ness of relation, his rollicking metres, his technical vocabulary, and his trick of repetition are admirably caught. It was the woman Sal o' the Dune, and the men were three to one, Bill the Skipper, and Ned the Nipper, and Sam that was Son of a Gun; Bill was a Skipper, and Ned was a Nipper, and Sam was the Son of a Gun, And the woman was Sal o' the Dune, as I said, and the men were three to one. There was never a light in the sky that night of the soft midsummer gales, But the great man-bloaters snorted low, and the young 'uns sang like whales; And out laughed Sal (like a dog- "Now who's for a bride on the shady side of up'ards of forty-three?" Its author has been called the modern Calverley, and no greater praise could the parodist wish for. "The Battle of the Bays" carries on the best traditions of an art which, for all its apparent worthlessness and triviality, is not to be despised. After all, a parody is generally nothing but a satire with the fierce-looking mask taken off, and it is none the less effective for its levity. After a prolonged diet of favorable reviews a corrective is sometimes necessary to the belauded poet, and to the parodist falls the task of gilding the philosophic pill-which, from the time of Horace to that of W. S. Gilbert, has always been considered a useful and a virtuous office. Herbert M. Sanders. THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINOR POET. A strange and terrible book might be compiled by choosing, let us say, two hundred of the loveliest of English lyrics, and appending to each a footnote tersely descriptive of its author's fate. The question, Why do Minor Poets exist? is sometimes raised by a newspaper, and settled humorously in its third leading article (the one devoted to culture, railway accidents, police court drolleries, and other social topics). But the absurdity of the Minor Poet, like that of Sir Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, is mainly a journalistic convention. He adds, by hypothesis, to the national stock of gaiety, although we shake our sides at him with as little genuine excuse as the one statesman who, exactly a year ago, was jeered at by Mr. Chamberlain for believing that the wrongs of the Uitlanders justified armed inter vention. And I say quite seriously that such an anthology as I suggest would set the question in a new light, and a sufficiently lurid one. We call our best collection of lyrics a "Golden Treasury," and forget in what dreadful matrices the jewels were shaped; we chase the satin slipper or the Grace's naked foot along the pathways without reckoning the concealed fires under the crust of turf; and to be sure we are wise in our carelessness, for the first claim of poetry is to be enjoyed, and if it be Art's business to conceal art, still more is it to conceal Art's Tophet. At the same time no critic can pursue his calling for long without facing the minor poet-or, for that matter, the major one- as a social problem. If we lacked the sense or the pluck to face that problem on our own motion, that painful and thoughtful book, "The Insanity of Genius"-a work which had the misfortune to be obscured by a showier German tract of less than half its honesty-thrust it fairly and squarely upon us. And the respectable pages of such a collection as Chalmers's "British Poets" are evidence all the more convincing, because squeamish and unwilling, that beneath the crust there does lie Tophet; that the question which Blake put to the Tiger-"Did He who made the lamb make thee?"-applies with an equal force of wonder to a great many of our fieriest as well as of our most innocent lyrics, and that Nature is, at least, as cruelly wasteful in producing a gem of song as in producing a diamond. On one student, at any rate, the Lives of the Poets have so worked that the receipt of a brand-new volume of verse gives him, if not a "stunner," a sensation which an accompanying letter from the author easily and invariably turns into one. The noble tragedies of Scott's life and Lamb's justify themselves. So, I think, do those of Hood's, Coleridge's, Shelley's, Byron's, Rossetti's-these, though less admirable, were the tragedies of big men. From the stories of Blake and Keats we may extract, in different ways, consolation. It is in the stories of lesser men that the real pathos resides. Keats, for example, perished young of consumption, but not before he had written "La Belle Dame Sans Merci;" the same malady carried off two young Scotsmen, Michael Bruce and David Gray, with their aspirations quite unfulfilled. Blake suffered, but he lit a new lyric dawn; but the premonitory flash of that dawn came out of the dark middle days of the eighteenth century-a single ray from the brain of a madman. It was in confinement, deprived of pen, ink and paper, that poor Kit Smart scratched with a Chidi Think of the footnotes to Peele's gay and delightful "Fair and fair" and his noble "His golden locks time hath to silver turned;" to Carew's "Ask me no more:" to Poe's "Helen;" the commentary of dishonor upon Waller's "Go, lovely rose," and Rochester's "Why dost thou shade thy lovely face"-a song of pure passion all but unrivalled in the language. Surrey, Southwell, Montrose went to the scaffold. ock, Tichborne and Raleigh wrote "My prime of life," and the exquisite "Even such is time" on the eve of execution; and the latter his "Go, soul, the body's guest" during captivity and while expecting the end. The singer of "Come live with me and be my love" died in a drunken scuffle; the author of the fine chorus "O wearisome condition of humanity" was stabbed by a serving man. We shall have to record starvationactual death by starvation. There is, of course, Otway's case to tack on to his pretty "I did but look and love a while." "He died," says Johnson, "in a manner which I am unwilling to mention," and