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Reviews
SOME LITERARY NOTES – I
(Woman’s World, January 1889.)
In a recent article on English Poetesses, 7 I ventured to suggest that our women of letters should turn their attention somewhat more to prose and somewhat less to poetry. Women seem to me to possess just what our literature wants – a light touch, a delicate hand, a graceful mode of treatment, and an unstudied felicity of phrase. We want some one who will do for our prose what Madame de Sévigné did for the prose of France. George Eliot’s style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Brontë’s too exaggerated. However, one must not forget that amongst the women of England there have been some charming letter-writers, and certainly no book can be more delightful reading than Mrs. Ross’s Three Generations of English Women, which has recently appeared. The three Englishwomen whose memoirs and correspondence Mrs. Ross has so admirably edited are Mrs. John Taylor, Mrs. Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon, all of them remarkable personalities, and two of them women of brilliant wit and European reputation. Mrs. Taylor belonged to that great Norwich family about whom the Duke of Sussex remarked that they reversed the ordinary saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man, and was for many years one of the most distinguished figures in the famous society of her native town. Her only daughter married John Austin, the great authority on jurisprudence, and her salon in Paris was the centre of the intellect and culture of her day. Lucie Duff Gordon, the only child of John and Sarah Austin, inherited the talents of her parents. A beauty, a femme d’esprit, a traveller, and clever writer, she charmed and fascinated her age, and her premature death in Egypt was really a loss to our literature. It is to her daughter that we owe this delightful volume of memoirs.
First we are introduced to Mrs. Ross’s great-grandmother, Mrs. Taylor, who ‘was called, by her intimate friends, “Madame Roland of Norwich,” from her likeness to the portraits of the handsome and unfortunate Frenchwoman.’ We hear of her darning her boy’s grey worsted stockings while holding her own with Southey and Brougham, and dancing round the Tree of Liberty with Dr. Parr when the news of the fall of the Bastille was first known. Amongst her friends were Sir James Mackintosh, the most popular man of the day, ‘to whom Madame de Staël wrote, “Il n’y a pas de société sans vous.” “C’est très ennuyeux de dîner sans vous; la société ne va pas quand vous n’êtes pas là”;’ Sir James Smith, the botanist; Crabb Robinson; the Gurneys; Mrs. Barbauld; Dr. Alderson and his charming daughter, Amelia Opie; and many other well-known people. Her letters are extremely sensible and thoughtful. ‘Nothing at present,’ she says in one of them, ‘suits my taste so well as Susan’s Latin lessons, and her philosophical old master.. When we get to Cicero’s discussions on the nature of the soul, or Virgil’s fine descriptions, my mind is filled up. Life is either a dull round of eating, drinking, and sleeping, or a spark of ethereal fire just kindled… The character of girls must depend upon their reading as much as upon the company they keep. Besides the intrinsic pleasure to be derived from solid knowledge, a woman ought to consider it as her best resource against poverty.’ This is a somewhat caustic aphorism: ‘A romantic woman is a troublesome friend, as she expects you to be as imprudent as herself, and is mortified at what she calls coldness and insensibility.’ And this is admirable: ‘The art of life is not to estrange oneself from society, and yet not to pay too dear for it.’ This, too, is good: ‘Vanity, like curiosity, is wanted as a stimulus to exertion; indolence would certainly get the better of us if it were not for these two powerful principles’; and there is a keen touch of humour in the following: ‘Nothing is so gratifying as the idea that virtue and philanthropy are becoming fashionable.’ Dr. James Martineau, in a letter to Mrs. Ross, gives us a pleasant picture of the old lady returning from market ‘weighted by her huge basket, with the shank of a leg of mutton thrust out to betray its contents,’ and talking divinely about philosophy, poets, politics, and every intellectual topic of the day. She was a woman of admirable good sense, a type of Roman matron, and quite as careful as were the Roman matrons to keep up the purity of her native tongue.
