Reviews

Yet, in the very next letter, she says to him:

Although I said good-bye to you less than an hour ago, I cannot refrain from writing to tell you that a happy calm which seems to penetrate my whole being seems also to have wiped out all remembrance of the misery and unhappiness which has overwhelmed me lately. Why cannot it always be so, or would life perhaps be then too blessed, too wholly happy for it to be life? I know that you are free to-night, will you not write to me, that the first words my eyes fall upon to-morrow shall prove that to-day has not been a dream? Yes, write to me.

The letter that immediately follows is one of six words only:

Let me dream – Let me dream.

In the following there are interesting touches of actuality:

Did you ever try a cup of tea (the national beverage, by the way) at an English railway station? If you have not, I would advise you, as a friend, to continue to abstain! The names of the American drinks are rather against them, the straws are, I think, about the best part of them. You do not tell me what you think of Mr. Disraeli. I once met him at a ball at the Duke of Sutherland’s in the long picture gallery of Stafford House. I was walking with Lord Shrewsbury, and without a word of warning he stopped and introduced him, mentioning with reckless mendacity that I had read every book he had written and admired them all, then he coolly walked off and left me standing face to face with the great statesman. He talked to me for some time, and I studied him carefully. I should say he was a man with one steady aim: endless patience, untiring perseverance, iron concentration; marking out one straight line before him so unbending that despite themselves men stand aside as it is drawn straightly and steadily on. A man who believes that determination brings strength, strength brings endurance, and endurance brings success. You know how often in his novels he speaks of the influence of women, socially, morally, and politically, yet his manner was the least interested or deferential in talking that I have ever met with in a man of his class. He certainly thought this particular woman of singularly small account, or else the brusque and tactless allusion to his books may perhaps have annoyed him as it did me; but whatever the cause, when he promptly left me at the first approach of a mutual acquaintance, I felt distinctly snubbed. Of the two men, Mr. Gladstone was infinitely more agreeable in his manner, he left one with the pleasant feeling of measuring a little higher in cubic inches than one did before, than which I know no more delightful sensation. A Paris, bientôt.

Elsewhere, we find cleverly-written descriptions of life in Italy, in Algiers, at Hombourg, at French boarding-houses; stories about Napoleon III., Guizot, Prince Gortschakoff, Montalembert, and others; political speculations, literary criticisms, and witty social scandal; and everywhere a keen sense of humour, a wonderful power of observation. As reconstructed in these letters, the Inconnue seems to have been not unlike Mérimée himself. She had the same restless, unyielding, independent character. Each desired to analyse the other. Each, being a critic, was better fitted for friendship than for love. ‘We are so different,’ said Mérimée once to her, ‘that we can hardly understand each other.’ But it was because they were so alike that each remained a mystery to the other. Yet they ultimately attained to a high altitude of loyal and faithful friendship, and from a purely literary point of view these fictitious letters give the finishing touch to the strange romance that so stirred Paris fifteen years ago. Perhaps the real letters will be published some day. When they are, how interesting to compare them!

The Bird-Bride, by Graham R. Tomson, is a collection of romantic ballads, delicate sonnets, and metrical studies in foreign fanciful forms. The poem that gives its title to the book is the lament of an Eskimo hunter over the loss of his wife and children.

Years agone, on the flat white strand,I won my sweet sea-girl:Wrapped in my coat of the snow-white fur,I watched the wild birds settle and stir,The grey gulls gather and whirl.One, the greatest of all the flock,Perched on an ice-floe bare,Called and cried as her heart were broke,And straight they were changed, that fleet bird-folk,To women young and fair.Swift I sprang from my hiding-placeAnd held the fairest fast;I held her fast, the sweet, strange thing:Her comrades skirled, but they all took wing,And smote me as they passed.I bore her safe to my warm snow house;Full sweetly there she smiled;And yet, whenever the shrill winds blew,She would beat her long white arms anew,And her eyes glanced quick and wild.But I took her to wife, and clothed her warmWith skins of the gleaming seal;Her wandering glances sank to restWhen she held a babe to her fair, warm breast,And she loved me dear and leal.Together we tracked the fox and the seal,And at her behest I sworeThat bird and beast my bow might slayFor meat and for raiment, day by day,But never a grey gull more.

Famine comes upon the land, and the hunter, forgetting his oath, slays four sea-gulls for food. The bird-wife ‘shrilled out in a woful cry,’ and taking the plumage of the dead birds, she makes wings for her children and for herself, and flies away with them.

