THE PALL MALL GAZETTE, APRIL 15, 1889
“One knocked at the Beloved’s door: and a Voice asked from within, Who is there? and he answered, It is I. And the door was not opened. And after a year he returned and knocked again at the door. And again the Voice asked, Who is there? and he said, It is Thyself! And the door was opened to him.”
THE author of this volume, who, with those pretty words on its title-page, seems modestly to disavow that difference from other people on which poets are apt to pride themselves, is, we judge, a Russian, of French culture, who, taken with a love of the English genius, has turned to that somewhat antique phase of our poetry which has ceased to be altogether vernacular, and has learned to write therein like an Englishman; certainly, with much genuine insight and sympathy. The best of those pieces, indeed, might find their place in an anthology of the later Elizabethan or early Jacobean muse, in a certain mood, half serious, half playful, not without a grain of satire. Mr. Raffalovich has mastered many of its quaint charms, its trick, especially, of seizing, in the little graces of actual life, of dress for instance, the poetic touch.
There are no colours that have sworn
Such bitter enmity
But may be reconciled and worn,
My dearest one, by thee.
Thy wearing shall do wonders
For those same colours summer links,
But man more tasteful sunders:
The purplest blues, the crudest pinks.
I know that yellows unsubdued
The crabbed reds repel,
But thou, quite heedless of their feud,
Their violence canst quell.
Thy wearing shall make harmless
Magenta, mauve, and green, shot through
With purple, nor quite charmless
Thy flag-like sporting of bright blue.
No bolder than a brilliant morn
On thy victorious way,
No less thyself thou canst adorn
Than can a summer’s day.
There is surely a pleasant vein of true poetry in that, akin to Herrick.
This brief collection, in short, with no titles except that general one, making it all the easier to sip at it lightly, is really a series of pleasant afterthoughts on human life, in what may be called its spring colours. It indicates, indeed, so true a sense of what is rightly attractive in trifles, that really poetic touch in the mere toys of life which suggest or is suggested by the living undercurrent of its deepest feelings that we doubt whether the author has found in English verse the proper scope for his talents. To add to the great body of English literature is not the natural function of a foreigner, however clever; but rather the critical one of reporting, of making known at home or abroad the real flowers, as distinguished from many imitation ones, the real graces of existence, to be gathered in the more fortunate regions of that English civilisation, which Parisians and Russians (Mr. Raffalovich being not alone in his preference) are said just now so greatly to affect.