THE NEW PRESIDENT
(Pall Mall Gazette, January 26, 1889.)
In a little book that he calls The Enchanted Island Mr. Wyke Bayliss, the new President of the Royal Society of British Artists, has given his gospel of art to the world. His predecessor in office had also a gospel of art but it usually took the form of an autobiography. Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital ‘I.’ However, he was never dull. His brilliant wit, his caustic satire, and his amusing epigrams, or, perhaps, we should say epitaphs, on his contemporaries, made his views on art as delightful as they were misleading and as fascinating as they were unsound. Besides, he introduced American humour into art criticism, and for this, if for no other reason, he deserves to be affectionately remembered. Mr. Wyke Bayliss, upon the other hand, is rather tedious. The last President never said much that was true, but the present President never says anything that is new; and, if art be a fairy-haunted wood or an enchanted island, we must say that we prefer the old Puck to the fresh Prospero. Water is an admirable thing—at least, the Greeks said it was—and Mr. Ruskin is an admirable writer; but a combination of both is a little depressing.
Still, it is only right to add that Mr. Wyke Bayliss, at his best, writes very good English. Mr. Whistler, for some reason or other, always adopted the phraseology of the minor prophets. Possibly it was in order to emphasise his well-known claims to verbal inspiration, or perhaps he thought with Voltaire that Habakkuk était capable de tout, and wished to shelter himself under the shield of a definitely irresponsible writer none of whose prophecies, according to the French philosopher, has ever been fulfilled. The idea was clever enough at the beginning, but ultimately the manner became monotonous. The spirit of the Hebrews is excellent but their mode of writing is not to be imitated, and no amount of American jokes will give it that modernity which is essential to a good literary style. Admirable as are Mr. Whistler’s fireworks on canvas, his fireworks in prose are abrupt, violent and exaggerated. However, oracles, since the days of the Pythia, have never been remarkable for style, and the modest Mr. Wyke Bayliss is as much Mr. Whistler’s superior as a writer as he is his inferior as a painter and an artist. Indeed, some of the passages in this book are so charmingly written and with such felicity of phrase that we cannot help feeling that the President of the British Artists, like a still more famous President of our day, can express himself far better through the medium of literature than he can through the medium of line and colour. This, however, applies only to Mr. Wyke Bayliss’s prose. His poetry is very bad, and the sonnets at the end of the book are almost as mediocre as the drawings that accompany them. As we read them we cannot but regret that, in this point at any rate, Mr. Bayliss has not imitated the wise example of his predecessor who, with all his faults, was never guilty of writing a line of poetry, and is, indeed, quite incapable of doing anything of the kind.
As for the matter of Mr. Bayliss’s discourses, his views on art must be admitted to be very commonplace and old-fashioned. What is the use of telling artists that they should try and paint Nature as she really is? What Nature really is, is a question for metaphysics not for art. Art deals with appearances, and the eye of the man who looks at Nature, the vision, in fact, of the artist, is far more important to us than what he looks at. There is more truth in Corot’s aphorism that a landscape is simply ‘the mood of a man’s mind’ than there is in all Mr. Bayliss’s laborious disquisitions on naturalism. Again, why does Mr. Bayliss waste a whole chapter in pointing out real or supposed resemblances between a book of his published twelve years ago and an article by Mr. Palgrave which appeared recently in the Nineteenth Century? Neither the book nor the article contains anything of real interest, and as for the hundred or more parallel passages which Mr. Wyke Bayliss solemnly prints side by side, most of them are like parallel lines and never meet. The only original proposal that Mr. Bayliss has to offer us is that the House of Commons should, every year, select some important event from national and contemporary history and hand it over to the artists who are to choose from among themselves a man to make a picture of it. In this way Mr. Bayliss believes that we could have the historic art, and suggests as examples of what he means a picture of Florence Nightingale in the hospital at Scutari, a picture of the opening of the first London Board-school, and a picture of the Senate House at Cambridge with the girl graduate receiving a degree ‘that shall acknowledge her to be as wise as Merlin himself and leave her still as beautiful as Vivien.’ This proposal is, of course, very well meant, but, to say nothing of the danger of leaving historic art at the mercy of a majority in the House of Commons, who would naturally vote for its own view of things, Mr. Bayliss does not seem to realise that a great event is not necessarily a pictorial event. ‘The decisive events of the world,’ as has been well said, ‘take place in the intellect,’ and as for Board-schools, academic ceremonies, hospital wards and the like, they may well be left to the artists of the illustrated papers, who do them admirably and quite as well as they need be done. Indeed, the pictures of contemporary events, Royal marriages, naval reviews and things of this kind that appear in the Academy every year, are always extremely bad; while the very same subjects treated in black and white in the Graphic or the London News are excellent. Besides, if we want to understand the history of a nation through the medium of art, it is to the imaginative and ideal arts that we have to go and not to the arts that are definitely imitative. The visible aspect of life no longer contains for us the secret of life’s spirit. Probably it never did contain it. And, if Mr. Barker’s Waterloo Banquet and Mr. Frith’s Marriage of the Prince of Wales are examples of healthy historic art, the less we have of such art the better. However, Mr. Bayliss is full of the most ardent faith and speaks quite gravely of genuine portraits of St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul dating from the first century, and of the establishment by the Israelites of a school of art in the wilderness under the now little appreciated Bezaleel. He is a pleasant, picturesque writer, but he should not speak about art. Art is a sealed book to him.
The Enchanted Island. By Wyke Bayliss, F.S.A., President of the Royal Society of British Artists. (Allen and Co.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES—II
(Woman’s World, February 1889.)
‘The various collectors of Irish folk-lore,’ says Mr. W. B. Yeats in his charming little book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, ‘have, from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of others, one great fault.’
They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after. To be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales in forms like grocers’ bills—item the fairy king, item the queen. Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day. Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility, saw everything humorised. The impulse of the Irish literature of their time came from a class that did not—mainly for political reasons—take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a humorist’s Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew nothing of. What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen, carmen, and gentlemen’s servants, into the type of a whole nation, and created the stage Irishman. The writers of ’Forty-eight, and the famine combined, burst their bubble. Their work had the dash as well as the shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is touched everywhere with beauty—a gentle Arcadian beauty. Carleton, a peasant born, has in many of his stories, . . . more especially in his ghost stories, a much more serious way with him, for all his humour. Kennedy, an old bookseller in Dublin, who seems to have had a something of genuine belief in the fairies, comes next in time. He has far less literary faculty, but is wonderfully accurate, giving often the very words the stories were told in. But the best book since Croker is Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends. The humour has all given way to pathos and tenderness. We have here the innermost heart of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through years of persecution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams, and hearing fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and on the dead. Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt dreaming.
Into a volume of very moderate dimensions, and of extremely moderate price, Mr. Yeats has collected together the most characteristic of our Irish folklore stories, grouping them together according to subject. First come The Trooping Fairies. The peasants say that these are ‘fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost’; but the Irish antiquarians see in them ‘the gods of pagan Ireland,’ who, ‘when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.’ Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, making love, and playing the most beautiful music. ‘They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun—the shoemaker.’ It is his duty to repair their shoes when they wear them out with dancing. Mr. Yeats tells us that ‘near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven years. When she came home she had no toes—she had danced them off.’ On May Eve, every seventh year, they fight for the harvest, for the best ears of grain belong to them. An old man informed Mr. Yeats that he saw them fight once, and that they tore the thatch off a house. ‘Had any one else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling everything into the air as it passed.’ When the wind drives the leaves and straws before it, ‘that is the fairies, and the peasants take off their hats and say “God bless them.”’ When they are gay, they sing. Many of the most beautiful tunes of Ireland ‘are only their music, caught up by eavesdroppers.’ No prudent peasant would hum The Pretty Girl Milking the Cow near a fairy rath, ‘for they are jealous, and do not like to hear their songs on clumsy mortal lips.’ Blake once saw a fairy’s funeral. But this, as Mr. Yeats points out, must have been an English fairy, for the Irish fairies never die; they are immortal.
