BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1132, 20 May 1911, Page 9

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

i_ fl • Verses old and new. dreams:; '' My son is in America, Away beyont tlio sea, But in his dreams lie .comes back liome, And looks out towards He sees the ribbon of whito'road Go winding towards Glenchree, And.he knocks witli his stick on the open door To call herself and mo. All day he's working in the town, And moidered'with the street,' But in his dreams ho feels the grass— The grass beneath his feet; He wanders'up the,green hill-side, The elder bloom smells sweet, Then he praises God for the Irish air And reek of burning peat. The wonders of the West he pees, For men of' wealth live there In houses reaching to the stars, With everything that's fair. "But och!" says he, "the hill for me, The sight of grouso or hare, The ciy of the curlews over tho bog, The breath of Irish air." —W. M. Letts, in tho "Nation." . ./ FORWARD. "A thousand creeds and battle-cries, A thousand warring social-schemes, A thousand new moralities, . And twenty thousand thousand teams; "Each on his own anarchic way From the old order breaking free,— Our ruined desires," you say, "Liccnee, once more, not Liberty.' But ah, beneath the.wind-whipt foam When storhr and change are on the deep, How quietly ;the tides come home, And how the depths of sea-shine sleep! And we that march towards a goal, Destroying, only to fulfil . Tho law, the law of that great sonl Which moves beneath your alien will, We that like foemen meet the past Because wo britig the future, know Wo only fight to achieve at last A great re-union with our foe; . Be-union in the truths that stand • AVhen all our wars are rolled aw'ay, Re-union of the heart and hand, And'of the prayers wherewith we pray; Re-union in the common needs, The common strivings of mankind; Re-union of our warring creeds _. In tho one God that dwells behind. Then—in that day—we shall not meet Wron? With new wrong, but right with ■ right: Our faith shall make your faith complete AYhen ; our battalions re-unite. ' Forward!—what use in idle words?— . Forward, 0 warriors of the, soul! There will be breaking,lip of swords When that now morning makes us whole. '.'■'.'} —Alfred Noyss, in tho "Westminster ■ ~ ' Gazette." . ', \ ~ ~~~".' SLUM CRY. ' Of a night without stars, the wind with- ';' drawn, ' ' ■ God's face hidden, indignity near me, Drink and the paraffin hares to sear me, Dust-coloured hunger—so was Inborn! Of a city noon-day—as sand through sieve Sifting down, as dusk padding the glamour— I of the,desolate white-lipped clamour,, Millioiung fester. So dd. L.liye! ;Of a Poor-house morning, not asking -why Breath-choKed;' dry-eyed, tho death of mo staring, ''■•,; Faces .'Of strangers, and no'bne caring— Thou/who hast made me—so shall I die! ■: —John Galsworthy. PAX-PIPES. Pan—did yon say be was dead, that he'd gone, and for goodGone "with the Dryads and all, of the shy forest faces? .'. .Who ivas.it, then, plucked your, sleeve as you came through tho wcod, What of the whisper that waits in, the oddest of places? Pan of the garden, tho fold, Paii| of the bird and the beast, Kindly, he lives as of old, He isn't dead in 'the least! Ses, you may find him to-day (how tho reeds twitter on, Tuneful, as once when he followed young Bacchus's leopards); ■ Stiffcr he may be, perhaps, since our moonlight has shone Centuries long .on his goat-horns—old Pan of'the shepherds! Brown are his tatters, his tan Roughened from tillage and toil, Pagan and homely, :but PanPan of the sap and the soil 1 Find him, in fact, in tho Park when the » first crocus cowers; Cockney is he when it suits him, I know . that ho.knocks his Crook at my window at times o'er, sixpenn'orth of flowers, / Gives me his blessing naew- with my fresh window-boxes! Piping the leaf on tho larch. Piping the nymphs (in the Row), Pining a magic of March, Just as he did long ago! —"Punch." GOSSE ON BROWNING, Two of tho latest additions to Dent's indispensable, "Everyman" series arc "Tho Ring- ami tho Book" and "The Old Yellow Book" (tho sourco of Browning's big work). Upon them Mr. Gossc writes for tho "jUorning Post" the sort of review we all are giat! to meet with:

When wo havo withdrawn far enough to secure our perspective it is possible that the poetry of tho present generation, and of that which immediately preceded it, may seem to us marked by nothing so much as by tho complete preponderance in it of tho pertonal lyrical note. Our recent poots havo persistently looked into their own hearts and sung of what they found there. In loss measure, with an effect not quite so exclusively subjective, tho same has been truo of the English poetry of the last ninety years- It ''as not lent itself to the celebration of large public topics, as seen from outside, but to the expression of such otherwise inarticulate melodies as those which had no voice to Asia until she read them in the measureless eyes of her sister Panthea. Thus, to an. extent, which we are sol-1 dom ready to admit, poetry has tended to become with us something esoteric, ob:cure, and acutely personal, dealing i almost entirely with matters which cannot bo expressed otherwise than in verse, with emotions, that is to say, which would seem indiscreet or silly if stated in prose. So that metro grows more and more to be the vehicle of thoughts which lie too far outside the path of daily speech for any hut a lyrical expression. This increases the intensity of our best poetry. But there, is a consequence of this victory of personal lyricism over every other kind of poetry which is less fortunate. It has had the effect of cheeking all tho more ambitious forms of creative work. The Eighteenth Century, which was ill endowed with the arts of personal imagination, and appraised in their stead the discipline of rjietoric and broad objective views of life, was constantly ready to undertake r7[tcr.'.}o{\ nooirs. Not a writer from Potto to Wordsworth but would essay

