Sir
Roger—What have we here?
Giles—There is everything under the sun set down
with some show of reason; they run atilt at the world,
and treat men and manners as familiar as an old hat.
Sir Roger—Think you they protest too much? I like
a matter disposed bravely, but—
Giles—Methinks they have a genial tongue. Will
you hear them?
Sir Roger—Well, an’ it be not too long I’ll
have some sack, and you read on.
—
Old Play.
A
great many people have the idea that a poet, or, indeed,
any kind of literary artist, must be a sort of monstrosity,
a person whose dress, language and habits are quite
out of the line of their ordinary experience. They expect
to find him a being wrapped in fiery abstractions, of
frenzied glance and disordered locks, forever impelled
by the most gorgeous sentiments, and getting off impassioned
remarks, full of unintelligible profundity. And how
astonished they are to find the poet so wonderfully
like other sensible men, the chief difference being
that he is possessed in a much higher degree of that
quality which they least looked for, namely, common
sense; for the faculty of genius is nothing more than
clear, plain common sense, carried to a high degree
and kindled with imagination. The poet differs from
the ordinary man of affairs in that he applies the quality
of common sense to all the relations and activities
of life; the man of affairs merely applies it in a limited
way to things as they are related to certain accepted
ideas, which he has been taught to regard as the sum
of existence. The hard-headed man of the world always
distrusts the poet as a dreamer or unpractical person.
It is a curious thing to reflect that the very reverse
is the fact. The business man, for instance, who with
ingenuity and labor accumulates a fortune, spends his
whole life in the pursuit of a dream, which in the end
is the most empty and futile imaginable; a dream which
to the unsparing eye of the poet is not only despicable
for its narrowness but possesses in a gigantic degree
all the elements of the ludicrous. The poet attaches
himself to no dream. He endeavors to see life simply
as it is, and to estimate everything at its true value
in relation to the universal and the infinite. But the
man of affairs still calls the poet a dreamer. There
are also a very great number of people, especially,
I believe, in this country, who regard the word “poet”
as simply and completely synonymous with the word “fool.”
They expect to find in the poet a very erratic person,
with weak eyes, a flabby complexion, an effeminate drawl,
and an alarming tendency to be affected to tears on
slight provocation. What is their astonishment when
he proves to be the wisest, the manliest, the most self-contained
and sometimes even the austerest and apparently most
unimpassionable of all men. Let us instance a few of
the great names:—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, Tennyson. Are
there in the annals of statecraft or business or philanthropy
any goodlier or wholesomer figures of men than these?
L.
We
may now look forward to numberless papers and reviews
on Shelley and subjects connected with his life and
works. The first of these is the article in the current
number of Harper’s by Guido Biagi, entitled “The
last Days of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” The author
is chief of the Laurentian Library of Florence. The
paper is exceedingly interesting and contains much new
matter collected by Signor Biagi. It is to be hoped
that the Shelley centenary may bring forth some new
matter dealing with his life and work, but it is extremely
doubtful whether research could discover any unknown
particular in connection with a subject so well and
so lovingly studied. But we should certainly look for
some new editions of his works—there is room for
them—and one in three or four small volumes, with
good-sized print, would be the most acceptable. The
tercentenary of Tasso’s death, which will be celebrated
in 1895, is likely to be made of considerable literary
interest, from the fact that a new, a heretofore unknown
manuscript, by the author of “Jerusalem Delivered,”
has been discovered in Italy, and will be published
during the year above mentioned. The manuscript deals
with a journey made by the poet to Egypt and Palestine,
and also contains several new sonnets.
S.
Mr.
Hardy’s new novel is a splendid performance. It
has all his old picturesqueness and his personal singularity,
but it springs from a deeper, a more human motive than
much of the work which has preceded it. There is less
of that theatric disposition of scene and incident which
has not been uncommon in Mr. Hardy’s work, and,
although it is full of distinctive happenings which
could not have been arranged by any other hand, they
fall naturally and inevitably. The book is replete with
descriptions of external nature which catch the strangest,
the most bizarre efforts with exquisite truthfulness.
Anything weird or obscure in a landscape Mr. Hardy reproduces
with perfect impression and his new book is even more
striking in this particular. I remember in “The
Return of the Native” some descriptions that will
hold with these later ones, but it is only in his books
that this special treatment of landscape is found. But
he has nowhere equaled the tragic pathos of this story,
which is almost too heavy for the heart to bear and
which is yet so true to the conditions of life. It is
only upon reflection that the true insight of the tale
comes out. Mr. Hardy has left us to work out the lesson
for ourselves, like the artist that he is, and has only
interfered with the complete impersonality of his work
in the sub-title, in which he seems to have felt the
need of emphasising the main feature of his heroine’s
character. It is upon reflection that one derives the
true value from the book, and in the end we cry out
once more against the code of morals which visits destruction
upon one sex and allows the other to go free for the
same crime. We may blame Angel Clare for not being stronger
than the society in which he was reared, but to me the
most heartrending thing in the whole book is to feel
how slight the veil was which separated him from his
happiness and Tess from her fate, and how any one of
many possibilities might have rent it asunder and left
them heart to heart as they should have been. But in
life it is just these infinitesimal things which will
not happen and to avoid such catastrophes we would need
a prophetic power of insight and a god-like power of
criticism.
S.
The
investigations of a certain Vienna professor into the
language of monkeys constitute one of the latest curiosities
in the way of scientific research. This professor affirms
that monkeys have a quite intelligible language, and
it appears that he has already made considerable progress
in the study of it. He holds long conversations with
some of the apes in the zoological gardens at London,
and whenever he appears these apes call to him, it is
said, with the greatest impatience and show manifest
pleasure in his society. The professor is now on the
point of setting out for Africa in order to prosecute
his studies among the native simian tribes. Let us hope
that he will be cautious in interviewing some of them.
An interchange of sentiments with an impulsive and able-bodied
gorilla, for instance, would call for a degree of delicate
diplomatic skill not at the disposal of every man.
L.
The
item of most interest in this month’s literary
news is that Mr. Swinburne has a tragedy in press, which
will be ready before long. It is called “The Sisters,”
and is written on a Northumbrian subject. Mr. Swinburne
has been silent now for some little time, and his new
tragedy will be received with general interest. Mr.
David Nutt has commenced the publication of a series
of Tudor translations, the initial number of which is
to be Florio’s Montaigne in three volumes. Mr.
Nutt will also publish three dramas by W.E. Henty and
Robert Louis Stevenson.
S.
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