In Mr. William Allingham’s opinion “Michel Scott clothing his own Soul with Hell-fire is tremendous!”
Professor Edward Dowden was not wholly in accord with the poet’s views, as expressed in the Introduction:
Rathmines, Dublin,
July 10, 1888.
My dear Sharp,
It gave me great pleasure to get your new volume from yourself. I think that a special gift of yours, and one not often possessed, appears in this volume of romance and phantasy. I don’t find it possible to particularise one poem as showing its presence more than another, for the unity of the volume comes from its presence. And I rejoice at anything which tends to make this last quarter of the century other than what I feared it would be—a period of collecting and arranging facts, with perhaps such generalisations as specialists can make. (Not that this is not valuable work, but if it is the sole employment of a generation what an ill time for the imagination and the emotions!) At the same time I don’t think I should make any demand, if I could, for Romance. I should not put forth any manifesto in its favour, for this reason—that the leaders of a movement of phantasy and romance will have such a sorry following. The leaders of a school which overvalued form and technique may have been smaller men than the leaders of a romantic school, yet still their followers were learning something; but while the chiefs of the romantic and phantastic movement will be men of genius, what a lamentable crowd the disciples will be, who will try to be phantastic prepense. We shall have the horrors of the spasmodic school revived without that element of a high, vague, spiritual intention which gave some nobility—or pseudo-nobility—to the disciples of the spasmodists. We shall have every kind of extravagance and folly posing as poetry.
The way to control or check this is for the men who have a gift for romance to use that gift—which you have done—and to prove that phantasy is not incoherence but has its own laws. And they ought to discourage any and every one from attempting romance who has not a genius for romance.
Sincerely yours,
E. Dowden.
Meanwhile, the author of the ballads was at work preparing two volumes for the Canterbury Series—a volume of selected Odes, and one of American Sonnets, to which he contributed prefaces—and writing critical articles for the Academy, Athenæum, Literary World, etc. Various important books were published that spring, and among those which came into his hands to write about were Underwoods by R. L. Stevenson, In Hospital by W. Henley; and from these writers respectively he received letters of comment. I am unable to remember what was the occasion of the first of the R. L. Stevenson notes, what nature of request it was that annoyed the older writer. Neither of his letters is dated, but from the context each obviously belongs to 1888.