However, if the Songs of the Inner Life are not very successful, the Spring Songs are delightful. They follow each other like wind-blown petals, and make one feel how much more charming flower is than fruit, apple-blossom than apple. There are some artistic temperaments that should never come to maturity, that should always remain in the region of promise and should dread autumn with its harvesting more than winter with its frosts. Such seems to me the temperament that this volume reveals. The first poem of the second series, La Belle au Bois Dormant, is worth all the more serious and thoughtful work, and has far more chance of being remembered. It is not always to high aim and lofty ambition that the prize is given. If Daphne had gone to meet Apollo, she would never have known what laurels are.
From these fascinating spring lyrics and idylls we pass to the romantic ballads. One artistic faculty Miss Robinson certainly possesses—the faculty of imitation. There is an element of imitation in all the arts; it is to be found in literature as much as in painting, and the danger of valuing it too little is almost as great as the danger of setting too high a value upon it. To catch, by dainty mimicry, the very mood and manner of antique work, and yet to retain that touch of modern passion without which the old form would be dull and empty; to win from long-silent lips some faint echo of their music, and to add to it a music of one’s own; to take the mode and fashion of a bygone age, and to experiment with it, and search curiously for its possibilities; there is a pleasure in all this. It is a kind of literary acting, and has something of the charm of the art of the stage-player. And how well, on the whole, Miss Robinson does it! Here is the opening of the ballad of Rudel:
There was in all the world of France
No singer half so sweet:
The first note of his viol brought
A crowd into the street.He stepped as young, and bright, and glad
As Angel Gabriel.
And only when we heard him sing
Our eyes forgot Rudel.And as he sat in Avignon,
With princes at their wine,
In all that lusty company
Was none so fresh and fine.His kirtle’s of the Arras-blue,
His cap of pearls and green;
His golden curls fall tumbling round
The fairest face I’ve seen.
How Gautier would have liked this from the same poem!—
Hew the timbers of sandal-wood,
And planks of ivory;
Rear up the shining masts of gold,
And let us put to sea.Sew the sails with a silken thread
That all are silken too;
Sew them with scarlet pomegranates
Upon a sheet of blue.Rig the ship with a rope of gold
And let us put to sea.
And now, good-bye to good Marseilles,
And hey for Tripoli!
The ballad of the Duke of Gueldres’s wedding is very clever:
‘O welcome, Mary Harcourt,
Thrice welcome, lady mine;
There’s not a knight in all the world
Shall be as true as thine.‘There’s venison in the aumbry, Mary,
There’s claret in the vat;
Come in, and breakfast in the hall
Where once my mother sat!’O red, red is the wine that flows,
And sweet the minstrel’s play,
But white is Mary Harcourt
Upon her wedding-day.O many are the wedding guests
That sit on either side;
But pale below her crimson flowers
And homesick is the bride.
Miss Robinson’s critical sense is at once too sound and too subtle to allow her to think that any great Renaissance of Romance will necessarily follow from the adoption of the ballad-form in poetry; but her work in this style is very pretty and charming, and The Tower of St. Maur, which tells of the father who built up his little son in the wall of his castle in order that the foundations should stand sure, is admirable in its way. The few touches of archaism in language that she introduces are quite sufficient for their purpose, and though she fully appreciates the importance of the Celtic spirit in literature, she does not consider it necessary to talk of ‘blawing’ and ‘snawing.’ As for the garden play, Our Lady of the Broken Heart, as it is called, the bright, birdlike snatches of song that break in here and there—as the singing does in Pippa Passes—form a very welcome relief to the somewhat ordinary movement of the blank verse, and suggest to us again where Miss Robinson’s real power lies. Not a poet in the true creative sense, she is still a very perfect artist in poetry, using language as one might use a very precious material, and producing her best work by the rejection of the great themes and large intellectual motives that belong to fuller and richer song. When she essays such themes, she certainly fails. Her instrument is the reed, not the lyre. Only those should sing of Death whose song is stronger than Death is.
* * * * *
The collected poems of the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, have a pathetic interest as the artistic record of a very gracious and comely life. They bring us back to the days when Philip Bourke Marston was young—‘Philip, my King,’ as she called him in the pretty poem of that name; to the days of the Great Exhibition, with the universal piping about peace; to those later terrible Crimean days, when Alma and Balaclava were words on the lips of our poets; and to days when Leonora was considered a very romantic name.