Reviews Part 34

(2) Caroline. By Lady Lindsay. (Bentley and Son.)

(3) Gleanings from the 'Graphic.' By Randolph Caldecott. (Routledge and Sons.)

(4) Meg's Friend. By Alice Corkran. (Blackie and Sons.)

(5) Under False Colours. By Sarah Doudney. (Blackie and Sons.)

(6) The Fisherman's Daughter. By Florence Montgomery. (Hatchards.)

(7) Under a Cloud. By the Author of The Atelier du Lys. (Hatchards.)

(8) The Third Miss St. Quentin. By Mrs. Molesworth. (Hatchards.)

(9) A Christmas Posy. By Mrs. Molesworth. Illustrated by Walter Crane.

(Hatchards.)

(10) Giannetta. A Girl's Story of Herself. By Rosa Mulholland. (Blackie and Sons.)

(11) Ralph Hardcastle's Will. By Agnes Giberne. (Hatchards.)

(12) Flora's Feast. A Masque of Flowers. Penned and Pictured by Walter Crane. (Cassell and Co.)

(13) Here's to the Maiden of Bashful Fifteen. By Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Illustrated by Alice Havers and Ernest Wilson. (Hildesheimer and Faulkner.)

POETRY AND PRISON

(Pall Mall Gazette, January 3, 1889.)

Prison has had an admirable effect on Mr. Wilfrid Blunt as a poet. The Love Sonnets of Proteus, in spite of their clever Musset-like modernities and their swift brilliant wit, were but affected or fantastic at best.

They were simply the records of passing moods and moments, of which some were sad and others sweet, and not a few shameful. Their subject was not of high or serious import. They contained much that was wilful and weak.

In Vinculis, upon the other hand, is a book that stirs one by its fine sincerity of purpose, its lofty and impassioned thought, its depth and ardour of intense feeling. 'Imprisonment,' says Mr. Blunt in his preface, 'is a reality of discipline most useful to the modern soul, lapped as it is in physical sloth and self-indulgence. Like a sickness or a spiritual retreat it purifies and ennobles; and the soul emerges from it stronger and more self-contained.' To him, certainly, it has been a mode of purification. The opening sonnets, composed in the bleak cell of Galway Gaol, and written down on the fly-leaves of the prisoner's prayer-book, are full of things nobly conceived and nobly uttered, and show that though Mr. Balfour may enforce 'plain living' by his prison regulations, he cannot prevent 'high thinking' or in any way limit or constrain the freedom of a man's soul. They are, of course, intensely personal in expression. They could not fail to be so. But the personality that they reveal has nothing petty or ignoble about it. The petulant cry of the shallow egoist which was the chief characteristic of the Love Sonnets of Proteus is not to be found here. In its place we have wild grief and terrible scorn, fierce rage and flame-like passion.

Such a sonnet as the following comes out of the very fire of heart and brain:

God knows, 'twas not with a fore-reasoned plan I left the easeful dwellings of my peace, And sought this combat with ungodly Man, And ceaseless still through years that do not cease Have warred with Powers and Principalities.

My natural soul, ere yet these strifes began, Was as a sister diligent to please And loving all, and most the human clan.

God knows it. And He knows how the world's tears Touched me. And He is witness of my wrath, How it was kindled against murderers Who slew for gold, and how upon their path I met them. Since which day the World in arms Strikes at my life with angers and alarms.

And this sonnet has all the strange strength of that despair which is but the prelude to a larger hope:

I thought to do a deed of chivalry, An act of worth, which haply in her sight Who was my mistress should recorded be And of the nations. And, when thus the fight Faltered and men once bold with faces white Turned this and that way in excuse to flee, I only stood, and by the foeman's might Was overborne and mangled cruelly.

Then crawled I to her feet, in whose dear cause I made this venture, and 'Behold,' I said, 'How I am wounded for thee in these wars.'

But she, 'Poor cripple, would'st thou I should wed A limbless trunk?' and laughing turned from me.

Yet she was fair, and her name 'Liberty.'

The sonnet beginning

A prison is a convent without God-- Poverty, Chastity, Obedience Its precepts are:

is very fine; and this, written just after entering the gaol, is powerful:

Naked I came into the world of pleasure, And naked come I to this house of pain.

Here at the gate I lay down my life's treasure, My pride, my garments and my name with men.

The world and I henceforth shall be as twain, No sound of me shall pierce for good or ill These walls of grief. Nor shall I hear the vain Laughter and tears of those who love me still.

Within, what new life waits me! Little ease, Cold lying, hunger, nights of wakefulness, Harsh orders given, no voice to soothe or please, Poor thieves for friends, for books rules meaningless; This is the grave--nay, hell. Yet, Lord of Might, Still in Thy light my spirit shall see light.

