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Reviews
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Mr. Harcourt’s reprint of John Evelyn’s Life of Mrs. Godolphin is a welcome addition to the list of charming library books. Mr. Harcourt’s grandfather, the Archbishop of York, himself John Evelyn’s great-great-grandson, inherited the manuscript from his distinguished ancestor, and in 1847 entrusted it for publication to Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of Oxford. As the book has been for a long time out of print, this new edition is sure to awake fresh interest in the life of the noble and virtuous lady whom John Evelyn so much admired. Margaret Godolphin was one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour at the Court of Charles II., and was distinguished for the delicate purity of her nature, as well as for her high intellectual attainments. Some of the extracts Evelyn gives from her Diary seem to show an austere, formal, almost ascetic spirit; but it was inevitable that a nature so refined as hers should have turned in horror from such ideals of life as were presented by men like Buckingham and Rochester, like Etheridge, Killigrew, and Sedley, like the King himself, to whom she could scarcely bring herself to speak. After her marriage she seems to have become happier and brighter, and her early death makes her a pathetic and interesting figure in the history of the time. Evelyn can see no fault in her, and his life of her is the most wonderful of all panegyrics.
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Amongst the Maids-of-Honour mentioned by John Evelyn is Frances Jennings, the elder sister of the great Duchess of Marlborough. Miss Jennings, who was one of the most beautiful women of her day, married first Sir George Hamilton, brother of the author of the Mémoires de Grammont, and afterwards Richard Talbot, who was made Duke of Tyrconnel by James II. William’s successful occupation of Ireland, where her husband was Lord Deputy, reduced her to poverty and obscurity, and she was probably the first Peeress who ever took to millinery as a livelihood. She had a dressmaker’s shop in the Strand, and, not wishing to be detected, sat in a white mask and a white dress, and was known by the name of the ‘White Widow.’
I was reminded of the Duchess when I read Miss Emily Faithfull’s admirable article in Gralignani on ‘Ladies as Shopkeepers.’ ‘The most daring innovation in England at this moment,’ says Miss Faithfull, ‘is the lady shopkeeper. At present but few people have had the courage to brave the current social prejudice. We draw such fine distinctions between the wholesale and retail traders that our cotton-spinners, calico-makers, and general merchants seem to think that they belong to a totally different sphere, from which they look down on the lady who has had sufficient brains, capital, and courage to open a shop. But the old world moves faster than it did in former days, and before the end of the nineteenth century it is probable that a gentlewoman will be recognised in spite of her having entered on commercial pursuits, especially as we are growing accustomed to see scions of our noblest families on our Stock Exchange and in tea-merchants’ houses; one Peer of the realm is now doing an extensive business in coals, and another is a cab proprietor.’ Miss Faithfull then proceeds to give a most interesting account of the London dairy opened by the Hon. Mrs. Maberley, of Madame Isabel’s millinery establishment, and of the wonderful work done by Miss Charlotte Robinson, who has recently been appointed Decorator to the Queen. About three years ago, Miss Faithfull tells us, Miss Robinson came to Manchester, and opened a shop in King Street, and, regardless of that bugbear which terrifies most women – the loss of social status – she put up her own name over the door, and without the least self-assertion quietly entered into competition with the sterner sex. The result has been eminently satisfactory. This year Miss Robinson has exhibited at Saltaire and at Manchester, and next year she proposes to exhibit at Glasgow, and, possibly, at Brussels. At first she had some difficulty in making people understand that her work is really commercial, not charitable; she feels that, until a healthy public opinion is created, women will pose as ‘destitute ladies,’ and never take a dignified position in any calling they adopt. Gentlemen who earn their own living are not spoken of as ‘destitute,’ and we must banish this idea in connection with ladies who are engaged in an equally honourable manner. Miss Faithfull concludes her most valuable article as follows: ‘The more highly educated our women of business are, the better for themselves, their work, and the whole community. Many of the professions to which ladies have hitherto turned are overcrowded, and when once the fear of losing social position is boldy disregarded, it will be found that commercial life offers a variety of more or less lucrative employments to ladies of birth and capital, who find it more congenial to their tastes and requirements to invest their money and spend their energies in a business which yields a fair return rather than sit at home content with a scanty pittance.’
