BOOKS.

VERNON LEE'S "JUVENILIA."*

THERE 15 a peculiar quality, or combination of qualities, about the work of "M. Vernon Lee "—as a writer in the Revue de Deux Honda, with a fine regard to literary etiquette, persists in calling her—which distinguishes it from that of all other con- temporary critics, male or female. She unites a feminine suppleness of intellect with a considerable mastery of her subject. Her learning sits lightly upon her, and her erudition is rarely aggressive. She is at once subtle and audacious, en- gagingly frank in proclaiming her likes and dislikes, agreeably discursive, though never wantonly irrelevant—her seeming deviations often enabling her to obtain only a better "take-off," so to speak—and, finally, able to express her meaning with a literary ease, a wealth of imagery, and a refinement rather than polish of style, which render the perusal of her works an intellectual luxury of a high order. Vernon Lee is at her best in these volumes, which are full of suggestive and attractive reading. And yet the elegiac vein which runs through nearly all these essays tends to exert a somewhat depressing influence upon the reader. The history of buried illusions, of tastes outgrown, and protests against the corrupting or sterilising influences at work in modern art, constitute so large a portion of these pages, that Vernon Lee.— though she spiritedly disdains "all morbid msthetic aversion against modern times and modern arrangements," being, per contra, convinced that "in many ways of generous thought and endeavour this age is nobler than former more romantic periods," and very scornful at the expense of the modern pessimist, "to whom the thought of misery becomes as necessary as his dinner or his pipe"—is not the most cheerful of companions. She is genial, but in the German sense of the word, her humour show- ing itself more particularly in a sort of delicate raillery—e.g., in treating Lady Archibald Campbell's deliciously prosaic conten- tion that Perigot must have been a small peasant-proprietor,- and not in broad strokes or general sunshine. But this may be in part the fault of the subject. The older the world grows—so Vernon Lee tells us— the more is it in need of the refreshment afforded by "Juvenilia "—pleasant pastimes of the mind which are concerned with beautiful things in Nature and Art—and, on the other hand, the more difficult is it to escape from the more serious and engrossing pursuits of life. In a word, Juvenilia belong of right to the juventus Mundi, when the function of Art was to amuse, not to edify ; and all the conditions of existence tend to make the pursuit of such pastimes less spontaneous.

It must not be supposed that the implied regretfulness which underlies Vernon Lee's treatment of her subject is born of the modern and ignoble desire to wrap oneself in cotton-wool and escape all contact with the disagreeables of the world,—a tendency so wonderfully embodied by Lucas Malet in the character of Jessie Enderby. On the contrary, she speaks with great force of the delusive morality of youth before "we discover that to be good means, unluckily, to deal with evil ; to be, I will not say beautiful, but clean and moderately healthy, spiritually means to see much that is ugly and foul." The mischief is, that the beautiful things of the world are so unequally divided, that the balance can only be adjusted by a redistribution initiated by the privileged classes. When this is realised, people can no longer be unduly engrossed with "Juvenilia," for they then recog- nise that they are "Juvenilia." This recognition is saddening, but as a set-off it gives the world a new and wider significance, and establishes a bond of sympathy between us and those with whom we may not have two ideas or tasks in common. The animated eulogy of realism which occurs in the opening essay, "The Lake of Charlemagne," needs to be read in close connec- tion with Vernon Lee's subsequent strictures upon the realism of Madame Sarah Bernhardt, which she pronounces to be " horrible and wrong ;" of Salvini, which "bruises and sickens " one; and of Zola, which she roundly declares to be "a hankering after filthy things." By realism, she means "simply the observation of things as they are, the familiarity with their aspect, physical and intellectual, and the consequent faculty of reproducing • Juvenilia: being a Second Series of Essays on Sundry Zethetical Questions. By Vernon Lee. 2 vole. London: T. Better Unwin.

them with approximate fidelity." And, further, her approval of realism is compatible with a brilliant plea in behalf of artistic anachronism, and a fine contempt for historical painting and "historic opera." After touching for a while upon the harmful side of association (which she defines as "the investing of one object having characteristics of its own, with the characteristics of some other object ; the pushing aside, in short, of reality to make room for the fiction of imagination or memory "), Vernon Lee takes up her brief in earnest on the other side, main- taining that without association there is no art, our instinctive preferences being due to transmitted associations of beauty with usefulness. "The original motive of preference has been obliterated, but the instinct of preference, the habit of pleasure, have become part and parcel of our nature." Pursuing this dis- putable view, she illustrates by a very happy image the fact that we do not perceive, much less remember, the totally unknown. "We wander, as it were, through a vast and populous city ; those that we notice and speak to are our old acquaintances ; but the old acquaintances introduce new ones, whom we admit for their sake. Nay, if we sometimes look twice upon the face of a stranger, if we accost a man of whom we have no knowledge, it is because in the face, the gait, the manner of that stranger, we have recognised something of the face, the gait, and the manner of some one we have known before." Association, she holds, not only plays a notable part in the production, bid also in the enjoyment of beautiful things. In her own case, it enabled her to enjoy the actual Rhineland by linking it with a fabulotis region of her childhood, born of the incoherent rhapsodies of a German nursemaid—a marvellous region, embosomed "in a kind of sea of everlasting fruit-blossom "—and made her feel "the vivid present, accompanied, like some clear melody, by the fainter yet fuller harmonies of the past." And thus she is led to believe that in our perceptions of Nature and Art, when this phantom of the past is omitted, the enjoyment of the present is less keen. The more of the past one has in one's mind, the more one is able to enjoy the present. But the present itself stands in the way of this enjoyment. "Our testhetic life is too crowded or huddled.

