which lend their calm and shadowy presence to the farmer’s toil, bring with them swift glimpses of a strong pastoral world. Not a blithe world by any means. No Pan pipes in the rushes. No shaggy herdsmen sing in rude mirthful harmony. No sun-burnt girls laugh in the harvest-field. Rusticity has lost its native grace, and the cares of earth sit at the fireside of the husbandman. Yet to him belong moments of deep content, and to his clean and arduous life are given pleasures which the artisan has never known.
“Better to watch the live-long day
The clouds that come and go,
Wearying the heaven they idle through,
And fretting out its everlasting blue.
Though sadness on the woods may often lie,
And wither to a waste the meadowy land,
Pure blows the air, and purer shines the sky,
For nearer always to Heaven’s gate you stand.”
The most curious characteristic of Mr. Mathew’s work is the easy and absolute fashion in which it ignores the influence, and indeed the very existence of woman. The word “man” must here be taken in its literal significance. It is not of the human race that the author sings, but of one half of it alone. No troublesome flutter of petticoats disturbs his serene meditations; no echo of passion haunts his placid verse. Even in his opening stanzas on “The Child,” there is no allusion to any mother. The infant appears to have come into life after the fashion of Pallas Athene, and upon the father only depends its future weal or woe. The teacher apparently confines his labors to little boys; the preacher has a congregation of men; the reformer, the scholar, the citizen, the friend, all dwell in a cool masculine world, where the seductive voice of womankind never insinuates itself to the endangering of sober and sensible behavior. This enforced absence of “The Eternal Feminine” is more striking when we approach the realms of art. Does the painter desire subjects for his brush?
“The mountain and the sea, the setting sun,
The storm, the face of men, and the calm moon,”
are considered amply sufficient for his needs. Does the sculptor ask for models? They are presented him in generous abundance.
“Crowned heroes of the early age,
Chieftain and soldier, senator and sage;
The tawny ancient of the warrior race,
With dusky limb and kindling face.”
Or, should he prefer less conventional types—
“Colossal and resigned, the gloomy gods
Eying at large their lost abodes,
Towering and swart, and knit in every limb;
With brows on which the tempest lives,
With eyes wherein the past survives,
Gloomy, and battailous, and grim.”
With all these legitimate subjects at his command, why indeed should the artist turn aside after that beguiling beauty which Eve saw reflected in the clear waters of Paradise, and which she loved with unconscious vanity or ever Adam met her amorous gaze. Only to the poet is permitted the smallest glimpse into the feminine world. In one brief half-line, Mr. Mathews coldly and chastely allows that “young Love” may whisper something—we are not told what—which is best fitted for the poetic ear.
What an old-fashioned bundle of verse it is, though written a bare half century ago! How far removed from the delicate conceits, the inarticulate sadness of our modern versifiers; from the rondeaux, and ballades, and pastels, and impressions, and nocturnes, with which we have grown bewilderingly familiar. How these titles alone would have puzzled the sober citizen who wrote the “Poems on Man,” and who endeavored with rigid honesty to make his meaning as clear as English words would permit. There is no more chance to speculate over these stanzas than there is to speculate over Hogarth’s pictures. What is meant is told, not vividly, but with steadfast purpose, and with an innocent hope that it may be of some service to the world. The world, indeed, has forgotten the message, and forgotten the messenger as well. Only in a brief foot-note of Mrs. Browning’s there lingers still the faint echo of what once was life. For such modest merit there is no second sunrise; and yet a quiet reader may find an hour well spent in the staid company of these serious verses, whose best eloquence is their sincerity.