And then (the hideous laugh Of fiends in full possession, keen to quaff The wine of one new soul not weak with tears, Pealing like ruinous thunder in mine ears) I fell, and heard no more. The pale day broke Through lazar-windows, when once more I woke, Remembering I might no more dare to pray.
The idea of the story is extremely powerful, and Venetia Victrix is certainly the best poem in the volume--better than Ophelion, which is vague, and than A Friar"s Story, which is pretty but ordinary. It shows that we have in Miss Fitz Gerald a new singer of considerable ability and vigour of mind, and it serves to remind us of the splendid dramatic possibilities extant in life, which are ready for poetry, and unsuitable for the stage. What is really dramatic is not necessarily that which is fitting for presentation in a theatre. The theatre is an accident of the dramatic form. It is not essential to it. We have been deluded by the name of action. To think is to act.
Of the shorter poems collected here, this Hymn to Persephone is, perhaps, the best:
Oh, fill my cup, Persephone, With dim red wine of Spring, And drop therein a faded leaf Plucked from the Autumn"s bearded sheaf, Whence, dread one, I may quaff to thee, While all the woodlands ring.
Oh, fill my heart, Persephone, With thine immortal pain, That lingers round the willow bowers In memories of old happy hours, When thou didst wander fair and free O"er Enna"s blooming plain.
Oh, fill my soul, Persephone, With music all thine own!
Teach me some song thy childhood knew, Lisped in the meadow"s morning dew, Or chant on this high windy lea, Thy G.o.dhead"s ceaseless moan.
But this Venetian Song also has a good deal of charm:
Leaning between carved stone and stone, As glossy birds peer from a nest Scooped in the crumbling trunk where rest Their freckled eggs, I pause alone And linger in the light awhile, Waiting for joy to come to me-- Only the dawn beyond yon isle, Only the sunlight on the sea.
I gaze--then turn and ply my loom, Or broider blossoms close beside; The morning world lies warm and wide, But here is dim, cool silent gloom, Gold crust and crimson velvet pile, And not one face to smile on me-- Only the dawn beyond yon isle, Only the sunlight on the sea.
Over the world the splendours break Of morning light and noontide glow, And when the broad red sun sinks low, And in the wave long shadows shake, Youths, maidens, glad with song and wile, Glide and are gone, and leave with me Only the dawn beyond yon isle, Only the sunlight on the sea.
Darwinism and Politics, by Mr. David Ritchie, of Jesus College, Oxford, contains some very interesting speculations on the position and the future of women in the modern State. The one objection to the equality of the s.e.xes that he considers deserves serious attention is that made by Sir James Stephen in his clever attack on John Stuart Mill. Sir James Stephen points out in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, that women may suffer more than they have done, if plunged into a nominally equal but really unequal contest in the already overcrowded labour market. Mr.
Ritchie answers that, while the conclusion usually drawn from this argument is a sentimental reaction in favour of the old family ideal, as, for instance, in Mr. Besant"s books, there is another alternative, and that is the resettling of the labour question. "The elevation of the status of women and the regulation of the conditions of labour are ultimately," he says, "inseparable questions. On the basis of individualism, I cannot see how it is possible to answer the objections of Sir James Stephen." Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his Sociology, expresses his fear that women, if admitted now to political life, might do mischief by introducing the ethics of the family into the State. "Under the ethics of the family the greatest benefits must be given where the merits are smallest; under the ethics of the State the benefits must be proportioned to the merits." In answer to this, Mr. Ritchie asks whether in any society we have ever seen people so get benefits in proportion to their merits, and protests against Mr. Spencer"s separation of the ethics of the family from those of the State. If something is right in a family, it is difficult to see why it is therefore, without any further reason, wrong in the State. If the partic.i.p.ation of women in politics means that as a good family educates all its members, so must a good State, what better issue could there be? The family ideal of the State may be difficult of attainment, but as an ideal it is better than the policeman theory. It would mean the moralisation of politics. The cultivation of separate sorts of virtues and separate ideals of duty in men and women has led to the whole social fabric being weaker and unhealthier than it need be. As for the objection that in countries where it is considered necessary to have compulsory military service for all men, it would be unjust and inexpedient that women should have a voice in political matters, Mr. Ritchie meets it, or tries to meet it, by proposing that all women physically fitted for such purpose should be compelled to undergo training as nurses, and should be liable to be called upon to serve as nurses in time of war. This training, he remarks, "would be more useful to them and to the community in time of peace than his military training is to the peasant or artisan." Mr.
Ritchie"s little book is extremely suggestive, and full of valuable ideas for the philosophic student of sociology.
