of
course there are rocks ahead answer it as you may; but we must pause a
little longer on it than Dr. Bayne does (page 89) over the question
"What is justice?"
Passing over other things, we now come to smoother water--the Essay on
Tennyson. Here there is, of course, much to say "on both sides." Many of
us would have liked a little less poet-worship, and a little more
scrutiny. "The Princess" is dismissed with a line or two of
apology--but it is far more, for Dr. Bayne's purpose, than "a
serio-comic poem,"--it contains, indirectly, a great deal of
self-disclosure. There is something very wrong about M. Taine's way of
looking at Mr. Tennyson's domestic sweetness, but he has a glimpse of a
truth about the poet and his work. Whatever the worshippers of Mr.
Tennyson may say, his poetry contains more feeling after human passion
if haply he may find it, than of passion itself; and he _is_
conventional. He has never been right out and away into the
wilderness. His poetry wants largeness, boldness, and breadth of
atmosphere. We find no fault--being profoundly grateful for what this
exquisite singer has given us; and knowing better than to expect
contradictory qualities from the same harp; and certainly M. Taine has
made a great blunder in setting up Alfred de Musset on the other side of
his antithesis--but it is a fact that Mr. Tennyson has shown in his
writings a tendency (or sub-tendency, if the phrase may pass) to please
Mrs. Grundy, as well as the higher Pallas--a tendency which does a
little to excuse those who insult the poor old soul without occasion;
and who, indeed, are sometimes thought to be grimacing at the Divine
Wisdom, when they are only teasing the old lady.
The subject of "Emendations" interests Mr. Bayne more than it does us,
and we decidedly disagree with him in his general apology for the
digging up of early writings which the writers may be presumed to wish
kept dark. The alteration in the words of Iphigenia in the "Dream of
Fair Women" is not as good as it might be, and Mr. Bayne most justly
condemns "the bright death," but it is quite clear that the lines as
they originally stood--
"One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat
Slowly--and nothing more--"
did not, grammatically considered, express the poet's meaning; and are
certainly open to ridicule on other grounds. The words, "And _I knew_ no
more," _do_ express the meaning.
The alterations and additions in "Maud" appear to us to be about as bad
as they could be. Explanatory additions were wanted, but not those flat
prosaic lines, though Mr. Bayne appears to like them. On the other hand,
the verse--
"I kissed her slender hand,
She took the kiss sedately,
Maud is not seventeen,
But she is tall and stately,"
which our intelligent critic does not like, appears to us perfect--in
its place. Sweeter love-poetry than the finest parts of "Maud" is not to
be found in the language; the remark being confined to the more
superficial kinds of love. For the "tender passion" of the poem is,
after all, superficial and thin: the strongest parts being the cynical.
It has always been a grief to us that so much exquisite poetry (Cantos
XII., XVIII., XXII., in Part I; and IV. in Part II.) should have been
framed in what is really nothing but a very poor "sensation" novel, with
a moral or lesson which is poorer still. Poetry is not bound to be
unintermittingly poetic; there must be flat passages,--but such
second-hand phrasing as "a war in defence of the right"--"that an iron
tyranny now should bend or cease"--"a cause that I felt to be pure and
true"--"a giant liar"--is intolerable in a poem of which the climax is
so high-pitched. Better the merest conversational familiarity, than this
rhetorical magniloquence.
Before passing from Tennyson's poems, we cannot help noting a curious
example of Dr. Bayne's tendency to excessive praise and admiration. In
that very poor poem, "Sea-Dreams," the city clerk's wife induces her
husband to forgive the just-dead man who has robbed them of their
savings. Upon which Dr. Bayne remarks; "There is not a nobler heroine in
literature than this wife of a city clerk, and I see no reason to
believe that there are not many such to be found in London." Nor do
we--six women out of ten exhibit every week of their lives "heroism"
just as "noble." It is perfectly commonplace; and it is the critic's
warm-heartedness which betrays him into these extravagancies of
language.
The Essay on Ruskin has been nearly all rewritten, and it is a fine
specimen of studious candour, and something more. All we will add is,
that we hope Mr. Bayne holds, along with Mr. Ruskin--though it hardly
looks as if he did--that "the destruction of beauty is a sacrilege and a
sin." This is undoubtedly a fair account of what Mr. Ruskin means in
certain portions of his writings, and he is not the only one who has
suffered "anguish," little short of despair, at certain "works of
profanation." Mr. Bayne quotes Mr. Ruskin's passionate words about the
befouling and desecration of the "pools and streams" around Carshalton.
