Part 18

[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”--