PLEASING AND PRATTLING
(Pall Mall Gazette, August 4, 1880.)
Sixty years ago, when Sir Walter Scott was inaugurating an era of historical romance, The Wolfe of Badenoch was a very popular book. To us its interest is more archæological than artistic, and its characters seem merely puppets parading in fourteenth-century costume. It is true our grandfathers thought differently. They liked novels in which the heroine exclaims, ‘Peace with thine impudence, sir knave. Dost thou dare to speak thus in presence of the Lady Eleanore de Selby? . . . A greybeard’s ire shall never—,’ while the hero remarks that ‘the welkin reddenes i’ the west.’ In fact, they considered that language like this is exceedingly picturesque and gives the necessary historical perspective. Nowadays, however, few people have the time to read a novel that requires a glossary to explain it, and we fear that without a glossary the general reader will hardly appreciate the value of such expressions as ‘gnoffe,’ ‘bowke,’ ‘herborow,’ ‘papelarde,’ ‘couepe,’ ‘rethes,’ ‘pankers,’ ‘agroted lorrel,’ and ‘horrow tallow-catch,’ all of which occur in the first few pages of The Wolfe of Badenoch. In a novel we want life, not learning; and, unfortunately, Sir Thomas Lauder lays himself open to the criticism Jonson made on Spenser, that ‘in affecting the ancients he writ no language.’ Still, there is a healthy spirit of adventure in the book, and no doubt many people will be interested to see the kind of novel the public liked in 1825.
Keep My Secret, by Miss G. M. Robins, is very different. It is quite modern both in manner and in matter. The heroine, Miss Olga Damien, when she is a little girl tries to murder Mr. Victor Burnside. Mr. Burnside, who is tall, blue-eyed and amber-haired, makes her promise never to mention the subject to any one; this, in fact, is the secret that gives the title to the book. The result is that Miss Damien is blackmailed by a fascinating and unscrupulous uncle and is nearly burnt to death in the secret chamber of an old castle. The novel at the end gets too melodramatic in character and the plot becomes a chaos of incoherent incidents, but the writing is clever and bright. It is just the book, in fact, for a summer holiday, as it is never dull and yet makes no demands at all upon the intellect.
Mrs. Chetwynd gives us a new type of widow. As a rule, in fiction widows are delightful, designing and deceitful; but Mrs. Dorriman is not by any means a Cleopatra in crape. She is a weak, retiring woman, very feeble and very feminine, and with the simplicity that is characteristic of such sweet and shallow natures she allows her brother to defraud her of all her property. The widow is rather a bore and the brother is quite a bear, but Margaret Rivers who, to save her sister from poverty, marries a man she does not love, is a cleverly conceived character, and Lady Lyons is an admirable old dowager. The book can be read without any trouble and was probably written without any trouble also. The style is prattling and pleasing.
The plot of Delamere is not very new. On the death of her husband, Mrs. De Ruthven discovers that the estates belong by right not to her son Raymond but to her niece Fleurette. As she keeps her knowledge to herself, a series of complications follows, but the cousins are ultimately united in marriage and the story ends happily. Mr. Curzon writes in a clever style, and though its construction is rather clumsy the novel is a thoroughly interesting one.
A Daughter of Fife tells us of the love of a young artist for a Scotch fisher-girl. The character sketches are exceptionally good, especially that of David Promoter, a fisherman who leaves his nets to preach the gospel, and the heroine is quite charming till she becomes civilised. The book is a most artistic combination of romantic feeling with realistic form, and it is pleasant to read descriptions of Scotch scenery that do not represent the land of mist and mountain as a sort of chromolithograph from the Brompton Road.
In Mr. Speight’s novel, A Barren Title, we have an impoverished earl who receives an allowance from his relations on condition of his remaining single, being all the time secretly married and the father of a grown-up son. The story is improbable and amusing.
On the whole, there is a great deal to be said for our ordinary English novelists. They have all some story to tell, and most of them tell it in an interesting manner. Where they fail is in concentration of style. Their characters are far too eloquent and talk themselves to tatters. What we want is a little more reality and a little less rhetoric. We are most grateful to them that they have not as yet accepted any frigid formula, nor stereotyped themselves into a school, but we wish that they would talk less and think more. They lead us through a barren desert of verbiage to a mirage that they call life; we wander aimlessly through a very wilderness of words in search of one touch of nature. However, one should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
(1) The Wolfe of Badenoch: A Historical Romance of the Fourteenth Century. By Sir Thomas Lauder. (Hamilton, Adams and Co.)
(2) Keep My Secret. By G. M. Robins. (Bentley and Son.)
(3) Mrs. Dorriman. By the Hon. Mrs. Henry Chetwynd. (Chapman and Hall.)
(4) Delamere. By G. Curzon. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)
(5) A Daughter of Fife. By Amelia Barr. (James Clarke and Co.)
(6) A Barren Title. By T. W. Speight. (Chatto and Windus.)
BALZAC IN ENGLISH
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 13, 1886.)
Many years ago, in a number of All the Year Round, Charles Dickens complained that Balzac was very little read in England, and although since then the public has become more familiar with the great masterpieces of French fiction, still it may be doubted whether the Comédie Humaine is at all appreciated or understood by the general run of novel readers. It is really the greatest monument that literature has produced in our century, and M. Taine hardly exaggerates when he says that, after Shakespeare, Balzac is our most important magazine of documents on human nature. Balzac’s aim, in fact, was to do for humanity what Buffon had done for the animal creation. As the naturalist studied lions and tigers, so the novelist studied men and women. Yet he was no mere reporter. Photography and procès-verbal were not the essentials of his method. Observation gave him the facts of life, but his genius converted facts into truths, and truths into truth. He was, in a word, a marvellous combination of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. The latter he bequeathed to his disciples; the former was entirely his own. The distinction between such a book as M. Zola’s L’Assommoir and such a book as Balzac’s Illusions Perdues is the distinction between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. ‘All Balzac’s characters,’ said Baudelaire, ‘are gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.’ He was, of course, accused of being immoral. Few writers who deal directly with life escape that charge. His answer to the accusation was characteristic and conclusive. ‘Whoever contributes his stone to the edifice of ideas,’ he wrote, ‘whoever proclaims an abuse, whoever sets his mark upon an evil to be abolished, always passes for immoral. If you are true in your portraits, if, by dint of daily and nightly toil, you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the world, the word immoral is thrown in your face.’ The morals of the personages of the Comédie Humaine are simply the morals of the world around us. They are part of the artist’s subject-matter; they are not part of his method. If there be any need of censure it is to life, not to literature, that it should be given. Balzac, besides, is essentially universal. He sees life from every point of view. He has no preferences and no prejudices. He does not try to prove anything. He feels that the spectacle of life contains its own secret. ‘II crée un monde et se tait.’
And what a world it is! What a panorama of passions! What a pell-mell of men and women! It was said of Trollope that he increased the number of our acquaintances without adding to our visiting list; but after the Comédie Humaine one begins to believe that the only real people are the people who have never existed. Lucien de Rubempré, le Père Goriot, Ursule Mirouët, Marguerite Claës, the Baron Hulot, Madame Marneffe, le Cousin Pons, De Marsay—all bring with them a kind of contagious illusion of life. They have a fierce vitality about them: their existence is fervent and fiery-coloured; we not merely feel for them but we see them—they dominate our fancy and defy scepticism. A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. Who would care to go out to an evening party to meet Tomkins, the friend of one’s boyhood, when one can sit at home with Lucien de Rubempré? It is pleasanter to have the entrée to Balzac’s society than to receive cards from all the duchesses in May fair.
