BOOKS.

MR. JOHN DAVIDSON'S NEW BALLADS.* WE are not sure that the new habit of publishing a poet's work in minute driblets, though it may be pleasant for the world of readers, does not react unfavourably on the poet himself. It gives him a sense of satisfaction before he has really earned any right to be satisfied with himself, and encourages him to think he has made the best use of his powers, when in reality he ought to be still fostering a nobler kind of ambition. There can be no doubt that Mr. John Davidson has a real genius of his own, but it appears to us that he has a disposition to fritter it away in half-matured, sometimes, we might say, thoroughly immature, work, which

• Nov Ballads. By John Davidson. London: John Lane. finishes, like many of his prose stories, in a ravelled edge with- out showing any true mastery of the purpose, or tottative endeavour to develop a purpose, with which be began to write. Take, for instance, the most elaborate effort in this little book, the dialogue between a mother and a son, intended to illustrate what the poet seems to think the bigotry of both mother and son, the bigotry of the mother's eager belief in her own salvation, and the still harder bigotry of the son's fierce and scornful rejection of anything like religion. The latter attitude of mind, the angry dogmatism of the atheist, is very powerfully delineated. Nothing that Mr. Davidson has written impresses us so much as his bold and vivid painting of the atheist's scornful arrogance, of his passionate determination to steel his mother against what he thinks her weak credulity, if only for one moment of passionate revolt, before she dies, and of the violent reaction when he seems to have succeeded, though the only result is that he goes half mad with his success, and is found gesticulating wildly over his mother's corpse. The attitude of mind which Mr. Davidson depicts, and intends to depict, in his angry atheist is of course perfectly irrational. If there be no mind of any kind working in the world, except the accidental and tempo. rary mind of man, who is there to be angry with P The atheist of Mr. Davidson's powerful picture is a most un- reasonable being. He spends all his wrath on the illusive power of certain human imaginations, and then he finds that his own mind is unequal to the effort of extingnishiug those illusions and yet retaining its sanity. All this is very power- fully painted, as for instance :— " Could I but touch your intellect,' be cried, 'Before you die ! Mother, the world is mad - This castle in the air, this Heaven of yours, Is the lewd dream of morbid vanity.

For each of us death is the end of all; And when the sun goes out the race of men Shall cease for ever. It is ours to make This farce of fate a splendid tragedy: Since we must be the sport of circumstance, We should be sportsmen, and produce a breed Of gallant creatures, conscious of their doom, Marching with lofty brows, game to the last. Oh good and evil, heaven and hell are lies ! But strength is great : there is no other truth : This is the yea-and nay that makes men hard. Mother, be hard and happy in your death.' "

And then comes the recovery which is no recovery just to confirm the victory of the son over the mother :—

"And when her funeral day had come, her son, Before they fastened down the coffin lid, Shut himself in the chamber, there to gaze Upon her dead face, hardening his heart. But as he gazed, into the smooth wan cheek Life with its wrinkles shot again ; the eyes Burst open, and the bony fingers clutched The coffin sides; the woman raised herself, And owl-like in her shroud blinked on the

Mother, what news of God and Heaven ? ' he asked. Feeble and strange, her voice came from afar am not dead : I must have been asleep.'

Do not imagine that. You lay here dead—

Three days and nights, a corpse. Life has come nack : Often it does, although faint-hearted folk Fear to admit it : none of those who die, And come to life again, can ever tell Of any bourne from which they have returned : Therefore they were not dead, your casuists say.

The ancient jugglery that tricks the world ! You lay here dead, three days and nights. What news?

"After I die I shall come back to you,

And then you must believe "—these were your words— "For For I shall bring you news of God and Heaven."

She cast a look forlorn about the room :

The door was shut; the worn venetian, down ; And stuffy sunlight through the dusty slats Spotted the floor, and smeared the faded walla. He with his strident voice and eyes of steel Stood by relentless."

And last of all we have the snapping of the son's own mind when he hears his mother's confession that she has no news of heaven or God to tell. And finally there comes the poet's own most slipshod ending :—

" He, holding her,

With sobs and laughter spoke : his wind had snapped Like a frayed string o'erstretched : Mother, rejoice ; For I shall make you glad. There is no heaven Your children are resolved to dust and dew: But, mother, I am God. I shall create The heaven of your desires. There must be heaven For mothers and their babes. Let heaven be now V They found him conjuring chaos with mad words Awl brandished hands across his mother's corpse.

Thus did he see her harden with a hiss As life went out in the cold bath of death ; Thus did she soften him before she died: For both were bigots—fateful souls that plague The gentle world."

