Chapter IX: Act V: from 'The Marriage of Guenevere.' ('Spring' first published in

_Poet-lore_, is included in 'Along the Trail' ($1.25), which also contains the sonnets here selected. 'Taliesin' also originally published in _Poet-lore_, Vol. VIII, old series, January, February, and June, 1896, pp. 1-14, 63-78, 292-306, is recently published in 1 vol. uniform with 'The Marriage of Guenevere' ($1.50). 'The Wander-lovers' appears in 'Vagabondia.' Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. A general review of Hovey's work will be the second of the 'Contemporary Writer Series' in next _Poet-lore_.)

_Queries for Discussion_.--Has Hovey's way of telling the story of Guenevere and Launcelot an advantage realistically over Tennyson's, but none either poetically or ethically? (See on this query, 'The Disloyal Wife in Literature: Comparative Study Programme,' _Poet-lore_, Vol. I., new series, pp. 265-274, Spring Number, 1897.) Does Hovey attain greatness by his liveliness and human quality joined to varied and skilful metrical effects? Is 'Taliesin' his best work, or is his best work done in his short pieces?

6. Bliss Carman.

_Readings_:--'Spring Song,' 'A More Ancient Mariner,' 'Envoy,' 'Beyond the Gaspereau,' 'Behind the Arras,' 'The Cruise of the Galleon,' 'A Song before Sailing,' 'The Lodger,' 'Beyond the Gamut,' 'The Ships of St. John,' 'The Marring of Malyn.' (The first, second, and third are in 'Vagabondia'; the fourth in _Poet-lore_, Vol. I., new series, pp. 321-329, Summer Number, 1897; the next five in 'Behind the Arras' ($1.50); the others in 'Ballads of Lost Haven' ($1.00). Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.)

_Query for Discussion_.--Is Carman better in his earlier descriptive lyrics, or better in his later symbolical lyrics because these being richer in interest are stronger to hold the deeper reader?

7. Hannah Parker Kimball.

_Readings_:--'Revelation,' 'The Smoke,' 'The Sower,' 'Consummation,' 'Glory of Earth,' 'Primitive Man,' 'Man to Nature,' 'Eavesdroppers,' 'Social Appeal,' 'The Quiet Land Within,' 'The Saving of Judas Iscariot.' (The first four of the poems named are in 'Soul and Sense,' 75 cents; the last in _Poet-lore_, Vol. I., new series, pp. 161-168, Spring Number, 1897; the others in 'Victory and Other Poems.' Boston: Copeland & Day, now Small, Maynard & Co.)

_Queries for Discussion_.--Does Miss Kimball's portraiture of Judas Iscariot reveal a capacity for dramatically creating development in character? Are her lyrics too grave, or is it their especial blend of high seriousness and intellectual insight with unforced expression which gives them unusual richness?

_The Editors._

* * * * *

SONGS FROM THE GHETTO AND A VISION OF
HELLAS.

Conceived amid the heat and discomfort of the sweating-shops, born in poverty and squalid surroundings, growing up with hunger and despair and failure, and at last an honored guest at the table of ease and culture--such is the history of the 'Songs from the Ghetto' by Morris Rosenfeld. Mr. Rosenfeld was born of poor parents in Poland in 1862. Wandering in search of work in England and Holland, he at length found a scanty means of support as a tailor in the sweating-shops of New York. Of miserable origin, poorly educated, struggling for the barest necessities of life, there was yet in him a poet's soul, struggling for expression.

The poems of Mr. Rosenfeld, written in the Judeo-German dialect, which he has brought to great literary perfection, have been collected, translated into English prose and edited by Professor Leo Wiener, instructor in Slavic languages at Harvard.

The songs in this little volume are very beautiful, but whether they sing of labour or nature, of the shop or the country, there is in every one a strain of sadness, the melody of each is broken with tears. For the beauty of which the poet sings, the birds and the flowers, are only dreams from which he wakes to the misery in his life. It is not the bitter sadness of hate and rebellion, but the sadness of the Jewish race, resigned and oppressed, expecting no happiness among an alien people, but looking for a life of peace in a new Jerusalem.

