BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1402, 30 March 1912, Page 11

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

VERSES OLD AND NEW.

IN PASSING. I was your stepping-stow From tho old love to the now— I, who loved you alono; Was.it I who changed, or jouf Now'you stand on land with your own true lover, > Poor.stone, my heart, let floods flow over! I.was a desert well; Passing, you slaked your thirst; Was the water brackish, tell? Yet you found it sweet at first: Now yon lave and bathe in the bounteous river, May sand-storms choke the well for ever. —Gcorgina B. Paget, in the "Westminster iGazetto." FLEET STREET. I never see tho newsboys 1 run Amid' tho whirling street, With swift untiring feet, . To i cry tho latest .venture don», But I expect one day to 'hear Them cry the crack of-doom And risings from tho tomb, With great Archangel Michael near; And seo them running from the Fleet As messengers of God.; With Heaven's tidings shod' Abbiit their brave unwearied feet. —Shano Leslie, in "The, Living Age." LYRIC. I caro not, 9hall I see my dear Own land before I die, or.no. Nor who forgets mo, buriod her* In desert wastes of alien snow; Though all forget mo—better so. A slave from my first bitter yean, Most surely I shall dio a slave L'ngraeed of any kinsmen's tears; And carry with me to my grave Everything; and leave-no trace, . No little mark to keep my place In the dear lost TJkraina Which is not ours, though our land. And nbno shall over understand; No father to his son shall.say,: —Kneel down, 'and fold' your hands, and pray;. .' ... ~; ~. He died for. our • TJkraina. ' I care no longer if the chill Shall pray for me, or pass m» by, One only thing I cannot bear: To know my land, that was beguiled Into a death-trap with a lie, Trampled and ruined arid denied, Ah, but I care, dear God; I care! —Taras Shevchenko, translated from the Ruthcnian by E.L. Voynich. .

THE GEORGIAN OUTBURST.

"What is the most important body of literature, produced in modern time's?" asks Charles Leonard Moore in the "Dial."

"National 1 prejudices, class feelings, the interests and passions of mankind, becloud such an inquiry. One can only offer; an opinion and an argument.' To me it seems that—setting aside Goethe, who was a world in himself—the work done.by the generation which, gave the Romantic revival to England surpasses anything-that has been done anywhere else during the last two hundred years. "Recent English literature seems -to see life us through- a telescope reversed; everything is small or blurred. Tennyson is the idyliist, a maker of - ' srnall though:'perfect things/; 'Carlyle in the company of tho great Georgians would almost show like Thersites in the Grecian camp, or,like the lamo Vulcan on Olympus. .' Altogether it is hard to seo anywhere such a company of proud and peculiar presences, such a senate of intellect, as appeared in England about the beginning of-the nineteenth century. "It really began with. Burns: for though to. the eighteenth century jby his satire and-didactic turn, b.o souncjed 'pretty nearly all- the notes of the feew'craMte'||Boltion,' J -ifa romance, its personal, ptfssioW ".'-"His i$ more like Goethe'than-any'other modern, and as far as he' goes' ?ho Vis 'quite , as great.' Goethe's! most 'characteristic qualities—intense;naturalnoss 'antt-undeviating truth—■ aro nio're/i'Jfia'n matched -by. the author, of the Scotch songs, 'Tarn O'Shanter' and' 'The -:Jolly Beggars.' , ■ ' , ' "Wordsworth is surely the modern king, of the spiritual' world. He dwelt in a, ' region beyond the ken of most 'poets—a place [0,l high tranquillity where we bird of peace sits brooding on the calmed wave.' The poet of nature—yes, but his naturg.-is-.not..the catalogue of outward things which even great poets give; it is the verity to which man is only an incident; it is the: melting-pot of generations; it is the,very body of the Eternal himself.

"Coleridge, though he gave a good part of his 'liiirid to'the making of.Wotlrsworth, is not spiritual. He is tee lord of the supersensuous, of that unreal world of glamour and dream image which is the most real thing in existence for the finer sort of minds. . It was his poetry and criticism that really broko the eighteenth century's cast-iron system of cora-mon-sense,.'iiia'de \explicable the' groat poetry of the'past, and gave tho new men the keys to'that'domain.

