THE ROSSLYN -SERIES EDITED BY W. EARL HODGSON. The New Day Thobias Gordon Hak. WITH A PREFACE BY THE EDITOR AiOhU"^ ^ 2^/ V/?^v PR4735.H2N5"""™"'""-*"^ The new day; sonnets. With a portrait of t 3 1924 013 476 936 THE ROSSLYN SERIES. The next Volume in this Series will be Poems by Mr. Walter Herries Pollock. PR THE NEW DAY SONNETS Works by Dr. GORDON HAKE. 'Parables and Tales.'' "Madeleine." (Chapman Hall.) 'Maiden Ecstasy.'' "New Symbols." 'Legends of the Morrow." " The Serpent Play." (Chatto Windits) ERRATA. The third Quatrain of Sonnet XCI. should read thus : — Ready to bend to Nature's high behest, Select for us a fitting burial spot, That we within her reach may ever rest, And never by our country be forgot. In Sonnet XLV., fifth line, for " rhymes " read rhyme. The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013476936 THE NEW DAiY SONNETS -THOMAS GORDON HAKE With a Portrait of the Author by Dante Gabriel Rossetti EDITED, WITH A PREFACE, BY W. EARL HODGSON London REMINGTON & CO PUBLISHERS HENRIETTA STREET COVENT GARDEN 1890 {All Rights reserved] >E I 'fe H 2. 14 5- K-\']4i^ 7 0.fi To W. T. W., THE FEIBND WHO HAS GONE WITH ME THEOUGH THE STUDY OF NATUEE, ACCOMPANIED ME TO HBE LOVELIEST PLACES AT HOME AND IN OTHEE LANDS, AND SHABED WITH ME THE EEWAED SHE HBSEEVES FOE HEE MINISTERS AND INTEEPEETEES, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. Friendship is love's full beauty unalloyed With passion that may waste in selfishness, Fed only at the heart and never cloyed : Such is our friendship ripened but to bless. It draws the arrow from the bleeding wound With cheery look that makes a winter bright ; It saves the hope from falling to the ground, And turns the restless pillow towards the light. To be another' s in his dearest want. At struggle with a thousand racking throes, When all the balm that Heaven itself can grant Is that which friendship' s soothing hand bestows : How joyful to be joined in such a love, — We two, — may it portend the days above ! PREFACE. The originality and the impressiveness of Dr. Gordon Hake's poetic work are not a new dis- covery. They have long been familiar to men of letters. Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, among many other critics, held Dr. Hake in high admiration. ' ' H appears to us, ' ' he said, writing in ' ' The Fort- nightly Review," " that Dr. Hake is, in relation to his own time, as original a poet as one can well con- ceive possible. He is uninfluenced by any styles or mannerisms of the day to so absolute a degree as to tempt one to believe that the latest singer he may have even heard of is Wordsworth ; while in some respects his ideas and points of view are newer than the newest in vogue ; and the external afp,nity frequently traceable to elder poets only throws this essential independence into startling and at times almost whimsical relief His style, at its most characteristic pitch, is a combina- B ii PREFACE. tion of extreme homeliness, as of Quarles or Bunyan, with a formality and even occasional courtliness of diction which recall Pope himself in his m.ost artificial flights ; -while one is frequently reminded of Gray by sustained vigour of declama- tion. This is leaving out of the question the direct reference to classical models, which is, perhaps, in reality, the chief source of what this poet has in comynon with the eighteenth-century writers." This gejieralised survey of Dr. Hake's work is wide enough to embrace poems so different in nature and in method as " Old Souls," where the popular theology is embodied in an allegory as original as Bunyan's and much more daring, and " The Snake-Charmer," where tnan in his relation to the lower animals is considered froin the point of view of the latest school of science, in which Dr. Hake himself was an early worker. In order to show that Dr. Hake is a poet of high rank, it would be necessary to consider all his poems in all their variety of impulse and of treatment ; for it has to PREFACE. iii be remembered, when writing of him, that the poet of " Old Souls " and of the impassioned Christian vision " Ecce Homo " has been declared by a com- petent authority upon such matters to have been "in the van of the Evolutionists." He had indeed gone through that study of Nature, " at home and in other lands," to which he so beautifully makes reference in the dedication of the rem.arkable sonnets now introduced to the public. With the exceptions of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Mr. Theodore Watts, one cannot recall any singer other than Dr. Hake who has gone through that study in natural science which he boldly declares to be a necessary part of the poet's equipment in these days. Still, while Mr. Watts' sonnets, " Natura Benigna" and "Natura Maligna," which are alluded to in Sonnet VHI . of this