A's black; E, white; I, blue; O, red; V, yellow;But purple seeks in vain a vowel-fellow.
A's black; E, white; I, blue; O, red; V, yellow;But purple seeks in vain a vowel-fellow.
A's black; E, white; I, blue; O, red; V, yellow;But purple seeks in vain a vowel-fellow.
A's black; E, white; I, blue; O, red; V, yellow;
But purple seeks in vain a vowel-fellow.
Those were the days, already ancient now! of Noël Loumo and Marius Tapera, when the inexpressible Adoré Floupette publishedLes Déliquescences. Where are the deliquescents of yesteryear? Where is the once celebrated scene in the "boudoir oblong aux cycloïdes bigarrures" which enlivenedLe Thé chez Mirandaof M. Jean Moréas? These added to the gaiety of nations, and have been forgotten;brief life was here their portion. Fresh oddities come forward, poets in shoals and schools, Evolutivo-instrumentists, Cataclysmists, Trombonists—even while we speak, have they not faded away? But amidst all this world of phantasmagoria, among these fugitive apparitions and futile individualities, dancing once across the stereopticon and seen no more—one figure of a genuine man of letters remains, that of M. Stéphane Mallarmé, the solitary name among those of the so-called Décadents which has hitherto proved its right to serious consideration.
If the dictionaries are to be trusted, M. Mallarmé was born in 1842. His career seems to have been the most uneventful on record. He has always been, and I think still is, professor of English at the Lycée Fontanes in Paris. About twenty years ago he paid a short visit to London, carrying with him, as I well remember, the vast portfolio of his translation of Poe'sRaven, with Manet's singular illustrations. His life has been spent in a Buddhistic calm, in meditation. He has scarcely published anything, disliking, so it is said, the "exhibitionnisme" involved in bringing out a book, the banality of types and proofs and revises.
His revolutionary ideas with regard to stylewere formulated about 1875, when theParnasse Contemporain, edited by the friends and co-evals of M. Mallarmé, rejected his first important poem,L'Après-Midi d'un Faune, which appeared at length in 1876, as a quarto pamphlet, illustrated by Manet. In the same year he gave his earliest example of the new prose in the shape of an essay prefixed to a beautiful reprint of Beckford'sVathek, a volume bound in vellum, tied with black and crimson silk, and produced in a very small edition. Ridicule was the only welcome vouchsafed to these two couriers of the Décadance. Perhaps M. Mallarmé was somewhat discouraged, although absolutely unsubdued.
He remained long submerged, but with the growth of his school he was persuaded to reappear. In 1887 one fascicule only of his complete poems was brought out in an extraordinary form, photolithographed from the original manuscript. In 1888 followed a translation of the poems of Edgar Poe. But until 1893 the general reader has had no opportunity, even in France, of forming an opinion on the prose or verse of M. Mallarmé. Meanwhile, his name has become one of the most notorious in contemporary literature. A thousand eccentricities, a thousand acts of revolt againsttradition, have been perpetrated under the banner of his tacit encouragement. It is high time to try and understand what M. Mallarmé's teaching really is, and what his practice.
To ridicule the Décadents, or to insist upon their extravagance, is so easy as to be unworthy of a serious critic. It would be quite simple for some crusty Christopher to show that the poems of master and scholars alike are monstrous, unintelligible, ludicrously inept, and preposterous. M. Mallarmé has had hard words, not merely from the old classical critics such as M. Brunetière, but from men from whom the extremity of sympathy might have been looked. Life-long friends like M. Leconte de Lisle confess that they understood him once, but, alas! understand him no longer; or, like M. François Coppée, avoid all discussion of his verses, and obstinately confine themselves to "son esprit élevé, sa vie si pure, si belle." When such men as these profess themselves unable to comprehend a writer of their own age and language, it seems presumptuous for a foreigner to attempt to do so, nor do I pretend that in the formal and minute sense I am able to comprehend the poems of M. Mallarmé. He remains, under the most loving scrutiny, a most difficult writer. But, at allevents, I think that sympathy and study may avail to enable the critic to detect the spirit which inspires this strange and cryptic figure. Study and sympathy I have given, and I offer some results of them, not without diffidence.
Translated into common language, then, the main design of M. Mallarmé and his friends seems to be to refresh the languid current of French style. They hold—and in this view no English critic can dare to join issue with them—that art is not a stable nor a definite thing, and that success for the future must lie along paths not exactly traversed in the immediate past. They are tired of the official versification of France, and they dream of new effects which all the handbooks tell them are impossible to French prosody. They make infinite experiments, they feel their way; and I have nothing to reproach them with except their undue haste (but M. Mallarmé has not been hasty) in publishing their "tentatives." Their aims are those of our own Areopagites of 1580, met "for the general surceasing and silence of bold Rymers, and also of the very best of them too"—"our new famous enterprise for the exchange of barbarous rymes for artificial verses." We must wish for the odd productions of these modern Parisianeuphuists a better fate than befell the trimeter iambics of Master Drant and Master Preston. But the cause of their existence is plain enough. It is the exhaustion, the enervation of the language, following upon the activities of Victor Hugo and his contemporaries. It is, morever, a reaction towards freedom, directly consequent upon the strict and impersonal versification of the Parnassians. When the official verse has been burnished and chased to the metallic perfection of M. de Hérédia's sonnets, nothing but to withdraw to the wilderness in sheepskins is left to would-be poets of the next generation.
