Essays from the Chap-Book

“Straightway he stood at heaven’s gateAbashed, and trembling for his sin:I trow he had not long to waitFor God came out and led him in.“And then there ran a radiant pair.Ruddy with haste and eager-eyed,To meet him first upon the stair —His wife and child, beatified.“God, smiling, took him by the hand,And led him to the brink of heaven:He saw where systems whirling stand,Where galaxies like snow are driven.”

And lo! it was to his own music that the very spheres were moving.

“A Ballad of Hell” tells the story of a woman’s love and a woman’s courage. Her lover writes her that he must go to prison, unless he marries, the next day, his cousin whom he abhors. There is no refuge but in death; and by her love he conjures her to kill herself at midnight, and meet him, though it must be in Hell. She waited till sleep had fallen on the house. Then out into the night she went, hurried to the trysting oak, and there she drove her dagger home into her heart, and fell on sleep. She woke in Hell. The devil was quite ready to welcome her; but she answered him only —

“‘I am young Malespina’s bride;Has he come hither yet?’”

But Malespina had turned coward, when the supreme test came, and he was to marry his cousin on the morrow. For long, and long, she would not believe; but when long waiting brought certainty, at last, she cried —

“‘I was betrayed. I will not stay.’”

And straight across the gulf between Hell and Heaven she walked: —

“To her it seemed a meadow fair;And flowers sprang up about her feet;She entered Heaven; she climbed the stair,And knelt down at the mercy-seat.”

Next to these three Ballads I should rank “Thirty Bob A Week.” It is of the solid earth, and has none of the Dantesque weirdness of the Ballads of Hell and Heaven; but it is stronger than either of them in its own way – this monologue of the man who must live on thirty shillings a week, and make the best of it.

“But the difficultest go to understand,And the difficultest job a man can do,Is to come it brave and meek, with thirty bob a week,And feel that that’s the proper thing for you.“It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;It’s walking on a string across a gulf,With millstones fore-an-aft about your neck;But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;And we fall, face-forward, fighting, on the deck.”

Here is a man to whom nothing human is foreign – who understands because he feels.

It is the “Ballads” rather than the “Songs,” which give to this book its exceptional value, yet some of the Songs are charming – for instance, the two “To the Street Piano,” “A Laborer’s Wife,” and “After the End.” Indeed there is nothing in the volume more deeply imbued with the human sympathy, of which Mr. Davidson’s work is so pregnant, than these two songs. Witness the refrain to the one which the laborer’s wife sings: —

“Oh! once I had my fling!I romped at ging-go-ring;I used to dance and sing,And play at everything.I never feared the light;I shrank from no one’s sight;I saw the world was right;I always slept at night.”

But in an evil hour she married, “on the sly.” Now three pale children fight and whine all day; her “man” gets drunk; her head and her bones are sore; and her heart is hacked; and she sings —

“Now I fear the light;I shrink from every sight;I see there’s nothing right;I hope to die to-night.”

“After the End” is in a very different key. It is more universal. Kings and queens, as well as the humblest of their subjects, may well cry out, into the unknown dark —

“After the end of all things,After the years are spent,After the loom is broken,After the robe is rent,Will there be hearts a-beating,Will friend converse with friend,Will men and women be lovers,After the end?”

“In Romney Marsh” is a fascinating bit of landscape-painting; and “A Cinque Port” has a melancholy and suggestive beauty that makes me long for space to copy it. The “Songs” for “Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” and “Winter” are charming, also.

There is thought enough and strength enough in the “Songs,” “To the New Women,” and “To the New Men;” but they are rhymed prose, rather than poetry – if, indeed, “what” and “hot” can be said to rhyme with “thought.”

Why, oh why, does Mr. Davidson treat us to such uncouth words as “bellettrist,” and “moneyers,” and “strappadoes”? – why talk to us of “apes in lusts unspoken,” and “fools, who lick the lip and roll the lustful eye”? “The Exodus From Houndsditch,” which contains these phrases, is certainly hard reading; but one is compelled, all the same, to read it more than once, for it is pregnant with thought, and here and there it is starred with splendid lines, such as —

“The chill wind whispered winter; night set in;Stars flickered high; and like a tidal wave,He heard the rolling multitudinous dinOf life the city lave – ”

or the picture of some fantastic world,

“Where wild weeds half way down the frowning bankFlutter, like poor apparel stained and sere,And lamplight flowers, with hearts of gold, their rankAnd baleful blossoms rear.”

