Reviews

But, says Mr. Sharp, every one is far too literary; even Rossetti is too literary. What we want is simplicity and directness of utterance; these should be the dominant characteristics of poetry. Well, is that quite so certain? Are simplicity and directness of utterance absolute essentials for poetry? I think not. They may be admirable for the drama, admirable for all those imitative forms of literature that claim to mirror life in its externals and its accidents, admirable for quiet narrative, admirable in their place; but their place is not everywhere. Poetry has many modes of music; she does not blow through one pipe alone. Directness of utterance is good, but so is the subtle recasting of thought into a new and delightful form. Simplicity is good, but complexity, mystery, strangeness, symbolism, obscurity even, these have their value. Indeed, properly speaking, there is no such thing as Style; there are merely styles, that is all.

One cannot help feeling also that everything that Mr. Sharp says in his preface was said at the beginning of the century by Wordsworth, only where Wordsworth called us back to nature, Mr. Sharp invites us to woo romance. Romance, he tells us, is ‘in the air.’ A new romantic movement is imminent; ‘I anticipate,’ he says, ‘that many of our poets, especially those of the youngest generation, will shortly turn towards the “ballad” as a poetic vehicle: and that the next year or two will see much romantic poetry.’

The ballad! Well, Mr. Andrew Lang, some months ago, signed the death-warrant of the ballade, and – though I hope that in this respect Mr. Lang resembles the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, whose bloodthirsty orders were by general consent never carried into execution – it must be admitted that the number of ballades given to us by some of our poets was, perhaps, a little excessive. But the ballad? Sir Patrick Spens, Clerk Saunders, Thomas the Rhymer —are these to be our archetypes, our models, the sources of our inspiration? They are certainly great imaginative poems. In Chatterton’s Ballad of Charity, Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the La Belle Dame sans Merci of Keats, the Sister Helen of Rossetti, we can see what marvellous works of art the spirit of old romance may fashion. But to preach a spirit is one thing, to propose a form is another. It is true that Mr. Sharp warns the rising generation against imitation. A ballad, he reminds them, does not necessarily denote a poem in quatrains and in antique language. But his own poems, as I think will be seen later, are, in their way, warnings, and show the danger of suggesting any definite ‘poetic vehicle.’ And, further, are simplicity and directness of utterance really the dominant characteristics of these old imaginative ballads that Mr. Sharp so enthusiastically, and, in some particulars, so wisely praises? It does not seem to me to be so. We are always apt to think that the voices which sang at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and could pass, almost without changing, into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its time is probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort. For Nature is always behind the age. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern.

Let us turn to the poems, which have really only the preface to blame for their somewhat late appearance. The best is undoubtedly The Weird of Michael Scott, and these stanzas are a fair example of its power:

Then Michael Scott laughed long and loud:‘Whan shone the mune ahint yon cloudI speered the towers that saw my birth —Lang, lang, sall wait my cauld grey shroud,Lang cauld and weet my bed o’ earth!’But as by Stair he rode full speedHis horse began to pant and bleed;‘Win hame, win hame, my bonnie mare,Win hame if thou wouldst rest and feed,Win hame, we’re nigh the House of Stair!’But, with a shrill heart-bursten yellThe white horse stumbled, plunged, and fell,And loud a summoning voice arose,‘Is’t White-Horse Death that rides frae Hell,Or Michael Scott that hereby goes?’‘Ah, Laird of Stair, I ken ye weel!Avaunt, or I your saul sall steal,An’ send ye howling through the woodA wild man-wolf – aye, ye maun reelAn’ cry upon your Holy Rood!’

There is a good deal of vigour, no doubt, in these lines; but one cannot help asking whether this is to be the common tongue of the future Renaissance of Romance. Are we all to talk Scotch, and to speak of the moon as the ‘mune,’ and the soul as the ‘saul’? I hope not. And yet if this Renaissance is to be a vital, living thing, it must have its linguistic side. Just as the spiritual development of music, and the artistic development of painting, have always been accompanied, if not occasioned, by the discovery of some new instrument or some fresh medium, so, in the case of any important literary movement, half of its strength resides in its language. If it does not bring with it a rich and novel mode of expression, it is doomed either to sterility or to imitation. Dialect, archaisms and the like, will not do. Take, for instance, another poem of Mr. Sharp’s, a poem which he calls The Deith-Tide:

The weet saut wind is blawingUpon the misty shore:As, like a stormy snawing,The deid go streaming o’er: —The wan drown’d deid sail wildlyFrae out each drumly wave:It’s O and O for the weary sea,And O for a quiet grave.