Now that seems to us, as in not a few of Mr. Davidson's poems, an impatient and almost unmeaning ending. The world is not " gentle " if it gives birth consciously—and all true gentleness must be conscious—to such souls as these, and subjects them to so harsh a fate. Indeed the poet, by passing such a judg- ment as this on his own creations, virtually confirms the son's pessimism even in the same breath in which he condemns his bigotry, for surely there is no truer pessimism than to present us with two fateful souls as plaguing "the gentle world" with creeds that are pure bigotries, blundering snatches at truth,—without giving us the least indication of any such interpretation of the blunder as would show what these souls had gained by their mistakes. The poem ends as if Mr. Davidson were sick of his own work, and had terminated it in a sort of poetical pet, with an impatient shrug of his shoulders,— ' There, get you gone, I am tired of you both, and can only send a sort of curse after you.' And is not that, or some- thing like that, the true drift of the little poem which imme- diately follows the one we have just been dealing with, called "A Song of the Road " ? In that song a traveller enters on the straight and narrow road, where thorns beset the way and lacerate him as he pushes on, and the sound of gay laughter in the distance tempts him to leave it for the "primrose path" of those who seek their own pleasure and find only the misery that comes of that greedy appetite; and this is the end :—

"He followed then the road

Wherein at first he hied ; Soon be came where men abode And loved, and wrought, and died; And straight the Broad and Narrow ways, Heaven fair and Hell obscene, For ever vanished out of space, Spectres that ne'er had been."

Does not that mean that when at last the true humanity shows itself, it finds no right and no wrong, but only an instinct for accepting what is really natural ? The same con- viction, too, so far as we understand Mr. Davidson, is the meaning of the apologetic note which he appends to his version of the Tannhauser legend, "A New Ballad of Tannhauser." In that version his wandering knight finds the abode of the pagan Queen of Love in the midst of the serpents and ghostly terrors which envelop her, and plunges into the raptures of passion with her, till the remembrance of the traditional anathemas on such passion awakens him from his dream of unholy bliss, and he rushes away to confess his sin and to be told that if his sin be not wholly unforgivable, only the Pope himself has the power to absolve him. Thereupon he seeks the Pope who pronounces Tannhiiuser'e soul lost unless the staff he carries in his hand breaks into blossom, but even as he speaks the miracle occurs, and Tannhaueer rushes away, drawn by the magic music which is still sounding in his ears, to renew his raptures with the pagan Queen of Love. That is the drift of Mr. Davidson's new version of the Tannhanser legend. The blossoming of the staff is taken not merely as a sign that there was pardon for him, which was what Tannhauser had asked for, but that there had been no sin at all, and that the dream of passion with the Venus of the old pagan legend might be prolonged under the sanction of miracle itself. And here is Mr. Davidson's apology for this new version :—

" The story of Tannhauser is best known in the sophisticated version of Wagner's great opera. In reverting to a simpler form I have endeavoured to present passion rather than sentiment, and once more to bear a hand in laying the ghost of an unwholesome idea that still haunts the world—the idea of the inherent impurity of nature. I beg to submit to those who may be disposed to think with me, and also to those who, although otherwise minded, are at liberty to alter their opinions, that • A New Ballad of Tannhiiuser ' is not only the most modern, but the most humane interpretation of the world-legend with which it deals."

We submit that Mr. Davidson entirely misreads the old legend. There is no such misreading of human nature in it as he supposes. What it suggests is not that there is no impurity in nature,—nay, that there is such impurity,—but not unforgivable impurity in yielding to the enchantments of mere sensual beauty what should be reserved for the beauty which

is more or lees inspired by a higher and more spiritual life. When the pagan Queen of Love by her magic strains beguiles the man whose heart has been fired by the nobler vision of a Christian chivalry, there is sin, but sin that is no more unfor- givable where there is true repentance, than there is inability in God to make the lifeless staff break into leaf and blossom like that of the tree from which it was originally severed. Mr. Davidson degrades the legend by teaching that no passion can be unholy, whereas it really taught that there is sin, though not unforgivable sin, in being taken captive by a pagan naturalism in a world which had been transfigured by the divine beauty of Christ. Mr. Davidson's naturalism is like the naturalism which Goethe embodied in his Roman elegies, a wilful return to the poorer ideals of an unregenerated world. In Mr. Davidson's reading of the Tannhauser legend there would be no meaning at all in the sounds and visions of horror which warned Tannhanser to flee from the unholy loveliness by which be was tempted on to his fall. In the "Ballad of an Artist's Wife" Mr. Davidson himself teaches a far better doctrine. His new version of the Tannhauser legend is not at all con- sistent with his "Ballad of an Artist's Wife," though even in that there are fragmentary elements of the same untrue and repellent naturalism.

It seems to us that Mr. Davidson frequently dashes off his poems with a sort of angry impatience that they had not turned out more to his liking, dismissing them with a hasty kick, as it were, because they have not proved more in keeping with his own better inspirations. He is a poet, but a poet who seldom matures his thoughts or rids them of their occasional savagery and their moral excrescences.