"There are two grent divisions among writers—those who speak for themselves, and those through whom others speakin other words, the lyric and the dramatic types. Largely this era was a lyric one, an era of great personalities who swept the world with .their passion or their grief. _ But it had its'supreme creative artist in Scott,-who was objective even in his poetry. . It is an Arab snperstition that he who draws or paints the picture of a human being must on the Last Day furnish it with a soul to be condemned or rewarded. What an expense Scott would-be in that case! And amid the cohorts of the man-created, what a vast aud predominant array would owe allegiance to him!

Byron was the dynamo of his gonera■tion—the most splendid figure, the.greatest force, English literature has produced. Shelley was tho prophet of his time, a Mcmnon of to-morrow. -It■.only needs a glance at contemporary , literature end life to sec how much his,spirit, is awake. The seed ideas..that he'flung about have taken root, are 'growing on every side. In, a literary way, he brought into the world a. haunting strain of music, new and perfect, which must, live on even if his ideas and policies wither away.

"All these men wero something more than writers, .but Keats, was literature incarnate—tho pure artist living for image and expression. Borrowing from tho best of his predecessors, he attained such mastery of lan'gunffe that he set his stamp upon two (renerations of his followers, us Popo did on two generations of his. Perhaps such' richly 1 floriated work has l>een ovcrdonor there is need to recur to tho granite foundation stuff of thought and feeling. But in Kents's mature work there is no weakness. Largeness nnd loveliness wero never more perfectly welded together. "These were the stars of first magnitude in that English constellation. It speaks volumes for their brilliancy when on orb like Landor could roll by unattached, unnoticed; when the novel world of Miss Austen could spring into being in their midst without attracting attention. There is enough good rending in Ltrador to give us measureless content; Miss Austen js surely the ciual of any English novelist, excepting Dickens, since her day; yet when we think of them in connection with the Georgian group, neither of them looms large. "The Georgian era wa.s an era of yonth. Nearly nil-its- writers did their great work early, and the majority of them died voung. The personalities and actions of the young' are certainly mora attractive to mankind than those that pertain to mature humanity. Balzac may discover the middle-aged hoToine, but she will never displace tho Juliets and Gretchons in tho affection of the world.

"Again, the Georgians were ■«. Tnoo of divino amateurs. Anion;? the chiofs, Scott was the only professional author— tlie only on« who deliberately wrote for money. Schopenhauer said that the ruin of literature como about when men found that they could make money by books. A frreat part of modern liieratiire roads ns if it was written to provide frocks for the authors' wives. Those who work with Mich' ulterior motive must keep a wary eye on the market; thoy must cog anil flatter and paller. The Georgians wrote in scorn of consequence. Thoy could play at pitch-and-toss,vnth tho univoroe. They could dare everything

"All in all, then, I think it in tolorably certain that tho Georgian outburst was thomost important apparition of literary S«wus that the world has soeh in mod-

era times. No 6inglo figure of its group is equal to Shakespeare or Milton or Moliero or GoDthe. But iu tho mass they surpass any but tho greatest of those. Vast and various as tho world's literature has bocoino since, 1 doubt if taken together it is equal in valuo to the work of those few years in one country.

"For ono thing, recent literature has takon a turn downward. It has largely oxchanged verse for prose; it has mingled, with tho crowd on the levels, instead of staying with the shining ones on tho hills; it has dealt,very exclusively with the passive peculiarities of women, rather than with tho active energies of men. If wo are going to have a great literature again, it seems to me that wo must think a great deal on the Georgian epoch."

IN PRAISE OF DICKENS.

The oontonary of Charles Dickens's birth has produced some glowing appreciations. Here wo quote a few:— "Tho conUmury ot Dickens is moro than tho triumph of Dickens: it is the triumph of tho simple person over the superior person," says Mr. James Douglas in the "-Morning Leader." "It is tho victory of the common man over tho cultured critic. It is tho survival and revival of human nature. It is the death .of decadence. The ilaming popularity of Dickens has always offended the fastidious arroganco of tho 'littery gent.' If Dickens had been tho idol of a precious clique or the god of a sickly coterie, the littlo men with their little measures would have burnt incense before his shrine. But they could not stomach tho darling of a democracy, tho hero of a multituue that no man can number. They "olt in! their small souls that there was something vulgar in a man of genius who was big enough to make tho whole world laugh. Their pride was hurt because they could not restrict his vogue and make it a narrow cult.