This is simply a very clever pastiche, nothing more, and our language is not likely to be permanently enriched by such words as ‘weet,’ ‘saut,’ ‘blawing,’ and ‘snawing.’ Even ‘drumly,’ an adjective of which Mr. Sharp is so fond that he uses it both in prose and verse, seems to me to be hardly an adequate basis for a new romantic movement.

However, Mr. Sharp does not always write in dialect. The Son of Allan can be read without any difficulty, and Phantasy can be read with pleasure. They are both very charming poems in their way, and none the less charming because the cadences of the one recall Sister Helen, and the motive of the other reminds us of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But those who wish thoroughly to enjoy Mr. Sharp’s poems should not read his preface; just as those who approve of the preface should avoid reading the poems. I cannot help saying that I think the preface a great mistake. The work that follows it is quite inadequate, and there seems little use in heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and proclaiming a Renaissance whose first-fruits, if we are to judge them by any high standard of perfection, are of so ordinary a character.

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Miss Mary Robinson has also written a preface to her little volume, Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play, but the preface is not very serious, and does not propose any drastic change or any immediate revolution in English literature. Miss Robinson’s poems have always the charm of delicate music and graceful expression; but they are, perhaps, weakest where they try to be strong, and certainly least satisfying where they seek to satisfy. Her fanciful flower-crowned Muse, with her tripping steps and pretty, wilful ways, should not write Antiphons to the Unknowable, or try to grapple with abstract intellectual problems. Hers is not the hand to unveil mysteries, nor hers the strength for the solving of secrets. She should never leave her garden, and as for her wandering out into the desert to ask the Sphinx questions, that should be sternly forbidden to her. Dürer’s Melancolia, that serves as the frontispiece to this dainty book, looks sadly out of place. Her seat is with the sibyls, not with the nymphs. What has she to do with shepherdesses piping about Darwinism and ‘The Eternal Mind’?

However, if the Songs of the Inner Life are not very successful, the Spring Songs are delightful. They follow each other like wind-blown petals, and make one feel how much more charming flower is than fruit, apple-blossom than apple. There are some artistic temperaments that should never come to maturity, that should always remain in the region of promise and should dread autumn with its harvesting more than winter with its frosts. Such seems to me the temperament that this volume reveals. The first poem of the second series, La Belle au Bois Dormant, is worth all the more serious and thoughtful work, and has far more chance of being remembered. It is not always to high aim and lofty ambition that the prize is given. If Daphne had gone to meet Apollo, she would never have known what laurels are.

From these fascinating spring lyrics and idylls we pass to the romantic ballads. One artistic faculty Miss Robinson certainly possesses – the faculty of imitation. There is an element of imitation in all the arts; it is to be found in literature as much as in painting, and the danger of valuing it too little is almost as great as the danger of setting too high a value upon it. To catch, by dainty mimicry, the very mood and manner of antique work, and yet to retain that touch of modern passion without which the old form would be dull and empty; to win from long-silent lips some faint echo of their music, and to add to it a music of one’s own; to take the mode and fashion of a bygone age, and to experiment with it, and search curiously for its possibilities; there is a pleasure in all this. It is a kind of literary acting, and has something of the charm of the art of the stage-player. And how well, on the whole, Miss Robinson does it! Here is the opening of the ballad of Rudel:

There was in all the world of FranceNo singer half so sweet:The first note of his viol broughtA crowd into the street.He stepped as young, and bright, and gladAs Angel Gabriel.And only when we heard him singOur eyes forgot Rudel.And as he sat in Avignon,With princes at their wine,In all that lusty companyWas none so fresh and fine.His kirtle’s of the Arras-blue,His cap of pearls and green;His golden curls fall tumbling roundThe fairest face I’ve seen.

