FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON

P. 590. Praed (p. 494) and Locker-Lampson are the advance guard of a host of writers of vers de société of exquisite delicacy and refinement. The ideal of such verse is elegant and ingenious trifling with only occasional touches of more serious sentiment as a swallow circles bright and swift through the air, dips its wing for a moment in the water, and like a flash is off again in its careless flight. Some of the lighter verse of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries bears a close resemblance to the work of these later writers, but there is a difference in tone, in attitude, in personal concern with the sentiments expressed. Locker (or Locker-Lampson, to use the name he assumed upon his marriage to Miss Lampson) was far superior to Praed in tenderness, in reserve, in genuine poetic feeling, and in technique. His range of sentiments, of ideas, and of rhythms was greater; and he has had the greater influence upon later writers. With the lines To My Grandmother a curious analogy and contrast are afforded by Oliver Wendell Holmes's The Last Leaf.

SIDNEY DOBELL

P. 591. Sidney Dobell is a notable example of the rather large class of poets in the nineteenth century who gave evidence of true and even great poetic ability, but who failed in unity, in sustained power, in final and perfect utterance.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Neither as poet nor as prose-writer did Arnold catch the ear of the great public, but in both characters he was eminent in his generation as one who taught and guided the teachers and guides of the educated world.

His prose is clear, vivacious, classical in its restraint and its definiteness of aim, and though often careless, its carelessness has always the effect of elegant negligence, not of slipshod ignorance. The importance of the ideas for which he contended and the unwavering and urbane persistence with which he supported a cause that could triumph only in the remote future are among the most admirable of his many admirable qualities.

His verse is more restrained than his prose and it lacks the lightheartedness, the spontaneity, the outward and obvious signs of power necessary for popularity. In his own day it found only a small band of lovers, but its permanent beauty and value

are steadily gaining wider recognition. It now seems probable that he and Browning will in the future be counted the most notable poets of the Victorian period.

THE SCHOLAR GIPSY

Pp. 617 ff. In a note, Arnold gave the following passage from Glanvil's Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) as the foundation of this poem:

"There was lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies. Among these ex-. travagant people, by the insinuating subtility of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gipsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the people he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others: that he himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned."

EDWARD FITZGERALD

THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Pp. 621 ff. Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has long had a place in the hearts of lovers of high and serious poetry. Although a translation, it is in the truest sense an original poem and expresses as scarcely any other does the strange combination of doubt and defiance and sensuousness and religious yearning characteristic of much of the thought and feeling of the Victorian Age.

Rubáiyát is a Persian word, the plural of rubái, which means a quatrain. Omar, surnamed Al Khayyam (the tent-maker), was a distinguished Persian scholar and poet. He was regarded as a paragon of learning, especially in astronomy. In one of his quatrains he refers whimsically to his surname and in another to his reformation of the calendar. His quatrains circulated very widely in the Orient and produced many imitations

some of which are indistinguishable from his own. He was born at Naishápúr in the second half of the eleventh century and died there in the first half of the twelfth. One of his school-fellows was the famous statesman Nizám-ul-Mulk, and another the infamous Hasan ben Sabbáh, the Old Man of the Mountains, from whose name the word assassin is said by some to be derived.

COVENTRY PATMORE

Pp. 623 f. Coventry Patmore has been the subject of the most widely divergent judgments. One contemporary critic says: "It may be affirmed that no poet of the present age is more certain of immortality than he." Another regards him as possessing no spark of the divine fire. The selections here presented seem to justify his claim to a unique and high position among the poets of his time, but his range was narrow his vocal register had scarcely a tone that does not find utterance in these selections - and his voice obviously lacked resonance and power. Being incapable of selfcriticism, he wrote much that is prosaic lines that even awaken inextinguishable laughter; but at its best his verse is simple, picturesque, passionate, of exquisite freshness and charm.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

some

Pp. 624 ff. The vigor and intensity of Rossetti's thought is often lost sight of in consequence of the luxuriance and sensuous richness of his imagery and melody. But his poems are not involuntary cries of passion; they are planned and constructed with serious artistic care and wrought out with infinite attention to details. Of The Blessed Damozel, he said: "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven." It would be difficult to find two more impressive examples of logical structure and development than are afforded by this poem and Sister Helen.

