HALL CAINE.
[PAGE 309]
This fine Manx ballad of “Graih my Chree” appeared this year in the first number of London Home, to the editor and proprietor of which, as well as to Mr Hall Caine, I am indebted for the permission to include “Love of my Heart” here. Mr Caine, so celebrated as a novelist, has published no volume of poems; but at rare intervals something of his in verse has appeared. I think that his earliest appearance as a poet was in Sonnets of this Century (1886, and later editions), where he is represented by two fine sonnets, “Where Lies the Land to which my Soul would go?” and “After Sunset.” Mr Caine’s own first acknowledged book was an anthology of sonnets (Sonnets of Three Centuries, Stock, 1882), published in the author’s twenty-seventh year. Of his many books, the best known are his Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and his romances, The Shadow of a Crime, The Deemster, The Bondman, The Scapegoat, and The Manxman. Mr Hall Caine is himself a Manxman, crossed with a strong strain of Cumberland blood. Both in his strength and weakness he is eminently Celtic, after his own kind; for he could belong to no other Celtic people than either the Manx or the Welsh. He has, and not without good reason, been called the Walter Scott of Man. Certainly, The Deemster and The Manxman alone have revealed Manxland and Manx life and character to the great mass of English readers.
CONTEMPORARY ANGLO-CELTIC POETS (CORNISH)
ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER COUCH.
[PAGE 317]
So well known as “Q,” was born at Bodwin, in Cornwall, of an old Cornish family, in 1863. He left Trinity College, Oxford, for London; but, after a brief experience of literary life in the metropolis, returned to the “Duchy,” and has since resided there, mainly at Fowey. He is not only the most noteworthy living Cornishman of letters, and the romancer par excellence of contemporary Cornwall and Cornish life, but is acknowledged as one of the best story-tellers of the day. His first book was The Splendid Spur (1889), a stirring romance, which was followed by The Delectable Duchy, Noughts and Crosses, and I Saw Three Ships. He has published little poetry; and even in his slender volume, Green Bays (1893), there are not more than one or two poems, the other verses being for the most part what are called “occasional.” If, however, he had written nothing in verse except the lyric called “The Splendid Spur,” he would be accounted a poet for remembrance. “The White Moth” is the most distinctively Celtic poem he has written. In the main, he is more Cornish than Celtic—in this a contrast to Dr Riccardo Stephens, who is far more distinctively Celtic than Cornish.
ROBERT STEPHEN HAWKER. (1804-1875.)
[PAGE 319]
The celebrated vicar of Morwenstow (born at Plymouth) came of an old Cornish family, and spent the greater part of his life in the Duchy. In 1834 he became Vicar of Morwenstow, a remote parish on the Cornish sea-board. His best-known book is Cornish Ballads (1869); but the reader who may not be acquainted with his writings should consult the Poetical Works, and Other Literary Remains, with a Memoir (1879). Hawker has much of the sombre note which is supposed to be characteristic of Celtic Cornwall.
RICCARDO STEPHENS.
[PAGE 321]
Dr Stephens is a Cornishman settled in Edinburgh, where he practises as a physician. He has not, as yet, published any of his poems in book form; but, none the less, has won (if necessarily, as yet, a limited) reputation by his exceedingly vigorous and individual poems. He has written several “Castle Ballads” (of which the very striking “Hell’s Piper” given here is one)—poems suggested by legendary episodes connected with Edinburgh Castle, or perhaps only vaguely influenced by that romantically picturesque and grand vicinage—for Dr Stephens is one of the many workers, thinkers, and dreamers who congregate in the settlement founded by Professor Patrick Geddes on the site of Allan Ramsay’s residence—“New Edinburgh,” as University Hall is sometimes called, an apt name in more ways than one. Dr Stephens is a poet of marked originality, and his work has all the Celtic fire and fervour, with much of that sombre gloom which is held to be characteristically Cornish. “Hell’s Piper” has lines in it of Dantesque vigour, as those which depict, among “the shackled earthquakes,” the “reeking halls of Hell,” and the torture-wrought denizens of that Inferno. “The Phantom Piper” will never be forgotten by any one who has once read and been thrilled by this highly-imaginative poem.