Chapter VIII: Part 8

It is impossible to give an adequate account of the evolution of criticism without a very careful survey of the chief contributors to criticism in each generation, and such a survey Mr. Worsfold has not attempted. To Latin criticism he never even refers. And yet it has had great influence on critical literature. The Romans, it is true, contributed scarcely anything new to criticism, except that which pertains to oratory. We know enough of Varro, with whom Roman criticism may be said to begin, to feel confident that he could have had no pretension to the finer qualities of the critic. Of the five treatises composed by him, only one, the περι χαρακτηρων, appears to have been purely critical, and it almost certainly drew largely on Greek sources. Horace derived the material of the _Ars Poetica_ from a Greek writer, Neoptolemus of Parium. Much of Quinctilian’s criticism is demonstrably a compilation from Greek writers. The best critic of poetry among the Romans is undoubtedly to be found in Petronius, occasional and scanty though his remarks are. But of prose literature Rome produced two really great critics--the one was Cicero, the other was Tacitus. The _Brutus_ and the _Dialogus de Oratoribus_ are masterpieces, equal to anything which has come down to us from the Greeks. One of the most important critical principles ever enunciated we owe to Cicero. He was the first to demonstrate that the test of excellence in oratory lay, in its appealing equally to the multitude and to the most fastidious of connoisseurs. The most consummate rhetorician which the world has ever seen, he was at the same time a consummate critic of his art. This department of criticism has, indeed, for nearly two thousand years, been practically his monopoly; it may be questioned whether anything can be added, so far as the technique of rhetoric is concerned, to what may be traced to his writings. The interest of the _Dialogus de Oratoribus_ is largely historical, but never have the causes which inspire and nourish, or depress and starve, eloquence been more eloquently and brilliantly explained. Nor must it be forgotten that it was through the medium of the Latin critics that Greek criticism became influential on modern literature.

Mr. Worsfold has very properly drawn attention to the fine passage about poetry in the second book of Bacon’s _Advancement of Learning_, but he says not a word about Sidney’s remarkable treatise, one of the most charming contributions to the criticism of poetry which has ever been made, or about the admirable remarks in Ben Jonson’s _Discoveries_. The interest of Elizabethan criticism, as represented by these works--and they are the only works on this subject of any value produced during the Elizabethan period--lies partly in its return to Aristotelian canons, and partly in the importance which, in accordance with the ancients, it attaches to the didactic element in poetry. This is expressed very eloquently in Ben Jonson’s dedication of the _Fox_:--

“If men will impartially and not asquint look toward the
offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to
themselves the impossibility of a man’s being the good poet
without being first the good man,--he that is able to inform
young men to all good discipline, inflame young men to all good
virtues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as
they decline to childhood, recover them to their first state,
that comes forth the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a
teacher of things divine no less than human.”

This was precisely Spenser’s conception of one of the chief functions of poetry. Thus the Elizabethan critics, who were followed afterwards by Milton, if they did not formally discuss the relation of æsthetic to ethic, insisted on their essential connection in the higher forms of poetry. Even in the succeeding age, when poetry lost all its high seriousness and much of its moral dignity, criticism, if it did not always insist on the application of this test, still retained it. Dryden could write, “I am satisfied if verse cause delight, for delight is the chief, if not the only end, of poesy”; but in adding “instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights,” he half corrected his former statement, and, indeed, simply reverted to what Aristophanes, Ben Jonson, and Milton would have been the first to admit.

But to return to Mr. Worsfold. A very serious defect in his work is his omission of all notice of Boileau and Dryden, and of the critics contemporary with them in France and England. The consequence is, that much is attributed to Addison which belongs to them, and Addison’s importance as a critic is much overrated. Again, of the many memorable contributions to this branch of literature in England, in France, in Italy, and in Germany, which were made between the appearance of the Abbé Dubos’s _Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture_ in 1719, and the lectures of Coleridge and Schlegel about 1812, all that is said is represented by what is said of Lessing. Though a long chapter is given to Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold’s master, Sainte-Beuve, is, if we remember rightly, not so much as named.

Dr. Johnson divided critics into three classes--those who know the rules and judge by them, those who know no rules but judge entirely by natural taste, those who know the rules but are above them. This has been true in all ages, and sufficiently disposes of Mr. Worsfold’s hypothesis about the stages through which criticism has passed. All that can be said is, that at certain times there has been a tendency, determined of course by the character of the particular age, towards the predominance of a particular critical method and of particular points of view. Further than this it would be perilous to go. It has been the task of the present age to develop each of these methods to the full, and the most authoritative critics of the last twenty years might easily be ranged under one of those classes.

The soundest and most valuable part of Mr. Worsfold’s book is the part dealing with the criticism of the last few years. His chapter on Matthew Arnold, in particular, is admirable, and his remarks on the functions of criticism at the present time, deduced as they have been from Wordsworth, Arnold and Ruskin, are in a high degree instructive and interesting. In pointing out that criticism should not confine itself merely to the investigation of technical excellence, and to all that is implied in the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake, but should recognise that there are limits beyond which the artist should not exercise his technical skill, he recalls us to principles which it is well that criticism should not forget. We quite agree with him that there is now an increasing tendency to recognise these limits, and to lay most stress on the interpretation of the ideal element in literature and art. That is certainly the modern note. We have expressed our reasons for dissenting from Mr. Worsfold’s historical view of the evolution of criticism, but his book is full of interest, and will amply repay the attention of serious readers. It is a book which does not deserve to be lost in the crowd.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 38: ὁ δε κατ’ αυτην την φυσιν του πραγματος ὁρος, αει μεν ὁ μειζων μεχρι του συνδηλος ειναι καλλιων εστι κατα το μεγεθος. ὡς δε ἁπλως διορισαντας ειπειν, εν ὁσω μεγεθει κατα το εικος η το αναγκαιον εφεξης γιγνομενων συμβαινει εις ευτυχιαν εκ δυστυχιας, η εξ ευτυχιας εις δυστυχιαν μεταβαλλειν, ἱκανος ὁρος εστιν του μεγεθους. (_Poet._, vii. 7.)]

