by Edith Nesbit
Freedom we sing, and would not lose
Her lightest footprint in life’s dust.
We sing of her because we choose,
We sing of love because we must.
Her lyrics are pitched in many keys, and many of them, perhaps the majority, must be taken as dramatic rather than personal. They are not essentially the worse for that; but through some of them there runs a strain of Byronism which is a little trying. The following stanzas may serve as an example, from a poem entitled Bewitched:
You are Fate, you are love, you are longing,
You are music, and roses, and wine,
You are devil, and man, and my lover,
You are hatefully mine and not mine.
You are all that’s infernal in loving,
And all that in hate is divine.
* * * * *
And all would be nothing to suffer,
If once at my feet you could lie,
And offer your soul for my loving —
Could I know that your world was just I —
And could laugh in your eyes and refuse you
And love you and hate you and die.
It is a matter of personal taste, no doubt, but for my part I prefer to these lurid outpourings, the subdued eighteenthcentury grace of such stanzas as the following:
SONG.
We loved, my love, and now it seems
Our love has brought to birth
Friendship, the fairest child of dreams,
The rarest gift on earth.
Soon die love’s roses fresh and frail;
And when their bloom is o’er,
Not all our heart-wrung tears avail
To give them life once more.
But when true love with friendship lives,
As now, for thee and me,
Love brings the roses — Friendship gives
Them immortality.
More characteristic than either the Satanic or the idyllic strain, is the note of nature-symbolism in the following verses:
HOPES.
* * ** *
In hollows where so late but dead leaves lay.
Through the dead leaves the primroses push up;
And wind-flowers fleck the copse, and fields are gay
With daisies and the budding buttercup.
So in our hearts, though thick the dead leaves lie
Of grief — heaped up by winds of old despair —
May there not be a spring-time by-and-by.
When flowers of joy shall blossom even there?
So long has Winter held our hearts in his.
We dare not dream of Spring and all her flowers!
Ah! the undreamed-of happiness it is
That comes — the dreamed-of joy is never ours.
Miss Nesbit has a real love of English nature and a keen eye for it. She seldom or never attempts formal landscapepainting, but her incidental and illustrative touches of description, as in the first of the above stanzas, are often very happy.
In A Pomander of Verse (1895), Miss Nesbit’s style has sensibly ripened. This collection contains some fine romantic lyrics, such as The Spider Queen, Inspiration, and The Golden Rose, quoted at the end of this article. Of the nature-lyrics, the best, perhaps, is that entitled A Kentish Garden; but the following versicles are shorter and no less charming:
CHILD’S SONG IN SPRING.
The silver birch is a dainty lady.
She wears a satin gown;
The elm tree makes the old churchyard shady.
She will not live in town.
The English oak is a sturdy fellow,
He gets his green coat late;
The willow is smart in a suit of yellow,
While brown the beech-trees wait.
Such a gay green gown God gives the larches —
As green as He is good!
The hazels hold up their arms for arches
When Spring rides through the wood.
The chestnut’s proud, and the lilac’s pretty,
The poplar’s gentle and tall.
But the plane tree’s kind to the poor dull city —
I love him best of all.
Several of these lyrics have a dramatic — one might almost say a psychological — significance, which gives them a character of their own. That the poetess has at last learnt the art of compression we may see from the five stanzas of Sanctuary, of which this is the last:
I could not speak. I touched your hand
At the green arch that ends the wood:
“Ah — if she should not understand!”
Ah — if you had not understood!
Here, again, is a lyric, not very happy in form perhaps, but containing the essence of a whole life-drama:
QUIETA NE MOVETE.
Dear, if I told you, made your sorrow certain.
Showed you the ghosts that o’er my pillow lean,
What joy were mine — to cast aside the curtain
And clasp you close with no base lies between!
You have given all, and still would find to give me
More love, more tenderness than ever yet:
You would forgive me — ah, you would forgive me,
But all your life you never would forget.
And I, thank God, can still in your embraces
Forget the past, with all its strife and stain,
— But, if you, too, beheld the evil faces,
I should forget them never, never again.
