And his eyes, too, and his mien Were, as are the eagles, keen; All the man was aquiline--
are two strong, simple verses, and indeed the spirit of the whole poem is dignified and stately. The rest of the volume, however, is disappointing. Ordinary theology has long since converted its gold into lead, and words and phrases that once touched the heart of the world have become wearisome and meaningless through repet.i.tion. If Theology desires to move us, she must re-write her formulas.
There is something very pleasant in coming across a poet who can apostrophise Byron as
transcendent star That gems the firmament of poesy,
and can speak of Longfellow as a "mighty t.i.tan." Reckless panegyrics of this kind show a kindly nature and a good heart, and Mr. Mackenzie"s Highland Daydreams could not possibly offend any one. It must be admitted that they are rather old-fashioned, but this is usually the case with natural spontaneous verse. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern. Nature is always a little behind the age.
The Story of the Cross, an attempt to versify the Gospel narratives, is a strange survival of the Tate and Brady school of poetry. Mr. Nash, who styles himself "a humble soldier in the army of Faith," expresses a hope that his book may "invigorate devotional feeling, especially among the young, to whom verse is perhaps more attractive than to their elders,"
but we should be sorry to think that people of any age could admire such a paraphrase as the following:
Foxes have holes, in which to slink for rest, The birds of air find shelter in the nest; But He, the Son of Man and Lord of all, Has no abiding place His own to call.
It is a curious fact that the worst work is always done with the best intentions, and that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves very seriously.
(1) David Westren. By Alfred Hayes, M.A. New Coll., Oxon. (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers.)
(2) The Unknown Madonna and Other Poems. By Rennell Rodd. (David Stott.)
(3) The Wind and Six Sonnets. By James Ross. (Bristol: J. W.
Arrowsmith.)
(4) Saul of Tarsus. By Isaac Sharp. (Kegan Paul.)
(5) Highland Daydreams. By George Mackenzie. (Inverness: Office of the Northern Chronicle.)
(6) The Story of the Cross. By Charles Nash. (Elliot Stock.)
M. CARO ON GEORGE SAND
(Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1888.)
The biography of a very great man from the pen of a very ladylike writer--this is the best description we can give of M. Caro"s Life of George Sand. The late Professor of the Sorbonne could chatter charmingly about culture, and had all the fascinating insincerity of an accomplished phrase-maker; being an extremely superior person he had a great contempt for Democracy and its doings, but he was always popular with the d.u.c.h.esses of the Faubourg, as there was nothing in history or in literature that he could not explain away for their edification; having never done anything remarkable he was naturally elected a member of the Academy, and he always remained loyal to the traditions of that thoroughly respectable and thoroughly pretentious inst.i.tution. In fact, he was just the sort of man who should never have attempted to write a Life of George Sand or to interpret George Sand"s genius. He was too feminine to appreciate the grandeur of that large womanly nature, too much of a dilettante to realise the masculine force of that strong and ardent mind. He never gets at the secret of George Sand, and never brings us near to her wonderful personality. He looks on her simply as a litterateur, as a writer of pretty stories of country life and of charming, if somewhat exaggerated, romances. But George Sand was much more than this. Beautiful as are such books as Consuelo and Mauprat, Francois le Champi and La Mare au Diable, yet in none of them is she adequately expressed, by none of them is she adequately revealed. As Mr.
Matthew Arnold said, many years ago, "We do not know George Sand unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole." With this spirit, however, M. Caro has no sympathy. Madame Sand"s doctrines are antediluvian, he tells us, her philosophy is quite dead and her ideas of social regeneration are Utopian, incoherent and absurd. The best thing for us to do is to forget these silly dreams and to read Teverino and Le Secretaire Intime. Poor M. Caro! This spirit, which he treats with such airy flippancy, is the very leaven of modern life. It is remoulding the world for us and fashioning our age anew. If it is antediluvian, it is so because the deluge is yet to come; if it is Utopian, then Utopia must be added to our geographies. To what curious straits M. Caro is driven by his violent prejudices may be estimated by the fact that he tries to cla.s.s George Sand"s novels with the old Chansons de geste, the stories of adventure characteristic of primitive literatures; whereas in using fiction as a vehicle of thought, and romance as a means of influencing the social ideals of her age, George Sand was merely carrying out the traditions of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Diderot and of Chateaubriand. The novel, says M. Caro, must be allied either to poetry or to science. That it has found in philosophy one of its strongest allies seems not to have occurred to him. In an English critic such a view might possibly be excusable. Our greatest novelists, such as Fielding, Scott and Thackeray cared little for the philosophy of their age. But coming, as it does, from a French critic, the statement seems to show a strange want of recognition of one of the most important elements of French fiction. Nor, even in the narrow limits that he has imposed upon himself, can M. Caro be said to be a very fortunate or felicitous critic. To take merely one instance out of many, he says nothing of George Sand"s delightful treatment of art and the artist"s life. And yet how exquisitely does she a.n.a.lyse each separate art and present it to us in its relation to life!