WOMEN IN GREEK POETRY[39]

[Footnote 39: _Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry._ By E. F. M. Benecke.]

The editor of this book cannot be congratulated either on his competence or on his discretion. To hurry into the world a work which is not merely a fragment, but which cries for revision, suppression, and correction in almost every page, is a literary crime of the first magnitude, and deserves the severest castigation. Of the author of the work, who appears to have been a young man of some attainments and of much promise, we desire to speak with all gentleness; we wholly absolve him from blame, for we have no right to assume that he would himself have given to the world what his editor admits was _intra penetralia Vestæ_, and what we hope and believe he would himself have committed _emendaturis ignibus_, had he arrived at years of discretion. But the dissemination of error is no light thing, especially in relation to subjects which are of great interest, and, from an historical and literary point of view, of great importance. When we think of the many amiable and industrious tutors at Oxford and Cambridge who, unless they are put on their guard, will unsuspiciously fill their note-books with the nonsense of this volume, and impart it, by degrees, to the listening credulity of youth, we feel we have no alternative but to perform a plain, if painful, duty. We repeat, we absolve the author from all blame; the sole culprit is the editor.

That Solomon was the author of the _Iliad_, Poggio the author of the _Annals_ of Tacitus, and Bacon the author of Shakespeare’s plays, are hypotheses scarcely less monstrously absurd than the thesis propounded in this volume. Mr. Benecke’s main contentions are “that a pure love between man and woman seemed to the early Greeks” (that is, to those who lived before the latter end of the Peloponnesian War) a sheer impossibility; that “in extant Greek poetry there is no trace of romantic love poetry addressed to women prior to the time of Asclepiades and Philetas”; that “in the works of these writers this element suddenly appears not in the nature of an experiment but as a leading motive”; that the appearance of this element was due to the influence of Antimachus, “who was the first man who had the courage to say that a woman was worth loving, and who may thus be regarded as the originator of the romantic element in literature.” As we have not space to refute this nonsense in detail, we will give some examples of the way in which it is supported. First come misrepresentations and blunders. To emphasize the degradation of women, passages in translation are twisted and perverted almost beyond recognition.

Thus the couplet of Catullus--

“Tunc te dilexi, non tantum ut vulgus amicam,
Sed pater ut natos diligit et generos”--

is actually paraphrased “I loved you, not as a man loves a woman, but as a man loves a youth.” The couplet in which Antigone says, “If my husband died, I could get another, and were I deprived of him too, I could be a mother by another man”--

ποσις μεν αν μοι, κατθανοντος, αλλος ην
και παις απ’ αλλου φωτος, ει τουδ’ ημπλακον--

is translated “If my husband had died, I could have married another, if he had failed to get me children, I could have committed adultery.” The “main motive of the Iliad,” we are informed, (p. 76), “is the love of Achilles for Patroclus.” The interest of the _Ajax_ “is meant to centre on Teucer, the _amasius_ of the dead Ajax.” That the _Alcestis_ may not be pressed into the service of those who would maintain that the Greeks knew how to respect women, the key to it is to be found “in the relation existing between Admetus and Apollo”(!) The revolting coarseness and flippant vulgarity which mark the book, and, which do very little credit to Oxford training, are illustrated by the remarks employed to disparage these types of womanhood which the writer well knows would refute his theory. Thus of Nausicaa, “she is always regarded as a charming type of woman; but, after all, how one naturally thinks of her is (_sic_) as a charming type of washerwoman”; of Penelope, “she longs for the return of her husband, no doubt; but what really grieves her about the suitors is not their suggestions as to his death, but the quantity of pork they eat.” On a par with this sort of thing is the remark about a play of Sophocles, which, by the way, is not extant, that “it merely drew the usual picture of the gods playing shove-halfpenny with human souls” (p. 47); or flippant vulgarity like the following--Admetus expresses “his deep regret that he cannot accompany Alcestis, as Charon does not issue return tickets.” If this is the humour of young Oxford, the progress of which we hear so much has been purchased at a heavy price.

But to continue. On page 27 we are confronted with the astounding statement that “it is in Anacreon that we find for the first time love-poetry addressed to a woman.” Why, Hermesianax (15, 16) distinctly states that Musæus wrote love-poetry to his wife or mistress, Antiope, and that Hesiod wrote many poems in honour of his love, Eoia (_Id._ 22-24). Alcæus notoriously wrote love-poems to Sappho, as we need go no further than the first book of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ to know; both Alcman, the lover of Egido and Megalostrate, and, probably Ibycus also wrote love-poetry to women. It is mere special pleading to contend that Mimnermus did not write poetry to the mistress of his affections, to whom, according to Strabo, his erotic poetry was addressed. Hermesianax distinctly states that Mimnermus was passionately in love with Nanno, and certainly implies that his love-poetry was addressed to her (35-38). It is true that two of the fragments of Archilochus are ambiguous, but one is not; and, if we may judge by a single line (Fr. 71), his love for Neobule expressed itself in a manner indistinguishable from Petrarch’s vein--“Would that I might touch Neobule’s hand”: ει γαρ ὡς εμοι γενοιτο χειρα Νεοβουλης θιγειν. It is clear that women had a prominent place in the poetry of Stesichorus, and in his poem entitled _Calyce_ we seem to have had an anticipation of the modern love romance. And yet, in spite of all this, we are informed that the Greeks had no love-poetry addressed to, or concerning women, before Anacreon.

