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The death of Tennyson, following so closely on those of Browning and Matthew Arnold, produced a violent and disturbing crisis in our poetical history. At the first moment, in the agitation caused by the disappearance of these extremely dignified figures, and particularly by the extinction of Tennyson, the critics rashly asserted that poetry had ceased to develop; that it would henceforward be the pastime of children; and that it could no longer form a vital branch of our literature. Almost immediately it was perceived that whatever might happen, a neglect of verse was not imminent. We had long served under a gerantocracy, a tyranny by very old men. These venerable figures once removed, attention became fixed on men of the youngest generation. When all the ancient trees have fallen in the forest, the sturdiest saplings have room to expand. Of these some may be oaks and some may be alders, but all have a chance at last. We have seen no visible increase of public interest in the poets who already held high second or third rank (although the extreme respect with which the announcement of Christina Rossetti’s death was received points to an understratum of appreciation for these), but we have certainly seen a sudden access of reputation among writers between thirty-five and twenty-five years of age. The pendulum of taste is ever swinging, and from the opinion that no one under eighty was worth reading, we have come to regard no one over thirty as deserving our attention.
It will be unfortunate, I think, if the poets allow themselves to be disturbed by the conditions of crisis through which we are now passing. I deprecate the use of phrases such as hail one or two young versemen as: “Swans emerging from the ruck of geese.” A swan may once have been an ugly duckling; he has never been a goose, and exaggerations of this kind tend to encourage what is by far the most dangerous tendency of the literature of to-day, its commercial greediness. Coleridge, in his old age, told a friend of mine, who was then young, that he had never been one shilling the better off for all the verse he had ever printed. Mr. Dykes Campbell will tell us that this was an error of memory, but practically speaking it was true. In our own century, surrounded by admirers, living long past maturity, here was one of the truest poets of England confessing that poetry had been not so much a failure to him as a bankruptcy. Browning, to the very end of his days, through the period of his splendid late celebrity, could never have lived, however modestly, on what his poetry put into his pocket. These are the instances which the poet should bear in mind, nor allow himself to be dazzled by the almost inexplicable and entirely exceptional success of the career of Tennyson.
We are told that this is not a poetical age, nor ours a poetical country. No country and no age is poetical. If England is badly off, I have yet to learn that France or America, Italy or Germany, is in a more fortunate condition. In one of these countries, in Italy, as in England, it is true that attention is concentrated on certain young men of the latest generation. It is in Italy only, I think, that our youngest poets meet with rivals of their own value. Gabriele d’Annunzio and Rudyard Kipling are probably the most gifted persons under the age of thirty now writing verses in any part of the world. The Italians loudly praise the author of “Elegie Romane,” but if they buy his volumes to any appreciable extent, I am greatly misinformed. He is what Carducci and Panzacchi were before him, distinguished and illustrious, but not successful as the “female fictionist” understands success. No Italian poet, I think, in this day of the revival of Italian poetry, makes what could be called an appreciable income by his verse.
It would be indecorous to push the inquiry so far as to speculate how the increased interest in verse affects the pockets of our own younger poets. One hopes that they are fed with the flour of returns as well as with the honey of renown. But one doubts whether their pretty “limited editions,” their choruses of praise, their various celebrity, are symptoms of more than a very moderate popularity. They would think it unkind if one were to say that one wished them no more pudding than their great forefathers enjoyed. In point of fact, one wishes for every true artist the maximum of practical appreciation of his art. But if they break their hearts because they are not Tennyson, they will be silly fellows. A poet need feel no sense of failure because his books do not lie on every parlor-table in Brompton, or because no movement is made towards his being called up into the House of Lords. Success in poetry has not been, and we may hope that it never will be, a matter in which income-tax collectors can take an interest.
