consolidated the dynasty, but also had done away with the legend that represented him as desirous of a foreign war in order to add to his prestige." He added exultantly: "No one can say so at present, because, after France has so positively affirmed its allegiance to the Empire, it would be madness for me to risk losing popularity through a war which, even if victorious, would nevertheless materially impoverish the country." But he seems not to have noticed, or to have wilfully disregarded, the fact that the vote of Paris was hostile to him; and Paris then, as so often before, was potent in the making and unmaking of governments and rulers. From the many excellent pen portraits that the book contains, and that in fact make up the bulk of its contents, a few will here be chosen for partial reproduction. The artist The artist lets us know that he had familiar access to all the most distinguished and interesting persons present in Paris at the time of his sojourn there, and we are not unwilling to accept his good offices and make their acquaintance through his pages. Of Thiers he writes: "I had known him even before I came to Paris in an official capacity, had often seen him at the houses of some mutual friends, and we came to know each other very well. He was one of the cleverest, nicest little men in the world, and even among the many interesting people who abounded in France at that time he stood out conspicuously as one of the pleasantest. He had many enemies, which is not to be wondered at if one takes into consideration the vivacity which he always displayed in his likes and dislikes, and the bitterness, or rather the caustic tendencies, of his tongue. But friends and foes alike were loud in their praise of his intelligence, and especially of his wit. During the whole reign of Louis Philippe, M. Thiers was a conspicuous figure in Paris society, and, strange to relate, this petit bourgeois had succeeded in entering the most exclusive circles of the Faubourg St. Germain, and contrived to install himself in the favours of its leaders, masculine as well as feminine. He was essentially the type of a middle-class man, in spite of the high offices which he had held, and never could rid himself of the habit of tying a napkin round his neck at meals, when he was in his family circle, neither would he go out without the umbrella that remained the distinctive sign of that epoch still known as the 'époque de Louis Philippe,' where the bourgeoisie reigned supreme, and where the Sovereign tried by all means to win for himself the sympathies of the mob by coming down to its level." The following characteristic passage gives a glimpse of a recently deceased French writer of note. "I have met most of the celebrities of modern France at the Duc d'Aumale's lunches. He was very catholic as to the people whom he invited, and only required them to be amiable and to listen well to him, without attempting to interrupt. Among his great friends was Jules Lemaître, the Academician, an amusing, intelligent little man, rather void of manners, who buzzed about in a way that would have been aggressive had it not said gauche things, the value of which did not been so funny. He was full of wit, but sometimes appear to strike his otherwise critical mind." Concerning another and a greater author, and his chief work, the following is of interest: "Taine used to spend the greater part of the year at Menthon, in Savoy, on the borders of the Lake of Annecy, and it was during a visit which I paid him there, from Aix-les-Bains, where I was undergoing a cure, that I had with him the longest and perhaps the most interesting conversation in the whole time of our intercourse with each other. We discussed many subjects, and among others his great work, the Origines de la France Contemporaine.' . . . He hated anarchy, he thought it his duty to show it up in all its vivid horror, and he tried to write the story of that tragedy with the same impartiality he would have brought to bear on the description of it in any other country than his own. As he told me on that day: 'C'est un pauvre patriotisme que celui qui s'imagine que l'on doit excuser les crimes de son pays, simplement par ce qu'on en est un citoyen.'" In this connection may be noted the author's rather rash assertion, on an earlier page, that "patriotism with Frenchmen is mostly a question of words; it rarely goes beyond phrases, full of enthusiasm but devoid of real meaning." French love of country and French readiness to make the last sacrifice for country are too well attested, too apparent at this very moment, to admit of question; and the author himself, in the course of his narrative, cites several instances of conspicuously patriotic conduct on the part of distinguished Frenchmen he has known. The writer believes himself to have made a few original contributions to French history of the later nineteenth century. For example. he was one of those who visited the Tuileries on the evening of that memorable fourth of September which saw the fall of