The methods adopted for minimizing or disguising the importance of women in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are very amusing. “The Trojan war was the work of a woman; but how very little that woman appears in the _Iliad_.” She appears quite as frequently and imposingly as the action admits, and she and Andromache are painted as elaborately as any of the _dramatis personæ_ in the poem. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that, with the exception of Achilles and Agamemnon, they leave the deepest impression on us. “A woman has been managing the affairs of Odysseus for twenty years in an exemplary fashion; but the hero of the _Odyssey_ on his return prefers to associate with the swineherd.” Comment is superfluous. Nothing could be more striking than the prominence which is given to women both in the _Iliad_ and in the _Odyssey_. To cite such writers as Simonides of Amorgus, Phocylides and Theognis, as authorities on the position of women, is as absurd, in Sancho Panza’s phrase, as to look for pears on an elm.

The Greek Tragedies are treated after the same fashion as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. We are told that the remarkable prominence given in Sophocles’s plays to the affection between brother and sister affords conclusive proof that the nature of modern love between man and woman was unknown to him; and we are also informed, that the relations between Electra and Orestes, and Antigone and Polynices “are absolutely those of modern lovers.” It would be difficult to say which is more absurd, the deduction or the statement. What love could be more loyal and more passionate than Hæmon’s love for Antigone? The prominence given by Sophocles to the love between brother and sister has its origin from the same cause as the very small part played by lovers in the Greek tragedies generally. In the first place, a poet who took his plot from the fortunes of the houses of Pelops or Laius could only work within the limits of tradition; in the second place, love romances, unless involving deep tragical issues as in the _Trachiniæ_, the _Medea_, and the _Hippolytus_, were totally incompatible with the Greek idea of tragedy. But we must hurry to the grand discovery made by the author of this volume.

Somewhere about 405 B.C. flourished Antimachus, of Colophon, the author of a voluminous epic, and of several other poems. He had the misfortune to lose his wife Lyde, and, to beguile his sorrow, he composed a long elegy in her honour. Of the far-reaching consequences of this act let our author speak. “When Antimachus first sat down in his empty house at Colophon to write an elegy to his dead wife, consciously or unconsciously he was initiating the greatest artistic revolution that the world has ever seen.” Asclepiades and Philetas followed him as imitators, and the thing was done. Woman was at last “connected with ‘romance.’” Our author admits the difficulty of supposing that “any one man could invent and popularize an entirely new emotion”; but suggests that if we regard it as “simply due to the readjustment of an already existing emotion,” that is παιδεραστια, such a supposition is “no longer absurd.” It is not only absurd but monstrous.

The truth almost certainly is, that the love between man and woman in ancient Greece differed very little from the love between man and woman as it exists now. Marriage was, it is true, purely a matter of business; most wives aspired to nothing more than the management of the nursery and the household, and most women being without education, and living in seclusion, could scarcely associate, intellectually at least, on equal terms with their husbands or lovers. But this proves nothing more than _mariages de convenance_, and love based on the fascination exercised by sensuous attraction prove now. Then, as in our own time, there were marriages and marriages, liaisons and liaisons. The story which Plutarch tells of Callias (_Cimon._ iv.) shows that marriage was often based on love. The pictures given of Hector and Andromache in the _Iliad_, of Alcinous and Arete, of Ulysses and Penelope, of Menelaus and Helen in the _Odyssey_, the charming account of Ischomachus and his young wife in the _Œconomics_ of Xenophon, the noble and pathetic story of Pantheia and Abradatas in the _Cyropædeia_, the story which, in his life of Agis,[40] Plutarch tells of Chilonis, and, in the _Morals_, of Camma,[41] and innumerable other legends, traditions, and anecdotes, prove that women could inspire and return as pure and as chivalrous a love as any of the heroines of chivalry. The poet who could write about marriage as Homer does in the Sixth Odyssey would have had little to learn from modern refinement.[42] The love which Critobulus describes himself as having for Amandra, in the _Symposium_ of Xenophon, and the remarks made by Socrates in that dialogue embody the most exalted conceptions of the passion of love between the sexes. The sentiments of Plutarch on this subject are indistinguishable from the most refined notions of the modern world, as is abundantly illustrated in the _Amatorius_, the _Conjugalia Præcepta_, and in the remarks on marriage in the eighth chapter of the Essay on Moral Virtue. If Ajax and Hercules became brutes, Tecmessa and Deianeira were not the only women who have discovered that men are, too often, May when they woo, and December when they wed. It is ridiculous to suppose that a people whose popular poetry could present such types of womanhood as Arete, Antigone, Alcestis, Deianeira, Electra, Macaria, Iphigenia, Evadne, and Polyxena, who could boast such poetesses as Sappho, Erinna, Corinna, Myrtis, and Damophila, and whose society was graced by such women as Aspasia, Diotima, Gnathæna, Herpyllis, Metaneira, and Leontium, should have given expression to passion, sentiment, and romance only in παιδικοι ὑμνοι.