One closes Mr. Davidson’s book with reluctance, and with a haunting sense of beauty, and power, and the promise of yet greater things to come. He is a young man – scarcely past thirty; what laurels are springing up for him to gather in the future, who shall say? Happily he is not faultless – since for the faultless there is no perspective of hope.

R. L. S. – Some Edinburgh Notes

By

Eve Blantyre Simpson

R. L. S. – SOME EDINBURGH NOTESGive me again all that was there,Give me the sun that shone!Give me the eyes, give me the soul,Give me the lad that’s gone!Robert Louis Stevenson.

LOUIS STEVENSON was born in 8 Howard Place, then an outlying suburban street between Edinburgh and the sea; and the substantial but unpretending house with its small plot of garden in front will doubtless be visited with interest in future by those who like to look on the birthplaces of famous men.

17 Heriot Row, on one of Edinburgh’s level terraces between the steep hills, “from which you see a perspective of a mile or so of falling street,” became his home before he was out of velvet tunics and socks, but as his mother was delicate, they lived when the weather was genial “in the green lap of the Rutland Hills,” at Swanston, a few miles from Edinburgh. He, however, spent his winters at Heriot Row, when he grew into an Academy boy, though not a specially brilliant scholar. His doubtful health would often stand as an excuse, when the rain splattered on the panes, or the square gardens opposite were hid in a scowling “haur,” for the small Louis to remain and “Child Play” beside his pretty mother. No doubt, too, the truant spirit was strong within him when he trotted down hill to school, “rasping his clachan1 on the area railings” as he made an Edinburgh hero of his do. We first knew Louis Stevenson when his schooldays and teens were past, and he was facing what he called “the equinoctial gales of youth,” and beginning to put his self-taught art of writing into print. He had great railings against his native town in these days, which were somewhere in the heart of the seventies. The “meteorological purgatory” of its climate embittered him, as his frail frame suffered sorely from the bleak blasts. He vowed his fellow-townsmen had a list to one side by reason of having to struggle against the East wind. He gave his spleen vent in “Picturesque Notes of Edinburgh,” yet by way of apology he says, “the place establishes an interest in people’s hearts; go where they will, they find no city of the same distinction, go where they will, they take a pride in their old home.” No one could clothe the historical tales of Edinburgh in more graphic words than this slim son of hers. Often he would talk thereon, and he speaks of his joy, as a lad, in finding “a nugget of cottages at Broughton;” and any bit of old village embedded in the modern town, he espied and rejoiced over. He would frequently drop in to dinner with us, and of an evening he had the run of our smoking-room. After 10 P. M., when a stern old servant went to bed, the “open sesame” to our door was a rattle on the letter-box. He liked this admittance by secret sign, and we liked to hear his special rat-a-tat, for we knew we would then enjoy an hour or two of talk which, he said, “is the harmonious speech of two or more, and is by far the most accessible of pleasures.” He always adhered to the same dress for all entertainments, a shabby, short, velveteen jacket, a loose, Byronic, collared shirt (for a brief space he adopted black flannel ones), and meagre, shabby-looking trousers. His straight hair he wore long, and he looked like an unsuccessful artist, or a poorly-clad but eager student. He was then fragile in figure and, to use a Scottish expression, shilpit looking. There is no English equivalent for shilpit, being lean, starveling, ill-thriven, in one. His dark, bright eyes were his most noticeable and attractive feature, – wide apart, almost Japanese in their shape, and above them a fine brow.

He was pale and sallow, and there was a foreign, almost gypsy look about him, despite his long-headed Scotch ancestry. In the “Inland Voyage,” he complains, he “never succeeded in persuading a single official abroad of his nationality.” I do not wonder he was suspected of being a spy with false passports, for he had a very un-British smack about him; but, slim and pinched-looking though he was, he still commanded notice by his unique appearance and his vivacity of expression. His manners, too, had a foreign air with waving gestures, elaborate bows, and a graceful nimbleness of action.

