attention, and the same discussion-with ever-lessening violence is likely to continue for many years, and to deal hereafter with his words, as well as with his work. As the book has already appeared in the pages of SCRIBNER, it is not necessary to rehearse its pathetic incidents, nor to quote as freely as a reviewer must feel inclined to do from the letters and conversations of the artist,-so subtile, so poetic, so abounding in insight, in correct judgment, in accurate and authoritative statement of the principles of plastic art. Not only are his views of his own art of unique value, but wherever he touches upon literary themes, old or new, Theocritus or Mistral, he shows a fresh and vigorous understanding. If he is able to make himself comprehended both through his painting and his speech, he himself gives us a key to the reason in a sentence of terrible simplicity. "Pain," said Millet, "is, perhaps, that which makes the artist express himself most distinctly."

Millet was a protestant against the superficiality, the empty prettiness of his time, and he put his protest not only into his pictures, but with almost equal force, as it now appears, into oral and literary expression. Did he carry his theory too far, both in what he painted and what he said? Was his correction of the manifest evil of the day too violent?

In his art, judging from what we have seen of his work, it seems to us that he scarcely ever erred in this respect-certainly he was never wantonly, sensationally ugly, though he was, very rarely, humanly painful and distressing. He was moved by the tragedy of life, but, in showing even the darkest side of the tragedy, he was never morbid. "Some tell me," he said, "that I deny the charms of the country. I find much more than charms-I find infinite glories. I see, as well as they do, the little flowers of which Christ said that Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. I see the haloes of dandelions, and the sun, also, which spreads out beyond the world its glory in the clouds. But I see as well, in the plain, the steaming horses at work, and in a rocky place a man, all worn out, whose han' has been heard since morning, and who tries to straighten himself a moment and breathe. The drama is surrounded by beauty." In his pictures as in nature, surely "the drama is surrounded by beauty." If it were true, as many of his contemporaries said, that he was "the painter of ugliness," there would have been no question, at this late day, concerning either his art or his opinions. Millet, like all real artists, had the sense of beauty; his pictures are full of loveliness, both physical and spiritual. He was "able to make people hear the songs, the silences, and murmurings of the air," and while, in his figures, he sought to characterize above all things, he did not fail to portray grace, stateliness, and tenderness of action, and charm of color, as well as the deeper beauty of expression.

In his words, however, Millet was, perhaps, on the question of the beautiful and the sublime in art, a special pleader, though in no petty sense; or rather, it should be said, that as every question has two sides, so it was Millet's part to put into clear, eloquent, and convincing language one side of the

truth concerning beauty and sublimity in plastic art Who will deny that he was right when he said, with that directness of which he was a master, "If I am to paint a mother, I shall try to make her beau. tiful simply by her look at her child. Beauty is expression." How well he puts a profound critical thought when he says that "one is never so Greek as in painting, naïvely, one's impressions, no matter where they are received." And who does not sympathize with the artist when he refuses to "prettify his types?" "I would rather do nothing than express myself feebly." "Yet, one sees handsome peasants, pretty country girls." "Yes, yes, but their beauty is not in their faces; it is in the expression of their figures and their appropriate action."

