“’Tis never too late for delight, my dear,”
and we will not even listen when Mr. Saintsbury tells us with sharp
impatience that, in turning our backs so coldly upon the poet who
enraptured our grandfathers, we are losing a great deal that we can
ill afford to spare. The quality of youth is still more distinctly
discernible in some of Thomas Beddoes’s dazzling little songs, stolen
straight from the heart of the sixteenth century, and lustrous with
that golden light which set so long ago. It is not in spirit only, nor
in sentiment, that this resemblance exists; the words, the imagery,
the swaying music, the teeming fancies of the younger poet, mark him
as one strayed from another age, and wandering companionless under
alien skies. Some two hundred years before Beddoes’s birth, Drummond
of Hawthornden, he who sang so tenderly the praises of his sweet
mistress, dead on her wedding-day, wrote these quaint and pretty lines
entreating for her favor:--
“I die, dear life, unless to me be given
As many kisses as the Spring hath flowers,
Or there be silver drops in Iris’ showers,
Or stars there be in all-embracing heaven.
And if displeased, you of the match remain,
You shall have leave to take them back again.”
In Beddoes’s unfinished drama of “Torresmond,” we find Veronica’s
maidens singing her to sleep with just such bright conceits and soft
caressing words, and their song rings like an echo from some dim old
room where Lesbia, or Althea, or Celia lies a-dreaming:--
“How many times do I love thee, dear?
Tell me how many thoughts there be
In the atmosphere
Of a new-fall’n year,
Whose white and sable hours appear
The latest flake of Eternity:
So many times do I love thee, dear.
“How many times do I love again?
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unraveled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star:
So many times do I love again.”
It is not in this fairy fashion that the truly modern poet declares his
passion; it is not thus that Wordsworth sings to us of Lucy, the most
alluring and shadowy figure in English poetry,--Lucy, richly dowered
with a few short verses of unapproachable beauty. To the lover of
Wordsworth her death is a lasting hurt. We cannot endure to think of
her as he thinks of her,--
“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.”
We cannot endure that anything so fine and rare should slip forever
from the sunshine, and that the secret stars should look down upon
her maidenhood no more. Browning, too, who has been termed the poet
of love, who has revealed to us every changeful mood, every stifled
secret, every light and shade of human emotion,--how has he dealt with
his engrossing theme? Beneath his unsparing touch, at once burning and
subtle, the soul lies bare, and its passions rend it like hounds. All
that is noble, generous, suffering, shameful, finds in him its ablest
exponent. Those strange, fantastic sentences in which Mr. Pater has
analyzed the inscrutable sorcery of Mona Lisa, beneath whose weary
eyelids “the thoughts and experiences of the world lie shadowed,” might
also fitly portray the image of Love, as Browning has unveiled him
to our sight. He too is older than the rocks, and the secrets of the
grave and of the deep seas are in his keeping. He too expresses all
that man has come to desire in the ways of a thousand years, and his
is the beauty “into which the soul with its maladies has passed.” The
slumbering centuries lie coiled beneath his feet, their hidden meaning
is his to grasp, their huge and restless impulses have nourished him,
their best results are his inheritance. But he is not glad, for the
maladies of the soul have stilled his laughter, and the brightness of
youth has fled.