Nor does the matter stop here. In Mr. Gosse’s recent volume of essays, he has included two admirable criticisms on Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry, and on Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s prose. These papers, discriminating, sympathetic, and exhaustive, are called pastels. They do not differ in any way from other critical studies of equal length and merit. They abound in agreeable quotations, and show a clear and genial appreciation of their themes. They are simply reviews of an unusually good order, and if their title be correctly applied, then it is serviceable for any piece of literary criticism which deals with a single author. Macaulay’s “Madame D’Arblay,” Mr. Birrell’s “Emerson,” Mr. Saintsbury’s “Peacock,” might all have been named pastels.
By this time the subject begins to grow perplexing. Miss Wilkins wanders far from her true gods, and from the sources of her genuine inspiration, to write a handful of labored sketches--pen pictures perhaps, albeit a trifle stiff in execution--which she calls pastels. Mr. Brander Matthews gives us, as his contribution to the puzzle, a vivid description of Carmencita dancing in a New York studio, and calls it a pastel. If we stray from prose to verse, we are tripped up at every step. Nebulous little couplets, songs of saddening subtlety, weird conceits and high-pacing rhymes are thoughtfully labeled pastels, so as to give us a clue to their otherwise impenetrable obscurity. Sullen seas, and wan twilights, and dim garden paths, relieved with ghostly lilies, and white-armed women of dubious decorum, are the chief ingredients of these poetic novelties; but here is one, picked up by chance, which reads like a genial conundrum:--
“The light of our cigarettes Went and came in the gloom; It was dark in the little room.
Dark, and then in the dark, Sudden, a flash, a glow, And a hand and a ring I know.
And then, through the dark, a flush, Ruddy and vague, the grace-- A rose--of her lyric face.”
Now, if that be a pastel, and Mr. Gosse’s reviews are pastels, and M. Bourget’s stories are pastels, and Maurice de Guérin’s “Centaur” is a pastel, and Mr. Brander Matthews’ realistic sketches are pastels, and Ephraïm Mikhaël’s allegories are pastels, I should like to be told, by some one who knows, just where the limits of the term is set.