In Songs of Love and Empire (1898), a new note makes itself heard in Miss Nesbit’s poetry. The internationalism, if I may call it so, of her early verse has now yielded a very pronounced nationalism. The political merits or demerits of the change do not here concern me; I have to consider only its literary results. My impression of the Songs of Empire — three long addresses to Queen Victoria, two songs of Trafalgar and one of Waterloo — may be summed up in the statement that they have sincerity and dignity, but lack distinction. This is not, as it may at first sight appear, a contradiction in terms. It is comparatively easy, now that Spenser and Keats have shown the way, to weave a stately lyrical stanza of eight or ten iambic lines. It is comparatively easy to give the individual lines a certain impetus and sonority. The difficulty is to find new ideas and images, and clothe them in words that shall seem to fly together, as though at a wizard’s spell, from the uttermost treasure-caves of language, and shall set up, in their collocation, a sort of elusive electricity, which not only welds them indissolubly together, but makes them glow and palpitate with light and colour. It is this magical quality of style which we do not find in Miss Nesbit’s odes. Her vocabulary is restricted, and her ideas are not, as a rule, imaginative inspirations, but selections from the common stock of patriotic rhetoric When her imagination leaves the beaten track, it is apt to go rather too far afield. In the following stanza, for instance, the first four lines are of the sonorous-commonplace order, while the last five belong rather to the imaginative-incongruous:
Throned on the surety of a splendid past,
With present glory clothed as with the sun.
Crowned with the future’s hopes, you know at last
What treasure from the years your life has won;
Behold your hands hold fast
The moon of Empire, and its sway controls
The tides of war and peace, while in those hands
Lies tender homage out of all the lands
Against whose feet your furthest ocean rolls.
Here we have too much sun and moon and too many hands and feet. Queen Victoria is clothed “as with the sun,” while she holds in her hands “the moon of Empire,” which sways “ the tides of war and peace.” Even up to this point the image, for all its juggling with the orbs of heaven, is more violent than luminous. “The moon of Empire” is not a natural or illustrative figure; it exists solely for the sake of swaying the tides, and is, therefore, a quirk of fancy, a conceit, rather than a flash of imaginative vision. But when we find that the Queen hol
ds in her hands, not only the moon of Empire, but “tender homage” from the Colonies, we cannot help feeling that she has altogether too large a handful. Then there is a distinct incongruity in placing the Queen’s “hands” on all-fours, so to speak, with the “feet” of the Colonies. The hands are real hands, imaginatively conceived ; the feet are metaphoric feet, belonging to a pure personification. But “hands” and “feet” are so closely associated in our mind that it gives us a decided jolt to pass in a single sentence from one scale or standard of imagination to another. Here, again, is an image which is neither novel nor congruous:
Upon your river where, by day and night,
Your world-adventuring ships come home again,
Glide ghostly galleons, manned by men of might,
Who plucked the wings and singed the beard of Spain.
Perhaps my ornithology is at fault, but it is surely a strange fowl that has both wings to be plucked and a beard to be singed. There is, I repeat, a certain nobility of movement, combined with real exaltation of feeling, in Miss Nesbit’s odes, but they will scarcely take lasting rank among the poems of English patriotism.
In this, as in her earlier books, Miss Nesbit shows that her real strength is centred in the pure lyric, whether personal or semi-dramatic. There is the germ of a psychological tragedy in the four stanzas of The Refusal, while The Goose Girl and The Pedlar are quaint and delicate ditties. But it is in the simplicity of the sheer lovesong that Miss Nesbit touches her truest note, making us forget her lack of verbal artistry in the fervour and intimacy of her emotion. Here is a phase of feeling charmingly rendered:
ENTREATY.
O Love, let us part now!
Ours is the tremulous, low-spoken vow,
Ours is the spell of meeting hands and eyes.
The first, involuntary, sacred kiss
Still on our lips in benediction lies.
O Love, be wise!
Love at its best is worth no more than this —
Let us part now!
O Love, let us part now I
Ere yet the roses wither on my brow.
Ere yet the lilies wither in your breast,
Ere the implacable hour shall flower to bear
The seeds of deathless anguish and unrest.
To part is best.
Between us still the drawn sword flameth fair —
Let us part now!
The stanzas entitled By Faith with Thanksgiving are more commonplace in idea, but have a genuine lyric glow; and the Song of Long Ago, and Love well the Hour, are delicate and charming pieces. This sonnet, the only one in the book, makes one regret that Miss Nesbit does not oftener cast her thoughts in sonnet form:
TOO LATE.
When Love, sweet Love, was tangled in my snare
I clipped his wings, and dressed his cage with flowers.
Made him my little joy for little hours.
And fed him when I had a song to spare.
And then I saw how good life’s good things were,
The kingdoms and the glories and the powers.
Flowers grew in sheaves and stars were shed in showers.
And, when the great things wearied. Love was there.
But when, within his cage, one winter day
I found him lying still with folded wings,
No longer fluttering, eager to be fed —
Kingdoms and powers and glories passed away.
And of life’s countless, precious, priceless things
Nothing was left but Love — and love was dead 1
Among the nature-poems of this collection, Ebb-Tide and Chains Invisible stand out among the most successful; and At Evening Time there shall be Light is a vigorous piece of aerial landscape.
