Chapter XIII: Part 13

However, Mr. Sharp does not always write in dialect. The Son of Allan can be read without any difficulty, and Phantasy can be read with pleasure. They are both very charming poems in their way, and none the less charming because the cadences of the one recall Sister Helen, and the motive of the other reminds us of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But those who wish thoroughly to enjoy Mr. Sharp's poems should not read his preface; just as those who approve of the preface should avoid reading the poems. I cannot help saying that I think the preface a great mistake. The work that follows it is quite inadequate, and there seems little use in heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and proclaiming a Renaissance whose first-fruits, if we are to judge them by any high standard of perfection, are of so ordinary a character.

* * * * *

Miss Mary Robinson has also written a preface to her little volume, Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play, but the preface is not very serious, and does not propose any drastic change or any immediate revolution in English literature. Miss Robinson's poems have always the charm of delicate music and graceful expression; but they are, perhaps, weakest where they try to be strong, and certainly least satisfying where they seek to satisfy. Her fanciful flower-crowned Muse, with her tripping steps and pretty, wilful ways, should not write Antiphons to the Unknowable, or try to grapple with abstract intellectual problems. Hers is not the hand to unveil mysteries, nor hers the strength for the solving of secrets. She should never leave her garden, and as for her wandering out into the desert to ask the Sphinx questions, that should be sternly forbidden to her. Durer's Melancolia, that serves as the frontispiece to this dainty book, looks sadly out of place. Her seat is with the sibyls, not with the nymphs. What has she to do with shepherdesses piping about Darwinism and 'The Eternal Mind'?

However, if the Songs of the Inner Life are not very successful, the Spring Songs are delightful. They follow each other like wind-blown petals, and make one feel how much more charming flower is than fruit, apple-blossom than apple. There are some artistic temperaments that should never come to maturity, that should always remain in the region of promise and should dread autumn with its harvesting more than winter with its frosts. Such seems to me the temperament that this volume reveals. The first poem of the second series, La Belle au Bois Dormant, is worth all the more serious and thoughtful work, and has far more chance of being remembered. It is not always to high aim and lofty ambition that the prize is given. If Daphne had gone to meet Apollo, she would never have known what laurels are.

From these fascinating spring lyrics and idylls we pass to the romantic ballads. One artistic faculty Miss Robinson certainly possesses--the faculty of imitation. There is an element of imitation in all the arts; it is to be found in literature as much as in painting, and the danger of valuing it too little is almost as great as the danger of setting too high a value upon it. To catch, by dainty mimicry, the very mood and manner of antique work, and yet to retain that touch of modern passion without which the old form would be dull and empty; to win from long-silent lips some faint echo of their music, and to add to it a music of one's own; to take the mode and fashion of a bygone age, and to experiment with it, and search curiously for its possibilities; there is a pleasure in all this. It is a kind of literary acting, and has something of the charm of the art of the stage-player. And how well, on the whole, Miss Robinson does it! Here is the opening of the ballad of Rudel:

There was in all the world of France
No singer half so sweet:
The first note of his viol brought
A crowd into the street.

He stepped as young, and bright, and glad
As Angel Gabriel.
And only when we heard him sing
Our eyes forgot Rudel.

And as he sat in Avignon,
With princes at their wine,
In all that lusty company
Was none so fresh and fine.

His kirtle's of the Arras-blue,
His cap of pearls and green;
His golden curls fall tumbling round
The fairest face I've seen.

How Gautier would have liked this from the same poem!--

Hew the timbers of sandal-wood,
And planks of ivory;
Rear up the shining masts of gold,
And let us put to sea.

Sew the sails with a silken thread
That all are silken too;
Sew them with scarlet pomegranates
Upon a sheet of blue.

Rig the ship with a rope of gold
And let us put to sea.
And now, good-bye to good Marseilles,
And hey for Tripoli!

The ballad of the Duke of Gueldres's wedding is very clever:

'O welcome, Mary Harcourt,
Thrice welcome, lady mine;
There's not a knight in all the world
Shall be as true as thine.

'There's venison in the aumbry, Mary,
There's claret in the vat;
Come in, and breakfast in the hall
Where once my mother sat!'

O red, red is the wine that flows,
And sweet the minstrel's play,
But white is Mary Harcourt
Upon her wedding-day.

O many are the wedding guests
That sit on either side;
But pale below her crimson flowers
And homesick is the bride.

Miss Robinson's critical sense is at once too sound and too subtle to allow her to think that any great Renaissance of Romance will necessarily follow from the adoption of the ballad-form in poetry; but her work in this style is very pretty and charming, and The Tower of St. Maur, which tells of the father who built up his little son in the wall of his castle in order that the foundations should stand sure, is admirable in its way. The few touches of archaism in language that she introduces are quite sufficient for their purpose, and though she fully appreciates the importance of the Celtic spirit in literature, she does not consider it necessary to talk of 'blawing' and 'snawing.' As for the garden play, Our Lady of the Broken Heart, as it is called, the bright, birdlike snatches of song that break in here and there--as the singing does in Pippa Passes--form a very welcome relief to the somewhat ordinary movement of the blank verse, and suggest to us again where Miss Robinson's real power lies. Not a poet in the true creative sense, she is still a very perfect artist in poetry, using language as one might use a very precious material, and producing her best work by the rejection of the great themes and large intellectual motives that belong to fuller and richer song. When she essays such themes, she certainly fails. Her instrument is the reed, not the lyre. Only those should sing of Death whose song is stronger than Death is.