Then come The Solitary Fairies, amongst whom we find the little Lepracaun mentioned above. He has grown very rich, as he possesses all the treasure-crocks buried in war-time. In the early part of this century, according to Croker, they used to show in Tipperary a little shoe forgotten by the fairy shoemaker. Then there are two rather disreputable little fairies—the Cluricaun, who gets intoxicated in gentlemen’s cellars, and the Red Man, who plays unkind practical jokes. ‘The Fear-Gorta (Man of Hunger) is an emaciated phantom that goes through the land in famine time, begging an alms and bringing good luck to the giver.’ The Water-sheerie is ‘own brother to the English Jack-o’-Lantern.’ ‘The Leanhaun Shee (fairy mistress) seeks the love of mortals. If they refuse, she must be their slave; if they consent, they are hers, and can only escape by finding another to take their place. The fairy lives on their life, and they waste away. Death is no escape from her. She is the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she persecutes. The Gaelic poets die young, for she is restless, and will not let them remain long on earth.’ The Pooka is essentially an animal spirit, and some have considered him the forefather of Shakespeare’s ‘Puck.’ He lives on solitary mountains, and among old ruins ‘grown monstrous with much solitude,’ and ‘is of the race of the nightmare.’ ‘He has many shapes—is now a horse, . . . now a goat, now an eagle. Like all spirits, he is only half in the world of form.’ The banshee does not care much for our democratic levelling tendencies; she loves only old families, and despises the parvenu or the nouveau riche. When more than one banshee is present, and they wail and sing in chorus, it is for the death of some holy or great one. An omen that sometimes accompanies the banshee is ‘. . . an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless horses driven by a Dullahan.’ A Dullahan is the most terrible thing in the world. In 1807 two of the sentries stationed outside St. James’s Park saw one climbing the railings, and died of fright. Mr. Yeats suggests that they are possibly ‘descended from that Irish giant who swam across the Channel with his head in his teeth.’
Then come the stories of ghosts, of saints and priests, and of giants. The ghosts live in a state intermediary between this world and the next. They are held there by some earthly longing or affection, or some duty unfulfilled, or anger against the living; they are those who are too good for hell, and too bad for heaven. Sometimes they ‘take the forms of insects, especially of butterflies.’ The author of the Parochial Survey of Ireland ‘heard a woman say to a child who was chasing a butterfly, “How do you know it is not the soul of your grandfather?” On November eve they are abroad, and dance with the fairies.’ As for the saints and priests, ‘there are no martyrs in the stories.’ That ancient chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis ‘taunted the Archbishop of Cashel, because no one in Ireland had received the crown of martyrdom. “Our people may be barbarous,” the prelate answered, “but they have never lifted their hands against God’s saints; but now that a people have come amongst us who know how to make them (it was just after the English invasion), we shall have martyrs plentifully.”’ The giants were the old pagan heroes of Ireland, who grew bigger and bigger, just as the gods grew smaller and smaller. The fact is they did not wait for offerings; they took them vi et armis.
Some of the prettiest stories are those that cluster round Tír-na-n-Og. This is the Country of the Young, ‘for age and death have not found it; neither tears nor loud laughter have gone near it.’ ‘One man has gone there and returned. The bard, Oisen, who wandered away on a white horse, moving on the surface of the foam with his fairy Niamh lived there three hundred years, and then returned looking for his comrades. The moment his foot touched the earth his three hundred years fell on him, and he was bowed double, and his beard swept the ground. He described his sojourn in the Land of Youth to Patrick before he died.’ Since then, according to Mr. Yeats, ‘many have seen it in many places; some in the depths of lakes, and have heard rising therefrom a vague sound of bells; more have seen it far off on the horizon, as they peered out from the western cliffs. Not three years ago a fisherman imagined that he saw it.’
Mr. Yeats has certainly done his work very well. He has shown great critical capacity in his selection of the stories, and his little introductions are charmingly written. It is delightful to come across a collection of purely imaginative work, and Mr. Yeats has a very quick instinct in finding out the best and the most beautiful things in Irish folklore. I am also glad to see that he has not confined himself entirely to prose, but has included Allingham’s lovely poem on The Fairies:
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs
All night awake.High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music,
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
All lovers of fairy tales and folklore should get this little book. The Horned Women, The Priest’s Soul, {411} and Teig O’Kane, are really marvellous in their way; and, indeed, there is hardly a single story that is not worth reading and thinking over.
The wittiest writer in France at present is a woman. That clever, that spirituelle grande dame, who has adopted the pseudonym of ‘Gyp,’ has in her own country no rival. Her wit, her delicate and delightful esprit, her fascinating modernity, and her light, happy touch, give her a unique position in that literary movement which has taken for its object the reproduction of contemporary life. Such books as Autour du Mariage, Autour du Divorce, and Le Petit Bob, are, in their way, little playful masterpieces, and the only work in England that we could compare with them is Violet Fane’s Edwin and Angelina Papers. To the same brilliant pen which gave us these wise and witty studies of modern life we owe now a more serious, more elaborate production. Helen Davenant is as earnestly wrought out as it is cleverly conceived. If it has a fault, it is that it is too full of matter. Out of the same material a more economical writer would have made two novels and half a dozen psychological studies for publication in American magazines. Thackeray once met Bishop Wilberforce at dinner at Dean Stanley’s, and, after listening to the eloquent prelate’s extraordinary flow and fund of stories, remarked to his neighbour, ‘I could not afford to spend at that rate.’ Violet Fane is certainly lavishly extravagant of incident, plot, and character. But we must not quarrel with richness of subject-matter at a time when tenuity of purpose and meagreness of motive seem to be becoming the dominant notes of contemporary fiction. The side-issues of the story are so complex that it is difficult, almost impossible, to describe the plot in any adequate manner. The interest centres round a young girl, Helen Davenant by name, who contracts a private and clandestine marriage with one of those mysterious and fascinating foreign noblemen who are becoming so invaluable to writers of fiction, either in narrative or dramatic form. Shortly after the marriage her husband is arrested for a terrible murder committed some years before in Russia, under the evil influence of occult magic and mesmerism. The crime was done in a hypnotic state, and, as described by Violet Fane, seems much more probable than the actual hypnotic experiments recorded in scientific publications. This is the supreme advantage that fiction possesses over fact. It can make things artistically probable; can call for imaginative and realistic credence; can, by force of mere style, compel us to believe. The ordinary novelists, by keeping close to the ordinary incidents of commonplace life, seem to me to abdicate half their power. Romance, at any rate, welcomes what is wonderful; the temper of wonder is part of her own secret; she loves what is strange and curious. But besides the marvels of occultism and hypnotism, there are many other things in Helen Davenant that are worthy of study. Violet Fane writes an admirable style. The opening chapter of the book, with its terrible poignant tragedy, is most powerfully written, and I cannot help wondering that the clever authoress cared to abandon, even for a moment, the superb psychological opportunity that this chapter affords. The touches of nature, the vivid sketches of high life, the subtle renderings of the phases and fancies of society, are also admirably done. Helen Davenant is certainly clever, and shows that Violet Fane can write prose that is as good as her verse, and can look at life not merely from the point of view of the poet, but also from the standpoint of the philosopher, the keen observer, the fine social critic. To be a fine social critic is no small thing, and to be able to incorporate in a work of fiction the results of such careful observation is to achieve what is out of the reach of many. The difficulty under which the novelists of our day labour seems to me to be this: if they do not go into society, their books are unreadable; and if they do go into society, they have no time left for writing. However, Violet Fane has solved the problem.
