I cannot sing the old songs, nor indeed any others, but I can read them,
in the neglected works of Thomas Haynes Bayly. The name of Bayly may be
unfamiliar, but every one almost has heard his ditties chanted--every one
much over forty, at all events. "I'll hang my Harp on a Willow Tree,"
and "I'd be a Butterfly," and "Oh, no! we never mention Her," are dimly
dear to every friend of Mr. Richard Swiveller. If to be sung everywhere,
to hear your verses uttered in harmony with all pianos and quoted by the
world at large, be fame, Bayly had it. He was an unaffected poet. He
wrote words to airs, and he is almost absolutely forgotten. To read him
is to be carried back on the wings of music to the bowers of youth; and
to the bowers of youth I have been wafted, and to the old booksellers.
You do not find on every stall the poems of Bayly; but a copy in two
volumes has been discovered, edited by Mr. Bayly's widow (Bentley, 1844).
They saw the light in the same year as the present critic, and perhaps
they ceased to be very popular before he was breeched. Mr. Bayly,
according to Mrs. Bayly, "ably penetrated the sources of the human
heart," like Shakespeare and Mr. Howells. He also "gave to minstrelsy
the attributes of intellect and wit," and "reclaimed even festive song
from vulgarity," in which, since the age of Anacreon, festive song has
notoriously wallowed. The poet who did all this was born at Bath in Oct.
1797. His father was a genteel solicitor, and his great-grandmother was
sister to Lord Delamere, while he had a remote baronet on the mother's
side. To trace the ancestral source of his genius was difficult, as in
the case of Gifted Hopkins; but it was believed to flow from his maternal
grandfather, Mr. Freeman, whom his friend, Lord Lavington, regarded as
"one of the finest poets of his age." Bayly was at school at Winchester,
where he conducted a weekly college newspaper. His father, like Scott's,
would have made him a lawyer; but "the youth took a great dislike to it,
for his ideas loved to dwell in the regions of fancy," which are closed
to attorneys. So he thought of being a clergyman, and was sent to St.
Mary's Hall, Oxford. There "he did not apply himself to the pursuit of
academical honours," but fell in love with a young lady whose brother he
had tended in a fatal illness. But "they were both too wise to think of
living upon love, and, after mutual tears and sighs, they parted never to
meet again. The lady, though grieved, was not heartbroken, and soon
became the wife of another." They usually do. Mr. Bayly's regret was
more profound, and expressed itself in the touching ditty:
"Oh, no, we never mention her,
Her name is never heard,
My lips are now forbid to speak
That once familiar word;
From sport to sport they hurry me
To banish my regret,
And when they only worry me--
[I beg Mr. Bayly's pardon]
"And when they win a smile from me,
They fancy I forget.
"They bid me seek in change of scene
The charms that others see,
But were I in a foreign land
They'd find no change in me.
'Tis true that I behold no more
The valley where we met;
I do not see the hawthorn tree,
But how can I forget?"
* * * * *
"They tell me she is happy now,
[And so she was, in fact.]
The gayest of the gay;
They hint that she's forgotten me;
But heed not what they say.
Like me, perhaps, she struggles with
Each feeling of regret:
'Tis true she's married Mr. Smith,
But, ah, does she forget!"
The temptation to parody is really too strong; the last lines, actually
and in an authentic text, are:
"But if she loves as I have loved,
She never can forget."
Bayly had now struck the note, the sweet, sentimental note, of the early,
innocent, Victorian age. Jeames imitated him:
"R. Hangeline, R. Lady mine,
Dost thou remember Jeames!"
We should do the trick quite differently now, more like this:
"Love spake to me and said:
'Oh, lips, be mute;
Let that one name be dead,
That memory flown and fled,
Untouched that lute!
Go forth,' said Love, 'with willow in thy hand,
And in thy hair
Dead blossoms wear,
Blown from the sunless land.
"'Go forth,' said Love; 'thou never more shalt see
Her shadow glimmer by the trysting tree;
But _she_ is glad,
With roses crowned and clad,
Who hath forgotten thee!'
But I made answer: 'Love!
Tell me no more thereof,
For she has drunk of that same cup as I.
Yea, though her eyes be dry,
She garners there for me
Tears salter than the sea,
Even till the day she die.'
So gave I Love the lie."
I declare I nearly weep over these lines; for, though they are only
Bayly's sentiment hastily recast in a modern manner, there is something
so very affecting, mouldy, and unwholesome about them, that they sound as
if they had been "written up to" a sketch by a disciple of Mr.
Rossetti's.
In a mood much more manly and moral, Mr. Bayly wrote another poem to the
young lady:
"May thy lot in life be happy, undisturbed by thoughts of me,
The God who shelters innocence thy guard and guide will be.
Thy heart will lose the chilling sense of hopeless love at last,
And the sunshine of the future chase the shadows of the past."
It is as easy as prose to sing in this manner. For example:
"In fact, we need not be concerned; 'at last' comes very soon, and our
Emilia quite forgets the memory of the moon, the moon that shone on
her and us, the woods that heard our vows, the moaning of the waters,
and the murmur of the boughs. She is happy with another, and by her
we're quite forgot; she never lets a thought of us bring shadow on her
lot; and if we meet at dinner she's too clever to repine, and mentions
us to Mr. Smith as 'An old flame of mine.' And shall I grieve that it
is thus? and would I have her weep, and lose her healthy appetite and
break her healthy sleep? Not so, she's not poetical, though ne'er
shall I forget the fairy of my fancy whom I once thought I had met.