* * * * *

The collected poems of the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, have a pathetic interest as the artistic record of a very gracious and comely life. They bring us back to the days when Philip Bourke Marston was young--'Philip, my King,' as she called him in the pretty poem of that name; to the days of the Great Exhibition, with the universal piping about peace; to those later terrible Crimean days, when Alma and Balaclava were words on the lips of our poets; and to days when Leonora was considered a very romantic name.

Leonora, Leonora,
How the word rolls--Leonora.
Lion-like in full-mouthed sound,
Marching o'er the metric ground,
With a tawny tread sublime.
So your name moves, Leonora,
Down my desert rhyme.

Mrs. Craik's best poems are, on the whole, those that are written in blank verse; and these, though not prosaic, remind one that prose was her true medium of expression. But some of the rhymed poems have considerable merit. These may serve as examples of Mrs. Craik's style:

A SKETCH

Dost thou thus love me, O thou all beloved,
In whose large store the very meanest coin
Would out-buy my whole wealth? Yet here thou comest
Like a kind heiress from her purple and down
Uprising, who for pity cannot sleep,
But goes forth to the stranger at her gate--
The beggared stranger at her beauteous gate--
And clothes and feeds; scarce blest till she has blest.

But dost thou love me, O thou pure of heart,
Whose very looks are prayers? What couldst thou see
In this forsaken pool by the yew-wood's side,
To sit down at its bank, and dip thy hand,
Saying, 'It is so clear!'--and lo! ere long,
Its blackness caught the shimmer of thy wings,
Its slimes slid downward from thy stainless palm,
Its depths grew still, that there thy form might rise.

THE NOVICE

It is near morning. Ere the next night fall
I shall be made the bride of heaven. Then home
To my still marriage-chamber I shall come,
And spouseless, childless, watch the slow years crawl.

These lips will never meet a softer touch
Than the stone crucifix I kiss; no child
Will clasp this neck. Ah, virgin-mother mild,
Thy painted bliss will mock me overmuch.

This is the last time I shall twist the hair
My mother's hand wreathed, till in dust she lay:
The name, her name given on my baptism day,
This is the last time I shall ever bear.

O weary world, O heavy life, farewell!
Like a tired child that creeps into the dark
To sob itself asleep, where none will mark,--
So creep I to my silent convent cell.

Friends, lovers whom I loved not, kindly hearts
Who grieve that I should enter this still door,
Grieve not. Closing behind me evermore,
Me from all anguish, as all joy, it parts.

The volume chronicles the moods of a sweet and thoughtful nature, and though many things in it may seem somewhat old-fashioned, it is still very pleasant to read, and has a faint perfume of withered rose-leaves about it.

(1) A Book of Verses. By William Ernest Henley. (David Nutt.)

(2) Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy. By William Sharp. (Walter Scott.)

(3) Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play. By A. Mary F. Robinson. (Fisher Unwin.)

(4) Poems. By the Author of John Halifax, Gentleman. (Macmillan and Co.)

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD'S LAST VOLUME

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 11, 1888.)

Writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets. They may crowd their page with gorgeous epithet and resplendent phrase, may pile Pelions of adjectives upon Ossas of descriptions, may abandon themselves to highly coloured diction and rich luxuriance of imagery, but if their verse lacks the true rhythmical life of verse, if their method is devoid of the self- restraint of the real artist, all their efforts are of very little avail. 'Asiatic' prose is possibly useful for journalistic purposes, but 'Asiatic' poetry is not to be encouraged. Indeed, poetry may be said to need far more self-restraint than prose. Its conditions are more exquisite. It produces its effects by more subtle means. It must not be allowed to degenerate into mere rhetoric or mere eloquence. It is, in one sense, the most self-conscious of all the arts, as it is never a means to an end but always an end in itself. Sir Edwin Arnold has a very picturesque or, perhaps we should say, a very pictorial style. He knows India better than any living Englishman knows it, and Hindoostanee better than any English writer should know it. If his descriptions lack distinction, they have at least the merit of being true, and when he does not interlard his pages with an interminable and intolerable series of foreign words he is pleasant enough. But he is not a poet. He is simply a poetical writer--that is all.

However, poetical writers have their uses, and there is a good deal in Sir Edwin Arnold's last volume that will repay perusal. The scene of the story is placed in a mosque attached to the monument of the Taj-Mahal, and a group composed of a learned Mirza, two singing girls with their attendant, and an Englishman, is supposed to pass the night there reading the chapter of Sa'di upon 'Love,' and conversing upon that theme with accompaniments of music and dancing. The Englishman is, of course, Sir Edwin Arnold himself:

lover of India,
Too much her lover! for his heart lived there
How far soever wandered thence his feet.

Lady Dufferin appears as

Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen's Vice-queen!

which is really one of the most dreadful blank-verse lines that we have come across for some time past. M. Renan is 'a priest of Frangestan,' who writes in 'glittering French'; Lord Tennyson is

One we honour for his songs--
Greater than Sa'di's self--

and the Darwinians appear as the 'Mollahs of the West,' who

hold Adam's sons
Sprung of the sea-slug.