then follows the story of how, al The case of Pattison is less known; he died in London in 1727, aged less than twenty-one, and if starvation did not immediately kill him it is certain that he starved. Mangan of the immortal "Rosaleen" and "The Nameless One, strayed from his hovel in Bride Street, Dublin, during the cholera epidemic of 1849. Sick with hunger and exhausted, he fell into a pit dug for a house foundation, was discovered there after a long while, was taken to the Meath Hospital and transferred to the cholera sheds. There the attendant physician found him not infected, but merely starving, too far gone for help. Next to Otway, in Chalmers's collection, comes Pomfret, author of the once famous "Choice." Pomfret had been presented to a living of value, but some malicious fool tried to persuade the Bishop of London that a passage in "The Choice" was immoral. Pomfret went up to London and easily disposed of the falsehood, but at the same time he took the small-pox and died of it, aged thirty-six. Well, an accident of this sort is not specially incident to Minor Poets; and the reader who comes on a whole nebula of disasters in the "Lives" may be tempted to account for it by the conditions of Grub Street, and to add that Grub Street has passed away. But the tragedies of such men as Boyce, Churchill, Lloyd, Bamfylde, are not to be laid at any door in Grub Street; the seeds of them lay in the men them selves. To be sure, of all callings Poesy was, and is, the worst paid. You may write a "Belle Dame Sans Merci" tomorrow, and consider yourself extremely fortunate if you make £5 by it. But poverty-though it has to be taken into account-is by no means all the mischief with the Minor Poet. The important mischief lies in the noble and hopeless business of nursing an ideal out of all proportion to your powers, in mistaking-to quote Johnson again -inclination for ability; in the struggle between the high dream and the despairing, stammering tongue; in the danger of valuing yourself by the aspiration and losing your temper with men who prefer to value you by the performance; in the temptation to despise them for blockheads, to find the world no place for you and bid it go to the devil-which means, as often as not, going to the devil yourself. The Speaker. In the list I have given at random a dozen disasters may be picked out as accidental, having no connection with the poetic calling, "the sort of thing that might happen to anybody." But as the list is extended-and it could be extended very far beyond the limits of this article the mere accumulation of disasters tells its own tale. The tragedies of Hartley Coleridge, James Thompson, Laman Blanchard, and Philip Bourke Marston are different; and the tragedies of Aphra Behn, "L. E. L.," Charlotte Smith, and Emily Brontë are different; but together they help to make up a terrible case. Eastcheap and the Bankside may pass, and Grub Street may pass; but the poetic temperament remains, self-torturing, sensitive, its sense of perfection unresting; its aspirations so seldom winged with power. A. T. Quiller-Couch. A PRAYER. From vain desires, base thoughts, and evil ways, And grateful lips o'erflowing with Thy praise, It may be mine to serve Thee all my days In psalms and hymns, and prayers that never cease, My spirit amplified with such increase As may my life to like fruition raise. Yea, lest my daily life should offer less Of love to Thee than doth my prayer or song, Let me in acts of merciful redress Take somewhat from the sum of human wrong: W. Cowan. I. The name of Feminism has been given in France to a strong intellectual and moral movement, the effects of which have been felt throughout Europe, in these last years of our agitated century. But we have really no adequate idea of the intensity of some of the manifestations of Feminism in climates less temperate than ours and in an atmosphere not yet rendered so tepid and equable by an all-pervading scepticism as that which we are accustomed to breathe. On the signal given by Ibsen's Nora, a complete feministic campaign at once took shape in the North, and was conducted vigorously and with the most inflexible logic. One of the avowed objects of the movement, and undoubtedly one of its deepest motives, was that "economic independence" of women, which an increasingly-keen competition for the means of livelihood had rendered an absolute necessity; but the Scandinavian woman was by no means content with the privilege of earning her bread independently of her husband's toil; she also desired emancipation from the chains imposed by the tyranny of marital affection. One remarkably clever woman, Mrs. Laura Marholm, the influence of whose *Translated for The Living Age. works' we purpose to consider at this time, had a near view of that simultaneous lifting of the bucklers. “Writing women"-these are her words-"came up like mushrooms under an autumnal rain; then sprouted a certain number of women doctors, and after them followed a cloud of teachers and telephone-workers. They all claimed the right to study, to practice law, to hold local and government office; above all -to vote. The single right about which they said nothing was the right to love. Woman became a neuter being, capable of thinking and producing; incapable, by the same token, of fulfilling her true mission. Every possible variety of sex-deterioration-every deformity which may result from the violent suppression of the natural instincts was paraded in broad daylight. Every opportunity was afforded for studying both temperaments ruined by a precocious development, and others stifled in the germ,-erotic mania and complete atrophy, the abuse of theory and the paralysis of instinct. The highways of the moral world were literally strewn with the corpses of these intrepid 1 Das Buch der Frauen: Munich 1894. |