Part 7

A genuine reaction, of the kind which predicts a true liberation of the imagination, is only momentarily a revolt against outgrown methods and the feebleness of a purely imitative art; it is essentially a return to the sources of power. It begins in revolt, but it does not long rest in that negative stage; it passes on to reconstruction, to creative work in a new and independent spirit. Goethe and Schiller went _through_ the _Sturm and Drang_ period; they did not stay in it. “The Sorrows of Werther” and “Goetz” were followed by “Tasso” and “Faust;” and “The Robbers” soon gave place to “William Tell.” The Romanticists who made such an uproar when “Hernani” was put on the stage, did not long wear red waistcoats and flowing locks; they went to work and brought forth the solid fruits of genius.

The man on the barricade is a picturesque figure, but he must not stay too long or he becomes ridiculous; the insurrection, if it means anything, must issue in a permanent social or political order. Even genius will not redeem perpetual revolt from monotony, as the case of Byron clearly shows. Revolt is inspiring if it is the prelude to a new and better order; if it falls short of this achievement, it is only a disturbance of the peace. It means, in that case, that there is dissatisfaction, but that the reaction has no more real power than the tyranny or stupidity against which it takes up arms. The new impulse in literature, when it comes, will evidence its presence neither by indecency nor by eccentricity; but by a certain noble simplicity, by the sanity upon which a great authority always ultimately rests, by the clearness of its insight, and the depth of its sympathy with that deeper life of humanity, in which are the springs of originality and productiveness.

The Man Who Dares

_By_ Louise Chandler Moulton

THE MAN WHO DARES

“BALLADS AND SONGS,” BY JOHN DAVIDSON

GRANT ALLEN has written of “The Woman Who Did”—and the title suggests that John Davidson may fitly be called “The Man Who Dares;” for certainly some of his themes and some of his lines, in this his latest book, are among the most daring in modern literature.

Richard Le Gallienne, in comparing William Watson and John Davidson, suggests that Davidson is a great man, and Watson a great manner. This is a statement I am not ready to indorse. I think Watson has much more than a great manner. He has noble and stately thought, a large outlook, and, in his own direction, subtle and keen perception. He knows the moods of the spirit, the reach of the soul; but the human heart does not cry out to him. He waits in the stately Court of the Intellect, and surveys the far heavens through its luminous windows.

Davidson, on the contrary, hearkens to the heart’s cry. The passionate senses clamor in his lines. Ceaseless unrest assails him. Doubt and faith war in him for mastery. Above all he is human; and, secondly, he is modern. “Perfervid,” “A Practical Novelist,” and two or three other tales, at once merry and fantastic, prove his gifts as a story-teller. He has written several delightful plays, among which “Scaramouch In Naxos” is, perhaps, the most remarkable. Its originality, its charm, its wayward grace give it a place to itself in modern literature; and I doubt if we have any other man who could have given us quite the same thing. But when the right to careful attention of his other work has been fully admitted, I am inclined to think that nowhere does he more thoroughly prove his high claim to distinction than in his “Fleet-Street Eclogues,” and his new volume of “Ballads and Songs.”

Of all these Ballads the three that have most moved me are “A Ballad of a Nun,” “A Ballad of Heaven,” and “A Ballad of Hell.” There is much crude strength in “A Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a Poet;” but the blank verse, impassioned though it be, has neither the stately splendor of Milton nor the artistic and finished grace of Tennyson. It is full of stress and strain,—this story of a youth who was brought up by a father and mother who really believed that the soul’s probation ends with this brief span of earthly life, and that

“In life it is your privilege to choose, But after death you have no choice at all.”

He tortured his mother by his unbelief, until he slowly broke her heart, and “she died, in anguish for his sins.” His father upbraided him, and he cried—very naturally, if not very poetically—

“Oh, let me be!”