To pass from Symbolism generally to M. Mallarmé and his particular series of theories, he presents himself to us above all as an individualist. The poets of the last generation were a flock of singing-birds, trained in a general aviary. They met, as on the marble pavement of some new Serapeum, to contend in public for the rewards of polished verse. In contrast with these rivalries and congregations M. Mallarmé has always shown himself solitary and disengaged. As he has said: "The poet is a man who isolates himself that he may carve the sculptures of his own tomb." He refuses to obey that hierarchical tradition of whichVictor Hugo was the most formidable pontiff. He finds the alexandrine, as employed in the intractable prosody of modern France, a rigid and puerile instrument, from which melodies can nowadays no more be extracted. So far as I comprehend the position, M. Mallarmé does not propose, as do some of his disciples, to reject this noble verse-form altogether, and to slide into a sort of rhymed Walt Whitmanism. I cannot trace in his published poems a single instance of such a determination. But it is plain that he takes the twelve syllables of the line as forming, not six notes, but twelve, and he demands permission to form with these twelve as many combinations as he pleases. Melody, to be gained at any sacrifice of the old Jesuit laws, is what he desiderates: harmony of versification, obtained in new ways, by extracting the latent capabilities of the organ until now too conventionally employed.
So much, very briefly, for the prosodical innovation. For the language he demands an equal refreshment, by the rejection of the old worn phrases in favour of odd, exotic, and archaic terms. He takes up and adopts literally the idea of Théophile Gautier that words are precious stones, and should be so set as to flash and radiate fromthe page. More individually characteristic of M. Mallarmé I find a certain preference for enigma. Language, to him, is given to conceal definite thought, to draw the eye away from the object. The Parnassians defined, described, analysed the object until it stood before us as in a coloured photograph. M. Mallarmé avoids this as much as possible. He aims at allusion only; he wraps a mystery around his simplest utterance; the abstruse and the symbolic are his peculiar territory. His aim, or I greatly misunderstand him, is to use words in such harmonious combinations as will suggest to the reader a mood or a condition which is not mentioned in the text, but is nevertheless paramount in the poet's mind at the moment of composition. To the conscious aiming at this particular effect are, it appears to me, due the more curious characteristics of his style, and much of the utter bewilderment which it produces on the brain of an indolent reader debauched by the facilities of realism.
The longest and the most celebrated of the poems of M. Mallarmé isL'Après-Midi d'un Faune. It appears in the "florilège" which he has just published, and I have now read it again, as I have often read it before. To say that I understand it bit bybit, phrase by phrase, would be excessive. But if I am asked whether this famous miracle of unintelligibility gives me pleasure, I answer, cordially, Yes. I even fancy that I obtain from it as definite and as solid an impression as M. Mallarmé desires to produce. This is what I read in it: A faun—a simple, sensuous, passionate being—wakens in the forest at daybreak and tries to recall his experience of the previous afternoon. Was he the fortunate recipient of an actual visit from nymphs, white and golden goddesses, divinely tender and indulgent? Or is the memory he seems to retain nothing but the shadow of a vision, no more substantial than the "arid rain" of notes from his own flute? He cannot tell. Yet surely there was, surely there is, an animal whiteness among the brown reeds of the lake that shines out yonder? Were they, are they, swans? No! But Naiads plunging? Perhaps!
Vaguer and vaguer grows the impression of this delicious experience. He would resign his woodland godship to retain it. A garden of lilies, golden-headed, white-stalked, behind the trellis of red roses? Ah! the effort is too great for his poor brain. Perhaps if he selects one lily from the garth of lilies, one benign and beneficent yielder of her cup to thirsty lips, the memory,the ever-receding memory, may be forced back. So, when he has glutted upon a bunch of grapes, he is wont to toss the empty skins into the air and blow them out in a visionary greediness. But no, the delicious hour grows vaguer; experience or dream, he will now never know which it was. The sun is warm, the grasses yielding; and he curls himself up again, after worshipping the efficacious star of wine, that he may pursue the dubious ecstasy into the more hopeful boskages of sleep.