All this is excellent fooling in its way, a kind of play-acting in literature; but the best parts of the book are the descriptions of the Taj itself, which are extremely elaborate, and the various translations from Sa'di with which the volume is interspersed. The great monument Shah Jahan built for Arjamand is

Instinct with loveliness--not masonry!
Not architecture! as all others are,
But the proud passion of an Emperor's love
Wrought into living stone, which gleams and soars
With body of beauty shrining soul and thought,
Insomuch that it haps as when some face
Divinely fair unveils before our eyes--
Some woman beautiful unspeakably--
And the blood quickens, and the spirit leaps,
And will to worship bends the half-yielded knees,
Which breath forgets to breathe: so is the Taj;
You see it with the heart, before the eyes
Have scope to gaze. All white! snow white! cloud white!

We cannot say much in praise of the sixth line:

Insomuch that it haps as when some face:

it is curiously awkward and unmusical. But this passage from Sa'di is remarkable:

When Earth, bewildered, shook in earthquake-throes,
With mountain-roots He bound her borders close;
Turkis and ruby in her rocks He stored,
And on her green branch hung His crimson rose.

He shapes dull seed to fair imaginings;
Who paints with moisture as He painteth things?
Look! from the cloud He sheds one drop on ocean,
As from the Father's loins one drop He brings;--

And out of that He forms a peerless pearl,
And, out of this, a cypress boy or girl;
Utterly wotting all their innermosts,
For all to Him is visible! Uncurl

Your cold coils, Snakes! Creep forth, ye thrifty Ants!
Handless and strengthless He provides your wants
Who from the 'Is not' planned the 'Is to be,'
And Life in non-existent void implants.

Sir Edwin Arnold suffers, of course, from the inevitable comparison that one cannot help making between his work and the work of Edward Fitzgerald, and certainly Fitzgerald could never have written such a line as 'utterly wotting all their innermosts,' but it is interesting to read almost any translation of those wonderful Oriental poets with their strange blending of philosophy and sensuousness, of simple parable or fable and obscure mystic utterance. What we regret most in Sir Edwin Arnold's book is his habit of writing in what really amounts to a sort of 'pigeon English.' When we are told that 'Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen's Vice-queen,' paces among the charpoys of the ward 'no whit afraid of sitla, or of tap'; when the Mirza explains--

ag lejao!
To light the kallians for the Saheb and me,

and the attendant obeys with 'Achcha! Achcha!' when we are invited to listen to 'the Vina and the drum' and told about ekkas, Byragis, hamals and Tamboora, all that we can say is that to such ghazals we are not prepared to say either Shamash or Afrin. In English poetry we do not want

chatkis for the toes,
Jasams for elbow-bands, and gote and har,
Bala and mala.

This is not local colour; it is a sort of local discoloration. It does not add anything to the vividness of the scene. It does not bring the Orient more clearly before us. It is simply an inconvenience to the reader and a mistake on the part of the writer. It may be difficult for a poet to find English synonyms for Asiatic expressions, but even if it were impossible it is none the less a poet's duty to find them. We are sorry that a scholar and a man of culture like Sir Edwin Arnold should have been guilty of what is really an act of treason against our literature. But for this error, his book, though not in any sense a work of genius or even of high artistic merit, would still have been of some enduring value. As it is, Sir Edwin Arnold has translated Sa'di and some one must translate Sir Edwin Arnold.

With Sa'di in the Garden; or The Book of Love. By Sir Edwin Arnold, M.A., K.C.I.E., Author of The Light of Asia, etc. (Trubner and Co.)

AUSTRALIAN POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 14, 1888.)

Mr. Sladen dedicates his anthology (or, perhaps, we should say his herbarium) of Australian song to Mr. Edmund Gosse, 'whose exquisite critical faculty is,' he tells us, 'as conspicuous in his poems as in his lectures on poetry.' After so graceful a compliment Mr. Gosse must certainly deliver a series of discourses upon Antipodean art before the Cambridge undergraduates, who will, no doubt, be very much interested on hearing about Gordon, Kendall and Domett, to say nothing of the extraordinary collection of mediocrities whom Mr. Sladen has somewhat ruthlessly dragged from their modest and well-merited obscurity. Gordon, however, is very badly represented in Mr. Sladen's book, the only three specimens of his work that are included being an unrevised fragment, his Valedictory Poem and An Exile's Farewell. The latter is, of course, touching, but then the commonplace always touches, and it is a great pity that Mr. Sladen was unable to come to any financial arrangement with the holders of Gordon's copyright. The loss to the volume that now lies before us is quite irreparable. Through Gordon Australia found her first fine utterance in song.

Still, there are some other singers here well worth studying, and it is interesting to read about poets who lie under the shadow of the gum-tree, gather wattle blossoms and buddawong and sarsaparilla for their loves, and wander through the glades of Mount Baw-baw listening to the careless raptures of the mopoke. To them November is

The wonder with the golden wings,
Who lays one hand in Summer's, one in Spring's:

January is full of 'breaths of myrrh, and subtle hints of rose-lands';

She is the warm, live month of lustre--she
Makes glad the land and lulls the strong sad sea;

while February is 'the true Demeter,' and

With rich warm vine-blood splashed from heel to knee,
Comes radiant through the yellow woodlands.

Each month, as it passes, calls for new praise and for music different from our own. July is a 'lady, born in wind and rain'; in August

Across the range, by every scarred black fell,
Strong Winter blows his horn of wild farewell;

while October is 'the queen of all the year,' the 'lady of the yellow hair,' who strays 'with blossom-trammelled feet' across the 'haughty-featured hills,' and brings the Spring with her. We must certainly try to accustom ourselves to the mopoke and the sarsaparilla plant, and to make the gum-tree and the buddawong as dear to us as the olives and the narcissi of white Colonus. After all, the Muses are great travellers, and the same foot that stirred the Cumnor cowslips may some day brush the fallen gold of the wattle blossoms and tread delicately over the tawny bush-grass.