Napoleon III. No one then knew what had become of the Empress, though all sorts of rumors were in the air, and when he visited the Palace he found that no one there believed she had taken flight. "Indeed, he adds—“and this is a detail that I believe has never been recorded elsewhere I found one of her maids preparing her bed as usual!" And again, speaking of the Comte de Chambord, he says: "One has spoken of the flag and of the reluctance of the Pretender to accept the tricolour, but what has never been revealed to this day is that a compromise had been suggested by a clever French politician who had been con sulted." This compromise was that the tricolour should continue to be the national flag while the white banner of his ancestors should be the new monarch's personal emblem and be borne before him on all occasions of ceremony. But even this not dishonorable arrangement was finally rejected by the high-principled descendant of Louis XIV. The details of this affair the writer believes have not hitherto been fully understood by the world at large. Like his former work, "Behind the Veil at the Russian Court," Count Vassili's present volume is full of the curious political information - possibly sometimes misinformation - and personal gossip with which a veteran diplomat is likely to find his memory well stored as he looks back over his professional career, and he writes in a way to hold the attention, though his anonymous translator leaves something to be desired on his part. The work is well illustrated. PERCY F. BICKNELL. DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.* When one sees William Drummond of Hawthornden - whose very name along with Kit Marlowe's and Michael Drayton's had such a special fragrance for Charles Lamb,- in a smartly bound two-volume edition with an apparatus of cuts, variant readings, and notes on sources that would do credit to an editor of a Greek poet, one is likely to receive such a labor of love with a rather absurd ungraciousness. One remembers the epitaph which Drummond, in a lovely sonnet, requested Sir William Alexander to engrave on his stone. "Here Damon lies, whose songs did sometime grace, The murmuring Esk; may roses shade the place!" Turning from these quiet-colored lines, one feels for a moment that such a monumental edition of Drummond as that of Professor Kastner is in positively bad taste. To be sure this is largely dilettanteish sentimentality. Yet Professor Kastner has not given us the Drummond that we are likely to pull down from our shelves over and over again. And And we have a right to tax him with leaving his edition so meagre in intimate, beautiful utterances about Drummond by famous critics. We have a right to tax the editor with his own severe refusal to say much of anything himself about Drummond, except to weigh general estimates coldly, to make bare citations * POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN. Edited by L. E. Kastner, M. A. In two volumes. With portraits and facsimiles. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. of sources, to list editions and portraits. Of course, this is the orthodox way of producing critical editions under the shadow of universities. And Professor Kastner has done the orthodox thing with a care that reveals his patient years of research. But why must such work be forever divorced from the utterances quaint and shrewd and magical that might tempt a few who are not literary ascetics to turn the pages of this charming old recluse who proves after all to be so far the reverse of ascetic himself? Is it not as important to quote and comment at length on the odd but strangely acute phrases of Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips, for instance, as to unearth an obscure Italian source of a love-sonnet? To me that estimate of Drummond which David Masson has so plausibly, conjectured to show the influence of Milton himself is a phrase that should be carefully weighed in every complete edition. Drummond, says Phillips or Milton, was "A genius the most polite and verdant that ever the Scottish nation produced." The ideal editor of Drummond should write a paragraph on that one bizarre but most expressive word "verdant." For while Drummond's amorous and religious poetry seems to the reader, in the languor that Drummond often begets, to be alike in a golden monotone there is in that golden monotone a quiet life that is perpetually alluring however close the dependence on a model or however interminable the recurrence of favored and self-indulging phrases. Whoever the French or Italian whom Drummond bettered, whatever the reiteration of subject or mood, there is the transforming alchemy of the man Drummond and his beloved retreat Hawthornden which David Masson has described in a manner which now seems of an archaic school of criticism because of its tinge of sentimentalism and its incorrigibly garrulous ways, but which, faded as it may be, has that faint fragrance about it which does not lull but quietly awakens. You ponder at leisure with