Reviews Part 40

Not much can be said of a poet who exclaims:

Oh, for the power of Byron or of Moore, To glow with one, and with the latter soar.

And yet Mr. Moodie is one of the best of those South African poets whose works have been collected and arranged by Mr. Wilmot. Pringle, the 'father of South African verse,' comes first, of course, and his best poem is, undoubtedly, Afar in the Desert:

Afar in the desert I love to ride, With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side: Away, away, from the dwelling of men By the wild-deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen: By valleys remote where the oribi plays, Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze, And the kudu and eland unhunted recline By the skirts of grey forests o'erhung with wild vine, Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood, And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood, And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will In the fen where the wild a.s.s is drinking his fill.

It is not, however, a very remarkable production.

The Smouse, by Fannin, has the modern merit of incomprehensibility. It reads like something out of The Hunting of the Snark:

I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse in the wilderness wide, The veld is my home, and the wagon's my pride: The crack of my 'voerslag' shall sound o'er the lea, I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!

I heed not the Governor, I fear not his law, I care not for civilisation one straw, And ne'er to 'Ompanda'--'Umgazis' I'll throw While my arm carries fist, or my foot bears a toe!

'Trek,' 'trek,' ply the whip--touch the fore oxen's skin, I'll warrant we'll 'go it' through thick and through thin-- Loop! loop ye oud skellums! ot Vikmaan trek jy; I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!

The South African poets, as a cla.s.s, are rather behind the age. They seem to think that 'Aurora' is a very novel and delightful epithet for the dawn. On the whole they depress us.

Chess, by Mr. Louis Tylor, is a sort of Christmas masque in which the dramatis personae consist of some unmusical carollers, a priggish young man called Eric, and the chessmen off the board. The White Queen's Knight begins a ballad and the Black King's Bishop completes it. The p.a.w.ns sing in chorus and the Castles converse with each other. The silliness of the form makes it an absolutely unreadable book.

Mr. Williamson's Poems of Nature and Life are as orthodox in spirit as they are commonplace in form. A few harmless heresies of art and thought would do this poet no harm. Nearly everything that he says has been said before and said better. The only original thing in the volume is the description of Mr. Robert Buchanan's 'grandeur of mind.' This is decidedly new.

Dr. c.o.c.kle tells us that Mullner's Guilt and The Ancestress of Grillparzer are the masterpieces of German fate-tragedy. His translation of the first of these two masterpieces does not make us long for any further acquaintance with the school. Here is a specimen from the fourth act of the fate-tragedy.

SCENE VIII.

ELVIRA. HUGO.

ELVIRA (after long silence, leaving the harp, steps to Hugo, and seeks his gaze).

HUGO (softly). Though I made sacrifice of thy sweet life. The Father has forgiven. Can the wife--Forgive?

ELVIRA (on his breast). She can!

HUGO (with all the warmth of love). Dear wife!

ELVIRA (after a pause, in deep sorrow). Must it be so, beloved one?

HUGO (sorry to have betrayed himself). What?

In his preface to The Circle of Seasons, a series of hymns and verses for the seasons of the Church, the Rev. T. B. Dover expresses a hope that this well-meaning if somewhat tedious book 'may be of value to those many earnest people to whom the subjective aspect of truth is helpful.' The poem beginning

Lord, in the inn of my poor worthless heart Guests come and go; but there is room for Thee,

has some merit and might be converted into a good sonnet. The majority of the poems, however, are quite worthless. There seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.

Lord Henry Somerset's verse is not so good as his music. Most of the Songs of Adieu are marred by their excessive sentimentality of feeling and by the commonplace character of their weak and lax form. There is nothing that is new and little that is true in verse of this kind:

The golden leaves are falling, Falling one by one, Their tender 'Adieux' calling To the cold autumnal sun.

The trees in the keen and frosty air Stand out against the sky, 'Twould seem they stretch their branches bare To Heaven in agony.

It can be produced in any quant.i.ty. Lord Henry Somerset has too much heart and too little art to make a good poet, and such art as he does possess is devoid of almost every intellectual quality and entirely lacking in any intellectual strength. He has nothing to say and says it.

Mrs. Cora M. Davis is eloquent about the splendours of what the auth.o.r.ess of The Circle of Seasons calls 'this earthly ball.'

Let's sing the beauties of this grand old earth,

she cries, and proceeds to tell how

Imagination paints old Egypt's former glory, Of mighty temples reaching heavenward, Of grim, colossal statues, whose barbaric story The caustic pens of erudition still record, Whose ancient cities of glittering minarets Reflect the gold of Afric's gorgeous sunsets.

'The caustic pens of erudition' is quite delightful and will be appreciated by all Egyptologists. There is also a charming pa.s.sage in the same poem on the pictures of the Old Masters:

the mellow richness of whose tints impart, By contrast, greater delicacy still to modern art.

This seems to us the highest form of optimism we have ever come across in art criticism. It is American in origin, Mrs. Davis, as her biographer tells us, having been born in Alabama, Genesee co., N.Y.

(1) The Story of the Kings of Rome in Verse. By the Hon. G. Denman, Judge of the High Court of Justice. (Trubner and Co.)

(2) Tales and Legends in Verse. By E. Cooper Willis, Q.C. (Kegan Paul.)

(3) The Poetry of South Africa. Collected and arranged by A. Wilmot.

(Sampson Low and Co.)

(4) Chess. A Christmas Masque. By Louis Tylor. (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) Poems of Nature and Life. By David R. Williamson. (Blackwood.)

(6) Guilt. Translated from the German by J. c.o.c.kle, M.D. (Williams and Norgate.)

(7) The Circle of Seasons. By K. E. V. (Elliot Stock.)

(8) Songs of Adieu. By Lord Henry Somerset. (Chatto and Windus.)

(9) Immortelles. By Cora M. Davis. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES--IV

(Woman's World, April 1889.)

'In modern life,' said Matthew Arnold once, 'you I cannot well enter a monastery; but you can enter the Wordsworth Society.' I fear that this will sound to many a somewhat uninviting description of this admirable and useful body, whose papers and productions have been recently published by Professor Knight, under the t.i.tle of Wordsworthiana. 'Plain living and high thinking' are not popular ideals. Most people prefer to live in luxury, and to think with the majority. However, there is really nothing in the essays and addresses of the Wordsworth Society that need cause the public any unnecessary alarm; and it is gratifying to note that, although the society is still in the first blush of enthusiasm, it has not yet insisted upon our admiring Wordsworth's inferior work. It praises what is worthy of praise, reverences what should be reverenced, and explains what does not require explanation. One paper is quite delightful; it is from the pen of Mr. Rawnsley, and deals with such reminiscences of Wordsworth as still linger among the peasantry of Westmoreland. Mr. Rawnsley grew up, he tells us, in the immediate vicinity of the present Poet-Laureate's old home in Lincolns.h.i.+re, and had been struck with the swiftness with which,

As year by year the labourer tills His wonted glebe, or lops the glades,

the memories of the poet of the Somersby Wold had 'faded from off the circle of the hills'--had, indeed, been astonished to note how little real interest was taken in him or his fame, and how seldom his works were met with in the houses of the rich or poor in the very neighbourhood.