CHAPTER VIII
ROMANTIC BALLADS
The Children of To-morrow
The three years spent at Wescam were happy years, full of work and interest. Slowly but steadily as health was re-established, the command over work increased, and all work was planned with the hope that before very long William should be able to devote himself to the form of imaginative work that he knew was germinating in his mind. Meanwhile he had much in hand. Critical work for many of the weeklies, a volume of poems in preparation, and a monograph on Heine, were the immediate preoccupations.
Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy was published in the spring (Walter Scott). The poems had been written at different times during the previous five or six years. “The Son of Allan” had met with the approval of Rossetti, whose influence was commented upon by certain of the critics. The book was well received both in England and America. The Boston Literary World considered that in such poems as “The Isle of Lost Dreams,” “Twin Souls,” and “The Death Child” “a conjuring imagination rises to extraordinary beauty of conception.” These three poems are undoubtedly forerunners of the work of the “Fiona Macleod” period. In the Preface the writer stated his conviction that “a Romantic Revival is imminent in our poetic literature, a true awakening of genuinely romantic sentiment. The most recent phase thereof,” however, “that mainly due to Rossetti, has not fulfilled the hopes of those who saw in it the prelude to a new great poetic period. It has been too literary, inherently, but more particularly in expression.... Spontaneity it has lacked supremely.... It would seem as if it had already become mythical that the supreme merit of a poem is not perfection of art, but the quality of the imagination which is the source of such real or approximate perfection.... In a sense, there is neither Youth nor Age in Romance, it is the quintessence of the most vivid emotions of life.” And further on he voices the very personal belief “Happy is he who, in this day of spiritual paralysis, can still shut his eyes for a while and dream.”
Concerning the idea of fatality that underlies the opening ballad “The Weird of Michel Scott”—“meant as a lyrical tragedy, a tragedy of a soul that finds the face of disastrous fate set against it whithersoever it turn in the closing moments of mortal life,” he wrote to a friend, “What has always impressed me deeply—how deeply I can scarcely say—is the blind despotism of fate. It is manifested in Æschylus, in Isaiah and in the old Hebrew Prophets, in all literature, in all history and in life. This blind, terrible, indifferent Fate, this tyrant Chance, stays or spares, mutilates or rewards, annihilates or passes by without heed, without thought, with absolute blankness of purpose, aim, or passion....
“I am tortured by the passionate desire to create beauty, to sing something of ‘the impossible songs’ I have heard, to utter something of the rhythm of life that has most touched me. The next volume of romantic poems will be daringly of the moment, vital with the life and passion of to-day (I speak hopefully, not with arrogant assurance, of course), yet not a whit less romantic than ‘The Weird of Michel Scott’ or ‘The Death Child.’”
Many encouraging and appreciative letters reached him from friends known and unknown.