"Hark, 'tis the troubadour
Breathing her name
Under the battlement
Softly he came,
Singing, "From Palestine
Hither I come.
Lady love! Lady love!
Welcome me home!"
The moral of all this is that minor poetry has its fashions, and that the
butterfly Bayly could versify very successfully in the fashion of a time
simpler and less pedantic than our own. On the whole, minor poetry for
minor poetry, this artless singer, piping his native drawing-room notes,
gave a great deal of perfectly harmless, if highly uncultivated,
enjoyment.
It must not be fancied that Mr. Bayly had only one string to his bow--or,
rather, to his lyre. He wrote a great deal, to be sure, about the
passion of love, which Count Tolstoi thinks we make too much of. He did
not dream that the affairs of the heart should be regulated by the
State--by the Permanent Secretary of the Marriage Office. That is what
we are coming to, of course, unless the enthusiasts of "free love" and
"go away as you please" failed with their little programme. No doubt
there would be poetry if the State regulated or left wholly unregulated
the affections of the future. Mr. Bayly, living in other times, among
other manners, piped of the hard tyranny of a mother:
"We met, 'twas in a crowd, and I thought he would shun me.
He came, I could not breathe, for his eye was upon me.
He spoke, his words were cold, and his smile was unaltered,
I knew how much he felt, for his deep-toned voice faltered.
I wore my bridal robe, and I rivalled its whiteness;
Bright gems were in my hair,--how I hated their brightness!
He called me by my name as the bride of another.
Oh, thou hast been the cause of this anguish, my mother!"
In future, when the reformers of marriage have had their way, we shall
read:
"The world may think me gay, for I bow to my fate;
But thou hast been the cause of my anguish, O State!"
For even when true love is regulated by the County Council or the village
community, it will still persist in not running smooth.
Of these passions, then, Mr. Bayly could chant; but let us remember that
he could also dally with old romance, that he wrote:
"The mistletoe hung in the castle hall,
The holly branch shone on the old oak wall."
When the bride unluckily got into the ancient chest,
"It closed with a spring. And, dreadful doom,
The bride lay clasped in her living tomb,"
so that her lover "mourned for his fairy bride," and never found out her
premature casket. This was true romance as understood when Peel was
consul. Mr. Bayly was rarely political; but he commemorated the heroes
of Waterloo, our last victory worth mentioning:
"Yet mourn not for them, for in future tradition
Their fame shall abide as our tutelar star,
_To instil by example the glorious ambition_
_Of falling_, _like them_, _in a glorious war_.
Though tears may be seen in the bright eyes of beauty,
One consolation must ever remain:
Undaunted they trod in the pathway of duty,
Which led them to glory on Waterloo's plain."
Could there be a more simple Tyrtaeus? and who that reads him will not be
ambitious of falling in a glorious war? Bayly, indeed, is always simple.
He is "simple, sensuous, and passionate," and Milton asked no more from a
poet.
"A wreath of orange blossoms,
When next we met, she wore.
_The expression of her features_
_Was more thoughtful than before_."
On his own principles Wordsworth should have admired this unaffected
statement; but Wordsworth rarely praised his contemporaries, and said
that "Guy Mannering" was a respectable effort in the style of Mrs.
Radcliffe. Nor did he even extol, though it is more in his own line,
"Of what is the old man thinking,
As he leans on his oaken staff?"
My own favourite among Mr. Bayly's effusions is not a sentimental ode,
but the following gush of true natural feeling:--
"Oh, give me new faces, new faces, new faces,
I've seen those around me a fortnight and more.
Some people grow weary of things or of places,
But persons to me are a much greater bore.
I care not for features, I'm sure to discover
Some exquisite trait in the first that you send.
My fondness falls off when the novelty's over;
I want a new face for an intimate friend."
This is perfectly candid: we should all prefer a new face, if pretty,
every fortnight:
"Come, I pray you, and tell me this,
All good fellows whose beards are grey,
Did not the fairest of the fair
Common grow and wearisome ere
Ever a month had passed away?"
For once Mr. Bayly uttered in his "New Faces" a sentiment not usually
expressed, but universally felt; and now he suffers, as a poet, because
he is no longer a new face, because we have welcomed his juniors. To
Bayly we shall not return; but he has one rare merit,--he is always
perfectly plain-spoken and intelligible.
"Farewell to my Bayly, farewell to the singer
Whose tender effusions my aunts used to sing;
Farewell, for the fame of the bard does not linger,
My favourite minstrel's no longer the thing.
But though on his temples has faded the laurel,
Though broken the lute, and though veiled is the crest,
My Bayly, at worst, is uncommonly moral,
Which is more than some new poets are, at their best."
Farewell to our Bayly, about whose songs we may say, with Mr. Thackeray
in "Vanity Fair," that "they contain numberless good-natured, simple
appeals to the affections." We are no longer affectionate, good-natured,
simple. We are cleverer than Bayly's audience; but are we better
fellows?