Then he sought his Aphrodite, and found her, dull, tawdry, unbeautiful,—an outcast of the streets. He wrote his dreams; and then he felt that they were lies. He grew desperate, at last, and professed himself convicted of sin, and became a Christian—resolved to please his father, if he could not please himself. But this phase could not last; and he shattered his father’s new-found happiness by a wild denunciation of all creeds, and an assertion that there is no God higher than ourselves. Then was the father torn between his desire to seek his wife in Heaven, and his impulse to go with his son into the jaws of Hell. At last, in his turn, the father died; and the poet—the child of storm and stress—was left at liberty to be himself—

“——a thoroughfare For all the pageantry of Time; to catch The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour, And make them known.”

There are lines, here and there, in this poem of exquisite beauty; but there are others that seem to me “tolerable and not to be endured.”

I make my “Exodus From Houndsditch,” without as yet being tempted to linger there, and come to “A Ballad of a Nun.” And here, indeed, you have something of which only John Davidson has proved himself capable. The Ballad tells the old Roman Catholic legend of the Nun whom the lust of the flesh tempted.

There are stanzas here of such splendid power and beauty that they thrill one like noble and stirring music. You shall listen to some of them. The Abbess loved this Nun so well that she had trusted her above all the rest, and made her the Keeper of the Door:—

“High on a hill the Convent hung, Across a duchy looking down, Where everlasting mountains flung Their shadows over tower and town.

“The jewels of their lofty snows In constellations flashed at night; Above their crests the moon arose; The deep earth shuddered with delight.

“Long ere she left her cloudy bed, Still dreaming in the orient land, On many a mountain’s happy head Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.

“The adventurous sun took heaven by storm; Clouds scattered largesses of rain; The sounding cities, rich and warm, Smouldered and glittered in the plain.

“Sometimes it was a wandering wind, Sometimes the fragrance of the pine, Sometimes the thought how others sinned That turned her sweet blood into wine.

“Sometimes she heard a serenade Complaining sweetly, far away: She said, ‘A young man wooes a maid; And dreamt of love till break of day.”

In vain she plied her knotted scourge. Day after day she “had still the same red sin to purge.” Winter came, and the snow shut in hill and plain; and she watched the nearest city glow beneath the frosty sky. “Her hungry heart devoured the town;” until, at last, she tore her fillet and veil into strips, and cast aside the ring and bracelet that she wore as the betrothed of Christ:—

“‘Life’s dearest meaning I shall probe; Lo! I shall taste of love, at last! Away!’ She doffed her outer robe, And sent it sailing down the blast.

“Her body seemed to warm the wind; With bleeding feet o’er ice she ran; ‘I leave the righteous God behind; I go to worship sinful man.’”

She reached “the sounding city’s gate.” She drank the wild cup of love to the dregs. She cried—

“‘I am sister to the mountains, now, And sister to the sun and moon.’”

She made her queen-like progress. She loved and lived—

“But soon her fire to ashes burned; Her beauty changed to haggardness; Her golden hair to silver turned; The hour came of her last caress.

“At midnight from her lonely bed She rose, and said, ‘I have had my will.’ The old ragged robe she donned, and fled Back to the convent on the hill.”

She blessed, as she ran thither, the comfortable convent laws by which nuns who had sinned as she had done were buried alive. But I must copy the remaining stanzas, for no condensation can do justice to their tender, piteous, triumphant charm:—

“Like tired bells chiming in their sleep, The wind faint peals of laughter bore; She stopped her ears and climbed the steep, And thundered at the convent door.

“It opened straight: she entered in, And at the Wardress’ feet fell prone: ‘I come to purge away my sin; Bury me, close me up in stone.’

“The Wardress raised her tenderly; She touched her wet and fast-shut eyes: ‘Look, sister; sister, look at me; Look; can you see through my disguise?’

“She looked, and saw her own sad face, And trembled, wondering, ‘Who art thou?’ ‘God sent me down to fill your place: I am the Virgin Mary now.’

“And with the word, God’s mother shone: The wanderer whispered, ‘Mary, Hail!’ The vision helped her to put on Bracelet and fillet, ring and veil.

