BOOKS.

MR. WATSON'S NEW POEMS.*

'Tins little volume more than sustains the reputation which Mr. Watson has already made by the fine poem on Words- worth's Grave and those which appeared with it or were added to it in later editions of the same volume. The poem on Tennyson's death is alone sufficient to make a great name. And though we hardly hold it equal in the calibre of its thought to the magnificent lines on Shelley's centenary, it is • Lathrymz Musiana, and other Poems. By William Watson. London : Macmillan and Co.

in one respect even more decisive evidence of his great gift of poetic speech, since it shows that when he has no great dis- tinctive conception, no organic intellectual framework to guide and direct him, he can speak with precisely the same singular dignity and impassioned felicity of diction as when he is writing under the control of a dominant idea. The poem on Tennyson's death is in substance (as distinguished from its form) such a reverie as might pass through any reverent imagination on the death of a great poet. He grieves for the great vacancy ; he muses on the scenes and objects with which the Laureate's imagination had busied itself, and mourns that we shall hear what he would say of them no more ; he notes that with the falling leaves and the various glory of decay is mingled the grief of a nation over their greatest singer who is snatched from them ; he imagines the meeting of the departing spirit with the spirits of the great poets of all ages ; he dreams that the music of the universe is enriched by the lofty strains which this world

seems to have lost ; he dwells on the great mystery of the poet's inspiration; he reflects on the far more perfect durability of a poet's fame as compared with the durability of that of a

great ruler or a great conqueror; and he exults that the great poet has passed where he can no longer be affected by the poor and often discordant praise and criticism of earth. There is little in all this which might not be said so that no one would be impressed by it, but it is actually so said by Mr.

Watson that every one is impressed by it. There is a depth in the regret, a reality in his vision of the power which has vanished, a richness in the autumnal splendour of the elegy, a dreamy ardour in the hope that what earth has lost, the uni- verse at large may have in some sense gained; a visionary ardour in the wonder with which the poet contemplates the enigma of all poetic inspiration ; a passion of conviction in the supremacy which he allots to the fame of the poet above the fame of every other kind of greatness ; and an elation in his confidence that even the honour of earth is insignificant compared with the honour conferred by the appreciation of nobler and loftier beings, which transform a reverie that, in its substance, is not specially remarkable, into a poem which will stand beside " Lycidas " and " Thyrsis " in the esteem of all good critics. It is, in many respects, a greater evidence of true poetic genius to be able to imbue such a train of thought as this with all the passion and the music of an imperishable poem, than to be able to give to criticisms as subtle, delicate, and true as those of " Wordsworth's Grave," or the lines addressed to Professor Dowden on his Life of Shelley, or the great ode on the centenary of the poet's birth, the splendour and har- mony of perfect form. A man who can give the highest distinction to the expression of every cultivated man's feeling, is more likely to become a great poet than the man who can only give similar expression to thoughts which have sprung up in his own mind with all the vigour of original conception and all the notes of a fastidious discrimination.

Mr. Watson ought to prove a great critic as well as a great poet. His finest lines are lines which only a great critic could have written. Sometimes he reminds us of Matthew Arnold ; sometimes of what he himself happily calls "the frugal note of Gray;" sometimes even of Milton's rich, sonorous line :-

" Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre P In far retreats of elemental mind

Obscurely comes and goes The imperative breath of song, that as the wind Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows."

That word " imperative " has all the singular aptness which Matthew Arnold gave to his happiest expressions. Indeed, the lines on Matthew Arnold's grave on the Thames at Laleham, published in Mr. Watson's former volume, might well have been written by Arnold himself, so far as regards their critical nicety and brilliancy :-

" And nigh to where his bones abide, The Thames with its unruffled tide Seems like his genius typified,—

Its strength, its grace, Its lucid gleam, its sober pride, Its tranquil pace.

But ah ! not his the eventual fate

Which doth the journeying wave await—

Doomed to resign its limpid state And quickly grow Turbid as passion, dark as hate, And wide as woe. Bather, it may be, over-much He shunned the common stain and smutch, From soilure of ignoble touch Too grandly free, Too loftily secure in such Cold purity.

But he preserved from chance control The fortress of his 'stablisht soul; In all things sought to see the Whole ; Brooked no disguise ; And set his heart upon the goal, Not on the prize."

Again, notice the likeness of the following fine passage of criti- cism on the revival of poetry after the death of Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, in the poetry of Burns, to the meditative strain of Gray himself :—

" From dewy pastures, uplands sweet with thyme, A virgin breeze freshened the jaded day. It wafted Collins' lonely vesper-chime,

It breathed abroad the frugal note °Wray.

It fluttered here and there, nor swept in vain The dusty haunts where futile echoes dwell,— Then, in a cadence soft as summer rain, And sad from Auburn voiceless, drooped and fell.

It drooped and fell, and one 'neath northern skies, With southern heart, who tilled his father's field, Found Poesy a-dying, bade her rise And touch quick nature's hem and go forth healed.