volume, and, indeed, all his poems, show, as a critic has said of them, that "a training in natural science does not necessarily hinder a poet from achieving the highest artistic effects in poetry,'' iv PREFACE. Dr. Holmes^ recent manifesto against rhythm, rhyme, and imagery would seem, on the other hand, to point to the conclusion, hinted at by Dar- win, that the study of natural science brings with it a distaste for poetic art. It is a remarkable coincidence indeed that Dr. Holmes' manifesto should appear simultaneously with Dr. Hake's enthusiastic sonnets. Now, those who have bee^i in the habit of admiring the astonishing brilliance and literary perfection of the venerable American' s prose writings must often have been struck with wonder at the metallic hard- ness of his verses. In "Elsie Vennerf in "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," in " The Poet at the Breakfast Table," and in many another piece of admirable work, we find, besides inex- haustible wealth of wit and wisdom, a very large amount of what a well-known critic, speaking of Byron, has called "poetry in solution" work which seemed to require only the shaping power of the artist to fashion it into high poetry. The PREFACE. V moment Dr. Holmes sets about exercising his .shaping power the literary matter ceases to be "poetry in solution." It becomes unmistakable prose. Even the quality of brilliance has de- parted. He himself has at length confessed that poetic form is a clog to him, not a spur. "Rhythm alone is a tether," he says, "and not a very long one; but rhymes are iron fetters ; it is dragging ■a chain and a ball to m.arch under the incum- brance ; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in when you execute your metrical ' pas seul.' . . . Poetry is comTnonly enough thought to be the language of emotion. On the contrary, most of what is so called proves the absence of all passionate excitement. It is a cold-blooded, haggard, anxious, worrying hunt after rhymes which can be made serviceable, after images which will be effective, after phrases which will be sonorous ; all this under lim.itations which restrict the natural movements of fancy and imagination." This passage, by a man who has ■worked for years in an art which, he now affirms, VI PREFACE. should be taught " to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylum," has been supposed to be the result " of a natural anger at finding his prose accepted by cofnpetent critics and his verse rejected." The defects of his own verses, however, show that his strictures must be attributed less to pique than to that "high conscience of science" which turned Darwin so completely away from poetry that he could not read even Shakespeare. Should we not, in endeavouring to understand the neglect of poetry which a certain eminent poet and his reviewers have been discussing, endeavour to bring into notice the scientific bias of our time ? Many high thinkers speak in verse ; but the people whom they address do not unanimously listen. Mr. Alfred Austin, the writer to whom we have alluded, has to fall back upon the humorous reflection that, " to do them justice, poets have usually exhibited a robust capacity for dispensing with readers." Following another critic, Mr. Austin is undeniably right when he attributes PREFACE. vii the decline of the poet to the rise of the novelist. He seems to think that prose, which is the mode of colloquy, is more easily followed than poesy, which ?s not the mode of men's habitual thoughts. Since Sir Walter Scott came among us to popularize the novel, we have had the common experiences, feel- ings, and aspirations of humanity so abundantly set forth in a style ivhich the running man may read that poetry, which is supposed to work the same materials itito a perplexing form, has been gradually suffering neglect. Encouraged by the precision, the force, and the amplitude with which certain writers have stated subtle and inom.entous ideas in prose, we have been lapsing into the assumption that there is contained in poetry nothing of truth or of imagination which could not be as clearly expressed in the plain language which multitudes can follow. This assumption, which has been definitively defended in one of our leading Reviews, is true in itself; but it suggests a falsehood. Any great viii PREFACE. narrative poem could easily he translated into prose without losing the high moralities which the authors were impelled to utter ; but if we had had no poets the high moralities would 7iever have been uttered, probably never conceived. Then, with re- gard to the fetters of form, the writer of " Natura Maligna " has spoken of being ' ' lifted on the wings of rhyme;" and Dr. Hake expresses the same idea in Sonnet XXXIV of this volume. It has been well said that, ifistead of being a hindrance to the