I myself entirely agree with Miss Faithfull, though I feel that there is something to be said in favour of the view put forward by Lady Shrewsbury in the Woman’s World, 4 and a great deal to be said in favour of Mrs. Joyce’s scheme for emigration. Mr. Walter Besant, if we are to judge from his last novel, is of Lady Shrewsbury’s way of thinking.
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I hope that some of my readers will be interested in Miss Beatrice Crane’s little poem, Blush-Roses, for which her father, Mr. Walter Crane, has done so lovely and graceful a design. Mrs. Simon, of Birkdale Park, Southport, tells me that she offered a prize last term at her school for the best sonnet on any work of art. The poems were sent to Professor Dowden, who awarded the prize to the youthful authoress of the following sonnet on Mr. Watts’s picture of Hope:
She sits with drooping form and fair bent head,
Low-bent to hear the faintly-sounding strain
That thrills her with the sweet uncertain pain
Of timid trust and restful tears unshed.
Around she feels vast spaces. Awe and dread
Encompass her.
And the dark doubt she fain
Would banish, sees the shuddering fear remain,
And ever presses near with stealthy tread.
But not for ever will the misty space
Close down upon her meekly-patient eyes.
The steady light within them soon will ope
Their heavy lids, and then the sweet fair face,
Uplifted in a sudden glad surprise,
Will find the bright reward which comes to Hope.
I myself am rather inclined to prefer this sonnet on Mr. Watts’s Psyche. The sixth line is deficient; but, in spite of the faulty technique, there is a great deal that is suggestive in it:
Unfathomable boundless mystery,
Last work of the Creator, deathless, vast,
Soul – essence moulded of a changeful past;
Thou art the offspring of Eternity;
Breath of his breath, by his vitality
Engendered, in his image cast,
Part of the Nature-song whereof the last
Chord soundeth never in the harmony.
‘Psyche’! Thy form is shadowed o’er with pain
Born of intensest longing, and the rain
Of a world’s weeping lieth like a sea
Of silent soundless sorrow in thine eyes.
Yet grief is not eternal, for clouds rise
From out the ocean everlastingly.
I have to thank Mr. William Rossetti for kindly allowing me to reproduce Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s drawing of the authoress of Goblin Market; and thanks are also due to Mr. Lafayette, of Dublin, for the use of his photograph of H.R.H. the Princess of Wales in her Academic Robes as Doctor of Music, which served as our frontispiece last month, and to Messrs. Hills and Saunders, of Oxford, and Mr. Lord and Mr. Blanchard, of Cambridge, for a similar courtesy in the case of the article on Greek Plays at the Universities.
(1) Canute the Great. By Michael Field. (Bell and Sons.)
(2) Life of Elizabeth Gilbert. By Frances Martin. (Macmillan and Co.)
(3) Ourselves and Our Neighbours. By Louise Chandler Moulton. (Ward and Downey.)
(4) Warring Angels. (Fisher Unwin.)
(5) A Song of Jubilee and Other Poems. By Mrs. De Courcy Laffan. (Kegan Paul.)
(6) Life of Madame de Staël. By Bella Duffy. ‘Eminent Women’ Series.
(7) Life of Mrs. Godolphin. By John Evelyn, Esq., of Wooton. Edited by William Harcourt of Nuneham. (Sampson Low, Marston and Co.)
THE POETS’ CORNER – V
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1888.)