We want all our casks and barrels for the new wine, the terrible new wine which seems to be made not once a year, but once a month,—nay, once a week ; and we have to empty out into the gutters, like so much stale water, the mellow, the deli- cate vintage of previous years." In fine, then, it comes to this, that not association, but the wanton and irrelevant indulgence in it, is to be condemned. And here Vernon Lee tells the strange story from Burton's Anatomy which gives the title to the essay, winding up with some plaintive comments thereon, showing that we each have our "Lake of Charlemagne," and she for one finds it hard to say whether it is more of a blessing than a curse.

Passing over " Botticelli at the Villa Lemmi " and "Rococo," a fragment of wathetic autobiography, we come to "Prosaic Music and Poetic Music," a record of the "disconnected, bizarre impressions" suggested by the hearing of two such widely unlike works in the space of forty-eight hours as Cimarosa's Matri- monio Se,greto and Boito's Mefistofele. Of the latter she has an inordinately high opinion, declaring the composer to be the lineal artistic descendant of Benedetto Marcell°, a fragment of a Psalm by whom she pronounces to be the only other piece of music that goes to her brain with equal force. One does not know whether to be more irritated or amused at the fantastic and audacious assertions which are compressed within the com- pass of these few pages. "The stage is the death of all poetic conceptions." This is a large proposition ; and here, again, is another :—" In the way of poetic suggestiveness, except in so far as it is distilled by our modern brains on contact with the past, there is not much to be squeezed out of

the good folk of the eighteenth century." Bolder still is the remark, on p. 160,—" All those good composers of the eighteenth

century from Carissimi to Rossini manu-

factured their music as other men manufacture soap or cloth at so much a day." Now, Beethoven belongs to the eighteenth century, in date at least, flu more than Rossini, and even if Beethoven be not aimed at, it is perfectly clear that the writer includes Gluck and Mozart in this category. The main object of this essay is to ascertain in what the poetry of music resides, and Vernon Lee is driven at last to conclude that it must - be simply in its beauty.

"Apollo the Fiddler" is a very brilliant apology for artistic anachronism as illustrated by Raphael's fresco in the Signature.

room of the Vatican. After disposing of the explanations usually advanced, Vernon Lee declares her conviction that

fulness are replaced by the positive element of beauty. questions of general criticism, what business has she to label " The Immortality of Maestro Galuppi " is a discourse on the Mozart's music placid ? Has Vernon Lee ever heard—of transitory character of music, illustrated by the fortunes of a course she has—the overture to Don Giovanni—that overture composer whose centenary was recently celebrated at Burano which Gonnod tells us first revealed to him the possi- without a note of his music. Vernon Lee quite over-emphasizes bilities of music—or the concluding scene P These are the the ephemeral character of music, forgetting that it is by far sort of things that exasperate one in these volumes, and the youngest of the arts, though not a modern growth. It may make one wish that these terribly clever young women

