_ (Pall Mall Gazette, March 30, 1889.)
Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments, and it was probably in one of his happiest and, certainly, in one of his most careless moods that Mr. Justice Denman conceived the idea of putting the early history of Rome into doggerel verse for the benefit of a little boy of the name of Jack. Poor Jack! He is still, we learn from the preface, under six years of age, and it is sad to think of the future career of a boy who is being brought up on bad history and worse poetry. Here is a passage from the learned judge's account of Romulus:
Poor Tatius by some unknown hand
Was soon assassinated,
Some said by Romulus' command;
I know not--but 'twas fated.
Sole King again, this Romulus
Play'd some fantastic tricks,
Lictors he had, who hatchets bore
Bound up with rods of sticks.
He treated all who thwarted him
No better than a dog,
Sometimes 'twas 'Heads off, Lictors, there!'
Sometimes 'Ho! Lictors, flog!'
Then he created Senators,
And gave them rings of gold;
Old soldiers all; their name deriv'd
From 'Senex' which means 'old.'
Knights, too, he made, good horsemen all,
Who always were at hand
To execute immediately
Whate'er he might command.
But these were of Patrician rank,
Plebeians all the rest;
Remember this distinction, Jack!
For 'tis a useful test.
The reign of Tullius Hostilius opens with a very wicked rhyme:
As Numa, dying, only left
A daughter, named Pompilia,
The Senate had to choose a King.
They choose one sadly _sillier_.
If Jack goes to the bad, Mr. Justice Denman will have much to answer for.
After such a terrible example from the Bench, it is pleasant to turn to the seats reserved for Queen's Counsel. Mr. Cooper Willis's Tales and Legends, if somewhat boisterous in manner, is still very spirited and clever. The Prison of the Danes is not at all a bad poem, and there is a great deal of eloquent, strong writing in the passage beginning:
The dying star-song of the night sinks in the dawning day,
And the dark-blue sheen is changed to green, and the green fades into grey,
And the sleepers are roused from their slumbers, and at last the
Danesmen know
How few of all their numbers are left them by the foe.
Not much can be said of a poet who exclaims:
Oh, for the power of Byron or of Moore,
To glow with one, and with the latter soar.
And yet Mr. Moodie is one of the best of those South African poets whose works have been collected and arranged by Mr. Wilmot. Pringle, the 'father of South African verse,' comes first, of course, and his best poem is, undoubtedly, Afar in the Desert:
Afar in the desert I love to ride,
With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side:
Away, away, from the dwelling of men
By the wild-deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen:
By valleys remote where the oribi plays,
Where the gnu, the gazelle and the hartebeest graze,
And the kudu and eland unhunted recline
By the skirts of grey forests o'erhung with wild vine,
Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will
In the fen where the wild ass is drinking his fill.
It is not, however, a very remarkable production.
The Smouse, by Fannin, has the modern merit of incomprehensibility. It reads like something out of The Hunting of the Snark:
I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse in the wilderness wide,
The veld is my home, and the wagon's my pride:
The crack of my 'voerslag' shall sound o'er the lea,
I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!
I heed not the Governor, I fear not his law,
I care not for civilisation one straw,
And ne'er to 'Ompanda'--'Umgazis' I'll throw
While my arm carries fist, or my foot bears a toe!
'Trek,' 'trek,' ply the whip--touch the fore oxen's skin,
I'll warrant we'll 'go it' through thick and through thin--
Loop! loop ye oud skellums! ot Vikmaan trek jy;
I'm a Smouse, I'm a Smouse, and the trader is free!
The South African poets, as a class, are rather behind the age. They seem to think that 'Aurora' is a very novel and delightful epithet for the dawn. On the whole they depress us.
Chess, by Mr. Louis Tylor, is a sort of Christmas masque in which the dramatis personae consist of some unmusical carollers, a priggish young man called Eric, and the chessmen off the board. The White Queen's Knight begins a ballad and the Black King's Bishop completes it. The Pawns sing in chorus and the Castles converse with each other. The silliness of the form makes it an absolutely unreadable book.