‘Babes of mine, of the wild wind’s kin,Feather ye quick, nor stay.Oh, oho! but the wild winds blow!Babes of mine, it is time to go:Up, dear hearts, and away!’And lo! the grey plumes covered them all,Shoulder and breast and brow.I felt the wind of their whirling flight:Was it sea or sky? was it day or night?It is always night-time now.Dear, will you never relent, come back?I loved you long and true.O winged white wife, and our children three,Of the wild wind’s kin though you surely be,Are ye not of my kin too?Ay, ye once were mine, and, till I forget,Ye are mine forever and aye,Mine, wherever your wild wings go,While shrill winds whistle across the snowAnd the skies are blear and grey.

Some powerful and strong ballads follow, many of which, such as The Cruel Priest, Deid Folks’ Ferry, and Märchen, are in that curious combination of Scotch and Border dialect so much affected now by our modern poets. Certainly dialect is dramatic. It is a vivid method of re-creating a past that never existed. It is something between ‘A Return to Nature’ and ‘A Return to the Glossary.’ It is so artificial that it is really naïve. From the point of view of mere music, much may be said for it. Wonderful diminutives lend new notes of tenderness to the song. There are possibilities of fresh rhymes, and in search for a fresh rhyme poets may be excused if they wander from the broad highroad of classical utterance into devious byways and less-trodden paths. Sometimes one is tempted to look on dialect as expressing simply the pathos of provincialisms, but there is more in it than mere mispronunciations. With the revival of an antique form, often comes the revival of an antique spirit. Through limitations that are sometimes uncouth, and always narrow, comes Tragedy herself; and though she may stammer in her utterance, and deck herself in cast-off weeds and trammelling raiment, still we must hold ourselves in readiness to accept her, so rare are her visits to us now, so rare her presence in an age that demands a happy ending from every play, and that sees in the theatre merely a source of amusement. The form, too, of the ballad – how perfect it is in its dramatic unity! It is so perfect that we must forgive it its dialect, if it happens to speak in that strange tongue.

Then by cam’ the bride’s companyWi’ torches burning bright.‘Tak’ up, tak’ up your bonny brideA’ in the mirk midnight!’Oh, wan, wan was the bridegroom’s faceAnd wan, wan was the bride,But clay-cauld was the young mess-priestThat stood them twa beside!Says, ‘Rax me out your hand, Sir Knight,And wed her wi’ this ring’;And the deid bride’s hand it was as cauldAs ony earthly thing.The priest he touched that lady’s hand,And never a word he said;The priest he touched that lady’s hand,And his ain was wet and red.The priest he lifted his ain right hand,And the red blood dripped and fell.Says, ‘I loved ye, lady, and ye loved me;Sae I took your life mysel’.’…Oh! red, red was the dawn o’ day,And tall was the gallows-tree:The Southland lord to his ain has fledAnd the mess-priest’s hangit hie!

Of the sonnets, this To Herodotus is worth quoting:

Far-travelled coaster of the midland seas,What marvels did those curious eyes behold!Winged snakes, and carven labyrinths of old;The emerald column raised to Heracles;King Perseus’ shrine upon the Chemmian leas;Four-footed fishes, decked with gems and gold:But thou didst leave some secrets yet untold,And veiled the dread Osirian mysteries.And now the golden asphodels amongThy footsteps fare, and to the lordly deadThou tellest all the stories left unsaidOf secret rites and runes forgotten long,Of that dark folk who ate the Lotus-bread

And sang the melancholy Linus-song.

Mrs. Tomson has certainly a very refined sense of form. Her verse, especially in the series entitled New Words to Old Tunes, has grace and distinction. Some of the shorter poems are, to use a phrase made classical by Mr. Pater, ‘little carved ivories of speech.’ She is one of our most artistic workers in poetry, and treats language as a fine material.

(1) An Author’s Love: Being the Unpublished Letters of Prosper Mérimée’s ‘Inconnue.’ (Macmillan and Co.)

(2) The Bird-Bride: A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets. By Graham R. Tomson. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

A THOUGHT-READER’S NOVEL

(Pall Mall Gazette, June 5, 1889.)

There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dénoûment one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously-guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display. In the case of Mr. Stuart Cumberland’s novel, The Vasty Deep, as he calls it, the last page is certainly thrilling and makes us curious to know more about ‘Brown, the medium.’

