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with a detailed exposition of the undulatory theory of light according to the most ancient scientific
discoveries. Mr. Collier points out how important it is for an artist to hold sound views on the subject of ether
waves, and his own thorough appreciation of Science may be estimated by the definition he gives of it as
being 'neither more nor less than knowledge.'
Mr. Collier has done his work with much industry and earnestness. Indeed, nothing but the most
conscientious seriousness, combined with real labour, could have produced such a book, and the exact value
of common-sense in art has never before been so clearly demonstrated.
A Manual of Oil Painting. By the Hon. John Collier. (Cassell and Co.)
MINER AND MINOR POETS
(Pall Mall Gazette, February 1, 1887.)
The conditions that precede artistic production are so constantly treated as qualities of the work of art itself
that one sometimes is tempted to wish that all art were anonymous. Yet there are certain forms of art so
individual in their utterance, so purely personal in their expression, that for a full appreciation of their style
and manner some knowledge of the artist's life is necessary. To this class belongs Mr. Skipsey's Carols from
MINER AND MINOR POETS 55
Reviews
the Coal-Fields, a volume of intense human interest and high literary merit, and we are consequently glad to
see that Dr. Spence Watson has added a short biography of his friend to his friend's poems, for the life and the
literature are too indissolubly wedded ever really to be separated. Joseph Skipsey, Dr. Watson tells us, was
sent into the coal pits at Percy Main, near North Shields, when he was seven years of age. Young as he was
he had to work from twelve to sixteen hours in the day, generally in the pitch dark, and in the dreary winter
months he saw the sun only upon Sundays. When he went to work he had learned the alphabet and to put
words of two letters together, but he was really his own schoolmaster, and 'taught himself to write, for
example, by copying the letters from printed bills or notices, when he could get a candle end, his paper
being the trapdoor, which it was his duty to open and shut as the wagons passed through, and his pen a piece
of chalk.' The first book he really read was the Bible, and not content with reading it, he learned by heart the
chapters which specially pleased him. When sixteen years old he was presented with a copy of Lindley
Murray's Grammar, by the aid of which he gained some knowledge of the structural rules of English. He had
already become acquainted with Paradise Lost, and was another proof of Matthew Prior's axiom, 'Who often
reads will sometimes want to write,' for he had begun to write verse when only 'a bonnie pit lad.' For more
than forty years of his life he laboured in 'the coal-dark underground,' and is now the caretaker of a
Board-school in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As for the qualities of his poetry, they are its directness and its
natural grace. He has an intellectual as well as a metrical affinity with Blake, and possesses something of
Blake's marvellous power of making simple things seem strange to us, and strange things seem simple. How
delightful, for instance, is this little poem:
'Get up!' the caller calls, 'Get up!'
And in the dead of night,
To win the bairns their bite and sup,
I rise a weary wight.
My flannel dudden donn'd, thrice o'er
My birds are kiss'd, and then
I with a whistle shut the door
I may not ope again.
How exquisite and fanciful this stray lyric:
The wind comes from the west to-night;
So sweetly down the lane he bloweth
Upon my lips, with pure delight
From head to foot my body gloweth.
Where did the wind, the magic find
To charm me thus? say, heart that knoweth!
'Within a rose on which he blows
Before upon thy lips he bloweth!'
We admit that Mr. Skipsey's work is extremely unequal, but when it is at its best it is full of sweetness and
strength; and though he has carefully studied the artistic capabilities of language, he never makes his form
formal by over-polishing. Beauty with him seems to be an unconscious result rather than a conscious aim;
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