By our library fire, on the winter evenings, he planned the canoe trip with my brother, and told us in the following season how the record of this “Inland Voyage” progressed. He was also laying future plans for a further trip, as he said, smiling with fun, with another donkey, – this time to the Cevennes. After the “Inland Voyage,” Louis was full of a project to buy a barge and saunter through the canals of Europe, Venice being the far-off terminus. A few select shareholders in this scheme were chosen, mostly artists, for the barge plan was projected in the mellow autumnal days at Fontainebleau Forest where artists abounded. Robert A. Stevenson, Louis’s cousin, then a wielder of the brush, was to be of the company. He, too, though he came of the shrewd Scottish civil engineer stock, had, like his kinsman, a foreign look and a strong touch of Bohemianism in him. He, also, with these alien looks, had his cousin’s attractive power of speech and fertile imagination. The barge company were then all in the hey-day of their youth. They were to paint fame-enduring pictures, as they leisurely sailed through life and Europe, and when bowed, gray-bearded, bald-headed men, they were to cease their journeyings at Venice. There, before St. Marks, a crowd of clamorously eager picture-dealers and lovers of art were to be waiting to purchase the wonderful work of the wanderers. The scene in the piazza of St. Marks on the barge’s arrival, and the excited throng of anxious buyers, the hoary-headed artists, tottering under the weight of canvases, was pictured in glowing colors by their author, when the forest was smelling of the “ripe breath of autumn.” The barge was purchased, but bankruptcy presently stared its shareholders in the face. The picture-dealers of that day were not thirsting to buy shareholders’ pictures. The man of the pen had only ventured on an “Inland Voyage,” and as yet no golden harvest for his work lined the pockets of his velveteen coat. The barge was arrested and, with it, the canoes which have earned an everlasting fame through the “Arethusa’s” pen. They were rescued, the barge sold, and the company wound up.

We saw most of Louis Stevenson in winter, when studies and rough weather held him in Edinburgh. In summer he was off to the country, abroad, or yachting on the West coast, for in his posthumous song he truly says: —

“Merry of soul he sailed on a dayOver the sea to Skye.”

As a talker by the winter’s fireside in these unknown-to-fame days, we give him the crown for being the king of speakers. His reading, his thoughts thereon, his plans, he described with a graphic and nimble tongue, accompanied by the queer, flourishing gesticulations and the “speaking gestures” of his thin, sensitive hands. We teased him unmercifully for his peculiarities in dress and manner. It did not become a youth of his years, we held, to affect a bizarre style, and he held he lived in a free country, and could exercise his own taste at will. Nothing annoyed him more than to affirm his shabby clothes, his long cloak, which he wore instead of an orthodox great-coat, were eccentricities of genius. He certainly liked to be noticed, for he was full of the self-absorbed conceit of youth. If he was not the central figure, he took what we called Stevensonian ways of attracting notice to himself. He would spring up full of a novel notion he had to expound (and his brain teemed with them), or he vowed he could not speak trammelled by a coat, and asked leave to talk in his shirt-sleeves. For all these mannerisms he had to stand a good deal of chaff, which he never resented, though he vehemently defended himself or fell squashed for a brief space in a limp mass into a veritable back seat.

Looking back through the mellowing vista of years these little eccentric whims were all very harmless and guileless, and I own we were hard on the susceptible lad, but, as we told him, it was for his good, and if he had been like ourselves, with a band of brothers, egotisms would have been stamped out in the nursery. He would, after a severe shower of chaff, put out his cigarette, wind himself in his cloak and silently, with an elaborate bow, go off; but, to his credit be it said, he bore no ill-will. His very sensitiveness was to his tormentors conceit. He wrote of himself later that he was “a very humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue he never had much credit for.” He is credited now with it, for as the then “uncharted desert of the future” lies mapped out, we see that his fantastic ways were not affectations, but second nature, to which the life he chose in the subtle south was an appropriate setting. We never, though we gibed him sorely, found fault with his enthusiasm; it was so infectious and refreshing. He was always brimful of new ideas, new ventures, full of sweeping changes, a rabid radical, a religious doubter; though with him, as with many others, there was more “belief in honest doubt than half their creeds.” He had an almost child-like fund of insatiable curiosity. He thirsted to know how it would feel to be in other people’s shoes, from those of a king to a beggar, and he smoked on the hearth rug an endless succession of cigarettes and put his imaginations thereof into words.