More, perhaps, than any other species of literature, poetry ought to be its own exceeding great reward. The verseman should write his verse with no other thought in his mind than that of relieving his heart of metrical pangs too acutely delicious to be borne. The verse being written, and then printed, the poet has done his work. He ought to have no further solicitude. He has adventured in a kind of writing in which less than in any other the element of ephemeral interest exists. If his stanzas are of true excellence, they will be as much admired in 1945 as in 1895, and perhaps more so. The best poetry does not grow old-fashioned. The poet should consider that he is not engaged in the timid coasting-trade of the novelist; he has put out on the vast seas, and if the risks of sinking are great, there is the chance of reaching the Golden Isles. He works, we will not say for immortality, since that is a vague and uncertain phrase, but for the future, and he ought to be content to miss the more facile successes of the immediate present. Poetry, after all, is not a democratic art. It appeals to the few, it “makes great music,” as Keats puts it, “for a little clan,” and it can by no means be sure, in the wild hurly-burly of our life, immediately to win the attention of those elect ears. But good verse, once printed, is never lost; sooner or later it is discovered, and fixed, like a jewel, into its proper drawer in the cabinet of the ages. To last forever, as a specimen, by the side of Lovelace or of Wolfe, should be better worth working for than to earn five thousand pounds as the author of a deciduous novel about the “New Woman.” At all events, the poet had better try to think so, for the financial prosperity can by no possible chance be his.
Concerning Me and the Metropolis
By
Louise Imogen Guiney
CONCERNING ME AND THE METROPOLISIT is my wish to make a confession, an extraordinary one for an American, to wit: I am no lover of Paris. This is putting it mildly. I had never misery elsewhere of which I could not get, and hold, the upper hand. Now we were there under pleasantest conditions, at good headquarters, within reach of things I profess to love: the crowd, the studios, the concerts and cafés, the lights of the Place de la Concorde, the parks, the Louvre, the river-boats, the circuses, the old schools, the National Library. We had sweet weather; we had health, youth, leisure; we had a menu; O shade of Angry Cat! (which, you must know, is French for the best of kings, Henry of Navarre) what a menu we did have! But over me and my hitherto unperturbed jollity there fell a deadly melancholy. My family shopped and sported, while I stood amid a thousand wheels in the Carrefour Montmartre, or in the lee of Molière’s fountained house-wall, with tears bursting down these indignant and constitutionally arid cheeks. All day I wandered about alone, like a lunatic or a lover; by night I slept little, and had visions weird and gory. This lasted an entire autumn, which I count as lost out of my life, and during which I never once could lay salt on the tail of what had been myself. Something in that nervous latitude knocked out my congenital stoicism; I began to have all manner of unmanageable emotions, like an eighteenth-century heroine with the spleen or the vapors; I was more sentient, more intelligent, more humanistic, more capable of vast virtues and vices than would have seemed credible to the New England which bred me upon her sacred bean. A violent quarrelsomeness possessed me; whatever I saw and heard was an irritation; I believe I could have offered, in all soberness, to reform the Comédie Française, to unbuild the Tour Saint-Jacques, and to fight the Immortals, man by man. The bearing and gesture of the polite wee police were odious in my eyes, and the parlous Parisian nurslings appeared insufferably like goblins. Frequently, I would fall literally on the neck of that dear little bronze Faun tiptoeing at the entrance to the Gardens of the Luxembourg, on the side of the Boule-Miche, scolding him fiercely for being able to live and smile and dance in fatal Paris!
And the unwonted behavior of me, the upside-downing and inside-outing of whatever I had fondly supposed to be my “ways”! It is to be desired, in general, that I were a less unspiritual creature; but there, at least, I haunted the great churches, especially Saint-Sulpice, with its solemn evensong borne on six hundred voices of seminarian men and boys. Whereas I had ever the relish of a genuine antiquary for tombs and epitaphs, I bolted incontinently from the beaded wreaths of Père-la-Chaise, and paid with a fit of shuddering for my propinquity to historic ashes in Saint-Denis. It would confound any of my acquaintances to be told that I was a misanthrope or a royalist; yet I used to look after the ominous, noisy, big-hatted, blue-chinned, whip-cracking cabbies, and grind my teeth at them as at the whole incarnate Revolution, which they instantly bring to mind. As for the Louvre, it gave me no comfort; I crossed its threshold but seldom, for it tore me in pieces with the unbearable glory on its walls.
