BOOKS.

THE POETESSES OF THE CENTURY.* WITH every wish to be polite, not to say gallant, to the poetesses in general (Mr. Miles discards the word poetess, and it is not an ideally satisfactory word, but it is the most con- venient one which has yet been invented, and we shall continue to use it), we are obliged to record our conviction that the poetic harvest garnered in this volume is a poor one. It would not be fair to judge the work of an individual poet by his averages, nor have we a right to demand that any single poet's average shall be high. Under such a test, some of the greatest

• The Poets and the Poetry of the Century. Edited by Alfred H. Miles. Vol. V.: "Joanna Baillie to Mathilde Blind." London : Hutchinson and Co. of poets would stagger. Bat we have a right to demand a high average of excellence in an anthology, and to judge such a book by its average ; and judged by its average, this volume of selections from nineteenth-century poetesses is the worst anthology we have seen for a good while.

Again, it would not be fair to measure the work of a Confessedly minor poetess against that of a distinctly "major" poet; but we think it is fair to measure the work of minor poetesses, collectively, against that, of minor poets; and such a comparison is greatly to the disadvantage of the former. The minor poets, as a rule,—we are alluding, of course, more especially to moderately favourable represen- tatives of their class, but the statement holds true, in general, even of the weaker ones,—evince a habit and faculty of self- criticism such as imply a power of holding their own produc- tions at arm's-length, so to speak, objectifying them in their own eyes, and forming an estimate of them which in the nature of things cannot, of course, be quite independent, but which gives evidence of an honest endeavour after impartiality. The minor poetesses, on the contrary, leave in the mind of a critical reader an impression that they are apt to be content with anything whatever which they have once written; nothing seems to be subjected to a chastising or a sifting process ; anything they have done appears to satisfy them. The cause is, in part at least, not far to seek. The poets can, in a measure, objectify their own work because its qualities are themselves usually more or less objec- tive, its themes more or less external to the writers' minds; but the subject-matter of women's poetry is nearly always some intensely personal and private emotion, which to the writers is so real, so momentous, and so profoundly in- teresting, as to throw utterly into the shade, so fax as their own perception is concerned, the method and detail of its literary rendering. Our judgment is based upon a tolerably wide acquaintance with the work of living and de- ceased poetesses, in which we have encountered again and again the spectacle of a writer who, at her best, achieved no mean excellence, descending at other times to depths of bathos or dead levels of flatness which, in a writer of the male sex, would, generally speaking, have been simply incom- patible with any but the feeblest order of literary capability. As for the broad question of the marked inferiority of women in this highest department of literature, we believe we run little danger of contradiction in assuming such inferiority as practically beyond dispute,—for instance, France, Germany, and Italy have not a great poetess amongst them,—bnt it is an inferiority which does not extend in anything like the same degree to their general aptitude for literary perform- ance, and therefore we conclude that it is not to be referred to any disparity between the sexes in general intellectual power, but to some special limitation affecting the particular group of faculties which co-operate in the production of, poetry. Speaking tentatively, and with no pretence to assur- ance—for the problem is difficult and obscure—we are dis- posed to think that the faculties in Which women, otherwise intellectually gifted, are notably deficient, are imagination and construction. They are more practical-minded than men, —in numerous relations of life they show themselves less repelled by detail and routine,—and they are proportionately less capable of that abstraction from the empirical or matter- of-fact world which is of the essence of imaginative vision. In this connection it is worth noting that one rarely meets with a feminine mind having any bias towards mysticism. And as regards the faculty of construction, in which we believe women to be relatively lacking, there is in every noticeably fine poem—not excepting the most spontaneous and im- passioned—a conscious or unconscious basis of intellectual architectonics for which a certain rapid, impulsive, and un- deliberate habit observable in women disqualifies the female mind.

As we have said, it is permissible to judge an anthology by its averages; but one feels more pleasure in the contemplation of its best. Of course, two poetesses stand out pre-eminently in this volume, by virtue alike of endowment and accomplish- ment—Mrs. Browning and Miss Rossetti ; and, in our opinion, the latter is the greater of the two. The selection from the former is accompanied by an admirably sympathetic preface from the pen of Mr. Ashcroft Noble, who, speaking of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," says :—" It was given to Mrs. Browning to render in perfect verse the very apotheosis

of love," and who describes that series of poems as "the noblest anthology for noble lovers which any literature has to show." We cannot help wondering whether he has forgotten for the moment "The Angel in the House," which its author, we believe, now depreciates in favour of the more mystical, and at times supremely beautiful, but less lucid and compact, verse of "The Unknown Eros." But, at all events, while doing full justice to the thoroughness with which Mr. Noble traces the development of Mrs. Browning's genius and analyses its charm, we are compelled to dissent from the letter, while admiring the spirit, of some of his detailed criticisms. Thus, he endorses and repeatedly emphasises the view, which we believe pretty general, that in the "Sonnets from the Portu- guese," Mrs. Browning's genius purified itself with triumphant completeness from the affectations and grotesque mannerisms which admittedly deform most of her earlier works ; but when we turn to his own selection from that very series of poems, we cannot but think his eulogium too unqualified. Here are two lines :—

" The dancers will break footing, from the care Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more."

