r in
French or Italian the book is one of the most fascinating autobiographies
that has appeared for some time, even in an age like ours when literary
egotism has been brought to such an exquisite pitch of perfection.

* * * * *

The New Purgatory and Other Poems, by Miss E. R. Chapman, is, in some
respects, a very remarkable little volume. It used to be said that women
were too poetical by nature to make great poets, too receptive to be
really creative, too well satisfied with mere feeling to search after the
marble splendour of form. But we must not judge of woman's poetic power
by her achievements in days when education was denied to her, for where
there is no faculty of expression no art is possible. Mrs. Browning, the
first great English poetess, was also an admirable scholar, though she
may not have put the accents on her Greek, and even in those poems that
seem most remote from classical life, such as Aurora Leigh, for instance,
it is not difficult to trace the fine literary influence of a classical
training. Since Mrs. Browning's time, education has become, not the
privilege of a few women, but the inalienable inheritance of all; and, as
a natural consequence of the increased faculty of expression thereby
gained, the women poets of our day hold a very high literary position.
Curiously enough, their poetry is, as a rule, more distinguished for
strength than for beauty; they seem to love to grapple with the big
intellectual problems of modern life; science, philosophy and metaphysics
form a large portion of their ordinary subject-matter; they leave the
triviality of triolets to men, and try to read the writing on the wall,
and to solve the last secret of the Sphinx. Hence Robert Browning, not
Keats, is their idol; Sordello moves them more than the Ode on a Grecian
Urn; and all Lord Tennyson's magic and music seems to them as nothing
compared with the psychological subtleties of The Ring and the Book, or
the pregnant questions stirred in the dialogue between Blougram and
Gigadibs. Indeed I remember hearing a charming young Girtonian,
forgetting for a moment the exquisite lyrics in Pippa Passes, and the
superb blank verse of Men and Women, state quite seriously that the
reason she admired the author of Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country was that he
had headed a reaction against beauty in poetry!

Miss Chapman is probably one of Mr. Browning's disciples. She does not
imitate him, but it is easy to discern his infl