Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,
Or the gold weather round us mellow slow;
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare,
And we can conquer, though we may not share
In the rich quiet of the afterglow,
What is to come,
is the concluding stanza of the last rondeau—indeed, of the last poem in the collection, and the high, serene temper displayed in these lines serves at once as keynote and keystone to the book. The very lightness and slightness of so much of the work, its careless moods and casual fancies, seem to suggest a nature that is not primarily interested in art—a nature, like Sordello’s, passionately enamoured of life, one to which lyre and lute are
things of less importance. From this mere joy of living, this frank delight in experience for its own sake, this lofty indifference, and momentary unregretted ardours, come all the faults and all the beauties of the volume. But there is this difference between them—the faults are deliberate, and the result of much study; the beauties have the air of fascinating impromptus. Mr. Henley’s healthy, if sometimes misapplied, confidence in the myriad suggestions of life gives him his charm. He is made to sing along the highways, not to sit down and write. If he took himself more seriously, his work would become trivial.
A Book of Verses. By William Ernest Henley. (David Nutt.)
SOME LITERARY LADIES
(Woman’s World, January 1889.)
In a recent article on English Poetesses, I ventured to suggest that our women of letters should turn their attention somewhat more to prose and somewhat less to poetry. Women seem to me to possess just what our literature wants—a light touch, a delicate hand, a graceful mode of treatment, and an unstudied felicity of phrase. We want some one who will do for our prose what Madame de Sévigné did for the prose of France. George Eliot’s style was far too cumbrous, and Charlotte Brontë’s too exaggerated. However, one must not forget that amongst the women of England there have been some charming letter-writers, and certainly no book can be more delightful reading than Mrs. Ross’s Three Generations of English Women, which has recently appeared. The
three Englishwomen whose memoirs and correspondence Mrs. Ross has so admirably edited are Mrs. John Taylor, Mrs. Sarah Austin, and Lady Duff Gordon, all of them remarkable personalities, and two of them women of brilliant wit and European reputation. Mrs. Taylor belonged to that great Norwich family about whom the Duke of Sussex remarked that they reversed the ordinary saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man, and was for many years one of the most distinguished figures in the famous society of her native town. Her only daughter married John Austin, the great authority on jurisprudence, and her salon in Paris was the centre of the intellect and culture of her day. Lucie Duff Gordon, the only child of John and Sarah Austin, inherited the talents of her parents. A beauty, a femme d’esprit, a traveller, and clever writer, she charmed and fascinated her age, and her premature death in Egypt was really a loss to our literature. It is to her daughter that we owe this delightful volume of memoirs.
First we are introduced to Mrs. Ross’s great-grandmother, Mrs. Taylor, who ‘was called, by her intimate friends, “Madame Roland of Norwich,” from her likeness to the portraits of the handsome and unfortunate Frenchwoman.’ We hear of her darning her boy’s grey worsted stockings while holding her own with Southey and Brougham, and dancing round the Tree of Liberty with Dr. Parr when the news of the fall of the Bastille was first known. Amongst her friends were Sir James Mackintosh, the most popular man of the day, ‘to whom Madame de Staël wrote, “Il n’y a pas de société sans vous.” “C’est très ennuyeux de dîner sans vous; la société ne va pas quand vous n’êtes pas là”;’ Sir James Smith, the botanist; Crabb
Robinson; the Gurneys; Mrs. Barbauld; Dr. Alderson and his charming daughter, Amelia Opie; and many other well-known people. Her letters are extremely sensible and thoughtful. ‘Nothing at present,’ she says in one of them, ‘suits my taste so well as Susan’s Latin lessons, and her philosophical old master. . . . When we get to Cicero’s discussions on the nature of the soul, or Virgil’s fine descriptions, my mind is filled up. Life is either a dull round of eating, drinking, and sleeping, or a spark of ethereal fire just kindled. . . . The character of girls must depend upon their reading as much as upon the company they keep. Besides the intrinsic pleasure to be derived from solid knowledge, a woman ought to consider it as her best resource against poverty.’ This is a somewhat caustic aphorism: ‘A romantic woman is a troublesome friend, as she expects you to be as impudent as herself, and is mortified at what she calls coldness and insensibility.’ And this is admirable: ‘The art of life is not to estrange oneself from society, and yet not to pay too dear for it.’ This, too, is good: ‘Vanity, like curiosity, is wanted as a stimulus to exertion; indolence would certainly get the better of us if it were not for these two powerful principles’; and there is a keen touch of humour in the following: ‘Nothing is so gratifying as the idea that virtue and philanthropy are becoming fashionable.’ Dr. James Martineau, in a letter to Mrs. Ross, gives us a pleasant picture of the old lady returning from market ‘weighted by her huge basket, with the shank of a leg of mutton thrust out to betray its contents,’ and talking divinely about philosophy, poets, politics, and every intellectual topic of the day. She was a woman of admirable good sense, a type of Roman matron,
and quite as careful as were the Roman matrons to keep up the purity of her native tongue.