♡

"The Ideal Popular Leader" suggests | This is neither abandonment nor couperhaps by its name "The Happy solation, but it answers, nevertheless, Warrior," and in some rather lumber- to a note within us; not, indeed, to ing and awkward titles Mr. Watson re- the first note which is struck when we minds us of Wordsworth's equally listen to the lark, for that is of the infelicitous choice. But here, except-pure joy which Shelley has rendered; ing only their common patriotism and nor to the secondary note which comes the accident that the elder poet is often with reflection, when we pass from the younger writer's subject, all like- considering the lark, how it sings, to ness ceases. Wordsworth's Muse is as considering its relation to ourselves, rustic and spontaneous as Mr. Wat- for that is of the transcendental joy son's is urban and academic. He which Wordsworth has attained; but to a note of discontented humanity, too feeble for self-respect.

never goes direct to nature, to daisied
meadows and thickly planted woods,
lakes radiant with sunset, and banks
where the primrose grows, reading
straight from what lies before him
lessons of faith and messages of joy.
He takes us rather to interpret nature,
to the nature of literary convention.
Let us consider in this aspect his ode
to "The First Skylark of Spring," 1 a
subject which is peculiarly helpful, as
it has been treated already by Shelley
and Wordsworth. Mr. Watson differs
characteristically from both, and
neither in inspiration nor in contagion
can he bear comparison with either.
While Shelley has caught the skylark's
own throb of joy in the flood of verse
which he pours forth, so that the poem
itself is a very skylark's song, panting
and ascending; while Wordsworth
draws from our pleasure in the song
an assurance of something common to
the skylark and to us, the anima mundi
which was his coustant care, and sees
that order in its freedom which he de-
siderated for men; Mr. Watson only
contrasts the skylark's lot with our
own, neither abandoning himself, like
Shelley, to the intoxication of its joy,
nor claiming our share in it, like
Wordsworth.

We sing of Life, with stormy breath
That shakes the lute's distempered
string:

We sing of Love, and loveless Death
Takes up the song we sing.

And fruitless knowledge clouds my soul,
And fretful ignorance irks it more.
Thou sing'st as if thou knew'st the whole,
And lightly held'st thy lore.

1 Odes and other Poems, pp. 21-25.

Somewhat as thou, Man once could sing,
In porches of the lucent morn,
Ere he had felt his lack of wing,

Or cursed his iron bourn.

The spring-tide bubbled in his heart,
The sweet sky seemed not far above,
And young
and lovesome came the note;
Ah, thine is Youth and Love!

It is, in a sense, if we may further
press the point, a note of the later
nineteenth century, when we have
drifted far from the intimate sympathy
with nature which characterized its
opening years, yet find in the very con-
trast which we evoke that pity of self,
which too, in its way, refreshes and
soothes, even if it cannot heal. Shel-
ley's verses fuse our clinging clay with
the liquid gladness of the song. Our
identity is lost, space and time are for-
gotten in a delicious sense of flight and
flood; we are like children living in
fairy-land, too soon, alas ! bodied and
solidified again. The audacity of an-
archism and atheism riots through his
lines. On Wordsworth lies the burden
and the blessing of the world, the
eternal paradox of voluntary knowl-
edge. If we miss in him the fusion
d'âme of joy which Shelley gives us,
we gain that higher joy of order, that
loftier freedom of responsibility, in
which the song is made articulate with
design, and man becomes spiritual in
execution. Mr. Watson, as we have
seen, is a spectator rather than an in-
terpreter. He neither draws man out-
side cosmos, like Shelley, nor raises
both man and bird to cosmic terms, like
Wordsworth -

True to the kindred points of Heav'n and | With the two exceptions just now mentioned by name, Mr. Watson fails on

home.

It is not unfair to make this a crucial the side of joy. He draws from nature instance, for the contrast is so very just what he brings to it, not hope nor striking. For all his admiration of comfort, but a vision of alien beauty, a Wordsworth, Mr. Watson, as a creator, confirmation of his own despair. Eveu never comes near the master's height those two poems, lofty in sentiment as of vision. For all his sense of the dig- they are, cannot be regarded as true nity of poetry, he is yet a "minor poetry. "The Things that are More poet," who only expresses more eloquently than the rest the feelings that are common to us all. Listen closely as we may, we never "overhear" Mr. Watson's finer interpretation of those feelings. He has no salve to offer to us, no secret to share with us. He never wins for himself from nature That blessed mood

In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened.