This, then, is what I read in the so excessively obscure and unintelligibleL'Après-Midi d'un Faune; and, accompanied as it is with a perfect suavity of language and melody of rhythm, I know not what more a poem of eight pages could be expected to give. It supplies a simple and direct impression of physical beauty, of harmony, of colour; it is exceedingly mellifluous, when once the ear understands that the poet, instead of being the slave of the alexandrine, weaves his variations round it like a musical composer. Unfortunately,L'Après-Midiwas written fifteen years ago, and his theories have grown upon M. Mallarmé as his have on Mr. George Meredith. In the new collection ofVers et ProseI miss some pieces which I used to admire—in particular, surely,Placet, and the delightful poem calledLe Guignon. Perhaps these were too lucid for the worshippers. In return, we have certain allegories which are terribly abstruse, and some subfusc sonnets. I have read the following, calledLe Tombeau d'Edgard Poe, over and over and over. I am very stupid, but I cannot tell what itsays. In a certain vague and vitreous way I think I perceive what itmeans; and we are aided now by its being punctuated, which was not the case in the original form in which I met with it. But, "O my Brothers, ye the Workers," is it not still a little difficult?
Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nuSon siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connuQue la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'angeDonner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribuProclamèrent très haut le sortilège buDans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-reliefDont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orneCalme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscurQue ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borneAux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.
Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nuSon siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connuQue la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'angeDonner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribuProclamèrent très haut le sortilège buDans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-reliefDont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orneCalme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscurQue ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borneAux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.
Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nuSon siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connuQue la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'angeDonner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribuProclamèrent très haut le sortilège buDans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-reliefDont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orneCalme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscurQue ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borneAux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.
Tel qu'en Lui-même enfin l'éternité le change,
Le Poëte suscite avec un glaive nu
Son siècle épouvanté de n'avoir pas connu
Que la mort triomphait dans cette voix étrange!
Eux, comme un vil sursaut d'hydre oyant jadis l'ange
Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu
Proclamèrent très haut le sortilège bu
Dans le flot sans honneur de quelque noir mélange.
Du sol et de la nue hostiles, ô grief!
Si notre idée avec ne sculpte un bas-relief
Dont la tombe de Poe éblouissante s'orne
Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un désastre obscur
Que ce granit du moins montre à jamais sa borne
Aux noirs vols du Blasphème épars dans le futur.
Of the prose of M. Mallarmé, I can here speak but briefly. He has not published very much of it;and it is all polished and cadenced like his verse, with strange transposed adjectives and exotic nouns fantastically employed. It is even more distinctly to be seen in his prose than in his verse that he descends directly from Baudelaire, and in the former that streak of Lamartine that marks his poems is lacking.
The book calledPagescan naturally be compared with thePoèmes en Proseof Baudelaire. Several of the sketches so named are now reprinted inVers et Prose, and they strike me as the most distinguished and satisfactory of the published writings of M. Mallarmé. They are difficult, but far more intelligible than the enigmas which he calls his sonnets.La Pipe, in which the sight of an old meerschaum brings up dreams of London and the solitary lodgings there;Le Nénuphar Blanc, recording the vision of a lovely lady, visible for one tantalising moment to a rower in his boat;Frisson d'Hiver, the wholly fantastic and nebulous reverie of archaic elegances evoked by the ticking of a clock of Dresden china; each of these, and several more of these exquisitePages, give just that impression of mystery and allusion which the author deems that style should give. They are exquisite—so far as they go—pure, distinguished, ingenious; and thefantastic oddity of their vocabulary seems in perfect accord with their general character.
Here is a fragment ofLa Pénultième, on which the reader may try his skill in comprehending the New French:
"Mais où s'installe l'irrécusable intervention du surnaturel, et le commencement de l'angoisse sous laquelle agonise mon esprit naguère seigneur, c'est quand je vis, levant les yeux, dans la rue des antiquaires instinctivement suivie, que j'étais devant la boutique d'un luthier vendeur de vieux instruments pendus au mur, et, à terre, des palmes jaunes et les ailes enfouies en l'ombre, d'oiseaux anciens. Je m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnée à porter probablement le deuil de l'inexplicable Pénultième."
As a translator, all the world must commend M. Mallarmé. He has put the poems of Poe into French in a way which is subtle almost without parallel. Each version is in simple prose, but so full, so reserved, so suavely mellifluous, that the metre and the rhymes continue to sing in an English ear. None could enter more tenderly than he into the strange charm ofUlalume, ofThe Sleeper, or ofThe Raven. It is rarely indeed that a word suggests that the melody of one, who was a symbolistand a weaver of enigmas like himself, has momentarily evaded the translator.
M. Mallarmé, who understands English so perfectly, has perhaps seen the poems of Sydney Dobell. He knows, it is possible, that thirty or forty years ago there was an English poet who cultivated the symbol, who deliquesced the language, as he himself does in French. Sydney Dobell wrote lovely, unintelligible things, that broke, every now and then, into rhapsodies of veritable beauty. But his whole system was violent. He became an eccentric cometary nebula, whirling away from our poetic system at a tangent. He whirled away, for all his sincere passion, into oblivion. This is what one fears for the Symbolists: that being read with so great an effort by their own generation, they may, by the next, not be read at all, and what is pure and genuine in their artistic impulses be lost. Something of M. Mallarmé will, however, always be turned back to with respect and perhaps with enthusiasm, for he is a true man of letters.