"Again your lime will be fragrant, and your orange will gleam," he comforts the wanderer, "again God will awaken and bring you thither. You will sing Shepherd songs as you will herd your sheep; you will live again, live eternally, without end. After your terrible wanderings you will again breathe freely; there will again beat a hero's heart under the silent mountain Moriah."

The songs are not all of labour, or of the sorrows of the Jews. In lighter vein is 'The Nightingale to the Labourer,' 'The Creation of Man'--which contains the pretty idea that the poet alone was given wings, and an angel stood always "ready day and night to attach the wings to him whenever his holy song will rise."

The last song in the little volume, called 'In the Wilderness,' is typical of the poet's spirit; but not, we believe, of his place in the world. For the world is always ready to listen to a song that carries with it the impress of truth and beauty.

"In a distant wilderness a bird stands alone and looks about him, sadly, and sings a beautiful song.

"His heavenly-sweet voice flows like the purest gold, and wakens the cold stones and the prairie wide and deserted.

"He wakens the dead rocks and the silent mountains round about,--but the dead remain dead, and the silent remain silent.

"For whom, sweet singer, do your clear tones resound? Who hears you, and who feels you? And whose concern are you?

"You may put your whole soul into your singing. You will not awaken a heart in the cold, hard rock!

"You will not sing there long,--I feel it, I know it: your heart will soon burst with loneliness and woe.

"In vain is your endeavour, it will not help you, no! Alone you have come, and alone you will pass away!"

'A Vison of New Hellas' is one of the books that is destined to be more important than interesting, more noteworthy than popular. The conception is certainly very beautiful and very wonderful even if the author does not always reach the height of expression towards which he aims. But it is a book which can only appeal to the few, who are ready to search beneath the covering of fantastic imagery and strange verse forms which clothe a high poetic purpose and ideal. Even those who come to the work with a knowledge of the songs of old Hellas and the philosophy of Plato must feel deeply grateful for the elucidating of the meaning of the book in an argument which the author has kindly supplied to forestall the vain imaginings of the uninitiated.

The poet's aim is as serious as was that of Milton or Dante--"to realize as best he can such visions of beauty as may be vouchsafed to him," that through his work he may "make richer the human world in things of the spirit that quicken and delight."

In contemplation the poet rises above the mists of sordidness which rise from the struggle of trade and industry, beyond the clouds of pessimism and religious doubt, and on the Pisgah heights of Hellenic culture he sees a vision of the new life that shall come to man.

Through the beautiful world-myth, the story of Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus, the poet is taught the lesson of the immortality of the race, of its ceaseless progression toward a nobler and more beautiful future. To celebrate their happiness at the discovery that Aidoneus, dread King of Death, is none other than the Lord of Life "leader of the blessed to the highest heaven," they resolve to bring about the redemption of the world.

This is made possible through the union of Aphrodite, Beauty of Form, with Apollo, Light of the Mind. From them shall spring a new race of Gods, typifying the new ideals which shall uplift man until he is fitted for fellowship at the banquet of the Immortals. Thence will rise "a nobler, a larger mankind," wakened at length from "the night of toil, unhallowed by joy in the task." Through Aphrodite will come "feeling and loving--and art that bids death defiance," and through Apollo "seeing and knowing and man's life-mastering science." Thence shall come

"The lover's rapture Elysian,
The poet's fury, the prophet's vision,
The serene world-sight of the thinker."

This vision typified the future regeneration of America and through her of the race. From the sordid reality of present conditions man must advance ever nearer to the "eternal ideal"; from mean conditions, inspired by lofty emotions and holy enthusiasms, shall come new standards of life and of art.

Mr. Guthrie's work indicates in its form some of the characteristics of the new literary art. Though his theories are undoubtedly good, the expression is as yet too crude to form much idea of its possibilities. Whatever may be the age of the author, his work indicates a certain inexperience and lacks the grasp and finish of the skilled workman. His work is too reminiscent; he has not sufficiently assimilated his sources and impressed them with his own individuality, giving them a distinctive unity of conception and expression. Though we are quite willing to accept his assurance that he "did not intend his work to resemble any known performance," we are continually reminded of passages in other writers who had inspired him. At times we are struck with admiration at his power for catching the very trick of his model.

