Part 12
The book called _Pages_ can naturally be compared with the _Poèmes en Prose_ of Baudelaire. Several of the sketches so named are now reprinted in _Vers et Prose_, and they strike me as the most distinguished and satisfactory of the published writings of M. Mallarmé. They are difficult, but far more intelligible than the enigmas which he calls his sonnets. _La Pipe_, in which the sight of an old meerschaum brings up dreams of London and the solitary lodgings there; _Le Nénuphar Blanc_, recording the vision of a lovely lady, visible for one tantalising moment to a rower in his boat; _Frisson d'Hiver_, the wholly fantastic and nebulous reverie of archaic elegances evoked by the ticking of a clock of Dresden china; each of these, and several more of these exquisite _Pages_, give just that impression of mystery and allusion which the author deems that style should give. They are exquisite--so far as they go--pure, distinguished, ingenious; and the fantastic oddity of their vocabulary seems in perfect accord with their general character.
Here is a fragment of _La Pénultième_, on which the reader may try his skill in comprehending the New French:
"Mais où s'installe l'irrécusable intervention du surnaturel, et le commencement de l'angoisse sous laquelle agonise mon esprit naguère seigneur, c'est quand je vis, levant les yeux, dans la rue des antiquaires instinctivement suivie, que j'étais devant la boutique d'un luthier vendeur de vieux instruments pendus au mur, et, à terre, des palmes jaunes et les ailes enfouies en l'ombre, d'oiseaux anciens. Je m'enfuis, bizarre, personne condamnée à porter probablement le deuil de l'inexplicable Pénultième."
As a translator, all the world must commend M. Mallarmé. He has put the poems of Poe into French in a way which is subtle almost without parallel. Each version is in simple prose, but so full, so reserved, so suavely mellifluous, that the metre and the rhymes continue to sing in an English ear. None could enter more tenderly than he into the strange charm of _Ulalume_, of _The Sleeper_, or of _The Raven_. It is rarely indeed that a word suggests that the melody of one, who was a symbolist and a weaver of enigmas like himself, has momentarily evaded the translator.
M. Mallarmé, who understands English so perfectly, has perhaps seen the poems of Sydney Dobell. He knows, it is possible, that thirty or forty years ago there was an English poet who cultivated the symbol, who deliquesced the language, as he himself does in French. Sydney Dobell wrote lovely, unintelligible things, that broke, every now and then, into rhapsodies of veritable beauty. But his whole system was violent. He became an eccentric cometary nebula, whirling away from our poetic system at a tangent. He whirled away, for all his sincere passion, into oblivion. This is what one fears for the Symbolists: that being read with so great an effort by their own generation, they may, by the next, not be read at all, and what is pure and genuine in their artistic impulses be lost. Something of M. Mallarmé will, however, always be turned back to with respect and perhaps with enthusiasm, for he is a true man of letters.
_1893._
TWO PASTELS
I
Mr. R. L. Stevenson as a Poet
A pretty little anthology might be made of poems by distinguished writers who never for a moment professed to be poets, and who only "swept, with hurried hand, the strings" when they thought nobody was listening. The elegant technical people of the eighteenth century, who never liked to be too abstruse to seem polite, would contribute a great many of these flowers that were born to bloom unseen. It is not everybody who is aware that the majestic Sir William Blackstone was "guilty," as people put it, of a set of one hundred octosyllabic verses which would do credit to any laurelled master on Parnassus. We might, indeed, open our little volume with _The Lawyers Farewell to his Muse_. Then, of course, there would be Bishop Berkeley's unique poem, _Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way_; and Oldys, the antiquary, would spare us his _Busy, curious, thirsty Fly_. We should appeal to Burton for the prefatory verses in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and to Bacon for _The World's Bubble_. If I had any finger in that anthology, Smollett's _Ode to Leven Water_ should by no means be omitted. It would be a false pride that would reject Holcroft's _Gaffer Gray_, or Sydney Smith's _Receipt for a Salad_, which latter Herrick might have been glad to sign. Hume's solitary poem should be printed by itself, or with some of Carlyle's lyrics, and George Eliot's sonnets, in an appendix, as an awful warning.
As we come down to recent times the task of editing our anthology would grow difficult. In our day, the prose writers have either been coy or copious with their verses. If Professor Tyndall has never essayed the Lydian measure it is very surprising, but we have not yet been admitted to hear his shell; nor has Mr. Walter Besant, to the best of my belief, published an ode to anything. Let the shades of Berkeley and Smollett administer reproof. Until quite lately, however, we should have been contented to close our selection with "The bed was made, the room was fit," from _Travels with a Donkey_. But Mr. Stevenson is now ineligible--he has published books of poems.
