BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1289, 18 November 1911, Page 9

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

VERSES OLD AND NEW. ■THE-MOUNTAINEER. I pay , my court in tho open day, A song and a laugh and a shining blade. The hermit who hears mo forgets to pray, Tho .sunburnt peasant throws down his i spade, \ The.merchant of spices grows tired of trade, ; When I am in love in tho noon of May. 1 Tho envious anchorite marks my way, ,Tho shepherd forgets that his sheep havo > strayed Through tho green of tho vines to tho olivo's grcj; , The trader curses his sordid trade, • Amber and rubies, Chinese jade,— "Better, far better his lot," they say. If Jove is in vain, I will tako my sword, No part of my joy will I leave behind, But swimming the rivers I cannot ford, I shall come to the hills that are always ' kind, lly liills I would sock, though my eyes ' wero blind, More dear to my feet than a velvetsward. If love is not mine, there is this for me, A cliff full of shadows where beecb leaves fall, '' The song of the wind on a sunlit sea, The sound of the waves that are free, free, ■ '■ free, .While the evening star-for my festival. ' —Bon Kendini, in the "Spectator." MYSTERY AND FAITH. God wiote upon the sunset with Hi 9 hand, v Limning tho mystic characters in light, \ And sealed that epistlo with tho night. 'And 10, men said: "We cannot understand, For darkness falleth o'er the silent, land 'And blotteth out God's message, ere, aright, '.It hath been read by each world-weary ' ' • wight Toiling, deep-footed, through tho shifting sand." Oi, little faith! Prom yonder darksome verge Where lopk'st thou not, perchance, for its. return, Shall God's bright hand and golden pen emerge - -— "When all the East doth with His glory burn, And though Ho seetn'd but now to write of woe, The dawn-light shall His tender mercy show.

i—A. B. Cooper, in the "Westminster Gazette."

EPITHALAMION. Stay and smile then, hand in hand, 'Children of sunbeams, white as snow, 'As Pelous, King of the Grecian land, ■Smiled upon Thetis, lons ago; So long ago when,.' heart aflame, The grave and gentle Peleus came To the shore where the halcyon flics To wed the maiden of his devotion, ' The dancing lady with sky-blue eyes, Thetis,. the darling of Paradise, The daughter of old Ocean. Seas before- her riso and break, Dolphins tuniblo in her wake ■Along the sapphire courses: With Tritons ablow on their pearly i shells, '.With a noiso of waves and a clash of bells,. .From tho secret house where her Father , dwells .She drives her white-tail horses: .'.•'And the boys of heavon, gowned and crowned, Had Aphrodite to lead thorn Tonnd— , .Aphrodite, with hair unbound, . Her silver . breasts. adorning:. JHer long, her soft, her streaming hair Fell on a silver breast, laid bare By the stir and swing of tho sea-lit air, The day the gods went dancing there, .Immortal in the morning, μ-fjames Elroy Flecker, in the "Nation.".