Mrs. Taylor, however, was more or less limited to Norwich. Mrs. Austin was for the world. In London, Paris, and Germany, she ruled and dominated society, loved by every one who knew her. ‘She is “My best and brightest” to Lord Jeffrey; “Dear, fair and wise” to Sydney Smith; “My great ally” to Sir James Stephen; “Sunlight through waste weltering chaos” to Thomas Carlyle (while he needed her aid); “La petite mère du genre humain” to Michael Chevalier; “Liebes Mütterlein” to John Stuart Mill; and “My own Professorin” to Charles Buller, to whom she taught German, as well as to the sons of Mr. James Mill.’ Jeremy Bentham, when on his deathbed, gave her a ring with his portrait and some of his hair let in behind. ‘There, my dear,’ he said, ‘it is the only ring I ever gave a woman.’ She corresponded with Guizot, Barthelemy de St. Hilaire, the Grotes, Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, Nassau Senior, the Duchesse d’Orléans, Victor Cousin, and many other distinguished people. Her translation of Ranke’s History of the Popes is admirable; indeed, all her literary work was thoroughly well done, and her edition of her husband’s Province of Jurisprudence deserves the very highest praise. Two people more unlike than herself and her husband it would have been difficult to find. He was habitually grave and despondent; she was brilliantly handsome, fond of society, in which she shone, and ‘with an almost superabundance of energy and animal spirits,’ Mrs. Ross tells us. She married him because she thought him perfect, but he never produced the work of which he was worthy, and of which she knew him to be worthy. Her estimate of him in the preface to the Jurisprudence is wonderfully striking and simple. ‘He was never sanguine. He was intolerant of any imperfection. He was always under the control of severe love of truth. He lived and died a poor man.’ She was terribly disappointed in him, but she loved him. Some years after his death, she wrote to M. Guizot:
In the intervals of my study of his works I read his letters to me – forty-five years of love-letters, the last as tender and passionate as the first. And how full of noble sentiments! The midday of our lives was clouded and stormy, full of cares and disappointments; but the sunset was bright and serene – as bright as the morning, and more serene. Now it is night with me, and must remain so till the dawn of another day. I am always alone – that is, I live with him.
The most interesting letters in the book are certainly those to M. Guizot, with whom she maintained the closest intellectual friendship; but there is hardly one of them that does not contain something clever, or thoughtful, or witty, while those addressed to her, in turn, are very interesting. Carlyle writes her letters full of lamentations, the wail of a Titan in pain, superbly exaggerated for literary effect.
Literature, one’s sole craft and staff of life, lies broken in abeyance; what room for music amid the braying of innumerable jackasses, the howling of innumerable hyænas whetting the tooth to eat them up? Alas for it! it is a sick disjointed time; neither shall we ever mend it; at best let us hope to mend ourselves. I declare I sometimes think of throwing down the Pen altogether as a worthless weapon; and leading out a colony of these poor starving Drudges to the waste places of their old Mother Earth, when for sweat of their brow bread will rise for them; it were perhaps the worthiest service that at this moment could be rendered our old world to throw open for it the doors of the New. Thither must they come at last, ‘bursts of eloquence’ will do nothing; men are starving and will try many things before they die. But poor I, ach Gott! I am no Hengist or Alaric; only a writer of Articles in bad prose; stick to thy last, O Tutor; the Pen is not worthless, it is omnipotent to those who have Faith.
Henri Beyle (Stendhal), the great, I am often tempted to think the greatest of French novelists, writes her a charming letter about nuances. ‘It seems to me,’ he says, ‘that except when they read Shakespeare, Byron, or Sterne, no Englishman understands “nuances”; we adore them. A fool says to a woman, “I love you”; the words mean nothing, he might as well say “Olli Batachor”; it is the nuance which gives force to the meaning.’ In 1839 Mrs. Austin writes to Victor Cousin: ‘I have seen young Gladstone, a distinguished Tory who wants to re-establish education based on the Church in quite a Catholic form’; and we find her corresponding with Mr. Gladstone on the subject of education. ‘If you are strong enough to provide motives and checks,’ she says to him, ‘you may do two blessed acts – reform your clergy and teach your people. As it is, how few of them conceive what it is to teach a people’! Mr. Gladstone replies at great length, and in many letters, from which we may quote this passage:
You are for pressing and urging the people to their profit against their inclination: so am I. You set little value upon all merely technical instruction, upon all that fails to touch the inner nature of man: so do I. And here I find ground of union broad and deep-laid.
I more than doubt whether your idea, namely that of raising man to social sufficiency and morality, can be accomplished, except through the ancient religion of Christ;.. or whether, the principles of eclecticism are legitimately applicable to the Gospel; or whether, if we find ourselves in a state of incapacity to work through the Church, we can remedy the defect by the adoption of principles contrary to hers.