Mr. Sladen has, of course, a great belief in the possibilities of Australian poetry. There are in Australia, he tells us, far more writers capable of producing good work than has been assumed. It is only natural, he adds, that this should be so, 'for Australia has one of those delightful climates conducive to rest in the open air. The middle of the day is so hot that it is really more healthful to lounge about than to take stronger exercise.' Well, lounging in the open air is not a bad school for poets, but it largely depends on the lounger. What strikes one on reading over Mr. Sladen's collection is the depressing provinciality of mood and manner in almost every writer. Page follows page, and we find nothing but echoes without music, reflections without beauty, second-rate magazine verses and third-rate verses for Colonial newspapers. Poe seems to have had some influence--at least, there are several parodies of his method--and one or two writers have read Mr. Swinburne; but, on the whole, we have artless Nature in her most irritating form. Of course Australia is young, younger even than America whose youth is now one of her oldest and most hallowed traditions, but the entire want of originality of treatment is curious. And yet not so curious, perhaps, after all. Youth is rarely original.

There are, however, some exceptions. Henry Clarence Kendall had a true poetic gift. The series of poems on the Austral months, from which we have already quoted, is full of beautiful things; Landor's Rose Aylmer is a classic in its way, but Kendall's Rose Lorraine is in parts not unworthy to be mentioned after it; and the poem entitled Beyond Kerguelen has a marvellous music about it, a wonderful rhythm of words and a real richness of utterance. Some of the lines are strangely powerful, and, indeed, in spite of its exaggerated alliteration, or perhaps in consequence of it, the whole poem is a most remarkable work of art.

Down in the South, by the waste without sail on it--
Far from the zone of the blossom and tree--
Lieth, with winter and whirlwind and wail on it,
Ghost of a land by the ghost of a sea.
Weird is the mist from the summit to base of it;
Sun of its heaven is wizened and grey;
Phantom of light is the light on the face of it--
Never is night on it, never is day!
Here is the shore without flower or bird on it;
Here is no litany sweet of the springs--
Only the haughty, harsh thunder is heard on it,
Only the storm, with a roar in its wings!

Back in the dawn of this beautiful sphere, on it--
Land of the dolorous, desolate face--
Beamed the blue day; and the beautiful year on it
Fostered the leaf and the blossom of grace.
Grand were the lights of its midsummer noon on it--
Mornings of majesty shone on its seas;
Glitter of star and the glory of moon on it
Fell, in the march of the musical breeze.
Valleys and hills, with the whisper of wing in them,
Dells of the daffodil--spaces impearled,
Flowered and flashed with the splendour of spring in them,
Back in the morn of this wonderful world.

Mr. Sladen speaks of Alfred Domett as 'the author of one of the great poems of a century in which Shelley and Keats, Byron and Scott, Wordsworth and Tennyson have all flourished,' but the extracts he gives from Ranolf and Amohia hardly substantiate this claim, although the song of the Tree-God in the fourth book is clever but exasperating.

A Midsummer's Noon, by Charles Harpur, 'the grey forefather of Australian poetry,' is pretty and graceful, and Thomas Henry's Wood-Notes and Miss Veel's Saturday Night are worth reading; but, on the whole, the Australian poets are extremely dull and prosaic. There seem to be no sirens in the New World. As for Mr. Sladen himself, he has done his work very conscientiously. Indeed, in one instance he almost re-writes an entire poem in consequence of the manuscript having reached him in a mutilated condition.

A pleasant land is the land of dreams
_At the back of the shining air_!
It hath _sunnier_ skies and _sheenier_ streams,
And gardens _than Earth's more_ fair,

is the first verse of this lucubration, and Mr. Sladen informs us with justifiable pride that the parts printed in italics are from his own pen! This is certainly editing with a vengeance, and we cannot help saying that it reflects more credit on Mr. Sladen's good nature than on his critical or his poetical powers. The appearance, also, in a volume of 'poems produced in Australia,' of selections from Horne's Orion cannot be defended, especially as we are given no specimen of the poetry Horne wrote during the time that he actually was in Australia, where he held the office of 'Warden of the Blue Mountains'--a position which, as far as the title goes, is the loveliest ever given to any poet, and would have suited Wordsworth admirably: Wordsworth, that is to say, at his best, for he not infrequently wrote like the Distributor of Stamps. However, Mr. Sladen has shown great energy in the compilation of this bulky volume which, though it does not contain much that is of any artistic value, has a certain historical interest, especially for those who care to study the conditions of intellectual life in the colonies of a great empire. The biographical notices of the enormous crowd of verse-makers which is included in this volume are chiefly from the pen of Mr. Patchett Martin. Some of them are not very satisfactory. 'Formerly of West Australia, now residing at Boston, U.S. Has published several volumes of poetry,' is a ludicrously inadequate account of such a man as John Boyle O'Reilly, while in 'poet, essayist, critic, and journalist, one of the most prominent figures in literary London,' few will recognise the industrious Mr. William Sharp.

Still, on the whole, we should be grateful for a volume that has given us specimens of Kendall's work, and perhaps Mr. Sladen will some day produce an anthology of Australian poetry, not a herbarium of Australian verse. His present book has many good qualities, but it is almost unreadable.

Australian Poets, 1788-1888. Edited by Douglas B. W. Sladen, B.A. Oxon. (Griffith, Farran and Co.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES--I

(Woman's World, January 1889.)