He was very sore and somewhat rebellious over writing not being considered a profession, and having to bend to his good father in so far as to join the Scottish bar. For long “R. L. Stevenson, Advocate,” was on the door-plate of 17 Heriot Row. The Parliament House saw him seldom, never therein to practise his bewigged profession. We frightened him much by avowing that a clerk was hunting for him, and even the rich library below the trampling advocate’s feet could not wile him into the old Hall for some time after that false scare. He also heard he had been dubbed “That Gifted Boy and the New Chatterton” by an idle legal wit. That name more nearly persuaded him to have his hair shorn to an orthodox length than any other entreaty. Like all people with character, he had animosities, but he was very just and tolerant in belaboring an adversary with his tongue, which, considering he was in the full bloom of the critical self-satisfiedness of youth, showed a just mind and kindliness of heart. When he had fallen foul of and had hurled some sarcasms at the stupid dulness of people, he next, in his queer inquisitive way, fell to wondering what it would be like to be inside their torpid minds and view things from their dead level. He was fond of travel, of boating, of walking tours, but he was no sportsman, and not even a lover of the Gentle Art. Though his friends were all golfers (and golf then was mostly confined to Scotland), I do not think he ever took a club in hand. His eyes, when outside, were wholly occupied enjoying his surroundings and painting them in words. “Even in the thickest of our streets,” he noted, “the country hill-tops find out a young man’s eyes and set his heart beating for travel and pure air.” He loved to wander round his native city. Duddingstone was one favorite haunt, Queensferry was another, and the Hawes Inn there, now grown into a villafied hotel, with the hawthorn hedges still in its garden, had attractions for him. From it Davie Balfour was “kidnapped,” and Rest-And-Be-Thankful on Corstorphine Hill, where Allan and Davie part after their adventures, we often walked to on Sundays, and all the while he was busy talking and full of plans and projects. The Jekyll and Hyde plot he had in his brain, and told us of in those days. Burke and Hare had a fascination for him. A novel called the “Great North Road” was another plot in his mind. His “Virginibus Puerisque” is dedicated to W. E. Henley, of whom I heard Stevenson speak when he had first discovered him an invalid in the Edinburgh Infirmary. He came in glowing with delight at the genius he had found and began ransacking our shelves for books for him. A few days later he was bristling with indignation because some people who visited the sick objected to the advanced and foreign literary food Stevenson had fed his new acquaintance on, and left a new supply of tract literature in their stead. In the preface of “Virginibus Puerisque,” which is dedicated to Mr. Henley, Stevenson says: “These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life.” To those who knew him in these past days to re-read these papers seem to travel the same road again in the same good company. They recall the slight, boyish-looking youth they knew, and to those who live under the stars which Stevenson thought shone so bright – the Edinburgh street lamps – he was not so much the famous author, as the sympathetic comrade, the unique, ideal talker we welcomed of yore. As he truly said, “The powers and the ground of friendship are a mystery,” but looking back I can discern in part we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be.

