LIGHT AND SHADOW.
In golden pomp at morn and eve
The purple mountains rise,
With banners bright of waving green
Gay flaunting to the skies;
But upward toiling, panting, slow,
Patient the fleetest step must go.
A winding pathway through the vale
Entices weary feet;
The shining waters sing of peace,
The morning breeze is sweet;
But nook or covert there is none
To shelter from the noonday sun.
The fainting trav’ller turns aside
To seek the woodland shade—
Beyond the thicket, stretching cool,
Invites the mossy glade—
But thorny is the tangled way,
And devious paths his steps betray.
The fleeciest cloud that graceful floats
In summer skies of light,
Within a veil of tender mist
Conceals the tempest’s might;
And winds that stir with softest breath
Are freighted with the seeds of death.
The loveliest blossom that unfolds
Its beauty to the day
Must yield its treasured fragrance up,
Then droop and fade away;
And greenwood birds that sweetest sing
Are soonest gone on flitting wing.
The undertone of earth’s delights
In sorrow’s pensive sigh
Is mingled with the echoing breeze
Ere joy’s glad accents die—
Of all the strains that saddest float
Are requiems blent with triumph’s note.
Chicago, October 14.
JEAN INGELOW’S POEMS.[131]
Jean Ingelow is now over fifty years of age. For some time past she has devoted herself chiefly to graceful prose, in which her pure and playful imagination seems to have found sufficient vent. She can never be removed from the company of the poets, however, notwithstanding her apparent purpose of withdrawal, so far as we may surmise a possible design by her neglect of versification.
That she has demonstrated her possession of genuine poetic feeling cannot be denied. The volume before us is sufficient proof of this. Whenever she has permitted herself to be simple, lucid, and natural, her verses’ not only please—they charm. She is one of the minor poets sincerely beloved—not in so great a degree as Adelaide Procter, or Christina Rossetti, because she is not equally successful in expressing the universal sentiments of the heart, and because she wanders from the unambitious poetry of natural feeling into the tricky and artificial, whither the multitude will not voluntarily follow. She is not always in one mood, as Adelaide Procter is; and her joy, when sincere, and not fictitious and artful, is sometimes exceedingly attractive and—what is its truest test—becomes infectious, pervading the reader’s mind and carrying the emotions away into its own atmosphere.
We never smile at Adelaide Procter’s
joy. Her smiles are sadder than her tears. She smiles like a dying saint, whose pallid features proclaim that the effort is inspired by something higher and more mysterious than the pleasure of the world. It is as Shakspere says: “Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort, as if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit, that could be moved to smile at anything.”
Jean Ingelow possesses enough perception of real humor to throw, here and there, winsome flashes of merriment over very sombre pictures, especially in genre scenes like that depicted in “The Supper at the Mill.” Indeed, it may be safe to say that if she unloosed the flimsy chains of artificiality in which she has bound her muse, that very affected maid would prove frolicsome and mischievous; but her mistress prefers a decorousness of behavior which, by this time, must have dulled her own sense of the ludicrous, while supplying additional keenness in that direction to her critics, and furnishing new and irresistible models for hilarious parody, as we shall see.
