THE POETICAL WORKS OF AUBREY DE VERE.* Ma. DE VERE
has used an opportunity forced on him by the fire at Messrs. Kegan Paul and Co.'s house in Paternoster Row, where the unsold copies of his chief poems were destroyed. He has republished, with important improvements, the legends of Ireland, and the dramas which have for their heroes Alexander the Great and St. Thomas of Canterbury. Shorter poems, "classical and meditative," form a first volume, a sort of intro- duction to the poet's maturer work, in which we see more of his own personality. His recollections of travel, his masque of " Proserpine," are scholarly evidences of his taste ; but it is im- possible not to feel that in them the poet yields to no true classical renaissance, though they are full of classical reminis- cence. His lines, " Written under Delphi," strike the note of robust Christian faith and hope, which is the motive of his life's work.
Trained in the friendship of Wordsworth, we expect many and good sonnets from his disciple, and we are not disappointed ;
yet we cannot do more here than observe how they witness to the quality of Mr. de Vere's imagination, and are proofs of a
nobility of sentiment, religions fervour, and clear good-sense, rare in this age of tortured phrase and doubtful meaning. Our wish is rather to point out the larger and more elaborate conceptions of human character, by which we do not ex- actly mean human personality, which he sets before us in his longer poems. We trust that in this attempt to appreciate his intention he will excuse our abstinence from quotation. Larger space than ours would be necessary to illustrate our criticism of his work as a whole, and his poems have before been reviewed here in detail. But Mr. de l'ere's steady assertion of principles and practice that are just now unpopular, but that have had the approval of greater literary ages than ours, is worth some examination. He deliberately chooses to set before us epic and dramatic poetry that echoes no modern air. He will not gratify our vanity by hints that his heroes are, after all, travesties of ourselves. He sacrifices the praise of lending librarians by suffering no dereliction in his St. Patrick and his St. Thomas, nor does he even allow Alexander to smirch his imperial robe of
pride. He admits little or no comic element to relieve the weight of his tragic and pathetic scenes—for he means to be
weighty ; he trusts that the dignity of his heroes, their witness to the deeper meanings and awful responsibilities of human life, and to the revelation in which he believes, must gain for
them a hearing, at least, from the ten thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal. Fre utterly scorns to be " subtle " after the eclectic fashion of our writers. His challenge to minute observers of moral and mental disease is open, and he insists on a normal health in his men and women which, no doubt, is
offensive to votaries of Our Lady of Pain and to the Lords of the Loathsome. He writes as if Milton and Corneille were still recognised poets, and he turns away from the "mysticism of sensuality" as from an open grave. It is easy to see why Mr. de Vere has met with but a aucces d'estime. He rows against the stream of tendency with persevering faith in the older traditions of man's place in the Universe, and he refuses to be swept away by the rush of physical discovery from
* The Poetical Works of Aubrey de Vero. London: Kogan Paul, Trench, and Co. 1884.
what he conceives to be the true and permanent basis of his art. The critic who would understand him must himself stand apart from the prevailing current, and this is not easy. Yet, as we come on passages of noble and manly emotion, on lines weighted with broad thoughts; as we try to grasp the ideas which are woven into the splendid web of Alexander's pride, and the yet more splendid growth of St. Thomas's humility, we are conscious of qualities in this little-read poet which compel while they do not woo our admiration. The blame of his unpopularity lies with a weary public, heavy-laden by doubt, and sick of dis- appointment in itself. Persons whose ghosts are gods and whose gods are ghosts, turn away from the virile assertion of his religion by Mr. de Vere, who in history sees Revelation, and over the human tragedy raises the triumphant cross. With the reticence of men who find in the emotion of love a type of Divine passion, and who, therefore, will not treat it as in itself supreme, he will have none of the "honey of poison-flowers and all the measureless ill" of love. He would rouse in us the scorn of scorn, the hate of hate, the love of a love that comprehends but is not limited by the experiences of Romeo and Juliet. Man as conqueror and statesman, man as evangelist and saint, man ruined by his own ambition, yet still the lord, not the puppet, of Fate, is Mr. de Vere's theme. It is naturally not popular in an age that inclines to pessimism.