Mr. Alan Cole"s lecture on Irish lace, delivered recently before the Society of Arts, contains some extremely useful suggestions as to the best method of securing an immediate connection between the art schools of a country and the country"s ordinary manufactures. In 1883, Mr. Cole was deputed by the Department of Science and Art to lecture at Cork and at Limerick on the subject of lace-making, and to give a history of its rise and development in other countries, as well as a review of the many kinds of ornamental patterns used from the sixteenth century to modern times. In order to make these lectures of practical value, Mr. Cole placed typical specimens of Irish laces beside Italian, Flemish, and French laces, which seem to be the prototypes of the lace of Ireland. The public interest was immediately aroused. Some of the newspapers stoutly maintained that the ornament and patterns of Irish lace were of such a national character that it was wrong to asperse them on that score.
Others took a different view, and came to the conclusion that Irish lace could be vastly improved in all respects, if some systematic action could be taken to induce the lace-makers to work from more intelligently composed patterns than those in general use. There was a consensus of opinion that the workmanship of Irish laces was good, and that it could be applied to better materials than those ordinarily used, and that its methods were suited to render a greater variety of patterns than those usually attempted.
These and other circ.u.mstances seem to have prompted the promoters of the Cork Exhibition to further efforts in the cause of lace-making. Towards the close of the year 1883 they made fresh representations to Government, and inquired what forms of State a.s.sistance could be given. A number of convents in the neighbourhood of Cork was engaged in giving instruction to children under their care in lace and crochet making. At some, rooms were allotted for the use of grown-up workers who made laces under the supervision of the nuns. These convents obviously were centres where experiments in reform could be tried. The convents, however, lacked instruction in the designing of patterns for laces. An excellent School of Art was at work at Cork, but the students there had not been instructed in specially designing for lace. If the convents with their workrooms could be brought into relation with this School of Art, it seemed possible that something of a serious character might be done to benefit lace-makers, and also to open up a new field in ornamental design for the students at the School of Art. The rules of the Department of Science and Art were found to be adapted to aid in meeting such wants as those sketched out by the promoters at Cork. As the nuns in the different lace-making convents had not been able to attend in Cork to hear Mr. Cole"s lectures, they asked that he should visit them and repeat them at the convents. This Mr. Cole did early in 1884, the masters of the local Schools of Art accompanying him on his visits. Negotiations were forthwith opened for connecting the convents with the art schools.
By the end of 1885 some six or seven different lace-making convents had placed themselves in connection with Schools of Art at Cork and Waterford. These convents were attended not only by the nuns but by outside pupils also; and, at the request of the convents, Mr. Cole has visited them twice a year, lecturing and giving advice upon designs for lace. The composition of new patterns for lace was attempted, and old patterns which had degenerated were revised and redrawn for the use of the workers connected with the convents. There are now twelve convents, Mr. Cole tells us, where instruction in drawing and in the composition of patterns is given, and some of the students have won some of the higher prizes offered by the Department of Science and Art for designing lace- patterns.
The Cork School of Art then acquired a collection of finely-patterned old laces, selections from which are freely circulated through the different convents connected with that school. They have also the privilege of borrowing similar specimens of old lace from the South Kensington Museum.
So successful has been the system of education pursued by Mr. Brennan, the head-master of the Cork School of Art, that two female students of his school last year gained the gold and silver medals for their designs for laces and crochets at the national compet.i.tion which annually takes place in London between all the Schools of Art in the United Kingdom. As for the many lace-makers who were not connected either with the convents or with the art schools, in order to a.s.sist them, a committee of ladies and gentlemen interested in Irish lace-making raised subscriptions, and offered prizes to be competed for by designers generally. The best designs were then placed out with lace-makers, and carried into execution. It is, of course, often said that the proper person to make the design is the lace-maker. Mr. Cole, however, points out that from the sixteenth century forward the patterns for ornamental laces have always been designed by decorative artists having knowledge of the composition of ornament, and of the materials for which they were called upon to design. Lace pattern books were published in considerable quant.i.ty in Italy, France and Germany during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and from these the lace-makers worked. Many lace- makers would, no doubt, derive benefit from practice in drawing, in discriminating between well and badly shaped forms. But the skill they are primarily required to show and to develop is one of fine fingers in reproducing beautiful forms in threads. The conception, arrangement, and drawing of beautiful forms for a design, have to be undertaken by decorative artists acquainted with the limitations of those materials and methods which the ultimate expression of the design involves.
