Читать книгу: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1876», страница 18

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

Sonnets, Songs and Stories. By Cora Kennedy Aitken. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

This little book is one of that numerous class which is the despair of the critic. Its spirit is so much better than its letter that one is left in doubt whether its author is incapable of more careful finish, or is simply disdainful of it. Mrs. Aitken is apparently a lesser Mrs. Browning, cast in a Scotch mould. She is fond of writing upon patriotic or historic themes, and through all her poems runs a current of strong religious feeling. Without being in any sense an imitator of Mrs. Browning, there is a certain trick of phrase here and there which recalls her style, while the choice of subjects continually reminds one of Mrs. Browning's favorite themes. One of her sonnets, called "Unless" (an awkward title enough, by the by) begins thus:

 
Sweetheart, I tell thee, I, a woman born
To live by music, and to soar and sing,
As stars for shining, flowers for blossoming,
Could never sit beneath the stars and mourn
With missing aught from such high destinies.
 

That is very suggestive of Mrs. Browning's style, and it were easy to multiply instances; such as this, for example, from the poem called "In York:"

 
The broad vaulted aisles are so still we can hear
The silences bend thro' the loneliness, listening
To the eloquent brasses that burn at our feet,
With holy signs glistening.
 

This is the worst form of Browningese. Exactly what Mrs. Aitken meant by it she probably knows as little as any of us; but we would humbly suggest to her that one does not hear anything bend, unless it be of a creaking nature, like an old tree, and that is rather opposed to one's idea of "silences," vague as our notions of that plural noun are. Why one "silence" could not serve her turn is one of those Dundrearyan conundrums that no fellow can find out. And, while we are about it, we should like to know whether it is the silences or the loneliness or "we" that listen to the eloquent brasses, and to inquire mildly why the poet threw away the opportunity to say the "brazen eloquences," which would have been novel and striking, and quite in the vein of her great original. If Mrs. Browning can talk about "broken sentiency" and "elemental strategies," why should not Mrs. Aitken aspire to hear the silences bend? To do her justice, she does not use such expressions very often—her style is usually simple and comprehensible—but she does sometimes make the mistake of confounding incomprehensibility and power. She has some pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian model, and generally end with a couplet. Her blank verse is the worst of all. The most ambitious poem in the book is that called "A Day in the Life of Mary Stuart," a dramatic poem in three scenes, dated the last of January, 1567. It contains a scene between the queen and her maidens, a scene with the Presbyterian deputies, and a scene with Bothwell, wherein she incites him to the murder of Darnley. It is unfortunate that the poem should have appeared in the same year with Swinburne's Bothwell, that magnificent study of the character of Mary Stuart. The characters in Mrs. Aitken's sketch are weak and thin, and the verse intolerable. She divides the most inseparable phrases to make out her measure, and constantly ends the lines with a preposition. No torturing of the voice can make verse of such sentences as these:

 
He bids
Your grace deny Lord Bothwell's wish to be
Made member of the council, and if so
Be you delay, he—
 

In the scene with Bothwell the queen declares her love to him thus:

 
Wait you for love? 'Tis worth the waiting for.
God put a power of closer tenderness
In mine than in most women's souls. Who thrills
The senses, holds the heart, in all inspiring
Ways sweetens and magnifies to good
Love's life, conceiving colder estimate
Of love? So will I love you, without stint.
 

Compare this feeble and disjointed utterance with the corresponding speech in Swinburne's play. Mary says:

 
O my fair lord!
How fairer is this warrior face, and eyes
With the iron light of battle in them, left
As the after-fire of sunset left in heaven
When the sun sinks, than any fool's face made
Of smiles and courtly color! Now I feel
As I were man too, and had part myself
In your great strength; being one with you as I,
How should I not be strong?
 

Cartoons. By Margaret J. Preston. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

If Mrs, Aitken's poems suggest Mrs. Browning's, these Cartoons of Mrs. Preston's have a slight flavor of Robert Browning's Men and Women in their subjects and in their mode of thought. A cartoon is usually supposed to be a design for tapestry or mosaic, but we suppose that Mrs. Preston has taken the significance given the word by our illustrated papers, where it is held to mean a large outline sketch. The title is not a very happy one, but the poems, are much better than the title. They are strong, simple and well-written, and the subjects are usually very well chosen. They are divided into "Cartoons from the Life of the Old Masters," "Cartoons from the Life of the Legends" and "Cartoons from the Life of To-day." Of these, the second division is perhaps the weakest, the first the most interesting, while the third makes up in religious sentiment what it lacks in poetic strength and beauty. It contains more commonplace verses and ideas than either of the other two. Of the stories of the old masters, "Mona Lisa's Picture," "The Duke's Commission" and "Woman's Art" are perhaps the best, and the last poem especially is very spirited and terse. Mrs. Preston's style has the rare merit in these days of uniting conciseness and directness to grace and beauty of expression. Her greatest failing is a lack of the sense of climax. There are several of these poems, like the two on the Venerable Bede and that called "Bacharach Wine," that rather disappoint one by the insignificance of their closing stanzas or the gradual dwindling of their interest toward the end. There is a great deal of art in knowing when to stop, and there are many stories, like some of those in this book, that are very impressive told in a few words, but elaborated into a long poem lose all their power to move us. At the same time, we realize that it is not from any poverty of ideas that Mrs. Preston sometimes dwells too long upon a subject: her poetry is not diluted with a mere harmonious jingle of words, as destitute of any meaning as the silver chime of sleigh-bells. "The Legend of the Woodpecker" is remarkable for its simplicity and terseness: it is one of the best of all the poems; only we wish that in the last verse but one she had not thought it necessary to use the word "chode" for "chided." So in the fine ballad called "The Reapers of Landisfarne" it is a pity to mar a good stanza by using the queer participle "strawed" as a rhyme to sod and abroad, especially as the latter words do not rhyme either, save in New England parlance. But such blemishes as these in Mrs. Preston's work are rare, and therefore it is worth while to point them out. Poems of so much vigor as these give fair promise for the future, and deserve something more than merely general commendation.

