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Reviews
MR. WILLIAM MORRIS’S LAST BOOK
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 2, 1889.)
Mr. Morris’s last book is a piece of pure art workmanship from beginning to end, and the very remoteness of its style from the common language and ordinary interests of our day gives to the whole story a strange beauty and an unfamiliar charm. It is written in blended prose and verse, like the mediæval ‘cante-fable,’ and tells the tale of the House of the Wolfings in its struggles against the legionaries of Rome then advancing into Northern Germany. It is a kind of Saga, and the language in which the folk-epic, as we may call it, is set forth recalls the antique dignity and directness of our English tongue four centuries ago. From an artistic point of view it may be described as an attempt to return by a self-conscious effort to the conditions of an earlier and a fresher age. Attempts of this kind are not uncommon in the history of art. From some such feeling came the Pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day and the archaistic movement of later Greek sculpture. When the result is beautiful the method is justified, and no shrill insistence upon a supposed necessity for absolute modernity of form can prevail against the value of work that has the incomparable excellence of style. Certainly, Mr. Morris’s work possesses this excellence. His fine harmonies and rich cadences create in the reader that spirit by which alone can its own spirit be interpreted, awake in him something of the temper of romance and, by taking him out of his own age, place him in a truer and more vital relation to the great masterpieces of all time. It is a bad thing for an age to be always looking in art for its own reflection. It is well that, now and then, we are given work that is nobly imaginative in its method and purely artistic in its aim. As we read Mr. Morris’s story with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative and descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and adventurous themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from the ignoble fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day. We breathe a purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and was simple and stately and complete.
The tragic interest of The House of the Wolfings centres round the figure of Thiodolf, the great hero of the tribe. The goddess who loves him gives him, as he goes to battle against the Romans, a magical hauberk on which rests this strange fate: that he who wears it shall save his own life and destroy the life of his land. Thiodolf, finding out this secret, brings the hauberk back to the Wood-Sun, as she is called, and chooses death for himself rather than the ruin of his cause, and so the story ends.
But Mr. Morris has always preferred romance to tragedy, and set the development of action above the concentration of passion. His story is like some splendid old tapestry crowded with stately images and enriched with delicate and delightful detail. The impression it leaves on us is not of a single central figure dominating the whole, but rather of a magnificent design to which everything is subordinated, and by which everything becomes of enduring import. It is the whole presentation of the primitive life that really fascinates. What in other hands would have been mere archæology is here transformed by quick artistic instinct and made wonderful for us, and human and full of high interest. The ancient world seems to have come to life again for our pleasure.
Of a work so large and so coherent, completed with no less perfection than it is conceived, it is difficult by mere quotation to give any adequate idea. This, however, may serve as an example of its narrative power. The passage describes the visit of Thiodolf to the Wood-Sun:
The moonlight lay in a great flood on the grass without, and the dew was falling in the coldest hour of the night, and the earth smelled sweetly: the whole habitation was asleep now, and there was no sound to be known as the sound of any creature, save that from the distant meadow came the lowing of a cow that had lost her calf, and that a white owl was flitting about near the eaves of the Roof with her wild cry that sounded like the mocking of merriment now silent. Thiodolf turned toward the wood, and walked steadily through the scattered hazel-trees, and thereby into the thick of the beech-trees, whose boles grew smooth and silver-grey, high and close-set: and so on and on he went as one going by a well-known path, though there was no path, till all the moonlight was quenched under the close roof of the beech-leaves, though yet for all the darkness, no man could go there and not feel that the roof was green above him. Still he went on in despite of the darkness, till at last there was a glimmer before him, that grew greater till he came unto a small wood-lawn whereon the turf grew again, though the grass was but thin, because little sunlight got to it, so close and thick were the tall trees round about it… Nought looked Thiodolf either at the heavens above, or the trees, as he strode from off the husk-strewn floor of the beech wood on to the scanty grass of the lawn, but his eyes looked straight before him at that which was amidmost of the lawn: and little wonder was that; for there on a stone chair sat a woman exceeding fair, clad in glittering raiment, her hair lying as pale in the moonlight on the grey stone as the barley acres in the August night before the reaping-hook goes in amongst them. She sat there as though she were awaiting some one, and he made no stop nor stay, but went straight up to her, and took her in his arms, and kissed her mouth and her eyes, and she him again; and then he sat himself down beside her.