The intellectual power of his verse may be seen also in the sonnets On the Refusal of Aid between Nations, The Sonnet, The Landmark, The Choice, Vain Virtues indeed in practically every selection, for even the love-sonnets are as closely reasoned as if they were treatises instead of lyrics.

SISTER HELEN

Pp. 626 ff. The superstition that an enemy's life could be destroyed by making a figure of him

in wax and melting it before a slow fire- the whole process, of course, to be carried out with proper ceremonies of black magic - is a very ancient and almost world-wide belief. The most interesting variants of the belief, in classical literature, are perhaps those in the second Idyl of Theocritus. The whole Idyl is interesting to read in connection with this poem, though the heroine Simaetha is attempting, not to destroy her lover, but to bring back his love; cf. especially the following (ll. 2331):

"Delphis troubled me, and I against Delphis am burning this laurel; and even as it crackles loudly when it has caught the flame, and suddenly is burned up, and we see not even the dust thereof, lo, even thus may the flesh of Delphis waste in the burning!

"My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

"Even as I melt this wax, with the god to aid, so speedily may he by love be molten, the Myndian Delphis! And as whirls this brazen wheel, so restless, under Aphrodite's spell, may he turn and turn about my doors!

"My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!"

Instances of the superstition in England and Ireland are discussed in Thomas Wright's introduction to The Proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler (Camden Society Publications).

THE BALLAD OF DEAD LADIES

P. 629. 1. 2. Lady Flora. The Roman goddess of flowers, or more probably the Roman lady mentioned by Juvenal, Sat. II, 49.

1.3. Hipparchia. Villon has Archipiada, which is probably a distortion of Alcibiades. The beauty of Alcibiades was proverbial, and Villon may have thought he was a woman. Modern editors have substituted the name Hipparchia, but the name of this learned Greek lady of the fourth century B.C. was probably unknown to Villon. For Thais see Alexander's Feast, p. 224, l. 9.

1. 5. Echo, the mythical sweetheart of Narcissus, cf. Gayley's Classic Myths, p. 206.

1. 9. Héloïse, cf. Pope's Eloisa to Abelard and the notes on it.

the mother of Charlemagne, heroine of the old French romance Berte aux Grans Pies. Beatrice, apparently Beatrice of Provence, wife of Charles, son of Louis VIII. Alice, perhaps the wife of Louis VII; but many old French songs begin "Belle Aalis" (i.e., Beautiful Alice).

1. 20. Ermengarde married the famous warrior Foulques d'Anjou in 1004.

1. 21. Joan, Jeanne d'Arc.

FRANCESCA DA RIMINI

As Dante, in the Inferno, passed among those whom guilty love had sent to hell, he entreated two to come and speak to him. They were the famous lovers Paolo and Francesca, and this passage is a part of Francesca's account of their love. She was given by her father in marriage to Giovanni Malatesta, a man of extraordinary courage and ability, but deformed. Unfortunately she fell in love with his younger brother, Paolo, and he with her. They were killed by Giovanni. Few love stories have attracted more sympathetic interest. Leigh Hunt wrote a narrative poem on the story, and it has been dramatized in English by G. H. Boker and by Stephen Phillips, and in Italian by Silvio Pellico and by Gabriele D'Annunzio. Pictures illustrating the story have been painted by Ingres, Cabanel, Ary Scheffer, G. F. Watts, and others.

WILLIAM MORRIS

Pp. 633 ff. To no poet of the Victorian period could the term "the idle singer of an empty day" be less appropriately applied than to William Morris. He not only was a chief factor in revolutionizing the general artistic taste of the English people and their house-decorations in particular, but also became a leader in the social reforms which are tending surely though slowly to the reorganization of society and the state. Such a career may seem strange for one whose whole interest as a young man lay apparently in mediæval romance and poetry; yet in reality the art-reformer and the social-reformer were logical and, one may almost say, inevitable developments of the lover of mediævalism, for his love of mediæval art taught him the hideousness of the work produced by modern artisans, and practical experience as a decorator soon brought the recognition that art is not possible under the conditions of modern industrialism, that beauty is the product of the free artist, working with a love of his art,

THE EARTHLY PARADISE

The Earthly Paradise was written under the influence of Chaucer (cf. Morris's Prologue, ll. 1–16) and, like the Canterbury Tales, is a collection of stories told by the members of a group of travelers. The Lady of the Land is a retelling of the story told briefly by Sir John Mandeville in his fourth chapter (see pp. 30 ff).

