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There was in all the world of France
No singer half so sweet:
The first note of his viol brought
A crowd into the street.
He stepped as young, and bright, and glad
As Angel Gabriel.
And only when we heard him sing
Our eyes forgot Rudel.
And as he sat in Avignon,
With princes at their wine,
In all that lusty company
Was none so fresh and fine.
His kirtle’s of the Arras-blue,
His cap of pearls and green;
His golden curls fall tumbling round
The 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 thread
That all are silken too;
Sew them with scarlet pomegranates
Upon a sheet of blue.
Rig the ship with a rope of gold
And 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 world
Shall be as true as thine.
‘There’s venison in the aumbry, Mary,
There’s claret in the vat;
Come in, and breakfast in the hall
Where once my mother sat!’
O red, red is the wine that flows,
And sweet the minstrel’s play,
But white is Mary Harcourt
Upon her wedding-day.
O many are the wedding guests
That sit on either side;
But pale below her crimson flowers
And 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.
* * * * *
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 SKETCH
Dost thou thus love me, O thou all beloved,
In whose large store the very meanest coin
Would out-buy my whole wealth? Yet here thou comest
Like a kind heiress from her purple and down
Uprising, 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 see
In 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 NOVICE
It is near morning. Ere the next night fall
I shall be made the bride of heaven. Then home
To my still marriage-chamber I shall come,
And spouseless, childless, watch the slow years crawl.
These lips will never meet a softer touch
Than the stone crucifix I kiss; no child
Will clasp this neck. Ah, virgin-mother mild,
Thy painted bliss will mock me overmuch.
This is the last time I shall twist the hair
My 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 dark
To sob itself asleep, where none will mark, —
So creep I to my silent convent cell.
Friends, lovers whom I loved not, kindly hearts
Who 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 there
How 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 love
Wrought into living stone, which gleams and soars
With body of beauty shrining soul and thought,
Insomuch that it haps as when some face
Divinely 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 eyes
Have 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! Uncurl
Your cold coils, Snakes! Creep forth, ye thrifty Ants!
Handless and strengthless He provides your wants
Who 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 – she
Makes 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
Across the range, by every scarred black fell,
Strong Winter blows his horn of wild farewell;
while October is ‘the queen of all the year,’ the ‘lady of the yellow hair,’ who strays ‘with blossom-trammelled feet’ across the ‘haughty-featured hills,’ and brings the Spring with her. We must certainly try to accustom ourselves to the mopoke and the sarsaparilla plant, and to make the gum-tree and the buddawong as dear to us as the olives and the narcissi of white Colonus. After all, the Muses are great travellers, and the same foot that stirred the Cumnor cowslips may some day brush the fallen gold of the wattle blossoms and tread delicately over the tawny bush-grass.
Mr. Sladen has, of course, a great belief in the possibilities of Australian poetry. There are in Australia, he tells us, far more writers capable of producing good work than has been assumed. It is only natural, he adds, that this should be so, ‘for Australia has one of those delightful climates conducive to rest in the open air. The middle of the day is so hot that it is really more healthful to lounge about than to take stronger exercise.’ Well, lounging in the open air is not a bad school for poets, but it largely depends on the lounger. What strikes one on reading over Mr. Sladen’s collection is the depressing provinciality of mood and manner in almost every writer. Page follows page, and we find nothing but echoes without music, reflections without beauty, second-rate magazine verses and third-rate verses for Colonial newspapers. Poe seems to have had some influence – at least, there are several parodies of his method – and one or two writers have read Mr. Swinburne; but, on the whole, we have artless Nature in her most irritating form. Of course Australia is young, younger even than America whose youth is now one of her oldest and most hallowed traditions, but the entire want of originality of treatment is curious. And yet not so curious, perhaps, after all. Youth is rarely original.
There are, however, some exceptions. Henry Clarence Kendall had a true poetic gift. The series of poems on the Austral months, from which we have already quoted, is full of beautiful things; Landor’s Rose Aylmer is a classic in its way, but Kendall’s Rose Lorraine is in parts not unworthy to be mentioned after it; and the poem entitled Beyond Kerguelen has a marvellous music about it, a wonderful rhythm of words and a real richness of utterance. Some of the lines are strangely powerful, and, indeed, in spite of its exaggerated alliteration, or perhaps in consequence of it, the whole poem is a most remarkable work of art.