How Gautier would have liked this from the same poem! —

Hew the timbers of sandal-wood,And planks of ivory;Rear up the shining masts of gold,And let us put to sea.Sew the sails with a silken threadThat all are silken too;Sew them with scarlet pomegranatesUpon a sheet of blue.Rig the ship with a rope of goldAnd let us put to sea.And now, good-bye to good Marseilles,And hey for Tripoli!

The ballad of the Duke of Gueldres’s wedding is very clever:

‘O welcome, Mary Harcourt,Thrice welcome, lady mine;There’s not a knight in all the worldShall be as true as thine.‘There’s venison in the aumbry, Mary,There’s claret in the vat;Come in, and breakfast in the hallWhere once my mother sat!’O red, red is the wine that flows,And sweet the minstrel’s play,But white is Mary HarcourtUpon her wedding-day.O many are the wedding guestsThat sit on either side;But pale below her crimson flowersAnd homesick is the bride.

Miss Robinson’s critical sense is at once too sound and too subtle to allow her to think that any great Renaissance of Romance will necessarily follow from the adoption of the ballad-form in poetry; but her work in this style is very pretty and charming, and The Tower of St. Maur, which tells of the father who built up his little son in the wall of his castle in order that the foundations should stand sure, is admirable in its way. The few touches of archaism in language that she introduces are quite sufficient for their purpose, and though she fully appreciates the importance of the Celtic spirit in literature, she does not consider it necessary to talk of ‘blawing’ and ‘snawing.’ As for the garden play, Our Lady of the Broken Heart, as it is called, the bright, birdlike snatches of song that break in here and there – as the singing does in Pippa Passes– form a very welcome relief to the somewhat ordinary movement of the blank verse, and suggest to us again where Miss Robinson’s real power lies. Not a poet in the true creative sense, she is still a very perfect artist in poetry, using language as one might use a very precious material, and producing her best work by the rejection of the great themes and large intellectual motives that belong to fuller and richer song. When she essays such themes, she certainly fails. Her instrument is the reed, not the lyre. Only those should sing of Death whose song is stronger than Death is.

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The collected poems of the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, have a pathetic interest as the artistic record of a very gracious and comely life. They bring us back to the days when Philip Bourke Marston was young – ‘Philip, my King,’ as she called him in the pretty poem of that name; to the days of the Great Exhibition, with the universal piping about peace; to those later terrible Crimean days, when Alma and Balaclava were words on the lips of our poets; and to days when Leonora was considered a very romantic name.

Leonora, Leonora,How the word rolls – Leonora.Lion-like in full-mouthed sound,Marching o’er the metric ground,With a tawny tread sublime.So your name moves, Leonora,Down my desert rhyme.

Mrs. Craik’s best poems are, on the whole, those that are written in blank verse; and these, though not prosaic, remind one that prose was her true medium of expression. But some of the rhymed poems have considerable merit. These may serve as examples of Mrs. Craik’s style:

A SKETCHDost thou thus love me, O thou all beloved,In whose large store the very meanest coinWould out-buy my whole wealth? Yet here thou comestLike a kind heiress from her purple and downUprising, who for pity cannot sleep,But goes forth to the stranger at her gate —The beggared stranger at her beauteous gate —And clothes and feeds; scarce blest till she has blest.But dost thou love me, O thou pure of heart,Whose very looks are prayers? What couldst thou seeIn this forsaken pool by the yew-wood’s side,To sit down at its bank, and dip thy hand,Saying, ‘It is so clear!’ – and lo! ere long,Its blackness caught the shimmer of thy wings,Its slimes slid downward from thy stainless palm,Its depths grew still, that there thy form might rise.THE NOVICEIt is near morning. Ere the next night fallI shall be made the bride of heaven. Then homeTo my still marriage-chamber I shall come,And spouseless, childless, watch the slow years crawl.These lips will never meet a softer touchThan the stone crucifix I kiss; no childWill clasp this neck. Ah, virgin-mother mild,Thy painted bliss will mock me overmuch.This is the last time I shall twist the hairMy mother’s hand wreathed, till in dust she lay:The name, her name given on my baptism day,This is the last time I shall ever bear.O weary world, O heavy life, farewell!Like a tired child that creeps into the darkTo sob itself asleep, where none will mark, —So creep I to my silent convent cell.Friends, lovers whom I loved not, kindly heartsWho grieve that I should enter this still door,Grieve not. Closing behind me evermore,Me from all anguish, as all joy, it parts.