In spite of this, there are many people who have declared the Comédie Humaine to be indigestible. Perhaps it is: but then what about truffles? Balzac’s publisher refused to be disturbed by any such criticism as that. ‘Indigestible, is it?’ he exclaimed with what, for a publisher, was rare good sense. ‘Well, I should hope so; who ever thinks of a dinner that isn’t?’ And our English publisher, Mr. Routledge, clearly agrees with M. Poulet-Malassis, as he is occupied in producing a complete translation of the Comédie Humaine. The two volumes that at present lie before us contain César Birotteau, that terrible tragedy of finance, and L’lllustre Gaudissart, the apotheosis of the commercial traveller, the Duchesse de Langeais, most marvellous of modern love stories, Le Chef d’Œuvre Inconnu, from which Mr. Henry James took his Madonna of the Future, and that extraordinary romance Une Passion dans le Désert. The choice of stories is quite excellent, but the translations are very unequal, and some of them are positively bad. L’lllustre Gaudissart, for instance, is full of the most grotesque mistakes, mistakes that would disgrace a schoolboy. ‘Bon conseil vaut un œil dans la main’ is translated ‘Good advice is an egg in the hand’! ‘Écus rebelles’ is rendered ‘rebellious lucre,’ and such common expressions as ‘faire la barbe,’ ‘attendre la vente,’ ‘n’entendre rien,’ pâlir sur une affaire,’ are all mistranslated. ‘Des bois de quoi se faire un cure-dent’ is not ‘a few trees to slice into toothpicks,’ but ‘as much timber as would make a toothpick’; ‘son horloge enfermée dans une grande armoire oblongue’ is not ‘a clock which he kept shut up in a large oblong closet’ but simply a clock in a tall clock-case; ‘journal viager’ is not ‘an annuity,’ ‘garce’ is not the same as ‘farce,’ and ‘dessins des Indes’ are not ‘drawings of the Indies.’ On the whole, nothing can be worse than this translation, and if Mr. Routledge wishes the public to read his version of the Comédie Humaine, he should engage translators who have some slight knowledge of French.
César Birotteau is better, though it is not by any means free from mistakes. ‘To suffer under the Maximum’ is an absurd rendering of ‘subir le maximum’; ‘perse’ is ‘chintz,’ not ‘Persian chintz’; ‘rendre le pain bénit’ is not ‘to take the wafer’; ‘rivière’ is hardly a ‘fillet of diamonds’; and to translate ‘son cœur avait un calus à l’endroit du loyer’ by ‘his heart was a callus in the direction of a lease’ is an insult to two languages. On the whole, the best version is that of the Duchesse de Langeais, though even this leaves much to be desired. Such a sentence as ‘to imitate the rough logician who marched before the Pyrrhonians while denying his own movement’ entirely misses the point of Balzac’s ‘imiter le rude logicien qui marchait devant les pyrrhoniens, qui niaient le mouvement.’
We fear Mr. Routledge’s edition will not do. It is well printed and nicely bound; but his translators do not understand French. It is a great pity, for La Comédie Humaine is one of the masterpieces of the age.
Balzac’s Novels in English. The Duchesse de Langeais and Other Stories; César Birotteau. (Routledge and Sons.)
TWO NEW NOVELS
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 16, 1880.)
Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their culture, and Mr. G. Manville Fenn’s last venture is no exception to the general rule. The Master of the Ceremonies is turbid, terrifying and thrilling. It contains, besides many ‘moving accidents by flood and field,’ an elopement, an abduction, a bigamous marriage, an attempted assassination, a duel, a suicide, and a murder. The murder, we must acknowledge, is a masterpiece. It would do credit to Gaboriau, and should make Miss Braddon jealous. The Newgate Calendar itself contains nothing more fascinating, and what higher praise than this can be given to a sensational novel? Not that Lady Teigne, the hapless victim, is killed in any very new or subtle manner. She is merely strangled in bed, like Desdemona; but the circumstances of the murder are so peculiar that Claire Denville, in common with the reader, suspects her own father of being guilty, while the father is convinced that the real criminal is his eldest son. Stuart Denville himself, the Master of the Ceremonies, is most powerfully drawn. He is a penniless, padded dandy who, by a careful study of the ‘grand style’ in deportment, has succeeded in making himself the Brummel of the promenade and the autocrat of the Assembly Rooms. A light comedian by profession, he is suddenly compelled to play the principal part in a tragedy. His shallow, trivial nature is forced into the loftiest heroism, the noblest self-sacrifice. He becomes a hero against his will. The butterfly goes to martyrdom, the fop has to become fine. Round this character centres, or rather should centre, the psychological interest of the book, but unfortunately Mr. Fenn has insisted on crowding his story with unnecessary incident. He might have made of his novel ‘A Soul’s Tragedy,’ but he has produced merely a melodrama in three volumes. The Master of the Ceremonies is a melancholy example of the fatal influence of Drury Lane on literature. Still, it should be read, for though Mr. Fenn has offered up his genius as a holocaust to Mr. Harris, he is never dull, and his style is on the whole very good. We wish, however, that he would not try to give articulate form to inarticulate exclamations. Such a passage as this is quite dreadful and fails, besides, in producing the effect it aims at:
‘He—he—he, hi—hi—hi, hec—hec—hec, ha—ha—ha! ho—ho! Bless my—hey—ha! hey—ha! hugh—hugh—hugh! Oh dear me! Oh—why don’t you—heck—heck—heck—heck—heck! shut the—ho—ho—ho—ho—hugh—hugh—window before I—ho—ho—ho—ho!’
This horrible jargon is supposed to convey the impression of a lady coughing. It is, of course, a mere meaningless monstrosity on a par with spelling a sneeze. We hope that Mr. Fenn will not again try these theatrical tricks with language, for he possesses a rare art—the art of telling a story well.
A Statesman’s Love, the author tells us in a rather mystical preface, was written ‘to show that the alchemist-like transfiguration supposed to be wrought in our whole nature by that passion has no existence in fact,’ but it cannot be said to prove this remarkable doctrine.
It is an exaggerated psychological study of a modern woman, a sort of picture by limelight, full of coarse colours and violent contrasts, not by any means devoid of cleverness but essentially false and over-emphasised. The heroine, Helen Rohan by name, tells her own story and, as she takes three volumes to do it in, we weary of the one point of view. Life to be intelligible should be approached from many sides, and valuable though the permanent ego may be in philosophy, the permanent ego in fiction soon becomes a bore. There are, however, some interesting scenes in the novel, and a good portrait of the Young Pretender, for though the heroine is absolutely a creation of the nineteenth century, the background of the story is historical and deals with the Rebellion of ’45. As for the style, it is often original and picturesque; here and there are strong individual touches and brilliant passages; but there is also a good deal of pretence and a good deal of carelessness.
What can be said, for instance, about such expressions as these, taken at random from the second volume,—‘evanishing,’ ‘solitary loneness,’ ‘in my then mood,’ ‘the bees might advantage by to-day,’ ‘I would not listen reverently as did the other some who went,’ ‘entangling myself in the net of this retiari,’ and why should Bassanio’s beautiful speech in the trial scene be deliberately attributed to Shylock? On the whole, A Statesman’s Love cannot be said to be an artistic success; but still it shows promise and, some day, the author who, to judge by the style, is probably a woman, may do good work. This, however, will require pruning, prudence and patience. We shall see.
