Can it be claimed for Lord de Tabley that in the poetical firmament which
hung over the days of his youth—when the heavens were bright with such
luminaries as Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne,
and Morris—he had a place of his own? We think it can. And in saying
this we are fully conscious of the kind of praise we are awarding him.
Whatever may be said for or against the artistic temper of the present
hour, it must certainly be said of the time we are alluding to that it
was great as regards its wealth of poetic genius, and as regards its
artistic temper greater still. It was a time when “the beauteous damsel
Poesy, honourable and retired,” whom Cervantes described, dared still
roam the English Parnassus, “a friend of solitude,” disturbed by no clash
of Notoriety’s brazen cymbals, “where fountains entertained her, woods
freed her from _ennui_, and flowers delighted her”—delighted her for
their own sakes. In order to write such verses as the following from the
concluding poem of the volume before us {231} a man must really have
passed into that true mood of the poet described by the great Spanish
humourist:—
How idle for a spurious fame
To roll in thorn-beds of unrest;
What matter whom the mob acclaim,
If thou art master of thy breast?
If sick thy soul with fear and doubt,
And weary with the rabble din,—
If thou wouldst scorn the herd without,
First make the discord calm within.
If we are lords in our disdain,
And rule our kingdoms of despair,
As fools we shall not plough the main
For halters made of syren’s hair.
We need not traverse foreign earth
To seek an alien Sorrow’s face.
She sits within thy central hearth,
And at thy table has her place.
So with this hour of push and pelf,
Where nought unsordid seems to last,
Vex not thy miserable self,
But search the fallows of the past.
In Time’s rich track behind us lies
A soil replete with root and seed;
There harvest wheat repays the wise,
While idiots find but charlock weed.
Between the writer of the above lines and those great poets who in his
youth were his contemporaries there is this point of affinity: like them
his actual achievements do not strike the reader so forcibly as the
potentialities which those achievements reveal. In the same way that
Achilles was suggested by his “spear” in the picture in the chamber of
Lucrece, the poet who writes not for fame, but writes to please himself,
suggests unconsciously his own portrait by every touch:—
For much imaginary work was there;
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles’ image stood his spear
Grip’d in an armèd hand; himself behind
Was left unseen save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,
Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.
Poets, indeed, have always been divisible into those whose poetry gives
the reader an impression that they are greater than their work, and those
whose poetry gives the reader a contrary impression. There have always
been poets who may say of themselves, like the “Poet” in ‘Timon of
Athens,’
Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes
From whence ’tis nourished: the fire i’ the flint
Shows not till it be struck.
And there have always been poets whose verse, howsoever good it may be,
shows that, although they have been able to mould into poetic forms the
riches of the life around them, and also of the literature which has come
to them as an inheritance, they are simply working for fame, or rather
for notoriety, in the markets of the outer world. The former can give us
an impression of personal greatness such as the latter cannot.
With regard to the originality of Lord de Tabley’s work, it is obvious
that every poet must in some measure be influenced by the leading
luminaries of his own period. But at no time would it have been fair to
call Lord de Tabley an imitator; and in the new poems in this volume the
accent is, perhaps, more individual than was the accent of any of his
previous poetry. The general reader’s comparatively slight acquaintance
with Greek poetry may become unfortunate for modern poets. Often and
often it occurs that a poet is charged with imitating another poet of a
more prominent position than his own when, as a matter of fact, both
poets have been yielding to the magic influence of some poet of Greece.
Such a yielding has been held to be legitimate in every literature of the
modern world. Indeed, to be coloured by the great classics of Greek and
Roman literature is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of all
the best poetry of the modern world, as it is the inevitable destiny and
the special glory of the far-off waters of the Nile to be enriched and
toned by the far-off wealth of Ruwenzori and the great fertilizing lakes
from which they have sprung. But in drawing from the eternal fountains
of beauty Lord de Tabley’s processes were not those of his great
contemporaries; they were very specially his own, as far removed from the
severe method of Matthew Arnold on the one hand as from Tennyson’s method
on the other.
His way of work was always to illustrate a story of Hellenic myth by
symbols and analogies drawn not from the more complex economies of a
later world, as was Tennyson’s way, but from that wide knowledge of the
phenomena of nature which can be attained only by a poet whose knowledge
is that of the naturalist. His devotion to certain departments of
natural science has been running parallel with his devotion to poetry,
and if learning is something wider than scholarship, he is the most
learned poet of his time. While Tennyson’s knowledge of natural science,
though wide, was gathered from books, Lord de Tabley’s knowledge,
especially in the department of botany, is derived largely from original
observation and inquiry. And this knowledge enables him to make his
poetry alive with organic detail such as satisfies the naturalist as
fully as the other qualities in his works satisfy the lover of poetry.
The leading poem of the present volume, ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ is full of a
knowledge of the ways of nature beyond the reach of most poets, and yet
this knowledge is kept well in governance by his artistic sense; it is
never obtruded—never more than hinted at, indeed:—
Soon, soon I saw the spectral vanguard come,
Coasting along, as swallows, beating low
Before a hint of rain. In buoyant air,
Circling thy poise, and hardly move the wing,
And rather float than fly. Then other spirits,
Shrill and more fierce, came wailing down the gale;
As plaintive plovers came with swoop and scream
To lure our footsteps from their furrowy nest,
So these, as lapwing guardians, sailed and swung
To save the secrets of their gloomy lair.
* * * * *
I hate to watch the flower set up its face.
I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea,
Its heaving roods of intertangled weed
And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit;
The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn,
The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones,
The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves,
Rotting the floors of Autumn.
‘The Death of Phaëthon’ is another poem in which Lord de Tabley succeeds
in mingling a true poetic energy with that subtle dignity of utterance
which can never really be divorced from true poetry, whether the poet’s
subject be lofty or homely.