It is impossible to read through a volume of her poems without coming to this conclusion: that she has a poetic stock-in-trade. Let us make an inventory of it. First, there are the birds; secondly, certain flowers and grasses; thirdly, a set of stereotypes composed of peculiar comminglings of sea, sky, ships, and stars. This poetic stock
is, as it were, all duly classified and labelled, and the whole is arranged with scientific calculation as to drafts, at intervals, upon the several departments. Matthew Arnold,[132] modestly defending his own attempts toward translating Homer into English hexameter, hopes to make it clear that he at least follows “a right method,” and that, if he fail, it is “from weakness of execution, not from original vice of design.” Jean Ingelow is guilty, we think, of “original vice of design.” “Weakness of execution” is infallibly certain to follow. In selecting her poetic stock—which is, in itself, vice of design—she deepens the folly by being persistently fantastical. It is not enough to choose birds, grasses, and particular flowers—these are an integral part of all descriptive poetry; but, in order to make them her especial poetic stock, she calls them by a curious and grotesque nomenclature, whose terms were undoubtedly devised with an ultimate view toward picturesque artificial composition. Her birds are not the sweet-syllabled singers of classic song; she eschews the nightingale and lark for jackdaws, wagtails, grouse, coot, rail, cushat, and mews. Her grasses and flowers are less grotesque and better adapted to sentimentalism in style: marigolds, foxglove, heather, daffodils—very fond is she of daffodils—orchis, bluebells, golden-broom, vetches, anemone, clover—her muse is very often in clover—ling, marybuds, cowslips, and cuckoo-pint. The bee appears with industrious frequency; his colors and his business are alike serviceable in a kind of composition both picturesque and fantastic, He is as full of available verbal
suggestion as of honey. The ships are invariably bowing to each other, to the land, or to the port. The figure is a good one, and true, but its recurrence soon renders it tiresome and exposes the dryness of the poet’s fancy. And after all Shakspere has been beforehand with her. In the Merchant of Venice Antonio is told that his mind is tossing on the ocean, where his argosies with portly sail, like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,
“Do overpeer the petty traffickers,
That curt’sy to them, do them reverence,
As they fly by them with their woven wings.”
The sea—which has supplied all the poets, from Homer down, with noble and beautiful images, lofty, grand, awful, terrible, or simply lovely,—the sea to Jean Ingelow is as a sleek servant who comes in to fill up a gap in the discourse or provide a necessary digression in the narrative. “A Sea Song” contains nothing of the sea except “salt sea foam” repeated. Her sea, stars, sun, and moon are all domestic. They perform no higher functions than the pipes of parsley or “the green ribbon” that “pranks the down.” Her sun either “stoops” or is “level”; her moon “droops”; the sea is usually “level,” and when disturbed, never awakens any sense of the sublime. Nothing more than her apparent imbecility in poetic treatment of the sea is wanting to dispose of the hope that Jean Ingelow can ever become a better poet than she appeared to be in her first volume.
Mrs. Browning, in one of her earlier efforts, “The Seraphim,” makes Ador and Zerah speak of “the glass sea-shore.” But we do not remember noting a recurrence of the expression throughout her tens of thousands of lines. Mrs. Browning seems to have been conscious
that she was unequal to an adequate depicting of marine grandeur, and she rarely attempts it, except in an instant’s lofty sweep remindful of Homer—as if she caught a single breath of his inspiration, and pressed it into her verse. She had more imagination than Jean Ingelow; Jean has the readier fancy. Mrs. Browning’s conceptions of the awe and beauty of the sea were far above her power of description, whose efforts are often turgid and swell into bombast; so she does not attempt, except in modest discretion, to write of the sea at all. Miss Ingelow, on the contrary, discovers the ocean only at her feet, or through the limited vision of a pretty opera-glass. Thus it becomes a mere commonplace in her stanzas; she is frivolous where Mrs. Browning would have been turgid had she not been cautious.
The sea, indeed, has wrecked most of the poets who did not hug the shore. Only the few greatest of the number have been able, like Jason, to tempt its unknown breadth, and fewer still return from Colchis without a Medea to torment them. The sea will always be the final touchstone of poetic genius. Of recent poets, Tennyson has been most ambitious and most successful; but his best ocean views may be seen from along the shores of the Æneid. The little ’scapes which are strictly his own are artificial and under-done; his pigment is only the residuum of lapis-lazuli—ultramarine ashes.
Jean Ingelow’s “vice of design” is very sadly shown, too, in her vocabulary. She wanders about in dusty, unused dictionaries, searching out odd, obsolete, obscure, and ambiguous words. Because a term is confessedly obsolete is no sound reason why it should not be revived;
but there is no justification for inserting it in a text where it must play the unbecoming part of a conspicuous intruder who can make no satisfactory excuse for his presence in uncongenial company. Where the silenced lexicons do not afford the desired material, she is not loath to make new combinations, and we are harassed by “bewrayed,” “amerce,” “ancientry,” “thrid,” “scorpe,” “eygre,” “chine,” “brattling,” etc. The best illustration of the artificiality and affectation of her style is found in one of her most pleasing and most popular poems, and it would be deservedly much more popular were these blemishes of etymology and simperings of rhetoric removed. We quote stanzas enough of “Divided” to exhibit her individuality both of thought and diction:
“An empty sky, a world of heather,
Purple of foxglove, yellow of broom;
We two among them, wading together,
Shaking out honey, treading perfume.