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

Pp. 640 ff. From his youth, almost from his boyhood, Swinburne possessed a wealth of sensuously beautiful words and a facility in versification unsurpassed by any other English poet. Unfortunately both these gifts tempted him to verbosity. He always has a meaning but it is often obscured, if not entirely hidden, by the excess of words and the long and elaborate sentences in which it is expressed. His influence upon other English poets - both great and small- was for a time very notable: to the great he taught new lessons and presented new standards of melodious verse; to the small he worked injury, tempting them to produce sound without sense and to indulge in all sorts of hot-house malaise and eroticism. He himself grew steadily in power and seriousness of thought, but he never escaped from the involuted coils of his diction and his syntax. The republican poems written under the influence of Victor Hugo and Mazzini cannot be quoted here, but they should be read by any one who wishes a just idea of his significance in English poetry.

GEORGE MEREDITH

Pp. 644 ff. George Meredith was one of the most richly and variously endowed writers of the nineteenth century. He is best known as a novelist, but to many of his admirers he seems equally great as a poet. All of his work is notable for its combination of significance and beauty. In depth of insight, in subtle apprehension of life and of the problems which it presents to try the hearts of intelligent men and women, even such great writers as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot are hardly his equals; and his sensitiveness to the beauties of nature and of the soul of man has a wider range and a finer delicacy. The same qualities are manifest in much of his poetry. But the gods gave him also the fatal gift of excessive intellectual ingenuity and a delight in the exercise of it; while the sole gift they denied him was self

restraint. Like his own Bellerophon, he had the winged horse and the golden bridle, and he, too,

could mount and sit

Flying, and up Olympus midway speed;

but instead of riding straight and hard for the summit he too often, in mere exuberance of power and of delight in his steed, executes difficult feats of horsemanship on the lower slopes of the mountain.

Love in the Valley is not a logical, consecutive description of the beloved, but a series of glimpses of her in many moods and under many aspects. The poem may be said to resemble in structure a diamond with a hundred facets, each of which glows with its own transformation of the white light of beauty.

Pp. 648 f. Juggling Jerry affords a striking contrast with this poem in both subject-matter and style.

Pp. 649 f. Bellerophon is a remarkable imaginative reconstruction of a situation, the tragedy and pathos of which depend upon an appreciation of the career of the hero as set forth in classical mythology.

P. 650. The Song of the Songless and the Dirge give some hint of the beauty of the nature poetry which forms a notable part of his work. Taken together these selections illustrate the range as well as the beauty of Meredith's poetry.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Pp. 650 ff. Christina Rossetti deserves a high, perhaps the highest, place among women poets of the nineteenth century, not by virtue of range of thought or volume of production, but because her verse is uniformly almost the perfection of simple passionate beauty.

JAMES THOMSON

Pp. 652 ff. James Thomson is one of the most curious and interesting figures of the Victorian period. No one has been more successful in catching the true poetic aspect of the pleasures of the lower middle classes of a great city. His "idyls of the London mob," as he calls them, are not echoes of Theocritus or Vergil, of the pastoral of the Italian Renaissance, or of the genuine bucolic poetry of Scotland and England; they are original and independent treatments of the material that he saw actually about him in the holiday excursions of the young people of cockneydom.

In striking contrast with these simple and charming pictures is the dark melancholy which finds expression in The City of Dreadful Night and other poems of his later years. These poems have often been admired, or condemned, as the ultimate expression of philosophical pessimism, and often the form and the ideas seem to justify such an interpretation; but there can be little doubt that they are in reality devoid of philosophical significance, though full of power and of far-reaching suggestion. The ideas and the imagery have the horrible fascination of a hideous dream. They are indeed the utterance of a poet of splendid original power and infinite aspiration for life and strength and beauty, whose vigor has been sapped by folly and misfortune, who with shattered nerves and strengthless hands strives vainly to clutch some good that has durability and three dimensions. The City of Dreadful Night is, as the poet explains, the city of darkness, peopled with sad forms by the insomnia which night after night tortures and weakens him and restores him to the day empty of strength and hope.