What the author of this book, and what others who are fond of generalizing about the Greeks, forget, is, that of a once vast and voluminous literature we have only fragments. That portion of their poetry which would have thrown light on the subject here discussed has perished. It is certain, for example, that of their lyric poetry a very large portion was erotic, of that portion exactly one poem has survived in its entirety, while a few hundred scattered lines, torn from their context, represent the rest that has come down to us. We know, again, that in some hundreds of their dramas, in the Middle and New Comedy that is to say, the plots turned on love--of these dramas not a single one is preserved. But the reflection of some twenty of them in Terence and Plautus, and several scattered fragments, clearly indicate, that the passion between the sexes involved as much sentiment and romance as it does in our Elizabethan dramatists. In what respect do Charinus and Pamphilus in the _Andria_ and Antipho in the _Phormio_--mere replicas, of course, of Greek originals--differ from modern lovers? What could be more romantic than the love story which formed the plot of the _Phasma_ of Menander? It is fair to our author to say that he fully admits this, in the only tolerably satisfactory part of his book, the chapter on Women in Greek Comedy. The great blot on Greek life, to which Mr. Benecke gives so much prominence, has probably had far too much importance attached to it, partly, perhaps, owing to its accentuation in the writings of Plato, and partly owing to that rage for scandalous tittle-tattle, so unhappily characteristic of ancient anecdote-mongers from Ion to Athenæus.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: Agis, xvii., xviii.]

[Footnote 41: De Mulierum Virtutibus.]

[Footnote 42: See particularly lines 180-185.]

MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS’ POEMS[43]

[Footnote 43: _Poems._ By Stephen Phillips. London and New York John Lane.]

The accent here is unmistakable, it is the accent of a new and a true poet. Mr. Phillips gives us no mere variations on familiar melodies, no clever copies of classical archetypes, and what is more, he has not employed any illegitimate means of attracting attention and giving distinction to his work. An audacious choice of subjects, the adoption of the stones which the builders have rejected, and, it may be added, disdained, has, when coupled with elaborate affectations and eccentricities of treatment and style, often enabled mediocrity to pass, temporarily at least, for genius, and the specious counterfeit of originality for the thing itself. But these poems are marked by simplicity, sincerity, spontaneity. If a discordant note is sometimes struck, here in an over-strained conceit, and there in an incongruous touch of preciosity or false sentiment, this is but an accident; in essentials all is genuine. Nature and passion affect to be speaking, and nature and passion really speak. A poet, of whom this may be said with truth, has passed the line which divides talent from genius, the true singer from the accomplished artist or imitator. He has taken his place, wherever that place may be, among authentic poets. To that high honour the present volume undoubtedly entitles Mr. Phillips. It would now, perhaps, be premature to say more than “Ingens omen habet magni clarique triumphi,” but we may predict with confidence that, if fate is kind and his muse is true to him, he has a distinguished future before him. It may be safely said that no poet has made his _début_ with a volume which is at once of such extraordinary merit and so rich in promise.

Mr. Phillips is not a poet who has “one plain passage of few notes.” He strikes many chords, and strikes them often with thrilling power. The awful story narrated in _The Wife_ is conceived and embodied with really Dantesque intensity and vividness; it has the master’s suggestive reservation, smiting phrase, and clairvoyant picture wording, as “in the red shawl _sacredly_ she burned,” “smiled at him with her lips, not with her eyes”; while “Mother and child that food together ate” is, in pregnancy of tragic suggestiveness, almost worthy to stand with the “poscia, più che il dolor, poté il digiuno.” Equally distinguished, though on another plane of interest, is _The woman with the dead Soul_, the soul which could once “wonder, laugh, and weep,” but over which the days began to fall “dismally, as rain on ocean blear,” till--

“Existence lean, in sky dead grey
Withholding steadily, starved it away.”

If the pathos in these poems is almost “too deep for tears,” it is gentler in the second and third of the lyrics, which are as exquisite as they are affecting. The idea in the lines _To Milton Blind_, is worthy of Milton’s own sublime conceit, that the darkness which had fallen on his eyes was but the shadow of God’s protecting wings. The whole poem, indeed, is a beautiful paraphrase of the noble passage in the _Second Defence of the People of England_: “For the Divine law”--we give it in the English translation--“not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack, not indeed so much from the privation of my sight as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity; and which, when occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light more precious and more pure.”

In _The Lily_, which is a little obscure--a fault against which Mr. Phillips would do well to guard, for he frequently offends in this respect--we have the note of Petrarch, but Petrarch would not have ended the poem so flatly. Tennyson is recalled, too nearly perhaps, in “By the Sea,” but it is a poem of great charm and beauty. _The New De Profundis_ is, unhappily, the key to Mr. Phillips’ characteristic mood; it reminds us of the curse imposed on the worldling in Browning’s _Easter Day_, before he has learned the use of life and doubt.

Mr. Phillips’ two most ambitious poems are _Christ in Hades_ and _Marpessa_. In _Christ in Hades_ he fails, as Mrs. Browning failed in _The Drama of Exile_. He attempts a theme--a stupendous theme--to which his genius is not equal, and which could only have been adequately treated by such poets as Dante and Milton, in the maturity of their powers. It has neither basis nor superstructure. It is what the Greeks would call “meteoric” as distinguished from “sublime.” It is a weird, wild, and chaotic dream; and yet for all this its appeal to the heart and the imagination is piercing and direct. Like Tennyson, Mr. Phillips has the art of unfolding the full significance of a few suggestive words in a great classic; and nothing could be more effective than the use to which he has applied the famous lines which Homer places in the mouth of Achilles. Poetry has few things more pathetic than Homer’s picture of Hades and the dead, and that pathos Mr. Phillips has given us in quintessence, as few would question after reading the lines which describe Persephone yearning for her return to the spring-illumined world, the speech of the Athenian ghost, and the woman’s address to Christ. If the world depicted has something of Horace’s artistic monster, or, to change the image, something of the anarchy of dreams in its composition, the vividness and picturesqueness with which particular figures and scenes are flashed into light and definition is extraordinarily impressive. It is so with the central figure, Christ; it is so with Prometheus; and the contrast between these martyrs for man has both pathos and grandeur.

