Czytaj książkę: «By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects», strona 5

PEERS AND POETRY

The succession of the Hon. J. Leicester Warren to the barony of De Tabley was something more than a change in the personnel of the House of Lords; it amounted to a conspicuous addition to the Chamber’s intellectual power, and especially to the number of its poetic votaries. The author of ‘Philoctetes’ and ‘Orestes,’ of ‘Rehearsals’ and ‘Searching the Net,’ is no mere versifier. He has felt the influence of the old Greek dramatists, and apparently also that of Mr. Swinburne; but, for all that, his work has undoubted individuality, as well as solid interest.

It must be admitted that the House of Lords does not at this moment contain many hereditary peers who are also poets. Lord Tennyson, of course, is an ennobled commoner, and the Bishop of Derry (Dr. Alexander), who has written so much excellent verse, both in the thoughtful and in the imaginative vein, is no longer one of the spiritual lords. But there is Lord Lytton, there is Lord Southesk, and there is Lord Rosslyn; and by all of these Lord de Tabley will be welcomed as a brother in the literary art. What Lord Lytton has done in poetry, need scarcely be recapitulated. He would be remembered as ‘Owen Meredith’ if, since his accession to the peerage, he had not made a new reputation as the author of ‘Fables in Song,’ ‘Glenaveril,’ and other performances. As ‘Owen Meredith’ he was, no doubt, more fresh and spontaneous than he has ever been as Lord Lytton; but his poetic work, as a whole, is of good quality, and some of it will find its way down the stream of time. Equally certain may we be that the ‘Jonas Fisher’ of Lord Southesk, with its unquestionable vigour, both of satire and of sentiment, will remain alive, whatever may be the fate of the author’s ‘Greenwood’s Farewell’ and ‘Meda Maiden.’ Lord Rosslyn, it will be remembered, was one of the most successful of the Jubilee Laureates; but, even before that, he had made himself esteemed by many trustworthy judges as the producer of numerous good sonnets.

‘’Tis ridiculous,’ says Selden, ‘for a lord to print verses; ’tis well enough to make them to please himself, but to make them public is foolish.’ He goes on to add that

‘If a man in his private chamber twists his band-strings, or plays with a rush to please himself, ’tis well enough; but if he should go into Fleet Street, and sit upon a stall, and twist a band-string, or play with a rush, then all the boys in the street would laugh at him.’

No doubt they would have done so in Selden’s time; and much more readily would they do so now. But that is scarcely to the point. Pace Master Selden, there is nothing ridiculous in a lord printing his verses – if they be but good enough for the process. A peer is not necessarily a poet, but a poet is none the worse for being a peer. Nay, there are even certain kinds of verse in which a peer may, other things being equal, be actually expected to excel. There is nothing to prevent his being – as Byron was – a poet of passion; there is every reason why, if he have the requisite literary capacity, he should shine in the poetry of the library, the salon, and the boudoir. He has usually the education for the first, and the leisure for the other two. He generally has culture, he always has breeding, he often has gallantry; and, with these endowments, the poetry par excellence of the peerage is well within his reach.

Considerable, indeed, would be the loss to English literature if by any chance the productions of our noble poets should disappear. Apart from Byron, who, of course, stands a head and shoulders above all his brethren, there is that Henry, Earl of Surrey, who ranks highest of all poets between Chaucer and Spenser, and who did so much to popularize in England both blank verse and the sonnet. But for Surrey both those accomplishments, since so popular among us, might have been long in establishing themselves in English poetry. The other poet-peers of the sixteenth century were admittedly not of the first class. Yet Buckhurst’s share in ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’ and in the tragedy of ‘Gorboduc’ was of undoubted value, both intrinsic and relative; and the world of letters would not willingly let die the work, slight as it was, of Lord Vaux, the Earls of Essex and Oxford, the Earls of Ancrum and Stirling, Lord Brooke, and Francis Bacon, although the great Chancellor wrote but one lyric of any moment – the well-known lines upon ‘The World.’ Lord Vaux’s ‘Of a Contented Mind,’ Lord Essex’s ‘There is None, O None but You,’ Lord Oxford’s ‘If Woman could be Fair and yet not Fond,’ are among the treasures of our verse; while the tragedies of Lord Stirling and Lord Brooke, and the sonnets of Lord Ancrum, are at least curious and interesting, if they are not substantively great.