1893.
TWO PASTELS
A pretty little anthology might be made of poems by distinguished writers who never for a moment professed to be poets, and who only "swept, with hurried hand, the strings" when they thought nobody was listening. The elegant technical people of the eighteenth century, who never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, would contribute a great many of these flowers that were born to bloom unseen. It is not everybody who is aware that the majestic Sir William Blackstone was "guilty," as people put it, of a set of one hundred octosyllabic verses which would do credit to any laurelled master on Parnassus. We might, indeed, open our little volume withThe Lawyers Farewell to his Muse. Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's unique poem,Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way; and Oldys, the antiquary, would spare us hisBusy, curious, thirsty Fly. We should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses in theAnatomy of Melancholy, and to Bacon forThe World's Bubble. If I had any finger in that anthology, Smollett'sOde to Leven Watershould by no means be omitted. It would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft'sGaffer Gray, or Sydney Smith'sReceipt for a Salad, which latter Herrick might have been glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, and George Eliot's sonnets, in an appendix, as an awful warning.
As we come down to recent times the task of editing our anthology would grow difficult. In our day, the prose writers have either been coy or copious with their verses. If Professor Tyndall has never essayed the Lydian measure it is very surprising, but we have not yet been admitted to hear his shell; nor has Mr. Walter Besant, to the best of my belief, published an ode to anything. Let the shades of Berkeley and Smollett administer reproof. Until quite lately, however, we should have been contented to close our selection with "The bed was made,the room was fit," fromTravels with a Donkey. But Mr. Stevenson is now ineligible—he has published books of poems.
That this departure is not quite a new one might be surmised by any one who has followed closely the publications of the essayist and novelist whom a better man than I am has called "the most exquisite and original of our day." Though Mr. Stevenson's prose volumes are more than twelve in number, and though he had been thought of essentially as a prose writer, the ivory shoulder of the lyre has peeped out now and then. I do not refer to his early collections of verse, toNot I, and other Poems, toMoral Emblems, and toThe Graver and the Pen. (I mention these scarce publications of the Davos press in the hope of rousing wicked passions in the breasts of other collectors, since my own set of them is complete.) These volumes were decidedly occult. A man might build upon them a reputation as a sage, but hardly as a poet. Their stern morality came well from one whose mother's milk has been theShorter Catechism;they are books which no one can read and not be the better for; but as mere verse, they leave something to be desired.Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, if you happen to belucky enough to possess them,e passa. Where the careful reader has perceived that Mr. Stevenson was likely to become openly a poet has been in snatches of verse published here and there in periodicals, and of a quality too good to be neglected. Nevertheless, the publication ofA Child's Garden of Verses(Longmans, 1885) was something of a surprise, and perhaps the new book of grown-up poems,Underwoods(Chatto and Windus, 1887) is more surprising still. There is no doubt about it any longer. Mr. Stevenson is a candidate for the bays.
TheChild's Garden of Verseshas now been published long enough to enable us to make a calm consideration of its merits. When it was fresh, opinion was divided, as it always is about a new strong thing, between those who, in Mr. Longfellow's phrase about the little girl, think it very, very good, and those who think it is horrid. After reading the new book, theUnderwoods, we come back toA Child's Gardenwith a clearer sense of the writer's intention, and a wider experience of his poetical outlook upon life. The later book helps us to comprehend the former; there is the same sincerity, the same buoyant simplicity, the same curiously candid andconfidential attitude of mind. If any one doubted that Mr. Stevenson was putting his own childish memories into verse in the first book, all doubt must cease in reading the second book, where the experiences, although those of an adult, have exactly the same convincing air of candour. The first thing which struck the reader ofA Child's Gardenwas the extraordinary clearness and precision with which the immature fancies of eager childhood were reproduced in it. People whose own childish memories had become very vague, and whose recollections of their games and dreams were hazy in the extreme, asked themselves how far this poet's visions were inspired by real memory and how far by invention. The new book sets that question at rest; the same hand that gave us—
My bed is like a little boat;Nurse helps me in when I embark;She girds me in my sailor's coat,And starts me in the dark;
My bed is like a little boat;Nurse helps me in when I embark;She girds me in my sailor's coat,And starts me in the dark;
My bed is like a little boat;Nurse helps me in when I embark;She girds me in my sailor's coat,And starts me in the dark;
My bed is like a little boat;
Nurse helps me in when I embark;
She girds me in my sailor's coat,
And starts me in the dark;
and the even more delicious—
Now, with my little gun, I crawlAll in the dark along the wall,And follow round the forest-trackAway behind the sofa-back,—
Now, with my little gun, I crawlAll in the dark along the wall,And follow round the forest-trackAway behind the sofa-back,—
Now, with my little gun, I crawlAll in the dark along the wall,And follow round the forest-trackAway behind the sofa-back,—
Now, with my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest-track
Away behind the sofa-back,—
now gives us pictures like the following:
My house,I say. But hark to the sunny doves,That make my roof the arena of their loves,That gyre about the gable all day longAnd fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:Our house,they say; andmine,the cat declares,And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;Andminethe dog, and rises stiff with wrathIf any alien foot profane the path.So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abodeAnd his late kingdom, only from the road.