There is more originality, more power in _Christ in Hades_ than in _Marpessa_, but _Marpessa_ has more balance, more sanity, more of the stuff out of which good and abiding poetry is made, than its predecessor. The one savours of the spasmodic school, the productions of which have rarely been found to have the principle of life, however rich they may have been in promise; the other is a return to a school in which most of those who have gained permanent fame have studied. And we are glad to find a young poet there.

But it would be doing Mr. Phillips great injustice not to note that, though he has had many predecessors in the semi-classical, semi-romantic re-treatment of the Greek myths, notably Keats in _Hyperion_, Wordsworth in _Dion_ and _Laodamia_, Landor in his _Hellenics_, and Tennyson in _Ænone_ and _Tithonus_, he has treated his theme with a distinction which is all his own, and has impressed on it an intense individuality. In comparison with these masters he may be _pauper_, but he is _pauper in suo ære_.

It would be easy to point to faults in Mr. Phillips’ work. His sense of rhythm, even allowing for what are plainly deliberate experiments in discord, seems often curiously defective. How stiff and limping, for example, is the following:--

“O pity us,
For I would ask of thee only to look
Upon the wonderful sunlight and to smell
Earth in the rain. Is not the labourer
Returning heavy through the August sheaves
Against the setting sun, who gladly smells
His supper from the opening door--is he
Not happier than these melancholy kings?
How good it is to live, even at the worst!
God was so lavish to us once, but here
He hath repented, jealous of His beams.”

Lines, again, like “Pierced her, and odour full of arrows was,” “Realizes all the uncoloured dawn,” “Yet followed a riddled memorable flag,” are, no doubt, extreme instances, but they are typical of many bad lines. Occasionally he falls flat on some harsh prosaic phrase, like “beautiful indolence _was on our brains_.” Nor is he always happy in his attempts at novelty in phraseology, as in his employment of the words “liable,” “inaccurate,” “pungent”; and these faults in rhythm and diction are the more remarkable, as the really subtle mastery over rhythmic expression which he exhibits at times, and his singularly felicitous epithets, turns, and phrases are among his most striking gifts. Take a few out of very many: “A bleak magnificence of endless hope,” “That common trivial face, of endless needs,” “The mystic river, floating wan,” “And the moist evening fallow, richly dark,” “That palest rose sweet on the night of life.” How noble is the rhythm and imagery of the following:--

“All the dead
The melancholy attraction of Jesus felt:
And millions, like a sea, wave upon wave,
Heaved dreaming to that moonlight face, or ran
In wonderful long ripples, sorrow-charmed.
Toward him, in faded purple, pacing came
Dead emperors, and sad, unflattered kings;
Unlucky captains, listless armies led:
Poets with music frozen on their lips
Toward the pale brilliance sighed.”

And it would be easy to multiply illustrations from _Marpessa_ and _By the Sea_. Occasionally there is a certain incongruity between the form and the matter. A poem so essentially, so intensely realistic as _The Wife_ should not have such quaintnesses as “palèd in her thought.” Nor should we have

“The constable, with lifted hand,
Conducting the orchestral Strand”;

nor should a railway station be described as a “moonèd terminus.” Nothing is so disenchanting as affectation.

One cannot but add that these poems, welcome as they are, would have been more welcome still, had they been less profoundly melancholy. Their monotonous sadness, the persistency with which they dwell on all those grim and melancholy realities which poetry should help us to forget, or cheer us in enduring, is not merely their leading, but their pervading characteristic. This note will, we hope, change. Leopardi is immortal, and could not be spared; but one Leopardi is enough for a single century.

THE ILLUSTRIOUS OBSCURE[44]

[Footnote 44: _West Country Poets: Their Lives and Works, etc._ Illustrated with Portraits. By W. H. Kearley Wright, F.R.H.S. London: Elliot Stock. 1896.]

Some nineteen hundred years ago Horace observed that there was one thing which neither gods, nor men, nor bookstalls would tolerate in a poet--and that was mediocrity. The verdict of gods, men, and the bookstalls is probably still what it was then; but to such tribunals the rhymesters of our time can afford to be quite indifferent. Paper and printing are cheap; small poets and small critics are now so numerous that they form a world, and a populous world, in themselves; and, well understanding the truth of the old proverb, “Concordiâ, parvæ res crescunt,” they mutually manufacture the wreaths with which they crown each other’s modest vanity. There are hundreds of “poets” and “critics” of whom the great world knows nothing, who are thus enabled, in their little day, to taste all the sweets of fame, and “walk with inward glory crown’d.” To wage serious war against such a tribe as this would be as absurd as to break butterflies upon a wheel; but we really think it high time that some protest should be made against the indefinite multiplication of the rubbish for which these people and their patrons are responsible, and still more against its importation into what purports to be a contribution to serious literature. As long as these geniuses confine themselves to their proper sphere, the poets’ corners of provincial newspapers, we have nothing to say. But it becomes quite another matter when the skill of an ingenious projector enables--we are really sorry to have to speak so harshly--a rabble of poetasters to figure side by side with poets of classical fame, and to appear in all the dignity of contributors to a national anthology. Yet such is the design of this volume, which was, it seems, published by subscription, the subscribers being for the most part the various candidates for poetical fame, who have obligingly sent their portraits and their biographies for insertion in Mr. Kearley Wright’s “monumental work.” As Mr. Kearley Wright’s collection begins with the fifteenth century, and includes the really eminent poets who happen to have been born in the West of England, many of his worthies are naturally _apud plures_, but the majority, in whose honour the anthology appears to have been compiled, adorn the living. And very gratifying it must be for these gentlemen, and for Mr. Kearley Wright himself--for he also has a niche--to find themselves side by side with Sir Walter Raleigh, Herrick, Gay, and Coleridge.

