Certainly dialect is dramatic. It is a vivid method of re-creating a past that never existed. It is something between "A Return to Nature"
and "A Return to the Glossary." It is so artificial that it is really naive. From the point of view of mere music, much may be said for it.
Wonderful diminutives lend new notes of tenderness to the song. There are possibilities of fresh rhymes, and in search for a fresh rhyme poets may be excused if they wander from the broad highroad of cla.s.sical utterance into devious byways and less-trodden paths. Sometimes one is tempted to look on dialect as expressing simply the pathos of provincialisms, but there is more in it than mere misp.r.o.nunciations. With the revival of an antique form, often comes the revival of an antique spirit. Through limitations that are sometimes uncouth, and always narrow, comes Tragedy herself; and though she may stammer in her utterance, and deck herself in cast-off weeds and trammelling raiment, still we must hold ourselves in readiness to accept her, so rare are her visits to us now, so rare her presence in an age that demands a happy ending from every play, and that sees in the theatre merely a source of amus.e.m.e.nt. The form, too, of the ballad--how perfect it is in its dramatic unity! It is so perfect that we must forgive it its dialect, if it happens to speak in that strange tongue.
Then by cam" the bride"s company Wi" torches burning bright.
"Tak" up, tak" up your bonny bride A" in the mirk midnight!"
Oh, wan, wan was the bridegroom"s face And wan, wan was the bride, But clay-cauld was the young mess-priest That stood them twa beside!
Says, "Rax me out your hand, Sir Knight, And wed her wi" this ring"; And the deid bride"s hand it was as cauld As ony earthly thing.
The priest he touched that lady"s hand, And never a word he said; The priest he touched that lady"s hand, And his ain was wet and red.
The priest he lifted his ain right hand, And the red blood dripped and fell.
Says, "I loved ye, lady, and ye loved me; Sae I took your life mysel"."
Oh! red, red was the dawn o" day, And tall was the gallows-tree: The Southland lord to his ain has fled And the mess-priest"s hangit hie!
Of the sonnets, this To Herodotus is worth quoting:
Far-travelled coaster of the midland seas, What marvels did those curious eyes behold!
Winged snakes, and carven labyrinths of old; The emerald column raised to Heracles; King Perseus" shrine upon the Chemmian leas; Four-footed fishes, decked with gems and gold: But thou didst leave some secrets yet untold, And veiled the dread Osirian mysteries.
And now the golden asphodels among Thy footsteps fare, and to the lordly dead Thou tellest all the stories left unsaid Of secret rites and runes forgotten long, Of that dark folk who ate the Lotus-bread And sang the melancholy Linus-song.
Mrs. Tomson has certainly a very refined sense of form. Her verse, especially in the series ent.i.tled New Words to Old Tunes, has grace and distinction. Some of the shorter poems are, to use a phrase made cla.s.sical by Mr. Pater, "little carved ivories of speech." She is one of our most artistic workers in poetry, and treats language as a fine material.
(1) An Author"s Love: Being the Unpublished Letters of Prosper Merimee"s "Inconnue." (Macmillan and Co.)
(2) The Bird-Bride: A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets. By Graham R.
Tomson. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
A THOUGHT-READER"S NOVEL
(Pall Mall Gazette, June 5, 1889.)
There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards.
The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the denoument one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hairbreadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved.
One knows the jealously-guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display. In the case of Mr. Stuart c.u.mberland"s novel, The Vasty Deep, as he calls it, the last page is certainly thrilling and makes us curious to know more about "Brown, the medium."
Scene, a padded room in a mad-house in the United States.
A gibbering lunatic discovered dashing wildly about the chamber as if in the act of chasing invisible forms.
"This is our worst case," says a doctor opening the cell to one of the visitors in lunacy. "He was a spirit medium and he is hourly haunted by the creations of his fancy. We have to carefully watch him, for he has developed suicidal tendencies."
The lunatic makes a dash at the retreating form of his visitors, and, as the door closes upon him, sinks with a yell upon the floor.
A week later the lifeless body of Brown, the medium, is found suspended from the gas bracket in his cell.
How clearly one sees it all! How forcible and direct the style is! And what a thrilling touch of actuality the simple mention of the "gas bracket" gives us! Certainly The Vasty Deep is a book to be read.
And we have read it; read it with great care. Though it is largely autobiographical, it is none the less a work of fiction and, though some of us may think that there is very little use in exposing what is already exposed and revealing the secrets of Polichinelle, no doubt there are many who will be interested to hear of the tricks and deceptions of crafty mediums, of their gauze masks, telescopic rods and invisible silk threads, and of the marvellous raps they can produce simply by displacing the peroneus longus muscle! The book opens with a description of the scene by the death-bed of Alderman Parkinson. Dr. Josiah Brown, the eminent medium, is in attendance and tries to comfort the honest merchant by producing noises on the bedpost. Mr. Parkinson, however, being extremely anxious to revisit Mrs. Parkinson, in a materialised form after death, will not be satisfied till he has received from his wife a solemn promise that she will not marry again, such a marriage being, in his eyes, nothing more nor less than bigamy. Having received an a.s.surance to this effect from her, Mr. Parkinson dies, his soul, according to the medium, being escorted to the spheres by "a band of white-robed spirits."
This is the prologue. The next chapter is ent.i.tled "Five Years After."