(1) The Master of the Ceremonies. By G. Manville Fenn. (Ward and Downey.)
(2) A Statesman’s Love. By Emile Bauche. (Blackwood and Co.)
BEN JONSON
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 20, 1886.)
In selecting Mr. John Addington Symonds to write the life of Ben Jonson for his series of ‘English Worthies,’ Mr. Lang, no doubt, exercised a wise judgment. Mr. Symonds, like the author of Volpone, is a scholar and a man of letters; his book on Shakspeare’s Predecessors showed a marvellous knowledge of the Elizabethan period, and he is a recognised authority on the Italian Renaissance. The last is not the least of his qualifications. Without a full appreciation of the meaning of the Humanistic movement it is impossible to understand the great struggle between the Classical form and the Romantic spirit which is the chief critical characteristic of the golden age of the English drama, an age when Shakespeare found his chief adversary, not among his contemporaries, but in Seneca, and when Jonson armed himself with Aristotle to win the suffrages of a London audience. Mr. Symonds’ book, consequently, will be opened with interest. It does not, of course, contain much that is new about Jonson’s life. But the facts of Jonson’s life are already well known, and in books of this kind what is true is of more importance than what is new, appreciation more valuable than discovery. Scotchmen, however, will, no doubt, be interested to find that Mr. Symonds has succeeded in identifying Jonson’s crest with that of the Johnstones of Annandale, and the story of the way the literary Titan escaped from hanging, by proving that he could read, is graphically told.
On the whole, we have a vivid picture of the man as he lived. Where picturesqueness is required, Mr. Symonds is always good. The usual comparison with Dr. Johnson is, of course, brought out. Few of ‘Rare Ben’s’ biographers spare us that, and the point is possibly a natural one to make. But when Mr. Symonds calls upon us to notice that both men made a journey to Scotland, and that ‘each found in a Scotchman his biographer,’ the parallel loses all value. There is an M in Monmouth and an M in Macedon, and Drummond of Hawthornden and Boswell of Auchinleck were both born the other side of the Tweed; but from such analogies nothing is to be learned. There is no surer way of destroying a similarity than to strain it.
As for Mr. Symonds’ estimate of Jonson’s genius, it is in many points quite excellent. He ranks him with the giants rather than with the gods, with those who compel our admiration by their untiring energy and huge strength of intellectual muscle, not with those ‘who share the divine gifts of creative imagination and inevitable instinct.’ Here he is right. Pelion more than Parnassus was Jonson’s home. His art has too much effort about it, too much definite intention. His style lacks the charm of chance. Mr. Symonds is right also in the stress he lays on the extraordinary combination in Jonson’s work of the most concentrated realism with encyclopædic erudition. In Jonson’s comedies London slang and learned scholarship go hand in hand. Literature was as living a thing to him as life itself. He used his classical lore not merely to give form to his verse, but to give flesh and blood to the persons of his plays. He could build up a breathing creature out of quotations. He made the poets of Greece and Rome terribly modern, and introduced them to the oddest company. His very culture is an element in his coarseness. There are moments when one is tempted to liken him to a beast that has fed off books.
We cannot, however, agree with Mr. Symonds when he says that Jonson ‘rarely touched more than the outside of character,’ that his men and women are ‘the incarnations of abstract properties rather than living human beings,’ that they are in fact mere ‘masqueraders and mechanical puppets.’ Eloquence is a beautiful thing but rhetoric ruins many a critic, and Mr. Symonds is essentially rhetorical. When, for instance, he tells us that ‘Jonson made masks,’ while ‘Dekker and Heywood created souls,’ we feel that he is asking us to accept a crude judgment for the sake of a smart antithesis. It is, of course, true that we do not find in Jonson the same growth of character that we find in Shakespeare, and we may admit that most of the characters in Jonson’s plays are, so to speak, ready-made. But a ready-made character is not necessarily either mechanical or wooden, two epithets Mr. Symonds uses constantly in his criticism.
We cannot tell, and Shakespeare himself does not tell us, why Iago is evil, why Regan and Goneril have hard hearts, or why Sir Andrew Aguecheek is a fool. It is sufficient that they are what they are, and that nature gives warrant for their existence. If a character in a play is lifelike, if we recognise it as true to nature, we have no right to insist on the author explaining its genesis to us. We must accept it as it is: and in the hands of a good dramatist mere presentation can take the place of analysis, and indeed is often a more dramatic method, because a more direct one. And Jonson’s characters are true to nature. They are in no sense abstractions; they are types. Captain Bobadil and Captain Tucca, Sir John Daw and Sir Amorous La Foole, Volpone and Mosca, Subtle and Sir Epicure Mammon, Mrs. Purecraft and the Rabbi Busy are all creatures of flesh and blood, none the less lifelike because they are labelled. In this point Mr. Symonds seems to us unjust towards Jonson.
We think, also, that a special chapter might have been devoted to Jonson as a literary critic. The creative activity of the English Renaissance is so great that its achievements in the sphere of criticism are often overlooked by the student. Then, for the first time, was language treated as an art. The laws of expression and composition were investigated and formularised. The importance of words was recognised. Romanticism, Realism and Classicism fought their first battles. The dramatists are full of literary and art criticisms, and amused the public with slashing articles on one another in the form of plays.
Mr. Symonds, of course, deals with Jonson in his capacity as a critic, and always with just appreciation, but the whole subject is one that deserves fuller and more special treatment.
Some small inaccuracies, too, should be corrected in the second edition. Dryden, for instance, was not ‘Jonson’s successor on the laureate’s throne,’ as Mr. Symonds eloquently puts it, for Sir William Davenant came between them, and when one remembers the predominance of rhyme in Shakespeare’s early plays, it is too much to say that ‘after the production of the first part of Tamburlaine blank verse became the regular dramatic metre of the public stage.’ Shakespeare did not accept blank verse at once as a gift from Marlowe’s hand, but himself arrived at it after a long course of experiments in rhyme. Indeed, some of Mr. Symonds’ remarks on Marlowe are very curious. To say of his Edward II., for instance, that it ‘is not at all inferior to the work of Shakespeare’s younger age,’ is very niggardly and inadequate praise, and comes strangely from one who has elsewhere written with such appreciation of Marlowe’s great genius; while to call Marlowe Jonson’s ‘master’ is to make for him an impossible claim. In comedy Marlowe has nothing whatever to teach Jonson; in tragedy Jonson sought for the classical not the romantic form.
As for Mr. Symonds’ style, it is, as usual, very fluent, very picturesque and very full of colour. Here and there, however, it is really irritating. Such a sentence as ‘the tavern had the defects of its quality’ is an awkward Gallicism; and when Mr. Symonds, after genially comparing Jonson’s blank verse to the front of Whitehall (a comparison, by the way, that would have enraged the poet beyond measure) proceeds to play a fantastic aria on the same string, and tells us that ‘Massinger reminds us of the intricacies of Sansovino, Shakespeare of Gothic aisles or heaven’s cathedral . . . Ford of glittering Corinthian colonnades, Webster of vaulted crypts, . . . Marlowe of masoned clouds, and Marston, in his better moments, of the fragmentary vigour of a Roman ruin,’ one begins to regret that any one ever thought of the unity of the arts. Similes such as these obscure; they do not illumine. To say that Ford is like a glittering Corinthian colonnade adds nothing to our knowledge of either Ford or Greek architecture. Mr. Symonds has written some charming poetry, but his prose, unfortunately, is always poetical prose, never the prose of a poet. Still, the volume is worth reading, though decidedly Mr. Symonds, to use one of his own phrases, has ‘the defects of his quality.’