As an example of the beauty of the verse we would take this from the song of the Wood-Sun. It at least shows how perfectly the poetry harmonises with the prose, and how natural the transition is from the one to the other:
In many a stead Doom dwelleth, nor sleepeth day nor night:
The rim of the bowl she kisseth, and beareth the chambering light
When the kings of men wend happy to the bride-bed from the board.
It is little to say that she wendeth the edge of the grinded sword,
When about the house half builded she hangeth many a day;
The ship from the strand she shoveth, and on his wonted way
By the mountain hunter fareth where his foot ne’er failed before:
She is where the high bank crumbles at last on the river’s shore:
The mower’s scythe she whetteth; and lulleth the shepherd to sleep
Where the deadly ling-worm wakeneth in the desert of the sheep.
Now we that come of the God-kin of her redes for ourselves we wot,
But her will with the lives of men-folk and their ending know we not.
So therefore I bid thee not fear for thyself of Doom and her deed,
But for me: and I bid thee hearken to the helping of my need.
Or else – Art thou happy in life, or lusteth thou to die
In the flower of thy days, when thy glory and thy longing bloom on high?
The last chapter of the book in which we are told of the great feast made for the dead is so finely written that we cannot refrain from quoting this passage:
Now was the glooming falling upon the earth; but the Hall was bright within even as the Hall-Sun had promised. Therein was set forth the Treasure of the Wolfings; fair cloths were hung on the walls, goodly broidered garments on the pillars: goodly brazen cauldrons and fair-carven chests were set down in nooks where men could see them well, and vessels of gold and silver were set all up and down the tables of the feast. The pillars also were wreathed with flowers, and flowers hung garlanded from the walls over the precious hangings; sweet gums and spices were burning in fair-wrought censers of brass, and so many candles were alight under the Roof, that scarce had it looked more ablaze when the Romans had litten the faggots therein for its burning amidst the hurry of the Morning Battle.
There then they fell to feasting, hallowing in the high-tide of their return with victory in their hands: and the dead corpses of Thiodolf and Otter, clad in precious glittering raiment, looked down on them from the High-seat, and the kindreds worshipped them and were glad; and they drank the Cup to them before any others, were they Gods or men.
In days of uncouth realism and unimaginative imitation, it is a high pleasure to welcome work of this kind. It is a work in which all lovers of literature cannot fail to delight.
A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the Kindreds of the Mark. Written in Prose and in Verse by William Morris. (Reeves and Turner.)
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 25, 1889.)
A critic recently remarked of Adam Lindsay Gordon that through him Australia had found her first fine utterance in song. 10 This, however, is an amiable error. There is very little of Australia in Gordon’s poetry. His heart and mind and fancy were always preoccupied with memories and dreams of England and such culture as England gave him. He owed nothing to the land of his adoption. Had he stayed at home he would have done much better work. In a few poems such as The Sick Stockrider, From the Wreck, and Wolf and Hound there are notes of Australian influences, and these Swinburnian stanzas from the dedication to the Bush Ballads deserve to be quoted, though the promise they hold out was never fulfilled:
They are rhymes rudely strung with intent less
Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds;
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.
Whence gather’d? – The locust’s grand chirrup
May furnish a stave;
The ring of a rowel and stirrup,
The wash of a wave.
The chaunt of the marsh frog in rushes,
That chimes through the pauses and hushes
Of nightfall, the torrent that gushes,
The tempests that rave.
In the gathering of night gloom o’erhead, in
The still silent change,
All fire-flushed when forest trees redden
On slopes of the range.
When the gnarl’d, knotted trunks Eucalyptian
Seem carved, like weird columns Egyptian,
With curious device – quaint inscription,
And hieroglyph strange;
In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles
’Twixt shadow and shine,
When each dew-laden air draught resembles
A long draught of wine;
When the sky-line’s blue burnish’d resistance
Makes deeper the dreamiest distance,
Some song in all hearts hath existence, —
Such songs have been mine.