Violet Parkinson, the Alderman"s only child, is in love with Jack Alston, who is "poor, but clever." Mrs. Parkinson, however, will not hear of any marriage till the deceased Alderman has materialised himself and given his formal consent. A seance is held at which Jack Alston unmasks the medium and shows Dr. Josiah Brown to be an impostor--a foolish act, on his part, as he is at once ordered to leave the house by the infuriated Mrs. Parkinson, whose faith in the Doctor is not in the least shaken by the unfortunate exposure.
The lovers are consequently parted. Jack sails for Newfoundland, is shipwrecked and carefully, somewhat too carefully, tended by "La-ki-wa, or the Star that shines," a lovely Indian maiden who belongs to the tribe of the Micmacs. She is a fascinating creature who wears "a necklace composed of thirteen nuggets of pure gold," a blanket of English manufacture and trousers of tanned leather. In fact, as Mr. Stuart c.u.mberland observes, she looks "the embodiment of fresh dewy morn." When Jack, on recovering his senses, sees her, he naturally inquires who she is. She answers, in the simple utterance endeared to us by Fenimore Cooper, "I am La-ki-wa. I am the only child of my father, Tall Pine, chief of the d.i.l.d.oos." She talks, Mr. c.u.mberland informs us, very good English. Jack at once entrusts her with the following telegram which he writes on the back of a five-pound note:--
Miss Violet Parkinson, Hotel Kronprinz, Franzensbad, Austria.--Safe.
JACK.
But La-ki-wa, we regret to say, says to herself, "He belongs to Tall Pine, to the d.i.l.d.oos, and to me," and never sends the telegram.
Subsequently, La-ki-wa proposes to Jack who promptly rejects her and, with the usual callousness of men, offers her a brother"s love. La-ki-wa, naturally, regrets the premature disclosure of her pa.s.sion and weeps. "My brother," she remarks, "will think that I have the timid heart of a deer with the crying voice of a papoose. I, the daughter of Tall Pine--I a Micmac, to show the grief that is in my heart. O, my brother, I am ashamed." Jack comforts her with the hollow sophistries of a civilised being and gives her his photograph. As he is on his way to the steamer he receives from Big Deer a soiled piece of a biscuit bag. On it is written La-ki-wa"s confession of her disgraceful behaviour about the telegram. "His thoughts," Mr. c.u.mberland tells us, "were bitter towards La-ki-wa, but they gradually softened when he remembered what he owed her."
Everything ends happily. Jack arrives in England just in time to prevent Dr. Josiah Brown from mesmerising Violet whom the cunning doctor is anxious to marry, and he hurls his rival out of the window. The victim is discovered "bruised and bleeding among the broken flower-pots" by a comic policeman. Mrs. Parkinson still believes in spiritualism, but refuses to have anything to do with Brown as she discovers that the deceased Alderman"s "materialised beard" was made only of "horrid, coa.r.s.e horsehair." Jack and Violet are married at last and Jack is horrid enough to send to "La-ki-wa" another photograph. The end of Dr. Brown is chronicled above. Had we not known what was in store for him we should hardly have got through the book. There is a great deal too much padding in it about Dr. Slade and Dr. Bartram and other mediums, and the disquisitions on the commercial future of Newfoundland seem endless and are intolerable. However, there are many publics, and Mr. Stuart c.u.mberland is always sure of an audience. His chief fault is a tendency to low comedy; but some people like low comedy in fiction.
The Vasty Deep: A Strange Story of To-day. By Stuart c.u.mberland.
(Sampson Low and Co.)
THE POETS" CORNER--X
(Pall Mall Gazette, June 24, 1889.)
Is Mr. Alfred Austin among the Socialists? Has somebody converted the respectable editor of the respectable National Review? Has even dulness become revolutionary? From a poem in Mr. Austin"s last volume this would seem to be the case. It is perhaps unfair to take our rhymers too seriously. Between the casual fancies of a poet and the callous facts of prose there is, or at least there should be, a wide difference. But since the poem in question, Two Visions, as Mr. Austin calls it, was begun in 1863 and revised in 1889 we may regard it as fully representative of Mr. Austin"s mature views. He gives us, at any rate, in its somewhat lumbering and pedestrian verses, his conception of the perfect state:
Fearless, unveiled, and unattended Strolled maidens to and fro: Youths looked respect, but never bended Obsequiously low.
And each with other, sans condition, Held parley brief or long, Without provoking _coa.r.s.e suspicion Of marriage_, or of wrong.
All were well clad, and none were better, And gems beheld I none, Save where there hung a jewelled fetter, Symbolic, in the sun.
I saw a n.o.ble-looking maiden Close Dante"s solemn book, And go, with crate of linen laden And wash it in the brook.
Anon, a broad-browed _poet, dragging A load of logs along_, To warm his hearth, withal not flagging In current of his song.
Each one some handicraft attempted Or helped to till the soil: None but the aged were exempted From communistic toil.
Such an expression as "coa.r.s.e suspicion of marriage" is not very fortunate; the log-rolling poet of the fifth stanza is an ideal that we have already realised and one in which we had but little comfort, and the fourth stanza leaves us in doubt whether Mr. Austin means that washerwomen are to take to reading Dante, or that students of Italian literature are to wash their own clothes. But, on the whole, though Mr.
Austin"s vision of the citta divina of the future is not very inspiriting, it is certainly extremely interesting as a sign of the times, and it is evident from the two concluding lines of the following stanzas that there will be no danger of the intellect being overworked: