Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,
From the deep throat of sad Melpomene!
Through bronzèd lyre in tragic order go,
And touch the strings into a mystery,
seems to him ‘a fadeur’; the Indian Bacchante of the fourth book of Endymion he calls a ‘sentimental and beguiling wine-bibber,’ and, as for Endymion himself, he declares that he cannot understand ‘how his human organism, with respirative and digestive processes, continues to exist,’ and gives us his own idea of how Keats should have treated the subject. An eminent French critic once exclaimed in despair, ‘Je trouve des physiologistes partout!’; but it has been reserved for Mr. Rossetti to speculate on Endymion’s digestion, and we readily accord to him all the distinction of the position. Even where Mr. Rossetti seeks to praise, he spoils what he praises. To speak of Hyperion as ‘a monument of Cyclopean architecture in verse’ is bad enough, but to call it ‘a Stonehenge of reverberance’ is absolutely detestable; nor do we learn much about The Eve of St. Mark by being told that its ‘simplicity is full-blooded as well as quaint.’ What is the meaning, also, of stating that Keats’s Notes on Shakespeare are ‘somewhat strained and bloated’? and is there nothing better to be said of Madeline in The Eve of St. Agnes than that ‘she is made a very charming and loveable figure, although she does nothing very particular except to undress without looking behind her, and to elope’? There is no necessity to follow Mr. Rossetti any further as he flounders about through the quagmire that he has made for his own feet. A critic who can say that ‘not many of Keats’s poems are highly admirable’ need not be too seriously treated. Mr. Rossetti is an industrious man and a painstaking writer, but he entirely lacks the temper necessary for the interpretation of such poetry as was written by John Keats.
It is pleasant to turn again to Mr. Colvin, who criticises always with modesty and often with acumen. We do not agree with him when he accepts Mrs. Owens’s theory of a symbolic and allegoric meaning underlying Endymion, his final judgment on Keats as ‘the most Shaksperean spirit that has lived since Shakspere’ is not very fortunate, and we are surprised to find him suggesting, on the evidence of a rather silly story of Severn’s, that Sir Walter Scott was privy to the Blackwood article. There is nothing, however, about his estimate of the poet’s work that is harsh, irritating or uncouth. The true Marcellus of English song has not yet found his Virgil, but Mr. Colvin makes a tolerable Statius.
(1) Keats. By Sidney Colvin. ‘English Men of Letters’ Series. (Macmillan and Co.)
(2) Life of John Keats. By William Michael Rossetti. ‘Great Writers’ Series. (Walter Scott.)
A SCOTCHMAN ON SCOTTISH POETRY
(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1887.)
A distinguished living critic, born south of the Tweed, once whispered in confidence to a friend that he believed that the Scotch knew really very little about their own national literature. He quite admitted that they love their ‘Robbie Burns’ and their ‘Sir Walter’ with a patriotic enthusiasm that makes them extremely severe upon any unfortunate southron who ventures to praise either in their presence, but he claimed that the works of such great national poets as Dunbar, Henryson and Sir David Lyndsay are sealed books to the majority of the reading public in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow, and that few Scotch people have any idea of the wonderful outburst of poetry that took place in their country during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at a time when there was little corresponding development in England. Whether this terrible accusation be absolutely true, or not, it is needless to discuss at present. It is probable that the archaism of language alone will always prevent a poet like Dunbar from being popular in the ordinary acceptation of the word. Professor Veitch’s book, however, shows that there are some, at any rate, in the ‘land o’ cakes’ who can admire and appreciate their marvellous early singers, and whose admiration for The Lord of the Isles and the verses To a Mountain Daisy does not blind them to the exquisite beauties of The Testament of Cresseid, The Thistle and the Rose, and the Dialog betwix Experience and ane Courteour.
Taking as the subject of his two interesting volumes the feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry, Professor Veitch starts with a historical disquisition on the growth of the sentiment in humanity. The primitive state he regards as being simply a sort of ‘open-air feeling.’ The chief sources of pleasure are the warmth of the sunshine, the cool of the breeze and the general fresh aspect of the earth and sky, connecting itself with a consciousness of life and sensuous enjoyment; while darkness, storm and cold are regarded as repulsive. This is followed by the pastoral stage in which we find the love of green meadows and of shady trees and of all things that make life pleasant and comfortable. This, again, by the stage of agriculture, the era of the war with earth, when men take pleasure in the cornfield and in the garden, but hate everything that is opposed to tillage, such as woodland and rock, or that cannot be subdued to utility, such as mountain and sea. Finally we come to the pure nature-feeling, the free delight in the mere contemplation of the external world, the joy in sense-impressions irrespective of all questions of Nature’s utility and beneficence. But here the growth does not stop. The Greek, desiring to make Nature one with humanity, peopled the grove and hillside with beautiful and fantastic forms, saw the god hiding in the thicket, and the naiad drifting with the stream. The modern Wordsworthian, desiring to make man one with Nature, finds in external things ‘the symbols of our inner life, the workings of a spirit akin to our own.’ There is much that is suggestive in these early chapters of Professor Veitch’s book, but we cannot agree with him in the view he takes of the primitive attitude towards Nature. The ‘open-air feeling,’ of which he talks, seems to us comparatively modern. The earliest Nature-myths tell us, not of man’s ‘sensuous enjoyment’ of Nature, but of the terror that Nature inspires. Nor are darkness and storm regarded by the primitive man as ‘simply repulsive’; they are to him divine and supernatural things, full of wonder and full of awe. Some reference, also, should have been made to the influence of towns on the development of the nature-feeling, for, paradox though it may seem, it is none the less true that it is largely to the creation of cities that we owe the love of the country.
Professor Veitch is on a safer ground when he comes to deal with the growth and manifestations of this feeling as displayed in Scotch poetry. The early singers, as he points out, had all the mediæval love of gardens, all the artistic delight in the bright colours of flowers and the pleasant song of birds, but they felt no sympathy for the wild solitary moorland, with its purple heather, its grey rocks and its waving bracken. Montgomerie was the first to wander out on the banks and braes and to listen to the music of the burns, and it was reserved for Drummond of Hawthornden to sing of flood and forest and to notice the beauty of the mists on the hillside and the snow on the mountain tops. Then came Allan Ramsay with his honest homely pastorals; Thomson, who writes about Nature like an eloquent auctioneer, and yet was a keen observer, with a fresh eye and an open heart; Beattie, who approached the problems that Wordsworth afterwards solved; the great Celtic epic of Ossian, such an important factor in the romantic movement of Germany and France; Fergusson, to whom Burns is so much indebted; Burns himself, Leyden, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg and (longo intervallo) Christopher North and the late Professor Shairp. On nearly all these poets Professor Veitch writes with fine judgment and delicate feeling, and even his admiration for Burns has nothing absolutely aggressive about it. He shows, however, a certain lack of the true sense of literary proportion in the amount of space he devotes to the two last writers on our list. Christopher North was undoubtedly an interesting personality to the Edinburgh of his day, but he has not left behind him anything of real permanent value. There was too much noise in his criticism, too little music in his poetry. As for Professor Shairp, looked on as a critic he was a tragic example of the unfortunate influence of Wordsworth, for he was always confusing ethical with æsthetical questions, and never had the slightest idea how to approach such poets as Shelley and Rossetti whom it was his mission to interpret to young Oxford in his later years; [{189}] while, considered as a poet, he deserves hardly more than a passing reference. Professor Veitch gravely tells us that one of the descriptions of Kilmahoe is ‘not surpassed in the language for real presence, felicity of epithet, and purity of reproduction,’ and statements of this kind serve to remind us of the fact that a criticism which is based on patriotism is always provincial in its result. But it is only fair to add that it is very rarely that Professor Veitch is so extravagant and so grotesque. His judgment and taste are, as a rule, excellent, and his book is, on the whole, a very fascinating and delightful contribution to the history of literature.