The fairy of my fancy! It was fancy, most things are; her emotions
were not steadfast as the shining of a star; but, ah, I love her image
yet, as once it shone on me, and swayed me as the low moon sways the
surging of the sea."
Among other sports his anxious friends hurried the lovelorn Bayly to
Scotland, where he wrote much verse, and then to Dublin, which completed
his cure. "He seemed in the midst of the crowd the gayest of all, his
laughter rang merry and loud at banquet and hall." He thought no more of
studying for the Church, but went back to Bath, met a Miss Hayes, was
fascinated by Miss Hayes, "came, saw, but did _not_ conquer at once,"
says Mrs. Haynes Bayly (_nee_ Hayes) with widow's pride. Her lovely name
was Helena; and I deeply regret to add that, after an education at
Oxford, Mr. Bayly, in his poems, accentuated the penultimate, which, of
course, is short.
"Oh, think not, Helena, of leaving us yet,"
he carolled, when it would have been just as easy, and a hundred times
more correct, to sing--
"Oh, Helena, think not of leaving us yet."
Miss Hayes had lands in Ireland, alas! and Mr. Bayly insinuated that,
like King Easter and King Wester in the ballad, her lovers courted her
for her lands and her fee; but he, like King Honour,
"For her bonny face
And for her fair bodie."
In 1825 (after being elected to the Athenaeum) Mr. Bayly "at last found
favour in the eyes of Miss Hayes." He presented her with a little ruby
heart, which she accepted, and they were married, and at first were well-
to-do, Miss Hayes being the heiress of Benjamin Hayes, Esq., of Marble
Hill, in county Cork. A friend of Mr. Bayly's described him thus:
"I never have met on this chilling earth
So merry, so kind, so frank a youth,
In moments of pleasure a smile all mirth,
In moments of sorrow a heart of truth.
I have heard thee praised, I have seen thee led
By Fashion along her gay career;
While beautiful lips have often shed
Their flattering poison in thine ear."
Yet he says that the poet was unspoiled. On his honeymoon, at Lord
Ashdown's, Mr. Bayly, flying from some fair sirens, retreated to a bower,
and there wrote his world-famous "I'd be a Butterfly."
"I'd be a butterfly, living a rover,
Dying when fair things are fading away."
The place in which the deathless strains welled from the singer's heart
was henceforth known as "Butterfly Bower." He now wrote a novel, "The
Aylmers," which has gone where the old moons go, and he became rather a
literary lion, and made the acquaintance of Theodore Hook. The loss of a
son caused him to write some devotional verses, which were not what he
did best; and now he began to try comedies. One of them, _Sold for a
Song_, succeeded very well. In the stage-coach between Wycombe Abbey and
London he wrote a successful little _lever de rideau_ called
_Perfection_; and it was lucky that he opened this vein, for his wife's
Irish property got into an Irish bog of dishonesty and difficulty. Thirty-
five pieces were contributed by him to the British stage. After a long
illness, he died on April 22nd, 1829. He did not live, this butterfly
minstrel, into the winter of human age.
Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom Moore of
much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of the most vapid
and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits, trees, breeze,
sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds, regret, deception, and so
forth, into fervid anapaestics. Perhaps his success lay in knowing
exactly how little sense in poetry composers will endure and singers will
accept. Why, "words for music" are almost invariably trash now, though
the words of Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and
difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister art, and
don't know anything about it. But any one can see that words like
Bayly's are and have long been much more popular with musical people than
words like Shelley's, Keats's, Shakespeare's, Fletcher's, Lovelace's, or
Carew's. The natural explanation is not flattering to musical people: at
all events, the singing world doted on Bayly.
"She never blamed him--never,
But received him when he came
With a welcome sort of shiver,
And she tried to look the same.
"But vainly she dissembled,
For whene'er she tried to smile,
A tear unbidden trembled
In her blue eye all the while."
This was pleasant for "him"; but the point is that these are lines to an
Indian air. Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines to an Indian
air; but we may "swear, and save our oath," that the singers preferred
Bayly's. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal the popularity of what
follows. I shall ask the persevering reader to tell me where Bayly ends,
and where parody begins:
"When the eye of beauty closes,
When the weary are at rest,
When the shade the sunset throws is
But a vapour in the west;
When the moonlight tips the billow
With a wreath of silver foam,
And the whisper of the willow
Breaks the slumber of the gnome,--
Night may come, but sleep will linger,
When the spirit, all forlorn,
Shuts its ear against the singer,
And the rustle of the corn
Round the sad old mansion sobbing
Bids the wakeful maid recall
Who it was that caused the throbbing
Of her bosom at the ball."
Will this not do to sing just as well as the original? and is it not true
that "almost any man you please could reel it off for days together"?
Anything will do that speaks of forgetting people, and of being forsaken,
and about the sunset, and the ivy, and the rose.
"Tell me no more that the tide of thine anguish
Is red as the heart's blood and salt as the sea;
That the stars in their courses command thee to languish,
That the hand of enjoyment is loosened from thee!
"Tell me no more that, forgotten, forsaken,
Thou roamest the wild wood, thou sigh'st on the shore.
Nay, rent is the pledge that of old we had taken,
And the words that have bound me, they bind thee no more!
"Ere the sun had gone down on thy sorrow, the maidens
Were wreathing the orange's bud in thy hair,
And the trumpets were tuning the musical cadence
That gave thee, a bride, to the baronet's heir.
"Farewell, may no thought pierce thy breast of thy treason;
Farewell, and be happy in Hubert's embrace.
Be the belle of the ball, be the bride of the season,
With diamonds bedizened and languid in lace."