the critic about the origin of certain mysterious caves said to be once the hiding place of Bruce and you wonder whether they were the dark strongholds of ancient Pictish kings. "Whether of Pictish antiquity, or of later, puzzles your powers of conjecture; but it is with an increased respect for the whole mansion that you emerge again in the open air, after having seen what ghastly secrecies of some inscrutable past underlie its rocky foundations. It is with this sense that after observing whatever else is apparent to close inspection of the exterior, you continue the walk which leads from it, on one side of the romantic glen, in the direction of Roslin. Turning in this path to look at the house now and again, at points where there is an opening through the trees, you see it as artists most delight to take it, a tall mass of gables and pinnacles shooting aloft from its crazy socket in the ravine. So leaving it, you may follow the path till it brings you down to a wooden bridge crossing the Esk. This bridge has a gate on it, so constructed that, if you pass through, you cannot reopen it from the other side. If you do pass it, you are in the public pathway, two miles of which will take you, still through the depths of the glen, with the stream now on your left, to the castle and Chapel of Roslin. But, if you would rather keep the sensation of Hawthornden unmixed, then, though it is unusual, there is nothing to prevent you from stopping your walk at the bridge and retracing your steps so as to renew your sight of the house in all the aspects in which you have already beheld it, only in reversed order. A noble old sycamore, just in front of the house, five hundred years old at least, may then arrest your attention, as well as the clipped clumps of yew which you noticed before. And so, regaining the road by the ascending avenue, you have seen Hawthornden and will remember it forever." This pleasant glimpse of Drummond's retreat, with some reflection about the peculiarly melancholy, yet serene life-giving magic which we may well assume to be its perennial properties, will help us as we read the poems themselves to understand precisely that sober freshness in Drummond's style which Milton or Phillips described with the queer but most happy adjective "verdant." But all this places a little too much emphasis on Drummond, the dreamer. All supreme artists are equally dreamers and doers. Drummond was not a supreme artist and his dreaming overbalanced his doing. But in order to appreciate fully his poetry we must remember that he was not a mere dreamer. To be sure his dabblings in military mechanics (in which he emulated at a great distance the versatility of Leonardo da Vinci and other supreme artists of the Renaissance), are not reassuring. King Charles granted the poet a letter patent for a number of proposed inventions including among more than a dozen others equally miraculous: "Instruments of the mortar or siphon kind: whereof the one, on account of its signal use in defending walls and ships, and its truly wonderful speed, is called λаTоσкεdασTIKOV, vulgarly, The FlatScourer; the other, because of its special utility for shattering the masts, sails, rigging, and oars of ships, receives the name 'EvvTμNTIKOV, vulgarly, The Cutter." We turn with a smile from Drummond the mechanic to Drummond the politician. Here we find him, like Milton, with a song dying on his lips as he turns eagerly to write political pamphlets-but not on Milton's side. Drummond does not seem to have gone much from his quiet retreat in his long and quixotic championship of King Charles. But his pen proved fluent and very cogent. Let the poet's readers remember his defiant pamphlets written when the Puritans were rapidly sweeping over all. Judicious readers can then return to the richly colored courtier poems that came from quiet Hawthornden with a feeling that they glow more with conviction than with a base fire for preferment. Readers may even return with a delighted smile to that most attractive youthful hyperbole in "Teares on the Death of Moeliades" (1613), Drummond's first publication, an elegy on the early death of Prince Henry so widely mourned by the young poets of the Jacobean era. "Moeliades, O that by Ister's streams, Amongst shrill-sounding trumpets, flaming gleams Of warm encrimsoned swords, and cannons' roar, Balls thick as rain poured by the Caspian shore, Amongst crushed lances, ringing helms and shields, Dismembered bodies ravishing the fields In Turkish blood made red like Mars's star, And in dear arras virgins fair had wrought The bays and trophies to thy country brought; While some new Homer, imping pens to fame, Deaf Nilus' dwellers had made hear thy name." Readers remembering Drummond's unflinching loyalty in the dark days of the Stuarts will also read from a later poem, with a delight unalloyed by morbid distrust, these charmingly inappropriate and fantastic promises to King James if he will but tarry long in his visit to Scotland. "The wanton wood-nymphs of the verdant spring But