PRIMAVERA: POEMS
BY FOUR AUTHORS

PORTLAND MAINE PUBLISHED
BY THOMAS B MOSHER AT XLV
EXCHANGE STREET MDCCCC

PREFACE

Primavera: Poems, by Four Authors. Oxford:
Published by B. H. Blackwell, Broad Street.
MDCCCXC. (Fcap 8vo, pp. 43.)

Such is the title of a little 'book of verses' that at the time found favour in the eyes of a few discerning critics, and then, apparently, was forgotten. As originally issued its dark brown paper wrapper was adorned with a simple but effective woodcut design by Mr. Selwyn Image, which we have reproduced on our first half-title. Even more fortunate has been the discovery of a signed review in the pages of the Academy for August 9, 1890, by the late John Addington Symonds. As a preface nothing could be better. And in this connexion the lines which we prefix from Guarini are also singularly appropriate. For these songs of Youth are still worth while; they thrill and fill us as of yesterday with their haunting sense of vanished love, of

PREFACE

This little book was written by four friends, three of them under-graduates at Oxford, and all of them penetrated with the spirit of the higher culture of our time. The poems, it is clear, have been carefully selected; and, it is probable, have been diligently polished. There is not one which is not remarkable for delicacy of style and conscious aiming after excellence in art. Whether these qualities promise well for future achievement and development is a question open to debate. But there can be no doubt that in Primavera we possess another of those tiny verse-books like Ionica, or Mr. Percy Pinkerton's Galeazzo, which will not lose in freshness and in perfume as the years go by.

The poems have the distinction of making one wish to be acquainted with their authors. Though they differ a good deal in mental tone, perhaps also somewhat in literary merit, they possess marked common characteristics: a restrained refinement, a subdued reserve, a gentle melancholy; the note of the latest Anglican æsthetic school. We find no humour, no Sturm und Drang, no inequalities and incoherences of passion. Even where it is obvious that the emotion has been intense, possibly of a rare and peculiar strain, as in Mr. Binyon's "Testamentum Amoris" and Mr. Phillips's "To a Lost Love," the expression of it obeys no violence of impulse. A tender tone of regret, rather than of acute grief, steeps these stanzas (to quote one instance) addressed to a friend removed into the spiritual world by death.

It would be invidious to institute critical comparisons between the styles of these four friends and their respective merits. It may, however, be remarked that Mr. Manmohan Ghose's work possesses a peculiar interest on account of its really notable command of the subtleties of English prosody and diction, combined with just a touch of foreign feeling. The artful employment of imperfect rhymes in "Raymond and Ida" illustrates what I mean. Occasionally, too, Mr. Ghose produces exactly the right phrase by means of a felicitous simplicity. Notice the line which I have italicised in the following stanza:

Take, again, these two lines:

There is but one piece of blank verse in the book. This prologue to "Orestes," by Mr. Stephen Phillips, has strength, is firm in outline, somewhat tardy in movement, fit for sonorous declamation. The gravity which I have indicated as a ruling quality of all these youthful compositions makes itself felt here in its proper place. We might have wished, perhaps, for more of joyous accent in the ode to "Youth," by Mr. Laurence Binyon, which dwells less on the rapture of youth than on its sadness—the melancholy of Theognis over youth's decay:

Mr. Cripps alone permits his Muse a gravely jocund note in his "Seasons' Comfort." He, too, of the four fellow-versifiers shows the greater aptitude for experiments, though it may perhaps be felt that his touch is nowhere quite so sure, nor his artistic feeling so direct as theirs.

It is difficult to lay the critic's hand lightly enough upon poems like these, or to make it clear what particular attraction they possess. With all the charm of rathe spring-flowers, they suggest the possibilities of varied personality not yet accentuated in the authors. Let us hope that the four Muses of the four friends will not, like the primroses,

but that we shall profit by their summer-songs, while ever remaining grateful for their Primavera.

john addington symonds.

August, 1890.

PRIMAVERA