But indeed I am most unfit to pursue the subject; private circumstances of no common interest are upon me, as I have become very recently engaged to Miss Glynne, and I hope your recollections will enable you in some degree to excuse me.
Lord Jeffrey has a very curious and suggestive letter on popular education, in which he denies, or at least doubts, the effect of this education on morals. He, however, supports it on the ground ‘that it will increase the enjoyment of individuals,’ which is certainly a very sensible claim. Humboldt writes to her about an old Indian language which was preserved by a parrot, the tribe who spoke it having been exterminated, and about ‘young Darwin,’ who had just published his first book. Here are some extracts from her own letters:
I heard from Lord Lansdowne two or three days ago… I think he is ce que nous avons de mieux. He wants only the energy that great ambition gives. He says, ‘We shall have a parliament of railway kings’.. what can be worse than that? – The deification of money by a whole people. As Lord Brougham says, we have no right to give ourselves pharisaical airs. I must give you a story sent to me. Mrs. Hudson, the railway queen, was shown a bust of Marcus Aurelius at Lord Westminster’s, on which she said, ‘I suppose that is not the present Marquis.’ To goûter this, you must know that the extreme vulgar (hackney coachmen, etc.) in England pronounce ‘marquis’ very like ‘Marcus.’
Dec, 11th. – Went to Savigny’s. Nobody was there but W. Grimm and his wife and a few men. Grimm told me he had received two volumes of Norwegian fairy-tales, and that they were delightful. Talking of them, I said, ‘Your children appear to be the happiest in the world; they live in the midst of fairytales.’ ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘I must tell you about that. When we were at Göttingen, somebody spoke to my little son about his father’s Mährchen. He had read them, but never thought of their being mine. He came running to me, and said with an offended air, “Father, they say you wrote those fairy-tales; surely you never invented such silly rubbish?” He thought it below my dignity.’
Savigny told a Volksmährchen too:
‘St. Anselm was grown old and infirm, and lay on the ground among thorns and thistles. Der liebe Gott said to him, “You are very badly lodged there; why don’t you build yourself a house?” “Before I take the trouble,” said Anselm, “I should like to know how long I have to live.” “About thirty years,” said Der liebe Gott. “Oh, for so short a time,” replied he, “it’s not worth while,” and turned himself round among the thistles.’
Dr. Franck told me a story of which I had never heard before. Voltaire had for some reason or other taken a grudge against the prophet Habakkuk, and affected to find in him things he never wrote. Somebody took the Bible and began to demonstrate to him that he was mistaken. ‘C’est égal,’ he said, impatiently, ‘Habakkuk était capable de tout!’
Oct. 30, 1853.
I am not in love with the Richtung (tendency) of our modern novelists. There is abundance of talent; but writing a pretty, graceful, touching, yet pleasing story is the last thing our writers nowadays think of. Their novels are party pamphlets on political or social questions, like Sybil, or Alton Locke, or Mary Barton, or Uncle Tom; or they are the most minute and painful dissections of the least agreeable and beautiful parts of our nature, like those of Miss Brontë – Jane Eyre and Villette; or they are a kind of martyrology, like Mrs. Marsh’s Emilia Wyndham, which makes you almost doubt whether any torments the heroine would have earned by being naughty could exceed those she incurred by her virtue.
Where, oh! where is the charming, humane, gentle spirit that dictated the Vicar of Wakefield – the spirit which Goethe so justly calls versöhnend (reconciling), with all the weaknesses and woes of humanity?.. Have you read Thackeray’s Esmond? It is a curious and very successful attempt to imitate the style of our old novelists… Which of Mrs. Gore’s novels are translated? They are very clever, lively, worldly, bitter, disagreeable, and entertaining… Miss Austen’s – are they translated? They are not new, and are Dutch paintings of every-day people – very clever, very true, very unæsthetic, but amusing. I have not seen Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell. I hear it much admired – and blamed. It is one of the many proofs of the desire women now have to friser questionable topics, and to poser insoluble moral problems. George Sand has turned their heads in that direction. I think a few broad scenes or hearty jokes à la Fielding were very harmless in comparison. They confounded nothing..
The Heir of Redcliffe I have not read… I am not worthy of superhuman flights of virtue – in a novel. I want to see how people act and suffer who are as good-for-nothing as I am myself. Then I have the sinful pretension to be amused, whereas all our novelists want to reform us, and to show us what a hideous place this world is: Ma foi, je ne le sais que trap, without their help.
