One cannot help feeling also that everything that Mr. Sharp says in his preface was said at the beginning of the century by Wordsworth, only where Wordsworth called us back to nature, Mr. Sharp invites us to woo romance. Romance, he tells us, is ‘in the air.’ A new romantic movement is imminent; ‘I anticipate,’ he says, ‘that many of our poets, especially those of the youngest generation, will shortly turn towards the “ballad” as a poetic vehicle: and that the next year or two will see much romantic poetry.’
The ballad! Well, Mr. Andrew Lang, some months ago, signed the death-warrant of the ballade, and—though I hope that in this respect Mr. Lang resembles the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, whose bloodthirsty orders were by general consent never carried into execution—it must be admitted that the number of ballades given to us by some of our poets was, perhaps, a little excessive. But the ballad? Sir Patrick Spens, Clerk Saunders, Thomas the Rhymer—are these to be our archetypes, our models, the sources of our inspiration? They are certainly great imaginative poems. In Chatterton’s Ballad of Charity, Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the La Belle Dame sans Merci of Keats, the Sister Helen of Rossetti, we can see what marvellous works of art the spirit of old romance may fashion. But to preach a spirit is one thing, to propose a form is another. It is true that Mr. Sharp warns the rising generation against imitation. A ballad, he reminds them, does not necessarily denote a poem in quatrains and in antique language. But his own poems, as I think will be seen later, are, in their way, warnings, and show the danger of suggesting any definite ‘poetic vehicle.’ And, further, are simplicity and directness of utterance really the dominant characteristics of these old imaginative ballads that Mr. Sharp so enthusiastically, and, in some particulars, so wisely praises? It does not seem to me to be so. We are always apt to think that the voices which sang at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and could pass, almost without changing, into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its time is probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort. For Nature is always behind the age. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern.
Let us turn to the poems, which have really only the preface to blame for their somewhat late appearance. The best is undoubtedly The Weird of Michael Scott, and these stanzas are a fair example of its power:
Then Michael Scott laughed long and loud:
‘Whan shone the mune ahint yon cloud
I speered the towers that saw my birth—
Lang, lang, sall wait my cauld grey shroud,
Lang cauld and weet my bed o’ earth!’But as by Stair he rode full speed
His horse began to pant and bleed;
‘Win hame, win hame, my bonnie mare,
Win hame if thou wouldst rest and feed,
Win hame, we’re nigh the House of Stair!’But, with a shrill heart-bursten yell
The white horse stumbled, plunged, and fell,
And loud a summoning voice arose,
‘Is’t White-Horse Death that rides frae Hell,
Or Michael Scott that hereby goes?’‘Ah, Laird of Stair, I ken ye weel!
Avaunt, or I your saul sall steal,
An’ send ye howling through the wood
A wild man-wolf—aye, ye maun reel
An’ cry upon your Holy Rood!’
There is a good deal of vigour, no doubt, in these lines; but one cannot help asking whether this is to be the common tongue of the future Renaissance of Romance. Are we all to talk Scotch, and to speak of the moon as the ‘mune,’ and the soul as the ‘saul’? I hope not. And yet if this Renaissance is to be a vital, living thing, it must have its linguistic side. Just as the spiritual development of music, and the artistic development of painting, have always been accompanied, if not occasioned, by the discovery of some new instrument or some fresh medium, so, in the case of any important literary movement, half of its strength resides in its language. If it does not bring with it a rich and novel mode of expression, it is doomed either to sterility or to imitation. Dialect, archaisms and the like, will not do. Take, for instance, another poem of Mr. Sharp’s, a poem which he calls The Deith-Tide:
The weet saut wind is blawing
Upon the misty shore:
As, like a stormy snawing,
The deid go streaming o’er:—
The wan drown’d deid sail wildly
Frae out each drumly wave:
It’s O and O for the weary sea,
And O for a quiet grave.
This is simply a very clever pastiche, nothing more, and our language is not likely to be permanently enriched by such words as ‘weet,’ ‘saut,’ ‘blawing,’ and ‘snawing.’ Even ‘drumly,’ an adjective of which Mr. Sharp is so fond that he uses it both in prose and verse, seems to me to be hardly an adequate basis for a new romantic movement.
However, Mr. Sharp does not always write in dialect. The Son of Allan can be read without any difficulty, and Phantasy can be read with pleasure. They are both very charming poems in their way, and none the less charming because the cadences of the one recall Sister Helen, and the motive of the other reminds us of La Belle Dame sans Merci. But those who wish thoroughly to enjoy Mr. Sharp’s poems should not read his preface; just as those who approve of the preface should avoid reading the poems. I cannot help saying that I think the preface a great mistake. The work that follows it is quite inadequate, and there seems little use in heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and proclaiming a Renaissance whose first-fruits, if we are to judge them by any high standard of perfection, are of so ordinary a character.
* * * * *
Miss Mary Robinson has also written a preface to her little volume, Poems, Ballads, and a Garden Play, but the preface is not very serious, and does not propose any drastic change or any immediate revolution in English literature. Miss Robinson’s poems have always the charm of delicate music and graceful expression; but they are, perhaps, weakest where they try to be strong, and certainly least satisfying where they seek to satisfy. Her fanciful flower-crowned Muse, with her tripping steps and pretty, wilful ways, should not write Antiphons to the Unknowable, or try to grapple with abstract intellectual problems. Hers is not the hand to unveil mysteries, nor hers the strength for the solving of secrets. She should never leave her garden, and as for her wandering out into the desert to ask the Sphinx questions, that should be sternly forbidden to her. Dürer’s Melancolia, that serves as the frontispiece to this dainty book, looks sadly out of place. Her seat is with the sibyls, not with the nymphs. What has she to do with shepherdesses piping about Darwinism and ‘The Eternal Mind’?