As a rule, however, Gordon is distinctly English, and the landscapes he describes are always the landscapes of our own country. He writes about mediæval lords and ladies in his Rhyme of Joyous Garde, about Cavaliers and Roundheads in The Romance of Britomarte, and Ashtaroth, his longest and most ambitious poem, deals with the adventures of the Norman barons and Danish knights of ancient days. Steeped in Swinburne and bewildered with Browning, he set himself to reproduce the marvellous melody of the one and the dramatic vigour and harsh strength of the other. From the Wreck is a sort of Australian edition of the Ride to Ghent. These are the first three stanzas of one of the so-called Bush Ballads:
On skies still and starlit
White lustres take hold,
And grey flashes scarlet,
And red flashes gold.
And sun-glories cover
The rose, shed above her,
Like lover and lover
They flame and unfold.
…
Still bloom in the garden
Green grass-plot, fresh lawn,
Though pasture lands harden
And drought fissures yawn.
While leaves, not a few fall,
Let rose-leaves for you fall,
Leaves pearl-strung with dewfall,
And gold shot with dawn.
Does the grass-plot remember
The fall of your feet
In Autumn’s red ember
When drought leagues with heat,
When the last of the roses
Despairingly closes
In the lull that reposes
Ere storm winds wax fleet?
And the following verses show that the Norman Baron of Ashtaroth had read Dolores just once too often:
Dead priests of Osiris, and Isis,
And Apis! that mystical lore,
Like a nightmare, conceived in a crisis
Of fever, is studied no more;
Dead Magian! yon star-troop that spangles
The arch of yon firmament vast
Looks calm, like a host of white angels
On dry dust of votaries past.
On seas unexplored can the ship shun
Sunk rocks? Can man fathom life’s links,
Past or future, unsolved by Egyptian
Or Theban, unspoken by Sphynx?
The riddle remains yet, unravell’d
By students consuming night oil.
O earth! we have toil’d, we have travailed:
How long shall we travail and toil?
By the classics Gordon was always very much fascinated. He loved what he calls ‘the scroll that is godlike and Greek,’ though he is rather uncertain about his quantities, rhyming ‘Polyxena’ to ‘Athena’ and ‘Aphrodite’ to ‘light,’ and occasionally makes very rash statements, as when he represents Leonidas exclaiming to the three hundred at Thermopylae:
‘Ho! comrades let us gaily dine —
This night with Plato we shall sup,’
if this be not, as we hope it is, a printer’s error. What the Australians liked best were his spirited, if somewhat rough, horse-racing and hunting poems. Indeed, it was not till he found that How We Beat the Favourite was on everybody’s lips that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a verse-writer, having up to that time produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them unsigned to the local magazines. The fact is that the social atmosphere of Melbourne was not favourable to poets, and the worthy colonials seem to have shared Audrey’s doubts as to whether poetry was a true and honest thing. It was not till Gordon won the Cup Steeplechase for Major Baker in 1868 that he became really popular, and probably there were many who felt that to steer Babbler to the winning-post was a finer achievement than ‘to babble o’er green fields.’
On the whole, it is impossible not to regret that Gordon ever emigrated. His literary power cannot be denied, but it was stunted in uncongenial surroundings and marred by the rude life he was forced to lead. Australia has converted many of our failures into prosperous and admirable mediocrities, but she certainly spoiled one of our poets for us. Ovid at Tomi is not more tragic than Gordon driving cattle or farming an unprofitable sheep-ranch.
That Australia, however, will some day make amends by producing a poet of her own we cannot doubt, and for him there will be new notes to sound and new wonders to tell of. The description, given by Mr. Marcus Clarke in the preface to this volume, of the aspect and spirit of Nature in Australia is most curious and suggestive. The Australian forests, he tells us, are funereal and stern, and ‘seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair.’ No leaves fall from the trees, but ‘from the melancholy gum strips of white bark hang and rustle. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter.’ The aborigines aver that, when night comes, from the bottomless depth of some lagoon a misshapen monster rises, dragging his loathsome length along the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy. No bright fancies are linked with the memories of the mountains. Hopeless explorers have named them out of their sufferings – Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair.
In Australia alone (says Mr. Clarke) is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of the fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the hieroglyphs of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of that wild dream-land termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than all the bountiful richness of Egypt.