be said to have begun, as we know it, in 1600. Once started, it of letters—'o,vfig dijNv !—would leave music alone, unluss has developed with immense rapidity. But are we to infer that they are fully qualified to discuss the subject. For to do full because seventeenth-century music is in great measure obsolete justice to even the early music, one needs to understand and in the nineteenth, eighteenth-century music will be obsolete in appreciate what has been written since the French Revolution, the twentieth ? Moreover, Bach is by no means antiquated. and there is no trace in these volumes of such comprehension Far from it. His greatest compositions are appreciated and and appreciation. Hence this disproportionate glorification of enjoyed far more fully now than when he wrote them. So, the early Italians. To write a great deal about music, and to too, with Beethoven, some of whose compositions are only say nothing of Beethoven, is like Hamlet with the part of the now beginning to be understood. Against the diffidence of Prince left out, And so it has come to pass that, in spite of Galuppi, the consciousness that his "precious scores" might all the eulogy at the beginning of this notice, we are in a fair become "in the eyes of posterity a mere heap of dirty music," way to part company from this ingenious author in a mood of should be set the melancholy conviction of Berlioz that his considerable dissatisfaction. What she says of Botticelli is to a reputation would be all he could desire if he lived to be one certain extent applicable to herself. She is "one of those people hundred and forty. The discourse on the fate of forgotten who never give you the satisfaction of thoroughly liking or melodies is a pretty piece of fantasticating," as Vernon Lee thoroughly disliking you, and who at the same time will would say. And yet of the two songs she takes to illustrate her not permit you to grow indifferent, suddenly charming you parable, "Di tanti palpiti " is by no means so dead and buried when you are ill-disposed to them and the next as she imagines. The tunes that perish seldom justify their time as suddenly leaving you dissatisfied, rubbing you the continued existence. Infinitely more pathetic is the circumstance wrong way." Fine thoughts and finical thoughts, pathos that much of Beethoven and a vast quantity of Schubert's and sentimentality, eloquence and slang, or something very like divinest music were never performed in the composers' lifetime, it, justice and prejudice, conviction and affectation, jostle and never heard save in their brains. This never fails to impress us alternate in these pages till one is bewildered and perplexed in powerfully whenever we hear the " Unfinished " or the C major the attempt to summarise one's impressions. It is impossible to Symphonies of Schubert. In the main, the fittest melodies deny that we have derived great pleasure from the perusal of survive, and are as durable as literature. It is only of late parts of these essays. It is equally impossible to deny that we centuries, and with improved systems of notation, that music have been at times excessively irritated. Perhaps we cannot do has had a fair chance. In fine, there is too much complacent better than take refuge, after Vernon Lee's own fashion, in a indulgence in this essay in the luxury of a gratuitous commisera- musical simile, and declare that while she displays a great tion, and the rhapsody about the colour of the dead melodies command of the keyboard, a fluent technique, and a picturesque is rather falsetto in tone. conception of her subject, her habitual abuse of the tempo In "Signor Curiazio," a long "musical medley," Vernon Lee rubato and her exaggerated accentuation of unimportant is mainly concerned with the endeavour to solve the equation of passages, are serious though not irremediable flaws in her musical personality, in the course of which she bestows a great performance.

deal of praise and a great deal of censure on the operas of

Wagner in general, and Tristas in particular. The latter opera RICHARD CRASHAW.* she calls "utterly and drearily undramatic," designating his TlfE only thing to regret about Mr. Tutin's edition of Crashaw heroic characters "mere phantoms," and the music" a monotony is that its circulation should be so limited. It is a pity that a of emotion ending in weary vacuity." Of Cam-ma's music, handy volume of the best pieces of a good poet should at the on the other hand, she speaks with effusion as "ridiculously

most find only two hundred and fifty readers. Crashaw, indeed, lovely," and speaks with evident regret of its having been "long seems to have been specially unfortunate in this respect, for Dr. supplanted by o her things, grown too difficult for coarse Grosart's edition, in which all the poet's work is included, and his modern performers, for coarse modern audiences." On the Italian genius exhaustively discussed, is confined to private circulation. operatic world of the last century Vernon Lee has much to say, Mr. Tutin, in the course of a short preface, says his aim is "to and says it with her usual skill ; but we rather lose patience present the lover of English poetry with the best work of a with her when she lingers with a more than sneaking liking over neglected genius of a high order." Nobody will dispute that the "world of tyrannical prima donnas and coxcomb primo title, high title as it is, and taken, as it must be, with

uontos with its exquisitely trained voices, its admirably its melancholy adjective. The best judges, the men who elegant music, its contempt for history, geography, and possi- • Poems of Richard Crashaw. Selected and Arranged, with Notes, by J. R. bility." We may be coarse, we moderns ; but by the Tutin. Printed for private circulation. 1887.