The chronicles which I am about to present to the reader are not the result of any conscious effort of the imagination. They are, as the title-page indicates, records of dreams occurring at intervals during the last ten years, and transcribed, pretty nearly in the order of their occurrence, from my diary. Written down as soon as possible after awaking from the slumber during which they presented themselves, these narratives, necessarily unstudied in style, and wanting in elegance of diction, have at least the merit of fresh and vivid colour; for they were committed to paper at a moment when the effect and impress of each successive vision were strong and forceful on the mind. . . .
The most remarkable features of the experiences I am about to record are the methodical consecutiveness of their sequences, and the intelligent purpose disclosed alike in the events witnessed and in the words heard or read. . . . I know of no parallel to this phenomenon, unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton’s romance entitled The Pilgrims of the Rhine, in which is related the story of a German student endowed with so marvellous a faculty of dreaming, that for him the normal conditions of sleeping and waking became reversed; his true life was that which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive intervals of arrest, occurring in an existence of intense and vivid interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. . . .
During the whole period covered by these dreams I have been busily and almost continuously engrossed with scientific and literary pursuits, demanding accurate judgment and complete self-possession and rectitude of mind. At the time when many of the most vivid and remarkable visions occurred I was following my course as a student at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, preparing for examinations, daily visiting hospital wards as dresser, and attending lectures. Later, when I had taken my degree, I was engaged in the duties of my profession and in writing for the Press on scientific subjects. Neither had I ever taken opium, haschish, or other dream-producing agent. A cup of tea or coffee represents the extent of my indulgences in this direction. I mention these details in order to guard against inferences which might otherwise be drawn as to the genesis of my faculty.
It may, perhaps, be worthy of notice that by far the larger number of the dreams set down in this volume occurred towards dawn; sometimes even, after sunrise, during a ‘second sleep.’ A condition of fasting, united possibly with some subtle magnetic or other atmospheric state, seems, therefore, to be that most open to impressions of the kind.
This is the account given by the late Dr. Anna Kingsford of the genesis of her remarkable volume, Dreams and Dream-Stories; and certainly some of the stories, especially those entitled Steepside, Beyond the Sunset, and The Village of Seers, are well worth reading, though not intrinsically finer, either in motive or idea, than the general run of magazine stories. No one who had the privilege of knowing Mrs. Kingsford, who was one of the brilliant women of our day, can doubt for a single moment that these tales came to her in the way she describes; but to me the result is just a little disappointing. Perhaps, however, I expect too much. There is no reason whatsoever why the imagination should be finer in hours of dreaming than in its hours of waking. Mrs. Kingsford quotes a letter written by Jamblichus to Agathocles, in which he says: ‘The soul has a twofold life, a lower and a higher. In sleep the soul is liberated from the constraint of the body, and enters, as an emancipated being, on its divine life of intelligence. The nobler part of the mind is thus united by abstraction to higher natures, and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the gods. . . . The night-time of the body is the day-time of the soul.’ But the great masterpieces of literature and the great secrets of wisdom have not been communicated in this way; and even in Coleridge’s case, though Kubla Khan is wonderful, it is not more wonderful, while it is certainly less complete, than the Ancient Mariner.
As for the dreams themselves, which occupy the first portion of the book, their value, of course, depends chiefly on the value of the truths or predictions which they are supposed to impart. I must confess that most modern mysticism seems to me to be simply a method of imparting useless knowledge in a form that no one can understand. Allegory, parable, and vision have their high artistic uses, but their philosophical and scientific uses are very small. However, here is one of Mrs. Kingsford’s dreams. It has a pleasant quaintness about it:
THE WONDERFUL SPECTACLES
I was walking alone on the sea-shore. The day was singularly clear and sunny. Inland lay the most beautiful landscape ever seen; and far off were ranges of tall hills, the highest peaks of which were white with glittering snows. Along the sands by the sea came towards me a man accoutred as a postman. He gave me a letter. It was from you. It ran thus:
‘I have got hold of the earliest and most precious book extant. It was written before the world began. The text is easy enough to read; but the notes, which are very copious and numerous, are in such minute and obscure characters that I cannot make them out. I want you to get for me the spectacles which Swedenborg used to wear; not the smaller pair—those he gave to Hans Christian Andersen—but the large pair, and these seem to have got mislaid. I think they are Spinoza’s make. You know, he was an optical-glass maker by profession, and the best we ever had. See if you can get them for me.’
When I looked up after reading this letter I saw the postman hastening away across the sands, and I cried out to him, ‘Stop! how am I to send the answer? Will you not wait for it?’
He looked round, stopped, and came back to me.
‘I have the answer here,’ he said, tapping his letter-bag, ‘and I shall deliver it immediately.’
‘How can you have the answer before I have written it?’ I asked. ‘You are making a mistake.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘In the city from which I come the replies are all written at the office, and sent out with the letters themselves. Your reply is in my bag.’
‘Let me see it,’ I said. He took another letter from his wallet, and gave it to me. I opened it, and read, in my own handwriting, this answer, addressed to you:
‘The spectacles you want can be bought in London; but you will not be able to use them at once, for they have not been worn for many years, and they sadly want cleaning. This you will not be able to do yourself in London, because it is too dark there to see well, and because your fingers are not small enough to clean them properly. Bring them here to me, and I will do it for you.’
I gave this letter back to the postman. He smiled and nodded at me; and then I perceived, to my astonishment, that he wore a camel’s-hair tunic round his waist. I had been on the point of addressing him—I know not why—as Hermes. But I now saw that he must be John the Baptist; and in my fright at having spoken to so great a Saint I awoke.
Mr. Maitland, who edits the present volume, and who was joint-author with Mrs. Kingsford of that curious book The Perfect Way, states in a footnote that in the present instance the dreamer knew nothing of Spinoza at the time, and was quite unaware that he was an optician; and the interpretation of the dream, as given by him, is that the spectacles in question were intended to represent Mrs. Kingsford’s remarkable faculty of intuitional and interpretative perception. For a spiritual message fraught with such meaning, the mere form of this dream seems to me somewhat ignoble, and I cannot say that I like the blending of the postman with St. John the Baptist. However, from a psychological point of view, these dreams are interesting, and Mrs. Kingsford’s book is undoubtedly a valuable addition to the literature of the mysticism of the nineteenth century.
* * * * *
The Romance of a Shop, by Miss Amy Levy, is a more mundane book, and deals with the adventures of some young ladies who open a photographic studio in Baker Street to the horror of some of their fashionable relatives. It is so brightly and pleasantly written that the sudden introduction of a tragedy into it seems violent and unnecessary. It lacks the true tragic temper, and without this temper in literature all misfortunes and miseries seem somewhat mean and ordinary. With this exception the book is admirably done, and the style is clever and full of quick observation. Observation is perhaps the most valuable faculty for a writer of fiction. When novelists reflect and moralise, they are, as a rule, dull. But to observe life with keen vision and quick intellect, to catch its many modes of expression, to seize upon the subtlety, or satire, or dramatic quality of its situations, and to render life for us with some spirit of distinction and fine selection—this, I fancy, should be the aim of the modern realistic novelist. It would be, perhaps, too much to say that Miss Levy has distinction; this is the rarest quality in modern literature, though not a few of its masters are modern; but she has many other qualities which are admirable.
