(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1888.)
Mr. Ian Hamilton’s Ballad of Hádji is undeniably clever. Hádji is a wonderful Arab horse that a reckless hunter rides to death in the pursuit of a wild boar, and the moral of the poem—for there is a moral—seems to be that an absorbing passion is a very dangerous thing and blunts the human sympathies. In the course of the chase a little child is drowned, a Brahmin maiden murdered, and an aged peasant severely wounded, but the hunter cares for none of these things and will not hear of stopping to render any assistance. Some of the stanzas are very graceful, notably one beginning
Yes—like a bubble filled with smoke—
The curd-white moon upswimming broke
The vacancy of space;
but such lines as the following, which occur in the description of the fight with the boar—
I hung as close as keepsake locket
On maiden breast—but from its socket
He wrenched my bridle arm,
are dreadful, and ‘his brains festooned the thorn’ is not a very happy way of telling the reader how the boar died. All through the volume we find the same curious mixture of good and bad. To say that the sun kisses the earth ‘with flame-moustachoed lip’ is awkward and uncouth, and yet the poem in which the expression occurs has some pretty lines. Mr. Ian Hamilton should prune. Pruning, whether in the garden or in the study, is a most healthy and useful employment. The volume is nicely printed, but Mr. Strang’s frontispiece is not a great success, and most of the tail-pieces seem to have been designed without any reference to the size of the page.
Mr. Catty dedicates his book to the memory of Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats—a somewhat pompous signboard for such very ordinary wine—and an inscription in golden letters on the cover informs us that his poems are ‘addressed to the rising generation,’ whom, he tells us elsewhere, he is anxious to initiate into the great comprehensive truth that ‘Virtue is no other than self-interest, deeply understood.’ In order to further this laudable aim he has written a very tedious blank verse poem which he calls The Secret of Content, but it certainly does not convey that secret to the reader. It is heavy, abstract and prosaic, and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions and the most earnest beliefs. In the rest of the volume, where Mr. Catty does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing things. The sonnet on Shelley’s room at University College would be admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.
Green in the wizard arms
Of the foam-bearded Atlantic,
An isle of old enchantment,
A melancholy isle,
Enchanted and dreaming lies;
And there, by Shannon’s flowing
In the moonlight, spectre-thin,
The spectre Erin sits.Wail no more, lonely one, mother of exile wail no more,
Banshee of the world—no more!
Thy sorrows are the world’s, thou art no more alone;
Thy wrongs the world’s—
are the first and last stanzas of Mr. Todhunter’s poem The Banshee. To throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is, as Mr. Swinburne once remarked, a wilful abdication of half the power and half the charm of verse, and we cannot say that Mr. Todhunter has given us much that consoles us for its loss. Part of his poem reads like a translation of an old Bardic song, part of it like rough material for poetry, and part of it like misshapen prose. It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art. It is amorphous and inchoate, and the same must be said of the two other poems, The Doom of the Children of Lir, and The Lamentation for the Sons of Turann. Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to song, and though the lovely lute-builded walls of Thebes may have risen up to unrhymed choral metres, we have had no modern Amphion to work such wonders for us. Such a verse as—
Five were the chiefs who challenged
By their deeds the Over-kingship,
Bov Derg, the Daghda’s son, Ilbrac of Assaroe,
And Lir of the White Field in the plain of Emain Macha;
And after them stood up Midhir the proud, who reigned
Upon the hills of Bri,
Of Bri the loved of Liath, Bri of the broken heart;
And last was Angus Og; all these had many voices,
But for Bov Derg were most,