In a recent article on English Poetesses, {374} I ventured to suggest that our women of letters should turn their attention somewhat more to prose and somewhat less to poetry. Women seem to me to possess just what our literature wants--a light touch, a delicate hand, a graceful mode of treatment, and an unstudied felicity of phrase. We want some one who will do for our prose what Madame de Sevigne did for the prose of France. George Eliot's style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Bronte's too exaggerated. However, one must not forget that amongst the women of England there have been some charming letter-writers, and certainly no book can be more delightful reading than Mrs. Ross's Three Generations of English Women, which has recently appeared. The three Englishwomen whose memoirs and correspondence Mrs. Ross has so admirably edited are Mrs. John Taylor, Mrs. Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon, all of them remarkable personalities, and two of them women of brilliant wit and European reputation. Mrs. Taylor belonged to that great Norwich family about whom the Duke of Sussex remarked that they reversed the ordinary saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man, and was for many years one of the most distinguished figures in the famous society of her native town. Her only daughter married John Austin, the great authority on jurisprudence, and her salon in Paris was the centre of the intellect and culture of her day. Lucie Duff Gordon, the only child of John and Sarah Austin, inherited the talents of her parents. A beauty, a femme d'esprit, a traveller, and clever writer, she charmed and fascinated her age, and her premature death in Egypt was really a loss to our literature. It is to her daughter that we owe this delightful volume of memoirs.

First we are introduced to Mrs. Ross's great-grandmother, Mrs. Taylor, who 'was called, by her intimate friends, "Madame Roland of Norwich," from her likeness to the portraits of the handsome and unfortunate Frenchwoman.' We hear of her darning her boy's grey worsted stockings while holding her own with Southey and Brougham, and dancing round the Tree of Liberty with Dr. Parr when the news of the fall of the Bastille was first known. Amongst her friends were Sir James Mackintosh, the most popular man of the day, 'to whom Madame de Stael wrote, "Il n'y a pas de societe sans vous." "C'est tres ennuyeux de diner sans vous; la societe ne va pas quand vous n'etes pas la";' Sir James Smith, the botanist; Crabb Robinson; the Gurneys; Mrs. Barbauld; Dr. Alderson and his charming daughter, Amelia Opie; and many other well-known people. Her letters are extremely sensible and thoughtful. 'Nothing at present,' she says in one of them, 'suits my taste so well as Susan's Latin lessons, and her philosophical old master . . . When we get to Cicero's discussions on the nature of the soul, or Virgil's fine descriptions, my mind is filled up. Life is either a dull round of eating, drinking, and sleeping, or a spark of ethereal fire just kindled. . . . The character of girls must depend upon their reading as much as upon the company they keep. Besides the intrinsic pleasure to be derived from solid knowledge, a woman ought to consider it as her best resource against poverty.' This is a somewhat caustic aphorism: 'A romantic woman is a troublesome friend, as she expects you to be as imprudent as herself, and is mortified at what she calls coldness and insensibility.' And this is admirable: 'The art of life is not to estrange oneself from society, and yet not to pay too dear for it.' This, too, is good: 'Vanity, like curiosity, is wanted as a stimulus to exertion; indolence would certainly get the better of us if it were not for these two powerful principles'; and there is a keen touch of humour in the following: 'Nothing is so gratifying as the idea that virtue and philanthropy are becoming fashionable.' Dr. James Martineau, in a letter to Mrs. Ross, gives us a pleasant picture of the old lady returning from market 'weighted by her huge basket, with the shank of a leg of mutton thrust out to betray its contents,' and talking divinely about philosophy, poets, politics, and every intellectual topic of the day. She was a woman of admirable good sense, a type of Roman matron, and quite as careful as were the Roman matrons to keep up the purity of her native tongue.

Mrs. Taylor, however, was more or less limited to Norwich. Mrs. Austin was for the world. In London, Paris, and Germany, she ruled and dominated society, loved by every one who knew her. 'She is "My best and brightest" to Lord Jeffrey; "Dear, fair and wise" to Sydney Smith; "My great ally" to Sir James Stephen; "Sunlight through waste weltering chaos" to Thomas Carlyle (while he needed her aid); "La petite mere du genre humain" to Michael Chevalier; "Liebes Mutterlein" to John Stuart Mill; and "My own Professorin" to Charles Buller, to whom she taught German, as well as to the sons of Mr. James Mill.' Jeremy Bentham, when on his deathbed, gave her a ring with his portrait and some of his hair let in behind. 'There, my dear,' he said, 'it is the only ring I ever gave a woman.' She corresponded with Guizot, Barthelemy de St. Hilaire, the Grotes, Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, Nassau Senior, the Duchesse d'Orleans, Victor Cousin, and many other distinguished people. Her translation of Ranke's History of the Popes is admirable; indeed, all her literary work was thoroughly well done, and her edition of her husband's Province of Jurisprudence deserves the very highest praise. Two people more unlike than herself and her husband it would have been difficult to find. He was habitually grave and despondent; she was brilliantly handsome, fond of society, in which she shone, and 'with an almost superabundance of energy and animal spirits,' Mrs. Ross tells us. She married him because she thought him perfect, but he never produced the work of which he was worthy, and of which she knew him to be worthy. Her estimate of him in the preface to the Jurisprudence is wonderfully striking and simple. 'He was never sanguine. He was intolerant of any imperfection. He was always under the control of severe love of truth. He lived and died a poor man.' She was terribly disappointed in him, but she loved him. Some years after his death, she wrote to M. Guizot:

In the intervals of my study of his works I read his letters to
me--_forty-five years of love-letters_, the last as tender and
passionate as the first. And how full of noble sentiments! The
midday of our lives was clouded and stormy, full of cares and
disappointments; but the sunset was bright and serene--as bright as
the morning, and _more_ serene. Now it is night with me, and must
remain so till the dawn of another day. I am always alone--that is,
_I live with him_.