Excellent" is an eloquent satire or sermon in verse, illustrated by natural objects; while "Vita Nuova "2 is a fragment of autobiography so unique in inspiration as to be rather morbidly personal than poetically universal.

We might, indeed, without offending the blind side of opinion, venture further than this. The function of the critic is synthetic no less than analytical, and his work is but half done, and therefore badly done, if he stops short at the form while neglecting the mat

While with an eye made quiet by the ter. For the poetry of an age, more

power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things,

discreetly considered, is but the expression of the mass, the moulding out of the raw bulk of civilization the type although in two poems at least, "Vita and character which are its content, Nuova" and "The Things that are and it is in this sense that a poet More Excellent," he has succeeded in is said to be the mirror of his age. conveying the reflection of that ready- The difference is, that the mirror is made mood. He is a fine critic, a magical, shaping while it reflects. It master of form and metre, but no can hardly be seriously maintained that poet, as those to whom he has been so Mr. Watson satisfies this condition. lightly likened have taught us to count There is a phrase, depreciated of late poets. We are grateful for his earnest by the free-trade of the press, to which satire on our national indifference, for sociologists might extend a partial prohis eloquent recall to our national tection, for fin de siècle is not equivalent treasures; but when his friends go to the end of a century but to the close further, and claim for him, too, room of an age. A superstitious reverence among those treasures, we listen in for an arbitrary division of time has vain to his wandering and plaintive cheapened the word and confused the voice for the sound to turn that key thought; but there is, nevertheless, a which is in the keeping of the people's certain significance to be recovered. heart. Had this position never been We are living in a fin de siècle which challenged, it would be unnecessary, has nothing to do with the hundreds as it is ungracious, to defend it; but column of our calendar. Historians, Mr. Watson does so little to relieve, in the fulness of time, will see enacted except by its expression, the despair in our midst a revolution no less sure and the weariness of life, pipes so per- for being silent. Feudalism is surrensistently in the minor key, that, really dering its last stronghold before the beautiful as many of his verses are, we incoming wave of democracy, and the are more concerned with the help long war between the "Haves" and which we miss than with the sympathy the "Have-nots," where the latter

which we find. We are all common

place; he sets our platitudes to music.

1 Lachrymæ Musarum, p. 54 and foll.
Odes and other Poems, pp. 45, 46.

P

2

London. Certain moods of both these subjects he renders with attractive fidelity, and the best of both is perhaps combined in the following lines. from a dedication "To London, my Hostess: "

Yes, alien in thy midst am I,

Not of thy brood;
The nursling of a Norland sky
Of rougher mood:

To me, thy tarrying guest, to me,
'Mid thy loud hum,

Strayed visions of the moor or sea
Tormenting come.

Above the thunder of the wheels
That hurry by,

From lapping of lone waves there steals
A far-sent sigh;

And many a dream-reared mountain-crest.
My feet have trod

have been victorious at every point, is | and somewhat akin to his love for the resolving itself into a last duel between sea is his love for the great ocean of Capital and Labor, a duel of which the issue is foregone. The political parties of the future will move on a place, like the guests at the Mad Tea-Party. The Conservatives will succeed to the Individualistic policy which the van of the Liberals is deserting, and in this faith will correct and temper the Socialism with which their opponents tend more and more to become identified. Under these banners the final conflict will be fought, and the new age inaugurated. In all this there is no room for Mr. Watson. Transition can neither be crystallized nor made artistic; "Virgil's Laokoon was obliged to shriek," but Lessing is shocked none the less. There is nothing solid beneath our feet, and form cannot be imposed upon shifting matter. The very fact that Mr. Watson is mainly occupied as a eulogist and an advocate becomes in this light not an isolated statement, but a reasonable judgment from the foregoing generalizations. Seen aright, there would be cause for surprise if a "major poet" had arisen in times when there is no stability and no clearness of vision, when the last stage of an antiquated order is dragging itself slowly to the new, to the consummation of that silent revolution which has been working out of sight. Seen aright, criticism would be stultified if it recognized in the wail of the reactionary or the war-cry of the reformer, in the laudator temporis acti or the dreamer of things to be, an abiding and uplifting voice, more than the consolation of the moment, the murmur of the passing hour. Youth only is eternal, and eternally the same, and with every cycle of the world's renewal the new-old songs are sung; every moruing the lark goes up, and there is clear shining after rain," but in age and darkness poetry is not made.