Here, certainly, is new material for the poet, here is a land that is waiting for its singer. Such a singer Gordon was not. He remained thoroughly English, and the best that we can say of him is that he wrote imperfectly in Australia those poems that in England he might have made perfect.
Poems. By Adam Lindsay Gordon. (Samuel Mullen.)
THE POETS’ CORNER – IX
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 30, 1889.)
Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments, and it was probably in one of his happiest and, certainly, in one of his most careless moods that Mr. Justice Denman conceived the idea of putting the early history of Rome into doggerel verse for the benefit of a little boy of the name of Jack. Poor Jack! He is still, we learn from the preface, under six years of age, and it is sad to think of the future career of a boy who is being brought up on bad history and worse poetry. Here is a passage from the learned judge’s account of Romulus:
Poor Tatius by some unknown hand
Was soon assassinated,
Some said by Romulus’ command;
I know not – but ’twas fated.
Sole King again, this Romulus
Play’d some fantastic tricks,
Lictors he had, who hatchets bore
Bound up with rods of sticks.
He treated all who thwarted him
No better than a dog,
Sometimes ’twas ‘Heads off, Lictors, there!’
Sometimes ‘Ho! Lictors, flog!’
Then he created Senators,
And gave them rings of gold;
Old soldiers all; their name deriv’d
From ‘Senex’ which means ‘old.’
Knights, too, he made, good horsemen all,
Who always were at hand
To execute immediately
Whate’er he might command.
But these were of Patrician rank,
Plebeians all the rest;
Remember this distinction, Jack!
For ’tis a useful test.
The reign of Tullius Hostilius opens with a very wicked rhyme:
As Numa, dying, only left
A daughter, named Pompilia,
The Senate had to choose a King.
They choose one sadly sillier.
If Jack goes to the bad, Mr. Justice Denman will have much to answer for.
After such a terrible example from the Bench, it is pleasant to turn to the seats reserved for Queen’s Counsel. Mr. Cooper Willis’s Tales and Legends, if somewhat boisterous in manner, is still very spirited and clever. The Prison of the Danes is not at all a bad poem, and there is a great deal of eloquent, strong writing in the passage beginning:
The dying star-song of the night sinks in the dawning day,
And the dark-blue sheen is changed to green, and the green fades into grey,
And the sleepers are roused from their slumbers, and at last the Danesmen know
How few of all their numbers are left them by the foe.
Not much can be said of a poet who exclaims:
Oh, for the power of Byron or of Moore,
To glow with one, and with the latter soar.
And yet Mr. Moodie is one of the best of those South African poets whose works have been collected and arranged by Mr. Wilmot. Pringle, the ‘father of South African verse,’ comes first, of course, and his best poem is, undoubtedly, Afar in the Desert:
Afar in the desert I love to ride,
With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side:
Away, away, from the dwelling of men
By the wild-deer’s haunt, by the buffalo’s glen:
By valleys remote where the oribi plays,
Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
And the kúdú and eland unhunted recline
By the skirts of grey forests o’erhung with wild vine,
Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will
In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.
It is not, however, a very remarkable production.
The Smouse, by Fannin, has the modern merit of incomprehensibility. It reads like something out of The Hunting of the Snark:
I’m a Smouse, I’m a Smouse in the wilderness wide,
The veld is my home, and the wagon’s my pride:
The crack of my ‘voerslag’ shall sound o’er the lea,
I’m a Smouse, I’m a Smouse, and the trader is free!
I heed not the Governor, I fear not his law,
I care not for civilisation one straw,
And ne’er to ‘Ompanda’ – ‘Umgazis’ I’ll throw
While my arm carries fist, or my foot bears a toe!
‘Trek,’ ‘trek,’ ply the whip – touch the fore oxen’s skin,
I’ll warrant we’ll ‘go it’ through thick and through thin —
Loop! loop ye oud skellums! ot Vikmaan trek jy;
I’m a Smouse, I’m a Smouse, and the trader is free!
The South African poets, as a class, are rather behind the age. They seem to think that ‘Aurora’ is a very novel and delightful epithet for the dawn. On the whole they depress us.