Perhaps, too, he not only expressed a private conviction, but hinted at a philosophic truth, when he said, "I do not speak of absolute beauty, for I do not know what it is, and it seems to me only a tre mendous joke." It may be he was right when he declared that "everything is beautiful in its own time and place;" that "nothing is beautiful which comes at the wrong time," and that "the beautiful is the suitable." "Who shall dare to say," he asks, "that a potato is inferior to a pomegranate?" But would it be too bold to confess that we still cling to the old idea that some things are prettier than others, and that, as a rule, fruits are more pleasing to the eye than vegetables, although it remains true that a painter of imagination can make a much more beautiful picture of a cabbage than a poor painter can make of a peach, and that even the same good painter's picture of a cabbage may happen to be prettier than his own picture of a peach. "I tried to show Thoré," he says, "that I thought grandeur was in the thought itself, and that everything became great that was employed in a great cause." Incontestable; but Millet illustrated and enforced the doctrine by a reference to the prophet's threatening of a plague of grasshoppers and locusts. "I asked him whether the threat would have been more terrible if, instead of locusts, the prophet had spoken of some king, with his chariots and war-horses, for the devastation is so great that nothing is untouched; the earth is denuded! Lament, husbandman, for the harvest of the field has perished! the wild asses and all creatures cry out, for there is no more grass; the object is accomplished and the imagination aroused." Certainly; but what has this to do with painting? If he had said one might paint a picture of a land that had been desolated by grasshoppers, which would be as fine as a picture of a land desolated by chariots and horsemen, this would have been true enough. But the prophet's threat was verbal, and Millet, in the heat of his controversy with Thore, confounded literary with plastic art, and for once, at least, is eloquent without being clear. He could hardly have denied that a group of a chariot and horseman is a finer thing to paint than a grasshopper. But far be it from us to combat the views of Millet with regard to beauty. They may be said to be fundamentally true, if not exclusively true; and the world of art has need of their lesson to-day as much as when they were first uttered.

It can scarcely be called a derogation that Millet, like all other geniuses that the world has known, with the almost solitary exception of Shakspere, had his limitations of temperament. In the large sense in which we say that Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Milton, and Dante were limited, so Millet was limited. He seems to have been somewhat deficient in humor, and lacking in appreciation of the gayety of life and nature. He did not understand or sympathize with Paris-a civic entity which has been an inspiration to so many men of genius. He was a somber, though serene spirit; a Norman peasant with a peasant's pride.

not.

"The gay side never shows itself to me," he said. "I don't know where it is. I have never seen it. The gayest thing I know is the calm, the silence, which is so sweet, either in the forest or in the cultivated land-whether the land be good for culture or Sometimes, in places where the land is sterile, you see figures hoeing and digging. From time to time one raises himself and straightens his back, as they call it, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brow.' Is this the gay, jovial work some people would have us believe in? But, nevertheless, to me it is true humanity, and great poetry." "True humanity and great poetry "-that should see these in the life about him, and be able to put them into his pictures-this is the important matter, after all. And if his pictures do possess these qualities, what becomes of the doubt thrown out by Fromentin as to their power to live? This is what Fromentin says:

he

An original painter of our own time, a lofty soul, a melancholy spirit, a good heart, a nature truly rustic, has said of the country and country people, of the severity, the melancholy, and the nobility of their work, things which no Dutchman would have ever dreamed of looking for. He said them in a language a little rude, and under forms where the thought has more clearness and vigor than the hand. We were deeply thankful for his tendencies; and in the French school of painting we saw in him the sensibilities of a Burns, less clever than the poet in making himself understood. After all, has he or not left beautiful pictures? Has his form, his language-I mean that exterior envelope without which the things of the mind cannot exist or last-has it the qualities to make him a beautiful painter, and to assure his future fame? He is a profound thinker compared with Paul Potter and de Cuyp; he is a sympathetic dreamer compared with Terburg and Metsu; he has something incontestably noble when we think of the trivialities of Steen, Ostade, and Brauwer. As a man, he puts them all to the blush; as a painter, is he their equal?'

Remember that Fromentin is judging Millet's use of pigments by one of the two highest standards in art-that of the Dutch school. Comparing him with his contemporaries, Fromentin might have held at least Rousseau, possibly Delacroix and one or two others, his superiors in color; but in this one point of technique, we think a critic as severe as Fromentin would have been at a loss to find among now living French painters more than two or three equals of Millet-if he could have found as many as that. The modern school in Holland-though so different from the old-still is a school in which color is not forgotten; but even in color who will say that Israels (sometimes called the Dutch Millet) is equal to his master? Is there now any one in England or