Mr. Heywood’s Salome seems to have thrilled the critics of the United States. From a collection of press notices prefixed to the volume we learn that Putnam’s Magazine has found in it ‘the simplicity and grace of naked Grecian statues,’ and that Dr. Jos. G. Cogswell, LL.D., has declared that it will live to be appreciated ‘as long as the English language endures.’ Remembering that prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error, we will not attempt to argue with Dr. Jos. G. Cogswell, LL.D., but will content ourselves with protesting against such a detestable expression as ‘naked Grecian statues.’ If this be the literary style of the future the English language will not endure very long. As for the poem itself, the best that one can say of it is that it is a triumph of conscientious industry. From an artistic point of view it is a very commonplace production indeed, and we must protest against such blank verse as the following:
From the hour I saw her first, I was entranced,
Or embosomed in a charmed world, circumscribed
By its proper circumambient atmosphere,
Herself its centre, and wide pervading spirit.
The air all beauty of colour held dissolved,
And tints distilled as dew are shed by heaven.
Mr. Griffiths’ Sonnets and Other Poems are very simple, which is a good thing, and very sentimental, which is a thing not quite so good. As a general rule, his verse is full of pretty echoes of other writers, but in one sonnet he makes a distinct attempt to be original and the result is extremely depressing.
Earth wears her grandest robe, by autumn spun,
Like some stout matron who of youth has run
The course,.
is the most dreadful simile we have ever come across even in poetry. Mr. Griffiths should beware of originality. Like beauty, it is a fatal gift.
Imitators of Mr. Browning are, unfortunately, common enough, but imitators of Mr. and Mrs. Browning combined are so very rare that we have read Mr. Francis Prevost’s Fires of Green Wood with great interest. Here is a curious reproduction of the manner of Aurora Leigh:
But Spring! that part at least our unchaste eyes
Infer from some wind-blown philactery,
(It wears its breast bare also) – chestnut buds,
Pack’d in white wool as though sent here from heaven,
Stretching wild stems to reach each climbing lark
That shouts against the fading stars.
And here is a copy of Mr. Browning’s mannerisms. We do not like it quite so well:
If another
Save all bother,
Hold that perhaps loaves grow like parsnips:
Call the baker
Heaven’s care-taker,
Live, die; Death may show him where the farce nips.
Not I; truly
He may duly
Into church or church-day shunt God;
Chink his pocket,
Win your locket; —
Down we go together to confront God.
Yet, in spite of these ingenious caricatures there are some good poems, or perhaps we should say some good passages, in Mr. Prevost’s volume. The Whitening of the Thorn-tree, for instance, opens admirably, and is, in some respects, a rather remarkable story. We have no doubt that some day Mr. Prevost will be able to study the great masters without stealing from them.
Mr. John Cameron Grant has christened himself ‘England’s Empire Poet,’ and, lest we should have any doubts upon the subject, tells us that he ‘dare not lie,’ a statement which in a poet seems to show a great want of courage. Protection and Paper-Unionism are the gods of Mr. Grant’s idolatry, and his verse is full of such fine fallacies and masterly misrepresentations that he should be made Laureate to the Primrose League at once. Such a stanza as —
Ask the ruined Sugar-worker if he loves the foreign beet —
Rather, one can hear him answer, would I see my children eat —
would thrill any Tory tea-party in the provinces, and it would be difficult for the advocates of Coercion to find a more appropriate or a more characteristic peroration for a stump speech than
We have not to do with justice, right depends on point of view,
The one question for our thought is, what’s our neighbour going to do.
The hymn to the Union Jack, also, would make a capital leaflet for distribution in boroughs where the science of heraldry is absolutely unknown, and the sonnet on Mr. Gladstone is sure to be popular with all who admire violence and vulgarity in literature. It is quite worthy of Thersites at his best.
Mr. Evans’s Cæsar Borgia is a very tedious tragedy. Some of the passages are in the true ‘Ercles’ vein,’ like the following:
CÆSAR (starting up).
Help, Michelotto, help! Begone! Begone!
Fiends! torments! devils! Gandia! What, Gandia?
O turn those staring eyes away. See! See
He bleeds to death! O fly! Who are those fiends
That tug me by the throat? O! O! O! O! (Pauses.)
But, as a rule, the style is of a more commonplace character. The other poems in the volume are comparatively harmless, though it is sad to find Shakespeare’s ‘Bacchus with pink eyne’ reappearing as ‘pinky-eyed Silenus.’