‘English Worthies.’ Edited by Andrew Lang. Ben Jonson. By John Addington Symonds. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
THE POETS’ CORNER—I
(Pall Mall Gazette, September 27, 1886.)
Among the social problems of the nineteenth century the tramp has always held an important position, but his appearance among the nineteenth-century poets is extremely remarkable. Not that a tramp’s mode of life is at all unsuited to the development of the poetic faculty. Far from it! He, if any one, should possess that freedom of mood which is so essential to the artist, for he has no taxes to pay and no relations to worry him. The man who possesses a permanent address, and whose name is to be found in the Directory, is necessarily limited and localised. Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living. Was not Homer himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a caravan? It is then with feelings of intense expectation that we open the little volume that lies before us. It is entitled Low Down, by Two Tramps, and is marvellous even to look at. It is clear that art has at last reached the criminal classes. The cover is of brown paper like the covers of Mr. Whistler’s brochures. The printing exhibits every fantastic variation of type, and the pages range in colour from blue to brown, from grey to sage green and from rose pink to chrome yellow. The Philistines may sneer at this chromatic chaos, but we do not. As the painters are always pilfering from the poets, why should not the poet annex the domain of the painter and use colour for the expression of his moods and music: blue for sentiment, and red for passion, grey for cultured melancholy, and green for descriptions? The book, then, is a kind of miniature rainbow, and with all its varied sheets is as lovely as an advertisement hoarding. As for the peripatetics—alas! they are not nightingales. Their note is harsh and rugged, Mr. G. R. Sims is the god of their idolatry, their style is the style of the Surrey Theatre, and we are sorry to see that that disregard of the rights of property which always characterises the able-bodied vagrant is extended by our tramps from the defensible pilfering from hen-roosts to the indefensible pilfering from poets. When we read such lines as:
And builded him a pyramid, four square,
Open to all the sky and every wind,
we feel that bad as poultry-snatching is, plagiarism is worse. Facilis descensus Averno! From highway robbery and crimes of violence one sinks gradually to literary petty larceny. However, there are coarsely effective poems in the volume, such as A Super’s Philosophy, Dick Hewlett, a ballad of the Californian school, and Gentleman Bill; and there is one rather pretty poem called The Return of Spring:
When robins hop on naked boughs,
And swell their throats with song,
When lab’rers trudge behind their ploughs,
And blithely whistle their teams along;When glints of summer sunshine chase
Park shadows on the distant hills,
And scented tufts of pansies grace
Moist grots that ’scape rude Borean chills.
The last line is very disappointing. No poet, nowadays, should write of ‘rude Boreas’; he might just as well call the dawn ‘Aurora,’ or say that ‘Flora decks the enamelled meads.’ But there are some nice touches in the poem, and it is pleasant to find that tramps have their harmless moments. On the whole, the volume, if it is not quite worth reading, is at least worth looking at. The fool’s motley in which it is arrayed is extremely curious and extremely characteristic.
Mr. Irwin’s muse comes to us more simply clad, and more gracefully. She gains her colour-effect from the poet, not from the publisher. No cockneyism or colloquialism mars the sweetness of her speech. She finds music for every mood, and form for every feeling. In art as in life the law of heredity holds good. On est toujours fits de quelqu’un. And so it is easy to see that Mr. Irwin is a fervent admirer of Mr. Matthew Arnold. But he is in no sense a plagiarist. He has succeeded in studying a fine poet without stealing from him—a very difficult thing to do—and though many of the reeds through which he blows have been touched by other lips, yet he is able to draw new music from them. Like most of our younger poets, Mr. Irwin is at his best in his sonnets, and those entitled The Seeker after God and The Pillar of the Empire are really remarkable. All through this volume, however, one comes across good work, and the descriptions of Indian scenery are excellent. India, in fact, is the picturesque background to these poems, and her monstrous beasts, strange flowers and fantastic birds are used with much subtlety for the production of artistic effect. Perhaps there is a little too much about the pipal-tree, but when we have a proper sense of Imperial unity, no doubt the pipal-tree will be as dear and as familiar to us as the oaks and elms of our own woodlands.
(1) Low Down: Wayside Thoughts in Ballad and Other Verse. By Two Tramps. (Redway.)
(2) Rhymes and Renderings. By H. C. Irwin. (David Stott.)
A RIDE THROUGH MOROCCO
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 8, 1886.)
Morocco is a sort of paradox among countries, for though it lies westward of Piccadilly yet it is purely Oriental in character, and though it is but three hours’ sail from Europe yet it makes you feel (to use the forcible expression of an American writer) as if you had been ‘taken up by the scruff of the neck and set down in the Old Testament.’ Mr. Hugh Stutfield has ridden twelve hundred miles through it, penetrated to Fez and Wazan, seen the lovely gate at Mequinez and the Hassen Tower by Rabat, feasted with sheikhs and fought with robbers, lived in an atmosphere of Moors, mosques and mirages, visited the city of the lepers and the slave-market of Sus, and played loo under the shadow of the Atlas Mountains. He is not an Herodotus nor a Sir John Mandeville, but he tells his stories very pleasantly. His book, on the whole, is delightful reading, for though Morocco is picturesque he does not weary us with word-painting; though it is poor he does not bore us with platitudes. Now and then he indulges in a traveller’s licence and thrills the simple reader with statements as amazing as they are amusing. The Moorish coinage, he tells us, is so cumbersome that if a man gives you change for half-a-crown you have to hire a donkey to carry it away; the Moorish language is so guttural that no one can ever hope to pronounce it aright who has not been brought up within hearing of the grunting of camels, a steady course of sneezing being, consequently, the only way by which a European can acquire anything like the proper accent; the Sultan does not know how much he is married, but he unquestionably is so to a very large extent: on the principle that you cannot have too much of a good thing a woman is valued in proportion to her stoutness, and so far from there being any reduction made in the marriage-market for taking a quantity, you must pay so much per pound; the Arabs believe the Shereef of Wazan to be such a holy man that, if he is guilty of taking champagne, the forbidden wine is turned into milk as he quaffs it, and if he gets extremely drunk he is merely in a mystical trance.
Mr. Stutfield, however, has his serious moments, and his account of the commerce, government and social life of the Moors is extremely interesting. It must be confessed that the picture he draws is in many respects a very tragic one. The Moors are the masters of a beautiful country and of many beautiful arts, but they are paralysed by their fatalism and pillaged by their rulers. Few races, indeed, have had a more terrible fall than these Moors. Of the great intellectual civilisation of the Arabs no trace remains. The names of Averroes and Almaimon, of Al Abbas and Ben Husa are quite unknown. Fez, once the Athens of Africa, the cradle of the sciences, is now a mere commercial caravansary. Its universities have vanished, its library is almost empty. Freedom of thought has been killed by the Koran, freedom of living by bad government. But Mr. Stutfield is not without hopes for the future. So far from agreeing with Lord Salisbury that ‘Morocco may go her own way,’ he strongly supports Captain Warren’s proposition that we should give up Gibraltar to Spain in exchange for Ceuta, and thereby prevent the Mediterranean from becoming a French lake, and give England a new granary for corn. The Moorish Empire, he warns us, is rapidly breaking up, and if in the ‘general scramble for Africa’ that has already begun, the French gain possession of Morocco, he points out that our supremacy over the Straits will be lost. Whatever may be thought of Mr. Stutfield’s political views, and his suggestions for ‘multiple control’ and ‘collective European action,’ there is no doubt that in Morocco England has interests to defend and a mission to pursue, and this part of the book should be carefully studied. As for the general reader who, we fear, is not as a rule interested in the question of ‘multiple control,’ if he is a sportsman, he will find in El Magreb a capital account of pig-sticking; if he is artistic, he will be delighted to know that the importation of magenta into Morocco is strictly prohibited; if criminal jurisprudence has any charms for him, he can examine a code that punishes slander by rubbing cayenne pepper into the lips of the offender; and if he is merely lazy, he can take a pleasant ride of twelve hundred miles in Mr. Stutfield’s company without stirring out of his armchair.