My house,I say. But hark to the sunny doves,That make my roof the arena of their loves,That gyre about the gable all day longAnd fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:Our house,they say; andmine,the cat declares,And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;Andminethe dog, and rises stiff with wrathIf any alien foot profane the path.So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abodeAnd his late kingdom, only from the road.
My house,I say. But hark to the sunny doves,That make my roof the arena of their loves,That gyre about the gable all day longAnd fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:Our house,they say; andmine,the cat declares,And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;Andminethe dog, and rises stiff with wrathIf any alien foot profane the path.So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abodeAnd his late kingdom, only from the road.
My house,I say. But hark to the sunny doves,
That make my roof the arena of their loves,
That gyre about the gable all day long
And fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:
Our house,they say; andmine,the cat declares,
And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;
Andminethe dog, and rises stiff with wrath
If any alien foot profane the path.
So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,
Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;
Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode
And his late kingdom, only from the road.
We now perceive that it is not invention, but memory of an extraordinarily vivid kind, patiently directed to little things, and charged with imagination; and we turn back with increased interest toA Child's Garden, assured that it gives us a unique thing, a transcript of that child-mind which we have all possessed and enjoyed, but of which no one, except Mr. Stevenson, seems to have carried away a photograph. Long ago, in one of the very earliest, if I remember right, of those essays by R. L. S. for which we used so eagerly to watch theCornhill Magazinein Mr. Leslie Stephen's time, in the paper called "Child Play," this retention of what is wiped off from the memories of the rest of us was clearly displayed. Out of this rarelysuggestive essay I will quote a few lines, which might have been printed as an introduction toA Child's Garden:
"In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in all. 'Making believe' is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitablemise-en-scène, and had to act a business-man in an office before I could sit down to my book.... I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligently together, they chatter gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to speak French."
Probably all will admit the truth of this statement of infant fancy, when it is presented to them in this way. But how many of us, in perfect sincerity, not relying upon legends of the nursery, not refreshed by the study of our own children's "make-believe," can say that we clearly recollect the method of it? We shall find that our memoriesare like a breath upon the glass, like the shape of a broken wave. Nothing is so hopelessly lost, so utterly volatile, as the fancies of our childhood. But Mr. Stevenson, alone amongst us all, appears to have kept daguerreotypes of the whole series of his childish sensations. Except the late Mrs. Ewing, he seems to be without a rival in this branch of memory as applied to literature.
The various attitudes of literary persons to the child are very interesting. There are, for instance, poets like Victor Hugo and Mr. Swinburne who come to admire, who stay to adore, and who do not disdain to throw their purple over any humble article of nursery use. They are so magnificent in their address to infancy, they say so many brilliant and unexpected things, that the mother is almost as much dazzled as she is gratified. We stand round, with our hats off, and admire the poet as much as he admires the child; but we experience no regret when he presently turns away to a discussion of grown-up things. We have an ill-defined notion that he reconnoitres infancy from the outside, and has not taken the pains to reach the secret mind of childhood. It is to be noted, and this is a suspicious circumstance, that Mr.Swinburne and Victor Hugo like the child better the younger it is.
What likeness may define, and stray notFrom truth's exactest way,A baby's beauty? Love can say not,What likeness may.
What likeness may define, and stray notFrom truth's exactest way,A baby's beauty? Love can say not,What likeness may.
What likeness may define, and stray notFrom truth's exactest way,A baby's beauty? Love can say not,What likeness may.
What likeness may define, and stray not
From truth's exactest way,
A baby's beauty? Love can say not,
What likeness may.
This is charming; but the address is to the mother, is to the grown-up reflective person. To the real student of child-life the baby contains possibilities, but is at present an uninteresting chrysalis. It cannot carry a gun through the forest, behind the sofa-back; it is hardly so useful as a cushion to represent a passenger in a railway-train of inverted chairs.
