MRS. MARRIOTT-WATSON MRS. MARRIOTT-WATSON disconcerts and discourages criticism by the absolute correctness of her writing. She is the "Andrea Senz'-Errore" of latter-day verse. Limitations she has, no doubt, but positive faults-not one. Her diction is pure, her rhymes perfect; her metres, without being mechanical, are absolutely correct; her imagery is always restrained, consistent, congruous. To some people, this faultlessness no doubt seems a blemish. Their idea of poetry is thought excruciated and language bedevilled. They love either to browse on intellectual chaff, chopped as dry and sapless as possible, or else to luxuriate in an iridescent lather of verbiage. Such readers may apply to Mrs. Marriott-Watson's work the much-misapplied phrase, "faultily faultless, splendidly null." I emphatically dissent. In reading her verse, I have the exhilarating sensation of skating over perfectly smooth, strong, and yet elastic ice, where one has not the least fear of catching one's skate in a crack, or sousing into an air-hole. Not that there is anything wintry or chill about her poetry. My metaphor refers simply to its surface texture, not to its temperature. Without metaphor or exaggeration of any sort, Mrs. Marriott-Watson has achieved an astonishing correctness of style and perfection of technique. "Achieved" is perhaps not the right word; this sense of form is a thing innate, constitutional; culture does not generate it, but merely sets it free to work its will. One feels that an imperfect rhyme, a halting verse, a violent or incongruous metaphor would be as impossible to this poetess as the shriek of a jay to a nightingale. Yet she may fairly be said to "achieve" her perfection of form at the cost of great renunciation. She attempts nothing very elaborate in metre, very ornate in imagery. She touches a little lyre, not a great organ. Its strings being few, she can all the more easily keep them in perfect tune. Her themes, indeed, may almost be told off on the five fingers. She praises the town, and paints it (sometimes) with an impressionist prodigality of colour; she praises the country, and paints it (generally) with classical firmness of touch and coolness of tone; she sings the fulness, the intensity of life, sighs for her full share of "the heady wine of living," and sets death at defiance; she clings to youth, shrinks from age, and owns the supremacy of death; and she lets her imagination stray among the eerie, and especially the supernatural, fantasies of romanticism. It would be too much to pretend that all her poems fall unmistakably under one or other of these rubrics; but those that remain unclassed are certainly few. The personal note in her poetry is exceedingly discreet. The heart-throb is always there, but it is not obtruded upon us. She hits the happy mean between absolute impersonality and tactless self-exposure. The even excellence of Mrs. Marriott-Watson's workmanship renders it difficult to quote from her. 'There is nothing that does not seem worthy of quotation, little that seems imperatively to call for it. The fragments which I shall cite to illustrate her different moods are not chosen as being specially admirable, but at most as being specially characteristic. Of her town poetry the opening verses of In the Rain may serve as a specimen : Rain in the glimmering street- Shapes fleeting on, going by. Figures, fantastical, grim— Red in the nimbus of flame Glance through the veil of the rain. Rain in the measureless street Vistas of orange and blue; Music of echoing feet, Pausing, and pacing anew. Rain, and the clamour of wheels, Splendour, and shadow, and sound; Lost in the twilight around. At this point the poem ceases to be pictorial, and becomes an example of that dwelling on the idea of death which runs like an almost monotonous burden through the poetess's work. The best-known of Mrs. Marriott-Watson's London poems is that which begins: The sun's on the pavement The current comes and goes, What joy that waits not? What that may not be? This is a fresh and tripping lyric; but of a far more serious |