"When two men of genius like Swinburne and Shaw are found sitting at tho feet of Dickens, it is clear that something , may be said for tho literary instinct of the democracy. Tho people may sometimes go wildly and madly wrong, but it is clear that they also may go wildly and madly right. It was a very wonderful thing that Dickens did when he took the people into his great heart: it was a still more wonderful thiiig,;that the people (lid when they took Dickens into their still greater heart. "A writer cannot touch the keart of the world until his own heart has been touched," writes Mr. Hall Caine in tho "Daily Telegraph." "And surely it is because Dickens's heart was so often and so deeply touched, touched with sympathy for those who toil and suffer, touched with a desire to make their lives more human and beautiful, touched with a firm belief that tho same divine soul lives in all classes, touched with a chivalrous love for all women, and a fatherly affection for all children, touched with faith in the gentle and good things of. life, touched with the joy of birth and tho sorrow of death—surely this is why Dickens laid his hand so lastingly on Time with an impress which nothing seems to disturb. Tho worid loves Dickens because Dickens loved tho world.

. "God bless him I At this moment of the centenary, of his birth, the humblest novelist of us all may feel his threat swell and his eyes fill when lie reflects that after so many years, in which Time's scythe has swept down a battalion of the world's great people—its statesmen, its diplomatists,, its soldiers, its sailors, even its kings—the place which the Eng-lish-spooking race keeps closest to its heart of hearts is still occupied by : a ; ' siiiglo story-teller." ■''■ -'- : •';■•'i'Vj ■'. Mr. Pett Ridge, at Whitfield's Tabernacle, referring to "Oliver Twist," said "many children in London to-day. were saying, liko Oliver, 'Please, sir, I want some more,' .but. were saying it in a whisper, sothut : folk who did not want to hear could pretend they did not hear. Tho great thing' about 'Oliver Twist' was that Dickens, with no greater weapon than his own pen,- attacked and wounded mortally tho giant of the' Poor Law system. His own 1 , feeling, was one of deep gratitude i thatUhete'j£JSt£<yGs a Charles Dickens, had the honour ,bf giv.in'gi^iro.^jbifihi'' Bishop- Welidoh'.'-rih.''Manchester Cathedral, said:-r-<-- ; < : :

"He' Was tho greatest, I think, because hho was.the,poorest, of all.humorists. Nobody has made so.many people laugh innocently as he. Ho has sent a ripplo of guileless laughter across'• tho face of the English-speaking .world. What images of merriment "arise in tho mind at the 'very mention of the characters whom he has made to .be living men and women! But his humour is-always restrained, always refined. Even when he treats of persons and places most closely associated with the vulgar and the criminal side of life, as in 'Oliver Twist/ lie shrinks with instinctive reserve from all that would needlessly offend good taste. 'To the puro all things aro pure, and even impurity itself seems somehow, to be purified in his hands.

"It is cosy to desecrate the sanctities of life, and perilously near to sin lies been in Christian times the humour of a Rabelais, a Voltaire, or a Swift. Nobler and finer is the humour of a Moliere, or an Addison, because it is more- free from vulgarity. But in these great writers the fun is not so irrepressible as it is in Dickens. In him if. bubbles up always and overywhere. There is scarcely a side of Enfrlish lifo which he dees not touch with tho light shaft of his humour. But he never defiles what lie touches. His wit is not like the jewel sparkling on a foul hand. The cup of laughter which he holds to men's lips contains no sediment."

M. Edmpnd Rostand, the French playwight, in the "Now York Times," sav'f:

"A wondrous Renins is coming with his welcome fragrance of Christmas and of tea; We mint crown him with the mistletoe under which wo embrace. Wn must place him between Anderson and Tolstoy. All kinds of roguish imps cling about 'Pickwick.' In his nhantasies he seems a Falstaff aureoled with tenderness."

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