Compare with this Mr. Myers's expres- ter of facile and musical commonplace. sion that we have in Shelley "an extreme, A poet's general position and leading almost an extravagant specimen of the ideas may be incoherent or shallow, but if poetic character;" or Mr. Swinburne's he is to succeed he must at least be a outburst: "He was alone the perfect sing-master of detail, he must be original by ing god; his thoughts, words, deeds, all lines and phrases, he must catch the subsang together." Perhaps the best answer the French ear, and satisfy the French we have to M. Scherer's various objec- rhetorical taste by a continual struggle tions is to be found in the thoughtful study with and a continual triumph over the difby Mr. Myers from which we have just ficulties of expression. Our English dequoted. Certainly Mr. Swinburne's dithy- mand is rather different. We are more rambs will not be enough to convince a serious, more prejudiced, less artisticforeigner, especially a foreigner with ideas sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. of sobriety in style. Mr. Swinburne says If the matter of a poet touches us we can in effect, "Take it on my word, the word pardon a great deal of inferiority of manof a poet, that Shelley is the greatest of ner. There are one or two disastrous poets," and we who feel the full roll and modern instances of the fact which will splendor of Mr. Swinburne's marvellous occur to everybody. On the other hand sentences are inclined to accept his ver- if the matter of the poet is in opposition dict entirely at his own valuation. But a to the dominant conceptions of the day, foreign critic, not so sensitive as we to or if intellectually it offends our critical those influences of sound over which Mr. and logical instincts, we are not very ready Swinburne has such extraordinary mas to shift our point of view, and to give a tery, will probably maintain that a poet's writer, who seems to us, whether justly or place in his generation is not settled so unjustly, to have failed on the side of easily or so high-handedly. general conceptions, that is to say on the intellectual side, the triumph which may really belong to him on the artistic side. Such work as Shelley's, indeed, before it can be finally classed passes necessarily and inevitably through a long period of debate. Generally speaking, a nation approaches its great poets first on the intellectual side, and the majority of readers are affected by the presence or absence of an intellectual framework they can understand in a poet's work, by the intellectual coherence or incoherence of his general attitude, before they form any judgment at all on his purely poetical qualities. The strength of this tendency varies, of course, in different nations in proportion to the strength of their artistic gift. In modern Spain, where the commoner artistic gifts are very widely spread, and where the language places a certain facile brilliancy and music within the reach of almost every poetical aspirant, the enormous popularity of a poet like Zorrilla has nothing to do with any intellectual consideration whatever. From a European standpoint Zorrilla's matter is beneath consideration. He has no ideas, no données, or almost none, that are not imitated or borrowed. And yet he is so facile, so musical, he plays so adroitly with all the common popular sentiments of his country and time, that his countrymen, even when they are most conscious that he has nothing to say, are still enthusiastic, still carried away by a sort of passion of delight in him which does not admit of reasoning. In France, it is not enough to be a mas Something of this kind has befallen Shelley. The ordinary English mind for one set of reasons, and a good many men of ability for another set of reasons, regard him as incoherent and rhapsodical, the preacher of a childish and contradictory philosophy. It is a purely intellectual judgment, and it is answered by the scorn of his devotees, who ask what logic and philosophy have got to do with poetry? And indeed, as Shelley was a great poet, one who saw the world “with the eyes of the imagination," and whose visions are immortal, this exclusive sort of judgment of him, which prevailed for so long, has had to give way, and is giv ing way more and more. But it is of no use to pretend that there is no question in debate, or that the instinct which has found so many spokesmen among our. selves, and has lately inspired the sentences we have quoted from M. Scherer, is an absurd and unsound one. Shelley's opinions were crude and fanciful, and among his many masteries he was not a master of large and clear philosophical expression. But he challenged the world as much by his opinions and his philosophy as by his purely poetical qualities, and his slowly widening audience has had to get behind the opinions and the philosophy, and to learn to approach him as the seer and the singer. The final result may be certain, but a large amount of doubt and debate on the road thither was and is still inevitable. Before we part with M. Scherer, we may quote from him the three following passages, also taken from the Wordsworth essay. (The articles on Carlyle and on Lord Beaconsfield's "Endymion are short, and hardly lend themselves to extracts.) The first of the passages contains an estimate of Tennyson, and whether we agree with it or no, is certainly what criticism ought to be the record of a real impression finely and delicately put. "Keats and Shelley have certainly not been thrown into the shade by Tennyson, but still Tennyson has climbed upon their shoulders, and perhaps in certain respects has touched a higher level than they. If he is not stronger and