muse, " the fetters of form" are a stimulant, and the cause of an enrichment ; for the need to find rhythms and rhymes forces the mind into layers of diction that would otherwise be unexplored, and the imagination is much stirred in the process. Words long unused are frcijuently as suggestive as an apparently forgotten perfume; and, in his sifting and seising of words, the poet comes upon experiences, feelings, and thoughts which, if prose had been his mode, would have remained lost in the mysterious depths of memory. Thus, far from kill- PREFACE. ix ing the spirit of thought in mechanical forms, the exigences of melody and of metre conjure up into a new dawn thoughts which would otherwise have per- Mianently set. The statement of this truth will perhaps lend a new force to Mr. Matthew Ar7told's aphorism that "poetry is at bottom a criticism of life." A review of life in general which did not spring from a complete review of the critic's own career would be a judgm.ent from insufficient knowledge, and, therefore, of little help. The poet only can give us an adequate criticism of life, because he is the only critic whose method prevents him from Jorgetting the great bulk of the relevant con- siderations. Neglecting poetry, which, by help of the con- ditions sneered at by Dr. Holmes, gets so far deeper down into the depths of personality than prose goes, society's view of life has been gra- dually becoming superficial. We have socially Mnd individually broken ourselves off from the X PREFACE. past. Each Monday morning begins a period of new bustles, with scores of novelists and politi- cians and philosophers clafnoiiring for our attention -ivhile they are "looking backward" or "looking forward," which, in either case, oddly enough, means that, on the strength of having pondered the doings of last week, they have a revelation to expound of how the civilized world is going to live unhappily ever afterwards. All this arises from our prose way of looking at things. We invent a new 'ism. or a new 'osophy, some patent specific ■which is to satisfy the soul until the next issue of the half-crown Reviews, every month, because, giving ear to the prosiasts and the politicians rather than to the poets, we live wholly in the present, and deprive ourselves of the strength which would arise in us if we allowed ourselves, by aid of poetry , to remember the things which should cause us to have faith and repose. Before the era of prose, in the time of the Border Minstrelsy, and when Ejigland was merrie because she was full of ballads,. PREFACE. xi we had much greater fortitude than we have in these latter days. If we were rejected by some bright maid, we either shot the rival and then, perhaps, ourselves, like gentlemen, or, with equally good results, invited ourselves to consider whether, wasting in despair, 'twere wise to die because a woman's fair ; but now, instead of duelling, with suicide to follow, or instead the satirist's wholesome reflections about the insignificance of the individual , we suddenly become convinced that there is no God, and rush off, a garrulous pack of sorrowing Werters, to Fetter Lane or to Bloomsbury, or to wheresoever are the temples of the latest sect along with whom it is fashionable to malign the Almighty and glorify our lugubrious selves. At any rate, if we do not do this, we in some other way, when things go wrong with us, disquiet our- selves in vain ; and even if things do not go wrong with us we frequently, when we have time to think, feel at a loss to find a sufficient reason for living. It is because our age is an age of prose that it is an :xii PREFACE. age of platitudinarian despair and of philosophical empiricisms. At the same time, we must admit that the unrest- Jul insipidity and infidelity of the age may be not altogether attributable to the neglect of poetry. We have had no great war for full thirty years. We have not for a long time, that is to say, been subject to the influence most potent to keep aglow the romantic feelings which prevent the rise of false sentiments and of fad philosophies. It is quite certain that if we had had a recent conflict with a great European Power we should not now have been so completely dominated by the meta- physical prosiast and the party politician. Our nation would have been full of lively patriotism, and, resembling the birds which sing because they ■cannot help it, we should have been engaged in a revival of the ballad. Besides, the neglect of poetry m.ay he in some measure attributable to a fault of the poets themselves. When poetry last fell into disrepute, the cause, as Mr. Courthope contends in PREFACE. xiii "The Liberal Movement in English Literature,"' was that the poets had become artificial. They were then of the school of Dryden, and were given lip to a severe classicism which