produced only one or two colorists who are superior to him: La Farge is, indeed, more purely a colorist than Millet, and perhaps the same can be said of Albert Ryder, a young painter of a more limited range of ability than La Farge, but of great beauty and intensity of color. So, even in the use of pigments, Millet falls short, if he does fall short, only by comparison with the very best, while as a delineator of the action of the human figure, we think it can be shown that Millet is among the first. But to adhere to what Fromentin actually says-"an original painter," "a lofty soul," who has said "things that no Dutchman would have ever dreamed of looking for"; "the sensibilities of Burns"; "a profound thinker compared with Paul Potter and de Cuyp"; "sympathetic," "noble," putting them all to the blush "as a man." But Millet was not a poet, a preacher, a statesman-he was a painter. He did not belong to the class of men whose friends say, deprecatingly: "If, only, he had the gift of expression, others beside us would know how great he is!" It is by means of his own plastic expression that he forces Fromentin to say, comparing him with the masters of painting: "As a man, he puts them all to the blush." If Fromentin was not deceived in declaring Millet to be a great man, by the testimony of his art, then it seems to us that he may have underrated the technical qualities themselves of that art. We repeat-we know Millet's moral and intellectual qualities only through his art; he makes through this medium a powerful impression, and so long as this impression continues to be made, so long will his pictures last. But, like Fromentin, we are inclined rather to suggest and question than to dogmatize in taking, as we do, a more hopeful view of the perpetuity of the fame of this "lofty soul" and "profound thinker."

Tennyson's New Ballads.*

THERE are people who believe that the poets are a short-lived guild, and apt, by too much giving way to their emotional nature, to wear themselves out earlier than other men. Keats in England, Schiller and Heine in Germany, Drake and Poe in America, give some color to the idea. But how many more reach an age when they live again for the third time in their grandchildren? Victor Hugo has made exquisite melody over his feelings as a grandfather, and now Tennyson, the happy father of sons who promise much better things than are supposed traditionally to be the lot of a great man's children, comes before the world as a grandparent of the most devoted kind. Little is known of Mrs. Tennyson. Whatever share she may have had in the love-lyrics of the Poet-Laureate remains concealed under the habitual reserve of Tennyson, but, as a woman is best and most honorably known by the children she has reared, the grandfather's testimony to the grandchild may be taken indirectly as a compliment to the grandmother.

* Ballads and Other Poems. By Alfred Tennyson. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1880.

It would not be true to say that this dedication, "To Alfred Tennyson, my Grandson," is particularly good poetry; its virtue is rather reflex and relative to the personality of its author. For there are many stories running about the world whose animus is to make the unwary hearer suppose that Mr. Tennyson is a morose and forbidding person in his old age, a sort of poetical Thomas Carlyle.

"Golden-haired Ally, whose name is one with mine,
Crazy with laughter, and babble, and earth's new wine,
Now that the flower of a year and a half is thine,
Oh, little blossom, oh mine, and mine of mine,
Glorious poet who never hast written a line,
Laugh, for the name at the head of my verse is thine.
Mayst thou never be wronged by the name that is mine!

There will be ten thousand readers of these lines who will glow over the fact that Tennyson dedicates his ballads to his baby grandson, and among them one, at most, who will shake his head over the weakness of the verse. The mass of readers are, fortunately, more occupied with the fact presented than with a critical analysis of the poem. Doubtless many who have heard grievous reports of the PoetLaureate, particularly from lion-hunting Americans who had been badgering him, will revise their judgment when they find him a doting grandfather.

Mr. Tennyson does not offer anything essentially different from his earlier work, nor is there any reason why we should expect it. He has a niche on Parnassus; whether it be high or low remains for posterity to decide. At present all we have to do is to pick out the best from what he gives us among the ballads and miscellaneous verses now for the first time printed in book form. Unquestionably the first place must be given to "The Revenge; A Ballad of the Fleet," which appeared a year or two ago in "The Nineteenth Century.' The scene is new (for Tennyson) and the versification very unusual. It reminds one of Browning's ballad of "Hervé Riel." Mr. Tennyson seems to have had a fit of disgust at the comparative smoothness of his usual versification, and to have determined to outdo Browning himself. Yet, for all that, his hearty love of rhyme, of the cling-clang of double and single rhymes, would not let him be, and so we find "The Revenge" full of rhymes in the line. The effect is to give an indescribable smack of sailor-song to the ballad; perhaps the poet had the ballad of Captain Kidd in mind. Were it shorter, it might rank as one of Tennyson's finest things, but it has upon it the thoroughly English curse of wordiness, and, by the time we know where the whole story tends, we are beginning to perceive that the author might have told it in half the time.

"Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: I know you are no coward;

You fly them for a moment to fight with them again.
But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore.
I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord
Howard,

To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.'

III.

"So Sir Howard passed away with five ships of war that day,

Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;
But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land

Very carefully and slow,

Men of Bideford in Devon,

And we laid them on the ballast down below;
For we brought them all aboard,

And they blest him, in their pain, that they never were left to Spain,

To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord

IV.

"He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight,

And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight,

With his huge sea-castle heaving upon the weather-bow. 'Shall we fight, or shall we fly?

Good Sir Richard, tell us now,

For to fight is but to die!

There'll be little of us left by the time this sun be set' And Sir Richard said again: We be all good English men Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil' For I never turned my back upon Don or devil yet'

Sir Richard spoke, and he laughed, and we roared a burrah, and so

The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe, With her hundred fighters on deck and her ninety sick be low;

For half of their fleet to the right, and half to the left were seen,

And the little Revenge ran on through the long sea-lane

between."

As the Poet-Laureate of England, Mr. Tennyson keeps his seat manfully, if the chief qualification be to write abundantly and in various directions. If, however, the laureateship be regarded as an appanage of the throne, as it was in former centuries, the present incumbent has not much to show in the way of direct poetical expression to or concerning members of the royal family. There is a dedicatory poem to the Princess Alice, and lines to the Princess Frederica of Hanover, daughter of the blind king, on her marriage-fine ideas not too happily expressed. The poem to the Princess Alice dedicates "The Defence of Lucknow" to her memory, a ballad full of good things and admirably fit for a poet-laureate of England to write, but a poem which suffers from the same defect that lessens the interest in much of Tennyson's work, namely, unnecessary length. It has such lines as

English people. Yet, a distinction must be made. He does not embrace in his sympathies anything but Saxon England; Ireland and Scotland are foreign countries to him, and it is clear that France or Montenegro interests him more than two of the three main divisions of Great Britain. He has seen tardily the value of certain Irish legends, and in "The Defence of Lucknow" is compelled to give credit to the Highlanders who relieved the city. But without the modernization of the "Battle of Brunanburh" from the Anglo-Saxon, one can see in his poems the prejudices entertained by Englishmen against the Irish and Scotch. This poem is a rough alliterative war chant in memory of the discomfiture, by West-Saxons and Mercians, of the Scotch under Constantinus and the Irish-Danes under Anlaf.

The translation of thirty lines of the 18th Book of the Iliad is admirably done, being executed in thirty-❘ three lines of blank verse. We might prefer in these lines a stronger word for "call'd," since it was a goddess who cried out, and it was her voice that paralyzed the Trojans.

"There standing, shouted, and Pallas far away
Call'd; and a boundless panic shook the foe.'

The sonnets are of different degrees of merit; that to Victor Hugo least pleasing; that to Montenegro fine; but the following is, to our thinking,

much the finest of the four :

"TO THE REV. W. H. BROOKFIELD. "Brooks, for they called you so that knew you best, Old Brooks, who loved so well to mouth my rhymes, How oft we two have heard St. Mary's chimes! How oft the Cantab supper, host and guest Would echo helpless laughter to your jest! How oft with him we paced that walk of limes, Him, the lost light of those dawn-golden times, Who loved you well! Now both are gone to rest. Yon man of humorous melancholy mark, Dead of some inward agony-is it so? Our kindlier, trustier Jacques, past away!

I can not laud this life, it looks so dark:

SKIAS ONAR-dream of a shadow, go-
God bless you. I shall join you in a day."

