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England in the Seven Years' War. LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., 1914 that these have their bravery in common. For the artificial distinction between words and deeds, involving also the minor falsity of a distinction between manner and matter in literary style, has surely its final obliteration in the choice of literature, not art, nor even music, as the chosen medium of the revelation that has been man's greatest motive-power. If the Word be God, what can be more life528 giving; and with whom, if not with the poet, lies the word ? 526 527 527-528 ANCIENT EGYPT AND HER BOOKS (A History of the FICTION: 529-530 SOCIAL STUDIES (Sinister Street; Tony Bellew; Thracian Sea; The Island of Love and Death) 531 EGYPT AND AMERICA (Cairo; The Auction Block; Patrol of the Sun-Dance Trail) It is no discredit, then, to Mr. Blunt to be here accounted a poet, and a fine one too. His travels in many and strange 532 lands, on camel-back and on fleet barbback, have taken him no such journey as this which he has accomplished on the feet of poetry. All his adventures culminate in his adventures among sonnet forms, where, on occasion, his excesses run him into sixteen or even twenty lines. Even his own proficiency as a bull-fighter merges into his entry of that sport in the familiar catalogue of men's follies-a catalogue which laments also that cities 533 FANTASY AND FUN (The Phantom Peer; In the City of Under; Once a Week; But She Meant Well).. 532 STUDIES OF WOMEN (Kate Mitchell; A Royal Marriage; The Woman in the Bazaar; The Rise of Jennie Cushing; The Taste of Brine; Ways of Miss Barbara; The Nightingale) CRIME AND ADVENTURE (The House in the Downs; Spacious Days; Duke of Oblivion; Sir Vincent's Patient; The Miracle Man; The White Lie; My Lady of the Yellow Domino; The Man Inside) LITERARY Gossip 534 535 536 The Poetical Works of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. A Complete Edition. 2 vols. (Macmillan & Co., 7s. 6d. net each vol.) MR. WILFRID BLUNT, himself something of an enigma among men of his own generation, is a poet of many paradoxes. Here, to begin with, are nine hundred pages of verse by one who declares I would not, if I could, be called a poet." Nor is there a suspicion of affectation in the disclaimer. The mood is that in which the doer in him rebels against the dreamer : If ought be worth the doing, I would do it. The occult activity of creative minds has been likened by another poet-one whose name is linked with Mr. Blunt's by an episode of uncommon kindness-to that interparticled vibration which gives to matter its fixity : From stones and poets you may know Nothing so active is as that which least seems so. We need not labour the theme by quoting a soldier's hackneyed saying that he would rather have written Gray's Elegy -the quintessence of quietude than have carried the heights of Quebec-the quintessence of movement. Still less can we attempt, in a self-contained modern instance, to settle the proportion of homage relatively due to Sir Ian Hamilton's dignified, yet daringly original elegy on Gordon and the most dashing of his military exploits. It is enough to say Deck their streets for barren wars Which have laid waste their youth. When, in his light verse-light as a July breeze on Goodwood Down-the poet confesses he I would not for a million not have seen perpetuates the fleetest of races, and the most expert of modern horsemen. Again the Bedouin Arabs, whom he learnt to love only after much living among them, are transported, by more than any mere dreamer, from their black tents to his pages : Children of Shem! Firstborn of Noah's race, takes two worlds into count in its most love-blinded and bewildered moments, is the mark of Mr. Blunt's poetry throughout. The direct note of George Peele's Farewell to Arms,' and of Raleigh's Verses before Death,' Mr. Blunt has resounded in the ears of a later generation of listeners; and it is no light praise of a living poet to associate his with their high names, and to feel guiltless of any incongruity. If in form his sonnets are sometimes Shakespearian, in thought and feeling they recall, now Rousseau, but far oftener a more ancient and fitting prototype. Mr. Blunt is the St. Augustine of sonneteers. If in later poems, like a tired child who at last relinquishes some striving, he capitulates to Pleasure, it is not by this relaxed mood that he will be best remembered and praised. The penitent has in him a prevailing spokesman in such a sonnet as He would live a better life,' and such a poem as On the Way to Church'piece in which we are conscious of the superfluity of the final stanza. The candid Quatrains of Life' contain many passages of regret for the days of a guarded childhood and youth, made unhappy only by the knowledge of man's cruelty to man and beast; and in one of the sonnets he affirms : If I have since done evil in my life, I did not love