Still more remote than the dithyrambic poets are those writers about children—and they are legion—who have ever the eye fixed upon morality, and carry the didactic tongue thrust in the cheek of fable. The late Charles Kingsley, who might have made so perfect a book of hisWater-Babies, sins notoriously in this respect. The moment a wise child perceives the presence of allegory, or moral instruction, all the charm of a book is gone. Parable is the very antipodes of childish "make-believe," into which the element ofulterior motive or secondary moral meaning never enters for an instant. The secret of the charm of Mrs. Gatty'sParables from Nature, which were the fairest food given to very young minds in my day, was that the fortunate child never discovered that they were parables at all. I, for one, used to read and re-read them as realistic statements of fact, the necessity of pointing a moral merely having driven the amiable author to the making of her story a little more fantastic, and therefore more welcome, than it would otherwise be. It was explained to me one hapless day that the parables were of a nature to instil nice principles into the mind; and from that moment Mrs. Gatty became a broken idol. Lewis Carroll owed his great and deserved success to his suppleness in bending his fancy to the conditions of a mind that is dreaming. It has never seemed to me that theAdventures in Wonderlandwere specially childish; dreams are much the same, whether a child or a man is passive under them, and it is a fact that Lewis Carroll appeals just as keenly to adults as to children. In Edward Lear's rhymes and ballads the love of grotesque nonsense in the grown-up child is mainly appealed to; and these are certainly appreciated more by parents than by children.
It would be easy, by multiplying examples, to drive home my contention that only two out of the very numerous authors who have written successfully on or for children have shown a clear recollection of the mind of healthy childhood itself. Many authors have achieved brilliant success in describing children, in verbally caressing them, in amusing, in instructing them; but only two, Mrs. Ewing in prose, and Mr. Stevenson in verse, have sat down with them without disturbing their fancies, and have looked into the world of "make-believe" with the children's own eyes. If Victor Hugo should visit the nursery, every head of hair ought to be brushed, every pinafore be clean, and nurse must certainly be present, as well as mamma. But Mrs. Ewing or Mr. Stevenson might lead a long romp in the attic when nurse was out shopping, and not a child in the house should know that a grown-up person had been there. There are at least a dozen pieces in theChild's Gardenwhich might be quoted to show what is meant. "The Lamplighter" will serve our purpose as well as any other:
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;It's time to take the window to see Learie going by;For every night at tea-time, and before you take your seat,With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street,Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,And my papa's a banker and as rich as he can be;But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I'm to do,O Learie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,And Learie stops to light it as he lights so many more;And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,O Learie, see a little child, and nod to him to-night.
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;It's time to take the window to see Learie going by;For every night at tea-time, and before you take your seat,With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street,Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,And my papa's a banker and as rich as he can be;But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I'm to do,O Learie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,And Learie stops to light it as he lights so many more;And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,O Learie, see a little child, and nod to him to-night.
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;It's time to take the window to see Learie going by;For every night at tea-time, and before you take your seat,With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street,
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It's time to take the window to see Learie going by;
For every night at tea-time, and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street,
Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,And my papa's a banker and as rich as he can be;But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I'm to do,O Learie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!
Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,
And my papa's a banker and as rich as he can be;
But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I'm to do,
O Learie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!
For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,And Learie stops to light it as he lights so many more;And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,O Learie, see a little child, and nod to him to-night.
For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Learie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,
O Learie, see a little child, and nod to him to-night.
In publishing this autumn a second volume, this time of grown-up verses, Mr. Stevenson has ventured on a bolder experiment. HisUnderwoods, with its title openly borrowed from Ben Jonson, is an easy book to appreciate and enjoy, but not to review. In many respects it is plainly the work of the same fancy that described the Country of Counterpane and the Land of Story-books, but it has grown a little sadder, and a great deal older. There is the same delicate sincerity, the same candour and simplicity, the same artless dependence on the good faith of the public. The ordinary themes of the poets are untouched; there is not one piece from cover to cover which deals with the passion of love. The book is occupied withfriendship, with nature, with the honourable instincts of man's moral machinery. Above all, it enters with great minuteness, and in a very confidential spirit, into the theories and moods of the writer himself. It will be to many readers a revelation of the every-day life of an author whose impersonal writings have given them so much and so varied pleasure. Not a dozen ordinary interviewers could have extracted so much of the character of the man himself as he gives us in these one hundred and twenty pages.
The question of admitting the personal element into literature is one which is not very clearly understood. People try to make rules about it, and say that an author may describe his study, but not his dining-room, and his wife, but not her cousin. The fact is that no rules can possibly be laid down in a matter which is one of individual sympathy. The discussion whether a writer may speak of himself or no is utterly vain until we are informed in what voice he has the habit of speaking. It is all a question which depends on thetimbreof the literary voice. As in life there are persons whose sweetness of utterance is such that we love to have them warbling at our side, no matter on what subject they speak, and others towhom we have scarcely patience to listen if they want to tell us that we have inherited a fortune, so it is in literature. Except that little class of stoic critics who like to take their booksin vacuo, most of us prefer to know something about the authors we read. But whether we like them to tell it us themselves, or no, depends entirely on the voice. Thackeray and Fielding are never confidential enough to satisfy us; Dickens and Smollett set our teeth on edge directly they start upon a career of confidential expansion; and this has nothing to do with any preference forTom JonesoverPeregrine Pickle. There is no doubt that Mr. Stevenson is one of those writers the sound of whose personal voices is pleasing to the public, and there must be hundreds of his admirers who will not miss one word of "To a Gardener" or "The Mirror Speaks," and who will puzzle out each of the intimate addresses to his private friends with complete satisfaction.