Scene, a padded room in a mad-house in the United States.

A gibbering lunatic discovered dashing wildly about the chamber as if in the act of chasing invisible forms.

‘This is our worst case,’ says a doctor opening the cell to one of the visitors in lunacy. ‘He was a spirit medium and he is hourly haunted by the creations of his fancy. We have to carefully watch him, for he has developed suicidal tendencies.’

The lunatic makes a dash at the retreating form of his visitors, and, as the door closes upon him, sinks with a yell upon the floor.

A week later the lifeless body of Brown, the medium, is found suspended from the gas bracket in his cell.

How clearly one sees it all! How forcible and direct the style is! And what a thrilling touch of actuality the simple mention of the ‘gas bracket’ gives us! Certainly The Vasty Deep is a book to be read.

And we have read it; read it with great care. Though it is largely autobiographical, it is none the less a work of fiction and, though some of us may think that there is very little use in exposing what is already exposed and revealing the secrets of Polichinelle, no doubt there are many who will be interested to hear of the tricks and deceptions of crafty mediums, of their gauze masks, telescopic rods and invisible silk threads, and of the marvellous raps they can produce simply by displacing the peroneus longus muscle! The book opens with a description of the scene by the death-bed of Alderman Parkinson. Dr. Josiah Brown, the eminent medium, is in attendance and tries to comfort the honest merchant by producing noises on the bedpost. Mr. Parkinson, however, being extremely anxious to revisit Mrs. Parkinson, in a materialised form after death, will not be satisfied till he has received from his wife a solemn promise that she will not marry again, such a marriage being, in his eyes, nothing more nor less than bigamy. Having received an assurance to this effect from her, Mr. Parkinson dies, his soul, according to the medium, being escorted to the spheres by ‘a band of white-robed spirits.’ This is the prologue. The next chapter is entitled ‘Five Years After.’ Violet Parkinson, the Alderman’s only child, is in love with Jack Alston, who is ‘poor, but clever.’ Mrs. Parkinson, however, will not hear of any marriage till the deceased Alderman has materialised himself and given his formal consent. A seance is held at which Jack Alston unmasks the medium and shows Dr. Josiah Brown to be an impostor – a foolish act, on his part, as he is at once ordered to leave the house by the infuriated Mrs. Parkinson, whose faith in the Doctor is not in the least shaken by the unfortunate exposure.

The lovers are consequently parted. Jack sails for Newfoundland, is shipwrecked and carefully, somewhat too carefully, tended by ‘La-ki-wa, or the Star that shines,’ a lovely Indian maiden who belongs to the tribe of the Micmacs. She is a fascinating creature who wears ‘a necklace composed of thirteen nuggets of pure gold,’ a blanket of English manufacture and trousers of tanned leather. In fact, as Mr. Stuart Cumberland observes, she looks ‘the embodiment of fresh dewy morn.’ When Jack, on recovering his senses, sees her, he naturally inquires who she is. She answers, in the simple utterance endeared to us by Fenimore Cooper, ‘I am La-ki-wa. I am the only child of my father, Tall Pine, chief of the Dildoos.’ She talks, Mr. Cumberland informs us, very good English. Jack at once entrusts her with the following telegram which he writes on the back of a five-pound note: —

Miss Violet Parkinson, Hotel Kronprinz, Franzensbad, Austria. – Safe. JACK.

But La-ki-wa, we regret to say, says to herself, ‘He belongs to Tall Pine, to the Dildoos, and to me,’ and never sends the telegram. Subsequently, La-ki-wa proposes to Jack who promptly rejects her and, with the usual callousness of men, offers her a brother’s love. La-ki-wa, naturally, regrets the premature disclosure of her passion and weeps. ‘My brother,’ she remarks, ‘will think that I have the timid heart of a deer with the crying voice of a papoose. I, the daughter of Tall Pine – I a Micmac, to show the grief that is in my heart. O, my brother, I am ashamed.’ Jack comforts her with the hollow sophistries of a civilised being and gives her his photograph. As he is on his way to the steamer he receives from Big Deer a soiled piece of a biscuit bag. On it is written La-ki-wa’s confession of her disgraceful behaviour about the telegram. ‘His thoughts,’ Mr. Cumberland tells us, ‘were bitter towards La-ki-wa, but they gradually softened when he remembered what he owed her.’