His work is as "oddly suited" as was Portia's lover. For he suggests to us--Homer and the Greek tragedians of course in theme and expression; Milton and Dante with their lofty ideals; Piers Ploughman dreaming about his "fair field full of folk." For the conception he owes much to Shelley's 'Prometheus,' whose theme is very similar, but his methods are more modern, with verse theories of Whitman, philosophy of Browning, a Wagnerian idea of rhythm, making each rhythmical theme represent a peculiar mood or image, which is frequently very effective but sometimes forced.

_Harriott S. Olive._

(Songs from the Ghetto, by Morris Rosenfeld. With Introduction, Prose Translation, and Glossary. By Leo Weiner, Instructor in the Slavic Languages at Harvard University. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.--A Vision of New Hellas--Songs of American Destiny. William Norman Guthrie. Clarke Publishing Company. Chicago: $2.50.)

* * * * *

COL. HIGGINSON'S 'CONTEMPORARIES' AND MRS.
HOWE'S 'REMINISCENCES.'

Colonel Higginson might have added to his 'Contemporaries' as a sub-title: 'Our Nineteenth Century Roll of Honor,' for he makes mention, either brief or extended, in his book, of nearly all the men and women of the age who would be entitled to a place on such a roll. It gives one's patriotism a thrill, on looking down the list, to see how long and splendid a one it is, to note what fine thoughts, emotions, and achievements stand representative in the brief sketches of the period of our national existence which the author has observed and shared in. Patriotic fervor for the past, and, arguing from the past, a renewed hope in the national future, are the dominant feelings the book begets. Not that the author has emphasized the bequests of statesmen and reformers to the country, to the neglect of other influences. The volume contains nineteen sketches; and the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, the man of private though beneficent life, have all places therein; yet all is woven into a whole with one aspect, the national one.

All of the sketches are, as the preface states, reprinted pieces first published in different periodicals any time during the past fifty years. Since from this point of view the volume can have little or no consecutiveness, it is noteworthy that a picture of the times is nevertheless obtained unbroken in its continuity. Every sketch, however fragmentary a part of the life of its subject, has the vigor of its surroundings; and the papers upon the men and women of the Abolitionist period and the Civil War, though most of them have been somewhat revised for their present publication, have the heart-beats of the "times that tried men's souls" throbbing in them true and loud.

One paper, upon John Brown's Household, printed in 1859 and quite unaltered, preserves by the splendid restraint of its simple language the very spirit of the iron endeavor and concentred force it describes.

The value of an author's judgment upon his contemporaries, is unquestioned; the advantage of a personal share in the lives and actions of the men who form his theme, added to our already confidence in his critical judgment, give it worth over other proved biography. On the deeds of many of the men whose work he commemorates, Fame has yet to pronounce lastly: their services are too recent for a perfect judgment. But testimony such as this will surely have value in a decision.

One feels a little inclined to quarrel with the author that there is so little "I" in his book, that there are so few really personal glimpses, but of course this is too much to ask of a book which is really a compilation of scattered sketches; and perhaps Colonel Higginson will remedy the lack in the future.

It is seldom that one has the pleasure of reading so satisfying and delightful a piece of autobiography as Mrs. Howe's 'Reminiscences.' One hardly knows, when the last page is turned, which of two capacities of the mind has been more completely filled and brimmed over: that of intellectual appreciation, or the well where abides the feeling of delighted enthusiasm which is inspired by our friend. We respond to the pleasure the reading gives us with a really personal sense of gratitude.