In fine, Paris had about driven me mad. While I strolled the Quarter, I had for company, step for step, now Abelard, now Jacques de Molay and his Templars, now the Maid, now Coligny or Guise, now the Girondists and André Chénier: the long procession of the wronging and the wronged, the disillusioned, the slain, which belongs to those altered and brightened streets. Strange theories inhabited me; I was no crass optimist any more. My head hummed with the tragic warning of Bossuet, which Persius uttered before him, that at the bottom of every knowable thing was nothingness. And all this with a bun in one fist, and in the other a gem of a duodecimo, bought at the quays for three sous, with a cloudless sky above, and every incentive, including poverty, towards fullest content and exhilaration.
In London I had been happy, and “clad in complete steel” against such alien moods as these. And to London, eventually, I had to go back, although M. S., who lives for art and Chicago, and who always knows what’s what, compared me to a spook with no stomach for Paradise, whimpering for Hades and the sooty company thereof. But in London I was calm, normal, free, as by some eternal paradox.
One door in Paris I regretted to leave, for I went almost daily, like Little Billee and his cheerful colleagues, to the Morgue. I should have become a great novelist, had I taken my chances there a bit longer! Next to the Morgue, I was loath to part with the bridges, over which goes so much laughing and shining life, under which so much mystery is forever being fished up by aid of the torch and the prong. Ah, those men and women, stung, from the beginning, by the scorpions in that smooth, clean, treacherous air, and asking of the Seine water that it should quench immaterial fires!
So long as I have an eye to my own longevity and peace, I shall never put foot in Paris. Moreover, the place is painful, as having shaken to the base my smug opinion of myself. It taught me my moral ticklishness, and shrunk me into less than a cosmopolite; though I make puns again, I do so humbly, and out of a psychic experience. Nor must the item go unrecorded that I had a French ancestor, an unimportant personage remembered not then so much as since. He was born on the borders of Provence; what Paris was to him, or whether he ever beheld it, I know not. It is possible that he may have burned his fingers there, and that his bullying spirit imposed upon mine this fantastic attraction of repulsion, this irrational hatred of what I knew all the time to be the most animated, the most consistent, and the most beautiful city in the world.
“Trilby”
By
Louise Imogen Guiney
“TRILBY”“TRILBY” is two things. It is a little, simple, light-hearted story, lop-sided, discursive, having breaks and patches; and it is also already a masterpiece hors concours, so that when you come before it, the only sage remark you can make is dumb-show: that is, you may with great propriety take off your hat. Its background is so treated that it takes rank as a new thing in English fiction. Others since Mürger have attempted to draw the life of the Quarter, but none with this blitheness and winning charm, not even Mr. Henry Harland (Sidney Luska) in his idyllic “Land of Love,” which deserves to be better known. The spirit of “Trilby” is the very essence of the best old English humor, as if Fielding, Steele, and Thackeray had collaborated upon it in Paradise (forgetting just a little the rules of their mundane grammar, the conditions of their mundane style!) and transfused into it their robust manly gayety and their understanding tenderness of heart. Indeed, its every page seems to breathe forth Thackeray’s darling axiom: “Fun is good; Truth is better; Love is best of all.” It is a capital illustration of the capital French thesis that a subject counts for nothing, but that the treatment of a subject counts for everything. Let the average readeress, a person of conventions, go through “Trilby” from cover to cover. Her attitude at the end is Mrs. Bagot’s own: affectionate and bewildered surrender. “Trilby” itself is what its heroine ingenuously calls the “altogether.” It is an elemental human book, staged without costumes, attractive for no spurious attribute, but only through its gentleness and candor. It constrains talk, only because it has so strengthened feeling.
As for the tone of it, it has escaped mysticism, by great good fortune. Hypnotism, apprehended and faintly feared from the first, is used with an exquisitely abstinent touch. There is nowhere too much of it, and therefore it becomes credible and tragic. Svengali’s evil influence hangs over the victim whom it glorifies, like a premonition of the Greeks, formless, having no precisely indicated end or beginning. His soul passes; and the music in her forsakes her on the instant, and passes with him. You are not told this; you gather it. The tale is crowded with these inferences, and the dullest or cleverest reader is alike flattered at finding them. So with the relationship of Little Billee and his stricken Trilby, fading away among the cheery and loyal painters who take pleasure yet in her perfections: there is not, in the written record, so much as a private look or sigh between the two any more; only Trilby’s saddened confession to a third person that her girlish bosom had subdued itself at last to a meek, motherly yearning over her wild little worshipper, who nearly won her at the nineteenth asking.