Mr. Kearley Wright’s “company of makers” is certainly a motley one. First comes among his living bards an inspired porter at the Teignmouth railway station, who asks in rapture,--

“Along the glitt’ring streets of gold,
Amid the brilliant glare,
Shall we God’s banner there unfold,
His righteous helmet wear?”

At no great distance follows, with a portrait looking intensely intellectual, “the manager of the Bristol and South Wales Railway Waggon Company, Limited,” whose poems are described as “lacking here and there logical sequence and literary method,” but “evincing undoubtedly a great poetical disposition and philosophical drift.” The two poems which illustrate this poet’s genius afford very little proof either of “a great poetical disposition” or of “a philosophical drift,” but painfully conclusive proof that much more is lacking than “logical sequence and literary method,” the lack of which may certainly be conceded as well. Next comes Mr. Jonas Coaker, “the landlord of the Warren House Inn,” whose verses “disclose a poetic spirit, and, had he possessed the advantages of education, would doubtless have attracted some attention.” Mr. Coaker is in the main autobiographical.

“I drew my breath first on the moor,
There my forefathers dwelled;
Its hills and dales I’ve traversed o’er,
Its desert parts beheld.

* * * * *

It’s oft envelop’d in a fog,
Because it’s up so high.”

And Mr. Coaker continues in the same strain further than we care to transcribe. Then we have Mr. John Goodwin, “formerly a coach-guard, who sung of the days when there was such a thing, if we may so phrase it, as the poetry of locomotion.” In his poetry, we are told, “there is a genuine ring,” as here, for example:--

“I mind the time, when I was guard,
The lord, the duke, or squire
Would travel by the old stage-coach,
Or post-chaise they would hire.”

Mr. Charles Chorley, who is, we are informed, submanager of the Truro Savings Bank, in verses which are presumably a parody of Sir William Jones’ _Imitation of Alcæus_, inquires, not without a certain propriety, “What constitutes a mine?” On a par with all these are the verses of the bard who “in summer hawked gooseberries and in winter shoelaces,” and those of the “uneducated journeyman woolcomber.”

Now, we need hardly say that the humble vocations of these poets are neither derogatory to them nor in any way detrimental to merit where merit exists; but there is no merit whatever in the poems assigned to them in this volume; they are simply such poems as hawkers, woolcombers, railway porters, and submanagers of provincial banks--“who pen a stanza when they should engross”--might be expected to write. The same may be said of almost every copy of verses, produced by amateurs, to be found in this collection. We have scarcely noticed a single poem which rises above mediocrity; a very large proportion are below even a mediocre standard--they are simply rubbish. In one poet only, among those whose names were not before known to us, do we discern genius, and that is in Mr. John Dryden Hosken, whose poem, entitled _My Masters_, is really excellent.

The editor of this anthology is plainly incompetent, both in point of taste and critical discernment, and in point of knowledge, for the task which he has undertaken. The first is proved by the extracts which he has selected from the works of well-known poets. Coleridge, for example, is represented by two comparatively inferior poems, _The Devil’s Thoughts_ and _Fancy in Nubibus_; Thomas Carew, by two short poems, one of which is probably the worst he ever wrote; Herrick, by two of his very worst; Praed, by two of the feeblest and least characteristic of his poems; Walcot, by mere trash. It is quite possible that their less illustrious brethren may have suffered from the deplorable inability of this editor to discern between what is good and what is bad. Certainly Capern, who was a poet with a touch of genius, suffers, for the lyric given is very far indeed from representing or illustrating his best or even his characteristic work. In giving an account of Alexander Barclay, who, by the way, is called Andrew in the Preface, Mr. Wright says nothing about his most important poems--his Eclogues. If Eustace Budgell is included among the poets, why are not his poems specified and represented? Of Aaron Hill it is observed that “neither his reputation as a poet nor his connexion with the county of Devon is sufficient to warrant more than a mere notice of his name.” Aaron Hill was the author of more than one poem of conspicuous merit. The verses attributed on page 488 to Sir William Yonge were written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. But these are trifles. What we wish to protest against is the foisting of such volumes as these on our libraries; and it is appalling to learn that it is the intention of Mr. Kearley Wright, if he is sufficiently encouraged by subscribers, to follow this with another similar collection. If poets like these wish to gratify their vanity, let them not gratify it to the detriment of serious literature; for, if the few can discriminate, the many cannot, and the multiplication of works like these must infallibly tend to lower the standard of current literature, by furthering the disastrous “cult of the average man.” In our opinion criticism can have no more imperative duty than to discountenance and discourage in every way such projectors as Mr. Kearley Wright and such poets as those for whose merits he and critics like him stand sponsors.

VIRGIL IN ENGLISH HEXAMETERS[45]

[Footnote 45: _The Eclogues of Virgil._ Translated into English Hexameter Verse by the Right Hon. Sir George Osborne Morgan, Bart., Q.C., M.P. London.]