Recent Works on Poe.*

MR. STODDARD's recently published selections from the writings of Edgar Poe contain all of Poe's poems worthy of retention, the best of his tales and sketches, and enough of his critical essays to give the general reader an idea of the singular acuteness of his literary judgments when unbiased by personal feeling. The accompanying life of the poet is enlarged from the memoir prefixed to Mr. Stoddard's edition of the poems published in 1875. It contains, however, much new material, and in special several of Poe's letters, now first presented. Mr. Stedman's valuable critical article on Poe, contributed to the May SCRIBNER, has been reprinted in elegant shape by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., so that the latest utterances on the subject, both in biography and in criticism, are now simultaneously before the public.

*Edgar Allan Poe. By Edmund Clarence Stedman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1880.

The Life and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. By R. H. Stoddard New York: W. J. Widdleton.

It can hardly be said that these two publications do much toward modifying the already very distinct impression made by Poe's peculiar genius. And yet they were not uncalled for, since they settle— it may be hoped finally-many mooted points in his career, both as a man and as an artist.

Poe's life has usurped an undue share of attention, considering how unrelated it was to his literary work. The latter occupied a sphere more remote from the real world than is usual even in the writings of the most "idealistic" poets. Mr. Lathrop, in his comparison of Poe with Hawthorne, has pointed out how un-American the former was; how little root he struck in the soil. His creations were like the blossoms of an air-plant. Even where they sprang from an actual experience, as in the lines "To Helen," or the little poem "For Annie," he translated the experience into that realm of weird creatures and unearthly landscapes which was the true home of his imagination. In Philadelphia or New York he was always a stranger. His mind had

The reason why so many memoirs of Poe have been written is to be found in the inaccuracy and malignity of Griswold's famous life. This was at once attacked by Graham and Neale, and the controversy thus started has raged ever since. Many obscure points have been thereby cleared up, such as the date and place of the poet's birth, the real manner of his death, the exact nature of his relations with Mrs. Whitman, etc. Griswold has been convicted of many errors of fact; and yet, in spite of the generous women who have rushed to Poe's defense, and of the laborious biography of his latest rehabilitator, Mr. Ingram, the essential features of his character remain much as Griswold left them.

It can hardly be denied that Poe was personally a very poor creature. He was thankless, vain, quarrelsome, and insincere. He had some fine, winning traits which made a few women love him, but he was one whom no man could trust or respect. Mr. Stoddard claims in his preface to have written "generally without a word either of praise or blame; for whatever else might be said of his memoir, he was determined that it should not be called controversial." This boast he carries out very fairly, maintaining an attitude of cold impartiality, and certainly not erring through excess of sympathy with his subject.

But whatever may have been the short-comings of Poe's life, the world willingly forgets and forgives. It knows that the order and harmony of the poet's verse have often no correspondence in his acts; that the ethereal quintessence of genius is lodged sometimes in the coarsest vessels, and sometimes in vessels sadly frail and broken. Has not the world forgiven Byron? And after all, what has it to forgive?—it remains so vastly in the poet's debt! It seems, therefore, a kind of ingratitude to recall the failure in living of one whose thinking has become part of the intellectual experience of the race.

Mr. Stoddard gives us suggestive glimpses of the

literary background against which Poe's figure is projected. Those were the days of Graham, and Godey, and of the annuals; the days of the Kennedys, the Hoffmans, and the Sigourneys; when the "North American Review" paid its contributors two dollars a page; when General Morris wrote songs for the "New York Mirror"; and Mr. Richard Henry Wilde wrote sonnets for the "Southern Literary Messenger." Does not all this read like ancient history? Poe slaved as an assistant editor for a salary of ten dollars a week. Willis was the only writer who made a comfortable income by his pen. The reading public was still small. There was no stimulating criticism. A new book was greeted with indifference by the public, and with feeble, indiscriminating praise by the reviews. Hard, surely, was the fortune of the bard born into such an environment. In reading the career of Poe, one is reminded of another American poet who suffered in the same way from an uncongenial milieu. We allude to Percival. The two men were quite unlike in character, and of totally unequal genius. Poe is as sure to be remembered as Percival to be forgotten. But they were alike in the bitterness of their reaction against their environment; in the injurious effect upon them of the atmosphere of their generation, at once relaxing and chilling. They both wrote, as it were, in vacuo.

