BOOKS.

MR. STORY'S GRAFFITI D'ITALIA.•

THE first criticism that will strike any reader of this volume will be that its best part looks, to a casual eye, like the creation of Mr. Browning. The dramatic manner of the great American sculptor's poems is the very dramatic manner of Mr. Browning's. In other words, he, like 11r. Browning, throws a thoroughly modern mind into an ancient or mediaeval situation, and while seizing with true insight the main characteristics of that situation, yet throws them into an apologetic form which reminds you in every line of modern controversy, not of the antiquated modes of thought which the situation would naturally suggest. Take, for instance, the first, the longest, and, as it seems to us, much the finest poem in this volume, the one called "G inevra da Siena." It is a story of passion told by the heroine herself, and told with great force and beauty. But no one can read it without observing that a great deal of the texture of the thought would barely have been possible in the middle ages, and certainly is not dramatic in form, if intended to be specially illustrative of the life of the middle ages. The following assault, for instance, on the defective education of girls as unfitting them for real life when it comes, is not, to our mind, at all naturally in the direction which a woman's rebellion against the hard fate which had led to her wreck in life would then have taken :-- "Look at the foolish way in which we're trained, And say, how can it fit us for the world ?

• Graffiti &Balk. By W. W. Story. London andolinburgh: Blackwood.

The doctrine and the mass, of course, we're taught ; Then comes our first communion in the fold Of some clean convent, 'mid the patient nuns, Whose minds and lives are stunted at the best.

What can they teach beside hypocrisy, To cheek the natural currents of our youth? Through their religious panes they show the world All glare and falseness—yet we sigh for it;

Then, taken back, we're kept beneath a glass,

Like some frail plant that cannot bear the breeze.

For home is but a kind of convent, whore Our mother is the abbess—we the nuns ; We learn our letters, but there's naught to read Save tedious homilies and bloodless books.

Life is more real, so we sigh for it—

Not life on this side marriage, but beyond.

For what is life so-called to us poor girls—

Embroidery and trivial talk at home, Dressing, a little music on the lute, and then A dull and formal walk on the parade, Where we may learn to smile and bow with ease.

Sometimes convoyed into society, Our mother leads us with a careful string,

And lets us hop a little way alone ;

But watching us the while with Argus eyes, And lecturing our manners and our words.

Peeps at the world from under down-dropped lids Of fear and innocence, we catch; we're told That this we must not do—nor that—nor that ; All that we long for is prohibited.

Burn though we may for liberty and joy, In whose fresh air the heart alone expands, With little worldly maxims we are drilled ; Calm and reserve alone are maidenly.

We must not speak unless our mother nods.

So life, with all its stern realities To us is vague as is a blind man's thought Of colours, or a deaf man's dream of sounds."

That is vigorous and true, but it seems to us of the sort o' reflec- tion which would have been very inappropriate to r injured woman of the mediaeval period. Her thoughts would have been far more likely to accuse her parents of indifference to the dignity of love, than to accuse them of not teaching her more of the world in early youth. The educational philosophy of our own day has been imported into one when women's idealism showed itself in a different direction, not in criticizing their own inferior pre- paration for the business of life, but rather in vaunting the claims which their weakness, and their beauty, and their power to reward courage by love, gave them over the minds and hearts of the other sex. There scarcely seems to us a line in " Ginevra da Siena " which would not be far truer of to-day than of the age in which it is placed. And we may say the same not merely of its apologetic tone iu dealing with women's wrongs, but of its analytic tone in dealing with human character. The following sketch of Ginevra's proud, cold, and diplomatic-minded husband is very finely given, but its analysis strikes us as clothed in a completely modern style : "Fair was his outward seeming—manners fair—

A little stiff with over-courtesy.

Like to those rich brocades all sewn in gold; But noble, I agree, and dignified.

The apricot is smooth upon the skin,

And yet it only has a stone for heart.

What education teaches, he had learned ;

But on a rock you cannot rear a rose.

Still, stoniest natures have their sunward side ; And there with him his pride and honour grew.

The shortest line's the straightest 'twist two points, And the frank nature takes it openly.

His nature was secretive : on his path, Lead where it would, he loved no human eye ; Dark windings, devious ways, he rather chose.

Fifty miles round, beyond the sight of man, Rather than one across in open view.

His good and bad alike he loved to hide ;

Spoke little, hated praise—suspected it—

And yet was flattered by obedient acts.

Passions he had, but he had mastered them, And loved and hated in a bloodless way ; But never was with generous anger fired,

Nor blazed to indignation at a wrong.

His impulses he doubted—would not stir To passion's trumpet ; but lay long in wait, Ambushed—then struck with slow and proud resolve, And called it justice when he took revenge.

"His dark impassive face was cold as bronze ; His mouth locked up in silence like a chest Whose key is lost, or drawn as it had worn A life-long curb ; his forehead full and bare,

Where not a wrinkle told what passed within.

Sometimes his hands would twitch when he was moved, But not his lips—no, nor his cold round eyes, From which he shut all meaning at his will ; While; like an intricate machine, his mind With counter-wheels worked out the simplest act." .

Very finely in keeping with this subtle analysis of the character, as preferring to reach by an elaborate and intricate calculation what most men reach, and reach best, by impulse, is the thrust by which, in their last conflict, after he has killed the man she really loves, she contrives to wound him to the quick :—

" Nay, look not on mo with that devil's smile ;

It makes me almost hate you. Not alone

'Tis love you lack, but pity, but remorse,

But conscience! Never shall that hand again, Stained by his blood, touch mine—'tis widowed now.