The subject matter of the book could not have been of other than deep interest. Mrs. Howe's long and beautiful life has been lived in surroundings of the highest culture of her time; the events of which she has written are those which will take their place in the history of the century just closing; and finally, the men and women who were her friends and in whose labors she shared, were the men and women whose opinions have largely moulded the events. But it is not all this, of unfailing interest though it must be, that gives the book its finest quality, and that makes one wish to read it over the moment one has read it through. It is, instead, that we have learned so much of a beauty-gifted and beauty-giving life in words at once so simple and so satisfying. Cheeriness and healthiness--if by the latter word one may express a certain poise and normalness of outlook--are the characteristics of the narrative. The great and the small of life each receive their just due; perhaps it is by her treatment of the small that we are best assured we have read into an intimacy with Mrs. Howe. That perennial question as to the feminine lack of humor, which has lately been re-threshed in the newspapers, should receive final and silencing reply--had it ever deserved a reply at all--in the 'Reminiscences.' The narrative twinkles with keen appreciation of the humorous, the ludicrous, even of the deliciously nonsensical; also abounding in that larger sort of humor which does not consist in seeing the point to a joke, but which makes life bearable and judgments tender under conditions least likely to keep them so.

Assuredly Mrs. Howe did not put together the recollections of her life with primarily didactic purpose, just as assuredly she did not write them down primarily for the benefit of the American young woman. Yet in view of the cause to which she has given the work of her latter years, it is permitted me to say that no greater encouragement could be given it for the future than the words from which we learn her personal services to it and to the other causes which she has aided with brain and hands throughout her life. _Helen Tracy Porter._

(Contemporaries, By Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1899. $2.00. Reminiscences: Julia Ward Howe. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Boston and New York. $2.50.)

* * * * *

LIFE AND LETTERS.

----The last scenes in the present-day epoch of commercialism promise to be like the last scenes in the old-time epoch of feudalism, picturesque, violent, and significant rendings and tearings of the whole body politic prior to a re-formation on the basis of a larger unity. Then they portended the unification of England under the Tudors, or the unification of France under the eleventh Louis. Now they portend--what?

Some larger, more spiritual unity, it may be guessed, that shall quietly and with unprecedented swiftness make use of the materialistic objects which the short-sighted leaders of commercialism now have in mind, and after a manner they no more dream is implied in their success than the royal dynasties of England and France dreamed that the bloody heads of kings would be the fruit of the new nationality.

* * *

----To the leaders of the commercial world-movement, their materialistic objects are ends in themselves, very substance of very substance. But the Time-spirit already laughs them to scorn and tosses them, as mere tools out of place, to some more convenient corner of her spacious work-shop, where they make but one with a mass of other such tools awaiting the mastery of her history-shaping hand.

The tumults of South Africa and China are but signs of the vaster tumult in which these tumults shall be devoured and assimilated.

* * *

----In the world of faith, too, how restless is the aggregate organism! Ruptures and dissolutions are splitting and fusing orthodoxies and heterodoxies.

And in the withdrawn and secret world of the human consciousness the ferment of new desires and potencies, opposed by all the organized and settled forces of opinion, is permeating thought, and stirring the slumbering soul to try the unguessed faculties of its idealism, as if the real king of the total Unquietness held there his throne.

The world of politics and commerce, the world of faith and intelligence tend, it would seem, already, towards that synthetic development foreseen in 1855, by one whom the obtuse world may yet have reason enough to recognize as one of the clearest-brained statesmen of the nineteenth century, though her trade was poetry not politics--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when she said of the future:

"What I expect is a great development of Christianity in opposition to the churches, and of humanity generally in opposition to the nations."

* * *

GOETHE'S IPHIGENIE AT HARVARD.

It is an age of the universality of genius. Not only the treasures of our own literature in our own day, but the best that has been written in all lands in all ages, the best that is being thought and sung in every tongue to-day is ours. And the test of what is good is no longer that it appeals to the people of a certain period or race, but that it appeals to and expresses the spirit of humanity, that it fills a place in a _Welt-Litteratur_.

A striking instance of the power of the present to interpret the spirit of the past was the performance of Goethe's Iphigenie at Harvard on the sixty-eighth anniversary of Goethe's death. Professor Kuno Franke, writing in the New York Evening Post speaks of Iphigenie as "the worthiest production of artistic genius to represent German ideals to a distinctly academic audience at the foremost of American universities." This it seems to us Iphigenie emphatically is _not_. In conscious imitation of Greek tragedy in the literary form and expression, as well as in the details of the story, it is Greek; in its psychological treatment, in the idea that personal salvation comes only through self-sacrifice, it is distinctively modern, but not German, in subject, expression or treatment.