That this departure is not quite a new one might be surmised by any one who has followed closely the publications of the essayist and novelist whom a better man than I am has called "the most exquisite and original of our day." Though Mr. Stevenson's prose volumes are more than twelve in number, and though he had been thought of essentially as a prose writer, the ivory shoulder of the lyre has peeped out now and then. I do not refer to his early collections of verse, to _Not I, and other Poems_, to _Moral Emblems_, and to _The Graver and the Pen_. (I mention these scarce publications of the Davos press in the hope of rousing wicked passions in the breasts of other collectors, since my own set of them is complete.) These volumes were decidedly occult. A man might build upon them a reputation as a sage, but hardly as a poet. Their stern morality came well from one whose mother's milk has been the _Shorter Catechism;_ they are books which no one can read and not be the better for; but as mere verse, they leave something to be desired. _Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda_, if you happen to be lucky enough to possess them, _e passa_. Where the careful reader has perceived that Mr. Stevenson was likely to become openly a poet has been in snatches of verse published here and there in periodicals, and of a quality too good to be neglected. Nevertheless, the publication of _A Child's Garden of Verses_ (Longmans, 1885) was something of a surprise, and perhaps the new book of grown-up poems, _Underwoods_ (Chatto and Windus, 1887) is more surprising still. There is no doubt about it any longer. Mr. Stevenson is a candidate for the bays.
The _Child's Garden of Verses_ has now been published long enough to enable us to make a calm consideration of its merits. When it was fresh, opinion was divided, as it always is about a new strong thing, between those who, in Mr. Longfellow's phrase about the little girl, think it very, very good, and those who think it is horrid. After reading the new book, the _Underwoods_, we come back to _A Child's Garden_ with a clearer sense of the writer's intention, and a wider experience of his poetical outlook upon life. The later book helps us to comprehend the former; there is the same sincerity, the same buoyant simplicity, the same curiously candid and confidential attitude of mind. If any one doubted that Mr. Stevenson was putting his own childish memories into verse in the first book, all doubt must cease in reading the second book, where the experiences, although those of an adult, have exactly the same convincing air of candour. The first thing which struck the reader of _A Child's Garden_ was the extraordinary clearness and precision with which the immature fancies of eager childhood were reproduced in it. People whose own childish memories had become very vague, and whose recollections of their games and dreams were hazy in the extreme, asked themselves how far this poet's visions were inspired by real memory and how far by invention. The new book sets that question at rest; the same hand that gave us--
_My bed is like a little boat;_ _Nurse helps me in when I embark;_ _She girds me in my sailor's coat,_ _And starts me in the dark;_
and the even more delicious--
_Now, with my little gun, I crawl_ _All in the dark along the wall,_ _And follow round the forest-track_ _Away behind the sofa-back,--_
now gives us pictures like the following:
My house, _I say. But hark to the sunny doves,_ _That make my roof the arena of their loves_, _That gyre about the gable all day long_ _And fill the chimneys with their murmurous song:_ Our house, _they say; and_ mine, _the cat declares,_ _And spreads his golden fleece upon the chairs;_ _And_ mine _the dog, and rises stiff with wrath_ _If any alien foot profane the path._ _So, too, the buck that trimmed my terraces,_ _Our whilome gardener, called the garden his;_ _Who now, deposed, surveys my plain abode_ _And his late kingdom, only from the road._
We now perceive that it is not invention, but memory of an extraordinarily vivid kind, patiently directed to little things, and charged with imagination; and we turn back with increased interest to _A Child's Garden_, assured that it gives us a unique thing, a transcript of that child-mind which we have all possessed and enjoyed, but of which no one, except Mr. Stevenson, seems to have carried away a photograph. Long ago, in one of the very earliest, if I remember right, of those essays by R. L. S. for which we used so eagerly to watch the _Cornhill Magazine_ in Mr. Leslie Stephen's time, in the paper called "Child Play," this retention of what is wiped off from the memories of the rest of us was clearly displayed. Out of this rarely suggestive essay I will quote a few lines, which might have been printed as an introduction to _A Child's Garden_:
"In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in all. 'Making believe' is the gist of his whole life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable _mise-en-scène_, and had to act a business-man in an office before I could sit down to my book.... I remember, as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was none to see. Children are even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligently together, they chatter gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to speak French."
