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An essay by Walter Pater |
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Mr. Gosse's Poems |
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Title: Mr. Gosse's Poems Author: Walter Pater [More Titles by Pater] [On Viol and Flute. By Edmund Gosse.] PERHAPS no age of literature, certainly no age of literature in England, has been so rich as ours in excellent secondary poetry; and it is with our poetry (in a measure) as with our architecture, constrained by the nature of the case to be imitative. Our generation, quite reasonably, is not very proud of its architectural creations; confesses that it knows too much--knows, but cannot do. And yet we could name certain modern churches in London, for instance, to which posterity may well look back puzzled.--Could these exquisitely pondered buildings have been indeed works of the nineteenth century? Were they not the subtlest creations of the age in which Gothic art was spontaneous? In truth, we have had instances of workmen, who, through long, large, devoted study of the handiwork of the past, have done the thing better, with a more fully enlightened consciousness, with full intelligence of what those early workmen only guessed at. And something like this is true of some of our best secondary poetry. It is the least that is true--the least that can fairly be said in praise of the poetic work of Mr. Edmund Gosse. Of course there can be no exact parallel between arts so different as architecture and poetic composition: But certainly in the poetry of our day also, though it has been in some instances powerfully initiative and original, there is great scholarship, a large comparative acquaintance with the poetic methods of earlier workmen, and a very subtle intelligence of their charm. Of that fine scholarship in this matter there is no truer example than Mr. Gosse. It is manifested especially in the even finish of his varied work, in the equality of his level--a high level--in species of composition so varied as the three specimens which follow. Far away, in late spring, "by the sea in the south," the swallows are still lingering around "white Algiers." In Mr. Gosse's "Return of the Swallows," the northern birds--lark and thrush--have long been calling to them:--
Compare the following stanzas, from a kind of palinode, "1870-1871," years of the Franco-German war and the Parisian Commune:-- The songs of pale emaciate hours, For men whose robes are dashed with blood, For men whose lips are blanched and white,
Below us through the valley crept a river, There is no night-time in the northern summer, But when the blue snow-shadows grew intenser And wandered downward to the Lap-men's dwelling,
He takes, indeed, the old themes, and manages them better than their old masters, with more delicate cadences, more delicate transitions of thought, through long dwelling on earlier practice. He seems to possess complete command of the technique of poetry--every form of what may be called skill of hand in it; and what marks in him the final achievement of poetic scholarship is the perfect balance his work presents of so many and varied effects, as regards both matter and form. The memories of a large range of poetic reading are blent into one methodical music so perfectly that at times the notes seem almost simple. Sounding almost all the harmonies of the modern lyre, he has, perhaps as a matter of course, some of the faults also, the "spasmodic" and other lapses, which from age to age, in successive changes of taste, have been the "defects" of excellent good "qualities." He is certainly not the-- Pathetic singer, with no strength to sing, as he says of the white-throat on the tulip-tree, Whose leaves unfinished ape her faulty song. In effect, a large compass of beautiful thought and expression, from poetry old and new, have become to him matter malleable anew for a further and finer reach of literary art. And with the perfect grace of an intaglio, he shows, as in truth the minute intaglio may do, the faculty of structure, the logic of poetry. "The New Endymion" is a good instance of such sustained power. Poetic scholar!--If we must reserve the sacred name of "poet" to a very small number, that humbler but perhaps still rarer title is due indisputably to Mr. Gosse. His work is like exquisite modern Latin verse, into the academic shape of which, discreet and coy, comes a sincere, deeply felt consciousness of modern life, of the modern world as it is. His poetry, according with the best intellectual instincts of our critical age, is as pointed out recently by a clever writer in the Nineteenth Century, itself a kind of exquisite, finally revised criticism. Not that he fails in originality; only, the graces, inborn certainly, but so carefully educated, strike one more. The sense of his originality comes to one as but an after-thought; and certainly one sign of his vocation is that he has made no conscious effort to be original. In his beautiful opening poem of the "White-throat," giving his book its key-note, he seems, indeed, to accept that position, reasons on and justifies it. Yet there is a clear note of originality (so it seems to us) in the peculiar charm of his strictly personal compositions; and, generally, in such touches as he gives us of the soul, the life, of the nineteenth century. Far greater, we think, than the charm of poems strictly classic in interest, such as the "Praise of Dionysus," exquisite as that is, is the charm of those pieces in which, so to speak, he transforms, by a kind of colour-change, classic forms and associations into those--say! of Thames-side--pieces which, though in manner or subject promising a classic entertainment, almost unaware bring you home.--No! after all, it is not imagined Greece, dreamy, antique Sicily, but the present world about us, though mistakable for a moment, delightfully, for the land, the age, of Sappho, of Theocritus:-- Quite congruously with the placid, erudite, quality of his culture, although, like other poets, he sings much of youth, he is often most successful in the forecast, the expression, of the humours, the considerations, that in truth are more proper to old age:-- As silent rivers into silent lakes,
Old, decadent, indeed, it would seem with Mr. Gosse to be also returning to the thoughts, the fears, the consolations, of its youth in Greece, in Italy:-- Then let me joy to be
My life is like the single dewy star And if, among the noiseless grasses, Death For I should pass, but all the world would be The light is flying; in the silver-blue
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