Mr. Williamson's Poems of Nature and Life are as orthodox in spirit as they are commonplace in form. A few harmless heresies of art and thought would do this poet no harm. Nearly everything that he says has been said before and said better. The only original thing in the volume is the description of Mr. Robert Buchanan's 'grandeur of mind.' This is decidedly new.
Dr. Cockle tells us that Mullner's Guilt and The Ancestress of Grillparzer are the masterpieces of German fate-tragedy. His translation of the first of these two masterpieces does not make us long for any further acquaintance with the school. Here is a specimen from the fourth act of the fate-tragedy.
SCENE VIII.
ELVIRA. HUGO.
ELVIRA (after long silence, leaving the harp, steps to Hugo, and seeks his gaze).
HUGO (softly). Though I made sacrifice of thy sweet life. The Father has forgiven. Can the wife--Forgive?
ELVIRA (on his breast). She can!
HUGO (with all the warmth of love). Dear wife!
ELVIRA (after a pause, in deep sorrow). Must it be so, beloved one?
HUGO (sorry to have betrayed himself). What?
In his preface to The Circle of Seasons, a series of hymns and verses for the seasons of the Church, the Rev. T. B. Dover expresses a hope that this well-meaning if somewhat tedious book 'may be of value to those many earnest people to whom the subjective aspect of truth is helpful.' The poem beginning
Lord, in the inn of my poor worthless heart
Guests come and go; but there is room for Thee,
has some merit and might be converted into a good sonnet. The majority of the poems, however, are quite worthless. There seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.
Lord Henry Somerset's verse is not so good as his music. Most of the Songs of Adieu are marred by their excessive sentimentality of feeling and by the commonplace character of their weak and lax form. There is nothing that is new and little that is true in verse of this kind:
The golden leaves are falling,
Falling one by one,
Their tender 'Adieux' calling
To the cold autumnal sun.
The trees in the keen and frosty air
Stand out against the sky,
'Twould seem they stretch their branches bare
To Heaven in agony.
It can be produced in any quantity. Lord Henry Somerset has too much heart and too little art to make a good poet, and such art as he does possess is devoid of almost every intellectual quality and entirely lacking in any intellectual strength. He has nothing to say and says it.
Mrs. Cora M. Davis is eloquent about the splendours of what the authoress of The Circle of Seasons calls 'this earthly ball.'
Let's sing the beauties of this grand old earth,
she cries, and proceeds to tell how
Imagination paints old Egypt's former glory,
Of mighty temples reaching heavenward,
Of grim, colossal statues, whose barbaric story
The caustic pens of erudition still record,
Whose ancient cities of glittering minarets
Reflect the gold of Afric's gorgeous sunsets.
'The caustic pens of erudition' is quite delightful and will be appreciated by all Egyptologists. There is also a charming passage in the same poem on the pictures of the Old Masters:
the mellow richness of whose tints impart,
By contrast, greater delicacy still to modern art.
This seems to us the highest form of optimism we have ever come across in art criticism. It is American in origin, Mrs. Davis, as her biographer tells us, having been born in Alabama, Genesee co., N.Y.
(1) The Story of the Kings of Rome in Verse. By the Hon. G. Denman, Judge of the High Court of Justice. (Trubner and Co.)
(2) Tales and Legends in Verse. By E. Cooper Willis, Q.C. (Kegan Paul.)
(3) The Poetry of South Africa. Collected and arranged by A. Wilmot. (Sampson Low and Co.)
(4) Chess. A Christmas Masque. By Louis Tylor. (Fisher Unwin.)
(5) Poems of Nature and Life. By David R. Williamson. (Blackwood.)
(6) Guilt. Translated from the German by J. Cockle, M.D. (Williams and Norgate.)
(7) The Circle of Seasons. By K. E. V. (Elliot Stock.)
(8) Songs of Adieu. By Lord Henry Somerset. (Chatto and Windus.)
(9) Immortelles. By Cora M. Davis. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.) _