Everything ends happily. Jack arrives in England just in time to prevent Dr. Josiah Brown from mesmerising Violet whom the cunning doctor is anxious to marry, and he hurls his rival out of the window. The victim is discovered ‘bruised and bleeding among the broken flower-pots’ by a comic policeman. Mrs. Parkinson still believes in spiritualism, but refuses to have anything to do with Brown as she discovers that the deceased Alderman’s ‘materialised beard’ was made only of ‘horrid, coarse horsehair.’ Jack and Violet are married at last and Jack is horrid enough to send to ‘La-ki-wa’ another photograph. The end of Dr. Brown is chronicled above. Had we not known what was in store for him we should hardly have got through the book. There is a great deal too much padding in it about Dr. Slade and Dr. Bartram and other mediums, and the disquisitions on the commercial future of Newfoundland seem endless and are intolerable. However, there are many publics, and Mr. Stuart Cumberland is always sure of an audience. His chief fault is a tendency to low comedy; but some people like low comedy in fiction.

The Vasty Deep: A Strange Story of To-day. By Stuart Cumberland. (Sampson Low and Co.)

THE POETS’ CORNER – X

(Pall Mall Gazette, June 24, 1889.)

Is Mr. Alfred Austin among the Socialists? Has somebody converted the respectable editor of the respectable National Review? Has even dulness become revolutionary? From a poem in Mr. Austin’s last volume this would seem to be the case. It is perhaps unfair to take our rhymers too seriously. Between the casual fancies of a poet and the callous facts of prose there is, or at least there should be, a wide difference. But since the poem in question, Two Visions, as Mr. Austin calls it, was begun in 1863 and revised in 1889 we may regard it as fully representative of Mr. Austin’s mature views. He gives us, at any rate, in its somewhat lumbering and pedestrian verses, his conception of the perfect state:

Fearless, unveiled, and unattendedStrolled maidens to and fro:Youths looked respect, but never bendedObsequiously low.And each with other, sans condition,Held parley brief or long,Without provoking coarse suspicionOf marriage, or of wrong.All were well clad, and none were better,And gems beheld I none,Save where there hung a jewelled fetter,Symbolic, in the sun.I saw a noble-looking maidenClose Dante’s solemn book,And go, with crate of linen ladenAnd wash it in the brook.Anon, a broad-browed poet, draggingA load of logs along,To warm his hearth, withal not flaggingIn current of his song.Each one some handicraft attemptedOr helped to till the soil:None but the aged were exemptedFrom communistic toil.

Such an expression as ‘coarse suspicion of marriage’ is not very fortunate; the log-rolling poet of the fifth stanza is an ideal that we have already realised and one in which we had but little comfort, and the fourth stanza leaves us in doubt whether Mr. Austin means that washerwomen are to take to reading Dante, or that students of Italian literature are to wash their own clothes. But, on the whole, though Mr. Austin’s vision of the citta divina of the future is not very inspiriting, it is certainly extremely interesting as a sign of the times, and it is evident from the two concluding lines of the following stanzas that there will be no danger of the intellect being overworked:

Age lorded not, nor rose the hecticUp to the cheek of youth;But reigned throughout their dialecticSobriety of truth.And if a long-held contest tendedTo ill-defined result,It was by calm consent suspendedAs over-difficult.

Mr. Austin, however, has other moods, and, perhaps, he is at his best when he is writing about flowers. Occasionally he wearies the reader by tedious enumerations of plants, lacking indeed reticence and tact and selection in many of his descriptions, but, as a rule, he is very pleasant when he is babbling of green fields. How pretty these stanzas from the dedication are!

When vines, just newly burgeoned, linkTheir hands to join the dance of Spring,Green lizards glisten from cleft and chink,And almond blossoms rosy pinkCluster and perch, ere taking wing;Where over strips of emerald wheatGlimmer red peach and snowy pear,And nightingales all day long repeatTheir love-song, not less glad than sweetThey chant in sorrow and gloom elsewhere;Where purple iris-banners scaleDefending walls and crumbling ledge,And virgin windflowers, lithe and frail,Now mantling red, now trembling pale,Peep out from furrow and hide in hedge.

Some of the sonnets also (notably, one entitled When Acorns Fall) are very charming, and though, as a whole, Love’s Widowhood is tedious and prolix, still it contains some very felicitous touches. We wish, however, that Mr. Austin would not write such lines as

Pippins of every sort, and codlins manifold.

‘Codlins manifold’ is a monstrous expression.