The selection As I came through the desert is one of the narratives of gloom and despair incorporated in Thomson's account of the dreadful City and the melancholy figures whom the poet meets in his wanderings. The poem is very difficult. It is clearly symbolic of the passage through life of some distressed soul, but the significance of the woman with the red lamp in her hand, of the two selves of the speaker, and of the woman's devotion to the corpse-like self will be differently interpreted by different students. Perhaps this poem no more admits of a definite interpretation of details than does Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

WALTER PATER

STYLE

Pp. 654 ff. Pater's essay on Style is exemplified in The Child in the House; from The Child in the House it would be possible to deduce his principles of style, so completely in his case are critic and creator at one. He and Stevenson are the two supremely self-conscious artists of the nineteenth century; and yet in neither case does the expenditure of thought, love, and care upon the process itself detract from the beauty of the result.

Pater's mind worked in a perpetual probing, testing, balancing, for the purpose of finding shades of difference among resemblances, shades of resemblance where differences were obvious, ever

approaching exactness in definition, ever defining relationships to the last degree of nicety. For that reason, his sentences often seem cumbersome; he was unwilling to relinquish his effort at expression until he had reached the end of the ramifications of his thought. Together with this went a love of words as words and a wonderful patience in seeking the exact word and the right combination of words to convey his meaning with such emotional suggestiveness as he himself felt in connection with it.

THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE

Pp. 657 ff. The Child in the House is to some extent autobiographical. It was written in 1878 when Pater was thirty-nine years old and had been away twenty-five years from the Enfield home (about ten miles from London). In the house itself the Watteau picture probably represents one by Jean-Baptiste Pater, Watteau's contemporary, to whose stock the English Paters were supposed to belong. For a study of Watteau and Pater, see Pater's essay, A Prince of Court Painters. Undoubtedly Florian Deleal represents Pater's own attitude as evolved by home influences, just as Emerald Uthwart reflects his own life at Canterbury School and its effect upon him.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

FRANÇOIS VILLON

Pp. 662 ff. Stevenson was exactly the man to write upon Villon; he was enough of a bohemian and enough of a poet to present with the utmost charity and clarity his sordid material. His interest in Villon appears further in his story, A Lodging for the Night, of which Villon is the hero. The book upon which Stevenson bases most of his information is Longnon's Etude biographique sur François Villon, Paris, 1877; but he seems also to have consulted the Bourgeois de Paris (ed. Panthéon) and the Chronique Scandaleuse (ed. Panthéon), among other books. Further details and illustrative material about the life of Villon may be found in Champion's François Villon, Paris, 1913.

Stevenson's object is to reconstruct, out of the facts brought to light by research, the living image of a man. In this he succeeds admirably, partly by his sympathetic realization of what Villon must have meant to himself and to others, and partly by his clearness of presentation. An

other source of charm is, as always, his racy and delightful English.

P. 664 a. with specification of one work, etc. Stevenson here misses the point. The book in question, The Rommant du Pet au Deable, was Villon's first work, now lost, a mock romance relating the pranks of students at the University of Paris while Villon was there. The Pet au Deable was a stone which lay before the house of a pious old woman. It was moved by the students to their quarter, and a great deal of merrymaking and rioting grew out of the whole affair. Signs were also stolen from different parts of the city, and the doings finally led to a serious clash between the University and the city authorities. Without attempting to whitewash Villon or his lost poem, we may believe that his uncle might have received such a legacy without being insulted and still be a worthy ecclesiastic, but with a twinkle for the vagaries of students.

P. 668 a. a whole improper romance, etc. Stevenson omits the important point that this romance was Villon's lost composition referred to above. Tabary was a clerk, apparently a fellowstudent with Villon, who describes him, in this very connection, as "a real man" (homs veritable); but his later career scarcely bore out the compliment.

P. 672 a. Charles of Orleans. . . in the pages of the present volume, that is Familiar Studies of Men and Books, in which is printed also Stevenson's essay on Charles of Orleans. He was nephew and cousin to kings of France, was captured at Agincourt in 1415, and kept prisoner in England for twenty-five years. He had a pretty skill in lyric verse and was a great patron of poets.

P. 675 a. The date of the "Large Testament," etc. Since the essay was written, a few more facts have been discovered; but they are sordid details of two more arrests, the second ending in a sentence of death by hanging, which was afterward lightened to banishment from Paris for ten years. In this case, an unprovoked assault on a notary and his scribes, Villon seems to have been entirely innocent; but he was punished for being in bad company, and because his career was notorious. In 1463, then, he left Paris, and no more is known of him. He was broken in health, and without means of subsistence; and the sentence against him must have kept him continually exposed to danger. He was dead in 1489 when his works were first published.