misrepre- sented the facts of life, the modes of the nation's thoughts and energies. The Revolution had revived the natural feelings of humanity ; and literature was neglected until Wordsworth, Scott^ Byron, and Shelley established the Romantic Movement, which put letters into harmony with life. Now, may it not be that the modern neglect of poetry, the criticism of life, is to some extent due to letters, of which poetry is the highest expression, having lagged behind the movement of life ? There is cause to think that this is so. The Romantic era in the life of Europe, which called forth the Liberal School in Literature, has been succeeded by the Scientific Era ; but, it must be admitted, Poetry, the criticism of life, the highest mode of letters, has not been widening with the process of men's thoughts. Apart from Dr. xiv PREFACE. Hake and the two other poet-students of natural science to whom reference has been made, only Lord Tennyson has recognized the new cosmogony established by the principle of Evolution, and until the appearance of his lastest volume all that even he had to say of it was that Nature " is careful of the type " and " careless of the single life." Until now the poets alone among English mankind have been unaffected by the doctrine of Evolution. This doctrine, the result of the greatest of modern discoveries, has affected the beliefs of all persons who either read or at afternoon tea hear the results of reading ; it has changed the tone of the novels to be had at circulating libraries ; but, excepting in the instances mentioned, there has hardly been a whisper of it in poetry. Ours is the only period in which poetry, instead of leading thought, has been either ignoring progress or lamenting it. Perhaps, however, this attitude of the poets is PREFACE. XV one with which nervous ■}nen have reason to be sympathetic. Progress is a will-o'-the-wisp. It is always in a marsh, and the most agile can never overtake it. Think of progress in politics. Ponder, that is to say, the evolution of the body politic. Speaking largely, one may remark that the Divine Right of Kings formulated into the philosophy of politics marked the first station in the progress of the State " down the ringing grooves of change." It ■was the first conception which defined man's rela- tion to the State. As the Chinese to this day feel, there was much to be said for it ; for, in the words of Mr. Ruskin, if kings do not rule by divine right, it is difficult to perceive by what right they rule at all. By-and-bye it began to dawn upon certain civilized peoples that a divine right to be ruled in decency and order was as distinctly a privilege of the nation as the majesty of govern- ance was a divine privilege of the king, and the king's powers became prerogatives, to be exercised only in so far as his subjects approved xvi PREFA CE. them, a7td he himself became a monarch. Atnong ourselves he is a monarch to this day, and with u^ the ultimate truth in politics is Monarchy, which meajis Kingship so far as we feel inclined to allow it ; but what cause have we to believe that we are the people and that the wisdom which abides with us shall perpetually endure? We have none whatever. We know that in France and in America Progress has been galloping more rapidly than it has with its, and there is cause to expect that Limited Monarchy will be supplanted by- Republic in the person of a gentleinan who is really Sovereign all the while he pretends to be Pro.xy for the People. A President, there is no doubt, fancies himself the last wonder, the last institution in politics, and the world at large agrees with him ; but that is only because he and the world arc subject to the i7nmortal error that "we arc the people" and that our wisdom is fnal. They do not see that wisdom, which has always been tentative, is likely to remain PREFACE. xvii so, and that if there were an omniscient Mr. Julian Sturgis "The Comedy of a County House" would be supplemented by " The Comedy of the State, " in which the endlessness of Progress in Politics would be proved as if it were a proposition in Euclid. The principle of Infinality, which governs our knowledge of human life, should, one may not unreasonably suppose, govern our knowledge of natural law. Once our knowledge was that the sun went round the earth, which was flat then ; now our knowledge is that the earth goes round the sun. Once our knowledge was that, at a divine command, there suddenly began to be mankind and other distinct species ; now our knowledge is that '^ elements organically met" produced the eozoon, who begat the forebears of the chattering ape, and subsequently, by natural law, the arguing Agnostic. Is Evolution to stop with Mr. Robert Elsmere ? Is insolvent creation to offer him a composition, have the terms accepted, and knowledge find u