Ephemera Critica; Or, Plain Truths About Current Literature

by John Churton Collins

[43] Poems. By Stephen Phillips. London and New York John Lane.

The accent here is unmistakable, it is the accent of a new and a true poet. Mr. Phillips gives us no mere variations on familiar melodies, no clever copies of classical archetypes, and what is more, he has not employed any illegitimate means of attracting attention and giving distinction to his work. An audacious choice of subjects, the adoption of the stones which the builders have rejected, and, it may be added, disdained, has, when coupled with elaborate affectations and eccentricities of treatment and style, often enabled mediocrity to pass, temporarily at least, for genius, and the specious counterfeit of originality for the thing itself. But these poems are marked by simplicity, sincerity, spontaneity. If a discordant note is sometimes struck, here in an over-strained conceit, and there in an incongruous touch of preciosity or false sentiment, this is but an accident; in essentials all is genuine. Nature and passion affect to be speaking, and nature and passion really speak. A poet, of whom this may be said with truth, has passed the line which divides talent from genius, the true singer from the accomplished artist or imitator. He has taken his place, wherever that place may be, among authentic poets. To that high honour the present volume undoubtedly entitles Mr. Phillips. It would now, perhaps, be premature to say more than "Ingens omen habet magni clarique triumphi," but we may predict with confidence that, if fate is kind and his muse is true to him, he has a distinguished future before him. It may be safely said that no poet has made his début with a volume which is at once of such extraordinary merit and so rich in promise.

Mr. Phillips is not a poet who has "one plain passage of few notes." He strikes many chords, and strikes them often with thrilling power. The awful story narrated in The Wife is conceived and embodied with really Dantesque intensity and vividness; it has the master's suggestive reservation, smiting phrase, and clairvoyant picture wording, as "in the red shawl sacredly she burned," "smiled at him with her lips, not with her eyes"; while "Mother and child that food together ate" is, in pregnancy of tragic suggestiveness, almost worthy to stand with the "poscia, più che il dolor, poté il digiuno." Equally distinguished, though on another plane of interest, is The woman with the dead Soul, the soul which could once "wonder, laugh, and weep," but over which the days began to fall "dismally, as rain on ocean blear," till—

"Existence lean, in sky dead grey

Withholding steadily, starved it away."

If the pathos in these poems is almost "too deep for tears," it is gentler in the second and third of the lyrics, which are as exquisite as they are affecting. The idea in the lines To Milton Blind, is worthy of Milton's own sublime conceit, that the darkness which had fallen on his eyes was but the shadow of God's protecting wings. The whole poem, indeed, is a beautiful paraphrase of the noble passage in the Second Defence of the People of England: "For the Divine law"—we give it in the English translation—"not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack, not indeed so much from the privation of my sight as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity; and which, when occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light more precious and more pure."

In The Lily, which is a little obscure—a fault against which Mr. Phillips would do well to guard, for he frequently offends in this respect—we have the note of Petrarch, but Petrarch would not have ended the poem so flatly. Tennyson is recalled, too nearly perhaps, in "By the Sea," but it is a poem of great charm and beauty. The New De Profundis is, unhappily, the key to Mr. Phillips' characteristic mood; it reminds us of the curse imposed on the worldling in Browning's Easter Day, before he has learned the use of life and doubt.

Mr. Phillips' two most ambitious poems are Christ in Hades and Marpessa. In Christ in Hades he fails, as Mrs. Browning failed in The Drama of Exile. He attempts a theme—a stupendous theme—to which his genius is not equal, and which could only have been adequately treated by such poets as Dante and Milton, in the maturity of their powers. It has neither basis nor superstructure. It is what the Greeks would call "meteoric" as distinguished from "sublime." It is a weird, wild, and chaotic dream; and yet for all this its appeal to the heart and the imagination is piercing and direct. Like Tennyson, Mr. Phillips has the art of unfolding the full significance of a few suggestive words in a great classic; and nothing could be more effective than the use to which he has applied the famous lines which Homer places in the mouth of Achilles. Poetry has few things more pathetic than Homer's picture of Hades and the dead, and that pathos Mr. Phillips has given us in quintessence, as few would question after reading the lines which describe Persephone yearning for her return to the spring-illumined world, the speech of the Athenian ghost, and the woman's address to Christ. If the world depicted has something of Horace's artistic monster, or, to change the image, something of the anarchy of dreams in its composition, the vividness and picturesqueness with which particular figures and scenes are flashed into light and definition is extraordinarily impressive. It is so with the central figure, Christ; it is so with Prometheus; and the contrast between these martyrs for man has both pathos and grandeur.

There is more originality, more power in Christ in Hades than in Marpessa, but Marpessa has more balance, more sanity, more of the stuff out of which good and abiding poetry is made, than its predecessor. The one savours of the spasmodic school, the productions of which have rarely been found to have the principle of life, however rich they may have been in promise; the other is a return to a school in which most of those who have gained permanent fame have studied. And we are glad to find a young poet there.

But it would be doing Mr. Phillips great injustice not to note that, though he has had many predecessors in the semi-classical, semi-romantic re-treatment of the Greek myths, notably Keats in Hyperion, Wordsworth in Dion and Laodamia, Landor in his Hellenics, and Tennyson in Ænone and Tithonus, he has treated his theme with a distinction which is all his own, and has impressed on it an intense individuality. In comparison with these masters he may be pauper, but he is pauper in suo ære.