The most interesting letters in the book are certainly those to M. Guizot, with whom she maintained the closest intellectual friendship; but there is hardly one of them that does not contain something clever, or thoughtful, or witty, while those addressed to her, in turn, are very interesting. Carlyle writes her letters full of lamentations, the wail of a Titan in pain, superbly exaggerated for literary effect.

Literature, one's sole craft and staff of life, lies broken in
abeyance; what room for music amid the braying of innumerable
jackasses, the howling of innumerable hyaenas whetting the tooth to
eat them up? Alas for it! it is a sick disjointed time; neither shall
we ever mend it; at best let us hope to mend ourselves. I declare I
sometimes think of throwing down the Pen altogether as a worthless
weapon; and leading out a colony of these poor starving Drudges to the
waste places of their old Mother Earth, when for sweat of their brow
bread _will_ rise for them; it were perhaps the worthiest service that
at this moment could be rendered our old world to throw open for it
the doors of the New. Thither must they come at last, 'bursts of
eloquence' will do nothing; men are starving and will try many things
before they die. But poor I, ach Gott! I am no Hengist or Alaric;
only a writer of Articles in bad prose; stick to thy last, O Tutor;
the Pen is not worthless, it is omnipotent to those who have Faith.

Henri Beyle (Stendhal), the great, I am often tempted to think the greatest of French novelists, writes her a charming letter about nuances. 'It seems to me,' he says, 'that except when they read Shakespeare, Byron, or Sterne, no Englishman understands "nuances"; we adore them. A fool says to a woman, "I love you"; the words mean nothing, he might as well say "Olli Batachor"; it is the nuance which gives force to the meaning.' In 1839 Mrs. Austin writes to Victor Cousin: 'I have seen young Gladstone, a distinguished Tory who wants to re-establish education based on the Church in quite a Catholic form'; and we find her corresponding with Mr. Gladstone on the subject of education. 'If you are strong enough to provide motives and checks,' she says to him, 'you may do two blessed acts--reform your clergy and teach your people. As it is, how few of them conceive what it is to teach a people'! Mr. Gladstone replies at great length, and in many letters, from which we may quote this passage:

You are for pressing and urging the people to their profit against
their inclination: so am I. You set little value upon all merely
technical instruction, upon all that fails to touch the inner nature
of man: so do I. And here I find ground of union broad and deep-laid
. . .

I more than doubt whether your idea, namely that of raising man to
social sufficiency and morality, can be accomplished, except through
the ancient religion of Christ; . . . or whether, the principles of
eclecticism are legitimately applicable to the Gospel; or whether, if
we find ourselves in a state of incapacity to work through the Church,
we can remedy the defect by the adoption of principles contrary to
hers . . .

But indeed I am most unfit to pursue the subject; private
circumstances of no common interest are upon me, as I have become very
recently engaged to Miss Glynne, and I hope your recollections will
enable you in some degree to excuse me.

Lord Jeffrey has a very curious and suggestive letter on popular education, in which he denies, or at least doubts, the effect of this education on morals. He, however, supports it on the ground 'that it will increase the enjoyment of individuals,' which is certainly a very sensible claim. Humboldt writes to her about an old Indian language which was preserved by a parrot, the tribe who spoke it having been exterminated, and about 'young Darwin,' who had just published his first book. Here are some extracts from her own letters:

I heard from Lord Lansdowne two or three days ago. . . . I think he
is ce que nous avons de mieux. He wants only the energy that great
ambition gives. He says, 'We shall have a parliament of railway
kings' . . . what can be worse than that?--The deification of money by
a whole people. As Lord Brougham says, we have no right to give
ourselves pharisaical airs. I must give you a story sent to me. Mrs.
Hudson, the railway queen, was shown a bust of Marcus Aurelius at Lord
Westminster's, on which she said, 'I suppose that is not the present
Marquis.' To gouter this, you must know that the extreme vulgar
(hackney coachmen, etc.) in England pronounce 'marquis' very like
'Marcus.'

Dec, 11th.--Went to Savigny's. Nobody was there but W. Grimm and his
wife and a few men. Grimm told me he had received two volumes of
Norwegian fairy-tales, and that they were delightful. Talking of
them, I said, 'Your children appear to be the happiest in the world;
they live in the midst of fairytales.' 'Ah,' said he, 'I must tell
you about that. When we were at Gottingen, somebody spoke to my
little son about his father's Mahrchen. He had read them, but never
thought of their being mine. He came running to me, and said with an
offended air, "Father, they say you wrote those fairy-tales; surely
you never invented such silly rubbish?" He thought it below my
dignity.'

Savigny told a Volksmahrchen too:

'St. Anselm was grown old and infirm, and lay on the ground among
thorns and thistles. Der liebe Gott said to him, "You are very badly
lodged there; why don't you build yourself a house?" "Before I take
the trouble," said Anselm, "I should like to know how long I have to
live." "About thirty years," said Der liebe Gott. "Oh, for so short
a time," replied he, "it's not worth while," and turned himself round
among the thistles.'

