By the Author of John Halifax, Gentleman. (Macmillan and
Co.)

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD'S LAST VOLUME

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 11, 1888.)

Writers of poetical prose are rarely good poets. They may crowd their
page with gorgeous epithet and resplendent phrase, may pile Pelions of
adjectives upon Ossas of descriptions, may abandon themselves to highly
coloured diction and rich luxuriance of imagery, but if their verse lacks
the true rhythmical life of verse, if their method is devoid of the self-
restraint of the real artist, all their efforts are of very little avail.
'Asiatic' prose is possibly useful for journalistic purposes, but
'Asiatic' poetry is not to be encouraged. Indeed, poetry may be said to
need far more self-restraint than prose. Its conditions are more
exquisite. It produces its effects by more subtle means. It must not be
allowed to degenerate into mere rhetoric or mere eloquence. It is, in
one sense, the most self-conscious of all the arts, as it is never a
means to an end but always an end in itself. Sir Edwin Arnold has a very
picturesque or, perhaps we should say, a very pictorial style. He knows
India better than any living Englishman knows it, and Hindoostanee better
than any English writer should know it. If his descriptions lack
distinction, they have at least the merit of being true, and when he does
not interlard his pages with an interminable and intolerable series of
foreign words he is pleasant enough. But he is not a poet. He is simply
a poetical writer--that is all.

However, poetical writers have their uses, and there is a good deal in
Sir Edwin Arnold's last volume that will repay perusal. The scene of the
story is placed in a mosque attached to the monument of the Taj-Mahal,
and a group composed of a learned Mirza, two singing girls with their
attendant, and an Englishman, is supposed to pass the night there reading
the chapter of Sa'di upon 'Love,' and conversing upon that theme with
accompaniments of music and dancing. The Englishman is, of course, Sir
Edwin Arnold himself:

lover of India,
Too much her lover! for his heart lived there
How far soever wandered thence his feet.

Lady Dufferin appears as

Lady Duffreen, the mighty Queen's Vice-queen!

which is really one of the most dreadful blank-verse lines that we have
come across for some time past. M. Renan is 'a priest of Frangestan,'
who writes in 'glittering French'; Lord Tennyson is

One we honour for his songs--
Greater than Sa'di's self--

and the Darwinians appear as the 'Mollahs of the West,' who

hold Adam's sons
Sprung of the sea-slug.

All this is excellent fooling in its way, a kind of play-acting in
literature; but the best parts of the book are the descriptions of the
Taj itself, which are extremely elaborate, and the various translations
from Sa'di with which the volume is interspersed.