THE FASHIONING OF STYLE. ' To-day more than in the past an infinity of books and travels, traffics and discoveries, renders the life of men manytinted: the coloured ribbons are twined with a curious intricacy round tho central polo. Men more and more have eouls of restless inquiry; their unquiet imaginations are ever turning to far horizons; they, are haunted by the dim sound of distant rivers and the silenco of limitless plains; or, delving in "old, unhappy, far-off things" of history, they think to have discovered a new country ■u'hen they are but altering the divisions of the olq. And this rich mosaic of men's imaginings seeks a new expression in the magic of style that lends a myriad facets' to familiar things. On the faded palimpsest of men's minds fresh scenes are continually imprinted, and it is no marvel that they snould have intimations of a pro'uens acquaintance with bo things thty see; for they may receive an ir-pres-sion a hundred times before it unites with a , former impression, and the two combine put of old material to fashion a thing that is new. Through the rush and flo'v* of many inventions that is modern lifo the palimpsest is ceaselessly obliterated and the writing is ever fresh. In tho mild of the artist the symbols of things clash and sever and reunite; a battalion of sounds and syllables mingles in ..onfused throng.then with shock of vowels and subtle sittings of consonants, as it were "frith the clink and clatter of steel, each falls into its proper rank and becomes a "lonely word." Some process of selection in tho mind there must always be, and it is further deliberately continued by many writers who follow Boileau's precepts and proceed to mauoouvro their troops of words on paper: "Si j'ecris quatre mots j'en effacerai trois." Wo may watch the painful toil of Flaubert limning with unwearied patience till n passage originally of ten lines is perhaps reduced to thTee at the fourth or fifth revision. -The final version still gives us the essential traits of the picture; all the rest has been eliminated, just as the skilful craftsman tako3 his chisel afresh and with bold strokes fashions his work when tho onlooker may have imagined it to be already finished. As tho material (lakes off beneath "the tool tho portrait becomes more living, the expression more intense. it is surely this intensity that is the very essence of style. To somo writers it may come more spontaneously thau to Flaubert, but in great art it is always present, to whatever cause it may havo been due. Perhaps the writer is "so dominated by his life's high purpose and endeavour" that the words are minted trom his brain like sparks from a flint; they glint, and clash like tho=R of Napoleon: "Soldals, dii haut do.ces Pyramides quaranto siecles vous r.qntcmplent!" Or in his impassioned thought he ranges earth and heaven, and cries with Pascal: "Le silence Rternel des espace3 infinis m'effraio." So in a moment of intense excitement s>, man has jio thought for turgid ornament but seeks the core of the matter; at such a time bo will not say, "Observe that verdant slopo," but "Look, at that green hill." The genius retains this intensity. He has the infinite capacity for taking pains ■becaus-3 he has 'he enthusiasm. Ho is over girt and ready for battle; there is no sloth, no encumbrance, all is clean and disengaged. The great stylist is a n>nn of action, in fact or potentially. Robert Louis Stevonson, working cheerfully and to some purpose in the intervals of sickness, was essentially a man of notion, although , the circumstances of his life chained him for long periods to his bed. And in the history of all countries there are many in whom the laiico has not Minted the pen, nor the pen tho lance. Many writers then, it will be said, whose subtle cadences and lingering music haunt the ear are not great stylists, since thero is a softness, an effeminacy, in all their periods. Hut they, too, are men of action. To action belong Leopardi and Vprlaine, Pierre Loti and Valle-Inclau. j

The so-called symbolist, or the decadent who has any claim to be termed great, is not a stagnant, enervated mind; he is a tortured, 'imr/uiPt spirit actively developin? some new phase of thought and expression. Thronih suffering.and strenuous emle.irour "these attain tho mighty life you see." .So the style of the genuine artist in words is without rhetoric, direct and true, falling liko the strokes of a kren sword blade. It springs from conviction, nnd convinces. The true realist is' ho who through tho heavenly alchemy of iifc style transforms reality, making it more real. He is a Kinjr Midas turning nil that ho touches to pure gold. Nothinir is too small, nothing too trivial for

