The first if not the strongest attraction this book will have for American curiosity is not in its contents, but in their selection. The poems presented are culled from a much greater number, especially and expressly for the American market, and the choice interests us vividly as indicating an English author's deliberate business opinion of that market. This edition has not been prepared without thought: Mr. De Vere does not often do anything without thought. Moreover, it has been, if we are not misinformed, somewhat unusually long in press, and several of the poems already published have been actually revised and improved on by their painstaking author to the very last copy, and differ in quite a number of minutiae from their former selves. Hence Americans must be all the more surprised at the singular estimate of taste and the singular conception of their character, which appear to underlie this book. We cannot help thinking—nay, we cannot help seeing—that Mr. De Vere has not selected so well as he would have done if he had ever lived in America, or, if he had had intelligent, practical, and experienced American advice. There was only one way to do this thing rightly. It was to consider either what we, the Americans, ought to like the best, or what we would like the best; to weigh the facts well, to settle on some definite plan or theory of selection, and carry this out with some little sternness to the end, only leaving the path for the very choicest flowers. We cannot trace any strictness of system in this book: it has neither spinal column nor spinal cord, but is made up of miscellaneous samples—disjecta membra poetae. Sometimes we imagine it to be a compromise of plans, and sometimes a random jumble. Too many of the best poems we miss, and some of the author's most taking lines of thought stated nearly, and some totally unrepresented. On the other hand, some mediocre pieces abound as to which we seek but cannot find an extrinsic cause for their reproduction. Our own suggestion to Mr. De Vere would have been to make general interest his prime criterion in choosing. We are a very heterogeneous nation, and it is not every topic that can unite our various tastes. For any wide or national success here, a book must have at least a kernel of thought or sentiment which shall appeal directly to almost the only thing we have in common here—our humanity. Next to such poems—and Mr. De Vere has written not a few—we should have taken the best expressed; the boldest or most beautiful. This indeed is but a branch corollary of the other principle, because we all love fine expressions of ideas. On these two principles we think we could have made up from the copies of Mr. De Vere's poetry one of the most attractive books of the year. We think he has missed this in several ways. To begin with, we cannot see anywhere that he ever once grasped the idea of addressing himself to the whole American people. There is pabulum enough for Boston, and for devout Catholics everywhere; but where is the intelligence of Georgia, or California, or Ohio in his estimates for the popularity of this volume? Some of the poems err in the direction of abstruseness, many in being founded on obscure facts; a few embody the gross fault of being occasional pieces—the flattest and most surely flat of all possible forms of dulness. That Mr. De Vere could forget himself to this last degree is to us proof positive that he never thought of pleasing the whole American reading community.
We have heard this praised as sagacity, since this work's appearance, on the ground that, as an outspoken Catholic and Irishman, he could never have succeeded. To this the American observer says, "Distinguo." Mr. De Vere is too elevated and refined a thinker to be a poet of the people anywhere; but it is, if anything, his religion, not his Celtic outbursts, that stand in his way here. We are—heaven knows with good reason—tolerably well past literary prejudices against foreigners. A foreign author, having no friends nor enemies, no clique nor counter-clique among the critics here, will have a fair trial by American public opinion always, on the one condition that he do not stand upon his being a foreigner and insist on cramming pet theories down our throats.
But we do question whether there may not be a measure of truth in the suggestion that Mr. De Vere, here as everywhere, is too conspicuously Catholic for popularity. We see little of sectarian prejudice among our best non-Catholic men; perhaps because so many of them are freethinkers or indifferentists in religion. But Protestant prejudice controls some otherwise first-class criticism, much more of lower grade, and very many ordinary readers and buyers of books. Perhaps Mr. De Vere is too pronounced for these—too full and too proud of his faith. Many a bigoted Protestant who can just barely make up his mind to hear a man out in spite of his being a "Romish idolater," etc., etc., lays down a book the instant he suspects—what Protestantism is always peculiarly quick to suspect—propagandism. Such men might know that if proselyte-making were Mr. De Vere's aim, his obviously shrewder plan would have been, first to gain influence and popularity by neutral poems, and then, entrenched on the vantage-ground of public favor, to bombard the community with his explosive Catholic notions to some purpose. But this would be far too much thinking for a bigoted man to go to the trouble of, especially when it is so much cheaper, as well as more sweet to the deacons and elders, to be unjust and slurring. So we fear that many Protestant organs of opinion will reject the poetry for the religion, and so do Mr. De Vere's book harm as an American venture so far as the non-Catholics are concerned.