* * * * *
“Flusheth the rise with her purple favor,
Groweth the cleft with her golden ring,
’Twixt the two brown butterflies waver,
Lightly settle, and sleepily swing.
* * * * *
“Hey the green ribbon! We kneeled beside it,
We parted the grasses, dewy and sheen;
Drop over drop there filtered and slided
A tiny bright beck that trickled between.
“Tinkle, tinkle, sweetly it sung to us,
Light was our talk as of faëry bells,—
Faëry wedding bells faintly rung to us
Down in their fortunate parallels.”
The “beck” grows into a widening stream and divides them.
“A shady freshness, chafers whirring,
A little piping of leaf-hid birds;
A flutter of wings, a fitful stirring,
A cloud to the eastward snowy as curds.
* * * * *
“Stately prows are rising and bowing
(Shouts of mariners winnow the air),
And level sands for banks endowing
The tiny green ribbon that shows so fair.”
In the last two verses Miss Ingelow, unconsciously forgetting her previous straining after literal effects, writes these true thoughts, which
are the most finely poetical in the entire poem:
“And yet I know past all doubting, truly—
A knowledge greater than grief can dim,
I know, as he loved, he will love me duly,
Yea better, e’en better than I loved him.
“And as I walk by the vast, calm river,
The awful river so dread to see.
I say, ‘Thy breadth and thy depth for ever
Are bridged by his thoughts that cross to me.’”
Only artificial poems can be well parodied, and the parody holds the mirror up to the artifices, so that even the author must make confession. The cleverest burlesques which have reached the public of late, reproducing in an exaggerated form the faults of the modern affected school of poetry, are those of C. S. Calverley.[133] The merit of his rhymed farces—which is precisely what he makes of his models—is nowhere more happily illustrated than in the following, which needs no introduction. It is entitled “Lovers, and a Reflection”:
“In moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter
(And heaven it knoweth what that may mean;
Meaning, however, is no great matter),
Where woods are a-tremble, with rifts atween;
“Through God’s own heather we wonned together,
I and my Willie (O love, my love!);
I need hardly remark it was glorious weather,
And flitterbats wavered alow, above;
“Boats were curtsying, rising, bowing
(Boats in that climate are so polite),
And sands were a ribbon of green endowing,
And O the sun-dazzle on bark and bight!
“Through the rare red heather we danced together
(O love, my Willie!), and smelt for flowers;
I must mention again it was gorgeous weather—
Rhymes are so scarce in this world of ours:—
“By rises that flushed with their purple favors,
Thro’ becks that brattled o’er grasses sheen,
We walked or waded, we two young shavers,
Thanking our stars we were both so green.
“We journeyed in parallels, I and Willie—
In fortunate parallels! Butterflies,
Hid in weltering shadows of daffodilly
Or marjoram, kept making peacock eyes;
* * * * *
“And Willie ’gan sing (O, his notes were fluty;
Wafts fluttered them out to the white winged sea)—
Something made up of rhymes that have done much duty,
Rhymes (better to put it) of ‘ancientry’;
* * * * *
“Oh! if billows and pillows and hours and flowers,
And all the brave rhymes of an elder day,
Could be furled together this genial weather,
And carted, or carried, on wafts away,
Nor ever again trotted out—ay me!
How much fewer volumes of verse there’d be!”
Miss Ingelow’s most pretentious poem, next to “Divided,” is the “Letter L.” It has all her characteristic faults, intensified by a curious jog-trot metre:
“We sat on grassy slopes that meet
With sudden dip the level strand;
The trees hung overhead—our feet
Were on the sand.
