lesque that Hunt came to do a number of his characteristic and least English things, like the laughing and lilting verses which sometimes, as in "The Fairy Concert," attain a kind of glittering gayety, hardly mere paste, though with no hardness of the diamond. There is some relationship between this verse and what we call vers de société ; but it is more critical, and has something of the epigram set to a jig. So far as it is meant for political satire, it is only necessary to compare even so brilliant a squib as the "Coronation Soliloquy of George IV " with Coleridge's "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," to realize how what in Hunt remains buffoonery and perhaps argument, can be carried to a point of imagination at which it becomes poetry. Hunt has a special talent, connected with his feeling for whatever approached the form of the epigram, for the writing of brief narrative poems. Can it be denied that so masterly an anecdote as "Abou ben Adhem" has in it some of the qualities, as it seems to have some of the results, of poetry? Read the same story in the French prose of the original: nothing is changed, nothing added; only the form of the verse, barely existent as it is, has given a certain point and finish to the prose matter. Here and in the two or three other stories there is a very precise and ingenious grasp on story-telling, worthy of Maupassant; and there is a kernel of just, at times of profound, thought, which suggests something of the quality of an Eastern apologue. Was it the more than half prose talent of Hunt that gave him, when he concentrated so tightly his generally diffuse and wandering verse, this particular, unusual kind of success? When, as in blank verse pieces such as "Paganini," he tried to get a purely emotional effect, not by narrative but in the form of confession, his failure was complete; all is restlessness and perturbation. But, once at least, in a little piece called "Ariadne Walking," there is something of the same happy concentration, the same clean outlines; and the poem may be paralleled with a lovely poem of Alfred de Vigny. The technique, as in almost, or, perhaps, everything of Hunt, is not perfect; and there are words of mere prose, like "the feel of sleep." How was it that a man, really poetically minded, and with so much knowledge of all the forms of verse, was never quite safe when he wrote in metre? A stanza in a poem on poppies may be compared, almost in detail, with a corresponding sentence in prose, which occurs in a rambling essay. They both say the same thing, but the verse says, We are slumberous poppies, Some awake and some asleep, What perchance our dreams may know, And the prose says, "They look as if they held a mystery at their hearts, like sleeping kings of Lethe," and comes nearer to poetry. From the epigram to the sonnet there is but one step, and Leigh Hunt's finest and most famous line, The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands, is found in a sonnet on the Nile, written impromptu in rivalry with Keats and Shelley, and more successful, within its limits, than its competitors. And the sonnet, written against Keats, on the subject of "The Grasshopper and the Cricket," would be good as well as characteristic if it were not flawed by words like "feel" and "class" and "nick," used to give the pleasant charm of talk, but resulting only in a degradation of refined and dignified speech. Three sonnets called "The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit," which might easily have been no more than one of Hunt's clever burlesques, seem to me for once to touch and seize and communicate a strange, cold, inhuman imagination, as if the very element of water entered into chill communion with the mind. Lamb might have shared the feeling, the epithets are XVI ROSE MACLEOD1 BY ALICE BROWN Electra felt very much alone in a world of wrongdoers. To her mind moral trespassing was a definite state of action fully recognized by the persons concerned in it. She made no doubt that everybody was as well able to classify obliquity as she was to do it for them. She had stated times for sitting down and debating upon her own past deeds, though she seldom found any flagrant fault in them. There was now and then an inability to reach her highest standard; but she saw no crude derelictions such as other people fell into. It was almost impossible for her to think about grandmother at all, the old lady seemed to her so naughty and so mad. Billy Stark, too, though he was a man of the world, admirably equipped, was guilty of extreme bad taste or he could never have asked Madam Fulton to marry him. Why was he calling her Florrie and giving her foolish nosegays every morning? Rose and Peter, when it came to them, seemed pledged to keeping up some wild fiction beneficial to Rose; only Markham MacLeod was entirely right, and so powerful, too, that his return must shake all the warring atoms into a harmonious conformity with Electra and the moral law. struct. Nothing, she inexorably knew, would tempt her to allow for a moment any further consideration of her grandmother's pernicious book. Yet the club was to meet with her, the honorable secretary, and it had no topic to whet its teeth upon. In her dilemma, she put on her hat and walked over to inquire of Rose when her father was to return. MacLeod's bubbling kindliness seemed to her so generous that she made no doubt he would talk to them for an hour, or even allow her to give him a reception. Rose was in the