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commercial success of a biographical and philosophical
book,
allowed literary and library success of a great work
of fiction,
failure of the latest production of a great poet,
Sisters
indeed, as has
been claimed, monumental. In this
country monuments are erected to the memory
of the
departed only. The powerful and beautiful and emi-
nently
significant romance by Mr. Thomas Hardy has one
drawback—for the mentally and
spiritually anaemic:
it is sane, vigorous, full-blooded, robust, with the
pulse
of indomitable youth. It is a book to read, to re-read,
to ponder,
to be proud of. Its author has at last won
the bâton of a Field-Marshal in
the army of contem-
porary novelists. Mr. Swinburne,
on the other hand,
has given a further and now serious impetus to the
retrograde movement of his great reputation. He is
a poet of, at his
best, so rare and high a genius that
many readers, during perusal of
tempted to believe in the
Doppelganger legend. Who
is Mr. Swinburne's double? It is an undesirable
co-
partnery. The lesser man, who had already satisfied
us of his
inability to sustain the honour done him,
should now retire. Mr. Swinburne
has played double-
dummy with him long enough.
It has fine things that might almost be written by
Webster, or at least by Cyril Tourneur, if one or other
of these dramatists
be thought of as a contemporary,
and maugre that special quality of spiritual
audacity
and intellectual bravura so characteristic of each, and
that
Mr. Swinburne himself at one time possessed. On
the other hand, it has pages
of drawing-room realism,
of "Friendship's-Offering" sentiment, of a dulness
un-
equalled by anything in "the new humour." It has
passages that would
make love impossible of continu-
ance: lovers can understand "speaking silence" but
not diction where
cherished commonplaces are choked
in struggling rhetoric. There are other
passages that
I recommend to the tender mercies of the University
Extension-Lecturer. He can then lay horrid pitfalls
for the unwary, for
who among them will be able to
say if the given excerpts be execrable verse
or villainous
prose? There are lines, alas, which excruciate the ear:
lines worthy of Byron at his worst, of a fibrelessness so
perverse, of
so maladroit a turn, that the ear of the
metricist revolts. And yet Mr.
Swinburne is a prince
of his craft in knowledge and skill! No: it is the
mysterious double who hath done this thing. It is a
bitter thing to tell a
poet that we prefer his prose, but
even a recantatory essay on Byron or
Whitman—the two
magnificent derelict comets of modern poetry whose tails
have been so carefully pulled by Mr. Swinburne while
under the
impression. that he was grappling with the
luminaries in front—would be
preferable to
For no one need read
Mr. Swinburne the critic of modern
men, but everyone must read Mr. Swinburne
the poet.
many beautiful passages, lyrical interludes of surpassing
grace. To read the lyric "Love and Sorrow met in
May" is to rejoice that
we have a great poet still
among us. When this drama itself is known only
of
rust and the moth, the flawless lyric it enshrines shall
have put on
immortality as a garment.
worthy
for two new books by Mr. George Meredith: if,
indeed, the reprint of his
superb
later additions, can
be called a new book. His novel,
faithful. Enthusiasts call it manna: the cavillers will
have it that it
is a St. John's feast with a multiplicity
of hard locusts to a small benefice
of wild honey. One
can certainly discern in it George Meredith at his
best:
it is easier, however, to find him in his least winsome
aspect. He
is the electric light among contemporary
illuminators of our darkness.
has
been: the most consummate poetic artist of his
time. He is Sovereign of the
Victorians. But he is not
a dramatist, though he can sometimes write
dramatically.
His
songs; but the England of Robin Hood is just what we
do
not find reflected in its exqusitely polished mirror.
This drama is even more
a Court-of-Victoria-fin-de-
siecle rendering of the wild life it nominally
represents
than the "Idyls of the King" are of the Arthurian past.
As a
stage play
please British and American audiences, having neither
intensity of vision,
overmastery of passion, vigour of dia-
logue, nor convincing
verisimilitude.
writer of verse. He was a worthy private citizen; as a
public man, an
ornamental Imperialist; as a diplomatist,
a sign-post to warn new-comers to
take the other way.
He was saved from being a bad Oriental by being an
unconventional Occidental.
the person of
Walt Whitman. This great pioneer of a
new literature has so many faults in
the view of
most of his contemporaries that they cannot discern the
volcano
beneath the scoriæ. Let us defy mixt metaphors, and
add that we
believe those who come after us will
look upon him as the Janitor of the New
House Beautiful.
Meanwhile all Whitmaniacs (the courteous appellation
is
not ours) must rejoice in the convincing, if unconscious,
tribute paid with
so much delicacy and graciousness
by the writer of a certain famous
re-written it. The experiment reflects
credit on him as a
conscientious workman, but is in other respects an
awful
example to set to the young. Horrible possibilities are
suggested.
Burke and Hare will be outdone in the resur-
recting business. Mudie will have
to start duplicate shelves,
the upper marked
The dead will arise and walk in a new
ghastliness.
procure an abortion.
once. It can then be put away.
Plains
The sunshine of genius is in both, though
the former is
but a series of collected papers and the latter a romance
of adventure. The delight of these books cancels the
deep disappointment of
the "South-Sea Letters." There
are pages of "The Lantern-Bearers" and
"Fontaine-
bleau" which ought to be committed to memory by
every aspirant
in the literary life.
to
strange aberrations from the well-defined "stream of
tendency" of the French
mind, from a lurid colour-study
by the Flemish-Parisian Huysmans to the
serene cold-
bloodedness of Maurice Barrès, or the scientific romancing
of J. H. Rosny—is Zola's recently published
It should be read not only as perhaps the most mature
and splendid effort of a great writer—a great writer who
has reached the
Temple of Fame through seas of mud,
and, unfortunately, has brought a good
deal with him,
even to the white steps of the portico; but also as a
work
likely to have a remarkable effect on the political temper
and
ideals of the French people.
to be a factor of supreme international significance, in
the relations of
France and Germany. In this country,
even, it will attract almost as much
attention as the
marriage of a duke or the misdemeanour of an actress.
kin
in
opened a vein. There is just a chance it is
not an artery.