The volume chronicles the moods of a sweet and thoughtful nature, and though many things in it may seem somewhat old-fashioned, it is still very pleasant to read, and has a faint perfume of withered rose-leaves about it.

(1) A Book of Verses. By William Ernest Henley. (David Nutt.)

(2) Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy. By William Sharp. (Walter Scott.)

(3) Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play. By A. Mary F. Robinson. (Fisher Unwin.)

(4) Poems. By the Author of John Halifax, Gentleman. (Macmillan and Co.)

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD’S LAST VOLUME

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 11, 1888.)

Writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets. They may crowd their page with gorgeous epithet and resplendent phrase, may pile Pelions of adjectives upon Ossas of descriptions, may abandon themselves to highly coloured diction and rich luxuriance of imagery, but if their verse lacks the true rhythmical life of verse, if their method is devoid of the self-restraint of the real artist, all their efforts are of very little avail. ‘Asiatic’ prose is possibly useful for journalistic purposes, but ‘Asiatic’ poetry is not to be encouraged. Indeed, poetry may be said to need far more self-restraint than prose. Its conditions are more exquisite. It produces its effects by more subtle means. It must not be allowed to degenerate into mere rhetoric or mere eloquence. It is, in one sense, the most self-conscious of all the arts, as it is never a means to an end but always an end in itself. Sir Edwin Arnold has a very picturesque or, perhaps we should say, a very pictorial style. He knows India better than any living Englishman knows it, and Hindoostanee better than any English writer should know it. If his descriptions lack distinction, they have at least the merit of being true, and when he does not interlard his pages with an interminable and intolerable series of foreign words he is pleasant enough. But he is not a poet. He is simply a poetical writer – that is all.

However, poetical writers have their uses, and there is a good deal in Sir Edwin Arnold’s last volume that will repay perusal. The scene of the story is placed in a mosque attached to the monument of the Taj-Mahal, and a group composed of a learned Mirza, two singing girls with their attendant, and an Englishman, is supposed to pass the night there reading the chapter of Sa’di upon ‘Love,’ and conversing upon that theme with accompaniments of music and dancing. The Englishman is, of course, Sir Edwin Arnold himself:

      lover of India,Too much her lover! for his heart lived thereHow far soever wandered thence his feet.

Lady Dufferin appears as

Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen’s Vice-queen!

which is really one of the most dreadful blank-verse lines that we have come across for some time past. M. Renan is ‘a priest of Frangestan,’ who writes in ‘glittering French’; Lord Tennyson is

One we honour for his songs —

Greater than Sa’di’s self —

and the Darwinians appear as the ‘Mollahs of the West,’ who

hold Adam’s sons

Sprung of the sea-slug.

All this is excellent fooling in its way, a kind of play-acting in literature; but the best parts of the book are the descriptions of the Taj itself, which are extremely elaborate, and the various translations from Sa’di with which the volume is interspersed. The great monument Shah Jahan built for Arjamand is

Instinct with loveliness – not masonry!Not architecture! as all others are,But the proud passion of an Emperor’s loveWrought into living stone, which gleams and soarsWith body of beauty shrining soul and thought,Insomuch that it haps as when some faceDivinely fair unveils before our eyes —Some woman beautiful unspeakably —And the blood quickens, and the spirit leaps,And will to worship bends the half-yielded knees,Which breath forgets to breathe: so is the Taj;You see it with the heart, before the eyesHave scope to gaze. All white! snow white! cloud white!

We cannot say much in praise of the sixth line:

Insomuch that it haps as when some face:

it is curiously awkward and unmusical. But this passage from Sa’di is remarkable:

When Earth, bewildered, shook in earthquake-throes,With mountain-roots He bound her borders close;Turkis and ruby in her rocks He stored,And on her green branch hung His crimson rose.He shapes dull seed to fair imaginings;Who paints with moisture as He painteth things?Look! from the cloud He sheds one drop on ocean,As from the Father’s loins one drop He brings; —And out of that He forms a peerless pearl,And, out of this, a cypress boy or girl;Utterly wotting all their innermosts,For all to Him is visible! UncurlYour cold coils, Snakes! Creep forth, ye thrifty Ants!Handless and strengthless He provides your wantsWho from the ‘Is not’ planned the ‘Is to be,’And Life in non-existent void implants.