Dr. Franck told me a story of which I had never heard before. Voltaire
had for some reason or other taken a grudge against the prophet
Habakkuk, and affected to find in him things he never wrote. Somebody
took the Bible and began to demonstrate to him that he was mistaken.
'C'est egal,' he said, impatiently, 'Habakkuk etait capable de tout!'

Oct. 30, 1853.

I am not in love with the Richtung (tendency) of our modern novelists.
There is abundance of talent; but writing a pretty, graceful,
touching, yet pleasing story is the last thing our writers nowadays
think of. Their novels are party pamphlets on political or social
questions, like Sybil, or Alton Locke, or Mary Barton, or Uncle Tom;
or they are the most minute and painful dissections of the least
agreeable and beautiful parts of our nature, like those of Miss
Bronte--Jane Eyre and Villette; or they are a kind of martyrology,
like Mrs. Marsh's Emilia Wyndham, which makes you almost doubt whether
any torments the heroine would have earned by being naughty could
exceed those she incurred by her virtue.

Where, oh! where is the charming, humane, gentle spirit that dictated
the Vicar of Wakefield--the spirit which Goethe so justly calls
versohnend (reconciling), with all the weaknesses and woes of
humanity? . . . Have you read Thackeray's Esmond? It is a curious
and very successful attempt to imitate the style of our old novelists.
. . . Which of Mrs. Gore's novels are translated? They are very
clever, lively, worldly, bitter, disagreeable, and entertaining. . . .
Miss Austen's--are they translated? They are not new, and are Dutch
paintings of every-day people--very clever, very true, very
_unaesthetic_, but amusing. I have not seen Ruth, by Mrs. Gaskell. I
hear it much admired--and blamed. It is one of the many proofs of the
desire women now have to friser questionable topics, and to poser
insoluble moral problems. George Sand has turned their heads in that
direction. I think a few _broad_ scenes or hearty jokes a la Fielding
were very harmless in comparison. They _confounded_ nothing. . . .

The Heir of Redcliffe I have not read. . . . I am not worthy of
superhuman flights of virtue--in a novel. I want to see how people
act and suffer who are as good-for-nothing as I am myself. Then I
have the sinful pretension to be amused, whereas all our novelists
want to reform us, and to show us what a hideous place this world is:
Ma foi, je ne le sais que trap, without their help.

The Head of the Family has some merits . . . But there is too much
affliction and misery and frenzy. The heroine is one of those
creatures now so common (in novels), who remind me of a poor bird tied
to a stake (as was once the cruel sport of boys) to be 'shyed' at
(i.e. pelted) till it died; only our gentle lady-writers at the end of
all untie the poor battered bird, and assure us that it is never the
worse for all the blows it has had--nay, the better--and that now,
with its broken wings and torn feathers and bruised body, it is going
to be quite happy. No, fair ladies, you know that it is not
so--_resigned_, if you please, but make me no shams of happiness out
of such wrecks.

In politics Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as moribund. 'The Radical party is evidently effete,' she writes to M. Victor Cousin; the probable 'leader of the Tory party' is Mr. Gladstone. 'The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short, governed,' she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says that the state of things in France fills 'me with the deepest anxiety on one point,--the point on which the permanency of our institutions and our salvation as a nation turn. Are our higher classes able to keep the lead of the rest? If they are, we are safe; if not, I agree with my poor dear Charles Buller--_our_ turn must come. Now Cambridge and Oxford must really look to this.' The belief in the power of the Universities to stem the current of democracy is charming. She grew to regard Carlyle as 'one of the dissolvents of the age--as mischievous as his extravagances will let him be'; speaks of Kingsley and Maurice as 'pernicious'; and talks of John Stuart Mill as a 'demagogue.' She was no doctrinaire. 'One ounce of education demanded is worth a pound imposed. It is no use to give the meat before you give the hunger.' She was delighted at a letter of St. Hilaire's, in which he said, 'We have a system and no results; you have results and no system.' Yet she had a deep sympathy with the wants of the people. She was horrified at something Babbage told her of the population of some of the manufacturing towns who are _worked out_ before they attain to thirty years of age. 'But I am persuaded that the remedy will not, cannot come from the people,' she adds. Many of her letters are concerned with the question of the higher education of women. She discusses Buckle's lecture on 'The Influence of Women upon the Progress of Knowledge,' admits to M. Guizot that women's intellectual life is largely coloured by the emotions, but adds: 'One is not precisely a fool because one's opinions are greatly influenced by one's affections. The opinions of men are often influenced by worse things.' Dr. Whewell consults her about lecturing women on Plato, being slightly afraid lest people should think it ridiculous; Comte writes her elaborate letters on the relation of women to progress; and Mr. Gladstone promises that Mrs. Gladstone will carry out at Hawarden the suggestions contained in one of her pamphlets. She was always very practical, and never lost her admiration for plain sewing.

All through the book we come across interesting and amusing things. She gets St. Hilaire to order a large, sensible bonnet for her in Paris, which was at once christened the 'Aristotelian,' and was supposed to be the only useful bonnet in England. Grote has to leave Paris after the coup d'etat, he tells her, because he cannot bear to see the establishment of a Greek tyrant. Alfred de Vigny, Macaulay, John Stirling, Southey, Alexis de Tocqueville, Hallam, and Jean Jacques Ampere all contribute to these pleasant pages. She seems to have inspired the warmest feelings of friendship in those who knew her. Guizot writes to her: 'Madame de Stael used to say that the best thing in the world was a serious Frenchman. I turn the compliment, and say that the best thing in the world is an affectionate Englishman. How much more an Englishwoman! Given equal qualities, a woman is always more charming than a man.'