Probably all will admit the truth of this statement of infant fancy, when it is presented to them in this way. But how many of us, in perfect sincerity, not relying upon legends of the nursery, not refreshed by the study of our own children's "make-believe," can say that we clearly recollect the method of it? We shall find that our memories are like a breath upon the glass, like the shape of a broken wave. Nothing is so hopelessly lost, so utterly volatile, as the fancies of our childhood. But Mr. Stevenson, alone amongst us all, appears to have kept daguerreotypes of the whole series of his childish sensations. Except the late Mrs. Ewing, he seems to be without a rival in this branch of memory as applied to literature.
The various attitudes of literary persons to the child are very interesting. There are, for instance, poets like Victor Hugo and Mr. Swinburne who come to admire, who stay to adore, and who do not disdain to throw their purple over any humble article of nursery use. They are so magnificent in their address to infancy, they say so many brilliant and unexpected things, that the mother is almost as much dazzled as she is gratified. We stand round, with our hats off, and admire the poet as much as he admires the child; but we experience no regret when he presently turns away to a discussion of grown-up things. We have an ill-defined notion that he reconnoitres infancy from the outside, and has not taken the pains to reach the secret mind of childhood. It is to be noted, and this is a suspicious circumstance, that Mr. Swinburne and Victor Hugo like the child better the younger it is.
_What likeness may define, and stray not_ _From truth's exactest way,_ _A baby's beauty? Love can say not,_ _What likeness may._
This is charming; but the address is to the mother, is to the grown-up reflective person. To the real student of child-life the baby contains possibilities, but is at present an uninteresting chrysalis. It cannot carry a gun through the forest, behind the sofa-back; it is hardly so useful as a cushion to represent a passenger in a railway-train of inverted chairs.
Still more remote than the dithyrambic poets are those writers about children--and they are legion--who have ever the eye fixed upon morality, and carry the didactic tongue thrust in the cheek of fable. The late Charles Kingsley, who might have made so perfect a book of his _Water-Babies_, sins notoriously in this respect. The moment a wise child perceives the presence of allegory, or moral instruction, all the charm of a book is gone. Parable is the very antipodes of childish "make-believe," into which the element of ulterior motive or secondary moral meaning never enters for an instant. The secret of the charm of Mrs. Gatty's _Parables from Nature_, which were the fairest food given to very young minds in my day, was that the fortunate child never discovered that they were parables at all. I, for one, used to read and re-read them as realistic statements of fact, the necessity of pointing a moral merely having driven the amiable author to the making of her story a little more fantastic, and therefore more welcome, than it would otherwise be. It was explained to me one hapless day that the parables were of a nature to instil nice principles into the mind; and from that moment Mrs. Gatty became a broken idol. Lewis Carroll owed his great and deserved success to his suppleness in bending his fancy to the conditions of a mind that is dreaming. It has never seemed to me that the _Adventures in Wonderland_ were specially childish; dreams are much the same, whether a child or a man is passive under them, and it is a fact that Lewis Carroll appeals just as keenly to adults as to children. In Edward Lear's rhymes and ballads the love of grotesque nonsense in the grown-up child is mainly appealed to; and these are certainly appreciated more by parents than by children.
It would be easy, by multiplying examples, to drive home my contention that only two out of the very numerous authors who have written successfully on or for children have shown a clear recollection of the mind of healthy childhood itself. Many authors have achieved brilliant success in describing children, in verbally caressing them, in amusing, in instructing them; but only two, Mrs. Ewing in prose, and Mr. Stevenson in verse, have sat down with them without disturbing their fancies, and have looked into the world of "make-believe" with the children's own eyes. If Victor Hugo should visit the nursery, every head of hair ought to be brushed, every pinafore be clean, and nurse must certainly be present, as well as mamma. But Mrs. Ewing or Mr. Stevenson might lead a long romp in the attic when nurse was out shopping, and not a child in the house should know that a grown-up person had been there. There are at least a dozen pieces in the _Child's Garden_ which might be quoted to show what is meant. "The Lamplighter" will serve our purpose as well as any other:
_My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;_ _It's time to take the window to see Learie going by;_ _For every night at tea-time, and before you take your seat,_ _With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street,_
_Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,_ _And my papa's a banker and as rich as he can be;_ _But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I'm to do,_ _O Learie, I'll go round at night and light the lamps with you!_
_For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,_ _And Learie stops to light it as he lights so many more;_ _And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,_ _O Learie, see a little child, and nod to him to-night._
In publishing this autumn a second volume, this time of grown-up verses, Mr. Stevenson has ventured on a bolder experiment. His _Underwoods_, with its title openly borrowed from Ben Jonson, is an easy book to appreciate and enjoy, but not to review. In many respects it is plainly the work of the same fancy that described the Country of Counterpane and the Land of Story-books, but it has grown a little sadder, and a great deal older. There is the same delicate sincerity, the same candour and simplicity, the same artless dependence on the good faith of the public. The ordinary themes of the poets are untouched; there is not one piece from cover to cover which deals with the passion of love. The book is occupied with friendship, with nature, with the honourable instincts of man's moral machinery. Above all, it enters with great minuteness, and in a very confidential spirit, into the theories and moods of the writer himself. It will be to many readers a revelation of the every-day life of an author whose impersonal writings have given them so much and so varied pleasure. Not a dozen ordinary interviewers could have extracted so much of the character of the man himself as he gives us in these one hundred and twenty pages.