The final chapters are out of proportion; chance, or weariness, led the author to hurry his thoroughly interesting hero off the scene in a few nervous paragraphs. But even this is no serious defect, for the general impression must be maintained; a prolonged soft orchestral strain for Little Billee would be mere sentiment, and episodic, the significance of “Trilby” having ended in Trilby’s dying with the wrong name upon her lips. Every part of the wonderful story is unconsciously managed with artistic reference to the whole; its incidents are as rich in meaning as you care to consider them. Trilby opens her heart to the Laird, and is most lover-like with him who is most brotherly. Her mother, poor lass, was an aristocrat with the bar sinister; her clerical father, a bibulous character enchantingly outlined, was her only authority for her disbelief in dogma. No stress is laid on these characteristics and conditions; but they tell. Taffy preserves an English silence when Gecko speaks his soulful and spills over. You half resent the hearty postlude, through your own too acute memory of what is past. Yet the book was bound to end in a tempo primo, in a strain of peace and hope as like as possible to what was hushed forever, the jocund dance-measure of art and friendship and Latin-Quarter youth. For “Trilby” is comedy, after all, genuine comedy, and it is so to be named, albeit with a scandalous lump in the throat. As it is, we take it; we covet it; we will pay any price for it; we cannot get along without it. “Je prong!”
Mr. Du Maurier is not the first artist in England who has come over the border into literature with victorious results. Opie and Fuseli were among the most suggestive of thinkers and talkers; Sir Joshua lectured with academic vigor and graceful persuasiveness; Haydon had an almost unequalled eye for character, and a racy, biting, individual manner with his pen. But no artist has so endowed the world of romance. Mr. Du Maurier’s achievement is not of malice prepense. As Dian stole to Endymion sleeping, so has immortal luck come upon him, chiefly because he did not, like the misguided Imlac in “Rasselas,” “determine to become” – a classic. “Trilby,” born of leisure and pastime, is vagrant; heedless of means to the end; profoundly modest and simple; told for what it is worth, as if it were, at least, something real and dear to the teller. Out of this easy, pleasure-giving mood, from one who is no trained expert, who has no idea to broach of disturbance or reform, out of genial genius, in short, which hates the niggardly hand and scatters roses, comes a gift of unique beauty. It crowns the publishers’ year, as do “Lord Ormont and his Aminta,” “Perleycross,” and “The Jungle Book.” With these great works of great writers, it stands, oddly enough, as tall as any; fresh, wide, healthful, curative, like them; and like them, a terrible punch on the head to a hundred little puling contemporaneous novels, with their crude and cowardly theories of life.
The “Trilby” pictures, haphazard and effectual as is their text, can bear no more direct praise than that they are verily Mr. Du Maurier’s. The masterly grouping, the multitude of fine lines, the spirited perspective, are here as of old. Some of these illustrations, not necessarily the best, stay on the retina; among such, surely, is the ludicrous, dripping funeral procession of the landlady’s vernacular lie; that huge procession filing up-street, with one belated, civic infant on the reviewing-stand! Hardly second to it as a spectacle is the high-born rogue of a Zouave, enacting the trussed fowl at midnight on the studio floor, or the companion gem, set in the dubious out-of-doors of the great original Parisian Carry-hatide. Of the serious drawings, there is a memorable one among the three of Trilby singing, with her delicately advanced foot, and falling hair, and the luminous Ellen-Terry-like look in her kind eyes. Above all, who can forget the pathetic, pleading figure of the little boy Jeannot, in his pretty Palm Sunday clothes, losing his holiday, losing faith in his sister; and of Trilby over him, revoking her promise, and compassing what was in very truth the “meanest and lowest deed” of her brief, unselfish life? She cried herself to sleep often, remembering it, but to Mrs. Bagot it was monstrous trivial: “the putting-off of a small child.” Her too typical phrase, “wrong with the intense wrongness of a right-minded person,” as Ruskin says, gives you a pang. So does the inscription under the last glimpse we have of Little Billee, poignant enough without the “Quae nunc abibis in loca,” which rushes its sweet pagan heart-break into the Rector’s mind. In these casual intolerable thrusts deep into the nerve of laughter or of tears, Mr. Du Maurier demonstrates his right of authorship; these, and not vain verbal felicities, constitute his literary style.