greater than Shelley, the metal of his poetry is purer, the workmanship of it is more ingenious, more exquisite, and the work, as a whole, of a more astonishing variety. Tennyson has a consummate mastery of rhythm; he has an extraordinary wealth of vocabulary; he has taste, grace, distinction, every kind of talent and refinement; he is the author of lyrical pieces unrivalled in any language, some breathing the subtlest melancholy, others the most penetrating pathos, and some vibrating like a knight's bugle-horn: and he lacks only one thing, the supreme gift, the last fight, which carries Gany mede into the empyrean, and throws him breathless at the feet of Jove. He sins by excess of elegance; he is too civilized, too accomplished. There is no genre that he has not attempted, whether grave, or gay, or tragic; whether idyl, ode, elegy, epic, or drama; there is not one in which he has not brilliantly succeeded, and yet we may almost say of him that in no one direction has he sounded the deepest depths of thought. In passion there are ardors, in the mind there are troubles, in life there are bankruptcies of the ideal, which the note of Tennyson is incapable of expressing." The following piece describes the artist's attitude towards nature: all her aspects, to penetrate all her secrets? Who then, if not the artist, may flatter himself that he is initiated into the mysteries of the great goddess? And yet, no! What the artist pursues is not so much nature as the effect to which she lends herself the picturesque-art. He is only at her feet that he may hurry off to boast of the favors which she has bestowed upon him. The artist is the man who has the rare and fatal gift of a double existence, who feels with the half of his soul and employs the other to repeat what he feels a man who has experienced emotion, but who has then slain it within him, that he may contemplate it at his ease and draw it at his leisure in strokes which ennoble and transfigure it." The third and last describes the element of mannerism in Wordsworth. "If ever a writer might have been thought sincere it is this genius at once so austere and so simple-hearted. And yet, there is no denying that all his work is not true metal. Wordsworth has pretensions, and a manner he has consciously made for himself. He exaggerates his feeling, he pushes to an excess his own special methods of conception and of speech, he assumes an air and look which are certainly his own, but of which the features and expression are none the less studied and composed. . . . All Wordsworth's defects spring from the same source and are of the same kind. He has an ideal o. life, to which he involuntarily adapts his moral attitude; he has an ideal of art and he overdoes what he admires." M. Darmestetter's book is partly a collection of prefaces (to an edition of " Macbeth," an edition of "Childe Harold," and so on), and partly a reproduction of certain long and elaborate reviews, which originally appeared in the Parlement, the Revue Critique, and elsewhere. The whole is introduced by a letter to M. Guillaume Guizot, professor of English literature at the Collège de France, in which M. Darmestetter pleads for the study of "The young man sees in nature an em- English in France as against the now pire to take possession of; the man of triumphant and wide-spread study of Germature age seeks in her repose from anx- man. He agrees that for the soldier and iety and agitation, the old man finds in the savant German is indispensable, but her a host of melancholy consolations he argues that for the French man of but the artist? Does not he, at least, letters and man of business, English is love her for herself? Does he not live by incomparably better worth having than her alone? is it not her beauty, and noth- German. As for literature, "where can ing else, that he is in love with? Is it not our French public find more enjoyment the whole of his ambition to understand or more inspiration than in England? I and to render her, to feel and translate do not wish to disparage German literaher, to enter into all her moods, to grasp ture. A literature that has produced Goethe and Heine has a future before it. | awakening the sister images which slept But it is none the less true that German within it, so that nature itself came to literature has behind it but one single seem but a mirror of the inward vision, century. Its medieval period may furnish an echo of all that wept in his own heart, the savant with interesting and curious the tissue which clothed the phantoms of things, but we are not talking here of the his own brain. Add to this a strength of men of research; we are talking of the feeling and of love, of indignation against men of letters living within the range of oppression, and of devotion to the cause modern thought. The French man of let- of the feeble, which no poet's life perhaps ters who reads English has three centuries has ever embodied so sincerely and so of masterpieces in his hands, from Spenser nobly, a ceaseless aspiration towards to Shakespeare, from Milton to Pope, from knowledge and the unknown, - a love of Burns to Byron and Shelley; the French mystery which led him from alchemy to man of letters who reads German has but Spinoza, from Spinoza to Faust, - and two books. . . . To sum up, I should say finally that anguish born of knowledge, that our savants have much to learn from without which no poetry is complete, and Germany, but that France in general has which is itself only one of the highest infinitely more to learn from England. I forms of the poetical instinct of humanity. am not protesting against the study of Thus there arose a poetry of an intensity German, but