STEPHEN PHILLIPS.

R. PHILLIPS has come into sudden prominence

through an award for the "most notable literary work of the year." His little volume contains only eighteen poems. Two of these are real poems; the others are unworthy the genius that produced "Marpessa" and "Christ in Hades."

"The Woman with a Dead Soul" may be taken as a fair representative of the short poems. Mr. Phillips is deeply concerned in the social conditions around him and in this poem he has attempted to analyze one of the characters that he has found in the slum life in London. He has attempted a tragedy in which his heroine is a "moth of London gaslight." There is no overthrow of a great soul. There was nothing great to begin with. Desdemona is a faithful wife; Ophelia is an obedient daughter and modest lover. Their destruction is tragedy. The "Woman with a Dead Soul" is no more than one of the thousands of weak characters that daily drift on the restless ocean of modern life.

In his treatment of the subject, Mr. Phillips is not a poet. His "poem" is a metaphysical dissection. There are no touches of pathos, no subtle fancies to hide the scientist's scalpel. There is not the delicacy and refinement needed in handling a subject so near to us and bearing so much of the repulsiveness of low life. In all these short poems Mr. Phillips has gone slumming with art as an enforced companion. Art has been bedraggled, and his analyses, that he would have us believe were done by her assistance, are cold and barren.

When we turn from these to "Marpessa” and “Christ in Hades" it is like going from a damp, unwholesome vault into the warmth of spring sunshine. A true poet speaks. After the publication of "Christ in Hades" so many of his weaker poems followed, that admirers began to fear that

this was to prove his exhaustive creative effort. "Marpessa" more than reassured them.

"Marpessa" is an old myth, the theme of an ode of Bacchylides. Apollo and Idas, a mortal, love Marpessa. Apollo attempts to carry her off, when Jupiter commands him to let the girl make her choice. It is at this point that Mr. Phillips begins his poem. The poem in reality consists of the speeches of the three. Apollo passionately pleads his love with the lavish promises of a god. He offers immortality, he would lift Marpessa into the rhythm of the universe, he would give her the power to call the flowers back to life, to fling the showers upon earth, to minister relief to pain-racked bodies. "Africa in her matted hair obscured" shall stretch below; "adoring Asia kindle and hugely bloom" as she rides in heaven, associate of the labors of the sun. Idas is mortal; he has not the prodigal wealth of a god. He replies humbly, but tells his love in the emotional language of human romance that not even a god could make more impassioned. Marpessa takes his hand in her own and makes answer to Apollo.

Though she would delight

"To fling the sunbeams diffusing silent bliss,
To gild the face that from its dead looks up
To shine on the rejected

Or to mend with sweetest surgery the mind,"

she knows she was born to sorrow, and she will not forego her lot. Replying to his offer of immortality she

says,

"Yet should I

Linger beside thee in felicity,

Sliding with open eyes through liquid bliss
Forever; still I must grow old. Ah I

Should ail beside thee, Apollo, and should note
With eyes that would not be, but yet are dim,
Ever so slight a change from day to day
In thee my husband: watch thee nudge thyself
To little offices that once were sweet;

Slow where thou once wert swift, remembering

To kiss those lips which once thou couldst not leave

I should expect thee by the Western bay

Faded, not sure of thee, with desperate smiles and pitiful

devices of my dress

Or fashion of my hair; thou wouldst grow kind;

Most bitter to a woman that once was loved."

The god departs in anger. Then Marpessa and Idas

"He looking downward and she gazing up
Into the evening green wander away."

This long quotation shows Mr. Phillips at his best. There is a suggestion of the impassioned dialogue of Keats's Hyperion and much of the beauty of Tennyson's Tithonus and Oenone. But while in picturesque treatment it is like the "Atlanta in Calydon," Mr. Phillips never wanders on and on, intoxicated with the beauty and prodigality of his conceits. Remarkable terseness and pregnant poetic suggestiveness characterize these two poems throughout.

If the treatment of Marpessa is picturesque, we shall find in "Christ in Hades" a Vergilian stateliness and simplicity of conception and treatment. Vergilian, too, are the clearcut epithets. There is no elaboration; a single phrase or word suffices. He uses such expressions as "In miserable dim magnificence," "straight from the dimness to the greenness," "sad unflattered kings." A striking feature of the poem is the interweaving of pagan and Christian sentiment. It is done with such skill and naturalness that there seems nothing inharmonious in Persephone's mistaking the Christ for Hermes come to lead her back to light, or in Prometheus's recognition of a brother's blood in the thorncrowned Saviour. But the greatest triumph is the conception of the majestic figure of the Saviour maintaining an unbroken silence throughout his circuit of hell. By his ineffable look of sympathy and tenderness he stops the labors of the dismal abode and draws the shadowy myriads after him. They do not understand him. Each according to his own character explains the mysterious visit; strikingly illustrative of the truth in the presence of God "the

secrets of all hearts are laid bare." Once he raised his hand as if to speak, but he knows his help can not be given. Then

"Waiting the signal that he could not give

Wanting the word that he might not speak," they

wandered off.

"And each man took his penance up, perhaps

Less easily from such an interval:

The vault closed back, woe upon woe, the wheel
Revolved, the stone rebounded; for that time
Hades her interrupted life resumed."

The beautiful verse and the genuine human sympathy of these poems have won for the author a place in the front rank of the young poets of the day. Mr. Phillips is not garrulous nor trivial. He looks seriously upon the conditions of life about him. That he has a keen insight into the human heart, is clearly seen in Marpessa. We can pardon him for allowing his metaphysical studies to lead him away from the poet's field, since this same seriousness has given us two fine poems. In the midst of the shallow rhymers of the day who treat the most sacred subjects with flippancy, we hail this young student poet with genuine pleasure.

J. M. Hopkins.

A

TWO WOMEN.

WOMAN upon the scaffold thrusts into acute contrast the two extremes of human tenderness and human harshness. The sight of Hester Prynne there above the writhing crowd wrings the heart; when groan out the eight fatal strokes and the dusky flag wavers over the head of Tess D'Urberville, our eyes and ears burn with the ultimate sympathy of pathos. Though age and time, culture and position struggle to divorce them, the scaffold makes them sisters. Death did not unlink them, for that shadow, dim and shapeless, of absolute right,—the sickle of earthly justice had already passed over them and nothing remained but the aftermath of a shorn life. Over this black deformity the American Rembrandt has traced in dull but fadeless colors the symbols of a weird romanticism; the firmest English hand of a French realism has trained to its top an animated sorrow bursting into blood-red roses all the way. Standing together upon this platform they utter the speech of centuries, protesting against the annihilating revenge of society, pleading for better justice to the defenceless half of sinning man.

Through this darkness bursts the dawning beauty of nature's women. The lover with the balance scale must leave, for here stand the splendid Helen, the beautiful Nicolette, the fair Rosalind, all conquering hearts at the first bow shot. Tess and Hester are such creatures as from Eden to the New Jerusalem are followed by a train of straining hearts. The dignity of the one and the shyness of the other are lost in the womanhood of each, for both are primal women of the summer and meadow. It is not a Hera-like form, a luxury of hair, an abysmal eye, so much as the spirit of Aphrodite, which makes us thrust out eagerly the golden apple. Through this halo of beauty we can but dimly see the scaffold, and our old scorn of Paris and Anthony merges into something akin to sympathy.