The first of my quotations from Miss Nesbit showed her intense sympathy with childhood, and the last shall exemplify the same all-pervading strain in her work. It is simply entitled:
DIRGE,
Let Summer go
To other gardens; here we have no need of her.
She smiles and beckons, but we take no heed of her,
Who love not Summer, but bare boughs and snow.
Set the snow free
To choke the insolent triumph of the year,
With birds that sing as though he still were here,
And flowers that blow as if he still could see.
Let the rose die —
What ailed the rose to blow? She is not dear to us,
Nor all the Summer pageant that draws near to us;
Let it be over soon, let it go by!
Let Winter come,
With the wild mourning of the wind-tossed boughs
To drown the stillness of the empty house
To which no more the little feet come home.
Such a Song of Love as this will — or I am no prophet — outlast many Songs of Empire.
THE GOLDEN ROSE.
A poor lost princess, weary and worn,
Came over the down by the wind-washed moor.
And the king looked out on her grace forlorn,
And he took her in at his palace door.
He made her queen, he gave her a crown.
Bidding her rest and be glad and gay
In his golden town, with a golden gown.
And a new gold lily every day.
But the crown is heavy, the gold gown gray,
And the queen’s pale breast is like autumn snows;
For he brings a gold lily every day,
But no king gathers the golden rose.
One came at last to the palace keep
By worlds of water and leagues of land,
Gray were his garments, his eyes were deep,
And he held the golden rose in his hand.
She left gold gown, gold town, gold crown,
And followed him straight to a world apart,
And he left her asleep on the wind-washed down,
With the golden rose on her quiet heart.
AT EVENING TIME THERE SHALL BE LIGHT.”
The day was wild with wind and rain,
One grey wrapped sky and sea and shore,
It seemed our marsh would never again
Wear the rich robes that once it wore.
The scattered farms looked sad and chill,
Their sheltering trees writhed all awry,
And waves of mist broke on the hill
Where once the great sea thundered by.
Then God remembered this His land,
His little land that is our own,
He caught the rain up in His hand,
He hid the winds behind His throne,
He soothed the fretful waves to rest,
He called the clouds to come away,
And, by blue pathways, to the west
They went, like children tired of play.
And then God bade our marsh put on
Its holy vestment of fine gold;
From marge to marge the glory shone
On lichened farm and fence and fold;
In the gold sky that walled the west,
In each transfigured stone and tree,
The glory of God was manifest.
Plain for a little child to see!
Review of ‘The Literary Sense’
From: The Reader, Volume 3, No. 3, February 1904. Page 316
That members of civilized communities, while more or less normal in those five senses that are the common heritage of the race, have yet a sixth sense which impels them, in moments of emotional crisis not only to act, but also to think and even to feel as they imagine the characters in the books they read, and the plays they see, would act and think and feel: this is the thesis upon which Mrs. Bland has founded these dozen and a half charming stories. It is not an unfamiliar thesis — witness “Sentimental Tommy” both as youth and man — but from it Mrs. Bland has evolved one or two impressive tragedies and several delightful little comedies.
Perhaps the stories of the former sort are the more convincing, because, as Mrs.
Bland speedily discovers, “Destiny is almost without the literary sense,” and, therefore, “ The Unfaithful Lover,” with its physical catastrophe, and “Rounding Off a Scene” and “The Holiday,” with their purely psychological tragedies, succeed where “ The Obvious “ and other variations upon the purely conventional lamentably fail. Nevertheless, there is the very best sort of genuine comedy in “The Lie Absolute,” “The Love of Romance,” and, above all, in “The Girl with the Guitar.”
Here, as always, Mrs. Bland writes delicately, gracefully, easily. The stories seem, as one reads them, to run from her pen with so little effort that it is only when one pauses to consider the admirable restraint in the climaxes that one gets a hint of the real art which contrives them. The note is nowhere forced; the saving grace of humor tempers the sterner scenes, and the sober sense of life’s spiritual reality sets its limits even to the fantastical.
R. W. K.
Review of ‘The Railway Children’ I
From: The Saturday Review, December 8, 1906 p. X
“The Railway Children,” by E. Nesbit (Wells Gardner, 6s.). It seems ungrateful to hint at a fault in anything by E. Nesbit, to whom we owe so many delightful books, but it seems to us a pity that she has introduced into her latest story so very tragic and unpleasant a subject as imprisonment, whether wrongful or otherwise; to say nothing of implanting a premature distrust of British justice in the youthful reader’s mind. The Railway Children are charming and adventurous little beings, with a wonderful gift for making useful friends, and of turning up in the nick of time to do some extraordinarily brave and useful deed.
From: The Outlook, December 15, 1906 p.771
Review of ‘The Railway Children’ II