only against the inferior posi- and an infinity unknown before. Wordstion assigned to English. German inter- worth indeed had been the high priest of ests specialists; English interests all the nature, but together with the grandeur intelligent classes. We lived for a long and the dignity of priesthood he had distime in the belief that there was only played all its narrownesses and all its France in the world; now we seem to weakness." Shelley's life and Shelley's believe that there are only France and poetry were one, to an extraordinary, to Germany. Germany is but a very small an unparalleled degree. "All his dreams part of the world, and if by force of acci- were lived, as all his life was dreamed." dent we find ourselves obliged for some fifty years to take a special and anxious interest in the movements of that part, that is no reason why it should hide from us the rest of the universe." Certainly M. Darmestetter's own book is an excellent example of the sympathy and intelligence towards England which he desires to see increased. His studies of Shakespeare's development are based upon the most recent Shakespearian research, and state the conclusions of Mr. Furnival and the New Shakespeare Society with an ease and lightness of touch which give them more general attractive ness than they have commonly possessed in English eyes; while the careful study of " Macbeth," and the articles on Byron and Shelley, are in every way up to the level of modern knowledge, and are lit up by a good deal of very fair critical reflec tion. The article on Shelley contains the following happy description of the most characteristic quality of Shelley's genius: "There was one thing in Shelley which was lacking in Wordsworth, and which enabled him to understand the Lake poet, while Wordsworth could not understand him. This was that strange wealth and mobility of impressions and perceptions, which transformed his whole being into a flexible, ethereal mould, where all the changing forms of visible and living nature took shape and outline for an instant, The essay on Wordsworth, which ap peared in the Revue Critique as a review of Mr. Myers's biography, is good and sufficient, though, as we have said, there is not the same high literary pleasure to be got out of it as out of M. Scherer's. It ends with a strong expression of Wordsworth's limitations. "Stuart Mill," says M. Darmestetter, "in trial and depression found peace and calm in the study of Wordsworth's poetry; but poetry which is made up of only light and peace does not render the whole of nature, or exhaust the human heart. And as nature has more shade than light, and the heart more of tempest than of peace, Wordsworth will never be the poet of the crowd, and even with natures akin to his own he will not be the poet of all hours. The gods approve The depth and not the tumult of the soul. There is his characteristic note. "But it was easy for the gods to say so; they were gods." M. Sarrazin's essays are well-meaning and often picturesque; but there is very little in them which need detain an English reader. There is no perspective in them, no sense of the whole. The article on Shelley, for instance, is taken up almost entirely with an analysis of "The Cenci," just as that on Keats dwells entirely upon "Endymion," which M. Sar London express at Snow Hill, and by eight o'clock was duly "slipped" at Warwick. Then retracing our steps to Hatton by a slow train, we cantered down the gradients through green pastures, till we curved in to a pretty oasis of red brick and tile amidst the meadows. Everything was bright and warm and clean in the September sun. Just outside the station on the right was a path marked "To Shottery," and — thanks to Mr. Black I felt at home at once. I lounged a little by the pleasant hospital, to light a pipe and watch the Stratford boys and girls trooping to school in twos and threes razin pronounces Keats's masterpiece, M. A. W. From Temple Bar. A SUMMER DAY AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON. THE other day I paid my first visit to Stratford-on-Avon, a case of love at first sight with me. I had been staying a month at a popular seaside, where idle crowds of inland mortals basked all day on the sandy shore, “drunk with gladness beneath the glorious sunshine of 1884. But now that memorable summer was coming to its end, and our five successive days of over "90° in the shade" were gone forever, when I found myself one hot September evening at the Queen's Hotel, Birmingham. As I went to bed it occurred to me that Stratford-on-Avon was in the neighborhood, and that the Great Western would be ready with a "slip carriage" to take me there early next morning. I got what sleep I could between the nocturnal cries of the newspaper boys below and the midnight reverberations under the station roof: when I awoke at six o'clock the boys were in full cry again. Having breakfasted, I caught the early the board school opposite. Hilarious boys, and girls intent on domestic narrative; all quite unconscious of the thoughts they suggest, for they were not even "creeping" to their books. A little farther on is a crossing where five roads meet, and on the corner house of one to the left a blue and white slip bears the in TO SHAKESPEARE'S HOUSE. Across the way there opens out a broad street lined with trees, giving a pretty Continental air; and here, as everywhere in Stratford, the old half-timbered houses are charmingly colored with creeper and flowers. I was so pleased at the first breath of the place that I declined to turn off immediately and see the house. So with no other guide than a pipe and delicious morning air, I kept on in the sunshine past the