garden, as usual, in the long chair, and Peter was painting. Ostensibly he was painting her, but the mood escaped him and he was blurring in a background. Electra remembered, as she went up the path, that still nothing had been said to her about Peter's painting. He might have been any sort of young 'prentice for all she heard about his work; and here it was beginning incidentally, like an idle task, with no reference to her. She had thought painting was something to be carried on gravely, when one had reached Peter's eminence. There ought to be talk of theories and emotions inspired by pictures in the inception, not merely this prosaic business of sitting down to work and characterizing beauties with a flippant jargon of words misused. Very nice," "stunning"- that was what she 1 Copyright, 1907, by ALICE BROWN. Moreover she had the entire programme of the club meeting to recon had heard Peter say even of sunsets that ought to have moved him to the skies. He had a delicate-fingered way of touching everything, as if the creative process were a little one, of small simplicities: not as if art were long. When she appeared that morning, behind the hollyhocks, Rose was about to spring up, and Peter did stand, expectant, with his charming smile. Electra at once made proper disclaimers and insisted that the sitter's pose should not be broken and that it would be an immense entertainment to see the work go on. Peter brought a chair out of the arbor, and she sat down, erect and handsome, while Rose sank back into her unconstrained reclining. Rose wore the simplest dress. and her slender arms were bare. There were about her the signs of tasks abandoned, even of pleasures dropped and not remembered - the book half closed upon her finger, the rose and fan. Her great hat with its long feather lay beside her on the ground, and Electra, justly appraising its picturesqueness and value, thought, with brief distaste, that it looked as if it might belong to an actress. She asked her question at once and Rose answered. No, her father would not be here in time for the important meeting. She had no doubt he would indeed have said more than a few words, since the entertainment had fallen through. Here Electra interrupted her delicately and challenged the use of that term for so serious an issue. It could hardly be called an entertainment; they had simply been unable to consider the topic fixed upon, and it was necessary to find a substitute. "Let me do something," said Rose, with her appealing grace. "I'll sing for them." That accounted for her again, Electra thought, the unconsidered ease, perhaps the boldness. She belonged to public life; yet as such she might well be taken into account. "What do you sing?" she asked. Rose forgot all about her picture and sat up, looking quite in earnest. Peter held his brush reproachfully poised. "I tell you what I can do," she said. after a moment's thinking. "I can give a little talk on contemporary music what they are doing in France, in Germany. I can give some personal data about living musicians things they would n't mind. And I really sing very well. Peter, boy, tell the lady I sing well." "She sings adorably," said Peter. "She has a nightingale in her throat: Two larks and a thrush, All the birds in the bush. You never heard anything more sympathetic. I never did." The "Peter, boy," had spoiled it. Electra grew colder. She wished she were able to be as easy as she liked; but she never could be, with other people perpetually doing and saying things in such bad taste. "The club is composed of ladies who know the best music," she heard herself saying, and realized that it sounded like a child's copy-book. Rose was still sitting upright, Peter patiently looking at her, evidently wishing she would return to her pose, and yet quite as evidently enriching his attention with this new aspect of her. She had turned into a vivid and yet humble creature, intent on offering something and having it accepted. The thought that she had something Electra wanted seemed for the moment the next best thing to knowing that Electra tendered her kinship and recognition. "Please like me," her look begged for her. "Please tolerate me, at least, and take what I have to give." The end of it was that Electra did accept it, and that Peter's painting was quite forgotten while Rose ran eagerly over the ground she could cover. One moment of malice she did have. While Electra was hesitating, she looked up at her with a curious little smile. "You can introduce me," she said, "as you always have, as 'the daughter of Markham MacLeod.' That will give your afternoon an added flavor." Electra answered seriously, "Thank you," and resolved to do it. Madam Fulton, she thought, would have the decency not to break the situation by her intemperate "Mrs. Tom's." Electra had no experience of contrition in her grandmother, but she could but feel that any woman who had done what that old lady had might be trusted to observe the decencies for at least a week thereafter. "That was my public name," Rose added hastily, as if she had invalidated her claim. "I sang for eight months or more as Rose MacLeod." It was a new triumph for her, Electra realized when the day was over. The ladies came down from the city and, in perfect weather, sat about on the veranda and in the two front rooms, while Rose, at the piano, sang to them and then gave them a charming talk. Electra, who could do no creative work, could not take her eyes from the young creature, all eager brilliancy and