* * * * *
Faithful and Unfaithful is a powerful but not very pleasing novel. However, the object of most modern fiction is not to give pleasure to the artistic instinct, but rather to portray life vividly for us, to draw attention to social anomalies, and social forms of injustice. Many of our novelists are really pamphleteers, reformers masquerading as story-tellers, earnest sociologists seeking to mend as well as to mirror life. The heroine, or rather martyr, of Miss Margaret Lee’s story is a very noble and graciously Puritanic American girl, who is married at the age of eighteen to a man whom she insists on regarding as a hero. Her husband cannot live in the high rarefied atmosphere of idealism with which she surrounds him; her firm and fearless faith in him becomes a factor in his degradation. ‘You are too good for me,’ he says to her in a finely conceived scene at the end of the book; ‘we have not an idea, an inclination, or a passion in common. I’m sick and tired of seeming to live up to a standard that is entirely beyond my reach and my desire. We make each other miserable! I can’t pull you down, and for ten years you have been exhausting yourself in vain efforts to raise me to your level. The thing must end!’ He asks her to divorce him, but she refuses. He then abandons her, and availing himself of those curious facilities for breaking the marriage-tie that prevail in the United States, succeeds in divorcing her without her consent, and without her knowledge. The book is certainly characteristic of an age so practical and so literary as ours, an age in which all social reforms have been preceded and have been largely influenced by fiction. Faithful and Unfaithful seems to point to some coming change in the marriage-laws of America.
(1) Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Edited and Selected by W. B. Yeats. (Walter Scott.)
(2) Helen Davenant. By Violet Fane. (Chapman and Hall.)
(3) Dreams and Dream-Stories. By Dr. Anna Kingsford. (Redway.)
(4) The Romance of a Shop. By Amy Levy. (Fisher Unwin.)
(5) Faithful and Unfaithful. By Margaret Lee. (Macmillan and Co.)
ONE OF THE BIBLES OF THE WORLD
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 12, 1889.)
The Kalevala is one of those poems that Mr. William Morris once described as ‘The Bibles of the World.’ It takes its place as a national epic beside the Homeric poems, the Niebelunge, the Shahnameth and the Mahabharata, and the admirable translation just published by Mr. John Martin Crawford is sure to be welcomed by all scholars and lovers of primitive poetry. In his very interesting preface Mr. Crawford claims for the Finns that they began earlier than any other European nation to collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century we meet men of literary tastes like Palmsköld who tried to collect and interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North. But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lönnrot. Both were practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent contact with the people of Finland. Topelius, who collected eighty epical fragments of the Kalevala, spent the last eleven years of his life in bed, afflicted with a fatal disease. This misfortune, however, did not damp his enthusiasm. Mr. Crawford tells us that he used to invite the wandering Finnish merchants to his bedside and induce them to sing their heroic poems which he copied down as soon as they were uttered, and that whenever he heard of a renowned Finnish minstrel he did all in his power to bring the song-man to his house in order that he might gather new fragments of the national epic. Lönnrot travelled over the whole country, on horseback, in reindeer sledges and in canoes, collecting the old poems and songs from the hunters, the fishermen and the shepherds. The people gave him every assistance, and he had the good fortune to come across an old peasant, one of the oldest of the runolainen in the Russian province of Wuokinlem, who was by far the most renowned song-man of the country, and from him he got many of the most splendid runes of the poem. And certainly the Kalevala, as it stands, is one of the world’s great poems. It is perhaps hardly accurate to describe it as an epic. It lacks the central unity of a true epic in our sense of the word. It has many heroes beside Wainomoinen and is, properly speaking, a collection of folk-songs and ballads. Of its antiquity there is no doubt. It is thoroughly pagan from beginning to end, and even the legend of the Virgin Mariatta to whom the Sun tells where ‘her golden babe lies hidden’—
Yonder is thy golden infant,
There thy holy babe lies sleeping
Hidden to his belt in water,
Hidden in the reeds and rushes—
is, according to all scholars, essentially pre-Christian in origin. The gods are chiefly gods of air and water and forest. The highest is the sky-god Ukks who is ‘The Father of the Breezes,’ ‘The Shepherd of the Lamb-Clouds’; the lightning is his sword, the rainbow is his bow; his skirt sparkles with fire, his stockings are blue and his shoes crimson-coloured. The daughters of the Sun and Moon sit on the scarlet rims of the clouds and weave the rays of light into a gleaming web. Untar presides over fogs and mists, and passes them through a silver sieve before sending them to the earth. Ahto, the wave-god, lives with ‘his cold and cruel-hearted spouse,’ Wellamo, at the bottom of the sea in the chasm of the Salmon-Rocks, and possesses the priceless treasure of the Sampo, the talisman of success. When the branches of the primitive oak-trees shut out the light of the sun from the Northland, Pikku-Mies (the Pygmy) emerged from the sea in a suit of copper, with a copper hatchet in his belt, and having grown to a giant’s stature felled the huge oak with the third stroke of his axe. Wirokannas is ‘The Green-robed Priest of the Forest,’ and Tapio, who has a coat of tree-moss and a high-crowned hat of fir-leaves, is ‘The Gracious God of the Woodlands.’ Otso, the bear, is the ‘Honey-Paw of the Mountains,’ the ‘Fur-robed Forest Friend.’ In everything, visible and invisible, there is God, a divine presence. There are three worlds, and they are all peopled with divinities.
As regards the poem itself, it is written in trochaic eight-syllabled lines with alliteration and the part-line echo, the metre which Longfellow adopted for Hiawatha. One of its distinguishing characteristics is its wonderful passion for nature and for the beauty of natural objects. Lemenkainen says to Tapio:
Sable-bearded God of forests,
In thy hat and coat of ermine,
Robe thy trees in finest fibres,
Deck thy groves in richest fabrics,
Give the fir-trees shining silver,
Deck with gold the slender balsams,
Give the spruces copper-belting,
And the pine-trees silver girdles,
Give the birches golden flowers,
Deck their stems with silver fretwork,
This their garb in former ages
When the days and nights were brighter,
When the fir-trees shone like sunlight,
And the birches like the moonbeams;
Honey breathe throughout the forest,
Settled in the glens and highlands,
Spices in the meadow-borders,
Oil outpouring from the lowlands.
All handicrafts and art-work are, as in Homer, elaborately described:
Then the smiter Ilmarinen
The eternal artist-forgeman,
In the furnace forged an eagle
From the fire of ancient wisdom,
For this giant bird of magic
Forged he talons out of iron,
And his beak of steel and copper;
Seats himself upon the eagle,
On his back between the wing-bones
Thus addresses he his creature,
Gives the bird of fire this order.
Mighty eagle, bird of beauty,
Fly thou whither I direct thee,
To Tuoni’s coal-black river,
To the blue-depths of the Death-stream,
Seize the mighty fish of Mana,
Catch for me this water-monster.
And Wainamoinen’s boat-building is one of the great incidents of the poem:
Wainamoinen old and skilful,
The eternal wonder-worker,
Builds his vessel with enchantment,
Builds his boat by art and magic,
From the timber of the oak-tree,
Forms its posts and planks and flooring.
Sings a song and joins the framework;
Sings a second, sets the siding;
Sings a third time, sets the rowlocks;
Fashions oars, and ribs, and rudder,
Joins the sides and ribs together.. . . . .
Now he decks his magic vessel,
Paints the boat in blue and scarlet,
Trims in gold the ship’s forecastle,
Decks the prow in molten silver;
Sings his magic ship down gliding,
On the cylinders of fir-tree;
Now erects the masts of pine-wood,
On each mast the sails of linen,
Sails of blue, and white, and scarlet,
Woven into finest fabric.
All the characteristics of a splendid antique civilisation are mirrored in this marvellous poem, and Mr. Crawford’s admirable translation should make the wonderful heroes of Suomi song as familiar if not as dear to our people as the heroes of the great Ionian epic.
The Kalevala, the Epic Poem of Finland. Translated into English by John Martin Crawford. (G. P. Putnam’s Sons.)
POETICAL SOCIALISTS
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1889.)