But in poetry the end by no way justifies the means ; and
( however we approve his aims, we are bound to criticise Mr. de Vere's methods. In this edition of his dramas he has strengthened their effects materially; his corrections of inverted phrases by directer speech, his excision of scenes unnecessary to the main purpose, are well done, and he strengthens the im- pression of unity by accenting the doomful growth of pride in Alexander, and the perfecting of St. Thomas in resolute humility. His improvements are indeed a key to his ideas, which are even more Biblical than those of Milton, inasmuch as they are more Catholic, and reflect the New not less than the Old Testament. Alexander's fall is the fall of Lucifer, refusing to accept limit and time, and setting up his own before the Messianic Hope revealed to him in that fine scene at Jerusalem, which is indeed the motive of the drama. St. Thomas is the antithesis to the "King of Grecia " of the prophets. He is the martyr of man's rights as they were declared by the Church. He is the victor-victim of the sacrificial idea, an idea at the root of all drama which appeals to our best instincts. Mr. de Vere may be inopportune, but if the practice of medimval poets be any gauge—if the legends of " Dr. Faustus" and" Don Juan" have undying vitality, and Calderon be still admir- able—he is justified in thinking that man's relations with the unseen are subjects for drama, though it be neither the Greek nor the Elizabethan conception of drama, inasmuch as it is both Christian and mystic. Pity and terror are, indeed, altered in their very grain by the catastrophe of martyrdom, but Mr. de Vere faces the difficulty. His tale of St. Thomas is, however, rather a historical rectification, full of noble and eloquent passages, than the tragedy of a soul at war with Divine promptings, such as is his "Alexander,"—which, in our opinion, is the finest drama of the day in conception, in restrained energy of diction, and in imaginative unity.
Alexander is a name good to conjure with as was that of Samson to Milton ; and Mr. de Vere connects him with our familiar thoughts by his interview with the Jewish high-priest within the temple at Jerusalem. The ten years of conquest, the splendid and beneficent projects of the hero, are foil to the spiritual crime by which he incurs Jehovah's wrath. The death of Parmenio, the underplot of Hephestion's and Arsinoe's love, merely intensify the onrushing doom that meets him at Babylon. The names of Tyre and Zion arouse reminiscence, and the songs of the captive Jews, familiar to us in the 127th and 137th Psalms, give to the death of the King almost the dignity of Holy Writ. All this is very noble and impressive art of a quality rare in English literature, for our poets have mostly looked for ideal beauty in what seems visibly real in our environment, and have regarded less what some high souls have felt to be loveliest of realities in an ideal world. But Mr. de Vere must not look for sympathy except from readers convinced of the tragic issues of action, and that life is worth living and death worth dying. His genius is epic and narrative, though his most artistic work is perhaps his Alexander ; but not daunted by modern impatience of epic poetry, he even dares to choose Irish subjects. More patriotic than his Celtic countrymen, he has resolutely set himself to
bridge the gulf of thought and sentiment that separates the imagination, the manners, and the aspirations of the western Gael of the past and the modern critics. He leads the forlorn. hope of those few who turn now, as men turned from the sixth to the ninth centuries, to Ireland as to a fountain of sanctity and poetic myth. He spends his cultivated and stately gift of sonorous verse in reproduction of the main fragments of the chief Irish tale of "Cattle Spoil." Moulding into recognisable shape the Gaelic legends of Patrick, Mr. de Vere tries to make us love the nephew of St. Martin, the pupil of St. Vincent, as he con- verts the Irish without bloodshed to the Roman obedience. And the poet is marvellously successful in his almost hopeless task,. though he is never Gaelic. He tells the fantastic legends of war and of faith in powerful English ; he is swayed by noble emotion as a true singer must be, but he cannot hide his indi- viduality as a compassionate Catholic patriot who appeals to our unexpectant ears because he would serve his adopted country, and not because he has inborn sympathy with the wild fairy music of the Irish Scoti. Their elaborate law, their weird poetry, please him as they did St. Patrick, because they remind him of Rome, not because of their special characteristics of subtle equity and grand style, even when the subjects either of love or poetry are childish and