The present writer is one of those who are most under the spell. For me Mr. Stevenson may speak for ever, and chronicle at full length all his uncles and his cousins and his nurses. But I think if it were my privilege to serve him in the capacity of Molière's old woman, or to be what afriend of mine would call his "foolometer," I should pluck up courage to represent to him that this thing can be overdone. I openly avow myself an enthusiast, yet even I shrink before the confidential character of the prose inscription toUnderwoods. This volume is dedicated, if you please, to eleven physicians, and it is strange that one so all compact of humour as Mr. Stevenson should not have noticed how funny it is to think of an author seated affably in an armchair, simultaneously summoning by name eleven physicians to take a few words of praise each, and a copy of his little book.
The objective side of Mr. Stevenson's mind is very rich and full, and he has no need to retire too obstinately upon the subjective. Yet I know not that anything he has written in verse is more worthily dignified than the following little personal fragment, in which he refers, of course, to the grandfather who died a few weeks before his birth, and to the father whom he had just conducted to the grave, both heroic builders of lighthouses:
Say not of me that weakly I declinedThe labours of my sires, and fled the sea,The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,To play at home with paper like a child.But rather say: In the afternoon of timeA strenuous family dusted from its handsThe sand of granite, and beholding farAlong the sounding coast its pyramidsAnd tall memorials catch the dying sun,Smiled well content, and to this childish taskAround the fire addressed its evening hours.
Say not of me that weakly I declinedThe labours of my sires, and fled the sea,The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,To play at home with paper like a child.But rather say: In the afternoon of timeA strenuous family dusted from its handsThe sand of granite, and beholding farAlong the sounding coast its pyramidsAnd tall memorials catch the dying sun,Smiled well content, and to this childish taskAround the fire addressed its evening hours.
Say not of me that weakly I declinedThe labours of my sires, and fled the sea,The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,To play at home with paper like a child.But rather say: In the afternoon of timeA strenuous family dusted from its handsThe sand of granite, and beholding farAlong the sounding coast its pyramidsAnd tall memorials catch the dying sun,Smiled well content, and to this childish taskAround the fire addressed its evening hours.
Say not of me that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child.
But rather say: In the afternoon of time
A strenuous family dusted from its hands
The sand of granite, and beholding far
Along the sounding coast its pyramids
And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
Smiled well content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours.
This is a particularly happy specimen of Mr. Stevenson's blank verse, in which metre, as a rule, he does not show to advantage. It is not that his verses are ever lame or faulty, for in the technical portion of the art he seldom fails, but that his rhymeless iambics remind the ear too much now of Tennyson, now of Keats. He is, on the contrary, exceedingly happy and very much himself in that metre of eight or seven syllables, with couplet-rhymes, which served so well the first poets who broke away from heroic verse, such as Swift and Lady Winchilsea, Green and Dyer. If he must be affiliated to any school of poets it is to these, who hold the first outworks between the old classical camp and the invading army of romance, to whom I should ally him. Martial is with those octo-syllabists of Queen Anne, and to Martial might well have been assigned, had they been in old Latin, the delicately homely lines, "To a Gardener." How felicitous is this quatrain about the onion—
Let first the onion flourish there,Rose among roots, the maiden fair,Wine-scented and poetic soulOf the capacious salad-bowl.
Let first the onion flourish there,Rose among roots, the maiden fair,Wine-scented and poetic soulOf the capacious salad-bowl.
Let first the onion flourish there,Rose among roots, the maiden fair,Wine-scented and poetic soulOf the capacious salad-bowl.
Let first the onion flourish there,
Rose among roots, the maiden fair,
Wine-scented and poetic soul
Of the capacious salad-bowl.
Or this, in more irregular measure, and enfolding a loftier fancy—
Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,Sing truer, or no longer sing!No more the voice of melancholy JacquesTo make a weeping echo in the hill;But as the boy, the pirate of the spring,From the green elm a living linnet takes,One natural verse recapture—then be still.
Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,Sing truer, or no longer sing!No more the voice of melancholy JacquesTo make a weeping echo in the hill;But as the boy, the pirate of the spring,From the green elm a living linnet takes,One natural verse recapture—then be still.
Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,Sing truer, or no longer sing!No more the voice of melancholy JacquesTo make a weeping echo in the hill;But as the boy, the pirate of the spring,From the green elm a living linnet takes,One natural verse recapture—then be still.
Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,
Sing truer, or no longer sing!
No more the voice of melancholy Jacques
To make a weeping echo in the hill;
But as the boy, the pirate of the spring,
From the green elm a living linnet takes,
One natural verse recapture—then be still.