Now, it would not be easy, perhaps, to prove that God made those "pools
and streams," still lovely in their degradation, in a sense in which he
did _not_ make the human beings who have "insolently defiled" them; but
we may at least say that the human will was concerned not only in the
"defiling" but in the production of the defilers, while it was _not_
concerned in the production of those "pools and streams." And we may
conjecture that if Mr. Ruskin had been asked to decide whether the
"pools and streams" should retain their original clearness and beauty,
and the human beings remain unproduced, or whether the latter should
come into existence and the "pools and streams" be defiled--he would
have stood for the first alternative. But if he afterwards followed out
his decision to its consequence, it would make an end of what Mr. Bayne
rightly calls the "communistic" element in his writings. It is painfully
certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth had been disgusted by "people
from Birthwaite" before the "Excursion" was written, that poem would
have been very different here and there.
* * * * *
Mr. John Addington Symonds writes much, and he writes with absorbing
pains. When he called his new book _Sketches and Studies in Italy_
(Smith, Elder, & Co.), had he forgotten a previous title of his,
_Sketches in Italy and Greece_? In any case there is a wide difference
between the two volumes; in the former we had more of the traveller, in
the latter we have more of the scholar, though the traveller is still
present; for instance, in the Essay, "Amalfi, Pæstum, Capri," and in the
"Lombard Vignettes." In the Essay on the "Orfeo" of Poliziano, and that
on the "Popular Italian Poetry of the Renaissance," we are again glad to
recognize the author's masterly power in certain kinds of translation;
and those the kinds in which the labourers are few, though the harvest
is so large. In about seventy pages, close pages it is true, Mr. Symonds
presents us with a sketch of Florentine history, the like of which, for
compactness and minuteness of information, one knows not where to seek.
Mr. Symonds is a striking example of the modern school of
"culture"--using that word in its more special sense. Unwearied in the
pursuit of detail, it occasionally tires the reader. There is a want of
emphasis--not to say a shamefaced avoidance of it; there is the want of
grasp which comes of the absence of hearty controlling emotion, or of
any purpose beyond what may belong to the monograph before you. There is
too much colour, and too little motion--the reader would even be glad of
a jolt now and then; almost anything rather than this eternally grave
gliding manner, in which the end is like the beginning, the beginning
like the middle, and the _quorsum hæc?_ seldom answered with anything
like energy. If we take an Essay like that on "Lucretius," we become
conscious, indeed, of an effort, but it seems rather an effort to lift a
weight, than the effort of a living mind in free movement over a large
subject. Inevitably we have much that is true, very much of refinement
and accomplishment, and of course a good aperçu now and then; but such
interest as there is appears a little forced, as if the author only
half-believed in his own points, and too often endeavoured to give an
air of breadth to literary stippling by mere largeness of phrase. These
hints apply (in our opinion) with peculiar force to the paper on
"Lucretius;" but they are not wholly inapplicable to that entitled
"Antinous," which does not fall far short of being tedious. But no
apology was necessary for reprinting the essays on blank verse, &c.,
which are contained in the Appendix, though in those also there seems an
excessive tendency to make small "points," and force large meanings on
trifles. The volume has a finely-executed steel engraving of the
Ildefonso group (Antinous) in the museum at Madrid.
* * * * *
There is nothing rude, we trust, in wondering aloud how many readers
will know quite off-hand, without glancing lower down, who wrote this
exquisite little poem, though scarcely any one will read it without a
sob, and none will ever forget it:--
"My little son, who looked from thoughtful eyes,
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
His mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So, when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath and say,
'I will be sorry for their childishness.'"
Only we hope the number of those who can readily assign the poem to its
author is after all, considerable: for it would be an ill omen if "The
Angel in the House," "Faithful for Ever," the "Unknown Eros," and their
companion poems did not find a fairly large, as well as a choice public.
"The Unknown Eros, and other Odes," was published in 1877. Though it
contained the little poem we have just quoted, and a few others of the
most pellucid simplicity and the most homely sweetness, these were found
in the company of "odes" in which the theme was as high-strung as the
title, and a few in which the author's peculiarities were stretched to
the utmost. On the whole that volume could hardly be supposed to appeal
to any but a few. Several years ago, there was a very cheap edition of
"Tamerton Church Tower," and most of the other poems (including the
"Angel in the House"), and we should conjecture that it sold well--but
it is now out of print, we are told. We have now, published by Messrs.
George Bell & Sons, a selection from Mr. Patmore's poems, made by Mr.
Richard Garnett (himself a poet) and entitled _Florilegium Amantis_. It
makes 230 pages in a very handy little volume, and contains some of the
most exquisite things Mr. Patmore has printed; along with a few that are
new to us. We are not sure that we miss many of the very best (or
best-loved) pieces; but judging, as we are at the moment compelled to
do, from the earlier editions of the poems, we fancy there has been some
"cooking,"--the sort of thing which an affectionate reader who gets his
poet by heart always resents a little. The "Wedding Sermon," as we have
it here, looks like an extension of Dean Churchill's letter to Frederick
in "Faithful for Ever"--though we note some changes in the old familiar
lines. Some very charming touches are omitted in "The Rosy Bosom'd
Hours;" but we are not surprised, for we had them struck out once by an
editor! The first four lines, about the curtained and locked "coupé" in
the train, were, we presume, looked upon as sure to set the hogs
snorting over any such touch as "the isthmus of your waist." Some
portions of "The Victories of Love" seem to have been worked into
"Amelia." The piece entitled "Alexander and Lycon" does not strike us as
being good enough for its company. But certainly we know of no such
"lover's garland" as this, and do not well see how there can be such
another. This must not be taken to imply that Mr. Patmore will seem to
every thoughtful reader consistent in his presentation of the ethics of
his topic. For example, Dean Churchill's Sermon will not hang together
with Mrs. Graham's beautiful letter to Frederick upon the difficulties
of married life.
If there is any real defect in this nosegay, it is, perhaps, that we do
not see a little more of Lady Clitheroe, with her ever-delightful
humour. But perhaps Mr. Garnett--or Mr. Patmore, looking over his
shoulder--remembered Mr. Shandy's advice to my Uncle Toby, to eschew
mirth while paying his addresses to Widow Wadman. We, however, are under
no restraint in this respect, and recommend everybody who takes up Mr.
Patmore to make the most of Lady Clitheroe, and not to pass
thoughtlessly over her most playful sayings; for they are usually quite
as wise and good as the serious passage which we now extract from her
letter to a newly-married couple:--
"Age has romance almost as sweet,
And much more generous than this
Of your's and John's. With all the bliss
Of the evenings when you coo'd with him,
And upset home for your sole whim,
You might have envied, were you wise,
The tears within your mother's eyes
Which, I dare say you did not see.
But let that pass! Yours yet will be
I hope, as happy, kind, and true
As lives which now seem void to you.
Have you not seen shop-painters paste
Their gold in sheets, then rub to waste
Full half, and, lo, you read the name?
Well, Time, my dear, does much the same
With this unmeaning glare of love."
These are the last words of the book, and, having read them, the worst
enemy of lovers' garlands will not accuse Mr. Patmore of "putting stuff
and nonsense into people's heads" about love and marriage.
Two more slight but perhaps not uninteresting remarks. It may be from
our ignorance, but we have never been able perfectly to enjoy the
lines--
"It was as if a harp _with wires_,
Was traversed by the breath I drew."
The force of the "harp" suggestion is plain, and it is good, but why "a
harp _with wires_?" The other small matter is amusing. The piece in
praise of England (p. 76), reproduced from "Faithful for Ever," is dated
1856, and this is the only date given in the volume. What does it mean?
We conjecture that Mr. Patmore has an almost savage wish to make it
clear that since what he has elsewhere called "the year of the great
crime, when the false English nobles, with their Jew, slew their trust,"
he thinks this beautiful description has become inapplicable to his
country:--
"Remnant of Honour, brooding in the dark,
Over your bitter cark,
Staring, as Rizpah stared, astonied seven days,
Upon the corpses of so many sons
Who loved her once,
_Dead in the dim and lion-haunted ways_,
Who could have dreamt
That times should come like these?"
Those are a few of the bitter lines about England which abound in "The
Unknown Eros, and other Odes."
* * * * *
Among books to possess--books to be bought, begged, or stolen, pleasant
to look at, pleasant to dip into, and useful to refer to, we give a
place in the front rank to _Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect_,
by William Barnes (C. Kegan Paul & Co.), and nobody will dispute this
award. Many of these poems are familiar upon the tongue, or laid up
silent-sweet in the memory of hundreds of world-weary Cockneys, who
never set eyes on a Dorset vale, and probably never will. Mr. Barnes
writes a modest and characteristic preface explaining that two of these
three Collections of rural poems had long been out of print (we are glad
to hear it), and also calling attention to the glossary at the end of
the volume, "with some hints on Dorset word-shapes." Mr. Barnes is past
reviewing, and we will only add that this complete collection (467
pages) forms a handsome and well-printed volume, and is altogether a
thing to be delightedly thankful for.
* * * * *
Titles often prove misleading things, and it is not often that the
outside of any book gives the faintest hint of its quality, unless it
tells you, or nearly tells you, the publisher's name, for of course
there are publishers who very rarely issue bad, or even weak books.
_Memories: a Life's Epilogue. New Edition. With a Lament for Princess
Alice._ This is so very unpromising a title-page that if it had not been
for the names, Longmans, Green & Co. at the foot of it, we might well
have begun to turn over the leaves with some prejudice against the
anonymous author. But a very casual glance informs the reader, in this
case, that he has to deal with a highly intelligent man of the old
school, with plenty of caustic humour in him. The author appears to be a
gentleman advanced in years, and the "Memoirs" consist of recollections
of incidents in his father's life and his own, going back at least as
far as the days of Cribb and Molyneux, and taking in some pleasant
scenes of Continental travel. There is something exceedingly quaint,
almost ludicrous, in the author's way of employing the Spenserian
stanza, and as it is not always clear that he is conscious of the humour
there is in it, the reader's attention is kept on the alert in the very
last way that would commend itself to a critic:--
"The matron of the house obligingly
Led him to two large rooms on the first floor,
Where he would have more light and liberty,
With a good walk along the corridor;
Besides which, they expected one or more
Nice gentlemen to-morrow afternoon.
The gentleman who left the day before--
Poor man! he had a cough would kill him soon--
Ten months he had been with them on the twelfth of June."
This is certainly odd, and the puzzle is that though the author, as we
have said, has true and biting humour in him, he never drives his stanza
with the conscious _lilt_ that you find in, for example, Byron's use of
a substantially kindred measure in "Beppo," or "Morgante Maggiore." Take
the first lines that occur to one's mind in the latter:--
"There being a want of water in the place,
Orlando, like a trusty brother, said,
Morgante, I could wish you in this case
To go for water. You shall be obeyed," &c.
Here Byron is making the flat prose of the metre (so to speak), a source
of humour in itself: but we cannot find that the author of these
"Memories" intends anything of the kind. We agree with some of our
brethren in finding the occasional lyrics good, and the opening lines of
the seventh canto contain hints of genuine poetic quality. Altogether
the book is a noticeable budget of gossip in verse, with not a few
strong, pointed passages to relieve the effect of the flat or weak
pages; which latter are, to speak the truth, too numerous. We should
guess the author to be a very "clubable man."
* * * * *
This is a very pleasant title, at all events, _A Nook in the Appennines,
or a Summer Beneath the Chestnuts_, by Leader Scott, author of "The
Painter's Ordeal," &c., &c. With twenty-seven Illustrations, chiefly
from Original Sketches (C. Kegan Paul & Co.), and the book is pleasant
too. Finding the heat at Florence, on the 11th of June--not _last_
June--too much for them, it being 96° in the shade, an English family
flee to a nook in the mountains, where an old villa has been got ready
for them; and there they sit, "at the receipt of coolness," like Lamb's
"gentle giantess," till September. The villa on the Apennines is 2220
feet above the level of the sea, and the thermometer stands only at 70°
in the open air. Now 70° is ordinary agreeable summer heat for England;
though it is many degrees higher than anything we have seen (up to the
middle of July) in England this dreadful year. The illustrations are
helpful, and, without being obtrusively antiquarian, have most of them a
retrospective or historical interest, as well as the more obvious one
which is common to illustrations. The forty short chapters of which the
book consists are filled with sketches of the life our English friends
lived in the mountain nook, and of the manners and daily lives of the
peasantry by whom they were surrounded--and these will be more
instructive to a reader who knows a little about the Etruscans than to
one who knows nothing of them. The interest of the narrative is never
strong, but it is strong enough to carry the attention equably forward
to the end, and there is no affectation; but it is a great mistake, and
an unkindness to the reader, to omit, in a case of this sort, giving a
sufficiently full, complete, and picturesque account of the travelling
party themselves. We ought to be told how many there were, their ages,
relationships, &c., and something of their previous travelling
experience, if any.
* * * * *