Mr. Stopford Brooke said some time ago that Socialism and the socialistic spirit would give our poets nobler and loftier themes for song, would widen their sympathies and enlarge the horizon of their vision and would touch, with the fire and fervour of a new faith, lips that had else been silent, hearts that but for this fresh gospel had been cold. What Art gains from contemporary events is always a fascinating problem and a problem that is not easy to solve. It is, however, certain that Socialism starts well equipped. She has her poets and her painters, her art lecturers and her cunning designers, her powerful orators and her clever writers. If she fails it will not be for lack of expression. If she succeeds her triumph will not be a triumph of mere brute force. The first thing that strikes one, as one looks over the list of contributors to Mr. Edward Carpenter’s Chants of Labour, is the curious variety of their several occupations, the wide differences of social position that exist between them, and the strange medley of men whom a common passion has for the moment united. The editor is a ‘Science lecturer’; he is followed by a draper and a porter; then we have two late Eton masters and then two bootmakers; and these are, in their turn, succeeded by an ex-Lord Mayor of Dublin, a bookbinder, a photographer, a steel-worker and an authoress. On one page we have a journalist, a draughtsman and a music-teacher: and on another a Civil servant, a machine fitter, a medical student, a cabinet-maker and a minister of the Church of Scotland. Certainly, it is no ordinary movement that can bind together in close brotherhood men of such dissimilar pursuits, and when we mention that Mr. William Morris is one of the singers, and that Mr. Walter Crane has designed the cover and frontispiece of the book, we cannot but feel that, as we pointed out before, Socialism starts well equipped.
As for the songs themselves, some of them, to quote from the editor’s preface, are ‘purely revolutionary, others are Christian in tone; there are some that might be called merely material in their tendency, while many are of a highly ideal and visionary character.’ This is, on the whole, very promising. It shows that Socialism is not going to allow herself to be trammelled by any hard and fast creed or to be stereotyped into an iron formula. She welcomes many and multiform natures. She rejects none and has room for all. She has the attraction of a wonderful personality and touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and draws this man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith in the future, and a third, it may be, by his love of art or by his wild worship of a lost and buried past. And all of this is well. For, to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.
They are not of any very high literary value, these poems that have been so dexterously set to music. They are meant to be sung, not to be read. They are rough, direct and vigorous, and the tunes are stirring and familiar. Indeed, almost any mob could warble them with ease. The transpositions that have been made are rather amusing. ’Twas in Trafalgar Square is set to the tune of ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay; Up, Ye People! a very revolutionary song by Mr. John Gregory, boot-maker, with a refrain of
Up, ye People! or down into your graves!
Cowards ever will be slaves!
is to be sung to the tune of Rule, Britannia! the old melody of The Vicar of Bray is to accompany the new Ballade of Law and Order—which, however, is not a ballade at all—and to the air of Here’s to the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen the democracy of the future is to thunder forth one of Mr. T. D. Sullivan’s most powerful and pathetic lyrics. It is clear that the Socialists intend to carry on the musical education of the people simultaneously with their education in political science and, here as elsewhere, they seem to be entirely free from any narrow bias or formal prejudice. Mendelssohn is followed by Moody and Sankey; the Wacht am Rhein stands side by side with the Marseillaise; Lillibulero, a chorus from Norma, John Brown and an air from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony are all equally delightful to them. They sing the National Anthem in Shelley’s version and chant William Morris’s Voice of Toil to the flowing numbers of Ye Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon. Victor Hugo talks somewhere of the terrible cry of ‘Le Tigre Populaire,’ but it is evident from Mr. Carpenter’s book that should the Revolution ever break out in England we shall have no inarticulate roar but, rather, pleasant glees and graceful part-songs. The change is certainly for the better. Nero fiddled while Rome was burning—at least, inaccurate historians say he did; but it is for the building up of an eternal city that the Socialists of our day are making music, and they have complete confidence in the art instincts of the people.
They say that the people are brutal—
That their instincts of beauty are dead—
Were it so, shame on those who condemn them
To the desperate struggle for bread.
But they lie in their throats when they say it,
For the people are tender at heart,
And a wellspring of beauty lies hidden
Beneath their life’s fever and smart,
is a stanza from one of the poems in this volume, and the feeling expressed in these words is paramount everywhere. The Reformation gained much from the use of popular hymn-tunes, and the Socialists seem determined to gain by similar means a similar hold upon the people. However, they must not be too sanguine about the result. The walls of Thebes rose up to the sound of music, and Thebes was a very dull city indeed.
Chants of Labour: A Song-Book of the People. With Music. Edited by Edward Carpenter. With Designs by Walter Crane. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)
MR. BRANDER MATTHEWS’ ESSAYS
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 27, 1889.)
‘If you to have your book criticized favorably, give yourself a good notice in the Preface!’ is the golden rule laid down for the guidance of authors by Mr. Brander Matthews in an amusing essay on the art of preface-writing and, true to his own theory, he announces his volume as ‘the most interesting, the most entertaining, and the most instructive book of the decade.’ Entertaining it certainly is in parts. The essay on Poker, for instance, is very brightly and pleasantly written. Mr. Proctor objected to Poker on the somewhat trivial ground that it was a form of lying, and on the more serious ground that it afforded special opportunities for cheating; and, indeed, he regarded the mere existence of the game outside gambling dens as ‘one of the most portentous phenomena of American civilisation.’ Mr. Brander Matthews points out, in answer to these grave charges, that Bluffing is merely a suppressio veri and that it requires a great deal of physical courage on the part of the player. As for the cheating, he claims that Poker affords no more opportunities for the exercise of this art than either Whist or Ecarté, though he admits that the proper attitude towards an opponent whose good luck is unduly persistent is that of the German-American who, finding four aces in his hand, was naturally about to bet heavily, when a sudden thought struck him and he inquired, ‘Who dole dem carts?’ ‘Jakey Einstein’ was the answer. ‘Jakey Einstein?’ he repeated, laying down his hand; ‘den I pass out.’
The history of the game will be found very interesting by all card-lovers. Like most of the distinctly national products of America, it seems to have been imported from abroad and can be traced back to an Italian game in the fifteenth century. Euchre was probably acclimatised on the Mississippi by the Canadian voyageurs, being a form of the French game of Triomphe. It was a Kentucky citizen who, desiring to give his sons a few words of solemn advice for their future guidance in life, had them summoned to his deathbed and said to them, ‘Boys, when you go down the river to Orleens jest you beware of a game called Yucker where the jack takes the ace;—it’s unchristian!’—after which warning he lay back and died in peace. And ‘it was Euchre which the two gentlemen were playing in a boat on the Missouri River when a bystander, shocked by the frequency with which one of the players turned up the jack, took the liberty of warning the other player that the winner was dealing from the bottom, to which the loser, secure in his power of self-protection, answered gruffly, “Well, suppose he is—it’s his deal, isn’t it?”’
The chapter On the Antiquity of Jests, with its suggestion of an International Exhibition of Jokes, is capital. Such an exhibition, Mr. Matthews remarks, would at least dispel any lingering belief in the old saying that there are only thirty-eight good stories in existence and that thirty-seven of these cannot be told before ladies; and the Retrospective Section would certainly be the constant resort of any true folklorist. For most of the good stories of our time are really folklore, myth survivals, echoes of the past. The two well-known American proverbs, ‘We have had a hell of a time’ and ‘Let the other man walk’ are both traced back by Mr. Matthews: the first to Walpole’s letters, and the other to a story Poggio tells of an inhabitant of Perugia who walked in melancholy because he could not pay his debts. ‘Vah, stulte,’ was the advice given to him, ‘leave anxiety to your creditors!’ and even Mr. William M. Evart’s brilliant repartee when he was told that Washington once threw a dollar across the Natural Bridge in Virginia, ‘In those days a dollar went so much farther than it does now!’ seems to be the direct descendant of a witty remark of Foote’s, though we must say that in this case we prefer the child to the father. The essay On the French Spoken by Those who do not Speak French is also cleverly written and, indeed, on every subject, except literature, Mr. Matthews is well worth reading.