The Head of the Family has some merits.. But there is too much affliction and misery and frenzy. The heroine is one of those creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird tied to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be ‘shyed’ at (i.e. pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the end of all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is never the worse for all the blows it has had – nay, the better – and that now, with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body, it is going to be quite happy. No, fair ladies, you know that it is not so – resigned, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness out of such wrecks.
In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as moribund. ‘The Radical party is evidently effete,’ she writes to M. Victor Cousin; the probable ‘leader of the Tory party’ is Mr. Gladstone. ‘The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short, governed,’ she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says that the state of things in France fills ‘me with the deepest anxiety on one point, – the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our salvation as a nation turn. Are our higher classes able to keep the lead of the rest? If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear Charles Buller —our turn must come. Now Cambridge and Oxford must really look to this.’ The belief in the power of the Universities to stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as ‘one of the dissolvents of the age – as mischievous as his extravagances will let him be’; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as ‘pernicious’; and talks of John Stuart Mill as a ‘demagogue.’ She was no doctrinaire. ‘One ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed. It is no use to give the meat before you give the hunger.’ She was delighted at a letter of St. Hilaire’s, in which he said, ‘We have a system and no results; you have results and no system.’ Yet she had a deep sympathy with the wants of the people. She was horrified at something Babbage told her of the population of some of the manufacturing towns who are worked out before they attain to thirty years of age. ‘But I am persuaded that the remedy will not, cannot come from the people,’ she adds. Many of her letters are concerned with the question of the higher education of women. She discusses Buckle’s lecture on ‘The Influence of Women upon the Progress of Knowledge,’ admits to M. Guizot that women’s intellectual life is largely coloured by the emotions, but adds: ‘One is not precisely a fool because one’s opinions are greatly influenced by one’s affections. The opinions of men are often influenced by worse things.’ Dr. Whewell consults her about lecturing women on Plato, being slightly afraid lest people should think it ridiculous; Comte writes her elaborate letters on the relation of women to progress; and Mr. Gladstone promises that Mrs. Gladstone will carry out at Hawarden the suggestions contained in one of her pamphlets. She was always very practical, and never lost her admiration for plain sewing.
All through the book we come across interesting and amusing things. She gets St. Hilaire to order a large, sensible bonnet for her in Paris, which was at once christened the ‘Aristotelian,’ and was supposed to be the only useful bonnet in England. Grote has to leave Paris after the coup d’état, he tells her, because he cannot bear to see the establishment of a Greek tyrant. Alfred de Vigny, Macaulay, John Stirling, Southey, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hallam, and Jean Jacques Ampère all contribute to these pleasant pages. She seems to have inspired the warmest feelings of friendship in those who knew her. Guizot writes to her: ‘Madame de Staël used to say that the best thing in the world was a serious Frenchman. I turn the compliment, and say that the best thing in the world is an affectionate Englishman. How much more an Englishwoman! Given equal qualities, a woman is always more charming than a man.’
Lucie Austin, afterwards Lady Duff Gordon, was born in 1821. Her chief playfellow was John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham’s garden was her playground. She was a lovely, romantic child, who was always wanting the flowers to talk to her, and used to invent the most wonderful stories about animals, of whom she was passionately fond. In 1834 Mrs. Austin decided on leaving England, and Sydney Smith wrote his immortal letter to the little girl:
Lucie, Lucie, my dear child, don’t tear your frock: tearing frocks is not of itself a proof of genius. But write as your mother writes, act as your mother acts: be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest, and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little import. And Lucie, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in the first sum of yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucie, to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic but a scene of horrors? You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts, peopled by men who have never understood arithmetic. By the time you return, I shall probably have received my first paralytic stroke, and shall have lost all recollection of you. Therefore I now give you my parting advice – don’t marry anybody who has not a tolerable understanding and a thousand a year. And God bless you, dear child.
