CONTENTS. PAGE VII. Why does Shakespeare's Hamlet' differ from the Amleth' Story of Belleforest? By Mrs. THE POETRY OF CARMEN SYLVA.1 BY MAURICE A. GEROTHWOHL. [Read March 25th, 1914.] REPUBLICS have ever been keen wooers of foreign Princes, and the Republic of Letters, through the medium of its Senates, the Academies, has shown itself in this respect a particularly eager wooer. But I doubt whether the Academies, as a rule, have done their wooing as all wooing should be done; I mean, not only with due discrimination and strength of purpose, but with fearlessness and dash. Their advances have often gone no further than to crave a colourless exchange of courtesies, the humble request and yet humbler acceptance of a distant patronage. True, a connection of this kind may lend something to the outward glamour of a learned or artistic corporation, and I would not deny the importance of its public bearing, especially when it can serve as a social hint to a pleasure-seeking and material generation, a generation heedless of all such intellectual activities as are not manifestly nor immediately convertible into specie or short bills. Such an honour, such a privilege, however, are unsubstantial; they contribute but little to the intrinsic worth or real effectiveness of the society that begs the favour. Nor is the prince who bestows the favour more likely to draw from it any appreciable gratification. At the most, its bestowal will wring from him the quiet, well-bred, but wholly formal, smile, which Queen Elizabeth of Roumania has crystallised for us with a playful if pathetic irony in her Thoughts of a Queen: "Strictly speaking, a prince requires nothing but eyes and ears; he does not need a mouth, except to smile." It is such aphorisms as that, or, again, as this: "A little contradiction animates conversation. This explains why Courts are so dull"; it is such aphorisms, from such a pen, which make my present task, if not an easy one, a task which is, to say the least, congenial. For they denote in their Royal author, along (1) An address delivered on the occasion of the admittance of H.M. the Queen of Roumania as a Fellow of the Society. with an unmitigated scorn for etiquette and insincerity, that intellectual tolerance which is, as she herself has put it, a token of the highest culture. Now, bolder perhaps in this than some academies, or at least happier than they, in that our boldness has been promptly crowned, it is, indeed, as a colleague and co-worker, not as a queen, that we have approached Carmen Sylva; and we have wooed her, not into patronage, but into Fellowship. And since it is as a Fellow that Carmen Sylva has been willing to link her name with ours, to become, as it were, one of our body corporate, it is then, as a colleague and co-worker, that we may claim, that we should claim, to treat her, in fairness both to her work and to ourselves. She has made literature-pure literature-the passionate devotion of her life; not through any shirking of the cares of rulership, as Roumanian history would testify, but in obedience to an early call, to a driving impulse from within, her temperament as a writer and as a poet. For, when, her duties as a Queen fulfilled, she turns to literature, among the various forms of poetry-epic, philosophic, lyricalor of prose-romances, novels, fairy tales-she will cultivate in either group those forms of it which owe most to the imagination and least to the topicalities of life; those from which the trappings of the more temporal sovereignty are shed according as the inner and more spiritual personality tends to clothe itself in a more independent garb. "Talent alone raises us," she writes, adding: "If you are to be great, your person must disappear behind your work." Hence it is to talent alone that she would owe her place in literature; hence, also, to gratify her wish, it is to talent alone that we must look. Hence, finally, I shall omit from this survey, as foreign to my purpose, the fascinating volume made up of her childhood's reminiscences, From Memory's Shrine. For the critic so difficult is it to hold the balance evenly as between the talents and the advantages of the author, when confronted with works of this character; so difficult is it to appraise exactly how far the public interest aroused by such a book has been. due, on the one hand, to the merits of the writer, and, on the other, to the glamour of the mighty events, to the curiosity in private anecdote and in the exalted personages who move therein. And yet, even here, in following the course of Carmen Sylva's childhood, it is more often the realm of dreams, of the imagination, that we behold or traverse in her company: "For in childhood Romance is Reality and Reality a very poor sort of Romance." And she is sorry for the children of the present day, deterred, forbidden as they are, by the cramping influences of our modern and utilitarian education, from spreading wide their wings: "Would not some of these little sceptics laugh at the idea?" she asks Not theirs, indeed, her gift of wonder. But we know to what uses on their behalf she has put this, her priceless gift, in order to supply and remedy their wants and needs; what she has done to give back to the disinherited of childhood their forsaken paradise, the fairy Kingdom; we know the charming tales which have won for her a place between Grimm and Perrault, by the side of Andersen. The graces of all three are her possession; but to their super-sane morality, which male selfishness has sometimes marred, her womanly, her motherly instincts have added something that is indefinably more tender and more uplifting. And my excuse for not quoting from her fairy tales must be that, after all, they represent only one facet, and that, however exquisite, a minor one, in her poetical physiognomy. And if this be not true of her longer, more worldly, and more realistic novels-never very worldly nor very realistic, however, as you may readily conceive-still, I cannot linger over these. They have been for the most part written in collaboration; they do not, therefore, come within the scope of so purely personal a study. Of her shorter romances. her novelettes, a good many are moral allegories, yet another kind of fable or fairy story, but intended this time for the benefit of grown-up readers; while the most attractive are studies in racial character and local colour, all moist and fragrant with an idealism recalling George Sand's rustic sketches. Here Carmen Sylva tells mainly of the Roumanian peasant's life, which she portrays to us in all the shades of its poetical complexion, its alternations of elemental tenderness and hate, of burning toil as of glorious rest in the fields of golden |