On life's broad plain the ploughman's conquering share Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew, And o'er the formal garden's trim parterre The peasant's team a ruthless furrow drew."

Had Gray lived later, Gray himself might, we think, have written that exquisite criticism.

And might not this echo of Milton persuade almost any one not perfectly familiar with " Lycidas " that it was taken from

" Lyoidas " itself?— "What needs his laurel our ephemeral tears

To save from visitation of decay ?

Not in this temporal sunlight, now, that bay Blooms, nor to perishable mundane ears Sings he with lips of transitory clay; For he bath joined the chorus of his peers, In habitations of the perfect day, His earthly notes a heavenly audience hears, And more melodious are henceforth the spheres, Enriched with music stol'n from earth away."

Evidently Mr. Watson is as fine a critic as he is a poet, and should be guided by his delicate critical faculty to avoid many of the blunders into which poets destitute of that faculty, and unable to appreciate what is not really within the scope of their genius, so frequently fall. Shelley, for instance, had he had this faculty, would never have made his disastrous attempts at satire, nor Wordsworth constructed many of those dreary and terrible dissertations on the moral bearing of education which "bold, bad men" declaim from the platforms of Social Science meetings.

And yet there is one poem in Mr. Watson's new volume which shows that even he can go astray as to the scope and character of his own genius. The poem called " The Dream of Man" is, we think, an ambitious failure, and we should have said, a priori, that Mr. Watson was almost incapable of an ambitious failure. It opens well, with a very fine dedica- tion of the poem to "London, my Hostess," which contains this noble apostrophe to London :— " 0 sea of living waves that roll

On golden sands, Or break on tragic reef and shoal, 'Mid fatal lands ; O forest wrought of living leaves, Some filled with Spring, Where joy life's festal raiment weaves,

And all birds sing,—

Some trampled in the miry ways, Or whirled along By fury of tempestuous days, —Take thou my song."

And we fear that London may fairly assume some of the responsibility for the inadequacy and the ambitiousness of the poem which follows. " The Dream of Man" is a confused dream. The poet himself says that be knows not whether it came through the horn or the ivory portal ; and we feel no doubt in our own mind that it was the latter. That man should dream himself the highest object in the universe is more than a dream,—it is a fact that he has done so, and the religion of Humanity has been the result. But the curious thing is that Mr. Watson's poem ends by justifying in some sense what he begins by confuting. For God's voice declares at the close that the greatest of all joys is the joy of growth and strife, and that this is a joy which he, as God, could not taste but could only bestow, and that therefore he had conferred on man a blessing which he might well envy even the creature of his hands. But that is not the chief confusion of the dream. The chief confusion of the dream is this : it represents man as conceiving that if he could but conquer death, he should have nothing left to desire ; and then goes on to represent him as having conquered death under the present conditions of human existence, though death is still in reserve for the race at large so soon as the cooling of the sun shall bring the whole organised life of this little planet to an end. That, as science,. is a rather incoherent dream. For we know with far greater certainty that the organism of man's body is one which is wound up only for a very limited time, than we do that the sources of the sun's heat may not be replenished by the con- stant rush and inflow of new force. Astronomers have no certainty that meteorites may not supply anew what radia- tion expends ; but physiologists have something of true certainty that the original vitality of every earthly organism is a finite store which ebbs away in the mere living. But that is only a scientific incoherence. There is a greater and deeper moral contradiction in " The Dream of Man " than this. It assumes that if physical death could be banished from the world, strife and want would be over, whereas the most eager strife and the most urgent want would only then begin. Life is not the sum and substance of human desire. It is knowledge,. vision, wisdom, love, justice, purity, serenity, peace, for which we crave, and how would these be secured by simply multiplying without limit the number of the eager and sinful aspirants for these great boons The radical conception of the poem, that. physical death inflicts the only intolerable wound of life is a mis- conception. And even the style of the poem is somewhat crude, like the substance of it. There is one very fine passage in which the emptiness of life, after the attainment of all that made it life to live had been reached, is delineated, and man is pictured as " by mighty weariness vanquished, and crowned by august des- pair ; " but the poet never seems to see that the triumph over death is not and cannot be the end of desire,—would, indeed, be but a commencement of nobler, larger, and more ardent reaches of desire. "The Dream of Man" is crude in conception, and to some extent even raw in execution,— an almost exceptional case with Mr. Watson. Take, by way of contrast to the rather ambitions straining of "The Dream of Man," the noble verses with which he concludes his centenary poem on the ardours of Shelley_

"A creature of impetuous breath, Our torpor deadlier than death He knew not ; whatsoe'er he saith Flashes with life; He spurreth men He quickeneth To splendid strife.

And in his gusts of song he brings

Wild odours shaken from strange wings, And unfamiliar whisperings From far lips blown,

While all the rapturous heart of things Throbs through his own,—

His own that from the burning pyre One who had loved his wind-swept lyre, Out of the sharp teeth of the fire TJnmolten drew, Beside the sea that in her ire Smote him and slew."

That is poetry of the grand order, and surely that " rapturous heart of things " is not quelled, but quickened, by im- mortality ?