* * * * *
“And let alighting jackdaws fleet
Adown it open-winged, and pass
Till they could touch with outstretched feet
The warmèd grass.”
And so on. Calverley has a little versification entitled “Changed.” Mark how ingeniously adroit he is in getting the jog-trot:
“I know not why my soul is racked
Why I ne’er smile as was my wont;
I only know that, as a fact,
I don’t.
“I used to roam o’er glen and glade,
Buoyant and blithe as other folk:
And not unfrequently I made
A joke.
* * * * *
“I cannot sing the old songs now!
It is not that I deem them low;
’Tis that I can’t remember how
They go.”
Calverley’s exhilarating volume, by the way, is not all parody; many of its numbers are original expressions of as pure fun, capitally expressed, as mirth ever conceived or art wove into verse.
Jean Ingelow is not altogether artificial. Occasionally she writes a terse truth:
“One striking with a pickaxe thinks the shock
Shall move the seat of God”;
or falls into a simple, unaffected strain:
“Far better in its place the lowliest bird
Should sing aright to Him the lowliest song,
Than that a seraph strayed should take the word
And sing His glory wrong.”
Hers is that oft-quoted couplet:
“Is there never a chink in the world above
Where they listen for words from below?”
“The Carpenter,” relating the touching story of his wife’s death to “The Scholar,” says with happy directness:
“’Tis sometimes natural to be glad;
And no man can be always sad,
Unless he wills to have it so.”
“The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire” is widely popularized by lyceum readers, who find its energy well fitted for semi-dramatic recitation; and certain divisions of the “Songs of Seven,” notably “Love” and “Giving in Marriage,” possess lyrical richness.
The thought of Jean Ingelow’s poems is always clean-of-heart; she eschews—generally—psychological tendencies, and, although far from lucid, her longer flights of speculation are merely curious, obscure, and fanciful rather than vicious or misleading. Indeed, according to her measure of grace, she is abjectly devout, worshipping with Eastern blindness a Deity of whose attributes she conceives only one—Love; and, in the humble resignation of a sightless child, she casts herself into the arms of her notion of what that Love is, and rests there, content to seek no knowledge outside herself. But even within these sacred limits her disposition to artificiality in expression unconsciously enters, to mar, with incongruous ornament, the limpid thought:
“For, O my God! thy creatures are so frail,
Thy bountiful creation is so fair,
That, drawn before us, like the Temple veil,
It hides the Holy Place from thought and care,
Giving man’s eyes instead its sweeping fold.
Rich as with cherub wings and apples wrought of gold.
“Purple and blue and scarlet—shimmering bells
And rare pomegranates on its broidered rim,
Glorious with chain and fretwork that the smell
Of incense shakes to music dreamy and dim,
Till on a day comes loss, that God makes gain,
And death and darkness rend the veil in twain.”
Literal criticism of Jean Ingelow is, however, abashed and almost silenced by the essence of her verse, which, in its chastity and beauty, is above the touch of cavil. She is one of our few contemporaneous poets who can look upon the face of her own work without a blush. Apparently past the zenith of her productive talent, she may look gratefully back upon her modest and constant rise, and say:
“Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast.”
She need not avert her gaze from any line, and plead that the public forgets it was hers and a woman’s. Wanting the genius of poetry, her inspiration has been only that of intense poetic feeling wrought out by the canons of verse; but, although only one of many in this respect, the work itself is far above the average of its class.
“Many fervent souls
Strike rhyme on rhyme who would strike steel on steel,
If steel had offered, in a restless heat
Of doing something. Many tender souls
Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread,
As children cowslips—the more pains they take,
The work more withers …
… Alas! near all the birds
Will sing at dawn, and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.”
While the popular magazines and the newspapers are daily lowering the standard of taste, and degrading and corrupting the sources of literary enjoyment as well as of personal honor and actual virtue, the regret is irresistible that a pleasing versifier like Jean Ingelow should not contribute more to a total of general reading into which what is known as “popular poetry” so largely enters.
[131] Jean Ingelow’s Poems. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
[132] Essays in Criticism, p. 334.
[133] Fly-Leaves. By C. S. C.