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THE SENTIMENTAL MEREDITH

The Late Lord Lytton and His Place in the Literature of His Age.

His Fame Rests on "Lucille"-- An Effeminite Writer and a Noted Eccentric- A Failure as a Diplomate.

If there had been nothing to remember Lord Lytton by excepting his vice royalty experience in India, he would have had a jeer rather than a eulogy for his epitaph. It was [d'lserali?] who appointed him, and that statesman liked splendor and pretense. Owen Meredith was both splendid and pretentious, and he had a Holly adroitness which suited the illustrious adventurer who wrote "Lothair," D'Iserall's idea of a ruler was one who loved spangles and glitter, and this Lytton undoubtedly did, and it is said that when d'Iserall made Victoria Empress of India that Lytton second this errant ostentation with much gaudiness over in India.

The men of England never had any liking for Lytton. They said he was not English in his tastes. They didn't like his slickness. And they didn't like his verses.

But with women it is different. There never was a more popular poem written than "Lucille." It had a delicacy, and sentiment, and pathos. The women wept over it, quoted it, made presents of couples of it to their lovers. Men of letters refused to criticize it. They considered it beneath them. Its fine discriminations seemed to them [mawkish?]. They had no use for the prettiness of its lines nor the daintiness of its metrical elaboration. If by chance any of them did quote from it, they chose the most material verse in the volume. These are the lines and they are, from a poetical point of view, the poorest in the whole book:

We may live without poetry, music, and art;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
We may live without books-what is knowledge but grieving?
We may live without hope-what is hope but deceiving?
We may live without love-what is a passion but pining?
But where is the man who can live without dining?
Even Meredith must have been ashamed of the cheap smartness of these lines.

Critcs whom one trusts so positively assert that there is no good "Lucille" that I hesitate to say that I think differently. I am free to confess that not one gleam of genius illumines its pleasant pages, but I do affirm that here and there are passages which a much greater poet need not have blushed for. Perhaps because I am a woman, with belongs to the sex, I am fond of the following lines, which close the poem of "Lucille," and strive to give in brief the character of the fascinating woman who is the heroine:

Power bid in pathos a fire veiled in cloud
Yet still shining outward: a branch which through bowed
By the bird in its passages, springs upward again:
Through all symbols I search for her sweetness in vain!
Judge her love by her life. For our life is but love.
In act Pure was hers: and the dear God above.
Who knows what his creatures have need of for life.
And whose love included all loves, through much patient strife.
Led her soul into peace. Love, though love may be given.
In vain, is yet lovely. Her own native heaven
More clearly she mirrored as life's troubled dream
Wore away: and love sigh'd into rest, like a stream
That breaks its heard over wild rocks toward the shore.
OF the great sea, which bushes it up evermore.
With its little wild wailing. No stream from its source.
Flows seaward, how lonely soever it source,
But what some land is gladdened. No start over rose.
And set, without influence somewhere. Who knows.
What earth needs from earth's lowliest creature? No life
Can be pure in its purpose and strong in its strife
And all life not be purer and stronger thereby
The spirits of just men made perfect on high,
The army of martyrs who stand by the throne.
And gaze in the place that makes glorious their own.
Know this, surely, at last. Honest love, honest sorrow.
Honest work for the day, honest hope for the morrow.
Are these worth nothing more than the hand they make weary.
The heart they have saddened, the life they leave dreary.

This, I maintain, is poetry, although it may not be of the highest order.

It has been more than hinted that "Lucille" was a steal from first to last, and I have seen printed columns of French verification identical line for line with Owen Meredith's poetry. But I have never seen that French book from which "Lucille" is said to be taken nor had any proof that even if such a book exists it was written before "Lucille" I am inclined to the belief that though Lord Lytton was not a particularly good man, that at least he was an honest author. Certainly, there is something peculiar and personal in "Lucille" which finds its repetition in many of his shorter poems. The reason that "Lucille" is so popular is that it is so sentimental. The temptation is bewitchingly [?] with and virtue finally triumphs. The reader gets all of the charms of playing with sin, and is saved a bad taste in the mouth in the end by having everyone suddenly become very good indeed. There is nothing stalwart about "Lucille." It has a hot house air. Indeed, the atmosphere seems vitlated, as it is in evening drawing rooms where the gas burns, and men and women crowd each other. That is to say, the poem is artificial. The work is essentially effeminate, and it is sometimes hard to believe that the delicate houses with their foolish elaboration of detail, their loving dwelling upon unimportant matters, and their dainty and sympathetic delineations, were not penned by woman, Here is the description of "Lucille's" room, it is hard to imagine a man writing these words:

Over the soft atmosphere of this temple of grace.
Rested silence and perfume. No sound reached the place.
In the white curtains waver'd the delicate shade.
Of the heaving acacia, through which the breeze played.
Over the smooth wooden floor, polish'd darkens a glass
Fragrant white Indian matting allowed you to pass
In light olive baskets, by window and door.
Some hung from the ceiling, some crowding the floor.
Rich wildflowers plucked by Lucille from the hill.
Some hung from the ceiling, some crowding the floor.
Rich wild flowers plucked by Lucile from the hill.
Seemed the room with their passionate presence to fill.
Blue aconite hid in white roses respond;
The deep belladonna its vermeil disclosed;
And the fail saponite, and the tender blue belt,
And the purple valerian-each child of the fell
And the solitude flourished, fed fair from the source
Of waters, the huntsman scarce holds in his course.
Where the chamole and wizard, with delicate hoof.
Pause or fit through the pinnacle silence aloof.
Here you felt, by the sense of its beauty reposed.
That you stood in the shrine of sweet thoughts.

It must be confessed that all this is rather maudlin. But it is pretty, for all that. There is a kind of 'fancy work" tendency to it. It suits the taste of a young woman who has nothing to do but make studies and go to 5 o'clock teas. And when the ingenious "Lord Alfred" and the bewitching Lucille really get in the midst of their love sorrows one is-if one is 10-simply swathed in various woe.

Next to "Lucille" in popularity comes "Aux Haliens." Here it is;

At Paris it was, at the opera there;
And she looked like a queen in a book that night.
With the wreath of pearl in her raven hair,
And the broach on her breast so bright.
Of all th' operas that Yordi wrote,
The best, to my mind, is the "Trovatore,"
And Maria can sooth, with a tenor note,
The souls in purgatory."

The moon on the tower slept soft as snow;
And who was not thrilled in the strangest way.
As we heard him sing, while the gas burned low.
"Non ti scordar di me?"

The Emperor there, in his box of side,
Looked grave, as if he had just seen
The red flags wave from the city gate,
Where his eagles in bronze had been.

The Empress, too, had a tear in her eyes.
You'd have said that her fancy had gone back again,
For one moment under that old blue sky,
To the old glad life in Spain.

Well there in our front row box we sat
Together, my bride betrothed, and I;
My graze was fixed on my opera but,
And hers on the stage hard by.

And both were silent, and both were sad;
Like a queen she leaned on her full white arm.
With that regal and indolent air she had;
So confident of charm!

I have not doubt she was thinking then
Of her former lord, good soul that he was,
Who died the richest and roundest of a men,
The Marquis of Carabas.

Meanwhile, I was thinking of my first love
As I had not been thinking of aught for years,
Till over my eyes there began to move
Something that felt like tours.

I thought of the dress she wore last time,
When we stood 'neath the cypress trees together
In that lost land, in that soft clime,
In the crimson evening weather

Of that muslin dress (for the eve was hot),
And her warm white neck in its golden chain,
And her full soft hair, just tied in a knot,
And falling loose again.

And the jasmine flower in her fair young breast,
(Oh the faint, sweet smell of that jasmine flower),
And the one bird singing one to its nest,
And the one star over the tower.

I thought of our little quarrels and strife,
And the letter that brought me back my ring;
And it all seemed then, in the waste of life,
Such a very little thing

For I thought of her grave below the hill,
Whore the sentinel cypress tree stands over;
And I thought, "were the only living still,
How I could forgive and love her!"

And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour.
And of how, after all, old things are best,
That I smelt the smell of that jasmine flower.
Which she used to wear on her breast.

It smelt so faint, and it smelt so sweet,
It made me creep, and it made me cold!
Like the scout that steals from the crumbling shoot
Where a mummy is half unrolled!