Nay, play not with your poniard,—out with it ! Strike ! there's no thing that wants its death so much.

Strike ! here I stand. Strike as you struck at him !

Strike, soul of honour ! Ah ! you calculate— Your cold blood cannot stir. I see your eyes—

They are arranging. No, it will not do To trust an impulse—you must think it out.

Oh be a man for once, and dare to strike :"

—a passage surely of very high dramatic and poetic merit ; but whether the sting it contains, the charge against her husband that he is not man enough to trust his impulses, that he feels compelled

to think them out, that his eyes show that he is " arranging," while his blood flows too slow for him to act even with that manly passion which is nobler than cold-blooded vindictiveness,—whether all this is in any sense mediaeval in form does not seem to us doubt- ful. It assumes all the controversies between the nobility of the conscious and unconscious side of human nature which surely are, if any thing of an intellectual kind is, truly modern.

Still there is little or nothing in the poem except its classification as mediaeval to assert for it a mediaeval origin, and we cannot well over-express our sense of the force, and depth, and beauty, and generous intensity of the Italian nature it so powerfully delineates. The other mediaeval poems, the controversy between the Prior of the convent in Milan and Leonardo da Vinci as to the delays made by that painter in the composition of his great " Last Supper," the picture of the evil-minded Monsignore who longs for a cardinal's hat, the criticism on Raffaelle and his own defence of himself, are all charming reading, but all so completely studies in the school of Browning, all of them so completely studies in that ventriloquism which makes a modern imagination speak out of the heart of ancient circumstances, that they will scarcely win for Mr.

Story a separate poetic reputation of his own.

Of the ancient pieces, the best is, we think, the " Cleopatra," which is also of interest as it tells us the kind of conception under the influence of which a great sculptor worked out one of the finest statues of modern times. It is not nearly so Browning- esque as most of the other pieces on ancient subjects ; but it is rather fine rhetoric than fine poetry, and the ferocity of Cleopatra's animalism seems to us too much emphasized and exaggerated. Shakespeare's conception of Cleopatra, perhaps unfairly, preoc- cupies our imagination. Perhaps there is nothing in history to suggest the wealth of imaginative tenderness in the woman who laments after Antony's death that,—

" Thera is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon."

But certainly Mr. Story's poem presents a picture rather of feminine ferocity and lust than of an enchantress whose fascinations cover the whole field of love. Her fanciful retrospect of the time when

she was a tigress in the jungle, fought for by the tigers, and torn even by her mate in the ferocity of his love, is almost Swin- burnian, and seems to us far below the Shakespearian level of

conception. This, again, is fine, but a part of the same somewhat revolting conception :- " There—leave me, and take from my chamber

That stupid little gazelle, With its bright black eyes so meaningless, And its silly tinkling bell!

Take him—my nerves be vexes— The thing without blood or brain,—

Or, by the body of Isis, I'll snap his thin neck in twain !"

Of the modern pieces, " Giannone" is the best, and a really fine sketch of its sort ; but Mr. Story seems to be anxious to justify the charge of imitating Browning, by inserting awkward Browningite rhymes, such as no one but Mr. Browning ever inserts, even in pieces which owe very little otherwise to him. Thus, in the middle of the sketch of Giannone :—

" On his wall was a head of Rachel, of course, Flanked by two dogs, a stag, and a horse From Landseer's brush, and, poised on her neat toe, The delicate sylph-like shape of Cerito."

Directly Mr. Story leaves the intellectual side of drama, that is, the elaborate description of a character from the point of view of an intellectual observer, he seems to us to lose his power. The pieces in this volume of a lyrical character are much the poorest things it contains. Scarcely one of them has what Mr. Arnold calls the true " lyrical cry," still less any full flow of poetic feeling. There is a certain poverty and thinness about all the pieces which follow Zia Nica (itself, by the way, one of the finest things in the book) ; and even in the semi-dramatic descriptions, where the theme has no local Italian colour (as, for instance, in the descrip- tion of the murderer's feelings in the piece called "The Shady Lane"), there is a failure of power. Among the pieces most nearly lyrical, the following are the sweetest verses we have been able to

find, and, indeed, the last two stanzas have a real lyrical depth of feeling, and a music of a high order. But they seem to us far above the greater number of poems of the same class. They occur in a piece written by the sea shore, and are descriptive of the impression

made upon the writer's mind by the moan of the sea which under- lies the sound of the rush of the waves on the beach :- "I sit as in a dream, and hear, and see, With senses lulled away,

And what the ocean says or sings to me I strive in vain to say.

"Something there is beneath that constant moan That utterance seeks in vain ; Like some dim memory, some hidden tone, That, helpless, haunts the brain.

"But all my thoughts, like sea-weed, swing and sway, The sport of fantasy ; And visions pass before mo far away, Like vessels out at sea,— " Pass through my mind with an ideal freight,

And softly move along—

A sweet procession without care or weigh t,

Like disembodied song."

Otherwise we should say that it is only in the intellectual drama that Mr. Story shows his imaginative power. The humour of the few pieces called " Scherzi " which end the book is not quite worthy of the finer elements it contains. On the whole, the great sculptor may fairly claim to have proved poetic power, but scarcely to have proved that he is a poet, even iu the sense in which Browning is a great poet, the sense of a great imaginative seer.