Do these lines attest Mrs. Browning's emancipation from

affected phraseology P Again: "I will not soil thy purple with my dust, Nor breathe my poison on thy Venice-glass."

Will Mr. Noble maintain that this is anything but a fantastic and crude conceit ? Once more :

"My hair no longer bounds to my foot's glee, Nor plant / it from rose or myrtle-tree,

As girls do, any more."

Is this an example of natural and unforced expression? One

more illustration shall suffice. She has been speaking of her lover's "first kiss"

"The second passed in height The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,

Half falling on the hair. 0 beyond meed ! That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown, With sanctifying sweetness, did precede.

The third upon my lips was folded down

In perfect, purple state."

This last is surely rubbish of the most insufferable kind, and our examples have been drawn, as we said, from Mr. Noble's own selection. We are far from insensible to the extreme beauty of some of the "Sonnets from the Portu- guese," and, on the whole, their diction is as pure and their form as admirable, as their spirituality is lofty and their emotion deep. Bat, all the same, there is an air of self- consciousness, a suggestion of " attitude " about them, which impair their charm. Mrs. Browning seems all the while to be watching the spectacle of her own emotions, with scarcely disguised interest in so beautiful and impressive an exhibition.

Miss Rossetti—" this mystic and remote, yet homely and simple, genius," as Mr. Arthur Symons, in a very interesting piece of prefatory criticism and exposition, calls her—seems to us, as we said, a greater writer than Mrs. Browning. Her range of emotion is, perhaps, somewhat narrow ; hers is a. sequestered and cloistral spirit, and her vision of the world is tinged with an almost ascetic gloom; but her powers of expression belong to that order of which the peculiar distinc- tion is the attainment of almost the highest ends by a wonderful restraint and husbandry of means—an effect which cannot be better exemplified than by a comparison of some of her sonnets, with their apparently limited vocabulary, their almost childlike simplicity of diction, and their profoundly pathetic charm, with the accumulated colour and laboured ornament which render the sonnets of her more celebrated brother so rich and so ineffectual.

Probably the best " songstress " of the century, as distin- guished from poetess, was Lady Nairn, and the selection from her well-known Volkslieder is prefaced by some admirable remarks of Mr. Mackenzie Bell's, who also contributes excel- lent biographical and critical accounts of Mrs. Hemazu3, Miss Landon, Jean Ingelow, and Mrs. Augusta Webster. Dr. Garnett considers that, "after George Eliot's," Sara Coleridge's was "the most powerful female mind which has as yet addressed itself to English literature." Her verse, however, is correct rather than interesting. The same dis- cerning critic elsewhere remarks, that, "as a rule, it is the merit of poetesses to be easy and fluent: their fault to go playfully rippling round the difficulties with which they ought to grapple." Some of the prefatory notices are rather apolo- getic, their writers not being able to get up any more enthu-

siasm than is involved in the description of this or that poem as "not without merit," or "far from destitute of ability." Various other " critical " prefaces are on the whole colourless; but this cannot be said of Mr. W. B. Yeats's account of Miss O'Leary, "the Fenian poet." Mr. Yeats

says :—" It may be that a troubled history and the smouldering unrest of agitation and conspiracy are good for the making of ballads. If this be so, Miss O'Leary lived amid surroundings of an ideal kind, for all her life she was deep in the councils of Fenianism." The "ideality" of those surroundings is

delicious.

Mr. Noble makes an ingenious defence of George Eliot's poetry, as against the somewhat depreciatory judgment of Mr. Dowden, Mr. Hutton, and Mr. Oscar Browning. After quoting their concurrent opinions, Mr. Noble says :—

"The verdict sounds very formidable, but it may lose some of its formidableness if we see in it only an illustration of a habit which has recently been growing among the critics of demanding in all poetry the presence of certain characteristics which necessarily belong only to poetry of the lyrical kind,—an effusion, an abandonment, a sense as of a pulse beating in the verse. Poetry has, in fact, been too exclusively identified with song, whereas many conceptions which are purely poetical, and which clothe themselves in verse as naturally and inevitably as other conceptions clothe themselves in prose, are not of a nature to ally themselves with song or to allow of being sung."

This reminds us of Lowell's remark about the old question as to the validity of Pope's claims as a poet.—viz., that it was an irrelevant matter, because, after all, whether Pope were a great poet or not, he was at any rate a great writer. In the abstract, we are rather inclined to take sides with Mr. Noble against the combined force of Mr. Dowden, Mr. Hutton, and Mr. Oscar Browning ; but in this particular instance our con- tention would be, that although there is such a thing (para- doxical as it may sound) as great poetry of a prosaic kind— Dryden is a typical illustration—George Eliot herself cannot be ranked high in the class of writers who produce that some- what hybrid species of literature.

Mr. Miles has, we think, made a mistake in filling a great portion of this volume with selections from poetesses in whom posterity cannot possibly take an interest, and whose names hardly convey a definite suggestion of any sort to the reader's mind.