And when we come to the noble poets of the Stuart and the early Georgian period, we find that the national indebtedness is not less marked. Who would be prepared to surrender the spirited effusions of Montrose? And is there not much to be said for the outcome, flimsy and over-free as it often was, of that mob of noblemen who wrote with ease – including the Earls of Roscommon, Dorset, and Rochester, and the Duke of Buckinghamshire? Had these writers not at least the virtues of lightness and of brightness? Did not Dorset pen the lines, ‘To all you ladies now on land?’ Did not Buckinghamshire produce ‘The Election of the Laureat’ – the prototype of Leigh Hunt’s ‘Feast of the Poets,’ and of a still more recent jeu d’esprit by Mr. Robert Buchanan? The great Lord Peterborough is even now less remembered for his military triumphs than for his ‘Song by a Person of Quality;’ while Chesterfield, if thought of most frequently in connection with his letters and his essays, still lives in poetry as the author of some admirable society verses. Horace Walpole claims mention in the list as Earl of Orford, and room must fairly be made, too, for Lords Lansdowne, Halifax, Nugent, Lyttelton, Egremont, and De la Warre, most of whom left behind them a few fugitive pieces which deserve to be embalmed in poetical collections.

The annals of nineteenth-century song will commemorate, besides Byron, those agreeable versifiers – Lord Holland, Lord Melbourne, and Lord Winchilsea, and those cultured translators – Lord Strangford, Lord Ellesmere, and Lord Derby. It would scarcely be fair to include among noble poets Lord Macaulay, Lord Houghton, or the first Lord Lytton, for they, like Lord Tennyson, were created peers, and won their laurel-wreaths in the character of commoners. In the same way, I have taken no account of the poetical peeresses, or I should have had to dwell upon the achievements of such ladies as Sidney’s sister, Lady Pembroke; the Duchess of Newcastle, the Countess of Winchilsea, the Baroness Nairne, and so on. Enough, indeed, has been said to show how prominent a part the peerage has played in the history of English poetry – not, indeed, in the front rank, in which (omitting Lord Tennyson) it is represented only by Byron, but in the second, where Montrose (for example) is eminent, and wherever, in short, the rhetorical, the amatory, and the witty elements are in the ascendant.

THE PRAISE OF THAMES

Afluent versifier of to-day has complained that, though many a poet has ‘dearer made the names’ of Tweed and Nith and Doon, and what not, no one has ‘sung our Thames;’ and he goes on especially to rate ‘green Kent and Oxfordshire and Middlesex,’ because those counties have offered, he says, no rhythmical tribute to our premier stream. Now, the Thames has not, perhaps, found many laureates of late. The glories of Henley may be celebrated annually in the comic or ‘society’ press, but in these times we hear more, no doubt, of sewage and steam-launches than of any other phenomena of the Thames. We are a practical generation, with a keen eye to business, and disposed to take not only as read, but as written, the praises which might well be bestowed upon the river even as it is.

If, however, the Thames does not often or greatly inspire the rhymers of to-day, it cannot, certainly, be described as songless. On the contrary, it has received from the poets more magnificent and more frequent eulogium than any of its compeers. If one goes back even so far as Spenser, one finds that writer picturing it in one poem as ‘noble Thamis’ – a ‘lovely bridegroom,’ ‘full, fresh and jolly,’ ‘all decked in a robe of watchet hew,’ and adorned by a coronet ‘in which were many towres and castels set;’ while, in another work from the same hand, it figures as a ‘gentle river,’ is characterized as ‘christall Thamis,’ and is lauded for its ‘pure streames’ and ‘sweete waters.’ Chapman, in his ‘Ovid’s Banquet of Sense,’ discourses eloquently of the ‘wanton Thamysis that hastes to greet The brackish coast of old Oceanus’:

 
‘And as by London’s bosom she doth fleet,
Casts herself proudly through the bridge’s twists,
Where, as she takes again her crystal feet,
She curls her silver hair like amourists,
Smooths her bright cheeks, adorns her brow with ships,
And, empress-like, along the coast she trips’ —
 

a description almost as impressive as the thing described. Among the lovers of the Thames must be ranked, too, Herrick, who, in one of his pieces, sends to his ‘silver-footed Thamasis’ his ‘supremest kiss.’ ‘No more,’ he regrets, will he ‘reiterate’ its strand, whereon so many stately structures stand; no more, in the summer’s sweeter evenings, will he go to bathe in it, as thousand others do:

 
‘No more shall I along thy christall glide,
The barge with boughes and rushes beautifi’d…
To Richmond, Kingstone, and to Hampton Court.
Never againe shall I with finnie ore
Cut from or draw unto the faithfull shore,
And landing here, or safely landing there,
Make way to my beloved Westminster.’
 

Milton, in his ‘Vacation Exercise,’ bestows upon the Thames the epithet of ‘Royal-towered.’ How Denham celebrated it is well known to most. In his view it was ‘the most loved of all the Ocean’s sons,’ and he commended it especially for its freedom from sudden and impetuous wave, from the unexpected inundations which spoil the mower’s hopes and mock the ploughman’s toil.

 
‘Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full’ —
 

such was the famous panegyric he passed upon it. From Denham, too, came an early poetical recognition of the growth of London’s commerce. The Thames, he says, brings home to us, and makes the Indies ours; his fair bosom is the world’s exchange. To Pope, in his ‘Windsor Forest,’ the Thames appears as the ‘great father of the British floods,’ on whose shores figure future navies.

 
‘No seas so rich, so gay no banks appear,
No lakes so gentle, and no spring so clear.’
 

And the poet ends by prophesying the time when ‘unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind,’ whole nations entering with each swelling tide. Elsewhere he assures us that ‘blest Thames’s shores the brightest beauties yield.’ Thomson, again, dwells on the extent of the trade fostered by the river. Commerce, he says, has chosen for his grand resort ‘Thy stream, O Thames, large, gentle, deep, majestic, King of floods!’ And he describes how, on either hand,

 
‘Like a long wintry forest, groves of masts
Shot up their spires.’
 

Then, as now, ‘the sooty hulk steered sluggish on,’ while

 
‘The splendid barge
Row’d, regular, to harmony; around,
The boat, light-skimming, stretched its oary wings.’
 

Up to this time, the river had been called ‘clear’ and ‘crystal,’ in spite of ‘sooty hulks;’ but, with the advent of Cowper, another note is struck. With him the Thames is

 
‘The finest stream
That wavers to the noon-day beam,’
 

but it is not, alas! absolutely pure:

 
‘Nor yet, my Delia, to the main
Runs the sweet tide without a stain,
Unsullied as it seems;
The nymphs of many a sable flood
Deform with streaks of oozy mud
The bosom of the Thames.’
 

Happily, this is about the only word of depreciation which the poets have permitted themselves. Wordsworth, standing on Westminster Bridge in 1803, notes that ‘the river glideth at its own sweet will,’ and if his olfactory nerves were at all distressed he has not said so in verse. Of later singers, none has been more enthusiastic about the Thames than Eliza Cook, who has told us that, though it bears no azure wave and rejoices in no leaping cascades, yet she ever loved to dwell where she heard its gushing swell – in which expression, we may be sure, there is no allusion to the British ‘dude.’ Another lady – Mrs. Isa Craig Knox – has supplied a very pretty description of the Thames in its more idyllic phases, pointing out how

 
‘It glimmers
Through the stems of the beeches;
Through the screen of the willows it shimmers
In long-winding reaches;
Flowing so softly that scarcely
It seems to be flowing;
But the reeds of the low little island
Are bent to its going;
And soft as the breath of a sleeper
Its heaving and sighing,
In the coves where the fleets of the lilies
At anchor are lying.’
 

