III In my brief Indian Songs I have taken the Indian key-note -which is often not more than a phrase, a single image, with variations of musical inflection and repetition-and expanded it very slightly. The Indian song often means more than it says; it is content to give the image and not to talk about it-it is not "journalistic." Pantomime in the dances also fills out what is given to us by the bare words. Very little consideration has been given to Indian poetry as poetry. The ethnologists, who might have done good service in this respect, have overlooked the literary significance of the Indian songs; and the tendency of others has been to Europeanize both sentiment and form. A translation of an Indian song that reads like an Elizabethan lyric gives little idea of the original. Of course any addition whatever is taking liberties with the originals, but I have tried to keep strictly within the spirit of them. I am indebted for my key-notes to the literal translations accompanying Miss Densmore's notations of Indian music. ÉMILE VERHAEREN May 21st, 1855—Nov. 29th, 1916 A. C. H. The death of Verhaeren is one more note in the tragedy. Il est ainsi de pauvres coeurs, Avec, en eux, des lacs de pleurs, Il est ainsi de pauvres dos, Plus lourds de peine et de fardeaux Que les toits des cassines brunes Il est ainsi de pauvres mains, Devant la porte. Il est ainsi de pauvres yeux, Il est ainsi de pauvres gens, Au long des plaines de la terre. Emile Verhaeren The man should have no epitaph save his own best verses, poems of the Flamand country, of the dull sorrow of peasants, of the oppression of labor. It is time to forget his rhetorical period, to forget that he pleased Gilbert Murray, and time to remember only his great sincerity, his great pity and the simplicity of his heart. He was excited by current generalities, in his worst moments he wrote such lines as: Le bondissant tocsin des vérités vivantes, In his reality he wrote such poems as the one I have quoted. Toward the end he wrote of the new sorrows of warfare, of men who had sat at his fireside and who in future would sit there no more. It is extremely difficult to write of Verhaeren at this moment and for the public of a country not at war. He was recognized as the greatest poet of Belgium, though heretical voices have also been heard acclaiming Max Elskamp. There is always danger of overestimating a man, and of senitmentalizing over him, at the moment of his death, especially if it be sudden and violent. And such. overestimation invariably leads to an equally undue reaction, both equitable minds and those tainted with jealousy adding their weight to this latter. I think I am right in saying that Verhaeren carried more weight with the better young poets of Paris, five years ago, than did most, or perhaps any, of his contemporaries. Fort was also at that time in vogue. And Bazalgette had stirred up a fresh flurry of Whitmanism by his very excellent French translation. Verhaeren's faults were not those which irritated most during that season. He and Whitman were the saints of one temple. I can not feel that he is so great a loss as Remy de Gourmont, but this is a personal and not a detached judicial opinion. Besides, DeGourmont's position was based in great part on his prose. I doubt if there is as much good poetry in Verhaeren as in the earlier books of poems by Francis Jammes. I do not know that Verhaeren's pictures of Flemish country are better than Viélé-Griffin's "Lâche comme le froid et la pluie”. I am fairly certain that his death leaves Laurent Tailhade the most important of the elder poets in France, or at least Emile Verhaeren the only one of the elder men from whom we can still expect enjoyable poems. Tailhade must not be considered as satirist only, though his satires make swiftest appeal. This whole French generation of men born in the late fifties and early sixties has presented the curious phenomenon of a dozen or two poets all "running even", all producing notable poems, none of them notably surpassing or dominating the rest. At no time would a company of a dozen intelligent literati have agreed on an order of prominence. This state of affairs might easily exist in a time of nonentities. It was in this case a sign of France's opulence, and though Verhaeren was not French he used the French language and his death must be held a loss to that literature. However much one may associate him with his own country, one must reckon his gifts in comparison with those of his French contemporaries. He was counted peer with the best of them. Ezra Pound REVIEWS THOSE BRONTES Bronté Poems: edited, and with an introduction, by A. C. Benson. G. P. Putnam's Sons. The Complete Works of Emily Bronté. Volume I-Poetry. Edited by W. Robertson Nicoll and Clement Shorter. Nodder and Stoughton. In 1846, the poems of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronté under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, were published by Aylott and Jones. Mr. Clement Shorter tells us that the book cost the authors thirty guineas and two copies supplied the public demand. In 1850, after the death of Emily and Anne, Charlotte issued a new edition of the 1846 volume, including other poems of theirs and notes of her own. The little book Mr. Benson has arranged so wisely, is composed of selections from these publications, and from hitherto unprinted verses of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell. Prefaced by a reproduction of the painting of the four, now in the National Portrait Gallery, the frank purpose and the chief interest of the collection are biographical. This interest, however, by no means arises from internal evidence that the poems are autobiographical. In Emily Bronté's hounting poem, My Ancient Ship, composed in her twenty-first year, she makes her voyaging hero say, Memory! how thy magic fingers Fast asleep and almost dying, Through my days of changeless pain, Till I dream these strings are lying, Winds have blown, but all unknown; In that heart which like a stone Senselessly has lain. But Emily Bronté's own heart, it seems, was not so heavy but that she could scribble gaily in a communicative and humorous outburst, along the margin of My Ancient Ship: |