Reviews

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 17, 1887.)

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.  Their compilers display a degraded passion for chronicling small beer, and rake out the dust-heap of history in an ardent search after rubbish.  Mr. Walter Scott, however, has made a new departure and has published a calendar in which every day of the year is made beautiful for us by means of an elegant extract from the poems of Mr. Alfred Austin.  This, undoubtedly, is a step in the right direction.  It is true that such aphorisms as

Graves are a mother’s dimples
   When we complain,

or

The primrose wears a constant smile,
And captive takes the heart,

can hardly be said to belong to the very highest order of poetry, still, they are preferable, on the whole, to the date of Hannah More’s birth, or of the burning down of Exeter Change, or of the opening of the Great Exhibition; and though it would be dangerous to make calendars the basis of Culture, we should all be much improved if we began each day with a fine passage of English poetry.  How far this desirable result can be attained by a use of the volume now before us is, perhaps, open to question, but it must be admitted that its anonymous compiler has done his work very conscientiously, nor will we quarrel with him for the fact that he constantly repeats the same quotation twice over.  No doubt it was difficult to find in Mr. Austin’s work three hundred and sixty-five different passages really worthy of insertion in an almanac, and, besides, our climate has so degenerated of late that there is no reason at all why a motto perfectly suitable for February should not be equally appropriate when August has set in with its usual severity.  For the misprints there is less excuse.  Even the most uninteresting poet cannot survive bad editing.

Prefixed to the Calendar is an introductory note from the pen of Mr. William Sharp, written in that involved and affected style which is Mr. Sharp’s distinguishing characteristic, and displaying that intimate acquaintance with Sappho’s lost poems which is the privilege only of those who are not acquainted with Greek literature.  As a criticism it is not of much value, but as an advertisement it is quite excellent.  Indeed, Mr. Sharp hints mysteriously at secret political influence, and tells us that though Mr. Austin ‘sings with Tityrus’ yet he ‘has conversed with Æneas,’ which, we suppose, is a euphemistic method of alluding to the fact that Mr. Austin once lunched with Lord Beaconsfield.  It is for the poet, however, not for the politician, that Mr. Sharp reserves his loftiest panegyric and, in his anxiety to smuggle the author of Leszko the Bastard and Grandmother’s Teaching into the charmed circle of the Immortals, he leaves no adjective unturned, quoting and misquoting Mr. Austin with a recklessness that is absolutely fatal to the cause he pleads.  For mediocre critics are usually safe in their generalities; it is in their reasons and examples that they come so lamentably to grief.  When, for instance, Mr. Sharp tells us that lines with the ‘natural magic’ of Shakespeare, Keats and Coleridge are ‘far from infrequent’ in Mr. Austin’s poems, all that we can say is that we have never come across any lines of the kind in Mr. Austin’s published works, but it is difficult to help smiling when Mr. Sharp gravely calls upon us to note ‘the illuminative significance’ of such a commonplace verse as

My manhood keeps the dew of morn,
   And what have I to give;
Being right glad that I was born,
   And thankful that I live.

Nor do Mr. Sharp’s constant misquotations really help him out of his difficulties.  Such a line as

A meadow ribbed with drying swathes of hay,

has at least the merit of being a simple, straightforward description of an ordinary scene in an English landscape, but not much can be said in favour of

A meadow ribbed with dying swathes of hay,

which is Mr. Sharp’s own version, and one that he finds ‘delightfully suggestive.’  It is indeed suggestive, but only of that want of care that comes from want of taste.

On the whole, Mr. Sharp has attempted an impossible task.  Mr. Austin is neither an Olympian nor a Titan, and all the puffing in Paternoster Row cannot set him on Parnassus.

His verse is devoid of all real rhythmical life; it may have the metre of poetry, but it has not often got its music, nor can there be any true delicacy in the ear that tolerates such rhymes as ‘chord’ and ‘abroad.’  Even the claim that Mr. Sharp puts forward for him, that his muse takes her impressions directly from nature and owes nothing to books, cannot be sustained for a moment.  Wordsworth is a great poet, but bad echoes of Wordsworth are extremely depressing, and when Mr. Austin calls the cuckoo a

Voyaging voice

and tells us that

   The stockdove broods
Low to itself,

we must really enter a protest against such silly plagiarisms.

Perhaps, however, we are treating Mr. Sharp too seriously.  He admits himself that it was at the special request of the compiler of the Calendar that he wrote the preface at all, and though he courteously adds that the task is agreeable to him, still he shows only too clearly that he considers it a task and, like a clever lawyer or a popular clergyman, tries to atone for his lack of sincerity by a pleasing over-emphasis.  Nor is there any reason why this Calendar should not be a great success.  If published as a broad-sheet, with a picture of Mr. Austin ‘conversing with Æneas,’ it might gladden many a simple cottage home and prove a source of innocent amusement to the Conservative working-man.

Days of the Year: A Poetic Calendar from the Works of Alfred Austin.  Selected and edited by A. S.  With Introduction by William Sharp.  (Walter Scott.)

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