Finally, there is that austere teacher, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, who, addressing the Thames, exhorts it to go on soothing, but beseeches it also to add a warning voice, telling her, to whom the pomp of gold is dear, of ‘Tyre that fell, of Fortune’s perfidy.’

 
‘With murmur low and ceaseless cheer,
The Imperial City’s agitated ear,’
 

Other poetic celebrations – such as those of Mr. Ernest Myers, Mr. Ashby-Sterry, and ‘C. C. R.’ – might be recorded; but the above will suffice to show how prominent a place the Thames has always held in the heart and mind of those poets who have come within the sphere of its influence. Even if it were never made the subject of a future song, it would still figure largely and conspicuously in the British corpus poetarum.

ENGLISH EPIGRAPHS

The student of English poetry must often have been struck by its richness in that form of verse which may best be called the Epigraph – the brief sententious effort, answering somewhat to the epigram as understood and practised by the Greeks, but unlike the Latin, French, and English epigram in being sentimental instead of witty, and aiming rather at all-round neatness than at pungency or point. Our language abounds, of course, in examples of short lyrical compositions, such (to name familiar instances) as Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Lay a garland on my hearse,’ Congreve’s ‘False though she be to me and love,’ Goldsmith’s ‘When lovely woman stoops to folly,’ Shelley’s ‘Music, when soft voices die,’ and MacDonald’s ‘Alas, how easily things go wrong!’ – all of these being only eight lines long. There are, indeed, plenty of lyrical performances even more brief than this; such as Mr. Marzials’ ‘tragedy’ in quatrain:

 
‘She reach’d a rosebud from the tree,
And bit the tip and threw it by;
My little rose, for you and me
The worst is over when we die!’
 

But, then, the epigraph is never lyrical. It belongs to the order of reflective poetry, and consists of a single thought, expressed with as much brevity and grace as possible. A common form of it is the epitaph; another is the inscription; while at other times the poets have used it for the purpose of enshrining some occasional or isolated utterance.

The thoroughly successful epitaphs – at once short, and wholly poetical in expression – are among the most famous and popular things in literature. Who does not remember the admirable tribute to ‘Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother’ – usually ascribed to Ben Jonson, but sometimes attributed to Browne? Jonson penned an epitaph on ‘Elizabeth L. H.,’ which would have been exquisite had it consisted only of the following:

 
‘Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die;
Which, in life, did harbour give
To more virtue than doth live.’
 

Even as they stand, the lines, as a whole, may fairly compare with those on Lady Pembroke. How happy Pope was in his epitaphs is familiarly known. The art was just that in which he might naturally be expected to excel. The time-honoured couplet on Newton need not be quoted: the ‘octave’ on Sir Godfrey Kneller is most notable for the final bit of hyperbole:

 
‘Living, great Nature fear’d he might outvie
Her works, and, dying, fears herself may die.’
 

And, talking of epitaphs, one is reminded of the quaint comment by Sir Henry Wotton ‘On the Death of Sir A. Morton’s Wife’:

 
‘He first deceased; she, for a little, tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died’ —
 

surely a piece of work as nearly as possible perfect in its way. In the matter of inscriptions, we have, of course, that by Ben Jonson on Shakespeare’s portrait, and that by Dryden under Milton’s picture – the last-named being by no means deserving of its reputation. We have also the well-known lines by Pope, ‘written on glass with Lord Chesterfield’s diamond pencil;’ the equally well-known sentence on Rogers by Lord Holland; and the less-hackneyed and even more flattering couplet composed by Lord Lyttelton for Lady Suffolk’s bust (erected in a wood at Stowe):

 
‘Her wit and beauty for a Court were made,
But truth and goodness fit her for a shade.’
 