full stop put to the progress of it ? xviii PREFA CE. One is reluctantly obliged to think not. To-day, Evolution seems to us a final explanatio7i of the universe ; but not so very long ago our forefathers had exactly the same impression about a view of the solar system superseded now, and they made Galileo suffer because his opinion differed from theirs. Who knows lohat, as expressed in poetry, the knowledge of man is coming to ? "Religion," it has been said, "is the emo- tional expression of the cosmogony of the period." Poetry, as Mr. Arnold and Mr. Austin have added, is the transfiguration of religion. As the periods and the cosmogonies change, the religion and the poetry also change. There is, therefore, some reason to believe that a hundred years hence the cosmogony of the period will be different from the cosmogony of our own time. The theory of Evohition, perhaps, may have givcji way to a theory of Involution. There is no saying what will have happened when knowledge has come and PREFACE. xix ■wisdom has lingered and the world has grown more and more for another century. Even the most cautious thinker, however, may feel that facts are facts. The theory of Evolution holds the field to-day. These sonnets, which sing of Nature viewed by a mind acquainted with Evolution, satisfy all the accepted canons of poetry. They fulfil the wish of the Reverend Dr. Bowles, who declared that "all images drawn from what is beautiful and sublime in the works of Nature are more beautiful and sublime than images drawn from. Art, and are therefore more poetical ; " they respond to Mr. Swinburne' s condition that "the two priniary and essential qualities of poetry are imagination and harmony ; " they have " the high and excellent seriousness " which Aris- totle named as among the chief virtues of poetry ; Macaulay, who felt that "belief is the parent of poetry," would have been pleased with them, for Dr. Hake's belief in Nature is absolute ; they accommodate to the affections of the mind, as XX PREFACE. Bacon would have said, the freshest philosophy of the age. Keats, who asked Do not all charms Jiy At the mere touch oj cold philosophy ? would have revised his canon of the poet's art if " The New Day " had been presented to him for review. There was an awfxit rainbow once in heaven ; IVe know her woof, her texture ; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line. Empty the haunted air and gnomed TninCf Unweave a rainbow. This thought, which was the dread of Keats, was decidedly depressing ; but that was merely because in his day philosophy had only timidly begun her voyage of discovery. Thought, which has gone sounding on its dim and perilous way , has achieved marvellous and reassuring triumphs since Keats deplored the audacity of its enterprise. It has enabled man to look upon Nature and find PREFACE, xxi his own image there. Knowledge has at length developed until we can say, with Dr, Hake^ that This lily, so unconscious, has the power To ask our love, not knowing its appeal = All poetry were centred in ajlower Could we its inany meanings read and feel. It hides such virtue as a maiden vexeth. She, blushing at your Inokj had nothing sought j Yet now a gaze her consciousness perplexeth, That to her cheek the rich vermilion brought. Nature herself interprets in the rose fPhen she absolves such beauty of its careSf But from a maiden^s bosom plucJcs repose^ And not the treacherous blush a moment spares. So speech begins in silence — Natures speech — That poets feel, but reason cannot reach. This puts the Agnostic out of the dread of Science which many moderns share with Keats and Macaulay, and enables him to realize with relief the remark of Schiller that "man has lost his dignity; hut Art/' the art of the poet ^ ''has saved it.'' It makes us feel that man's vision of the universe is conditioned by the prin- ciple of ebb and flow, and that Agnosticism itself XX ii PREFACE. may change to synthesis, which means perennial faith. Truth develops with the ages ; but what service to man higher thait idealistically defining the change could poet possibly achieve ? It is not wholly on account of their poetic and intellectual merits that these sonnets claim so high a place among the poetry of our time. If it is true that "literature is beautiful or unbeautiful, pre- cious or worthless, according to the quality and the temper of the human soul it gives expression to," Dr. Hake's sonnets cannot fail to recommend them- selves to all readers of poetry. The self 'Suppression of the author in his loving enthusiasm about his friends Rossetti and Borrow, and still more notably in his regard for the poet to whom this volume is dedicated, whotn he believes to be Great, nor knows how p-eat he is, IS without a parallel until we bring into comparison the sonnets of Shakespeare