El Magreb: Twelve Hundred Miles’ Ride through Morocco. By Hugh Stutfield. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)
THE CHILDREN OF THE POETS
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886.)
The idea of this book is exceedingly charming. As children themselves are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection of the best poems written on children should be the most perfect of all anthologies. Yet, the book itself is not by any means a success. Many of the loveliest child-poems in our literature are excluded and not a few feeble and trivial poems are inserted. The editor’s work is characterised by sins of omission and of commission, and the collection, consequently, is very incomplete and very unsatisfactory. Andrew Marvell’s exquisite poem The Picture of Little T. C., for instance, does not appear in Mr. Robertson’s volume, nor the Young Love of the same author, nor the beautiful elegy Ben Jonson wrote on the death of Salathiel Pavy, the little boy-actor of his plays. Waller’s verses also, To My Young Lady Lucy Sidney, deserve a place in an anthology of this kind, and so do Mr. Matthew Arnold’s lines To a Gipsy Child, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee, a little lyric full of strange music and strange romance. There is possibly much to be said in favour of such a poem as that which ends with
And I thank my God with falling tears
For the things in the bottom drawer:
but how different it is from
I was a child, and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the wingèd Seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me
The selection from Blake, again, is very incomplete, many of the loveliest poems being excluded, such as those on The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found, the Cradle Song, Infant Joy, and others; nor can we find Sir Henry Wotton’s Hymn upon the Birth of Prince Charles, Sir William Jones’s dainty four-line epigram on The Babe, or the delightful lines To T. L. H., A Child, by Charles Lamb.
The gravest omission, however, is certainly that of Herrick. Not a single poem of his appears in Mr. Robertson’s collection. And yet no English poet has written of children with more love and grace and delicacy. His Ode on the Birth of Our Saviour, his poem To His Saviour, A Child: A Present by a Child, his Graces for Children, and his many lovely epitaphs on children are all of them exquisite works of art, simple, sweet and sincere.
An English anthology of child-poems that excludes Herrick is as an English garden without its roses and an English woodland without its singing birds; and for one verse of Herrick we would gladly give in exchange even those long poems by Mr. Ashby-Sterry, Miss Menella Smedley, and Mr. Lewis Morris (of Penrhyn), to which Mr. Robertson has assigned a place in his collection. Mr. Robertson, also, should take care when he publishes a poem to publish it correctly. Mr. Bret Harte’s Dickens in Camp, for instance, is completely spoiled by two ridiculous misprints. In the first line ‘dimpling’ is substituted for ‘drifting’ to the entire ruin of rhyme and reason, and in the ninth verse ‘the pensive glory that fills the Kentish hills’ appears as ‘the Persian glory . . . ’ with a large capital P! Mistakes such as these are quite unpardonable, and make one feel that, perhaps, after all it was fortunate for Herrick that he was left out. A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
As for Mr. Robertson’s preface, like most of the prefaces in the Canterbury Series, it is very carelessly written. Such a sentence as ‘I . . . believe that Mrs. Piatt’s poems, in particular, will come to many readers, fresh, as well as delightful contributions from across the ocean,’ is painful to read. Nor is the matter much better than the manner. It is fantastic to say that Raphael’s pictures of the Madonna and Child dealt a deadly blow to the monastic life, and to say, with reference to Greek art, that ‘Cupid by the side of Venus enables us to forget that most of her sighs are wanton’ is a very crude bit of art criticism indeed. Wordsworth, again, should hardly be spoken of as one who ‘was not, in the general, a man from whom human sympathies welled profusely,’ but this criticism is as nothing compared to the passage where Mr. Robertson tells us that the scene between Arthur and Hubert in King John is not true to nature because the child’s pleadings for his life are playful as well as piteous. Indeed, Mr. Robertson, forgetting Mamillius as completely as he misunderstands Arthur, states very clearly that Shakespeare has not given us any deep readings of child nature. Paradoxes are always charming, but judgments such as these are not paradoxical; they are merely provincial.
On the whole, Mr. Robertson’s book will not do. It is, we fully admit, an industrious compilation, but it is not an anthology, it is not a selection of the best, for it lacks the discrimination and good taste which is the essence of selection, and for the want of which no amount of industry can atone. The child-poems of our literature have still to be edited.
The Children of the Poets: An Anthology from English and American Writers of Three Generations. Edited, with an Introduction, by Eric S. Robertson. (Walter Scott.)
NEW NOVELS
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 28, 1886.)
Astray: A Tale of a Country Town, is a very serious volume. It has taken four people to write it, and even to read it requires assistance. Its dulness is premeditated and deliberate and comes from a laudable desire to rescue fiction from flippancy. It is, in fact, tedious from the noblest motives and wearisome through its good intentions. Yet the story itself is not an uninteresting one. Quite the contrary. It deals with the attempt of a young doctor to build up a noble manhood on the ruins of a wasted youth. Burton King, while little more than a reckless lad, forges the name of a dying man, is arrested and sent to penal servitude for seven years. On his discharge he comes to live with his sisters in a little country town and finds that his real punishment begins when he is free, for prison has made him a pariah. Still, through the nobility and self-sacrifice of his life, he gradually wins himself a position, and ultimately marries the prettiest girl in the book. His character is, on the whole, well drawn, and the authors have almost succeeded in making him good without making him priggish. The method, however, by which the story is told is extremely tiresome. It consists of an interminable series of long letters by different people and of extracts from various diaries. The book consequently is piecemeal and unsatisfactory. It fails in producing any unity of effect. It contains the rough material for a story, but is not a completed work of art. It is, in fact, more of a notebook than a novel. We fear that too many collaborators are like too many cooks and spoil the dinner. Still, in this tale of a country town there are certain solid qualities, and it is a book that one can with perfect safety recommend to other people.
Miss Rhoda Broughton belongs to a very different school. No one can ever say of her that she has tried to separate flippancy from fiction, and whatever harsh criticisms may be passed on the construction of her sentences, she at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin. We are sorry, however, to see from a perusal of Betty’s Visions that Miss Broughton has been attending the meetings of the Psychical Society in search of copy. Mysticism is not her mission, and telepathy should be left to Messrs. Myers and Gurney. In Philistia lies Miss Broughton’s true sphere, and to Philistia she should return. She knows more about the vanities of this world than about this world’s visions, and a possible garrison town is better than an impossible ghost-land.