the court poems are too garish to represent what, despite Drummond's love of conventional mannerisms, I have called his sober freshness. His love poems will serve our purpose better. Here we find the recluse. Content in his own words, "Content with my books and the use of my eyes, I learnt even from boyhood to live beneath my fortune; and dwelling by myself as much as I can, I neither sigh for nor seek aught that is outside me." Always ready to hurl a courageous pamphlet in the teeth of Puritan and Covenanter when a beloved Stuart needed defence, Drummond was nevertheless much happier as far as his personal interests were concerned, when he could write unmolested of the mystery of the universe or of the glories and sorrows of earthly love. In these days when it is still fashionable among students of English literature to explain away all Petrarchan love affairs, there nevertheless arises no reason for doubting the story of Drummond's youthful mistress and her untimely death. To be sure Petrarch mourned the death of his Laura, and Drummond's sonnets are often but paraphrases of French and Italian Petrarchans. But the critic who questions Drummond's sincerity for such reasons is truly purblind from having looked too long at books and too little at life. Two lovely moods predominate in Drummond's best love poems, two moods so mutually sympathetic that they seem to blend readily in that golden monotone which I have already noted as characteristic of Drummond. Though one of these moods is that of exaltation it is an exaltation which (I say it without fear of a phrase which contradicts itself) is so pensive and gentle that it has intimate kinship with the other mood, the melancholy of bereavement. Turn to one of his most beautiful lyrics of exaltation. “Like the Idalian queen, Her hair about her eyne, With neck and breast's ripe apples to be seen, In Cyprus' gardens gathering those fair flow'rs I saw, but fainting saw, my paramours. With silence on her gaz'd; The flow'rs did smile, like those upon her face, A hyacinth I wish'd me in her hand." Now this is exaltation but exaltation far removed from that of Spenser's exaltation in the "Epithalamion." It is exaltation, but an exaltation so gentle and timorous that it is half prophetic and we expect to pass with but the ghost of a modulation to the exquisite elegiac key that comes with the death of the beloved. "My lute, be as thou wast when thou didst grow With thy green mother in some shady grove, When immelodious winds but made thee move, And birds on thee their ramage did bestow. Sith that dear voice which did thy sounds approve, Which used in such harmonious strains to flow, Is reft from earth to tune those spheres above, What art thou but a harbinger of woe? Thy pleasing notes be pleasing notes no more, But orphan wailings to the fainting ear; Each stop a sigh, each sound draws forth a tear, Be, therefore, silent as in woods before; Or, if that any hand to touch thee deign, Like widowed turtle still her loss complain." Now if the modern reader, used to considering the thrust and sting of the modern love lyric as the only badge of sincerity, is troubled and dubious over the quaintly and conventionally cut jewels of Petrarchanism let him turn for a luminous commentary on this sober freshness for a proof of the sincerity of this golden monotone, to the reticent but strangely intimate words written by the poet to Sir William Alexander four years after the loss of the beloved. "And therefore, that now I live, that I enjoy a dear idleness, sweet solitariness, I have it of Him and not from Man. Trust in Him; prefer not to certainties uncertain hopes. Conspiravit in dolores nostros haec aestas; sola Dies potent tantum lenire dolorem, for we have what to plain and regret together and I what alone I must lament." But Drummond's greatest mood, one which neither the memory of the breathing and warm body of his mistress nor the loyalty which always beat for King James and King Charles could keep long from the spirit that clung so close to the shadows and wayward lights of Hawthornden, was a favorite mood of those Elizabethan predecessors, his poetic brethren: the long pondering over "this vapour, smoke, or spark called Life," the contemplation of mutability, the earnest scrutiny of the signs. of a life hereafter. Like his Elizabethan kinsmen who achieved with such a large practical sense, not like the more restricted orthodox, but like the equally pagan and Christian men, the Marlowes, the Spensers, the Raleighs, the Shakespeares, Drummond realized that meditation on eternal things, the destiny of man was of the first practical importance in the conduct of ordinary daily life. In our generation, when most church-goers are irreligious because of their lassitude (that deadly sin which the old ecclesiasts called sloth, accidia) and because in their lassitude they listen to pastors who talk languidly about "practical Christianity" (a phrase which really means positivism or mere social morality without religion), men may well go to