Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald’s volume of poems, Venetia Victrix, is dedicated to Mr. Robert Browning, and in the poem that gives its title to the book it is not difficult to see traces of Mr. Browning’s influence.  Venetia Victrix is a powerful psychological study of a man’s soul, a vivid presentation of a terrible, fiery-coloured moment in a marred and incomplete life.  It is sometimes complex and intricate in expression, but then the subject itself is intricate and complex.  Plastic simplicity of outline may render for us the visible aspect of life; it is different when we come to deal with those secrets which self-consciousness alone contains, and which self-consciousness itself can but half reveal.  Action takes place in the sunlight, but the soul works in the dark.

There is something curiously interesting in the marked tendency of modern poetry to become obscure.  Many critics, writing with their eyes fixed on the masterpieces of past literature, have ascribed this tendency to wilfulness and to affectation.  Its origin is rather to be found in the complexity of the new problems, and in the fact that self-consciousness is not yet adequate to explain the contents of the Ego.  In Mr. Browning’s poems, as in life itself which has suggested, or rather necessitated, the new method, thought seems to proceed not on logical lines, but on lines of passion.  The unity of the individual is being expressed through its inconsistencies and its contradictions.  In a strange twilight man is seeking for himself, and when he has found his own image, he cannot understand it.  Objective forms of art, such as sculpture and the drama, sufficed one for the perfect presentation of life; they can no longer so suffice.

The central motive of Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald’s psychological poem is the study of a man who to do a noble action wrecks his own soul, sells it to evil, and to the spirit of evil.  Many martyrs have for a great cause sacrificed their physical life; the sacrifice of the spiritual life has a more poignant and a more tragic note.  The story is supposed to be told by a French doctor, sitting at his window in Paris one evening: 

   How far off Venice seems to-night!  How dim
   The still-remembered sunsets, with the rim
   Of gold round the stone haloes, where they stand,
   Those carven saints, and look towards the land,
   Right Westward, perched on high, with palm in hand,
   Completing the peaked church-front.  Oh how clear
   And dark against the evening splendour!  Steer
   Between the graveyard island and the quay,
   Where North-winds dash the spray on Venice;—­see
   The rosy light behind dark dome and tower,
   Or gaunt smoke-laden chimney;—­mark the power
   Of Nature’s gentleness, in rise or fall
   Of interlinked beauty, to recall
   Earth’s majesty in desecration’s place,
   Lending yon grimy pile that dream-like face
   Of evening beauty;—­note yon rugged cloud,
   Red-rimmed and heavy, drooping like a shroud
   Over Murano in the dying day. 
   I see it now as then—­so far away!