That Other Person, who gives Mrs. Alfred Hunt the title for her three-volume novel, is a young girl, by name Hester Langdale, who for the sake of Mr. Godfrey Daylesford sacrifices everything a woman can sacrifice, and, on his marrying some one else, becomes a hospital nurse. The hospital nurse idea is perhaps used by novelists a little too often in cases of this kind; still, it has an artistic as well as an ethical value. The interest of the story centres, however, in Mr. Daylesford, who marries not for love but for ambition, and is rather severely punished for doing so. Mrs. Daylesford has a sister called Polly who develops, according to the approved psychological method, from a hobbledehoy girl into a tender sweet woman. Polly is delightfully drawn, but the most attractive character in the book, strangely enough, is Mr. Godfrey Daylesford. He is very weak, but he is very charming. So charming indeed is he, that it is only when one closes the book that one thinks of censuring him. While we are in direct contact with him we are fascinated. Such a character has at any rate the morality of truth about it. Here literature has faithfully followed life. Mrs. Hunt writes a very pleasing style, bright and free from affectation. Indeed, everything in her work is clever except the title.
A Child of the Revolution is by the accomplished authoress of the Atelier du Lys. The scene opens in France in 1793, and the plot is extremely ingenious. The wife of Jacques Vaudes, a Lyons deputy, loses by illness her baby girl while her husband is absent in Paris where he has gone to see Danton. At the instigation of an old priest she adopts a child of the same age, a little orphan of noble birth, whose parents have died in the Reign of Terror, and passes it off as her own. Her husband, a stern and ardent Republican, worships the child with a passion like that of Jean Valjean for Cosette, nor is it till she has grown to perfect womanhood that he discovers that he has given his love to the daughter of his enemy. This is a noble story, but the workmanship, though good of its kind, is hardly adequate to the idea. The style lacks grace, movement and variety. It is correct but monotonous. Seriousness, like property, has its duties as well as its rights, and the first duty of a novel is to please. A Child of the Revolution hardly does that. Still it has merits.
Aphrodite is a romance of ancient Hellas. The supposed date, as given in the first line of Miss Safford’s admirable translation, is 551 B.C. This, however, is probably a misprint. At least, we cannot believe that so careful an archæologist as Ernst Eckstein would talk of a famous school of sculpture existing at Athens in the sixth century, and the whole character of the civilisation is of a much later date. The book may be described as a new setting of the tale of Acontius and Cydippe, and though Eckstein is a sort of literary Tadema and cares more for his backgrounds than he does for his figures, still he can tell a story very well, and his hero is made of flesh and blood. As regards the style, the Germans have not the same feeling as we have about technicalities in literature. To our ears such words as ‘phoreion,’ ‘secos,’ ‘oionistes,’ ‘Thyrides’ and the like sound harshly in a novel and give an air of pedantry, not of picturesqueness. Yet in its tone Aphrodite reminds us of the late Greek novels. Indeed, it might be one of the lost tales of Miletus. It deserves to have many readers and a better binding.
(1) Astray: A Tale of a Country Town. By Charlotte M. Yonge, Mary Bramston, Christabel Coleridge and Esmé Stuart. (Hatchards.)
(2) Betty’s Visions. By Rhoda Broughton. (Routledge and Sons.)
(3) That Other Person. By Mrs. Alfred Hunt. (Chatto and Windus.)
(4) A Child of the Revolution. By the Author of Mademoiselle Mori. (Hatchards.)
(5) Aphrodite. Translated from the German of Ernst Eckstein by Mary J. Safford. (New York: Williams and Gottsberger; London: Trübner and Co.)
A POLITICIAN’S POETRY
(Pall Mall Gazette, November 3, 1886.)
Although it is against etiquette to quote Greek in Parliament, Homer has always been a great favourite with our statesmen and, indeed, may be said to be almost a factor in our political life. For as the cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make up, so those who cannot make up their minds always take to Homeric studies. Many of our leaders have sulked in their tents with Achilles after some violent political crisis and, enraged at the fickleness of fortune, more than one has given up to poetry what was obviously meant for party. It would be unjust, however, to regard Lord Carnarvon’s translation of the Odyssey as being in any sense a political manifesto. Between Calypso and the colonies there is no connection, and the search for Penelope has nothing to do with the search for a policy. The love of literature alone has produced this version of the marvellous Greek epic, and to the love of literature alone it appeals. As Lord Carnarvon says very truly in his preface, each generation in turn delights to tell the story of Odysseus in its own language, for the story is one that never grows old.
Of the labours of his predecessors in translation Lord Carnarvon makes ample recognition, though we acknowledge that we do not consider Pope’s Homer ‘the work of a great poet,’ and we must protest that there is more in Chapman than ‘quaint Elizabethan conceits.’ The metre he has selected is blank verse, which he regards as the best compromise between ‘the inevitable redundancy of rhyme and the stricter accuracy of prose.’ This choice is, on the whole, a sensible one. Blank verse undoubtedly gives the possibility of a clear and simple rendering of the original. Upon the other hand, though we may get Homer’s meaning, we often miss his music. The ten-syllabled line brings but a faint echo of the long roll of the Homeric hexameter, its rapid movement and continuous harmony. Besides, except in the hands of a great master of song, blank verse is apt to be tedious, and Lord Carnarvon’s use of the weak ending, his habit of closing the line with an unimportant word, is hardly consistent with the stateliness of an epic, however valuable it might be in dramatic verse. Now and then, also, Lord Carnarvon exaggerates the value of the Homeric adjective, and for one word in the Greek gives us a whole line in the English. The simple εσπεριος, for instance, is converted into ‘And when the shades of evening fall around,’ in the second book, and elsewhere purely decorative epithets are expanded into elaborate descriptions. However, there are many pleasing qualities in Lord Carnarvon’s verse, and though it may not contain much subtlety of melody, still it has often a charm and sweetness of its own.
The description of Calypso’s garden, for example, is excellent:
Around the grotto grew a goodly grove,
Alder, and poplar, and the cypress sweet;
And the deep-winged sea-birds found their haunt,
And owls and hawks, and long-tongued cormorants,
Who joy to live upon the briny flood.
And o’er the face of the deep cave a vine
Wove its wild tangles and clustering grapes.
Four fountains too, each from the other turned,
Poured their white waters, whilst the grassy meads
Bloomed with the parsley and the violet’s flower.
The story of the Cyclops is not very well told. The grotesque humour of the Giant’s promise hardly appears in
Thee then, Noman, last of all
Will I devour, and this thy gift shall be,
and the bitter play on words Odysseus makes, the pun on μητις, in fact, is not noticed. The idyll of Nausicaa, however, is very gracefully translated, and there is a great deal that is delightful in the Circe episode. For simplicity of diction this is also very good:
So to Olympus through the woody isle
Hermes departed, and I went my way
To Circe’s halls, sore troubled in my mind.
But by the fair-tressed Goddess’ gate I stood,
And called upon her, and she heard my voice,
And forth she came and oped the shining doors
And bade me in; and sad at heart I went.
Then did she set me on a stately chair,
Studded with silver nails of cunning work,
With footstool for my feet, and mixed a draught
Of her foul witcheries in golden cup,
For evil was her purpose. From her hand
I took the cup and drained it to the dregs,
Nor felt the magic charm; but with her rod
She smote me, and she said, ‘Go, get thee hence
And herd thee with thy fellows in the stye.’
So spake she, and straightway I drew my sword
Upon the witch, and threatened her with death.
Lord Carnarvon, on the whole, has given us a very pleasing version of the first half of the Odyssey. His translation is done in a scholarly and careful manner and deserves much praise. It is not quite Homer, of course, but no translation can hope to be that, for no work of art can afford to lose its style or to give up the manner that is essential to it. Still, those who cannot read Greek will find much beauty in it, and those who can will often gain a charming reminiscence.
The Odyssey of Homer. Books I.-XII. Translated into English Verse by the Earl of Carnarvon. (Macmillan and Co.)