66

a

There is much to admire in Mr. Wat-
son, and it is pleasant to return to this.
He has a painter's eye for the various
attitudes of the sea, though here, too,
we look in vain for "the light that
never was,
the poet's dream,'

Or

There where thy Minster in the West
Gropes towards God.
Yet from thy presence if I go,
By woodlands deep
ocean-fringes, thou, I know,
Wilt haunt my sleep;
Thy restless tides of life will foam,
Still, in my sight;
Thy imperturbable dark dome
Will crown my night.

O living forest, living sea,

Take thou my song.1

He gives us very few flowers, but occasionally he catches their charm in a happy phrase. This is oftenest the case with the rose, but we may also select the passage

over-.

Where gentian flowers Make mimic sky in mountain bowers,2 though here, as elsewhere, be it observed that he stands outside of his picture, and is "heard," not " heard." But perhaps enough has been said and quoted to learn what to look. for without disappointment in Mr. Watson's slender volumes. He is not,. nor has he ever claimed to be, a poet of the higher rank, and those who have made this claim on his behalf may live to see it reversed by the verdict of time. On the other hand, he is a 1 Lachrymæ Musarum, pp. 12, 13, 15. 1 Poems, p. 21..

graceful critic, a kindly satirist, and a greater bulk of his poetry. cultured observer; a man withal of deep personal emotion matched by a stateliness of expression. There is ample room for his like in the land, but in the valley, not on the heights of Parnassus. LAURIE MAGNUS.

ordinary mortals are content to live, he West believes itself to have trodden looked calmly down upon all struggles, down forever the creed of contemplabarely deigning to point out that liberty tion. is an abstract principle, to be had only by laying aside all ideas of attaining it in a material fashion.

Thus it was to a very sympathetic spirit that Nature had whispered her secrets, and that some of her passive cruelty, as well as some of her terrifying beauty, had been woven into his very being. Years after, in a style faultless and terse, he describes his world of ideals:

Neither did this poet study man as other poets have studied him. Life and its turmoil seemed to him unworthy themes, whilst irresistible fate, and the uselessness of struggling against it, were facts so evident that the only wonder was how man could, even for a time, carry on such an unequal warfare. Untimely death was to Leconte de Lisle but as a sad, soft reflection of a dawn unable to pierce persistent darkness; or as a flower,

Le monde où j'ai véçu n'a point quelques picked before the sun had faded its

coudées ;

On ne le trouve en aucun lieu.
C'est l'empire infini des sereines idées,
Et, calme, on y rencontre Dieu.

petals, and before it could shed its perfume, even for one day, around the silent shadows of the wood. 66 Who," says he, "will be able to remember The time may come, but certainly it that the flower has bloomed and died if has not yet arrived, when the Western those who loved it have also departed mind will be altogether invaded by the into the silent mystery; who is to spirit of the East. If that time ever know that a soul has blossomed on comes, the world will undergo a revolu-earth when those who follow it have tion more strange than that which de- also passed into the nothingness which stroyed the social fabric of the Middle irretrievably lies beyond ?" Ages. What appears to us extraordinary is that that invading spiritwhether in the future it achieves victory or not-should have placed in a country, where everything is in direct opposition to it, a few isolated skirmishers to prepare its way. It is in France that we shall most often find advance-guard of any great movement, or else it is the French who, seizing upon the yet simmering ideas of other nations, after a process of incubation, display them fully fledged to the still lagging and astonished world.

Such was Leconte de Lisle's creed, but the very fact that he asks the question shows that he could not altogether repress his Western inheritance of desire for inquiry. Without further questioning, his creed could have answered him that the individual is nothing; that life, art, religion are nothing; that the future of the universe, Maya, will be absolutely void; and that Nirvâna will be the intangible end of an intangible aim. He would fain insist on the worship of infinity by finite man, to our minds an impossible Leconte de Lisle was one of these realization, but to thousands of our felisolated outposts of Eastern thought. low-creatures in the East, and to a few Despising all that held others in thral- others who seem, through some misdom, power, passion, active energy, take, to have been born out of due sea-. love of humanity, shown in many and son, and in a country of which they often mistaken ways, he soared almost cannot call themselves citizens, the at once into a region which attracts but basis of religion. It may have been few, and at whose portals only isolated early disappointments and discouragetravellers beg for admittance. Still ments which led the poet into this there can be no doubt that now for path, but once there the way seemed many years the spirit of the Fast has made easy, and he believed that to him been creeping slowly westward, even had come the revelation of the ideal at the very time when the arrogant | which can conquer the real.