his art. The trilling incident receives at Ins hands a, new sigmfU-:ma>. We still hear the sound of tho brick fallin" on the' I wall in the silence of the wiutVr night us tio riiire.ins runkc their escape throiiKli the besieging host. He niny thus sco and portray tile commonest things, but he sees them in an uncommon light, and tho reader in his turn catching the fresh vision considers again tho life that has Irecn portrayed and finds it altered. The false, wtist may likewise see and portray the commonest things, but lie sees only their vulgarity. It is tho former, however, who is tho nioro realistic, not the exact photographer at whose work men say "That is precisely how tho thing copied seems," but tho pointer at whoso work they exclaim "I had not noticed that shadow, that colour, but that is how the thing really is." Tho artist imposes his' vision. Tho greatest passages of literature, effortless aud serene, seem almost , easily imitablo in their simplicity- "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while- "the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them";.or, .though hero the artifice beneath the simplicity is more apparent, Bacon's "A crowd is not company," and faces are but a gallery of pictures, aud talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love." So we listen to tho singing of nightingales in the Lolonus grove: Eiso Kat auton eustomous aedoncs. Sophocles merely savs "Nightingales sing there," but the ■ nintric. is in the word eustomous, while eiso conveys a subtle mystery of "beccheu, green aud shadows numberless." "By patient study, passionate faith, or obstinate questiouiiigs the writers have scaled these tranquil heights, as the day breaks nfter storm in a shining peace. The effort is distant, belonging to the past, and has no part in tho actual composition. Tho style and tho man have become one; he indites of a goodly matter and speaks out of the fulness of his heart. To write of "les affres du style" has thus little meaning; the tortures, the blank misgivings must be undergone in the search of an intense conviction, a faith strong enough to seek expression in words; then the furnace, one may say, is heated to a whito heat and the style comes without effort. So to class writers as realists and idealists is an empty definition. The things in themselves aro without form and void; an inartistic presentation of them leave them a vague and motley company of names; but tho artist comes, and, setting the right word in the right place, sorts and marshals them, as a man of science, by the help of a theory, reduces an incoherent array of phenomena to an ordered sequence. The thing visible to the eye must necessarily be embraced by the higher vision o'f the mind; tho artist's idealism is the crucible in which the real is fused and spiritualised and realised. If Flauber: suffered from the obsession of style, Stendhal was perhaps the first writer to be tortured with the wish to bo styleless. It was liis anxiety'to dissect thoughts, free and untrammelled, without, rhetoric. He succeeded in writing some masterpieces of psychological skill, and, by reason of his sincerity, his style or absence of style, in spite of repetitions which he did not care to avoid, has a clearness and precision that delight, as a medium of penetrating analysis, though without any.'grace of diction.

It vras a task worthy of Stendhal's genius, this attempt to "escape from style and set forth in bare lines the working of tlio brain. A man with less power of concentration must have failed conspicuously. A school of Russian writers has striven to do for the material world what Beyle did so fascinatingly for tho world of thought—to five the clear, nntempered imprint of the tiling seen, and curiously, certain modern Spanish authors, especially. Pio Baroja, are also in somo sense of this school. They have discarded Ihe Latin love of form for a northern crudoness of impression that is very striking. But to others the same objects will appear softened by various tints and shades that, if they are sincere, will not obscure but. rather, deepen tlio picture. Tho intensity of all true stylo is not a limitation; its sincerity .Tenders it not less but more impersonal, more harmonious. Musical cadences, onomatopoeic effects, exquisite alliterations are in the greatest art not so much the outcome of conscious effort as the natural fringe and accompaniment .of .the', mind's impression, harsh or "delicate", monotonous or varied. At Tennvson's "heavy-shotted hammock;... .shroud'', or Swinburne's "Where "the" sea-ridgo of Hellas lies heavier and cast, upon west, waters break," we are inclined to pause in order to admire tho skilful _ and intricate workmanship. But in such a line as the fbllowing of, Shakespeare: . . . and jocund day Stands tip-too on tho misty mountaintops, though the alternating alliterations are as subtle and as elaborate they are woven so naturally into the texturo of tho whole passage that on.a first reading tho marvel of the line's structure might pass almost unnoticed. So in Marlowe's line: My heart is as an anvil unto sorrow; or in Victor Hugo's .Apres la plaine blanche uno autre pLiine blanche; or in Dante's E come i gru van cantaudo lor lai; we are struck, not by tho author's cleverness, but by tho heavy weight of the speaker's grief, or tho white monotony of the Russian snows or the slow, tired flight of cranes. If tho writer is gifted with the faculty of undimmed insight the material to his hand is of a marvellous variety and richness. But if he wavers and has no clearness of vision, no will, no enthusiasm, ho is but a reed shaken by tho wind; ho will bo borne away in the rushing torrent of impressions; tho material that was to have made him rich will starve him liko Mida's gold, and his words will be, like tlio words of Claudio in "Much Ado about Nothing," "a very fantastical banquet." —A.F.E.8., in tho "Morning Post."