MR. SYMONDS’ HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE
(Pall Mall Gazette, November 10, 1886.)
Mr. Symonds has at last finished his history of the Italian Renaissance. The two volumes just published deal with the intellectual and moral conditions in Italy during the seventy years of the sixteenth century which followed the coronation of Charles the Fifth at Bologna, an era to which Mr. Symonds gives the name of the Catholic Reaction, and they contain a most interesting and valuable account of the position of Spain in the Italian peninsula, the conduct of the Tridentine Council, the specific organisation of the Holy Office and the Company of Jesus, and the state of society upon which those forces were brought to bear. In his previous volumes Mr. Symonds had regarded the past rather as a picture to be painted than as a problem to be solved. In these two last volumes, however, he shows a clearer appreciation of the office of history. The art of the picturesque chronicler is completed by something like the science of the true historian, the critical spirit begins to manifest itself, and life is not treated as a mere spectacle, but the laws of its evolution and progress are investigated also. We admit that the desire to represent life at all costs under dramatic conditions still accompanies Mr. Symonds, and that he hardly realises that what seems romance to us was harsh reality to those who were engaged in it. Like most dramatists, also, he is more interested in the psychological exceptions than in the general rule. He has something of Shakespeare’s sovereign contempt of the masses. The people stir him very little, but he is fascinated by great personalities. Yet it is only fair to remember that the age itself was one of exaggerated individualism and that literature had not yet become a mouthpiece for the utterances of humanity. Men appreciated the aristocracy of intellect, but with the democracy of suffering they had no sympathy. The cry from the brickfields had still to be heard. Mr. Symonds’ style, too, has much improved. Here and there, it is true, we come across traces of the old manner, as in the apocalyptic vision of the seven devils that entered Italy with the Spaniard, and the description of the Inquisition as a Belial-Moloch, a ‘hideous idol whose face was blackened with soot from burning human flesh.’ Such a sentence, also, as ‘over the Dead Sea of social putrefaction floated the sickening oil of Jesuitical hypocrisy,’ reminds us that rhetoric has not yet lost its charms for Mr. Symonds. Still, on the whole, the style shows far more reserve, balance and sobriety, than can be found in the earlier volumes where violent antithesis forms the predominant characteristic, and accuracy is often sacrificed to an adjective.
Amongst the most interesting chapters of the book are those on the Inquisition, on Sarpi, the great champion of the severance of Church from State, and on Giordano Bruno. Indeed the story of Bruno’s life, from his visit to London and Oxford, his sojourn in Paris and wanderings through Germany, down to his betrayal at Venice and martyrdom at Rome, is most powerfully told, and the estimate of the value of his philosophy and the relation he holds to modern science, is at once just and appreciative. The account also of Ignatius Loyola and the rise of the Society of Jesus is extremely interesting, though we cannot think that Mr. Symonds is very happy in his comparison of the Jesuits to ‘fanatics laying stones upon a railway’ or ‘dynamiters blowing up an emperor or a corner of Westminster Hall.’ Such a judgment is harsh and crude in expression and more suitable to the clamour of the Protestant Union than to the dignity of the true historian. Mr. Symonds, however, is rarely deliberately unfair, and there is no doubt but that his work on the Catholic Reaction is a most valuable contribution to modern history—so valuable, indeed, that in the account he gives of the Inquisition in Venice it would be well worth his while to bring the picturesque fiction of the text into some harmony with the plain facts of the footnote.
On the poetry of the sixteenth century Mr. Symonds has, of course, a great deal to say, and on such subjects he always writes with ease, grace, and delicacy of perception. We admit that we weary sometimes of the continual application to literature of epithets appropriate to plastic and pictorial art. The conception of the unity of the arts is certainly of great value, but in the present condition of criticism it seems to us that it would be more useful to emphasise the fact that each art has its separate method of expression. The essay on Tasso, however, is delightful reading, and the position the poet holds towards modern music and modern sentiment is analysed with much subtlety. The essay on Marino also is full of interest. We have often wondered whether those who talk so glibly of Euphuism and Marinism in literature have ever read either Euphues or the Adone. To the latter they can have no better guide than Mr. Symonds, whose description of the poem is most fascinating. Marino, like many greater men, has suffered much from his disciples, but he himself was a master of graceful fancy and of exquisite felicity of phrase; not, of course, a great poet but certainly an artist in poetry and one to whom language is indebted. Even those conceits that Mr. Symonds feels bound to censure have something charming about them. The continual use of periphrases is undoubtedly a grave fault in style, yet who but a pedant would really quarrel with such periphrases as sirena de’ boschi for the nightingale, or il novella Edimione for Galileo?
From the poets Mr. Symonds passes to the painters: not those great artists of Florence and Venice of whom he has already written, but the Eclectics of Bologna, the Naturalists of Naples and Rome. This chapter is too polemical to be pleasant. The one on music is much better, and Mr. Symonds gives us a most interesting description of the gradual steps by which the Italian genius passed from poetry and painting to melody and song, till the whole of Europe thrilled with the marvel and mystery of this new language of the soul. Some small details should perhaps be noticed. It is hardly accurate, for instance, to say that Monteverde’s Orfeo was the first form of the recitative-Opera, as Peri’s Dafne and Euridice and Cavaliere’s Rappresentazione preceded it by some years, and it is somewhat exaggerated to say that ‘under the régime of the Commonwealth the national growth of English music received a check from which it never afterwards recovered,’ as it was with Cromwell’s auspices that the first English Opera was produced, thirteen years before any Opera was regularly established in Paris. The fact that England did not make such development in music as Italy and Germany did, must be ascribed to other causes than ‘the prevalence of Puritan opinion.’
These, however, are minor points. Mr. Symonds is to be warmly congratulated on the completion of his history of the Renaissance in Italy. It is a most wonderful monument of literary labour, and its value to the student of Humanism cannot be doubted. We have often had occasion to differ from Mr. Symonds on questions of detail, and we have more than once felt it our duty to protest against the rhetoric and over-emphasis of his style, but we fully recognise the importance of his work and the impetus he has given to the study of one of the vital periods of the world’s history. Mr. Symonds’ learning has not made him a pedant; his culture has widened not narrowed his sympathies, and though he can hardly be called a great historian, yet he will always occupy a place in English literature as one of the remarkable men of letters in the nineteenth century.
Renaissance in Italy: The Catholic Reaction. In Two Parts. By John Addington Symonds. (Smith, Elder and Co.)
A ‘JOLLY’ ART CRITIC
(Pall Mall Gazette, November 18, 1886.)
There is a healthy bank-holiday atmosphere about this book which is extremely pleasant. Mr. Quilter is entirely free from affectation of any kind. He rollicks through art with the recklessness of the tourist and describes its beauties with the enthusiasm of the auctioneer. To many, no doubt, he will seem to be somewhat blatant and bumptious, but we prefer to regard him as being simply British. Mr. Quilter is the apostle of the middle classes, and we are glad to welcome his gospel. After listening so long to the Don Quixote of art, to listen once to Sancho Panza is both salutary and refreshing.