Raphael acted deliberately in the matter, and that he only elimination of male sopranos an odious anomaly has been followed a habit which has prevailed in every country and removed, and the repugnance shown by the audience in every time which has possessed a really great and vigorous art, the year 1825, when, after a lapse of a quarter of a century, The desire for realising an already known event, for pitting the Vellnti, the last of the tribe, trod the boards in England, artificial against the natural, she points out, is one of very late was the outcome of a healthy and natural instinct. As to growth. Our great fault is that we are for ever judging and con- Wagner's music, we may be permitted to remark that Vernon demning Art from a scientific point of view, the intrusive sciences Lee's glowing picture of the intoxicating effect of his harmonies being not the physical ones, but those vaguer historic and is difficult to reconcile with her statement, quoted above, as to geographic sciences, luxuries of modern life, which are for ever the dreariness and undramatic nature of his operas. There is a stepping in and telling us that this, that, and the other is wrong great deal about music in these pages, but it is mainly in the in picture, sculpture, or opera.. This mania for accuracy is not form of an elegiac panegyric upon Italian masters. With the harmless, she argues, because Art must suffer in its essentials as great German composers of the last or of this century she has soon as it is made subservient to some extra-artistic interest ; evidently little affinity or acquaintance. The bracing and soul- and, secondly, because in thus attempting to make Art illustrate stimulating quality which she denies to Wagner is to be found in Science, " we shall, in the first place, violate the inherent organic the highest degree in the music of Beethoven and his great conditions of Art, and then, as sole reward, give it in exchange descendant Brahms. But to Beethoven there is nothing but for the stability and imperishableness of artistic form, the a passing allusion, of Brahma not a word. Again, what more fluctuating, changing impersonality of scientific fact." No romantic or imaginative composer than Schumann ever lived ? purely scientific work can ever continue to be read, unless by And Schumann is only barely mentioned, though the sugges- specialists studying the development of some particular science. tiveness of music is dwelt on at great length. For a well-read If we want to know about gravitation or acoustics, we do not author, Vernon Lee is singularly careless in her spelling, writing turn to Newton, but the latest books. Whereas in Art we go Cimarosa or Cimaroza indifferently, and alluding to Pergo- straight to Homer, Phidias, Shakespeare, or Mozart, the case lisi (sic) and D'Aponte,—it is true that one other writer being changed as soon as the relative elements of truth and use- uses this form. And, to turn from matters of detail to fulness are replaced by the positive element of beauty. questions of general criticism, what business has she to label " The Immortality of Maestro Galuppi " is a discourse on the Mozart's music placid ? Has Vernon Lee ever heard—of transitory character of music, illustrated by the fortunes of a course she has—the overture to Don Giovanni—that overture composer whose centenary was recently celebrated at Burano which Gonnod tells us first revealed to him the possi- without a note of his music. Vernon Lee quite over-emphasizes bilities of music—or the concluding scene P These are the the ephemeral character of music, forgetting that it is by far sort of things that exasperate one in these volumes, and the youngest of the arts, though not a modern growth. It may make one wish that these terribly clever young women

be said to have begun, as we know it, in 1600. Once started, it of letters—'o,vfig dijNv !—would leave music alone, unluss has developed with immense rapidity. But are we to infer that they are fully qualified to discuss the subject. For to do full because seventeenth-century music is in great measure obsolete justice to even the early music, one needs to understand and in the nineteenth, eighteenth-century music will be obsolete in appreciate what has been written since the French Revolution, the twentieth ? Moreover, Bach is by no means antiquated. and there is no trace in these volumes of such comprehension Far from it. His greatest compositions are appreciated and and appreciation. Hence this disproportionate glorification of enjoyed far more fully now than when he wrote them. So, the early Italians. To write a great deal about music, and to too, with Beethoven, some of whose compositions are only say nothing of Beethoven, is like Hamlet with the part of the now beginning to be understood. Against the diffidence of Prince left out, And so it has come to pass that, in spite of Galuppi, the consciousness that his "precious scores" might all the eulogy at the beginning of this notice, we are in a fair become "in the eyes of posterity a mere heap of dirty music," way to part company from this ingenious author in a mood of should be set the melancholy conviction of Berlioz that his considerable dissatisfaction. What she says of Botticelli is to a reputation would be all he could desire if he lived to be one certain extent applicable to herself. She is "one of those people hundred and forty. The discourse on the fate of forgotten who never give you the satisfaction of thoroughly liking or melodies is a pretty piece of fantasticating," as Vernon Lee thoroughly disliking you, and who at the same time will would say. And yet of the two songs she takes to illustrate her not permit you to grow indifferent, suddenly charming you parable, "Di tanti palpiti " is by no means so dead and buried when you are ill-disposed to them and the next as she imagines. The tunes that perish seldom justify their time as suddenly leaving you dissatisfied, rubbing you the continued existence. Infinitely more pathetic is the circumstance wrong way." Fine thoughts and finical thoughts, pathos that much of Beethoven and a vast quantity of Schubert's and sentimentality, eloquence and slang, or something very like divinest music were never performed in the composers' lifetime, it, justice and prejudice, conviction and affectation, jostle and never heard save in their brains. This never fails to impress us alternate in these pages till one is bewildered and perplexed in powerfully whenever we hear the " Unfinished " or the C major the attempt to summarise one's impressions. It is impossible to Symphonies of Schubert. In the main, the fittest melodies deny that we have derived great pleasure from the perusal of survive, and are as durable as literature. It is only of late parts of these essays. It is equally impossible to deny that we centuries, and with improved systems of notation, that music have been at times excessively irritated. Perhaps we cannot do has had a fair chance. In fine, there is too much complacent better than take refuge, after Vernon Lee's own fashion, in a indulgence in this essay in the luxury of a gratuitous commisera- musical simile, and declare that while she displays a great tion, and the rhapsody about the colour of the dead melodies command of the keyboard, a fluent technique, and a picturesque