In Consuelo she tells us of music; in Horace of authorship; in Le Chateau des Desertes of acting; in Les Maitres Mosaistes of mosaic work; in Le Chateau de Pictordu of portrait painting; and in La Daniella of the painting of landscape. What Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning have done for England she did for France. She invented an art literature. It is unnecessary, however, to discuss any of M. Caro"s minor failings, for the whole effect of the book, so far as it attempts to portray for us the scope and character of George Sand"s genius, is entirely spoiled by the false att.i.tude a.s.sumed from the beginning, and though the dictum may seem to many harsh and exclusive, we cannot help feeling that an absolute incapacity for appreciating the spirit of a great writer is no qualification for writing a treatise on the subject.
As for Madame Sand"s private life, which is so intimately connected with her art (for, like Goethe, she had to live her romances before she could write them), M. Caro says hardly anything about it. He pa.s.ses it over with a modesty that almost makes one blush, and for fear of wounding the susceptibilities of those grandes dames whose pa.s.sions M. Paul Bourget a.n.a.lyses with such subtlety, he transforms her mother, who was a typical French grisette, into "a very amiable and spirituelle milliner"! It must be admitted that Joseph Surface himself could hardly show greater tact and delicacy, though we ourselves must plead guilty to preferring Madame Sand"s own description of her as an "enfant du vieux pave de Paris."
As regards the English version, which is by M. Gustave Ma.s.son, it may be up to the intellectual requirements of the Harrow schoolboys, but it will hardly satisfy those who consider that accuracy, lucidity and ease are essential to a good translation. Its carelessness is absolutely astounding, and it is difficult to understand how a publisher like Mr.
Routledge could have allowed such a piece of work to issue from his press. "Il descend avec le sourire d"un Machiavel" appears as "he descends into the smile of a Machiavelli"; George Sand"s remark to Flaubert about literary style, "tu la consideres comme un but, elle n"est qu"un effet" is translated "you consider it an end, it is merely an effort"; and such a simple phrase as "ainsi le veut Festhe"tique du roman" is converted into "so the aesthetes of the world would have it."
"Il faudra relacher mes Economies" is "I will have to draw upon my savings," not "my economies will a.s.suredly be relaxed"; "ca.s.sures resineuses" is not "cleavages full of rosin," and "Mme. Sand ne reussit que deux fois" is hardly "Madame Sand was not twice successful."
"Querelles d"ecole" does not mean "school disputations"; "ceux qui se font une sorte d"esthetique de l"indifference absolue" is not "those of which the aesthetics seem to be an absolute indifference"; "chimere"
should not be translated "chimera," nor "lettres ineditees" "inedited letters"; "ridicules" means absurdities, not "ridicules," and "qui pourra definir sa pensee?" is not "who can clearly despise her thought?" M.
Ma.s.son comes to grief over even such a simple sentence as "elle s"etonna des fureurs qui accueillirent ce livre, ne comprenant pas que l"on haisse un auteur a travers son oeuvre," which he translates "she was surprised at the storm which greeted this book, _not understanding that the author is hated through his work_." Then, pa.s.sing over such phrases as "subst.i.tuted by religion" instead of "replaced by religion," and "vulgarisation" where "popularisation" is meant, we come to that most irritating form of translation, the literal word-for-word style. The stream "excites itself by the declivity which it obeys" is one of M.
Ma.s.son"s finest achievements in this genre, and it is an admirable instance of the influence of schoolboys on their masters. However, it would be tedious to make a complete "catalogue of slips," so we will content ourselves by saying that M. Ma.s.son"s translation is not merely quite unworthy of himself, but is also quite undeserved by the public.
Nowadays, the public has its feelings.
George Sand. By the late Elme Marie Caro. Translated by Gustave Ma.s.son, B.A., a.s.sistant Master, Harrow School. "Great French Writers" Series.
(Routledge and Sons.)
THE POETS" CORNER--VII
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1888.)