On literature and literary subjects he is certainly ‘sadly to seek.’ The essay on The Ethics of Plagiarism, with its laborious attempt to rehabilitate Mr. Rider Haggard and its foolish remarks on Poe’s admirable paper Mr. Longfellow and Other Plagiarists, is extremely dull and commonplace and, in the elaborate comparison that he draws between Mr. Frederick Locker and Mr. Austin Dobson, the author of Pen and Ink shows that he is quite devoid of any real critical faculty or of any fine sense of the difference between ordinary society verse and the exquisite work of a very perfect artist in poetry. We have no objection to Mr. Matthews likening Mr. Locker to Mr. du Maurier, and Mr. Dobson to Randolph Caldecott and Mr. Edwin Abbey. Comparisons of this kind, though extremely silly, do not do much harm. In fact, they mean nothing and are probably not intended to mean anything. Upon the other hand, we really must protest against Mr. Matthews’ efforts to confuse the poetry of Piccadilly with the poetry of Parnassus. To tell us, for instance, that Mr. Austin Dobson’s verse ‘has not the condensed clearness nor the incisive vigor of Mr. Locker’s’ is really too bad even for Transatlantic criticism. Nobody who lays claim to the slightest knowledge of literature and the forms of literature should ever bring the two names into conjunction. Mr. Locker has written some pleasant vers de société, some tuneful trifles in rhyme admirably suited for ladies’ albums and for magazines. But to mention Herrick and Suckling and Mr. Austin Dobson in connection with him is absurd. He is not a poet. Mr. Dobson, upon the other hand, has produced work that is absolutely classical in its exquisite beauty of form. Nothing more artistically perfect in its way than the Lines to a Greek Girl has been written in our time. This little poem will be remembered in literature as long as Thyrsis is remembered, and Thyrsis will never be forgotten. Both have that note of distinction that is so rare in these days of violence, exaggeration and rhetoric. Of course, to suggest, as Mr. Matthews does, that Mr. Dobson’s poems belong to ‘the literature of power’ is ridiculous. Power is not their aim, nor is it their effect. They have other qualities, and in their own delicately limited sphere they have no contemporary rivals; they have none even second to them. However, Mr. Matthews is quite undaunted and tries to drag poor Mr. Locker out of Piccadilly, where he was really quite in his element, and to set him on Parnassus where he has no right to be and where he would not claim to be. He praises his work with the recklessness of an eloquent auctioneer. These very commonplace and slightly vulgar lines on A Human Skull:
It may have held (to shoot some random shots)
Thy brains, Eliza Fry! or Baron Byron’s;
The wits of Nelly Gwynne or Doctor Watts—
Two quoted bards. Two philanthropic sirens.But this, I trust, is clearly understood,
If man or woman, if adored or hated—
Whoever own’d this Skull was not so good
Nor quite so bad as many may have stated;
are considered by him to be ‘sportive and brightsome’ and full of ‘playful humor,’ and ‘two things especially are to be noted in them—individuality and directness of expression.’ Individuality and directness of expression! We wonder what Mr. Matthews thinks these words mean.
Unfortunate Mr. Locker with his uncouth American admirer! How he must blush to read these heavy panegyrics! Indeed, Mr. Matthews himself has at least one fit of remorse for his attempt to class Mr. Locker’s work with the work of Mr. Austin Dobson, but like most fits of remorse it leads to nothing. On the very next page we have the complaint that Mr. Dobson’s verse has not ‘the condensed clearness’ and the ‘incisive vigor’ of Mr. Locker’s. Mr. Matthews should confine himself to his clever journalistic articles on Euchre, Poker, bad French and old jokes. On these subjects he can, to use an expression of his own, ‘write funny.’ He ‘writes funny,’ too, upon literature, but the fun is not quite so amusing.
Pen and Ink: Papers on Subjects of More or Less Importance. By Brander Matthews. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES—III
(Woman’s World, March 1889.)
Miss Nesbit has already made herself a name as a writer of graceful and charming verse, and though her last volume, Leaves of Life, does not show any distinct advance on her former work, it still fully maintains the high standard already achieved, and justifies the reputation of the author. There are some wonderfully pretty poems in it, poems full of quick touches of fancy, and of pleasant ripples of rhyme; and here and there a poignant note of passion flashes across the song, as a scarlet thread flashes through the shuttlerace of a loom, giving a new value to the delicate tints, and bringing the scheme of colour to a higher and more perfect key. In Miss Nesbit’s earlier volume, the Lays and Legends, as it was called, there was an attempt to give poetic form to humanitarian dreams and socialistic aspirations; but the poems that dealt with these subjects were, on the whole, the least successful of the collection; and with the quick, critical instinct of an artist, Miss Nesbit seems to have recognised this. In the present volume, at any rate, such poems are rare, and these few felicitous verses give us the poet’s defence:
A singer sings of rights and wrongs,
Of world’s ideals vast and bright,
And feels the impotence of songs
To scourge the wrong or help the right;
And only writhes to feel how vain
Are songs as weapons for his fight;
And so he turns to love again,
And sings of love for heart’s delight.For heart’s delight the singers bind
The wreath of roses round the head,
And will not loose it lest they find
Time victor, and the roses dead.
‘Man can but sing of what he knows—
I saw the roses fresh and red!’
And so they sing the deathless rose,
With withered roses garlanded.And some within their bosom hide
Their rose of love still fresh and fair,
And walk in silence, satisfied
To keep its folded fragrance rare.
And some—who bear a flag unfurled—
Wreathe with their rose the flag they bear,
And sing their banner for the world,
And for their heart the roses there.Yet thus much choice in singing is;
We sing the good, the true, the just,
Passionate duty turned to bliss,
And honour growing out of trust.
Freedom we sing, and would not lose
Her lightest footprint in life’s dust.
We sing of her because we choose,
We sing of love because we must.
Certainly Miss Nesbit is at her best when she sings of love and nature. Here she is close to her subject, and her temperament gives colour and form to the various dramatic moods that are either suggested by Nature herself or brought to Nature for interpretation. This, for instance, is very sweet and graceful:
When all the skies with snow were grey,
And all the earth with snow was white,
I wandered down a still wood way,
And there I met my heart’s delight
Slow moving through the silent wood,
The spirit of its solitude:
The brown birds and the lichened tree
Seemed less a part of it than she.Where pheasants’ feet and rabbits’ feet
Had marked the snow with traces small,
I saw the footprints of my sweet—
The sweetest woodland thing of all.
With Christmas roses in her hand,
One heart-beat’s space I saw her stand;
And then I let her pass, and stood
Lone in an empty world of wood.And though by that same path I’ve passed
Down that same woodland every day,
That meeting was the first and last,
And she is hopelessly away.
I wonder was she really there—
Her hands, and eyes, and lips, and hair?
Or was it but my dreaming sent
Her image down the way I went?Empty the woods are where we met—
They will be empty in the spring;
The cowslip and the violet
Will die without her gathering.
But dare I dream one radiant day
Red rose-wreathed she will pass this way
Across the glad and honoured grass;
And then—I will not let her pass.
And this Dedication, with its tender silver-grey notes of colour, is charming:
In any meadow where your feet may tread,
In any garland that your love may wear,
May be the flower whose hidden fragrance shed
Wakes some old hope or numbs some old despair,
And makes life’s grief not quite so hard to bear,
And makes life’s joy more poignant and more dear
Because of some delight dead many a year.Or in some cottage garden there may be
The flower whose scent is memory for you;
The sturdy southern-wood, the frail sweet-pea,
Bring back the swallow’s cheep, the pigeon’s coo,
And youth, and hope, and all the dreams they knew,
The evening star, the hedges grey with mist,
The silent porch where Love’s first kiss was kissed.So in my garden may you chance to find
Or royal rose or quiet meadow flower,
Whose scent may be with some dear dream entwined,
And give you back the ghost of some sweet hour,
As lilies fragrant from an August shower,
Or airs of June that over bean-fields blow,
Bring back the sweetness of my long ago.