At Boulogne she sat next Heine at table d’hôte. ‘He heard me speak German to my mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then said, “When you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine.” I replied, “And who is Heinrich Heine?” He laughed heartily and took no offence at my ignorance; and we used to lounge on the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish, mermaids, water-sprites and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very often pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings from the “Nord See.” He was.. so kind to me and so sarcastic to every one else.’ Twenty years afterwards the little girl whose ‘braune Augen’ Heine had celebrated in his charming poem Wenn ich an deinem Hause, used to go and see the dying poet in Paris. ‘It does one good,’ he said to her, ‘to see a woman who does not carry about a broken heart, to be mended by all sorts of men, like the women here, who do not see that a total want of heart is their real failing.’ On another occasion he said to her: ‘I have now made peace with the whole world, and at last also with God, who sends thee to me as a beautiful angel of death: I shall certainly soon die.’ Lady Duff Gordon said to him: ‘Poor Poet, do you still retain such splendid illusions, that you transform a travelling Englishwoman into Azrael? That used not to be the case, for you always disliked us.’ He answered: ‘Yes, I do not know what possessed me to dislike the English… it really was only petulance; I never hated them, indeed, I never knew them. I was only once in England, but knew no one, and found London very dreary, and the people and the streets odious. But England has revenged herself well; she has sent me most excellent friends – thyself and Milnes, that good Milnes.’
There are delightful letters from Dicky Doyle here, with the most amusing drawings, one of the present Sir Robert Peel as he made his maiden speech in the House being excellent; and the various descriptions of Hassan’s performances are extremely amusing. Hassan was a black boy, who had been turned away by his master because he was going blind, and was found by Lady Duff Gordon one night sitting on her doorstep. She took care of him, and had him cured, and he seems to have been a constant source of delight to every one. On one occasion, ‘when Prince Louis Napoleon (the late Emperor of the French) came in unexpectedly, he gravely said: “Please, my Lady, I ran out and bought twopenny worth of sprats for the Prince, and for the honour of the house.”’ Here is an amusing letter from Mrs. Norton:
MY DEAR LUCIE, – We have never thanked you for the red Pots, which no early Christian should be without, and which add that finishing stroke to the splendour of our demesne, which was supposed to depend on a roc’s egg, in less intelligent times. We have now a warm Pompeian appearance, and the constant contemplation of these classical objects favours the beauty of the facial line; for what can be deduced from the great fact, apparent in all the states of antiquity, that straight noses were the ancient custom, but the logical assumption that the constant habit of turning up the nose at unsightly objects – such as the National Gallery and other offensive and obtrusive things – has produced the modern divergence from the true and proper line of profile? I rejoice to think that we ourselves are exempt. I attribute this to our love of Pompeian Pots (on account of the beauty and distinction of this Pot’s shape I spell it with a big P), which has kept us straight in a world of crookedness. The pursuit of profiles under difficulties – how much more rare than a pursuit of knowledge! Talk of setting good examples before our children! Bah! let us set good Pompeian Pots before our children, and when they grow up they will not depart from them.
Lady Duff Gordon’s Letters from the Cape, and her brilliant translation of The Amber Witch, are, of course, well known. The latter book was, with Lady Wilde’s translation of Sidonia the Sorceress, my favourite romantic reading when a boy. Her letters from Egypt are wonderfully vivid and picturesque. Here is an interesting bit of art criticism:
Sheykh Yoosuf laughed so heartily over a print in an illustrated paper from a picture of Hilton’s of Rebekah at the well, with the old ‘wekeel’ of ‘Sidi Ibraheem’ (Abraham’s chief servant) kneeling before the girl he was sent to fetch, like an old fool without his turban, and Rebekah and the other girls in queer fancy dresses, and the camels with snouts like pigs. ‘If the painter could not go into “Es Sham” to see how the Arab really look,’ said Sheykh Yoosuf, ‘why did he not paint a well in England, with girls like English peasants – at least it would have looked natural to English people? and the wekeel would not seem so like a madman if he had taken off a hat!’ I cordially agree with Yoosuf’s art criticism. Fancy pictures of Eastern things are hopelessly absurd.
Mrs. Ross has certainly produced a most fascinating volume, and her book is one of the books of the season. It is edited with tact and judgment.
* * * * *
Caroline, by Lady Lindsay, is certainly Lady Lindsay’s best work. It is written in a very clever modern style, and is as full of esprit and wit as it is of subtle psychological insight. Caroline is an heiress, who, coming downstairs at a Continental hotel, falls into the arms of a charming, penniless young man. The hero of the novel is the young man’s friend, Lord Lexamont, who makes the ‘great renunciation,’ and succeeds in being fine without being priggish, and Quixotic without being ridiculous. Miss Ffoulkes, the elderly spinster, is a capital character, and, indeed, the whole book is cleverly written. It has also the advantage of being in only one volume. The influence of Mudie on literature, the baneful influence of the circulating library, is clearly on the wane. The gain to literature is incalculable. English novels were becoming very tedious with their three volumes of padding – at least, the second volume was always padding – and extremely indigestible. A reckless punster once remarked to me, apropos of English novels, that ‘the proof of the padding is in the eating,’ and certainly English fiction has been very heavy – heavy with the best intentions. Lady Lindsay’s book is a sign that better things are in store for us. She is brief and bright.