As for his Sententiæ, they differ very widely in character and subject. Some of them are ethical, such as ‘Humility may be carried too far’; some literary, as ‘For one Froude there are a thousand Mrs. Markhams’; and some scientific, as ‘Objects which are near display more detail than those which are further off.’ Some, again, breathe a fine spirit of optimism, as ‘Picturesqueness is the birthright of the bargee’; others are jubilant, as ‘Paint firm and be jolly’; and many are purely autobiographical, such as No. 97, ‘Few of us understand what it is that we mean by Art.’ Nor is Mr. Quilter’s manner less interesting than his matter. He tells us that at this festive season of the year, with Christmas and roast beef looming before us, ‘Similes drawn from eating and its results occur most readily to the mind.’ So he announces that ‘Subject is the diet of painting,’ that ‘Perspective is the bread of art,’ and that ‘Beauty is in some way like jam’; drawings, he points out, ‘are not made by recipe like puddings,’ nor is art composed of ‘suet, raisins, and candied peel,’ though Mr. Cecil Lawson’s landscapes do ‘smack of indigestion.’ Occasionally, it is true, he makes daring excursions into other realms of fancy, as when he says that ‘in the best Reynolds landscapes, one seems to smell the sawdust,’ or that ‘advance in art is of a kangaroo character’; but, on the whole, he is happiest in his eating similes, and the secret of his style is evidently ‘La métaphore vient en mangeant.’
About artists and their work Mr. Quilter has, of course, a great deal to say. Sculpture he regards as ‘Painting’s poor relation’; so, with the exception of a jaunty allusion to the ‘rough modelling’ of Tanagra figurines he hardly refers at all to the plastic arts; but on painters he writes with much vigour and joviality. Holbein’s wonderful Court portraits naturally do not give him much pleasure; in fact, he compares them as works of art to the sham series of Scottish kings at Holyrood; but Doré, he tells us, had a wider imaginative range in all subjects where the gloomy and the terrible played leading parts than probably any artist who ever lived, and may be called ‘the Carlyle of artists.’ In Gainsborough he sees ‘a plainness almost amounting to brutality,’ while ‘vulgarity and snobbishness’ are the chief qualities he finds in Sir Joshua Reynolds. He has grave doubts whether Sir Frederick Leighton’s work is really ‘Greek, after all,’ and can discover in it but little of ‘rocky Ithaca.’ Mr. Poynter, however, is a cart-horse compared to the President, and Frederick Walker was ‘a dull Greek’ because he had no ‘sympathy with poetry.’ Linnell’s pictures, are ‘a sort of “Up, Guards, and at ’em” paintings,’ and Mason’s exquisite idylls are ‘as national as a Jingo poem’! Mr. Birket Foster’s landscapes ‘smile at one much in the same way that Mr. Carker used to “flash his teeth,”’ and Mr. John Collier gives his sitter ‘a cheerful slap on the back, before he says, like a shampooer in a Turkish bath, “Next man!” Mr. Herkomer’s art is, ‘if not a catch-penny art, at all events a catch-many-pounds art,’ and Mr. W. B. Richmond is a ‘clever trifler,’ who ‘might do really good work’ ‘if he would employ his time in learning to paint.’ It is obviously unnecessary for us to point out how luminous these criticisms are, how delicate in expression. The remarks on Sir Joshua Reynolds alone exemplify the truth of Sententia No. 19, ‘From a picture we gain but little more than we bring.’ On the general principles of art Mr. Quilter writes with equal lucidity. That there is a difference between colour and colours, that an artist, be he portrait-painter or dramatist, always reveals himself in his manner, are ideas that can hardly be said to occur to him; but Mr. Quilter really does his best and bravely faces every difficulty in modern art, with the exception of Mr. Whistler. Painting, he tells us, is ‘of a different quality to mathematics,’ and finish in art is ‘adding more fact’! Portrait painting is a bad pursuit for an emotional artist as it destroys his personality and his sympathy; however, even for the emotional artist there is hope, as a portrait can be converted into a picture ‘by adding to the likeness of the sitter some dramatic interest or some picturesque adjunct’! As for etchings, they are of two kinds—British and foreign. The latter fail in ‘propriety.’ Yet, ‘really fine etching is as free and easy as is the chat between old chums at midnight over a smoking-room fire.’ Consonant with these rollicking views of art is Mr. Quilter’s healthy admiration for ‘the three primary colours: red, blue, and yellow.’ Any one, he points out, ‘can paint in good tone who paints only in black and white,’ and ‘the great sign of a good decorator’ is ‘his capability of doing without neutral tints.’ Indeed, on decoration Mr. Quilter is almost eloquent. He laments most bitterly the divorce that has been made between decorative art and ‘what we usually call “pictures,”’ makes the customary appeal to the Last Judgment, and reminds us that in the great days of art Michael Angelo was the ‘furnishing upholsterer.’ With the present tendencies of decorative art in England Mr. Quilter, consequently, has but little sympathy, and he makes a gallant appeal to the British householder to stand no more nonsense. Let the honest fellow, he says, on his return from his counting-house tear down the Persian hangings, put a chop on the Anatolian plate, mix some toddy in the Venetian glass, and carry his wife off to the National Gallery to look at ‘our own Mulready’! And then the picture he draws of the ideal home, where everything, though ugly, is hallowed by domestic memories, and where beauty appeals not to the heartless eye but the family affections; ‘baby’s chair there, and the mother’s work-basket . . . near the fire, and the ornaments Fred brought home from India on the mantel-board’! It is really impossible not to be touched by so charming a description. How valuable, also, in connection with house decoration is Sententia No. 351, ‘There is nothing furnishes a room like a bookcase, and plenty of books in it.’ How cultivated the mind that thus raises literature to the position of upholstery and puts thought on a level with the antimacassar!
And, finally, for the young workers in art Mr. Quilter has loud words of encouragement. With a sympathy that is absolutely reckless of grammar, he knows from experience ‘what an amount of study and mental strain are involved in painting a bad picture honestly’; he exhorts them (Sententia No. 267) to ‘go on quite bravely and sincerely making mess after mess from Nature,’ and while sternly warning them that there is something wrong if they do not ‘feel washed out after each drawing,’ he still urges them to ‘put a new piece of goods in the window’ every morning. In fact, he is quite severe on Mr. Ruskin for not recognising that ‘a picture should denote the frailty of man,’ and remarks with pleasing courtesy and felicitous grace that ‘many phases of feeling . . . are as much a dead letter to this great art teacher, as Sanskrit to an Islington cabman.’ Nor is Mr. Quilter one of those who fails to practice what he preaches. Far from it. He goes on quite bravely and sincerely making mess after mess from literature, and misquotes Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Alfred de Musset, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, in strict accordance with Sententia No. 251, which tells us that ‘Work must be abominable if it is ever going to be good.’ Only, unfortunately, his own work never does get good. Not content with his misquotations, he misspells the names of such well-known painters as Madox-Brown, Bastien Lepage and Meissonier, hesitates between Ingrès and Ingres, talks of Mr. Millais and Mr. Linton, alludes to Mr. Frank Holl simply as ‘Hall,’ speaks with easy familiarity of Mr. Burne-Jones as ‘Jones,’ and writes of the artist whom he calls ‘old Chrome’ with an affection that reminds us of Mr. Tulliver’s love for Jeremy Taylor. On the whole, the book will not do. We fully admit that it is extremely amusing and, no doubt, Mr. Quilter is quite earnest in his endeavours to elevate art to the dignity of manual labour, but the extraordinary vulgarity of the style alone will always be sufficient to prevent these Sententiæ Artis from being anything more than curiosities of literature. Mr. Quilter has missed his chance; for he has failed even to make himself the Tupper of Painting.
Sententiæ: Artis: First Principles of Art for Painters and Picture Lovers. By Harry Quilter, M.A. (Isbister.)
[A reply to this review appeared on November 23.]