dressed in a perfect Paris gown. The dress, Electra knew, was no finer than she herself could amply afford to buy in her own country. Only it was worn with a grace, the air of a woman born to be looked at, and used to fervid tributes. The other women, too, were worshipers of notability, and Rose knew she had raised a wave of admiration. To her, unused to the American woman's passion for new things, it was a real tribute, something she could count upon to-morrow after the epoch of to-day; and the afternoon left her exhilarated and warm in momentary triumph. The women crowded about her with intemperate comment and question. They wanted to know as much about her father as they did about her. They were all eager to show their conversance with the Brotherhood, its aims and potencies, and they were more than ready to besiege her father and to entertain her. Some of them even wanted to make dates for the coming autumn, and Rose found herself the recipient of a score of visiting cards, all pointing to new alliances. She slipped away before the afternoon was over, to spare Electra the pains of thanking her, and going home, found Markham MacLeod at the gate. Immediately her hopes died. She had forgotten the issues she had to reckon with in him. From these no ladies' club could save her. He was affection itself in greeting her. "I have just come," he explained. "Peter is in town and Mrs. Grant is taking her afternoon rest. Let us walk a little way." "I have n't my hat," she demurred. He looked at her sufficient parasol and took her hand, turning her toward the road again. "Come. We'll walk along to that grove. It is shady there. I want to see you before we meet the others." She yielded, and presently they stepped in at the bars to the field where the grove invited. Under the trees she furled her parasol, and sat down on a stone. She looked involuntarily toward the plantation, below them to the west. There were the little clumps of nursery trees, the green patches of seedlings, and, dotted through the working area, men with backs bent over the rows. She wondered if Osmond were there, and the thought gave her, if not courage, at least the defiance that answers for it. MacLeod threw himself on the ground, and her eyes came back to him. He looked so strong, so much a part of all living things, that he seemed to her invincible. He spoke quite seriously, as if there were matters between them to be gravely settled. "I have been wondering about the bearing of these people toward you. What explanation did you make when you came? "I made no explanation." "What attitude did you take?" "Peter introduced me to her. He went in advance, to tell her I was coming." "Electra ? " "Yes, Tom's sister." "What did Peter tell her ?" He glanced sharply up at her, and she met the look coldly. Her cheeks were burning, but there was nothing willingly responsive in her face. She repeated it: "Peter told her Tom had married me. I have reason to think she told him she did not believe it." "Has Peter said that to you?" "No, but I think so." "Did she send for you, to go to see her?" "No, I went without it." "Now, how did she receive you? His voice betrayed an amiable curiosity. He might have been interested merely in the vagaries of human nature, and particularly because Electra, as a handsome, willful creature, had paces to be noted. Rose laughed a little, in a way that jarred on him. He liked mirth to sound like mirth. "She was civil to me. But she has never once given me Tom's name, nor has she allowed me to introduce myself by it." "The old lady used it." "That was because I followed an impulse one day and told her. She followed an impulse and used it. She is a naughty old lady." "Ah!" He considered for a moment. "If she did believe you, is it your impression she would expect you to inherit ?" "I would n't have it." Her face quivered all over. "I never thought of that for a moment. Can't you see why I came? I was beside myself in Paris. There were you, hurrying back from the East and bringing — him.” "The prince?" "You had written me he would come with you. When he saw me again, you said, he would not take 'no.' Peter was going home. Kind Peter! He said, "Why don't you come with me?' He But he did not answer that. It was a part of his large kindliness never to perpetuate harsh conclusions, even by accepting them. "I shall go to see your Electra at once," he said. She raised a forbidding hand. "Do nothing of the kind. I insist on that." But he was again reflecting. "That puzzles me," he said at last: "that she should receive you at all if she does not believe you. Why?" She looked at him steadfastly for a moment, a satirical smile coming on her face. These emotions he was awakening in her made her an older woman. "I really believe you don't know," she said, at length. "Certainly I don't know." "Why, it's you!" He stared at her. It was, she saw, an honest wonder. "She adores you. They all do, all her ladies. They meet and talk over things, and you are the biggest thing of all. I am the daughter of Markham MacLeod. That is what she calls me." "I see." He mused again. "I must go over there to-night." "No! no! no!" It was an ascending scale of entreaty, but he did not regard it. He got up and offered her his hand. "Come," he said. "Peter will be back. By the way," he added, as she followed him laggingly, "does Peter know why you came to America?" "Peter thought it the most natural thing in the world to wish to be with Tom's relations." "You have n't told him about the prince?" |