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What are the best books to give as Christmas presents to good girls who are always pretty, or to pretty girls who are occasionally good? People are so fond of giving away what they do not want themselves, that charity is largely on the increase. But with this kind of charity I have not much sympathy. If one gives away a book, it should be a charming book – so charming, that one regrets having given it, and would not take it back. Looking over the Christmas books sent to me by various publishers, I find that these are the best and the most pleasing: Gleanings from the ‘Graphic,’ by Randolph Caldecott, a most fascinating volume full of sketches that have real wit and humour of line, and are not simply dependent on what the French call the légende, the literary explanation; Meg’s Friend, by Alice Corkran, one of our most delicate and graceful prose-writers in the sphere of fiction, and one whose work has the rare artistic qualities of refinement and simplicity; Under False Colours, by Sarah Doudney, an excellent story; The Fisherman’s Daughter, by Florence Montgomery, the author of Misunderstood, a tale with real charm of idea and treatment; Under a Cloud, by the author of The Atelier du Lys, and quite worthy of its author; The Third Miss St. Quentin, by Mrs. Molesworth, and A Christmas Posy from the same fascinating pen, and with delightful illustrations by Walter Crane. Miss Rosa Mulholland’s Giannetta and Miss Agnes Giberne’s Ralph Hardcastle’s Will are also admirable books for presents, and the bound volume of Atalanta has much that is delightful both in art and in literature.
The prettiest, indeed the most beautiful, book from an artistic point of view is undoubtedly Mr. Walter Crane’s Flora’s Feast. It is an imaginative Masque of Flowers, and as lovely in colour as it is exquisite in design. It shows us the whole pomp and pageant of the year, the Snowdrops like white-crested knights, the little naked Crocus kneeling to catch the sunlight in his golden chalice, the Daffodils blowing their trumpets like young hunters, the Anemones with their wind-blown raiment, the green-kirtled Marsh-marigolds, and the ‘Lady-smocks all silver-white,’ tripping over the meadows like Arcadian milk-maids. Buttercups are here, and the white-plumed Thorn in spiky armour, and the Crown-imperial borne in stately procession, and red-bannered Tulips, and Hyacinths with their spring bells, and Chaucer’s Daisy —
small and sweet,
Si douce est la Marguerite.
Gorgeous Peonies, and Columbines ‘that drew the car of Venus,’ and the Rose with her lover, and the stately white-vestured Lilies, and wide staring Ox-eyes, and scarlet Poppies pass before us. There are Primroses and Corncockles, Chrysanthemums in robes of rich brocade, Sunflowers and tall Hollyhocks, and pale Christmas Roses. The designs for the Daffodils, the wild Roses, the Convolvulus, and the Hollyhock are admirable, and would be beautiful in embroidery or in any precious material. Indeed, any one who wishes to find beautiful designs cannot do better than get the book. It is, in its way, a little masterpiece, and its grace and fancy, and beauty of line and colour, cannot be over-estimated. The Greeks gave human form to wood and stream, and saw Nature best in Naiad or in Dryad. Mr. Crane, with something of Gothic fantasy, has caught the Greek feeling, the love of personification, the passion for representing things under the conditions of the human form. The flowers are to him so many knights and ladies, page-boys or shepherd-boys, divine nymphs or simple girls, and in their fair bodies or fanciful raiment one can see the flower’s very form and absolute essence, so that one loves their artistic truth no less than their artistic beauty. This book contains some of the best work Mr. Crane has ever done. His art is never so successful as when it is entirely remote from life. The slightest touch of actuality seems to kill it. It lives, or should live, in a world of its own fashioning. It is decorative in its complete subordination of fact to beauty of effect, in the grandeur of its curves and lines, in its entirely imaginative treatment. Almost every page of this book gives a suggestion for some rich tapestry, some fine screen, some painted cassone, some carving in wood or ivory.