All through the volume we find the same dexterous refining of old themes, which is indeed the best thing that our lesser singers can give us, and a thing always delightful. There is no garden so well tilled but it can bear another blossom, and though the subject-matter of Miss Nesbit’s book is as the subject-matter of almost all books of poetry, she can certainly lend a new grace and a subtle sweetness to almost everything on which she writes.
The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems is from the clever pen of Mr. W. B. Yeats, whose charming anthology of Irish fairy-tales I had occasion to notice in a recent number of the Woman’s World. {437} It is, I believe, the first volume of poems that Mr. Yeats has published, and it is certainly full of promise. It must be admitted that many of the poems are too fragmentary, too incomplete. They read like stray scenes out of unfinished plays, like things only half remembered, or, at best, but dimly seen. But the architectonic power of construction, the power to build up and make perfect a harmonious whole, is nearly always the latest, as it certainly is the highest, development of the artistic temperament. It is somewhat unfair to expect it in early work. One quality Mr. Yeats has in a marked degree, a quality that is not common in the work of our minor poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to us—I mean the romantic temper. He is essentially Celtic, and his verse, at its best, is Celtic also. Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to study how to ‘load every rift with ore,’ yet is more fascinated by the beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music. The spirit that dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual poem or particular passage, but this from The Wanderings of Oisin is worth quoting. It describes the ride to the Island of Forgetfulness:
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow light,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one;Till the horse gave a whinny; for cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak,
Of hollies, and hazels, and oak-trees, a valley was sloping away
From his hoofs in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk,
Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they lay.More comely than man may make them, inlaid with silver and gold,
Were arrow and shield and war-axe, arrow and spear and blade,
And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollows a child of three years old
Could sleep on a couch of rushes, round and about them laid.
And this, which deals with the old legend of the city lying under the waters of a lake, is strange and interesting:
The maker of the stars and worlds
Sat underneath the market cross,
And the old men were walking, walking,
And little boys played pitch-and-toss.‘The props,’ said He, ‘of stars and worlds
Are prayers of patient men and good.’
The boys, the women, and old men,
Listening, upon their shadows stood.A grey professor passing cried,
‘How few the mind’s intemperance rule!
What shallow thoughts about deep things!
The world grows old and plays the fool.’The mayor came, leaning his left ear—
There were some talking of the poor—
And to himself cried, ‘Communist!’
And hurried to the guardhouse door.The bishop came with open book,
Whispering along the sunny path;
There was some talking of man’s God,
His God of stupor and of wrath.The bishop murmured, ‘Atheist!
How sinfully the wicked scoff!’
And sent the old men on their way,
And drove the boys and women off.The place was empty now of people;
A cock came by upon his toes;
An old horse looked across the fence,
And rubbed along the rail his nose.The maker of the stars and worlds
To His own house did Him betake,
And on that city dropped a tear,
And now that city is a lake.
Mr. Yeats has a great deal of invention, and some of the poems in his book, such as Mosada, Jealousy, and The Island of Statues, are very finely conceived. It is impossible to doubt, after reading his present volume, that he will some day give us work of high import. Up to this he has been merely trying the strings of his instrument, running over the keys.
* * * * *
Lady Munster’s Dorinda is an exceedingly clever novel. The heroine is a sort of well-born Becky Sharp, only much more beautiful than Becky, or at least than Thackeray’s portraits of her, which, however, have always seemed to me rather ill-natured. I feel sure that Mrs. Rawdon Crawley was extremely pretty, and I have never understood how it was that Thackeray could caricature with his pencil so fascinating a creation of his pen. In the first chapter of Lady Munster’s novel we find Dorinda at a fashionable school, and the sketches of the three old ladies who preside over the select seminary are very amusing. Dorinda is not very popular, and grave suspicions rest upon her of having stolen a cheque. This is a startling début for a heroine, and I was a little afraid at first that Dorinda, after undergoing endless humiliations, would be proved innocent in the last chapter. It was quite a relief to find that Dorinda was guilty. In fact, Dorinda is a kleptomaniac; that is to say, she is a member of the upper classes who spends her time in collecting works of art that do not belong to her. This, however, is only one of her accomplishments, and it does not occupy any important place in the story till the last volume is reached. Here we find Dorinda married to a Styrian Prince, and living in the luxury for which she had always longed. Unfortunately, while staying in the house of a friend she is detected stealing some rare enamels. Her punishment, as described by Lady Munster, is extremely severe; and when she finally commits suicide, maddened by the imprisonment to which her husband had subjected her, it is difficult not to feel a good deal of pity for her. Lady Munster writes a very clever, bright style, and has a wonderful faculty of drawing in a few sentences the most lifelike portraits of social types and social exceptions. Sir Jasper Broke and his sister, the Duke and Duchess of Cheviotdale, Lord and Lady Glenalmond, and Lord Baltimore, are all admirably drawn. The ‘novel of high life,’ as it used to be called, has of late years fallen into disrepute. Instead of duchesses in Mayfair, we have philanthropic young ladies in Whitechapel; and the fashionable and brilliant young dandies, in whom Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton took such delight, have been entirely wiped out as heroes of fiction by hardworking curates in the East End. The aim of most of our modern novelists seems to be, not to write good novels, but to write novels that will do good; and I am afraid that they are under the impression that fashionable life is not an edifying subject. They wish to reform the morals, rather than to portray the manners of their age. They have made the novel the mode of propaganda. It is possible, however, that Dorinda points to some coming change, and certainly it would be a pity if the Muse of Fiction confined her attention entirely to the East End.
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The four remarkable women whom Mrs. Walford has chosen as the subjects of her Four Biographies from ‘Blackwood’ are Jane Taylor, Elizabeth Fry, Hannah More, and Mary Somerville. Perhaps it is too much to say that Jane Taylor is remarkable. In her day she was said to have been ‘known to four continents,’ and Sir Walter Scott described her as ‘among the first women of her time’; but no one now cares to read Essays in Rhyme, or Display, though the latter is really a very clever novel and full of capital things. Elizabeth Fry is, of course, one of the great personalities of this century, at any rate in the particular sphere to which she devoted herself, and ranks with the many uncanonised saints whom the world has loved, and whose memory is sweet. Mrs. Walford gives a most interesting account of her. We see her first a gay, laughing, flaxen-haired girl, ‘mightily addicted to fun,’ pleased to be finely dressed and sent to the opera to see the ‘Prince,’ and be seen by him; pleased to exhibit her pretty figure in a becoming scarlet riding-habit, and to be looked at with obvious homage by the young officers quartered hard by, as she rode along the Norfolk lanes; ‘dissipated’ by simply hearing their band play in the square, and made giddy by the veriest trifle: ‘an idle, flirting, worldly girl,’ to use her own words. Then came the eventful day when ‘in purple boots laced with scarlet’ she went to hear William Savery preach at the Meeting House. This was the turning-point of her life, her psychological moment, as the phrase goes. After it came the era of ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ of the drab gown and the beaver hat, of the visits to Newgate and the convict ships, of the work of rescuing the outcast and seeking the lost. Mrs. Walford quotes the following interesting account of the famous interview with Queen Charlotte at the Mansion-House:
Inside the Egyptian Hall there was a subject for Hayter—the diminutive stature of the Queen, covered with diamonds, and her countenance lighted up with the kindest benevolence; Mrs. Fry, her simple Quaker’s dress adding to the height of her figure—though a little flushed—preserving her wonted calmness of look and manner; several of the bishops standing near; the platform crowded with waving feathers, jewels, and orders; the hall lined with spectators, gaily and nobly clad, and the centre filled with hundreds of children, brought there from their different schools to be examined. A murmur of applause ran through the assemblage as the Queen took Mrs. Fry by the hand. The murmur was followed by a clap and a shout, which was taken up by the multitudes without till it died away in the distance.