The writers of verse have naturally shone in such concentrated testimonies to the merits of those whom they delighted to honour. Our literature is full of eloquent and graceful summaries of individual gifts and acquirements, apart altogether from the ordinary inscription or epitaph. Pope celebrated Lady Wortley Montagu’s beauty in a couple of lines too frequently cited to need reproduction. Less often quoted is David Graham’s concise but sufficient criticism on Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’:

 
‘This work is Nature’s; every tittle in’t
She wrote, and gave it Richardson to print.’
 

James Montgomery, in a well-turned quatrain, said of Burns that he ‘pass’d through life … a brilliant trembling northern light,’ but that ‘thro’ years to come’ he would shine from far ‘a fix’d unsetting polar star.’ It will be remembered that, in another quatrain, Lord Erskine besought his contemporaries to ‘mourn not for Anacreon dead,’ for they rejoiced in the possession of ‘an Anacreon Moore.’ James Smith wrote of Miss Edgeworth that her work could never be anonymous – ‘Thy writings … must bring forth the name of their author to light.’ And so on, and so on: the poetry of compliment presents many such conceits.

A treatise, indeed, might be written on the epigraphs in which poets have praised their lady-loves or their friends – from Herrick’s Julia to, say, Tennyson’s General Gordon. Rather, however, let us turn to what the bards have been at pains to say about themselves, recalling, for example, Herrick’s ‘Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste,’ and Matthew Prior’s triplet ‘On Himself.’ Colman the Younger wrote:

 
‘My muse and I, ere youth and spirits fled,
Sat up together many a night, no doubt;
But now I’ve sent the poor old lass to bed,
Simply because my fire is going out.’
 

But how inferior is this, both in feeling and in expression, to the dignified epigraph in which Landor celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birthday:

 
‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.’
 

In the couplet and quatrain of pure sentiment and reflection, some of the most delightful of our poetry is embodied. Herrick was conspicuously fond of this species of verse, and his works abound in gems of style and fancy, the difficulty being, not to find them, but to select from them. The beauty of one is apt to be rivalled by that of its neighbour. Thus we find on one page:

 
‘When words we want, Love teaches to indite;
And what we blush to speak, she bids us write.’
 

And on another:

 
‘Love’s of itself too sweet; the best of all
Is when love’s honey has a dash of gall.’
 

Then there is Lord Lyttelton’s distich about ‘Love can hope when reason would despair;’ there are Aaron Hill’s famous lines on ‘modest ease in beauty,’ which, though it ‘means no mischief, does it all.’ There are Sir William Jones’s ‘To an Infant Newly Born;’ Wolcot’s ‘To Sleep;’ Luttrell’s ‘On Death;’ and many, many others.

Of nineteenth-century writers, the most admirable composer of the epigraph has been Landor, who in this, as in some other respects, may be placed in the same category with Herrick. What, for instance, could be prettier than this?

 
‘Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,
Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever;
From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass
Like little ripples in a sunny river.’
 

How well-phrased, again, is this:

 
‘Various the roads of life; in one
All terminate, one lonely way.
We go; and “Is he gone?”
Is all our best friends say.’
 

Among living authors, Mr. Aubrey de Vere can lay claim to a quatrain which is entirely faultless:

 
‘For me no roseate garlands twine,
But wear them, dearest, in my stead;
Time has a whiter hand than thine,
And lays it on my head.’
 

To this, Sir Henry Taylor wrote a pendant scarcely less fortunate in idea and wording. Lord Tennyson has in his day written several epitaphs, inscriptions, and other trifles; but none of them have quite the perfection which might have been looked for from so great a master of poetic form. Mr. Matthew Arnold produced, with others, this excellent epigraph:

 
‘Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard.’
 

Finally, the reader may be recommended to glance at Mr. William Allingham’s little book of ‘Blackberries,’ in which they will find a large number of such ‘snatches of song,’ many of them fresh in conception and finished in execution.