But, indeed, all the sonnets are worth reading, and The Canon of Aughrim, the longest poem in the book, is a most masterly and dramatic description of the tragic life of the Irish peasant. Literature is not much indebted to Mr. Balfour for his sophistical Defence of Philosophic Doubt which is one of the dullest books we know, but it must be admitted that by sending Mr. Blunt to gaol he has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet. The narrow confines of the prison cell seem to suit the 'sonnet's scanty plot of ground,' and an unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.

In Vinculis. By Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Author of The Wind and the Whirlwind, The Love Sonnets of Proteus, etc. etc. (Kegan Paul.)

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WALT WHITMAN

(Pall Mall Gazette, January 25, 1889.)

'No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance . . . or as aiming mainly toward art and aestheticism.'

'Leaves of Grass . . . has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature--an attempt, from first to last, to put _a Person_, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century in America,) freely, fully and truly on record. I could not find any similar personal record in current literature that satisfied me.' In these words Walt Whitman gives us the true attitude we should adopt towards his work, having, indeed, a much saner view of the value and meaning of that work than either his eloquent admirers or noisy detractors can boast of possessing. His last book, November Boughs, as he calls it, published in the winter of the old man's life, reveals to us, not indeed a soul's tragedy, for its last note is one of joy and hope, and noble and unshaken faith in all that is fine and worthy of such faith, but certainly the drama of a human soul, and puts on record with a simplicity that has in it both sweetness and strength the record of his spiritual development, and of the aim and motive both of the manner and the matter of his work. His strange mode of expression is shown in these pages to have been the result of deliberate and self-conscious choice.

The 'barbaric yawp' which he sent over 'the roofs of the world' so many years ago, and which wrung from Mr. Swinburne's lip such lofty panegyric in song and such loud clamorous censure in prose, appears here in what will be to many an entirely new light. For in his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded. There is much method in what many have termed his madness, too much method, indeed, some may be tempted to fancy.

In the story of his life, as he tells it to us, we find him at the age of sixteen beginning a definite and philosophical study of literature:

Summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island's seashores--there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorb'd (probably to better advantage for me than in any library or indoor room--it makes such difference _where_ you read) Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante's among them.

As it happened, I read the latter mostly in an old wood. The Iliad . . . I read first thoroughly on the peninsula of Orient, northeast end of Long Island, in a sheltered hollow of rock and sand, with the sea on each side. (I have wonder'd since why I was not overwhelmed by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described, in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.)

Edgar Allan Poe's amusing bit of dogmatism that, for our occasions and our day, 'there can be no such thing as a long poem,' fascinated him.

'The same thought had been haunting my mind before,' he said, 'but Poe's argument . . . work'd the sum out, and proved it to me,' and the English translation of the Bible seems to have suggested to him the possibility of a poetic form which, while retaining the spirit of poetry, would still be free from the trammels of rhyme and of a definite metrical system.

Having thus, to a certain degree, settled upon what one might call the 'technique' of Whitmanism, he began to brood upon the nature of that spirit which was to give life to the strange form. The central point of the poetry of the future seemed to him to be necessarily 'an identical body and soul, a personality,' in fact, which personality, he tells us frankly, 'after many considerations and ponderings I deliberately settled should be myself.' However, for the true creation and revealing of this personality, at first only dimly felt, a new stimulus was needed. This came from the Civil War. After describing the many dreams and passions of his boyhood and early manhood, he goes on to say:

These, however, and much more might have gone on and come to naught (almost positively would have come to naught,) if a sudden, vast, terrible, direct and indirect stimulus for new and national declamatory expression had not been given to me. It is certain, I say, that although I had made a start before, only from the occurrence of the Secession War, and what it show'd me as by flashes of lightning, with the emotional depths it sounded and arous'd (of course, I don't mean in my own heart only, I saw it just as plainly in others, in millions)--that only from the strong flare and provocation of that war's sights and scenes the final reasons-for-being of an autochthonic and passionate song definitely came forth.

I went down to the war fields of Virginia . . . lived thenceforward in camp--saw great battles and the days and nights afterward--partook of all the fluctuations, gloom, despair, hopes again arous'd, courage evoked--death readily risk'd--_the cause_, too--along and filling those agonistic and lurid following years . . . the real parturition years . . . of this henceforth homogeneous Union. Without those three or four years and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.

Having thus obtained the necessary stimulus for the quickening and awakening of the personal self, some day to be endowed with universality, he sought to find new notes of song, and, passing beyond the mere passion for expression, he aimed at 'Suggestiveness' first.

I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought--there to pursue your own flight.

Another 'impetus-word' is Comradeship, and other 'word-signs' are Good Cheer, Content and Hope. Individuality, especially, he sought for:

I have allowed the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon American individuality and assist it--not only because that is a great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalising laws, but as counterpoise to the leveling tendencies of Democracy--and for other reasons. Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I avowedly chant 'the great pride of man in himself,' and permit it to be more or less a motif of nearly all my verse. I think this pride indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning.

Chapter end