Sir George Osborne Morgan has served his generation in much more important capacities than those of a scholar and a translator of Virgil, and had this little work, therefore, been less meritorious than it is, no critic with a sense of the becoming would deal harshly with it. But it challenges and deserves serious consideration, not only as an attempt to solve a problem of singular interest to students of classical poetry, but as a somewhat ambitious contribution to the literature of translation. Sir Osborne Morgan is, however, mistaken in supposing that in translating Virgil into his own metre he “has undertaken a task which has never been attempted before.” In 1583 Richard Stanihurst published a translation of the first four books of the _Æneid_ in English hexameters; and, if Sir Osborne will turn to Webbe’s _Discourse of English Poetrie_, published as early as 1586, he will find versions in English hexameters of the First and Second Eclogues, while Abraham Fraunce, in a curious volume, entitled _The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivy Church_, which appeared in 1591, has, among the other hexameters in the collection, given a version of the Second Eclogue in this measure. But Sir Osborne Morgan has been more immediately anticipated in his experiment. In 1838 Dr. James Blundell published anonymously, under the title of _Hexametrical Experiments_, versions in hexameters of the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Eclogues, and to this translation he prefixed an elaborate preface, vindicating the employment of the hexameter in English, and explaining its mechanism to the unlearned. Indeed, Blundell arrived at the same conclusion as Sir Osborne Morgan, that the proper medium for an English translation of hexametrical poems in Greek and Latin is the English hexameter. We may, however, hasten to add that Sir Osborne has little to fear from a comparison with his predecessors, who have, indeed, done their best to refute by example their own theory. It may be observed, in passing, that the translations of Virgil into rhymed decasyllabic verse are far more numerous than Sir Osborne Morgan seems to suppose. He is, he says, acquainted only with two--the version by Dryden and Joseph Warton--not seeming to be aware that Warton translated only the _Georgics_ and _Eclogues_, printing Pitt’s version of the _Æneid_. The whole of Virgil was translated into this measure by John Ogilvie between 1649-50, and by the Earl of Lauderdale about 1716, while versions of the _Æneid_, the _Georgics_, and the _Eclogues_, in the same metre, have abounded in every era of our literature, from Gawain Douglas’s translation of the _Æneid_ printed in 1553, to Archdeacon Wrangham’s version of the _Eclogues_ in 1830.

It is no reproach to Sir Osborne Morgan that, in the occupations of a busy political life, his scholarship should have become a little rusty, but it is a pity that he should so often have allowed himself to be caught tripping, when a little timely counsel in the correction of his proof sheets might have prevented this. In the First Eclogue the line

“Non insueta graves temptabunt pabula fetas”

is translated

“Here no unwonted herb shall tempt the travailing cattle.”

What it really means is, no change of fodder, no fodder which is strange to them, shall “infect” or “try” the pregnant cattle, “insueta” being used in exactly the same sense as in Eclogue V. 56, “_insuetum_ miratur limen Olympi,” and “temptare” as it is used in Georg. III. 441, and commonly in classical Latin. It is, to say the least, questionable whether in the couplet--

“Pauperis et tuguri congestum cæspite culmen,
Post aliquot, mea regna videns, mirabor aristas?”--

the last line can mean

“Gaze on the straggling corn, the remains of what once was my kingdom.”

“Aristas” is much more likely to be a metonymy for “messes,” _i.e._ “annos,” like αροτου in Sophocles’ _Trachiniæ_, 69, τον μεν παρελθοντ’ αροτον, a confirmative illustration which seems to have escaped the commentators; but it is difficult to say, and Sir Osborne has, it must be owned, excellent authority for his interpretation. In Eclogue III. the somewhat difficult passage

“pocula ponam
Fagina....
Lenta quibus torno facili superaddita vitis
Diffusos hedera vestit pallente corymbos”--

_i.e._ “where the limber vine wreathed round them by the deft graving tool is twined with pale ivy’s spreading clusters,”--is translated:

“Over whose side the vine by a touch of the graving tool added
Mantles its clustering grapes in the paler leaves of the ivy.”

This is quite wrong. “Corymbos” cannot possibly mean clusters of grapes, but clusters of ivy berries, “hederâ pallente” being substituted, after Virgil’s manner, for “hederæ pallentis.” In Eclogue IV. 24 there is no reason for supposing that the “fallax herba veneni” is hemlock; it is much more likely to be aconite. In line 45 “sandyx” should be translated not “purple” but “crimson,” vague as the colour indicated by “purple” is. In Eclogue V.

“Si quos aut Phyllidis ignes,
Aut Alconis habes laudes, aut jurgia Codri”

is not

“Phyllis’s fiery loves you would sing or the quarrels of Codrus,”

but “your passion for Phyllis, your invectives against Codrus,” “ignes” being used far more becomingly for a man’s love than for a woman’s. So, again, “pro purpureo narcisso” cannot mean what nature never saw, “purple daffodil,” but the white narcissus. In Eclogue VIII. “Sophocleo tua carmina digna cothurno” is turned by what is obviously a _lapsus calami_, “worthy of Sophocles’ sock.” A scholar like Sir Osborne Morgan does not need reminding that the “sock” is a metonymy for Comedy, as Milton anglicizes it in _L’Allegro_, “if Jonson’s learned sock be on.” In the exquisite passage in Eclogue VIII. 41--

“Jam fragiles poteram ab terrâ contingere ramos”--

to translate “fragiles” as “frail” is to miss the whole point of the epithet. What Virgil means is, “I could just reach the branches from the ground and _break them off_”; if it is to be translated by one epithet, it must be “brittle.” Again in the Ninth Eclogue the words

“quâ se subducere colles
_Incipiunt_, mollique jugum demittere clivo,”

do not mean “where the hills with gentle depression steal away into the plain,” but the very opposite: _i.e._ “Where the hills begin to draw themselves up from the plain,” the ascent being contemplated from below. In Eclogue IX., in turning the couplet

“Nam neque adhuc Vario videor, nec dicere Cinnâ
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores,”

the translator has no authority for turning the last verse into “a cackling goose in a chorus of cygnets,” for there is no tradition that cygnets sang, and goose should have been printed with a capital letter to preserve the pun, the allusion being to a poetaster named Anser. Unfortunately for the English translator, our literature can boast no counterpart to “Anser” _totidem literis_, but Goose printed with a capital is near enough to preserve, or suggest the sarcasm. There is another slip in Eclogue X.: “Ferulas” is not “wands of willow” but “fennel.”