This lovely Irish art of lace-making is very much indebted to Mr. Cole, who has really re-created it, given it new life, and shown it the true artistic lines on which to progress. Hardly 20,000 pounds a year is spent by England upon Irish laces, and almost all of this goes upon the cheaper and commoner kinds. And yet, as Mr. Cole points out, it is possible to produce Irish laces of as high artistic quality as almost any foreign laces. The Queen, Lady Londonderry, Lady Dorothy Nevill, Mrs.
Alfred Morrison, and others, have done much to encourage the Irish workers, and it rests largely with the ladies of England whether this beautiful art lives or dies. The real good of a piece of lace, says Mr.
Ruskin, is "that it should show, first, that the designer of it had a pretty fancy; next, that the maker of it had fine fingers; lastly, that the wearer of it has worthiness or dignity enough to obtain what is difficult to obtain, and common-sense enough not to wear it on all occasions."
The High-Caste Hindu Woman is an interesting book. It is from the pen of the Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati, and the introduction is written by Miss Rachel Bodley, M.D., the Dean of the Woman"s Medical College of Pennsylvania. The story of the parentage of this learned lady is very curious. A certain Hindu, being on a religious pilgrimage with his family, which consisted of his wife and two daughters, one nine and the other seven years of age, stopped in a town to rest for a day or two. One morning the Hindu was bathing in the sacred river G.o.davari, near the town, when he saw a fine-looking man coming there to bathe also. After the ablution and the morning prayers were over, the father inquired of the stranger who he was and whence he came. On learning his caste, and clan, and dwelling-place, and also that he was a widower, he offered him his little daughter of nine in marriage. All things were settled in an hour or so; next day the marriage was concluded, and the little girl placed in the possession of the stranger, who took her nearly nine hundred miles away from her home, and gave her into the charge of his mother. The stranger was the learned Ananta Shastri, a Brahman pundit, who had very advanced views on the subject of woman"s education, and he determined that he would teach his girl-wife Sanskrit, and give her the intellectual culture that had been always denied to women in India. Their daughter was the Pundita Ramabai, who, after the death of her parents, travelled all over India advocating the cause of female education, and to whom seems to be due the first suggestion for the establishment of the profession of women doctors. In 1866, Miss Mary Carpenter made a short tour in India for the purpose of finding out some way by which women"s condition in that country might be improved. She at once discovered that the chief means by which the desired end could be accomplished was by furnishing women teachers for the Hindu Zenanas. She suggested that the British Government should establish normal schools for training women teachers, and that scholarships should be awarded to girls in order to prolong their school-going period, and to a.s.sist indigent women who would otherwise be unable to pursue their studies.
In response to Miss Carpenter"s appeal, upon her return to England, the English Government founded several schools for women in India, and a few "Mary Carpenter Scholarships" were endowed by benevolent persons. These schools were open to women of every caste; but while they have undoubtedly been of use, they have not realised the hopes of their founders, chiefly through the impossibility of keeping caste rules in them. Ramabai, in a very eloquent chapter, proposes to solve the problem in a different way. Her suggestion is that houses should be opened for the young and high-caste child-widows, where they can take shelter without the fear of losing their caste, or of being disturbed in their religious belief, and where they may have entire freedom of action as regards caste rules. The whole account given by the Pundita of the life of the high-caste Hindu lady is full of suggestion for the social reformer and the student of progress, and her book, which is wonderfully well written, is likely to produce a radical change in the educational schemes that at present prevail in India.
(1) Venetia Victrix. By Caroline Fitz Gerald. (Macmillan and Co.)
(2) Darwinism and Politics. By David Ritchie, Jesus College, Oxford.
(Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)
(3) The High-Caste Hindu Woman. By the Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati. (Bell and Sons.)
OUIDA"S NEW NOVEL
(Pall Mall Gazette, May 17, 1889.)
Ouida is the last of the romantics. She belongs to the school of Bulwer Lytton and George Sand, though she may lack the learning of the one and the sincerity of the other. She tries to make pa.s.sion, imagination, and poetry part of fiction. She still believes in heroes and in heroines.
She is florid and fervent and fanciful. Yet even she, the high priestess of the impossible, is affected by her age. Her last book, Guilderoy as she calls it, is an elaborate psychological study of modern temperaments.
For her, it is realistic, and she has certainly caught much of the tone and temper of the society of our day. Her people move with ease and grace and indolence. The book may be described as a study of the peerage from a poetical point of view. Those who are tired of mediocre young curates who have doubts, of serious young ladies who have missions, and of the ordinary figureheads of most of the English fiction of our time, might turn with pleasure, if not with profit, to this amazing romance. It is a resplendent picture of our aristocracy. No expense has been spared in gilding. For the comparatively small sum of 1 pound, 11s. 6d. one is introduced to the best society. The central figures are exaggerated, but the background is admirable. In spite of everything, it gives one a sense of something like life.