The Cross and the Grail is a collection of poems on the subject of temperance. Compared to real poetry these verses are as ‘water unto wine,’ but no doubt this was the effect intended. The illustrations are quite dreadful, especially one of an angel appearing to a young man from Chicago who seems to be drinking brown sherry.
Juvenal in Piccadilly and The Excellent Mystery are two fierce social satires and, like most satires, they are the product of the corruption they pillory. The first is written on a very convenient principle. Blank spaces are left for the names of the victims and these the reader can fill up as he wishes.
Must – bluster, – give the lie,
– wear the night out, – sneer!
is an example of this anonymous method. It does not seem to us very effective. The Excellent Mystery is much better. It is full of clever epigrammatic lines, and its wit fully atones for its bitterness. It is hardly a poem to quote but it is certainly a poem to read.
The Chronicle of Mites is a mock-heroic poem about the inhabitants of a decaying cheese who speculate about the origin of their species and hold learned discussions upon the meaning of evolution and the Gospel according to Darwin. This cheese-epic is a rather unsavoury production and the style is at times so monstrous and so realistic that the author should be called the Gorgon-Zola of literature.
(1) Salome. By J. C. Heywood. (Kegan Paul.)
(2) Sonnets and Other Poems. By William Griffiths. (Digby and Long.)
(3) Fires of Green Wood. By Francis Prevost. (Kegan Paul.)
(4) Vanclin and Other Verses. By John Cameron Grant. (E. W. Allen.)
(5) Cæsar Borgia. By W. Evans, M.A. (William Maxwell and Son.)
(6) The Cross and the Grail. (Women’s Temperance Association, Chicago.)
(7) Juvenal in Piccadilly. By Oxoniensis. (Vizetelly and Co.)
(8) The Excellent Mystery: A Matrimonial Satire. By Lord Pimlico. (Vizetelly and Co.)
(9) The Chronicle of Mites. By James Aitchison. (Kegan Paul.)
VENUS OR VICTORY
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 24, 1888.)
There are certain problems in archæology that seem to possess a real romantic interest, and foremost among these is the question of the so-called Venus of Melos. Who is she, this marble mutilated goddess whom Gautier loved, to whom Heine bent his knee? What sculptor wrought her, and for what shrine? Whose hands walled her up in that rude niche where the Melian peasant found her? What symbol of her divinity did she carry? Was it apple of gold or shield of bronze? Where is her city and what was her name among gods and men? The last writer on this fascinating subject is Mr. Stillman, who in a most interesting book recently published in America, claims that the work of art in question is no sea-born and foam-born Aphrodite, but the very Victory Without Wings that once stood in the little chapel outside the gates of the Acropolis at Athens. So long ago as 1826, that is to say six years after the discovery of the statue, the Venus hypothesis was violently attacked by Millingen, and from that time to this the battle of the archæologists has never ceased. Mr. Stillman, who fights, of course, under Millingen’s banner, points out that the statue is not of the Venus type at all, being far too heroic in character to correspond to the Greek conception of Aphrodite at any period of their artistic development, but that it agrees distinctly with certain well-known statues of Victory, such as the celebrated ‘Victory of Brescia.’ The latter is in bronze, is later, and has the wings, but the type is unmistakable, and though not a reproduction it is certainly a recollection of the Melian statue. The representation of Victory on the coin of Agathocles is also obviously of the Melian type, and in the museum of Naples is a terra-cotta Victory in almost the identical action and drapery. As for Dumont d’Urville’s statement that, when the statue was discovered, one hand held an apple and the other a fold of the drapery, the latter is obviously a mistake, and the whole evidence on the subject is so contradictory that no reliance can be placed on the statement made by the French Consul and the French naval officers, none of whom seems to have taken the trouble to ascertain whether the arm and hand now in the Louvre were really found in the same niche as the statue at all. At any rate, these fragments seem to be of extremely inferior workmanship, and they are so imperfect that they are quite worthless as data for measure or opinion. So far, Mr. Stillman is on old ground. His real artistic discovery is this. In working about the Acropolis of Athens, some years ago, he photographed among other sculptures the mutilated Victories in the Temple of Nikè Apteros, the ‘Wingless Victory,’ the little Ionic temple in which stood that statue of Victory of which it was said that ‘the Athenians made her without wings that she might never leave Athens.’ Looking over the photographs afterwards, when the impression of the comparatively diminutive size had passed, he was struck with the close resemblance of the type to that of the Melian statue. Now, this resemblance is so striking that it cannot be questioned by any one who has an eye for form. There are the same large heroic proportions, the same ampleness of physical development, and the same treatment of drapery, and there is also that perfect spiritual kinship which, to any true antiquarian, is one of the most valuable modes of evidence. Now it is generally admitted on both sides that the Melian statue is probably Attic in its origin, and belongs certainly to the period between Phidias and Praxiteles, that is to say, to the age of Scopas, if it be not actually the work of Scopas himself; and as it is to Scopas that these bas-reliefs have been always attributed, the similarity of style can, on Mr. Stillman’s hypothesis, be easily accounted for.