|

How much more bracing is the air of literature to-day appears on comparing Mr. Stedman's little book with Poe's own critical writings. The latter was alternately engaged in attacking his rivals with jealous ferocity, and in puffing some third-class obscurity into notice. The former, with much less than Poe's natural sagacity, brings to his task a sense of responsibility which makes him, in the end, the better critic. If his criticism seems the result of a nicely trained taste rather than of original insight, it is nevertheless just and delicate throughout. It applies largely though by no means exclusively— | to matters of technique, as might perhaps be expected from the nature of his subject, and from the fact that he is himself a conscientious literary workman. Poe's art at least as a poet-was minute, and invites minute discussion.

It may be worth while to compare Mr. Stedman's judgments with Mr. Stoddard's, where they touch the same points. Criticism, it is to be feared, can never become an exact science. It always brings up against some such maxim as “De gustibus non est disputandum." Here are two poets writing of a third, and reaching, perhaps, a general agreement; but in details the subjective element comes in and defeats consent. "If Annabel Lee' and 'For Annie,'" writes Mr. Stoddard, "possess any merit other than attaches to melodious jingle, I have not been able to discover it." On the other hand, Mr. Stedman says of "For Annie": "For repose, and for delicate and unstudied melody, it is one of Poe's truest poems, and his tenderest." And he pronounces "Annabel Lee" "a tuneful dirge, the simplest of Poe's melodies, and the most likely to please the common ear." He adds that it was written with more spontaneity than others of Poe's

lyrics: "The theme is carried along skillfully, the movement hastened and heightened to the end, and there dwelt upon, as often in a piece of music." Still greater is their divergence of opinion touching "Ulalume," that fantastic requiem which the poet wrote shortly after the death of his wife. Of" Ula. lume" Mr. Stoddard writes as follows, after calling it "the most singular poem that anybody ever produced in commemoration of a dead woman": "I can perceive no touch of grief in it, no intellectual sincerity, but a diseased determination to create the strange, the remote, and the terrible. No healthy mind was ever impressed by Ulalume."" On the other hand, Mr. Stedman says: "It is so strange, so unlike anything that preceded it, so vague and yet so full of meaning, that of itself it might establish a new method. To me it seems an improvisation, such as a violinist might play upon the instrument which had become his one thing of worth after the death of a companion had left him alone with his own soul."

We think that the subtler interpretation is here the truer one. Is there any touch of grief in "Ly. cidas"? Poe was incapable of writing a simple, direct expression of a personal sorrow, such as Burns wrote, e. g., in his lines "To Mary in Heaven." As Milton's pastoral machinery keeps his emotion at arm's length, so with Poe: the strangest form which his imagination imposed upon his utterance grew to be his instrument of expression— his violin. In the preface to his third volume of poems, he says that "a poem is opposed to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure." This is one of the cases in which he limited his definitions by his own practice, and "Ulalume" is his extremest example of indefinite

ness.

Apropos of "Ulalume," Mr. Stoddard objects to Poe's abuse of the refrain-or, as Mr. Stedman prefers to call it, the " repetend." "The gain of a single word and the variation of a single thought are hardly worth such repetitions as these":

"The leaves they were crisped and sere-
The leaves they were withering and sere," etc.

Here again Mr. Stedman would seem to take issue with his brother critic. He instances, as an example of the employment of the refrain with "novel and poetical results," the following lines from "Ulalume":

"But our thoughts they were palsied and sere,
Our memories were treacherous and sere."

So far as the instances here quoted go, we agree with Mr. Stoddard. The trick becomes distasteful in its excess, and has been wittily compared to the arithmetical process of "carrying one" from the line above. But we would not willingly relinquish the masterly employment of this effect in "The Raven," nor that lingering echo in which the music of "Annabel Lee" expires

"In her sepulcher there by the seaIn her tomb by the sounding sea." After what Stoddard says of the "jingle” in “For