“‘You are sister to the mountains now, And sister to the day and night; Sister to God.’ And on the brow She kissed her thrice, and left her sight.

“While dreaming in her cloudy bed, Far in the crimson orient land, On many a mountain’s happy head Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.”

“A Ballad of a Nun” seems to me Mr. Davidson’s crowning achievement; yet “A Ballad of Heaven” and “A Ballad of Hell” are scarcely less striking. In “A Ballad of Heaven” there is a musician who works for years at one great composition. The world ignores him. His wife and child, clothed in rags, are starving in their windy garret; but he does not know it, for he dwells in the strange, far heaven of his music.

“Wistful he grew, but never feared; For always on the midnight skies His rich orchestral score appeared, In stars and zones and galaxies.”

He turns, at last, from his completed score to seek the sympathy of love; but wife and child are lying dead. He gathers to his breast the stark, wan wife with the baby skeleton in her arms.

“‘You see you are alive,’ he cried. He rocked them gently to and fro. ‘No, no, my love, you have not died; Nor you, my little fellow; no.’

“Long in his arms he strained his dead, And crooned an antique lullaby; Then laid them on the lowly bed, And broke down with a doleful cry.”

Then his own heart broke, at last, and he, too, was dead.

“Straightway he stood at heaven’s gate Abashed, and trembling for his sin: I trow he had not long to wait For God came out and led him in.

“And then there ran a radiant pair. Ruddy with haste and eager-eyed, To meet him first upon the stair— His wife and child, beatified.

“God, smiling, took him by the hand, And led him to the brink of heaven: He saw where systems whirling stand, Where galaxies like snow are driven.”

And lo! it was to his own music that the very spheres were moving.

“A Ballad of Hell” tells the story of a woman’s love and a woman’s courage. Her lover writes her that he must go to prison, unless he marries, the next day, his cousin whom he abhors. There is no refuge but in death; and by her love he conjures her to kill herself at midnight, and meet him, though it must be in Hell. She waited till sleep had fallen on the house. Then out into the night she went, hurried to the trysting oak, and there she drove her dagger home into her heart, and fell on sleep. She woke in Hell. The devil was quite ready to welcome her; but she answered him only—

“‘I am young Malespina’s bride; Has he come hither yet?’”

But Malespina had turned coward, when the supreme test came, and he was to marry his cousin on the morrow. For long, and long, she would not believe; but when long waiting brought certainty, at last, she cried—

“‘I was betrayed. I will not stay.’”

And straight across the gulf between Hell and Heaven she walked:—

“To her it seemed a meadow fair; And flowers sprang up about her feet; She entered Heaven; she climbed the stair, And knelt down at the mercy-seat.”

Next to these three Ballads I should rank “Thirty Bob A Week.” It is of the solid earth, and has none of the Dantesque weirdness of the Ballads of Hell and Heaven; but it is stronger than either of them in its own way—this monologue of the man who must live on thirty shillings a week, and make the best of it.

“But the difficultest go to understand, And the difficultest job a man can do, Is to come it brave and meek, with thirty bob a week, And feel that that’s the proper thing for you.

“It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf; It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck; It’s walking on a string across a gulf, With millstones fore-an-aft about your neck; But the thing is daily done by many and many a one; And we fall, face-forward, fighting, on the deck.”

Here is a man to whom nothing human is foreign—who understands _because_ he feels.

It is the “Ballads” rather than the “Songs,” which give to this book its exceptional value, yet some of the Songs are charming—for instance, the two “To the Street Piano,” “A Laborer’s Wife,” and “After the End.” Indeed there is nothing in the volume more deeply imbued with the human sympathy, of which Mr. Davidson’s work is so pregnant, than these two songs. Witness the refrain to the one which the laborer’s wife sings:—

“Oh! once I had my fling! I romped at ging-go-ring; I used to dance and sing, And play at everything. I never feared the light; I shrank from no one’s sight; I saw the world was right; I always slept at night.”