Down in the South, by the waste without sail on it —
Far from the zone of the blossom and tree —
Lieth, with winter and whirlwind and wail on it,
Ghost of a land by the ghost of a sea.
Weird is the mist from the summit to base of it;
Sun of its heaven is wizened and grey;
Phantom of light is the light on the face of it —
Never is night on it, never is day!
Here is the shore without flower or bird on it;
Here is no litany sweet of the springs —
Only the haughty, harsh thunder is heard on it,
Only the storm, with a roar in its wings!
Back in the dawn of this beautiful sphere, on it —
Land of the dolorous, desolate face —
Beamed the blue day; and the beautiful year on it
Fostered the leaf and the blossom of grace.
Grand were the lights of its midsummer noon on it —
Mornings of majesty shone on its seas;
Glitter of star and the glory of moon on it
Fell, in the march of the musical breeze.
Valleys and hills, with the whisper of wing in them,
Dells of the daffodil – spaces impearled,
Flowered and flashed with the splendour of spring in them,
Back in the morn of this wonderful world.
Mr. Sladen speaks of Alfred Domett as ‘the author of one of the great poems of a century in which Shelley and Keats, Byron and Scott, Wordsworth and Tennyson have all flourished,’ but the extracts he gives from Ranolf and Amohia hardly substantiate this claim, although the song of the Tree-God in the fourth book is clever but exasperating.
A Midsummer’s Noon, by Charles Harpur, ‘the grey forefather of Australian poetry,’ is pretty and graceful, and Thomas Henry’s Wood-Notes and Miss Veel’s Saturday Night are worth reading; but, on the whole, the Australian poets are extremely dull and prosaic. There seem to be no sirens in the New World. As for Mr. Sladen himself, he has done his work very conscientiously. Indeed, in one instance he almost re-writes an entire poem in consequence of the manuscript having reached him in a mutilated condition.
A pleasant land is the land of dreams
At the back of the shining air!
It hath sunnier skies and sheenier streams,
And gardens than Earth’s more fair,
is the first verse of this lucubration, and Mr. Sladen informs us with justifiable pride that the parts printed in italics are from his own pen! This is certainly editing with a vengeance, and we cannot help saying that it reflects more credit on Mr. Sladen’s good nature than on his critical or his poetical powers. The appearance, also, in a volume of ‘poems produced in Australia,’ of selections from Horne’s Orion cannot be defended, especially as we are given no specimen of the poetry Horne wrote during the time that he actually was in Australia, where he held the office of ‘Warden of the Blue Mountains’ – a position which, as far as the title goes, is the loveliest ever given to any poet, and would have suited Wordsworth admirably: Wordsworth, that is to say, at his best, for he not infrequently wrote like the Distributor of Stamps. However, Mr. Sladen has shown great energy in the compilation of this bulky volume which, though it does not contain much that is of any artistic value, has a certain historical interest, especially for those who care to study the conditions of intellectual life in the colonies of a great empire. The biographical notices of the enormous crowd of verse-makers which is included in this volume are chiefly from the pen of Mr. Patchett Martin. Some of them are not very satisfactory. ‘Formerly of West Australia, now residing at Boston, U.S. Has published several volumes of poetry,’ is a ludicrously inadequate account of such a man as John Boyle O’Reilly, while in ‘poet, essayist, critic, and journalist, one of the most prominent figures in literary London,’ few will recognise the industrious Mr. William Sharp.
Still, on the whole, we should be grateful for a volume that has given us specimens of Kendall’s work, and perhaps Mr. Sladen will some day produce an anthology of Australian poetry, not a herbarium of Australian verse. His present book has many good qualities, but it is almost unreadable.
Australian Poets, 1788-1888. Edited by Douglas B. W. Sladen, B.A. Oxon. (Griffith, Farran and Co.)