Those who regard Hannah More as a prim maiden lady of the conventional type, with a pious and literary turn of mind, will be obliged to change their views should they read Mrs. Walford’s admirable sketch of the authoress of Percy. Hannah More was a brilliant wit, a femme d’esprit, passionately fond of society, and loved by society in return. When the serious-minded little country girl, who at the age of eight had covered a whole quire of paper with letters seeking to reform imaginary depraved characters, and with return epistles full of contrition and promises of amendment, paid her first visit to London, she became at once the intimate friend of Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick, and most of the distinguished people of the day, delighting them by her charm, and grace, and wit. ‘I dined at the Adelphi yesterday,’ she writes in one of her letters. ‘Garrick was the very soul of the company, and I never saw Johnson in more perfect good-humour. After all had risen to go we stood round them for above an hour, laughing, in defiance of every rule of decorum and Chesterfield. I believe we should never have thought of sitting down, nor of parting, had not an impertinent watchman been saucily vociferating. Johnson outstaid them all, and sat with me for half an hour.’ The following is from her sister’s pen:
On Tuesday evening we drank tea at Sir Joshua’s with Dr. Johnson. Hannah is certainly a great favourite. She was placed next him, and they had the entire conversation to themselves. They were both in remarkably high spirits, and it was certainly her lucky night; I never heard her say so many good things. The old genius was as jocular as the young one was pleasant. You would have imagined we were at some comedy had you heard our peals of laughter. They certainly tried which could ‘pepper the highest,’ and it is not clear to me that the lexicographer was really the highest seasoner.
Hannah More was certainly, as Mrs. Walford says, ‘the fêted and caressed idol of society.’ The theatre at Bristol vaunted, ‘Boast we not a More?’ and the learned cits at Oxford inscribed their acknowledgment of her authority. Horace Walpole sat on the doorstep—or threatened to do so—till she promised to go down to Strawberry Hill; Foster quoted her; Mrs. Thrale twined her arms about her; Wilberforce consulted her and employed her. When The Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World was published anonymously, ‘Aut Morus, aut Angelus,’ exclaimed the Bishop of London, before he had read six pages. Of her village stories and ballads two million copies were sold during the first year. Cælebs in Search of a Wife ran into thirty editions. Mrs. Barbauld writes to tell her about ‘a good and sensible woman’ of her acquaintance, who, on being asked how she contrived to divert herself in the country, replied, ‘I have my spinning-wheel and my Hannah More. When I have spun one pound of flax I put on another, and when I have finished my book I begin it again. I want no other amusement.’ How incredible it all sounds! No wonder that Mrs. Walford exclaims, ‘No other amusement! Good heavens! Breathes there a man, woman, or child with soul so quiescent nowadays as to be satisfied with reels of flax and yards of Hannah More? Give us Hannah’s company, but not—not her writings!’ It is only fair to say that Mrs. Walford has thoroughly carried out the views she expresses in this passage, for she gives us nothing of Hannah More’s grandiloquent literary productions, and yet succeeds in making us know her thoroughly. The whole book is well written, but the biography of Hannah More is a wonderfully brilliant sketch, and deserves great praise.
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Miss Mabel Wotton has invented a new form of picture-gallery. Feeling that the visible aspect of men and women can be expressed in literature no less than through the medium of line and colour, she has collected together a series of Word Portraits of Famous Writers extending from Geoffrey Chaucer to Mrs. Henry Wood. It is a far cry from the author of the Canterbury Tales to the authoress of East Lynne; but as a beauty, at any rate, Mrs. Wood deserved to be described, and we hear of the pure oval of her face, of her perfect mouth, her ‘dazzling’ complexion, and the extraordinary youth by which ‘she kept to the last the . . . freshness of a young girl.’ Many of the ‘famous writers’ seem to have been very ugly. Thomson, the poet, was of a dull countenance, and a gross, unanimated, uninviting appearance; Richardson looked ‘like a plump white mouse in a wig.’ Pope is described in the Guardian, in 1713, as ‘a lively little creature, with long arms and legs: a spider is no ill emblem of him. He has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.’ Charles Kingsley appears as ‘rather tall, very angular, surprisingly awkward, with thin staggering legs, a hatchet face adorned with scraggy gray whiskers, a faculty for falling into the most ungainly attitudes, and making the most hideous contortions of visage and frame; with a rough provincial accent and an uncouth way of speaking which would be set down for absurd caricature on the boards of a comic theatre.’ Lamb is described by Carlyle as ‘the leanest of mankind; tiny black breeches buttoned to the knee-cap and no further, surmounting spindle legs also in black, face and head fineish, black, bony, lean, and of a Jew type rather’; and Talfourd says that the best portrait of him is his own description of Braham—‘a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.’ William Godwin was ‘short and stout, his clothes loosely and carelessly put on, and usually old and worn; his hands were generally in his pockets; he had a remarkably large, bald head, and a weak voice; seeming generally half asleep when he walked, and even when he talked.’ Lord Charlemont spoke of David Hume as more like a ‘turtle-eating alderman’ than ‘a refined philosopher.’ Mary Russell Mitford was ill-naturedly described by L.E.L. as ‘Sancho Panza in petticoats!’; and as for poor Rogers, who was somewhat cadaverous, the descriptions given of him are quite dreadful. Lord Dudley once asked him ‘why, now that he could afford it, he did not set up his hearse,’ and it is said that Sydney Smith gave him mortal offence by recommending him ‘when he sat for his portrait to be drawn saying his prayers, with his face hidden in his hands,’ christened him the ‘Death dandy,’ and wrote underneath a picture of him, ‘Painted in his lifetime.’ We must console ourselves—if not with Mr. Hardy’s statement that ‘ideal physical beauty is incompatible with mental development, and a full recognition of the evil of things’—at least with the pictures of those who had some comeliness, and grace, and charm. Dr. Grosart says of a miniature of Edmund Spenser, ‘It is an exquisitely beautiful face. The brow is ample, the lips thin but mobile, the eyes a grayish-blue, the hair and beard a golden red (as of “red monie” of the ballads) or goldenly chestnut, the nose with semi-transparent nostril and keen, the chin firm-poised, the expression refined and delicate. Altogether just such “presentment” of the Poet of Beauty par excellence, as one would have imagined.’ Antony Wood describes Sir Richard Lovelace as being, at the age of sixteen, ‘the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld.’ Nor need we wonder at this when we remember the portrait of Lovelace that hangs at Dulwich College. Barry Cornwall, described himself by S. C. Hall as ‘a decidedly rather pretty little fellow,’ said of Keats: ‘His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness,—it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight.’ Chatterton and Byron were splendidly handsome, and beauty of a high spiritual order may be claimed both for Milton and Shelley, though an industrious gentleman lately wrote a book in two volumes apparently for the purpose of proving that the latter of these two poets had a snub nose. Hazlitt once said that ‘A man’s life may be a lie to himself and others, and yet a picture painted of him by a great artist would probably stamp his character.’ Few of the word-portraits in Miss Wotton’s book can be said to have been drawn by a great artist, but they are all interesting, and Miss Wotton has certainly shown a wonderful amount of industry in collecting her references and in grouping them. It is not a book to be read through from beginning to end, but it is a delightful book to glance at, and by its means one can raise the ghosts of the dead, at least as well as the Psychical Society can.