And I turned and looked: she was sitting there.
In a dim box over the stage; and drost
In that insulin dress, with that full soft hair,
And that jasmine in her breast!

I was here, and she was there;
And the glittering horseshoe curved between!
From my bride betrothed, with her raven hair
And her sumptuous scornful [?].

To my early love, with her eyes downcast,
And over her primrose face the shade,
(In short, from the future back to the past),
There is but a step to be made.

To my early love from my future bride
One moment I looked. Then I stole to the door.
I traversed the passage; and down at her side
I was sitting, a moment more

My thinking of her, or the music a strain,
Or something which never will be express,
Had brought her back from the grave again,
With the jasmine in her breast

She is not dead, and she is not wed!
But she loves me now and she loved me then
And the very first word that her sweet lips
My heart grew youthful again.

The Marchiones there, of Carabus,
She is wealthy, am I young, and handsome still?
And but for her-well, w [?] that pass,
She may marry whomever she will,

But I will marry my own first love,
With her primose face, for old things are best.
And the flower in her bosom I prize above
The brooch in my lady a breast,

The world is filled with folly and sin,
And love must cling where it can, I say;
For beauty is easy enough to win,
But one isn't loved every day.

And I think, in the lives of most women and men,
There's a moment when all would go smooth and even
If only the dead would find out when
To come back and be forgiven.

But O, the smell of that jasmine flower,
And O that music! and O the way
That voice rang out from the donjon tower,
Non ti scordar di me!
Non ti acordar di me!

Owen Meredith a few years ago consented to explain what all this meant. I heard the explanation, but I have forgotten it. It seemed to me that was the only thing anyone could do- was to forget it.

Sometimes Meredith affected a classical strain, but it always had a sophomoric sound. Often he was merely lugubrious and seemed to temporarily lose that sense of art which he undoubtedly possessed. He has a pretty trick of making happy smilies. He knew how to portray all the suffering that comes from sensitiveness. He had a light philosophy, not vicious, but certainly not very deep.

Personally, he had a very poor taste, and would wear a false jewel with conscious pomposity. While he was in India he had a gold medal made for the chief bareback rider in a circus at Calcutta, and himself presented it, with a speech before all the people. The conservative Englishmen at home fairly howled with impatience and disgust. His wife is said to have been a lady with great adroitness, who succeeded in keeping from public knowledge those little amorous episodes from which the poet sought his inspiration. He is said to have resembled his father, Bulwer Lytton, in many ways, but in all respects he was a lesser man- not that Bulwer can be counted among the great. ELIA W. PEATTIE.

THOSE EXPENSIVE FRAMES.

Something More About the Photographers- "Want to Introduce"

The questionable methods alleged to be surrounding the sale of "photograph" tickets in the north end of town continue to unfold themselves Friday B. A. Eastinan called at the WORLD-HERALD office and told his adventures with the canvassing man.

A person representing himself as T. J. Cutter called at Mr.Eastman's house, 2017 Charles street, and told his story of free pictures for the price of frames. He had but for tickets, and to make up the six for he endorsed out the back of one a request that three pictures be taken for it. No other cost beyond that for a frame was to be charged, and the purchaser might if he chose get the frame elsewhere.

However, the Knowlton people demanded 50 cents in advance for the artist. Three dollars and fifty cents extra were also asked for three faces on one picture, although the collector had stated no extra charge would be made. A request to show new proof of one sitting which had been made was met with the statement that one of the sitters had smiled and new negative must be made. The Knowitons refused to show the proof.

Mrs. Eastman then sought to get the picture and take it elsewhere to be framed, but it was found that the canvasser had substituted another contract for the one he had shown, which made it obligatory to purchase a frame of Knowlton. The only frame shown was valued at $8.

The photographer refused to refund the money paid for the contract when objection was made to this extortion, so the Eastman family is still short on family portraits as well the money paid for the contract.

At least, such is Mr. Eastman's story.

REV. MR, WARFIELD ARRIVES.

Rev. F. A. Warfield arrived in Omaha yesterday from Brocton, Mass, and is stopping at the Brunswick. He will preach at the St. Mary's Avenue Congressional church today both morning and evening.