What is the story? Well, we must admit that we have a faint suspicion that Ouida has told it to us before. Lord Guilderoy, "whose name was as old as the days of Knut," falls madly in love, or fancies that he falls madly in love, with a rustic Perdita, a provincial Artemis who has "a Gainsborough face, with wide-opened questioning eyes and tumbled auburn hair." She is poor but well-born, being the only child of Mr. Vernon of Llanarth, a curious recluse, who is half a pedant and half Don Quixote.
Guilderoy marries her and, tiring of her shyness, her lack of power to express herself, her want of knowledge of fashionable life, returns to an old pa.s.sion for a wonderful creature called the d.u.c.h.ess of Soria. Lady Guilderoy becomes ice; the d.u.c.h.ess becomes fire; at the end of the book Guilderoy is a pitiable object. He has to submit to be forgiven by one woman, and to endure to be forgotten by the other. He is thoroughly weak, thoroughly worthless, and the most fascinating person in the whole story. Then there is his sister Lady Sunbury, who is very anxious for Guilderoy to marry, and is quite determined to hate his wife. She is really a capital sketch. Ouida describes her as "one of those admirably virtuous women who are more likely to turn men away from the paths of virtue than the wickedest of sirens." She irritates herself, alienates her children, and infuriates her husband:
"You are perfectly right; I know you are always right; I admit you are; but it is just that which makes you so d.a.m.nably odious!" said Lord Sunbury once, in a burst of rage, in his town house, speaking in such stentorian tones that the people pa.s.sing up Grosvenor Street looked up at his open windows, and a crossing-sweeper said to a match- seller, "My eye! ain"t he giving it to the old gal like blazes."
The n.o.blest character in the book is Lord Aubrey. As he is not a genius he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion. He begins by pitying the neglected Lady Guilderoy, and ends by loving her, but he makes the great renunciation with considerable effect, and, having induced Lady Guilderoy to receive back her husband, he accepts "a distant and arduous Viceroyalty." He is Ouida"s ideal of the true politician, for Ouida has apparently taken to the study of English politics. A great deal of her book is devoted to political disquisitions. She believes that the proper rulers of a country like ours are the aristocrats. Oligarchy has great fascinations for her. She thinks meanly of the people and adores the House of Lords and Lord Salisbury. Here are some of her views. We will not call them ideas:
The House of Lords wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people"s needs and resources. It has never withstood the real desire of the country: it has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent follies.
A democracy cannot understand honour; how should it? The Caucus is chiefly made up of men who sand their sugar, put alum in their bread, forge bayonets and girders which bend like willow-wands, send bad calico to India, and insure vessels at Lloyd"s which they know will go to the bottom before they have been ten days at sea.
Lord Salisbury has often been accused of arrogance; people have never seen that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, candid consciousness of a great n.o.ble that he is more capable of leading the country than most men composing it would be.
Democracy, after having made everything supremely hideous and uncomfortable for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat tails of some successful general.
The prosperous politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a questionable quality. The moment that a thing is a metier, it is wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the pursuit of it. To the professional politician national affairs are a manufacture into which he puts his audacity and his time, and out of which he expects to make so much percentage for his lifetime.
There is too great a tendency to govern the world by noise.
Ouida"s aphorisms on women, love, and modern society are somewhat more characteristic:
Women speak as though the heart were to be treated at will like a stone, or a bath.
Half the pa.s.sions of men die early, because they are expected to be eternal.
It is the folly of life that lends charm to it.
What is the cause of half the misery of women? That their love is so much more tenacious than the man"s: it grows stronger as his grows weaker.
To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity of Wordsworth"s mind, and boots and stockings as homely.
It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into the habit of saying what is not true. Wise is the woman who never insists on an explanation.
Love can make its own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot.
Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous; often even polyandrous.
Moralists say that a soul should resist pa.s.sion. They might as well say that a house should resist an earthquake.
The whole world is just now on its knees before the poorer cla.s.ses: all the cardinal virtues are taken for granted in them, and it is only property of any kind which is the sinner.
Men are not merciful to women"s tears as a rule; and when it is a woman belonging to them who weeps, they only go out, and slam the door behind them.
Men always consider women unjust to them, when they fail to deify their weaknesses.
No pa.s.sion, once broken, will ever bear renewal.
Feeling loses its force and its delicacy if we put it under the microscope too often.