himself. In this aspect, indeed, in the soul-absorption of friendship, they PREFACE. xxiii are more like that wonderful and unapproachable sonnet sequence than anything else in English poetry. Although others may be right in find- ing the poet's enthusiasm about his friend ex- cessive, the critic would indeed be poor of soul who should be able to get up a sneer. The loving re- miniscences of his other friends, Dante Rossetti* and George Borrow,'^ are equally delightful . Dr. Hake was on terms of the closest intimacy with both of those men, and two m,ore remarkable per- sonalities have not appeared in our time. His intimacy with " Lavengro " dated from early days when the two friends lived in the Eastern Counties. Their relations with each other, and in later life with Mr. Theodore Watts, another Romany student, are of the most interesting kind ; and, as so little is known about Borrow beyond what he gives in autobiographical romances, it will indeed be a pity if they pass unrecorded. Dr. Hake has found room here for only one sonnet upon this * Sonnets No. 1-5, f Sonne/ No. 6. xxiv PRE FA CE. fascinating subject. It is to be hoped that the others will soon be forthcoming. It seems strange that Dr. Hake, the fervid nature-worshipper , and Rossetti, the equally fervid art-worshipper, should Iiavc approached each other so closely. When quite a young man, Dr. Hake, making what in a pleasant old-fasliioned phrase was then called "the grand tour," was thrown into intimate relations with distinguished people at all the Courts of Europe, and on his re- turn to England he passed through " Ainswortli' s Magazine " a prose romance, "Valdarno," in which some of /lis remarkable experiences and some of his original theories upon art were treated in a quasi-allegoric form. Every idea enunciated in it was so startlingly new that the work, which, of course, did not attain any popular vogue, attracted the attention of all really competent readers. It brought to the writer interesting letters from many strangers. One of tlieni was signed " G. C. Rossetti." This was from the poet-painter , who had PREFACE. XXV not then changed his signature for the one with which the world is familiar. It was full of admira- tion for the work. Rossetti's name was not then the famous one it now is; and, although Dr. Hake re- plied to the letter, the meeting of the two was long deferred. Many years afterwards, when Dr. Hake was preparing "Madeleine and Other Po'ems" for the press, he called upon Rossftti, and at once there arose a friendship which largely influenced the lives of both. It was so intimate that during what are ■called "the Kelmscott and Bognor periods" of Rossetti's life, a period of which no record has ieen attempted by his biographers, he saw no one besides his family and two or three friends. Kelmscott Manor, an Elizabethan house in Oxfordshire for several years in the joint occu- pancy of Rossetti and the author of " The Earthly Paradise," will become historic. Situated not far from the source of the Thames, with the modest stream, running through the grounds, it had origi- nally been taken, Dr. Hake says, by Mr. Morris, XX vi PREFACE. who is a keen fisher ; but, Rossetti having "fallen in love with it" and especially with a remark- able tapestried room admirably adapted for a studio, it was agreed that the two poets should enter upon a joint possession of the place. Some of Rossetti' s finest pictures were pai?ited in the tapestried room, and some of his finest poems were written in the meadows and by the river- side. It is the " Holmscote" of Rossetti' s beautiful lyric "Down Stream," which originally ap- peared in "The Dark Blue," illustrated by one of Mr. Madox Brown's most powerful dramatic designs. — Between Holmscote and Hurstcote The river-reaches wind. The whispering trees accept the breeze, The ripple*s coot and kind. It is also the scene of the most charming sketches in Dr. Hak^s volume entitled "New Symbols." — PREFACE. xxvii These ^ey-mossed tiles still ^neath it scorch ; Tke glare and shade still side by side Aslant the mullioned casements glide From yon old gable to the porch. Transparent isles of rushes bind The river's light with bars of green. That catch the water's blue between To where it darkens in the wind. Then, again, it is the scene of Mr. Watts' well- known poem ^' Foreshadowings/' a unique sonnet with a refrain which Rossetti was never tired of quoting. — The mirrored stars lit all the bulrush spears. And all thejlags and broad-leaved lily-isles; The ripples shook the stars to golden smiles. Then smoothed them bach to happy golden spheres. Pf e rowed, we sang ; her voice seevnedj in mine earSy An angefsj yet with woma?i^s dearest wiles ; But shadows fell from gathering cloudy piles, Ajid ripples shook the stars to Jiery tears. God shaped the shadows lih