Sir Edwin Arnold suffers, of course, from the inevitable comparison that one cannot help making between his work and the work of Edward Fitzgerald, and certainly Fitzgerald could never have written such a line as ‘utterly wotting all their innermosts,’ but it is interesting to read almost any translation of those wonderful Oriental poets with their strange blending of philosophy and sensuousness, of simple parable or fable and obscure mystic utterance. What we regret most in Sir Edwin Arnold’s book is his habit of writing in what really amounts to a sort of ‘pigeon English.’ When we are told that ‘Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen’s Vice-queen,’ paces among the charpoys of the ward ‘no whit afraid of sitla, or of tap’; when the Mirza explains —

âg lejao!

To light the kallians for the Saheb and me,

and the attendant obeys with ‘Achcha! Achcha!’ when we are invited to listen to ‘the Vina and the drum’ and told about ekkas, Byrâgis, hamals and Tamboora, all that we can say is that to such ghazals we are not prepared to say either Shamash or Afrîn. In English poetry we do not want

   chatkis for the toes,Jasams for elbow-bands, and gote and har,Bala and mala.

This is not local colour; it is a sort of local discoloration. It does not add anything to the vividness of the scene. It does not bring the Orient more clearly before us. It is simply an inconvenience to the reader and a mistake on the part of the writer. It may be difficult for a poet to find English synonyms for Asiatic expressions, but even if it were impossible it is none the less a poet’s duty to find them. We are sorry that a scholar and a man of culture like Sir Edwin Arnold should have been guilty of what is really an act of treason against our literature. But for this error, his book, though not in any sense a work of genius or even of high artistic merit, would still have been of some enduring value. As it is, Sir Edwin Arnold has translated Sa’di and some one must translate Sir Edwin Arnold.

With Sa’di in the Garden; or The Book of Love. By Sir Edwin Arnold, M.A., K.C.I.E., Author of The Light of Asia, etc. (Trübner and Co.)

AUSTRALIAN POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 14, 1888.)

Mr. Sladen dedicates his anthology (or, perhaps, we should say his herbarium) of Australian song to Mr. Edmund Gosse, ‘whose exquisite critical faculty is,’ he tells us, ‘as conspicuous in his poems as in his lectures on poetry.’ After so graceful a compliment Mr. Gosse must certainly deliver a series of discourses upon Antipodean art before the Cambridge undergraduates, who will, no doubt, be very much interested on hearing about Gordon, Kendall and Domett, to say nothing of the extraordinary collection of mediocrities whom Mr. Sladen has somewhat ruthlessly dragged from their modest and well-merited obscurity. Gordon, however, is very badly represented in Mr. Sladen’s book, the only three specimens of his work that are included being an unrevised fragment, his Valedictory Poem and An Exile’s Farewell. The latter is, of course, touching, but then the commonplace always touches, and it is a great pity that Mr. Sladen was unable to come to any financial arrangement with the holders of Gordon’s copyright. The loss to the volume that now lies before us is quite irreparable. Through Gordon Australia found her first fine utterance in song.

Still, there are some other singers here well worth studying, and it is interesting to read about poets who lie under the shadow of the gum-tree, gather wattle blossoms and buddawong and sarsaparilla for their loves, and wander through the glades of Mount Baw-baw listening to the careless raptures of the mopoke. To them November is

   The wonder with the golden wings,Who lays one hand in Summer’s, one in Spring’s:

January is full of ‘breaths of myrrh, and subtle hints of rose-lands’;

She is the warm, live month of lustre – sheMakes glad the land and lulls the strong sad sea;

while February is ‘the true Demeter,’ and

With rich warm vine-blood splashed from heel to knee,Comes radiant through the yellow woodlands.

Each month, as it passes, calls for new praise and for music different from our own. July is a ‘lady, born in wind and rain’; in August