As regards the appearance of the statue in Melos, Mr. Stillman points out that Melos belonged to Athens as late as she had any Greek allegiance, and that it is probable that the statue was sent there for concealment on the occasion of some siege or invasion. When this took place, Mr. Stillman does not pretend to decide with any degree of certainty, but it is evident that it must have been subsequent to the establishment of the Roman hegemony, as the brickwork of the niche in which the statue was found is clearly Roman in character, and before the time of Pausanias and Pliny, as neither of these antiquaries mentions the statue. Accepting, then, the statue as that of the Victory Without Wings, Mr. Stillman agrees with Millingen in supposing that in her left hand she held a bronze shield, the lower rim of which rested on the left knee where some marks of the kind are easily recognisable, while with her right hand she traced, or had just finished tracing, the names of the great heroes of Athens. Valentin’s objection, that if this were so the left thigh would incline outwards so as to secure a balance, Mr. Stillman meets partly by the analogy of the Victory of Brescia and partly by the evidence of Nature herself; for he has had a model photographed in the same position as the statue and holding a shield in the manner he proposes in his restoration. The result is precisely the contrary to that which Valentin assumes. Of course, Mr. Stillman’s solution of the whole matter must not be regarded as an absolutely scientific demonstration. It is simply an induction in which a kind of artistic instinct, not communicable or equally valuable to all people, has had the greatest part, but to this mode of interpretation archæologists as a class have been far too indifferent; and it is certain that in the present case it has given us a theory which is most fruitful and suggestive.
The little temple of Nikè Apteros has had, as Mr. Stillman reminds us, a destiny unique of its kind. Like the Parthenon, it was standing little more than two hundred years ago, but during the Turkish occupation it was razed, and its stones all built into the great bastion which covered the front of the Acropolis and blocked up the staircase to the Propylæa. It was dug out and restored, nearly every stone in its place, by two German architects during the reign of Otho, and it stands again just as Pausanias described it on the spot where old Ægeus watched for the return of Theseus from Crete. In the distance are Salamis and Ægina, and beyond the purple hills lies Marathon. If the Melian statue be indeed the Victory Without Wings, she had no unworthy shrine.
There are some other interesting essays in Mr. Stillman’s book on the wonderful topographical knowledge of Ithaca displayed in the Odyssey, and discussions of this kind are always interesting as long as there is no attempt to represent Homer as the ordinary literary man; but the article on the Melian statue is by far the most important and the most delightful. Some people will, no doubt, regret the possibility of the disappearance of the old name, and as Venus not as Victory will still worship the stately goddess, but there are others who will be glad to see in her the image and ideal of that spiritual enthusiasm to which Athens owed her liberty, and by which alone can liberty be won.
On the Track of Ulysses; together with an Excursion in Quest of the So-called Venus of Melos. By W. J. Stillman. (Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston.)
