BOOKS.

MR. WOOLNER'S " SILENUS."

MR. WOOLICER'S name is sufficient to ensure a respectful atten- tion for his work. His eminence in another art affords a presumption in his favour, and lie has already achieved a certain success in poetry. More than twenty years have passed since the publication of My Beautiful Lady; after so long an interval, we naturally expect something very good. A poet who has neither abandoned his art altogether, nor made haste to thrust upon the world ill-considered and unfinished work, but has satisfied more than twice the Horatian precept, " nonum prematur in annum," excites our high hopes; we must try to explain why these are not satisfied by Silenus.

There is something perverse, we cannot help thinking, in the choice of a subject. The plot of the poem, briefly put, is this. Silenus is happy in the love of the nymph Syrinx. While he is following Bacchns in his Indian triumphs, Syrinx, flying from the violence of Pan, meets with her death. Her lover, crushed by the unutterable sorrow of her loss, seeks comfort in the wine-cup, and becomes the degraded creature with which we are familiar in the Greek mythology. He meets with an heroic end in the attack which Lycurgus of Thrace and his followers make on the train of Bacchus, but not till Athene, to whom he has gone for counsel, has given him hopes that the restoration to which he aspires may yet be accomplished. It is an obvious remark that there is something in this story alien to the simplicity of the classical conception on which it is founded. Silenus to the Greeks personified the grosser side of vinous excitement. His purple cheeks, his bloated form, his staggering gait, are the ordinary characteristics of intoxica- tion. But he was not a mere drunkard. Under certain conditions, he had a gift of inspired speech, and could unfold with eloquence the mysteries of nature; in another legend we find him invested with a certain cynical wisdom, when we find him telling the Phrygian Midas that the best thing for man is not to be born at all, the next best to die as soon as may be. But this did nothing but represent a familiar phenomenon. There is a time when the drinker, or at least some drinkers, become inspired

• &loses. By Thomas Woolner. London : Macmillan and Co. 1884.

with an eloquence which they never possess in their sober moments. There is a vivid description in The Caztons of how Leonard watches Burley pass through this stage with an admiration only to be equalled by the disgust with which he views the brutal condition which follows it. There is sometimes a point in this stage of exhilaration when the eloquence assumes just the tone of pessimism which is symbolised by the Midas legend. The complex ethical idea of the drunkard who has fled to intoxication for solace under the pressure of an intolerable grief, who cherishes the hope that he may yet be restored to his better self, is a conception wholly foreign, not only to this, but to all Greek thought, at least in this stage of its development. We venture to think that there is also something unclassical in the characterisation of Pan, as we find it in the poem before us. The tragic fate of the nymph who escapes from an un- welcome love only by death is common enough in the Greek myths. We find it in the story of Apollo and Daphne, in that of Aristmus and Eurydice. But it does not represent the pursuing god as a monster of cruelty. This is the treatment which Pan receives at our poet's hands. The picture of him in. Book III. is unnecessarily and untruthfully hideous. He is not the Nature-God, but a Cyclops, even worse than a Cyclops, worse than brutal, because unnatural. The whole passage is, we must say frankly, a blot upon the poem which is nothing less than hideous. Its presence could scarcely be excused, even were it as true to the Greek conception of the rural deity as we believe it to be false. As to the curse which Silenus pronounces upon Pan, fine piece of rhetorical writing as it is, we do not see how it can in any way be linked on to the Pan myth.

Mr. Woollier does not wield the metre which he has chosen with any special skill. It wants both melody and strength in his hands. One common fault in his verses is that an un- emphatic word is put into a place where an emphatic is required.

"While leaping over the dividing space."

"Then calmly smiling on her, thus he spoke."

"Had seemed a fuming pigmy alongside That evil Titan by Athene slain,"

are instances taken at random. In the last quotation "along- side" is particularly inenphonious, while "by," put in an accented syllable, is a license which a writer cannot indeed wholly avoid, but which he should use very rarely, but then only under the guidance of a finely-cultivated ear.

It is time to let the reader see some specimen of Mr. Wooluer's work. We take two that will show him, as we think, at his best :—

" Long after Dionysus and his rout

Had vanished, and the airy echoes ceased Of distant laugh and thrilling cymbal-clash ; When noon and brooding silence lay like thought On the green ocean of the woods afar, Silenus still was standing, cup in hand, Gazing, or as in gaze, on its device.

He had beheld the baby arms outstretched To reach the dancing grapes a teasing nymph Dangled in nearness never to be touched ; And this recalled a tale his Syrinx told : How when a babe, fresh from her mother's arms, She first stepped forth and walked. Lying one day Within her father's orchard, on the grass, Babbling to one drooped apple overhead, Her mother noted how she fain would pull The mellow prize, and plucked it from the bough; Then, placing Syrinx on her little feet

Against the tree, went off a pace or two, . Holding the bright temptation nigh her reach. To seize it in her eager bands the babe Unconsciously moved forward step by step After the wondering mother ; who, enrapt, Snatched up the child and kissed her out of breath."

And here is the fine passage that concludes the poem, the last utterance of the Bacchanals, who have become the wives Of their Thracian captors :—

" Oar fathers said the ruling Gods were just;

And haply, when our bones are laid at rest,

In the Elysian Fields our shades may meet

The lovers of our souls we never found ; When looking back, this loveless life of ours Will be remembered as a feverish dream, Where thine own hand was guide and comforter, Saving us from the pitfalls of despair. Our tears, affection, memory, all are thine.

Our solace thou art now Our sweetest hopes, That ever beck with smiles of welcoming, Are in some way we know not mixed with thee."

If we have not praised Mr. Woolner it has not been because we have not found in his poem much to praise. But he is no

young writer to whose creditable exercises in verse the writer gladly gives as hearty a commendation as he can. He has, at least, had his foot on the ascent which leads to the circle of the true poets of the world. It is "from this point of view that we have regarded his latest effort.