Although the choice of Iphigenie as a representative German play was not justified, certainly nothing could have better expressed the genius of the greatest of German poets. The greatness of Goethe!--that was the fact of all others demonstrated by the performance of Iphigenie. He has given us a play which realizes the ideals of the Greek poets and sculptors, a play instinct with the deepest reverence of the Greek religion, yet at the same time a play which expressed the deepest emotions of a great spiritual revolution in his own life; a play which may be considered as a presentation of the very spirit of that Christianity which findeth its soul in losing it. One of its leading critics says of Iphigenie--"its ideals are not those of Greece or of Germany, or of any nationality or time, but rather the realization of the highest and noblest aspirations of mankind in all lands and all tongues."

A universal literature is but the child of a universal religion, of that yearning toward the good and beautiful and true which has been the guiding star of man since the world began. The struggle in his own soul; the mystic meaning of a pagan faith, that in passing has touched all succeeding ages with some measure of its radiant beauty; the poet's vision of the future spiritual triumph of the race; all these Goethe united in one artistic expression, and the result is one of the great poems of the world.

The presentation of the play at Harvard was a marvellous exhibition of the power of a great artistic conception to carry an audience with it in enthusiastic appreciation of the spirit, without the necessity for an understanding of the medium of expression. Back of all expression is the spirit of its author, and as a beautiful voice interprets the meaning of the song written in an unknown tongue, so these German actors by the power of an art statuesque in its beauty, musical in expression, deeply spiritual in its interpretation of the poet's soul, revealed to the audience the wondrous charm of Iphigenie. In a foreign tongue they portrayed the emotions of mythical heroes long dead in a distant land, and as we watched and listened the mythical dead became living mortals, and we understood their suffering and their heroism, saw the agony of the spiritual struggle, realized the force of the great temptation, knew the joy of the final victory.

A great poet, a drama of transcendent power and beauty, actors of consummate art, an enthusiastic audience,--nothing was lacking to make the event a memorable one. _H. S. O._

* * *

----At a recent debate at the 'Philadelphia Browning Society' Miss Mary M. Cohen, the founder and first president of the Society and now one of its vice-presidents, opened the discussion with the following bright paper written to the question:--

Is Browning to be ranked as a legitimate member of the Victorian School?

Certainly he is. If any one tries to prove that he is not entitled to the claim, it must be because the poet has so much more of brilliant mental make-up than most of the Victorian writers that the critics are dazzled.

They want to cut and fit a man's ability and achievement to a particular class of work, to press him down, as it were, into a jelly-mould and say, "There, take that shape and mind, not a drop of you is to spill over!" It is a good deal like a woman when asked her age; she often says, "I am twenty"; so she is, dear thing, and frequently much more, besides. Our poet is a Victorian poet and gloriously transcends them all. "If this be treason, make the most of it." My opponent is no doubt carefully writing down this challenge with a view to crushing me later, but unlike my sex in general, I do not want the last word, if I can only get the first. "He laughs best who laughs last" has always had rather a prejudiced sound in my ears; on the contrary, he who makes the first score has often a tremendous advantage. A charming young artist, a friend of mine, has thrown a certain light upon the subject of this debate: She said, "Victorian always suggests to me something housekeepery and mutton-choppy: Is Browning mutton-choppy?" I suppose that the adversary will answer this.

In one of the popular manuals of English literature, we find Tennyson and Browning described as the two masters of Victorian poetry. My definition of a poet of the Victorian School would be that he should combine a musical versification with ethical, philosophical and artistic thought. I believe that Tennyson is generally received as an example. If Shelley be accepted as a Victorian School poet, then it is absolutely certain that Browning, having absorbed Shelley until poetic inspiration was fused to a white heat, may be held to represent the Victorian School in gigantic and overwhelming form. Although it has been said that "until late years Browning has been entirely at variance with the tendencies of his time and for nearly forty years represented that opposition to the poetry of the age which has recently been made prominent by a small band of poetical innovators of whom Swinburne is the most extreme," still I feel justified in my claim. Browning incorporated the introspective philosophy of his period in his work, and also displayed in many of his writings the musical sweetness which is supposed especially to mark the Victorian poets. Think of his poem of 'Saul,' forceful, yet melodious, suffused with the intense interest of the Biblical story, glorified by the superb imagery of a mind dwelling in a time of psychological inquiry. Almost the whole of 'Asolando' is musical. Remember the poem 'Reverie':