Mr. Ian Hamilton"s Ballad of Hadji is undeniably clever. Hadji is a wonderful Arab horse that a reckless hunter rides to death in the pursuit of a wild boar, and the moral of the poem--for there is a moral--seems to be that an absorbing pa.s.sion is a very dangerous thing and blunts the human sympathies. In the course of the chase a little child is drowned, a Brahmin maiden murdered, and an aged peasant severely wounded, but the hunter cares for none of these things and will not hear of stopping to render any a.s.sistance. Some of the stanzas are very graceful, notably one beginning
Yes--like a bubble filled with smoke-- The curd-white moon upswimming broke The vacancy of s.p.a.ce;
but such lines as the following, which occur in the description of the fight with the boar--
I hung as close as keepsake locket On maiden breast--but from its socket He wrenched my bridle arm,
are dreadful, and "his brains festooned the thorn" is not a very happy way of telling the reader how the boar died. All through the volume we find the same curious mixture of good and bad. To say that the sun kisses the earth "with flame-moustachoed lip" is awkward and uncouth, and yet the poem in which the expression occurs has some pretty lines. Mr.
Ian Hamilton should prune. Pruning, whether in the garden or in the study, is a most healthy and useful employment. The volume is nicely printed, but Mr. Strang"s frontispiece is not a great success, and most of the tail-pieces seem to have been designed without any reference to the size of the page.
Mr. Catty dedicates his book to the memory of Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, Coleridge and Keats--a somewhat pompous signboard for such very ordinary wine--and an inscription in golden letters on the cover informs us that his poems are "addressed to the rising generation," whom, he tells us elsewhere, he is anxious to initiate into the great comprehensive truth that "Virtue is no other than self-interest, deeply understood." In order to further this laudable aim he has written a very tedious blank verse poem which he calls The Secret of Content, but it certainly does not convey that secret to the reader. It is heavy, abstract and prosaic, and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions and the most earnest beliefs. In the rest of the volume, where Mr. Catty does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing things. The sonnet on Sh.e.l.ley"s room at University College would be admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.
Green in the wizard arms Of the foam-bearded Atlantic, An isle of old enchantment, A melancholy isle, Enchanted and dreaming lies; And there, by Shannon"s flowing In the moonlight, spectre-thin, The spectre Erin sits.
Wail no more, lonely one, mother of exile wail no more, Banshee of the world--no more!
Thy sorrows are the world"s, thou art no more alone; Thy wrongs the world"s--
are the first and last stanzas of Mr. Todhunter"s poem The Banshee. To throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is, as Mr.
Swinburne once remarked, a wilful abdication of half the power and half the charm of verse, and we cannot say that Mr. Todhunter has given us much that consoles us for its loss. Part of his poem reads like a translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose. It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art. It is amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems, The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of Turann. Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to song, and though the lovely lute-builded walls of Thebes may have risen up to unrhymed choral metres, we have had no modern Amphion to work such wonders for us.
Such a verse as--
Five were the chiefs who challenged By their deeds the Over-kingship, Bov Derg, the Daghda"s son, Ilbrac of a.s.saroe, And Lir of the White Field in the plain of Emain Macha; And after them stood up Midhir the proud, who reigned Upon the hills of Bri, Of Bri the loved of Liath, Bri of the broken heart; And last was Angus Og; all these had many voices, But for Bov Derg were most,
has, of course, an archaeological interest, but has no artistic value at all. Indeed, from the point of view of art, the few little poems at the end of the volume are worth all the ambitious pseudo-epics that Mr.
Todhunter has tried to construct out of Celtic lore. A Bacchic Day is charming, and the sonnet on the open-air performance of The Faithfull Shepherdesse is most gracefully phrased and most happy in conception.
Mr. Peac.o.c.k is an American poet, and Professor Thomas Danleigh Supplee, A.M., Ph.D., F.R.S., who has written a preface to his Poems of the Plains and Songs of the Solitudes, tells us that he is ent.i.tled to be called the Laureate of the West. Though a staunch Republican, Mr. Peac.o.c.k, according to the enthusiastic Professor, is not ashamed of his ancestor King William of Holland, nor of his relatives Lord and Lady Peac.o.c.k who, it seems, are natives of Scotland. He was brought up at Zanesville, Muskingum Co., Ohio, where his father edited the Zanesville Aurora, and he had an uncle who was "a superior man" and edited the Wheeling Intelligencer. His poems seem to be extremely popular, and have been highly praised, the Professor informs us, by Victor Hugo, the Sat.u.r.day Review and the Commercial Advertiser. The preface is the most amusing part of the book, but the poems also are worth studying. The Maniac, The Bandit Chief, and The Outlaw can hardly be called light reading, but we strongly recommend the poem on Chicago:
Chicago! great city of the West!
All that wealth, all that power invest; Thou sprang like magic from the sand, As touched by the magician"s wand.
"Thou sprang" is slightly depressing, and the second line is rather obscure, but we should not measure by too high a standard the untutored utterances of artless nature. The opening lines of The Vendetta also deserve mention:
When stars are glowing through day"s gloaming glow, Reflecting from ocean"s deep, mighty flow, At twilight, when no grim shadows of night, Like ghouls, have stalked in wake of the light.