The question of admitting the personal element into literature is one which is not very clearly understood. People try to make rules about it, and say that an author may describe his study, but not his dining-room, and his wife, but not her cousin. The fact is that no rules can possibly be laid down in a matter which is one of individual sympathy. The discussion whether a writer may speak of himself or no is utterly vain until we are informed in what voice he has the habit of speaking. It is all a question which depends on the _timbre_ of the literary voice. As in life there are persons whose sweetness of utterance is such that we love to have them warbling at our side, no matter on what subject they speak, and others to whom we have scarcely patience to listen if they want to tell us that we have inherited a fortune, so it is in literature. Except that little class of stoic critics who like to take their books _in vacuo_, most of us prefer to know something about the authors we read. But whether we like them to tell it us themselves, or no, depends entirely on the voice. Thackeray and Fielding are never confidential enough to satisfy us; Dickens and Smollett set our teeth on edge directly they start upon a career of confidential expansion; and this has nothing to do with any preference for _Tom Jones_ over _Peregrine Pickle_. There is no doubt that Mr. Stevenson is one of those writers the sound of whose personal voices is pleasing to the public, and there must be hundreds of his admirers who will not miss one word of "To a Gardener" or "The Mirror Speaks," and who will puzzle out each of the intimate addresses to his private friends with complete satisfaction.
The present writer is one of those who are most under the spell. For me Mr. Stevenson may speak for ever, and chronicle at full length all his uncles and his cousins and his nurses. But I think if it were my privilege to serve him in the capacity of Molière's old woman, or to be what a friend of mine would call his "foolometer," I should pluck up courage to represent to him that this thing can be overdone. I openly avow myself an enthusiast, yet even I shrink before the confidential character of the prose inscription to _Underwoods_. This volume is dedicated, if you please, to eleven physicians, and it is strange that one so all compact of humour as Mr. Stevenson should not have noticed how funny it is to think of an author seated affably in an armchair, simultaneously summoning by name eleven physicians to take a few words of praise each, and a copy of his little book.
The objective side of Mr. Stevenson's mind is very rich and full, and he has no need to retire too obstinately upon the subjective. Yet I know not that anything he has written in verse is more worthily dignified than the following little personal fragment, in which he refers, of course, to the grandfather who died a few weeks before his birth, and to the father whom he had just conducted to the grave, both heroic builders of lighthouses:
_Say not of me that weakly I declined_ _The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,_ _The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,_ _To play at home with paper like a child._ _But rather say: In the afternoon of time_ _A strenuous family dusted from its hands_ _The sand of granite, and beholding far_ _Along the sounding coast its pyramids_ _And tall memorials catch the dying sun,_ _Smiled well content, and to this childish task_ _Around the fire addressed its evening hours._
This is a particularly happy specimen of Mr. Stevenson's blank verse, in which metre, as a rule, he does not show to advantage. It is not that his verses are ever lame or faulty, for in the technical portion of the art he seldom fails, but that his rhymeless iambics remind the ear too much now of Tennyson, now of Keats. He is, on the contrary, exceedingly happy and very much himself in that metre of eight or seven syllables, with couplet-rhymes, which served so well the first poets who broke away from heroic verse, such as Swift and Lady Winchilsea, Green and Dyer. If he must be affiliated to any school of poets it is to these, who hold the first outworks between the old classical camp and the invading army of romance, to whom I should ally him. Martial is with those octo-syllabists of Queen Anne, and to Martial might well have been assigned, had they been in old Latin, the delicately homely lines, "To a Gardener." How felicitous is this quatrain about the onion--
_Let first the onion flourish there,_ _Rose among roots, the maiden fair,_ _Wine-scented and poetic soul_ _Of the capacious salad-bowl._
Or this, in more irregular measure, and enfolding a loftier fancy--
_Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still,_ _Sing truer, or no longer sing!_ _No more the voice of melancholy Jacques_ _To make a weeping echo in the hill;_ _But as the boy, the pirate of the spring,_ _From the green elm a living linnet takes,_ _One natural verse recapture--then be still._