his didactic epic or expand his' moral composition into many books. Whether wo read tliein still or"no, tliero survive on all our shelves "The Seasons" and "Night Thoughts,"- "The Shipwreck" and "The Deserted Village," to prove what largo aims were cultivated by tlio poets cf tlio reign of George 11. The tradition of such energy and sustained eli'ort survived down into tho romantic poriod, and wo owo to it "The Excursion," the narratives of Crabbe and Scott, "Don Juan," and perhaps even "Hyperion." If Keats had lived it is almost certain that ho would have devoted himself to the composition of a really stupendous poem, fit to rank with tho '"Divina Cnmincdia" and "Paradiso Lost." But since the death of Keats, that is to cay, for nearly ninety years, tho tendency of which wo have spoken has been ever on the increase. Jho English poets have been bent on tlio development of their lyrical personality, and have neglected more and more tliosc wider flights which, with the loss perhaps of somo exquisite detail, contrive to embrace the sympathies of all mankind. Poetry has grown to be a | sort of abracadabra, not intelligible to the uninitiated, and not addressed to mankind in general. If therefore wo glance over the literature of our country for the ast three-quarters of a century we shall have great difficulty in finding, amid tho unparalleled wealth of personal poetry, more than two or throe poems that cover a large space in the way in which, far instance, space is covered by "The Lusiads" or "The I'aerie O'uoene," or even by "Les Chatiments. Tennyson, when we come to think seriously of it, offers us nothing of this kind, nor Matthew Arnold, nor Bossctti. Swinburne's "Tristram and Iseult" is a lvric extravagantly expf'"cd; Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh too eccentric and old-fashioned to he exhibited; "The Earthly Paradise' a chain of short romances rather than one stately whole. The more we reflect on tho snbiect the more we shall come to tho conclusion that it is "The Riot and the Book." and no other Victorian poem, which completely escapes from the personal and elegiacnl note, and achieves, with permnnnnt success, the creation of n. poem of larsro enical structure, united in its complexity, manysided in its sympathies, and calculated to awaken interest in every r-.ador without 'resicnins anv of the attributes of art. to n. vulftar effort, nfter pnpulnrity. "The RiiiK a'"d the Bio'-." in short, is our solitary Nineteenth Century enic. More than Wtv years have passed since Robert Browninc eroding the. ■ Piazza'di S. Lorenzo i,u Florence, ri.inscd at a raff merchant's stall and picked out. and boiH't, for riflitpenco, the "couare old volloiv book" which set forth-the trial'of Guid« -p.^,,,.— >- : ~ nobWan<cf Arezzo, and his execution on February 22. 1698. for the inv'der of his wife. Frar-eoseo Pmnpilia.' Somotliim: occult, irresistible, demoniac, forced him to Fave this expiring document from; the dust, he in. fo that., after loner meditation, he r«ii»hl fashion out of it a' monirvent winch rnisfc endure so long as the English languago is alive: '

Small quarto size, part print, part manu- . script. A book in sliane, but, really, pure crude fact . " -'. • Secreted from. man's • life when hearts •'. . beat hard. . And brains, high-blooded,-ticked two centuries since. • Give' it me back! the thing's restorative I' the touch and sight. . .

Tho present writer seems to hear the very voice- of Browning .as he. copies theso lines. . The "square-' old yellow book" used to lie on the-tabic'in the back room, on'the first, floor of 19 Warwick Crescent,. in the year; of tho poet's early settlement in London; and often have -wq' seen. him,., half affectionately, half in the air, and catch'againf ; aiid .twirl about, by the crumpled 'vellum corners" the queer volume from which (it looked liko' a,, cake of olcl-.wax) so much of tho pure honey of'Hymott'iis had flowed. Ho would thrust it, into his Visitor's hands with a sort of scorn, and then seizo it in a spasm of* affectionato compunction—"Give it me back! The thing's restorative." But these, alas! aro memories of thirty years ago!

Tho unquestioned success of "The, Ring and tho Book" is a fair answer to those who.arc always timidly or cringingly insisting that a poet must choose a subject which."interests the public." As a. matter'of fact, "the public" has no preconceived views on what if likes, but waits to bo persuaded by the genius of any gifted writer. No quo could havo predicted that 'tho quatrains of Omar Khayyam or tho crudo passion of "Wuthcring Heights" would ever be "popular," yet ambition desires no wider province than theso havo conquered. ' So oven Tennyson doubted whether a poem on a forgotten Roman murder trial, although told with so much "strango vigour," could hope to make:its way. But tho public, that queer and unaccountable entity, determined to acc?pt Browning as a general favourite for the first time on tho score of "Tho Ring and Ihe Book," which has hold place as the most "popular" of his works ever since. No doubt of all thoso which are not lyrical expressions of his profound and ardent personal passion, it is tho most effective, or, as Eossetti used to say, tha ires') "amusing." It' exhibits to the fullest extent and with the greatest variety Browning's analytical lucidity and his almost supernatural insight into the complexities of character.' When Browning died ho left the old yelohv quarto to Balliol College, Ox- N ford, where no doubt it still enjoys a dignified repose. An American institution considered that tho numerous and glowing 'Browning Societies of tho United States would apnreciale an cpnortunity of reading what their poet had read to such excellent purpose. Whether there is much to bn made of tho wax'when o'very drop'of honey has .been drained out of it is anuthev question. The Americans,, at all events, havo reproduced tho entire book in photo-facsimile, a costly work of which a cheap reprint is. now for tho first time presented -to.ihc English world. It is a very pretty little volume, and many who buy the edition of "The RiiM nm-i the Book" will I'D gbd to nlaco this appendix to it on the shelf by its side.