Lucie Austin, afterwards Lady Duff Gordon, was born in 1821. Her chief playfellow was John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham's garden was her playground. She was a lovely, romantic child, who was always wanting the flowers to talk to her, and used to invent the most wonderful stories about animals, of whom she was passionately fond. In 1834 Mrs. Austin decided on leaving England, and Sydney Smith wrote his immortal letter to the little girl:

Lucie, Lucie, my dear child, don't tear your frock: tearing frocks is
not of itself a proof of genius. But write as your mother writes, act
as your mother acts: be frank, loyal, affectionate, simple, honest,
and then integrity or laceration of frock is of little import. And
Lucie, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in the first sum of
yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab
is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucie, to have carried but
one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic but a
scene of horrors? You are going to Boulogne, the city of debts,
peopled by men who have never understood arithmetic. By the time you
return, I shall probably have received my first paralytic stroke, and
shall have lost all recollection of you. Therefore I now give you my
parting advice--don't marry anybody who has not a tolerable
understanding and a thousand a year. And God bless you, dear child.

At Boulogne she sat next Heine at table d'hote. 'He heard me speak German to my mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then said, "When you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine." I replied, "And who is Heinrich Heine?" He laughed heartily and took no offence at my ignorance; and we used to lounge on the end of the pier together, where he told me stories in which fish, mermaids, water-sprites and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle were mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, and very often pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings from the "Nord See." He was . . . so kind to me and so sarcastic to every one else.' Twenty years afterwards the little girl whose 'braune Augen' Heine had celebrated in his charming poem Wenn ich an deinem Hause, used to go and see the dying poet in Paris. 'It does one good,' he said to her, 'to see a woman who does not carry about a broken heart, to be mended by all sorts of men, like the women here, who do not see that a total want of heart is their real failing.' On another occasion he said to her: 'I have now made peace with the whole world, and at last also with God, who sends thee to me as a beautiful angel of death: I shall certainly soon die.' Lady Duff Gordon said to him: 'Poor Poet, do you still retain such splendid illusions, that you transform a travelling Englishwoman into Azrael? That used not to be the case, for you always disliked us.' He answered: 'Yes, I do not know what possessed me to dislike the English, . . . it really was only petulance; I never hated them, indeed, I never knew them. I was only once in England, but knew no one, and found London very dreary, and the people and the streets odious. But England has revenged herself well; she has sent me most excellent friends--thyself and Milnes, that good Milnes.'

There are delightful letters from Dicky Doyle here, with the most amusing drawings, one of the present Sir Robert Peel as he made his maiden speech in the House being excellent; and the various descriptions of Hassan's performances are extremely amusing. Hassan was a black boy, who had been turned away by his master because he was going blind, and was found by Lady Duff Gordon one night sitting on her doorstep. She took care of him, and had him cured, and he seems to have been a constant source of delight to every one. On one occasion, 'when Prince Louis Napoleon (the late Emperor of the French) came in unexpectedly, he gravely said: "Please, my Lady, I ran out and bought twopenny worth of sprats for the Prince, and for the honour of the house."' Here is an amusing letter from Mrs. Norton:

MY DEAR LUCIE,--We have never thanked you for the red Pots, which no
early Christian should be without, and which add that finishing stroke
to the splendour of our demesne, which was supposed to depend on a
roc's egg, in less intelligent times. We have now a warm Pompeian
appearance, and the constant contemplation of these classical objects
favours the beauty of the facial line; for what can be deduced from
the great fact, apparent in all the states of antiquity, that
_straight noses_ were the ancient custom, but the logical assumption
that the constant habit of turning up the nose at unsightly
objects--such as the National Gallery and other offensive and
obtrusive things--has produced the modern divergence from the true and
proper line of profile? I rejoice to think that we ourselves are
exempt. I attribute this to our love of Pompeian Pots (on account of
the beauty and distinction of this Pot's shape I spell it with a big
P), which has kept us straight in a world of crookedness. The pursuit
of profiles under difficulties--how much more rare than a pursuit of
knowledge! Talk of setting good examples before our children! Bah!
let us set good Pompeian Pots before our children, and when they grow
up they will not depart from them.

Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from the Cape, and her brilliant translation of The Amber Witch, are, of course, well known. The latter book was, with Lady Wilde's translation of Sidonia the Sorceress, my favourite romantic reading when a boy. Her letters from Egypt are wonderfully vivid and picturesque. Here is an interesting bit of art criticism:

Sheykh Yoosuf laughed so heartily over a print in an illustrated paper
from a picture of Hilton's of Rebekah at the well, with the old
'wekeel' of 'Sidi Ibraheem' (Abraham's chief servant) _kneeling_
before the girl he was sent to fetch, like an old fool without his
turban, and Rebekah and the other girls in queer fancy dresses, and
the camels with snouts like pigs. 'If the painter could not go into
"Es Sham" to see how the Arab really look,' said Sheykh Yoosuf, 'why
did he not paint a well in England, with girls like English
peasants--at least it would have looked natural to English people? and
the wekeel would not seem so like a madman if he had taken off a hat!'
I cordially agree with Yoosuf's art criticism. _Fancy_ pictures of
Eastern things are hopelessly absurd.

Mrs. Ross has certainly produced a most fascinating volume, and her book is one of the books of the season. It is edited with tact and judgment.

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