In Mr. Gosse's graceful ode, "The Gifts of the Muses," the goddesses of song take away from Daphnis his beechwood flute and give him an ivory lyre, with which, at the cost of secret sorrow, he charms the ears of the world. But his last prayer to Apollo is that he may have his flute again before he dies. Mr. Gosse is like Daphnis in his preference for the homely flute. The ivory lyre, "the sorrowful great gift," as Mrs. Browning calls it, he has not chosen. His graceful, melodious verse, flawless in construction, delicate in form, does not anywhere show signs of passionate conviction or imperious stress; it has none of the "perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart." Intensity there is, but it is the intensity of enjoyment; Mr. Gosse's poems are full of the spirit of the sunlit wood, the breezy headland, the fragrant garden-walks at dusk; they are full of the cheerful felicity that plays about the wholesome energies of life, the happy love of wife and child, inspiriting talk, leisurely sessions in warm orchards, or libraries full of books. Mr. Gosse has the active love of nature intensified by the confinement of town life. He has inherited the eager instinct of the naturalist, and his studies of woodland things are produced with the eye on the object, or, better still, from loving and accurate recollection. There is nothing vague in his transcripts from sea or wood: the broken imitative music of the white-throat, the yellow water-lily stealing up to daylight through the dim pool, the beetle with his jewelled wing-cases, the bright crest of the swooping wood-chat, the whispering of the rain upon the leaves, the mist flooding the orchard, all these are touched with that swift intuition which comes from patient watchfulness.
Mr. Gosse's muse is fond of masquerading—and she does it very gracefully, too—in a classical dress. In such poems as the "Suppliant" he catches the very spirit, the unadorned sweetness, of the Greek Anthology. But this classical flavour belongs essentially to his earlier work. Mr. Gosse has within himself the untainted Greek spirit, and has grown to feel more and more, I venture to believe, that there is no need to shift his readers to an earlier age and a sunnier scenery: that the ardent natural sense of enjoyment, without morbidity even in its sadness, which is the essence of Greek feeling, needs no setting to declare itself. It can exist in London smoke, on the promontory with its short turf, in the Devonshire orchard. If this be so, the instinct which has led him gradually to abjure the earlier forms is a true one.
Of the poems which have a philosophical motive—not a numerous class—we may take "Verdleigh Coppice" (New Poems, p. 74) as a type. It is a sensitive description of the horror that creeps over even the most thoughtless heart on realising that below the surface of nature in her most peaceful moods lies a whole world of death and strife. But this leads to no Puritan or melancholy conclusion. "I learn," he says, in the exquisite stanza with which the poem concludes,
I learn 'tis best in all things to hold living very lightly,
Taste the perfumes of the fir-wood, but not linger there
too long,
Lest the mazes of the forest lead to foulnesses unsightly,
And a haunting horror clash upon the night-bird's liquid
song.
Mr. Gosse's latest volume, In Russet and Silver, shows, as we have said, the true and gentle development of this happy philosophy. From end to end it breathes the genial resignation of one who feels a happy youth depart with promise of calm and gracious hours to come. But at the same time, as far as poetical power goes, it is incomparably stronger than any of the author's previous work. The noble dedication to "Tusitala in Vailima" (Mr. R. L. Stevenson in Samoa) is the high-water mark of Mr. Gosse's genius. The haunting melody of this poem, its serene and equable sweep, exalt the writer among his contemporaries; although for ardent feeling and pure workmanship the idyll entitled "A Tragedy without Words" ranks nearly as high.
But we must pass to the technical consideration of Mr. Gosse's art.
In the first place, he is singularly free from mannerism, and his style has clarified itself every year. It would be difficult for the most ingenious imitator to produce a poem which should be indisputably in Mr. Gosse's manner. There is an equable lucidity about his expression; it is never necessary to pause in order to adjust the sense of a passage. Robert Browning, perhaps, of contemporary poets, presents the most acute contrast to Mr. Gosse. Browning's style may be compared to a Swiss pasture, where the green meadows which form the foreground of a sublime landscape are yet cumbered with awkward blocks and boulders—things not without a certain rough dignity of their own, but essentially out of place. Mr. Gosse's poems, on the other hand, are like trim meadow-lands, with wealth of wood and water, where the pilgrim can linger without fear of obstacles or catastrophes.
Another salient characteristic of Mr. Gosse is the entire absence of errors of taste. There is nothing that can jar on the most sensitive reader either in feeling or expression; and in this he may be called somewhat of a reactionary when compared with the tendency of much modern poetry. There is, moreover, a sweetness and simplicity about his handling both of metre and rhyme which never degenerates into commonplace, and yet is never affected. The only trace of affectation, indeed, is in a certain dabbling, in earlier work, with names of jewels such as "chrysoprase," and plants such as "euphrasy" and "agrimony." It may be doubted whether such names—for the introduction of which into our poetry Mrs. Browning is largely responsible—ever succeed in giving true or accurate vividness to a picture, for the simple reason that most readers, and, we fear, many writers, have no idea what jewel or flower is intended.
Lastly, in the difficult matter of epithets Mr. Gosse is a master. Nowadays, when all ordinary combinations of adjectives and nouns have been employed in poetry, the poet must give special attention to epithets which shall arrest and please, shall be, in fact, almost paradoxical at first sight, yet shall justify themselves on examination. And here Mr. Gosse is singularly successful; without multiplying instances, let any reader judicially examine the two poems mentioned above, in In Russet and Silver, where experiment in epithet is carried to the verge of daring, and say whether the adjectives do not drop into their places in a predestined fashion, like the swans which Virgil describes settling in the marsh:—"Aut capere, aut captas jam despectare videntur."
It will be as well to give a few phrases and expressions, taken at random from the various volumes, to illustrate the elaborate felicity of phrase and epithet which are characteristic of the patient art of Mr. Gosse. We have the "boisterous bee," the "velvet darkness of the pines," the "horizon's primrose bar," the "night and her innumerable eyes" the "hushed elbow of the reedy leas" where the heron finds peace, the "bales of solid sleep" in which the opium is packed, the loadstone cliff at which "the fluttering magnets leap with lying poles," the "tight curls closing like the marigold," of the young athlete, the eye of the woodman that flickers "keen as the flashing of a snipe through beds of windless rushes." The poet passes the charcoal-burner's hut and says: "I love to watch the pale blue spire His scented labour builds above it." In the June garden he notes "how spring and summer flowers arrange Their aromatic interchange." He hears "the small hushed cry of crisp dry life The terebinth gives beneath the graver's knife." To the pushing iris he cries, "What news from hollow worlds beneath?" He sees, on a Provençal coast, "Where now the prickly cactus gibes and crawls Down towards cold waves from firm rock-battlements." He watches the expiring light: "As ceases in a lamp at break of day The fragrant remnant of memorial flame." He hears in passing "Joybells of some exuberant town at play." He indicates in a stroke of rare insight the characteristic failure of the melancholy Obermann, his "high lassitude," and for a delicate simile what could be more perfect than the following:—