Mr. Gilbert Parker’s

Sonnets

By

Richard Henry Stoddard

MR. GILBERT PARKER’S SONNETS. 2

A SEQUENCE of songs, of which this collection of Mr. Parker’s sonnets is an example, is more recondite and remote than most of its readers probably imagine. It would be as difficult to trace its origins as to trace springs, which, flowing from many subterranean sources, unite somewhere in one current, and force their way onward and upward until they appear at last, and are hailed as the well-heads of famous rivers. Who will may trace its beginnings to the lays of the troubadours, which were nothing if they were not amorous: I am content to find them on Italian soil in the sonnets of Petrarch, and on English soil in the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey. What the literatures of Greece and Rome were to men of letters the world over, once they were freed from the seclusion of the manuscripts which sheltered them so long, the literature of Italy was to English men of letters from the days of Chaucer down. They read Italian more than they read Latin and Greek: they wrote Italian, not more clumsily, let us hope, than they wrote English: and they sojourned in Italy, if they could get there, not greatly to their spiritual welfare, if the satirists of their time are to be believed. One need not be deeply read in English literature of the sixteenth century to perceive its obligations to Italian literature, to detect the influences of Boccaccio, and Bandello, and other Italian story-tellers in its drama, and the influence of Italian poets in its poetry, particularly the influence of Petrarch, the sweetness, the grace, the ingenuity of whose amorous effusions captivated the facile nature of so many English singers. He was the master of Wyatt and Surrey, who, tracking their way through the snow of his footprints, introduced the sonnet form into English verse, and, so far as they might, the sonnet spirit, as they understood it. They allowed themselves, however, licenses of variation in the construction of their octaves and sextets, which, judging from his avoidance of them, would have displeased Petrarch, – a proceeding which was followed by their immediate successors, who seldom observed the strict laws of the Petrarchian sonnet. Whether the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey were expressions of genuine emotion, or were merely poetic exercises, is not evident in the sonnets themselves, which are formal and frigid productions. They were handed round in manuscript copies, and greatly admired in the courtly circles in which their authors moved, and ten years after the death of Surrey were collected by Master Richard Tottell, to whom belongs the honor of publishing the first miscellany of English verse. That this miscellany, the original title of which was “Songs and Sonnets written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey and other,” was very popular is certain from the number of editions through which it passed, and from the number of similar publications by which it was followed. It was an epoch-making book, like the “Reliques” of good Bishop Percy two centuries afterwards, and like that rare miscellany was fruitful of results in the direction of what chiefly predominated there, – the current of personal expression in amatory sonnets. The first notable scholar of Wyatt and Surrey, a scholar who surpassed his masters in every poetical quality, was Sir Philip Sidney, whose sequence of sonnets was given to the world five years after his death as “Astrophel and Stella.” This was in 1591. Samuel Daniel appeared the next year with a sequence entitled “Delia,” Michael Drayton a year later with a sequence entitled “Idea,” and two years after that came Edmund Spenser with a sequence entitled “Amoretti.” The frequency of the sonnet form in English verse was determined at this time by this cluster of poets, to which the names of Constable, Griffin, and others might be added, and determined for all time by their great contemporary, whose proficiency as a sonneteer, outside of his comedies, was chiefly confined to the knowledge of “Mr. W. H.” and his friends until 1609. To what extent this treasury of sonnets is read now I have no means of knowing; but it cannot, I think, be a large one, the fashion of verse has changed so much since they were written. They should be read for what they are rather than what we might wish them to be; in other words, from the Elizabethan and not the Victorian point of view. So read they seem to me “choicely good,” as Walton said of their like, though I cannot say that they are much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age. Only two of these sonnet sequences are known to have been inspired by real persons, Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella,” which celebrates his enamourment of Lady Rich, and consists of one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs, and Spenser’s “Amoretti,” which celebrates his admiration for the unknown beauty whom he married during his residence in Ireland, and which consists of eighty-eight sonnets, and an epithalamium. Of the two sequences, the Sidneyan is the more poetical, and making allowance for the artificial manner in which it is written, the more impassioned, certain of the sonnets authenticating their right to be considered genuine by virtue of their qualities as portraiture, their self-betrayal of the character of Sidney, and the vividness of their picturesque descriptions or suggestions. Such I conceive to be the twenty-seventh (“Because I oft, in dark, abstracted guise”), the thirty-first (“With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies”), the forty-first (“Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance”), the fifty-fourth (“Because I breathe not love to every one”), the eighty-fourth (“Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be”), and the one hundred and third (“O happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear”). If Sidney had followed the advice of his Muse in the first of these sonnets, that noble heart would surely have taught him to write in a simpler and more sincere fashion than he permitted himself to do in “Astrophel and Stella,” which is more important for what it promised than for what it achieved.

“Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write,”

The ease of a more practised poet than Sidney lived to be is manifest in Spenser’s “Amoretti,” – as manifest there, I think, as in “The Faerie Queene,” the musical cadences of whose stanzas and, to a certain extent, its rhythmical construction are translated into sonnetry; but, taken as a whole, they are as hard reading as most easy writing. They are fluent and diffuse, but devoid of felicities of expression, and the note of distinction which Sidney sometimes attains. Daniel and Drayton were reckoned excellent poets by their contemporaries, and measured by their standards, and within their limitations, they were; but their excellence did not embrace the emotion which the writing of amatory sonnets demands, nor the art of simulating it successfully, for the “Delia” of the one was as surely an ideal mistress as the “Idea” of the other. The substance of Drayton’s sonnets is more prosaic than that of Daniel’s and his touch is less felicitous, is so infelicitous, in fact, that only one of the sixty-three of which the sequence is composed lingers in the memory as the expression of what may have been genuine feeling. The sonnets of Daniel are distinguished for sweetness of versification, for graces of expression, and for a vein of tender and pensive thought which was native to him. One of them (there are fifty-seven in all) which begins, “Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable night,” recalls a similar invocation to sleep in “Astrophel and Stella,” and others, especially the nineteenth, which begins, “Restore thy tresses to the golden ore,” remind us of some of the sonnets of Shakespeare, whose first master in sonnetry was as certainly Samuel Daniel, as in dramatic writing Christopher Marlowe.