Chess, by Mr. Louis Tylor, is a sort of Christmas masque in which the dramatis personæ consist of some unmusical carollers, a priggish young man called Eric, and the chessmen off the board. The White Queen’s Knight begins a ballad and the Black King’s Bishop completes it. The Pawns sing in chorus and the Castles converse with each other. The silliness of the form makes it an absolutely unreadable book.
Mr. Williamson’s Poems of Nature and Life are as orthodox in spirit as they are commonplace in form. A few harmless heresies of art and thought would do this poet no harm. Nearly everything that he says has been said before and said better. The only original thing in the volume is the description of Mr. Robert Buchanan’s ‘grandeur of mind.’ This is decidedly new.
Dr. Cockle tells us that Müllner’s Guilt and The Ancestress of Grillparzer are the masterpieces of German fate-tragedy. His translation of the first of these two masterpieces does not make us long for any further acquaintance with the school. Here is a specimen from the fourth act of the fate-tragedy.
SCENE VIII
ELVIRA. HUGO.
ELVIRA (after long silence, leaving the harp, steps to Hugo, and seeks his gaze).
HUGO (softly). Though I made sacrifice of thy sweet life. The Father has forgiven. Can the wife – Forgive?
ELVIRA (on his breast). She can!
HUGO (with all the warmth of love). Dear wife!
ELVIRA (after a pause, in deep sorrow). Must it be so, beloved one?
HUGO (sorry to have betrayed himself). What?
In his preface to The Circle of Seasons, a series of hymns and verses for the seasons of the Church, the Rev. T. B. Dover expresses a hope that this well-meaning if somewhat tedious book ‘may be of value to those many earnest people to whom the subjective aspect of truth is helpful.’ The poem beginning
Lord, in the inn of my poor worthless heart
Guests come and go; but there is room for Thee,
has some merit and might be converted into a good sonnet. The majority of the poems, however, are quite worthless. There seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.
Lord Henry Somerset’s verse is not so good as his music. Most of the Songs of Adieu are marred by their excessive sentimentality of feeling and by the commonplace character of their weak and lax form. There is nothing that is new and little that is true in verse of this kind:
The golden leaves are falling,
Falling one by one,
Their tender ‘Adieux’ calling
To the cold autumnal sun.
The trees in the keen and frosty air
Stand out against the sky,
’Twould seem they stretch their branches bare
To Heaven in agony.
It can be produced in any quantity. Lord Henry Somerset has too much heart and too little art to make a good poet, and such art as he does possess is devoid of almost every intellectual quality and entirely lacking in any intellectual strength. He has nothing to say and says it.
Mrs. Cora M. Davis is eloquent about the splendours of what the authoress of The Circle of Seasons calls ‘this earthly ball.’
Let’s sing the beauties of this grand old earth,
she cries, and proceeds to tell how
Imagination paints old Egypt’s former glory,
Of mighty temples reaching heavenward,
Of grim, colossal statues, whose barbaric story
The caustic pens of erudition still record,
Whose ancient cities of glittering minarets
Reflect the gold of Afric’s gorgeous sunsets.
‘The caustic pens of erudition’ is quite delightful and will be appreciated by all Egyptologists. There is also a charming passage in the same poem on the pictures of the Old Masters:
the mellow richness of whose tints impart,
By contrast, greater delicacy still to modern art.
This seems to us the highest form of optimism we have ever come across in art criticism. It is American in origin, Mrs. Davis, as her biographer tells us, having been born in Alabama, Genesee co., N.Y.
(1) The Story of the Kings of Rome in Verse. By the Hon. G. Denman, Judge of the High Court of Justice. (Trübner and Co.)
(2) Tales and Legends in Verse. By E. Cooper Willis, Q.C. (Kegan Paul.)
(3) The Poetry of South Africa. Collected and arranged by A. Wilmot. (Sampson Low and Co.)
(4) Chess. A Christmas Masque. By Louis Tylor. (Fisher Unwin.)
(5) Poems of Nature and Life. By David R. Williamson. (Blackwood.)
(6) Guilt. Translated from the German by J. Cockle, M.D. (Williams and Norgate.)
(7) The Circle of Seasons. By K. E. V. (Elliot Stock.)
(8) Songs of Adieu. By Lord Henry Somerset. (Chatto and Windus.)
(9) Immortelles. By Cora M. Davis. (G. P. Putnam’s Sons.)