Among my Books. (Second Series.) By James Russell Lowell. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

The essays in this volume have an advantage over the former series published under the same title in the greater homogeneousness of the subjects. These are all poets, and with one exception English poets. They are poets, too, so to speak, of one family, unequal in rank, but having that resemblance of character which marks the higher and lower peaks of the same mountain-chain. All are epic and lyric, none in a proper sense dramatic. All are poets de pur sang, endowed by nature with the special qualities which cannot be confounded with those of a different order, and which forbid all doubt as to a true "vocation." Dante, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, differing as they do in intellectual greatness and imaginative power, have all, as a distinguishing characteristic, that magic mastery over the harmonies of language which renders them responsive to subtle thoughts and ethereal conceptions. We find, however, no intimation that it is from any view of this kind that these essays have been collected, in a single group. It seems indeed more probable that they have simply been reprinted, in the order in which they first appeared, on being found of sufficient bulk to fill a volume of the desired size. Nor is it to be supposed that they indicate a particular course of study pursued with reference to their production. Though the author has had the works on which he comments beside him while he wrote, his long and close familiarity with them, as well as with the range of literature to which they belong, and with the principles and necessary details which help to illustrate them, is apparent throughout. Seldom, indeed, except in the case of a specialist devoting himself to some single field, has a critical panoply been more complete than that with which Mr. Lowell has armed himself. He discusses with equal learning and enthusiasm the profoundest and the minutest questions, mysteries of consciousness and niceties of metre and accent. Yet this laboriousness is curiously conjoined with something of a sybaritic tone, as of a taste cultivated to hyper-fastidiousness and courting a languorous enjoyment of flavors rather than the satisfaction of a keen appetite. There are in this book some passages in which the thought is so attenuated in the process of elaboration and figurative adornment that we are tempted to regard the whole as a mere effort of fancy, not as the expression of a serious conviction. It might have been appropriate and suggestive to characterize the poetry of Spenser by some allusions to the splendors and bizarreries of Venetian art; but when it is asserted as a proposition logically formulated and supported that "he makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his style Venetian, but as the gallery there is housed in the shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory; and again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure, like the rhythmical impulse of the oar, floats you lullingly along from picture to picture,"—we are rather reminded of Venetian filigree than struck by the force and truth of the analogy. The statement that Spenser's style is Venetian is a puzzling one, and we are not much helped by the explanation given in a foot note, where Mr. Lowell, citing from the Muiopotmos a description of the rape of Europa, asks, "Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example?" and then adds, "Spenser begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the 'Commonwealth and Government of Venice' (1599) with this beautiful verse,

 
Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight.
 

Perhaps we should read 'lost.'"

We fail to get any light from these quotations, and we should be glad to have been spared the doubt as to Mr. Lowell's accuracy and authority as a verbal critic suggested by his off-hand emendation of a phrase which he has remembered for its alliterative sweetness while he has missed its sense and forgotten the context. In the line "Fayre Venice," etc., which occurs not at the beginning, but near the end, of the sonnet, "lost" would be so contradictory to the sense that any editor who had found the word thus printed and had failed to substitute "last" would have betrayed inexcusable negligence. Spenser, writing while Venice, though declined from the height of her greatness, was still flourishing as well as fair, considers her as the marvel of his own age—the "last," i.e., latest, world—as Babylon and Rome, with which he compares her, had been the marvels of antiquity, of worlds that were indeed lost.⁶ Slips of this kind are probably rare, but a prevailing tendency to put forward loose or fanciful conjectures as ex-cathedrâ rulings detracts from the pleasure and instruction to be derived from these essays.

Books Received

The Excavation of Olympia, by Ernst Curtius; and Ernst Curtius, by Prof. Robert P. Keep, Ph. D. Republished from International Review. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.

History of the United States. By J.A. Doyle, with Maps by Francis A. Walker. (Freeman's Historical Course for Schools.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Our National Currency and the Money Problem. By Hon. Amasa Walker, LL.D. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.

A Hundred Years Ago, and other Poems. By Charles W.E. Siegel, A.B. Lancaster: Daily and Weekly Examiner.

History of the United States. (Centenary Edition.) Vol.I. By George Bancroft. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

The Christ of Paul; or, The Enigmas of Christianity. By George Reber. New York: Charles P. Somerby.

Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer. By Charles Sotheran. New York: Charles P. Somerby.

The Summerfield Imbroglio: A Tale. By Mortimer Collins. Boston: Loring.

Dear Lady Disdain. By Justin McCarthy. New York: Sheldon & Co.