On the other hand we do believe that his Irish pieces would be his best hold on public favor; for he certainly is one of the best-informed men in Irish history of all the late writers; and if there is one thing an American admires more than another—in literature or anything else—it is a man that knows what he is talking about.
But this is all of the dead past now; the book is upon us. We go on to this question—since Mr. De Vere did not aim to please us all, what was his aim? He has not told us in the natural place—the preface—and we can only ask the reader to decide for himself whether it is, as we said, compromise or jumble. The selection of the Irish pieces is infinitely the worst of all. The best, because the most truly Irish, of these, are in Inisfail. There are very many Irishmen indeed who would not appreciate the sonnet to Sarsfield and Clare, and who could make neither head nor tail of "The Building of the Cottage;" but take up Inisfail and read out "The Malison," or "The Bier that Conquered," or the "Dirge of Rory O'More," to any Irish audience, and see if they understand it or not!
There lay one main element of strength of a book like this; and yet we do not recall a single piece from "Inisfail" in the entire collection! It is inconceivable to us except upon the very well-known and extremely ill-understood principle that an author always differs with his readers, and generally with posterity, as to what is his best. In our own humble opinion, for instance, "The Bard Ethell" or "The Phantom Funeral," as historical pictures, or the "Parvuli Ejus" or "Semper Eadem" as pure poetry, is singly worth the whole fifty pages of Irish Odes, sonnets, and interludes that begin this new volume: and we doubt as little that Mr. De Vere would smile in benign derision at our notion. So we will not dispute about tastes, and simply say that we do not understand the classification of the main body of the Irish pieces. Especially is this hard to discover the reason for omitting Inisfail in the light of the following passage from the preface: "I cannot but wish that my poetry, much of which illustrates their history and religion, should reach those Irish 'of the dispersion,' in that land which has extended to them its hospitality. Whoever loves that people must follow it in its wanderings with an earnest desire that it may retain with vigilant fidelity, and be valued for retaining, those among its characteristics which most belong to the Ireland of history and religion."
The remainder of the selected poems are purely miscellaneous, and are chiefly remarkable to us as again showing how curiously authors estimate themselves. We do indeed meet with much of the best there is; but we miss, as we have said, very much more. And having, as we have, a personal intimacy with many of Mr. De Vere's poems, we feel really resentful to see our favorites slighted and supplanted by others which—as it seems to us, be it remembered—no one could ever like half so well.
After all, Mr. De Vere may be right and we wrong; but we feel so interested in his success, and so earnestly desirous of recognition for his high abilities, that—we do wish he had done it our way!
The first sixty pages of the present volume are composed mainly of a sort of rosary of ten odes, all strung on Ireland and the Irish. Now, odes we disbelieve in generally. We think they contain more commonplace which we imagine we admire, and which we don't and can't admire, than any other variety of composition in English literature. They are the supremely fit form of a few peculiar orders of thought. The cause of Ireland is not one of these, and Mr. De Vere has tried hard and failed, to prove the contrary. Irish griefs are too human, Irish sympathies too heartfelt, to be reached by this road in the clouds. One good ballad or slogan is worth practically a million odes. As Ode I. in this very series beautifully puts it,
"Like severed locks that keep their light,
When all the stately frame is dust,
A nation's songs preserve from blight
A nation's name, their sacred trust.
Temple and pyramid eterne
May memorize her deeds of power;
But only from her songs we learn
How throbbed her life-blood hour by hour."