It would be arrogant in the extreme to decide whether or no Mr. R. L. Stevenson's poems will be read in the future. They are, however, so full of character, so redolent of his own fascinating temperament, that it is not too bold to suppose that so long as his prose is appreciated those who love that will turn to this. There have been prose writers whose verse has not lacked accomplishment or merit, but has been so far from interpreting their prose that it rather disturbed its effect and weakened its influence. Cowley is an example of this, whose ingenious and dryly intellectual poetry positively terrifies the reader away from hiseminently suave and human essays. Neither of Mr. Stevenson's volumes of poetry will thus disturb his prose. Opinions may be divided as to their positive value, but no one will doubt that the same characteristics are displayed in the poems, the same suspicion of "the abhorred pedantic sanhedrim," the same fulness of life and tenderness of hope, the same bright felicity of epithet as in the essays and romances. The belief, however, may be expressed without fear of contradiction that Mr. Stevenson's fame will rest mainly upon his verse and not upon his prose, only in that dim future when Mr. Matthew Arnold's prophecy shall be fulfilled and Shelley's letters shall be preferred to his lyrical poems. It is saying a great deal to acknowledge that the author ofKidnappedis scarcely less readable in verse than he is in prose.
1887.
Two years ago there was suddenly revealed to us, no one seems to remember how, a new star out of the East. Not fewer distinguished men of letters profess to have "discovered" Mr. Kipling than there were cities of old in which Homer was born. Yet, in fact, the discovery was not much more creditable to them than it would be, on a summer night, to contrive to notice a comet flaring across the sky. Not only was this new talent robust, brilliant, and self-asserting, but its reception was prepared for by a unique series of circumstances. The fiction of the Anglo-Saxon world, in its more intellectual provinces, had become curiously feminised. Those novel-writers who cared to produce subtle impressions upon their readers, in England and America, had becomeextremely refined in taste and discreet in judgment. People who were not content to pursue the soul of their next-door neighbour through all the burrows of self-consciousness had no choice but to take ship with Mr. Rider Haggard for the Mountains of the Moon. Between excess of psychological analysis and excess of superhuman romance there was a great void in the world of Anglo-Saxon fiction. It is this void which Mr. Kipling, with something less than one hundred short stories, one novel, and a few poems, has filled by his exotic realism and his vigorous rendering of unhackneyed experience. His temperament is eminently masculine, and yet his imagination is strictly bound by existing laws. The Evarras of the novel had said:
Thus gods are made,And whoso makes them otherwise shall die,
Thus gods are made,And whoso makes them otherwise shall die,
Thus gods are made,And whoso makes them otherwise shall die,
Thus gods are made,
And whoso makes them otherwise shall die,
when, behold, a young man comes up out of India, and makes them quite otherwise, and lives.
The vulgar trick, however, of depreciating other writers in order to exalt the favourite of a moment was never less worthy of practice than it is in the case of the author ofSoldiers Three. His relation to his contemporaries is curiously slight. One living writer there is, indeed, with whom it is notunnatural to compare him—Pierre Loti. Each of these men has attracted the attention, and then the almost exaggerated admiration, of a crowd of readers drawn from every class. Each has become popular without ceasing to be delightful to the fastidious. Each is independent of traditional literature, and affects a disdain for books. Each is a wanderer, a lover of prolonged exile, more at home among the ancient races of the East than among his own people. Each describes what he has seen in short sentences, with highly coloured phrases and local words, little troubled to obey the laws of style if he can but render an exact impression of what the movement of physical life has been to himself. Each produces on the reader a peculiar thrill, a voluptuous and agitating sentiment of intellectual uneasiness, with the spontaneous art of which he has the secret. Totally unlike in detail, Rudyard Kipling and Pierre Loti have these general qualities in common, and if we want a literary parallel to the former, the latter is certainly the only one that we can find. Nor is the attitude of the French novelist to his sailor friends at all unlike that of the Anglo-Indian civilian to his soldier chums. To distinguish we must note very carefully the difference betweenMulvaney andmon frère Yves; it is not altogether to the advantage of the latter.
The old rhetorical manner of criticism was not meant for the discussion of such writers as these. The only way in which, as it seems to me, we can possibly approach them, is by a frank confession of their personal relation to the feelings of the critic. I will therefore admit that I cannot pretend to be indifferent to the charm of what Mr. Kipling writes. From the first moment of my acquaintance with it it has held me fast. It excites, disturbs, and attracts me; I cannot throw off its disquieting influence. I admit all that is to be said in its disfavour. I force myself to see that its occasional cynicism is irritating and strikes a false note. I acknowledge the broken and jagged style, the noisy newspaper bustle of the little peremptory sentences, the cheap irony of the satires on society. Often—but this is chiefly in the earlier stories—I am aware that there is a good deal too much of the rattle of the piano at some café concert. But when all this is said, what does it amount to? What but an acknowledgment of the crudity of a strong and rapidly developing young nature? You cannot expect a creamy smoothness while the act of vinous fermentation is proceeding.