Mr. W. J. Linton’s fame as a wood-engraver has somewhat obscured the merits of his poetry. His Claribel and Other Poems, published in 1865, is now a scarce book, and far more scarce is the collection of lyrics which he printed in 1887 at his own press and brought out under the title of Love-Lore. The large and handsome volume that now lies before us contains nearly all these later poems as well as a selection from Claribel and many renderings, in the original metre, of French poems ranging from the thirteenth century to our own day. A portrait of Mr. Linton is prefixed, and the book is dedicated ‘To William Bell Scott, my friend for nearly fifty years.’ As a poet Mr. Linton is always fanciful with a studied fancifulness, and often felicitous with a chance felicity. He is fascinated by our seventeenth-century singers, and has, here and there, succeeded in catching something of their quaintness and not a little of their charm. There is a pleasant flavour about his verse. It is entirely free from violence and from vagueness, those two besetting sins of so much modern poetry. It is clear in outline and restrained in form, and, at its best, has much that is light and lovely about it. How graceful, for instance, this is!

BARE FEETO fair white feet! O dawn-white feetOf Her my hope may claim!Bare-footed through the dew she cameHer Love to meet.Star-glancing feet, the windflowers sweetMight envy, without shame,As through the grass they lightly came,Her Love to meet.O Maiden sweet, with flower-kiss’d feet!My heart your footstool name!Bare-footed through the dew she came,Her Love to meet.

‘Vindicate Gemma!’ was Longfellow’s advice to Miss Héloïse Durant when she proposed to write a play about Dante. Longfellow, it may be remarked, was always on the side of domesticity. It was the secret of his popularity. We cannot say, however, that Miss Durant has made us like Gemma better. She is not exactly the Xantippe whom Boccaccio describes, but she is very boring, for all that:

GEMMA.  The more thou meditat’st, more mad art thou.Clowns, with their love, can cheer poor wives’ hearts moreO’er black bread and goat’s cheese than thou canst mineO’er red Vernaccia, spite of all thy learning!Care I how tortured spirits feel in hell?DANTE. Thou tortur’st mine.GEMMA. Or how souls sing in heaven?DANTE. Would I were there.GEMMA. All folly, naught but folly.DANTE. Thou canst not understand the mandates givenTo poets by their goddess Poesy..GEMMA. Canst ne’er speak prose? Why daily clothe thy thoughtsIn strangest garb, as if thy wits played foolAt masquerade, where no man knows a maidFrom matron? Fie on poets’ mutterings!DANTE (to himself). If, then, the soul absorbed at last to whole —GEMMA. Fie! fie! I say. Art thou bewitched?DANTE. O! peace.GEMMA. Dost thou deem me deaf and dumb?DANTE. O! that thou wert.

Dante is certainly rude, but Gemma is dreadful. The play is well meant but it is lumbering and heavy, and the blank verse has absolutely no merit.

Father O’Flynn and Other Irish Lyrics, by Mr. A. P. Graves, is a collection of poems in the style of Lover. Most of them are written in dialect, and, for the benefit of English readers, notes are appended in which the uninitiated are informed that ‘brogue’ means a boot, that ‘mavourneen’ means my dear, and that ‘astore’ is a term of affection. Here is a specimen of Mr. Graves’s work:

‘Have you e’er a new song,My Limerick Poet,To help us alongWid this terrible boat,Away over to Tork?’‘Arrah I understand;For all of your work,’Twill tighten you, boys,To cargo that sandTo the overside strand,Wid the current so strongUnless you’ve a song —A song to lighten and brighten you, boys… ’

It is a very dreary production and does not ‘lighten and brighten’ us a bit. The whole volume should be called The Lucubrations of a Stage Irishman.

The anonymous author of The Judgment of the City is a sort of bad Blake. So at least his prelude seems to suggest:

   Time, the old viol-player,For ever thrills his ancient stringsWith the flying bow of Fate, and thenceMuch discord, but some music, brings.His ancient strings are truth,Love, hate, hope, fear;And his choicest melodyIs the song of the faithful seer.

As he progresses, however, he develops into a kind of inferior Clough and writes heavy hexameters upon modern subjects:

Here for a moment stands in the light at the door of a playhouse,One who is dignified, masterly, hard in the pride of his station;Here too, the stateliest of matrons, sour in the pride of her station;With them their daughter, sad-faced and listless, half-crushed to their likeness.

He has every form of sincerity except the sincerity of the artist, a defect that he shares with most of our popular writers.