grotesque. Hence follows a, certain dissonance of theme and treatment; but Mr. de Vera "can no other," and when we have pointed out this jarring note,. we can the more heartily praise the fine painting of the legendary saint with his background of Irish scenery, never before described with the same truth. Patrick on Mount Cruachan is a wonderful presentation of the Christian mystic and prophet._ The whole history is delightful, and to wander with the apostle of Ireland is to enter a dreamland peopled with noble forms. In the same way Mr. de Vere sees the fragments of Ossianic and even older poetry in the light—which, again, is not Gaelic —of his cheerful hope, and he lifts the venerable legends, so to speak, off their feet to bring them to his ideal stature. From two of the "Sorrows of Song," which rank high in the long list of Irish sagas, he has made fine and pathetic poems. The noble Deirdre, always a graceful wraith, becomes a type of Irish womanhood of the highest class. Some stanzas added to "The Sons of Usnach," bring into higher relief her character as distinct from Italian, English, or Hebrew women, classical or medimval. Her purity and ardour in love or war, her mobile impulses but unalterable fidelity, her light-hearted courage yet tragic depth of grief, give her charm and originality, and Irish women should be grateful to Mr. de Vere for such exquisite assertion of their right to our love and admiration. There is no more beautiful figure in modern literature than that of Deirdre. Still, she is the result of studious, cultivated, and observant imagination, rather than of natural growth in her Ulster home.
Perhaps Mr. de Vere's greatest triumph of tact and skill is in his modern presentment of Meave's raid, which remains more Gaelic than his other examples of Irish legend. She is its Semiramis, and the tale of her foray has distinct priority over any other European epic. Eager and faithful patriot as be is, Mr. de Vera emphasises the political meaning of the Ulster "imbecility," the incoherence of the clans from the South and West, and, indeed,. the semi-insanity of the whole conflict about a brown and a white bull—surely, ancestors of the three-year-old and four-year- old animals which to this day divide the chivalry of Tipperary. But there remain in this poem inestimable pictures of the heroic age of the Gael, when beauty and valour, physical training and personal dignity, were objects almost of worship. No hero is more delightful than Cachnllin in Mr. de Vere's hands,. though he rationalises away some of his brightest extravagances. He has thrown over them the mantle of fine verse, in which occur the best phrases and lines he has ever written. The foray of Meave is a brilliant and mainly successful attempt to set before our fastidious taste scenes wild as a stormy Atlantic sunset seen across the brown wastes of Connemara. True it is that the glamour of the original, its red chaos and the limitless morasses of its foreground, defy pigments ; but we owe gratitude to the artist who has brought us within ken of it. He must some day reap a reward if he had never done more than reproduce the "Combat of the Ford," an incident of the tale of Meave's cattle-spoil. It is a really noble fragment from the vast Gaelic mine, worthy of the land of Gudrun and Ossian. Mr. de Vere's sympathy with Irish landscape serves him well. He makes lovely backgrounds for the athletic and strong fair women of the legends. In some respects we hold his latest to be,—with the exception of "Alexander the Great," Mr. de Vere's most powerful and original work, and that fact goes far to prove bow true a poet he is. The natural returu of a profoundly religions mind from modern enigmas towards the potential Christianity of noble heathendom no doubt decided him in his choice of Irish themes ; yet his genius constrains him even in them to represent man in no fantastic or morbid conditions, but at his full stature —not a subject for psychological curiosity, but as the founder and maintainer of society, and the representative of Deity. We owe hearty thanks to one who has felt the power of such thoughts with the emotion that begets poetry. No poet of our time has done more to rouse his readers from petty and passing interests ; no poet has struggled with nobler perseverance to make his readers look up towards the fountains of poetry. if the air of those heights be somewhat cold and rare for modern lotus-eaters, we trust that some are yet able to bear its tonic purity. They will be rewarded by wider horizons and visions of nobler forms than have been presented to them by any other poet of our day, though it may be that one or two other poets have sung more beautifully of less worthy themes. •
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