But in an evil hour she married, “on the sly.” Now three pale children fight and whine all day; her “man” gets drunk; her head and her bones are sore; and her heart is hacked; and she sings—

“Now I fear the light; I shrink from every sight; I see there’s nothing right; I hope to die to-night.”

“After the End” is in a very different key. It is more universal. Kings and queens, as well as the humblest of their subjects, may well cry out, into the unknown dark—

“After the end of all things, After the years are spent, After the loom is broken, After the robe is rent, Will there be hearts a-beating, Will friend converse with friend, Will men and women be lovers, After the end?”

“In Romney Marsh” is a fascinating bit of landscape-painting; and “A Cinque Port” has a melancholy and suggestive beauty that makes me long for space to copy it. The “Songs” for “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” and “Winter” are charming, also.

There is thought enough and strength enough in the “Songs,” “To the New Women,” and “To the New Men;” but they are rhymed prose, rather than poetry—if, indeed, “what” and “hot” can be said to _rhyme_ with “thought.”

Why, oh why, does Mr. Davidson treat us to such uncouth words as “bellettrist,” and “moneyers,” and “strappadoes”?—why talk to us of “apes in lusts unspoken,” and “fools, who lick the lip and roll the lustful eye”? “The Exodus From Houndsditch,” which contains these phrases, is certainly hard reading; but one is compelled, all the same, to read it more than once, for it is pregnant with thought, and here and there it is starred with splendid lines, such as—

“The chill wind whispered winter; night set in; Stars flickered high; and like a tidal wave, He heard the rolling multitudinous din Of life the city lave—”

or the picture of some fantastic world,

“Where wild weeds half way down the frowning bank Flutter, like poor apparel stained and sere, And lamplight flowers, with hearts of gold, their rank And baleful blossoms rear.”

One closes Mr. Davidson’s book with reluctance, and with a haunting sense of beauty, and power, and the promise of yet greater things to come. He is a young man—scarcely past thirty; what laurels are springing up for him to gather in the future, who shall say? Happily he is not faultless—since for the faultless there is no perspective of hope.

R. L. S.—Some Edinburgh Notes

_By_ Eve Blantyre Simpson

R. L. S.—SOME EDINBURGH NOTES

Give me again all that was there, Give me the sun that shone! Give me the eyes, give me the soul, Give me the lad that’s gone!

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

LOUIS STEVENSON was born in 8 Howard Place, then an outlying suburban street between Edinburgh and the sea; and the substantial but unpretending house with its small plot of garden in front will doubtless be visited with interest in future by those who like to look on the birthplaces of famous men.