Occasionally a touch is introduced which is neither authorized by the original, nor true to nature. There is nothing, for instance to warrant, in Eclogue I. 56, the epithet “odorous” as applied to the willow, nor does “salictum” mean a “willow” but a “willow-bed or plantation.” To translate “ubi tempus erit” by “when the hour shall have struck” reminds us of Shakespeare’s famous anachronism in _Julius Cæsar_ and is as surprising in the work of a scholar as the lengthening of the penultimate in arbutus, “Sweet is the shower to the blade, To the newly weaned kid the arbutus.” As a rule, the translator turns difficult passages very skilfully, but this is not the case with the couplet which concludes the “Pollio”:--

“Incipe, parve puer: cui non risere parentes
Nec deus hunc mensâ, dea nec dignata cubili est”;

that is, the “babe on whom the parent never smiled, no god ever deemed worthy of his board, no goddess of her bed”--in other words, he can never enjoy the rewards of a hero like Hercules; but there is neither sense nor skill, and something very like a serious grammatical error, in

“Who knows not the smile of a parent,
Neither the board of a god nor the bed of a goddess is worthy.”

But to turn from comparative trifles. No one who reads this version of the _Eclogues_ can doubt that Sir Osborne Morgan has proved his point, that the English hexameter, when skilfully used, is the measure best adapted for reproducing Virgil’s music in English. The following passage (_Ec._ VII. 45-48) is happily turned; let us place the original beside the translation:--

“Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,
Et quæ vos rarâ viridis tegit arbutus umbrâ,
Solstitium pecori defendite: jam venit æstas
Torrida, jam læto turgent in palmite gemmæ.”

“Moss-grown fountains and sward more soft than the softest of slumbers,
Arbutus tree that flings over both its flickering shadows,
Shelter my flock from the sun. Already the summer is on us,
Summer that scorches up all! See the bud on the glad vine is swelling.”

Again (_Ec._ X. 41-48):--

“Serta mihi Phyllis legeret, cantaret Amyntas:
Hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori,
Hic nemus: hic ipso tecum consumerer ævo.
Nunc insanus amor duri me Martis in armis
Tela inter media atque adversos detinet hostes:
Tu procul a patriâ--nec sit mihi credere tantum!--
Alpinas, ah dura, nives et frigora Rheni
Me sine sola vides.”

“Phyllis would gather me flowers and Amyntas a melody chant me;
Cool is the fountain’s wave and soft is the meadow, Lycoris;
Shady the grove! Here with thee I would die of old age in the greenwood.
Mad is the lust of war, that now in the heart of the battle
Chains me where darts fall fast, and the charge of the foemen is fiercest,
Far, far away from your home--Oh, would that I might not believe it--
Lost amid Alpine snows or the frozen desolate Rhineland,
Lonely without me you wander.”

Many other felicitous passages might be quoted; indeed, there is no Eclogue without them; but the translator is not sure-footed, and, if he occasionally illustrates the hexameter in its excellence, he illustrates, unhappily too often, some of its worst defects. Two qualities are indispensable to the success of this measure in English. Our language, unlike the classical languages, being accentual and not quantitative, if the long syllable is not represented where the stress naturally falls, and the short syllables where it does not fall, the effect is sometimes grotesque, sometimes distressing, and always unsatisfactory. Nothing, for example, could be worse in their various ways than the following:--

“Wept when you saw they were given the lad, and had you not managed.”
“Let not the frozen air harm you.”
“Scatter the sand with his hind hoofs.”
“The pliant growth of the osier.”
“Worthy of Sophocles’ sock, trumpet-tongued through the Universe echo.”
“Own’d it himself, and yet he would not deliver it to me.”

A very nice ear, too, is required to adjust the collocation of words in which either vowels or consonants predominate, and the relative position of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, the predominance of the former in our language increasing enormously the difficulty. No measure, moreover, so easily runs into intolerable monotony--a monotony which Clough sought to avoid by overweighting his verses with spondees, and which Longfellow illustrates by the cloying predominance of the dactylic movement. Sir Osborne Morgan tells us that he took Kingsley as his model. Kingsley’s hexameters are respectable, but they have no distinction, and he had certainly not a good ear. Longfellow’s are far better, and are sometimes exquisitely felicitous, as in a couplet like the following, which, with the exception of one word, is flawless:--

“Men whose lives glided on like the rivers that water the woodlands,
Darken’d by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of Heaven.”

Probably the best hexameters which have been composed in English are those in William Watson’s _Hymn to the Sea_ and those in which Hawtry translated Iliad III. 234-244, and the parting of Hector and Andromache in the Sixth Iliad, models--these versions--not merely of translation, but of hexametrical structure. There are, however, certain magical effects, particularly in the Virgilian hexameter, produced by an exquisite but audacious tact in the employment of licences, which can never be reproduced in English.

Such would be--

“Nam neque Parnassi vobis juga, nam neque Pindi
Ulla moram fecere, neque Aonie Aganippe.
Illum etiam lauri, etiam flevere myricæ;
Pinifer illum etiam solâ sub rupe jacentem
Mænalus et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycæi.”

Milton, and Milton alone among Englishmen, had the secret of this music, but he elicited it from another instrument.

THE LATEST EDITION OF THOMSON[46]

[Footnote 46: _The Poetical Works of James Thomson._ A New Edition, with Memoir and Critical Appendices, by the Rev. D. C. Tovey. 2 vols. London.]