corruption, nor do love. I find it ill to hate and ill to grieve. The mere discordant dreams in which I live. I was a saint of Heaven by right of birth. In the same mood he frankly tells his foolish Manon, If I had chosen thee, thou shouldst have been Uncovenanted, too, in its candour is the sonnet in which Manon is assured-what perhaps no woman ever believes that in her very derogations she is most dear to some of her adorers : I love not thy perfections. When I hear I found thee with eyes bleared and cheeks all pale, And lips that trembled to a voiceless cry, And that thy bosom in my bosom lay. "If all men were like you," says Stevenson's perceiving Baroness to Prince Otto, "it would be worth while to be a woman.' of these tragic affections, may find themThe moralist and the poet, in presence selves, to their mutual surprise, very much in agreement-if the one wields a threat, then the other suffers a regret-the threat fulfilled. In the lines At a Funeral ' Mr. Blunt claims the very ashes of her whom, living, he had loved : I loved her too, this woman who is dead. The notable thing throughout is that there is no levity in this poet's treatment of even light love. He brings loyalty to the unlikeliest assignment to which loyalty, in all its odd service, was ever set: a handmaid in the very house of the disloyal. In an anthology of Mr. Blunt's poetry, prepared years ago by George Wyndham and Henley, the political poems had no representation. They are, of course, included in these volumes. Their suppression would not merely have maimed the monument of Mr. Blunt's literary lifework, but would also have shown a stupid insensibility to the changed conditions of the day, with its shifted hopes and hates, its larger tolerances, and its wider trust. So long ago as in 1882, Mr. Blunt's lack of sympathy with his country's policy of expansion (in Egypt and elsewhere) was confessed by himself in a manly prose at 6 statement which he desired to be 66 66 least no impertinent aggravation of his fault." In the poetry now published The Wind and the Whirlwind is likely to offend only those insensible to fine frenzy" of feeling. The punishment originally awarded it was that of a neglect, natural enough, which did little justice to its literary quality; and its sometimes reported suppression at the hands of our Pro-Consuls strikes us as being hardly less beside the mark than, say, a prohibition by the Turk of the reading of the Prophet's lamentations in the Palestine of to-day. We purposely leave ourselves no space to speak of the lines, now first published, 'To a Happy Warrior -an elegy on the poet's friend and cousin, George Wyndham. Any extract would do violence to its sensitive organism. Like the man himself, it is compounded of realism and romance. If the author has succeeded in his happy and heroic plan-and we think he has he proves that, after passing the limits of threescore years and ten, he has assuredly added the renown of an English elegiast to that of an English sonneteer. THE AFTERMATH OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By entitling this volume 'The Period of the French Revolution' the editors of the latest volume of The Cambridge History of English Literature' have, perhaps a little inadvisedly, directed attention to the fact that neither in filiation of ideas nor in date do the essays of which it is composed correspond to that title. Apart from the admitted influence of everything on everything else, it would be, we think, difficult to show any purely literary influence of the French Revolution on English literature in Peacock's novels, for instance, or in the later Wordsworth. To a French student the Revolution in France is a true spiritual epoch, making all things new; to an English student of English literature it is from this point of view not an influence but an interesting result of the penetration of eighteenth- and seventeenth-century English ideas into a foreign medium. No doubt it influenced the matter of Burke or Wordsworth, but The Cambridge History of English Literature. -Vol. XI. The Period of the French Revolution. (Cambridge University Press, 9s. net.) merely as an accident; it neither explains nor accounts for anything essential in the literary history of many writers in this volume. idiot "" One is for a moment puzzled to find Wordsworth, who died in 1850, between Cowper and Crabbe, though Shelley and Keats are not dealt with, or Peacock, who died in 1866, while Scott has still to come; but further consideration only justifies the editorial selection, with the possible exception of Coleridge, who defies any attempt at classification- an inspired as William Morris once called him, to the horror of a party of literary critics. If printers and publishers still used emblems, this volume should bear on its face the image of Janus, and if Janus should suggest the lineaments of Wordsworth so much the better. For Wordsworth was, first and foremost, an eighteenth-century