17 Heriot Row, on one of Edinburgh’s level terraces between the steep hills, “from which you see a perspective of a mile or so of falling street,” became his home before he was out of velvet tunics and socks, but as his mother was delicate, they lived when the weather was genial “in the green lap of the Rutland Hills,” at Swanston, a few miles from Edinburgh. He, however, spent his winters at Heriot Row, when he grew into an Academy boy, though not a specially brilliant scholar. His doubtful health would often stand as an excuse, when the rain splattered on the panes, or the square gardens opposite were hid in a scowling “haur,” for the small Louis to remain and “Child Play” beside his pretty mother. No doubt, too, the truant spirit was strong within him when he trotted down hill to school, “rasping his clachan[1] on the area railings” as he made an Edinburgh hero of his do. We first knew Louis Stevenson when his schooldays and teens were past, and he was facing what he called “the equinoctial gales of youth,” and beginning to put his self-taught art of writing into print. He had great railings against his native town in these days, which were somewhere in the heart of the seventies. The “meteorological purgatory” of its climate embittered him, as his frail frame suffered sorely from the bleak blasts. He vowed his fellow-townsmen had a list to one side by reason of having to struggle against the East wind. He gave his spleen vent in “Picturesque Notes of Edinburgh,” yet by way of apology he says, “the place establishes an interest in people’s hearts; go where they will, they find no city of the same distinction, go where they will, they take a pride in their old home.” No one could clothe the historical tales of Edinburgh in more graphic words than this slim son of hers. Often he would talk thereon, and he speaks of his joy, as a lad, in finding “a nugget of cottages at Broughton;” and any bit of old village embedded in the modern town, he espied and rejoiced over. He would frequently drop in to dinner with us, and of an evening he had the run of our smoking-room. After 10 P. M., when a stern old servant went to bed, the “open sesame” to our door was a rattle on the letter-box. He liked this admittance by secret sign, and we liked to hear his special rat-a-tat, for we knew we would then enjoy an hour or two of talk which, he said, “is the harmonious speech of two or more, and is by far the most accessible of pleasures.” He always adhered to the same dress for all entertainments, a shabby, short, velveteen jacket, a loose, Byronic, collared shirt (for a brief space he adopted black flannel ones), and meagre, shabby-looking trousers. His straight hair he wore long, and he looked like an unsuccessful artist, or a poorly-clad but eager student. He was then fragile in figure and, to use a Scottish expression, _shilpit_ looking. There is no English equivalent for _shilpit_, being lean, starveling, ill-thriven, in one. His dark, bright eyes were his most noticeable and attractive feature,—wide apart, almost Japanese in their shape, and above them a fine brow.

He was pale and sallow, and there was a foreign, almost gypsy look about him, despite his long-headed Scotch ancestry. In the “Inland Voyage,” he complains, he “never succeeded in persuading a single official abroad of his nationality.” I do not wonder he was suspected of being a spy with false passports, for he had a very un-British smack about him; but, slim and pinched-looking though he was, he still commanded notice by his unique appearance and his vivacity of expression. His manners, too, had a foreign air with waving gestures, elaborate bows, and a graceful nimbleness of action.

By our library fire, on the winter evenings, he planned the canoe trip with my brother, and told us in the following season how the record of this “Inland Voyage” progressed. He was also laying future plans for a further trip, as he said, smiling with fun, with another donkey,—this time to the Cevennes. After the “Inland Voyage,” Louis was full of a project to buy a barge and saunter through the canals of Europe, Venice being the far-off terminus. A few select shareholders in this scheme were chosen, mostly artists, for the barge plan was projected in the mellow autumnal days at Fontainebleau Forest where artists abounded. Robert A. Stevenson, Louis’s cousin, then a wielder of the brush, was to be of the company. He, too, though he came of the shrewd Scottish civil engineer stock, had, like his kinsman, a foreign look and a strong touch of Bohemianism in him. He, also, with these alien looks, had his cousin’s attractive power of speech and fertile imagination. The barge company were then all in the hey-day of their youth. They were to paint fame-enduring pictures, as they leisurely sailed through life and Europe, and when bowed, gray-bearded, bald-headed men, they were to cease their journeyings at Venice. There, before St. Marks, a crowd of clamorously eager picture-dealers and lovers of art were to be waiting to purchase the wonderful work of the wanderers. The scene in the piazza of St. Marks on the barge’s arrival, and the excited throng of anxious buyers, the hoary-headed artists, tottering under the weight of canvases, was pictured in glowing colors by their author, when the forest was smelling of the “ripe breath of autumn.” The barge was purchased, but bankruptcy presently stared its shareholders in the face. The picture-dealers of that day were not thirsting to buy shareholders’ pictures. The man of the pen had only ventured on an “Inland Voyage,” and as yet no golden harvest for his work lined the pockets of his velveteen coat. The barge was arrested and, with it, the canoes which have earned an everlasting fame through the “Arethusa’s” pen. They were rescued, the barge sold, and the company wound up.

We saw most of Louis Stevenson in winter, when studies and rough weather held him in Edinburgh. In summer he was off to the country, abroad, or yachting on the West coast, for in his posthumous song he truly says:—

“Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye.”