Modern Laodicea
By
Norman Hapgood
MODERN LAODICEAFOR centuries the word Laodicean was a reproach; to-day it is beginning to carry with it a suggestion of nobility. It was Saint John who, in making the unknown city famous, covered it with obloquy:
“And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write: …
“‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.
“‘So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’”
Among the moderns who have suggested that to be neither hot nor cold is to be well, Mr. Thomas Hardy is prominent, as he gave the title of “A Laodicean” to a novel of which the heroine is attractive. She is a girl who loves both the old and the new where they are most in conflict. She liked ruins and she liked restorations. She had half a mind to marry a picturesque noble, De Stancy, with no brains, no character, and an atmosphere of old-world romance, and she did marry a hard-headed modern. At the end of the book, she remarks: “‘We’ll build a new house beside the ruin, and show the modern spirit forevermore … but, George, I wish – ’ And Paula repressed a sigh.
“‘Well?’
“‘I wish my castle was not burned; and I wish you were a De Stancy.’”
At Harvard University, a few years ago, there was started a society intended to represent the true spirit of the Neo-Laodiceans. It held that lukewarmness was the most admirable condition obtainable by man. Moral heat or cold in the heart of any applicant for election was reason for his rejection. “Nothing in excess” was suggested as a motto, but the word “but” was thought to be a more subtle suggestion that something could always be said on either side. In the end no motto was chosen, because this matter, like all other matters, was not pressed. For refreshments, lukewarm tea and sweet California wine were served. Conversation was neither encouraged nor discouraged. Serious argument was as freely tolerated as genuine trifling. A well-known man in college, who thought himself worthy of the club, was rejected because he was believed to be hostile to seriousness. Another was kept out because, although he said nothing against frivolity, it bored him.
The society had no secrets. The members sought no proselytes, but gave full answers to all inquiries. The Harvard students smiled and were interested. The young women at the Harvard Annex tried to laugh, but thought it wasn’t right. They said the young men were posing. The most magnanimous said that under the seemingly erroneous spirit was a really ardent search for truth. The Annex held but one girl who was ever mentioned for membership, and she was defeated by a close vote on the ground that, although her Laodiceanism seemed perfect, as she was a woman it was axiomatic that a thorough knowledge of her would reveal some ethical prejudice.
The founder of the society, naturally enough, was the most imperfect member. At one time there was serious thought of accepting his resignation. Instead of being lukewarm he was alternately hot and cold, being one of the ablest moral speakers as well as one of the most inspired jesters at morality. He himself did not know whether reverence or blasphemy was strongest in him. It was the perfection of this doubt about himself which induced the club to forgive his unstable equilibrium.
“Doing is a deadly thing; doing ends in death.” One member was expelled because he quoted with approval this Antinomian hymn. That statement is as far from improved Laodiceanism as is the fury for doing things. Action is well enough if it be within bounds, as is rest. The Laodicean must see the advantages of all opposites, else he is unworthy of his name.
In contrast to the founder was the elected head of the society, the most fully developed specimen, a model of intellectual and temperamental moderation. He was mild in study, in exercise, in personal relations. He had more wisdom than most men and more knowledge, but he had acquired his knowledge, not by effort, but by putting his attention, when he chose to give attention to the acquisition of facts, to those of permanent importance. He had never wasted any strength on hobbies; he had never been enthusiastic. Yet he had always been interested. He knew nothing that was not worth knowing. His easy intellectual spirit was combined with æsthetic fineness and sensuous delicacy. He spent much of his time in the sunshine, amusing himself with the passing events of the hour. His friends were chosen for their dispositions, not for their acquirements. He preferred a small mind, simple and harmonious, to a large one distorted or turbulent. He spent a few hours of the day in severe study, a few in strolling in the air, a few in chatting and drinking tea, a few in reading poetry or other imaginative literature. He was fond of conversation, but not of dispute. He was loyal to reason and cared little for reasoning.