poet whose Nature - love was founded on the school of Thomson, and whose solitude was not complete without a ruined hermitage in the distance, occupied by a professional hermit, probably on weekly wages. Of course, this was but one of his faces; the other turned towards the future of romantic poetry, and on this side his genius soared to the highest level of English verse. Prof. Legouis's essay on Wordsworth is one of the most memorable things in a volume which contains many notable aids to criticism; and principally for this, that it passes over nearly all the things that strike an English lover of his verse, and selects for comment features of his work quite unimportant to us. Rousseau tempered by Burke is too facile an explanation of Wordsworth: the causes which produced Rousseau, the causes which produced Burke, were to produce later the Wordsworth who wrote essential prose in verse; the poet Wordsworth was the child of Ossian and Percy and Spenser. The eighteenth century was an age of prose of great prose in great hands, nearly always of good prose, since those who wrote had usually something of importance to say, and most of them said it directly and simply. Burke stands alone in his time, but Godwin and Paine and Cobbett can hardly be surpassed as political pamphleteers: Southey has left us Bentham supplied the philosophic basis the best short biography in our language; of the Liberal party of the nineteenth century; Coleridge opened the way to modern literary criticism. Compare this achievement with that of the poets of the time: Cowper and Crabbe are on the further side of Janus; Southey rarely rises beyond the lower slopes of Parnassus; Blake and Coleridge are in a class by themselves at the highest among the glories of our literature; at the worst, pitiable. Burns is the direct child, partly of the romantic movement on its literary side, but still more of the revival of national feeling which a century of peace and comparative prosperity had brought about among the Scottish peasantry, and of the traditional verse which survived among them. The eighteenth century marked him only when he tried to write English verse. Let us in passing note the singular case of a Scottish writer who can give us as free and candid a criticism of Burns's failures as of his successes. Apart from the important studies on the writers we have named, the most novel and interesting chapters here are those which sweep up into their net the less important authors of the eighteenth century, leaving to the writers of the next volume a clear ground for the history of the romantic revival - that is, of modern English literature. Chief among these general studies are those of Prof. Saintsbury on the minor poets and on the prosody of the eighteenth century, and on the novel as it existed before Scott. The minor poets are unreadable, but some of the eighteenth-century novelists preserve a certain amount of popularity in the outer circles of the reading public, and 'The Scottish Chiefs,' Thaddeus of Warsaw,' 'The Children of the Abbey,' and half a dozen others like them, still line the barrows at country fairs; while Miss Edgeworth, Beckford, and even Maturin have found favour in the eyes of modern publishers. Of the Georgian dramatists: only Goldsmith and Sheridan survive; the slumber of the others on their shelves: is undisturbed except by the unsuccessful raids of a predatory dramatic author in search of situations. Yet forty years ago cheap reprints of the plays of this period were to be found on every bookstall. More novel in their conception, and generally interesting, are the final chapters of the volume-on Children's Books, the Blue-Stockings, and Book-Production and Distribution. The last-named is in the hands of Mr. H. G. Aldis, a master of the subject, though one or two points in his evidence for the existence of circulating essay will bear discussion. There is some libraries in the early years of the Restoration, and there is much evidence of Scottish printing for London houses even before the end of the sixteenth century. The chapter on Children's Books by Mr. F. J. Harvey Darton is specially good and thorough, though, as a matter of completeness, some mention should have been made of the later religious books of the "hell-fire" school written for children, to Early Piety,' Todd's Lectures to Chilsome of which, such as Pike's Persuasive dren,' and Furniss's A Sight of Hell,' were in use as Sunday books till quite recently. The revolutions in children's appreciation of authors are another theme worth study; experiment shows that a modern child of any age will hardly glance at Mrs. Sherwood or Miss Edgeworth while there is anything else to read, just as the ordinary schoolboy refuses Marryat or Fenimore Cooper. Taken as a whole, the volume quite sustains the high reputation of the series, while the value and bulk of the bibliographical studies at the end increase as modern times are approached. |