"I know there shall dawn a day
--Is it here on homely earth?
Is it yonder, worlds away,
Where the strange and new have birth
That Power comes full in play?"

Note the influence which contemporary events must have on a man like Browning: in 1851 the great Exhibition, the first of the series held later in different countries, and stimulating in its effects upon the intellectual, social and spiritual culture of the poet: in 1854 the Crimean War, conducted with France against Russia who had appropriated the Turkish principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, and made famous by such battles as Alma, Balaklava and Inkermann. In 1853 came Florence Nightingale with her reform in hospital service. In 1858 the Atlantic cable was laid. In 1888 came the "Philadelphia Browning Society." No one of the Victorian poets was mentally organized by these events, the last excepted, as was Browning. The critic Alexander has said "A man's work is determined not only by the character of his genius, but also by the conditions of his age. Homer would not write a great epic, were he alive now, nor Shakespeare great dramas."

'Prospice' is another instance of melodious verse, expressing thought exalted, philosophical and spiritual.

Who is not impressed with the strength and sweep of 'Cristina'?

"There are flashes struck from mid-nights, there are fire-flames
noon-days kindle,
Whereby piled-up honors perish, Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle."

We cannot ignore the graceful flow of 'Confessions':

"How sad and bad and mad it was--
But then, how it was sweet!"

I must also quote what seems to me a very vital tribute to his genius:

"Browning is one of the very few men--Mr. Meredith excepted--who can paint women without idealization or degradation, not from the man's side, but from their own; as living equals, not as goddesses or as toys." His poetry has been described as "superb landscape painting in verse." Swinburne differentiates Browning's work as marked by decisive and incisive faculty of thought, sureness and intensity of perception, rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. 'The Ring and the Book' is the masterpiece of this great Victorian master.

If then it be remembered that Browning ranks high as a humorist, that he has brilliant and subtle qualities, that he could appreciate and translate into poetry the stirring events of both sacred and profane history; that he drew Religion in all shapes to his side, that Mythology and Orientalism were his boon companions; that he moulded Art to his purpose, allured Music by his call, won Philosophy by his gaze, looked Truth in the eyes; there can be little or no doubt that he was the greatest of all the poets of the Victorian School and in his single person united all the highest characteristics of his literary contemporaries. Through him the Victorian School was raised to a height and deepened to a depth that without him it never would have had.

_Mary M. Cohen._

* * *

----Is there anything that so forcibly brings home to us the foreign point of view or rather the point of tongue and point of ear that makes a Frenchman's expression alien to ours, than to see how he explains the proper English pronunciation of English? Here is the way, for example, that he elaborately spells out the sound of 'Much Ado About Nothing' in a dictionary of Foreign Names and Phrases: "Meutch a-dou a-boutt' neuth' igne." And of course our point of ear is quite as droll to him.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 1: In 'The Broken Heart,' John Ford, 1633, Calantha, addressing the dead body of her betrothed husband, says: "Now turn I to thee, thou shadow Of my departed lord." Antony refers to his dead body as "a mangled shadow"; 'Antony and Cleopatra,' iv., 2, 27. Shakespeare elsewhere refers to disembodied spirits as "shadows"; as in 'Richard III,' i, 4, 53; _Ibid_., v, 3, 216; 'Cymbeline, v, 4, 97; and 'Titus Andronicus,' I, 1, 126.]

[Footnote 2: For 'I. A Group of British Poets' see _Poet-lore_, Vol. III. (New Series), End Year Number 1899. Pp. 610-612.]

End of Project Gutenberg's The Three Heron's Feathers, by Hermann Sudermann

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