Drummond to learn that perspective which comes only from true religious meditation and without which, as Drummond's countryman Carlyle warned us only a generation ago, no race can survive for long. One does not need to take the mythological literalness of the following sonnet as gospel nor even believe in anything like the concept at the heart of it to realize that it has a spaciousness of reflective power, the lack of which is one of our gravest and most paralyzing checks to progress, not only among the desolate pews of a modern church but in the slums where we would grip the throat of Poverty and try to look steadily at his blue lips and leering eyes. "If with such passing beauty, choice delights, Of whose bright sun ours here is but a beam! All joy is but annoy, all concord strife, Matched with your endless bliss and happy life." There is at once, I say, something suffocating in this apparently orthodox primness and conventional imagery and something liberating in its bold flight into the universe where we must all soar freely at times if we really hope to cleanse the terrible finiteness of our tenement districts. I am not urging that old doctrine which makes many modern reformers so impatient. I do not recommend the prayer of the religious quietist who then goes about his own business and leaves God to do the social reforming. I merely assert that a passionate contemplation of the universe is essential to practical reform. This we have forgotten and this we can learn again in the quiet and steadfast glow of Drummond's poetry, or even more beautiful, I think, his noble prose threnody of mankind, "The Cypress Grove," especially in the great skeptical or mournful passages that precede the calm faith of the close. Death, as it seems to many, "Death is the sad estranger of acquaintance, the eternal divorcer of marriage, the ravisher of children from their parents, the stealer of parents from their children, the interrer of fame, the sole cause of forgetfulness, by which the living talk of those gone away as of so many shadows, or fabulous paladins. . . . The ruins of fanes, palaces, and other magnificent frames, yield a sad prospect to the soul, and how should it consider the wreck of such a wonderful masterpiece as is the body without horror?" The poet rises quickly from personal fear to a calm and spacious vision. "This is the highway of mortality, our general home; behold what millions have trod it before thee, what multitudes shall follow after thee, with them which at that same instant run! In so universal a calamity, if Death be one, private complaints cannot be heard; with so many royal palaces, it is small loss to see thy poor cabin burn. Thy death is a piece of the order of this All." Like an impetuous Elizabethan adventurer on seas and in majestic dreams, Drummond is almost eager for death that he may enrich his knowledge now so imperfect, that he may understand better man's blind, audacious aspirations. For here on earth: "Science, by the diverse notions of this globe of the brain of man, are become opinions, nay, errors, and leave the imagination in a thousand labyrinths. What is all we know compared with what we know not? We have not yet agreed about the chief good and felicity." Yet even here one may become greater with a glimpse, at least, of Eternity for "This Sun, that Moon, these Stars, the varying dance of the spring, summer, autumn, winter is that very same which the Golden Age did see." Who would not be tempted to hasten to know more? Whom the gods love die young. Wherein is the pathos? "Life is a journey on a dusty way; the furthest rest is death. In this, some go more heavily burdened than others: swift and active pilgrims come to the end of it in the morning, or at noon which tortoise-paced wretches, clogged with the fragmentary rubbidge of this world, scarce with great travel crawl unto at midnight." For can any seek substitute for a knowledge of eternity in that which we call on earth fame? "The huge Egyptian Pyramids, and that grot in Pausilipo, though they have wrestled with Time, and worn upon the vast of days, yet are their authors no more known than it is known by what strange earthquakes and deluges isles were divided from the continent, or hills bursted forth of the valleys.". So our poet ponders until Neo-Platonism and Christianity, wedded with no conflict in his renaissance mind, teach him that he himself is a master of the universe through his soul, "an image of that unsearchable Trinity in three essential powers, understanding, will, memory. Nowadays our amorous poets do not dare to write sonnets in the form of catalogues vaunting the superiority of their lady's eyes over diamonds, the moon, the sun, lightning; nor do they venture to sing of the Trinity. These things would be considered insincere in our generation, or by many lifeless. Here, on the contrary, is the note that pierces the modern reader. "I have forgot much, Cynara, gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing to put thy pale lost lillies out of mind." |