chattering children, down Wood Street, round to the right into High Street. Here was a perspective where all seemed spotlessly clean, healthy, and cared for: the timbered fronts and gables made a rich contrast against the glowing flowers on every window-sill; a solitary dog-cart stood waiting on some early errand; and a lull of scarcely finished breakfast filled the pavements. I strolled along Chapel Street in great contentment, past old stone buildings, past the Shakespeare Hotel (of this more anon) half smothered in flowers; a bicycle rested in the shady porch. At the next crossing on my left I noticed a tiny plot of lawn where some shallow holes were covered by wire netting; but unsuspicious of their significance I sauntered on, ignorant of topography, trusting the town to disclose itself. In front a slip on the wall said: — OLD TOWN and sent me round to the left into the sun. More timbered villas here peeped out among the trees, trim and glossy in their cleanliness; then came the old churchyard straight ahead, with its tall spire above a rampart of elms: the early sunlight had not yet disturbed the dark peace of the limes and cedars. "and a labor of love it is to me to watch their ways, and the cur-osity of some of my quadrups is extraordinary to those who have not seen them, tho' there's some as pass on and miss it all. The price it cannot be, for sixpence clears the whole, and the place you will find by asking any one, for is my name, and Museum is the Museum of Stratford." Assuring him that I was only scamping the place that day, but hoped to return some other time with more leisure, he gave me "good morning," and stumped down slowly off across the fields. little knew that he was much more interesting than any of his "quadrups" so carefully collected. He My pipe was not finished, so I struck down Mill Lane, where the splash of a water-wheel soon rewarded me. Here was the Avon, with a list of its "flood marks" painted up on a wall of the mill. The lane ends here in a footpath which crosses the river by a wooden bridge: on this I sat, enjoying the sun. The water swarmed with young fish, and a steady stream flowed noiselessly towards the Bristol Channel. Behind me the view was closed by the E. & W. Junction The Avon flowed tranquilly again when railway, whose red brick arches divide his voice had died away, the wheel the transparent current. In front lay the splashed round, and the sunlight made town, half hid by trees; an engine quietly soft mist on the meadow land. In Stratfizzed on the embankment; the mill-wheel ford these interruptions are easily forgiv splashed; and an occasional voice gave en; with Shakespeare for central figure or took orders for the day's work. Some all the others fit in; the town seems a hundred yards away, on the doorstep of a living drama, and no one is out of place house withdrawn from the lane, a young in such a nest of human nature. The girl stood rapt in a pretty attitude, reading charm of the spot is not spoilt by noxious a letter she had just received; her round," touts;" there is scarcely any profescropped head leant against a luxuriant creeper bright in the sun, and a dog rejoiced on the lawn. sional obtrusion, but rather an air of neighbors chatting a week after a funeral. Unlike the illustrations of most fine tales, which so outrage our conceptions of the hero or heroine, in the case of Stratford the concrete picture makes Shakespeare stand out much more real than before. However, half past nine. Descending from the bridge I returned to the churchyard and entered the shade. If Stratford as a whole seems just what we should like it, the church is the keynote of a pictured harmony. Strolling round among the gravestones, I came to the low wall which forms the river boundary, and looked down at the Avon gliding noiselessly beneath. The pensive elms leaning over the stream from the gravel walk where I sat just stirred above their images below, the freckled sunshine crept in here and there upon the sod, and a melody of last century stole out from the pipes of the organ within. Across the river two or three cattle grazed in silence, while some sketcher's easel stood close to the water's edge. The Avon kept its course, soft and still as three hundred years ago, when Naseby had not been fought on the oolite hills where its waters rise. Upon this morning paradise an interruption came too soon. A heavy tread shook the bridge, and a thick-set veteran drew near to me, dressed in a worthy hat of many years' service. I tipped the ashes from my pipe, and was moving off, but this ancient landsman held me captive with his eye. He began by a careless allusion to the fact that cholera in foreign parts had been the occasion of an unusual number of visitors to Stratford this year. Mere "birds of passage," he remarked; and to some it seemed a pity they should pass through such a place so hurriedly. For the town, he considered, though few might know it, had more than a Shakespearian interest. He was one who re spected independence of action in others, and was never more content than when each tourist pleased himself as to what he should see or leave unseen: still, to those who loved nature and beauty in general there was always - so he found an unexpected treat "when they see the mar vellous collection of quadrups and other cur-osities," which he had during many years stored up in his "museum." "For A group of gravestones accosted me, to I ham a self-taught man," he concluded, the memory of four of a family, aged twenty-seven, twenty-four, ten, and the last, one year old. The two eldest were brothers, drowned; and the father closed * In this opinion the writer thoroughly agrees with him. |