Feast of the Poets_, but is somewhat longer. As a satire on William
Gifford it possessed the disadvantage of coming too late in the day to
be of any service to anybody. At the close of 1823 Gifford, in failing
health, was resigning the editorial chair of the _Quarterly_, which he
had made so formidable, and was retiring into private life, to die in
1826. The poem probably explains, however, what has always seemed a
little difficult to comprehend, the extreme personal bitterness with
which Gifford, at the close of his career, regarded Hunt, since the
slayer of the Della Cruscans was not the man to tolerate being
treated as though he were a Della Cruscan himself. However narrow the
circulation of _Ultra-crepidarius_ may have been, care was no doubt
taken that the editor of the _Quarterly Review_ should receive one
copy at his private address, and Leigh Hunt returned from Italy in
time for that odd incident to take place at the Roxburgh sale, when
Barron Field called his attention to the fact that "a little man, with
a warped frame, and a countenance between the querulous and the angry,
was gazing at me with all his might." Hunt tells this story in the
_Autobiography_, from which, however, he omits all allusion to his
satire.
The latter opens with the statement that:
'_Tis now about fifty or sixty years since
(The date of a charming old boy of a Prince)--_
Mercury was in a state of rare fidget from the discovery that he had
lost one of his precious winged shoes, and had in consequence dawdled
away a whole week in company with Venus, not having dreamed that it
was that crafty goddess herself, who, wishing for a pair of them, had
sent one of Mercury's shoes down to Ashburton for a pattern. Venus
confesses her peccadillo, and offers to descend to the Devonshire
borough with her lover, and see what can have become of the ethereal
shoe. As they reach the ground, they meet with an ill-favoured boot
of leather, which acknowledges that it has ill-treated the delicate
slipper of Mercury. This boot, of course, is Gifford, who had been a
shoemaker's apprentice in Ashburton. Mercury curses this unsightly
object, and part of his malediction may here be quoted.
_I hear some one say "Murrain take him, the ape!"
And so Murrain shall, in a bookseller's shape;
An evil-eyed elf, in a down-looking flurry,
Who'd fain be a coxcomb, and calls himself_ Murray.
_Adorn thou his door, like the sign of the Shoe,
For court-understrappers to congregate to;
For_ Southey _to come, in his dearth of invention,
And eat his own words for mock-praise and a pension;
For_ Croker _to lurk with his spider-like limb in,
And stock his lean bag with waylaying the women;
And Jove only knows for what creatures beside
To shelter their envy and dust-liking pride,
And feed on corruption, like bats, who at nights,
In the dark take their shuffles, which they call then flights;
Be these the court-critics and vamp a Review.
And by a poor figure, and therefore a true,
For it suits with thy nature, both shoe-like and slaughterly
Be its hue leathern, and title the_ Quarterly,
_Much misconduct, and see that the others
Misdeem, and misconstrue, like miscreant brothers;
Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate,
Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate,
Misinform, misconjecture, misargue; in short,
Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court_.
* * * * *
_And finally, thou, my old soul of the tritical,
Noting, translating, high slavish, hot critical,
Quarterly-scutcheon'd, great heir to each dunce,
Be Tibbald, Cook, Arnall, and Dennis at once_
At the end, Mercury dooms the ugly boot to take the semblance of
a man, and the satire closes with its painful metamorphosis into
Gifford. The poem is not without cleverness, but it is chiefly
remarkable for a savage tone which is not, we think, repeated
elsewhere throughout the writings of Hunt. The allusions to Gifford's
relations, nearly half a century earlier, to that Earl Grosvenor
who first rescued him from poverty, the well-deserved scorn of his
intolerable sneers at Perdita Robinson's crutches:
_Hate Woman, thou block in the path of fair feet;
If Fate want a hand to distress them, thine be it;
When the Great, and their flourishing vices, are mention'd
Say people "impute" 'em, and show thou art pension'd;
But meet with a Prince's old mistress_ discarded,
_And_ then _let the world see how vice is rewarded_--
the indications of the satirist's acquaintance with the private life
of his victim, all these must have stung the editor of the _Quarterly_
to the quick, and are very little in Hunt's usual manner, though he
had examples for them in Peter Pindar and others. There is a very
early allusion to "Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley," where, "calm, up above
thee, they soar and they shine." This was written immediately after
the review of _Endymion_ in the _Quarterly_.
At the close is printed an extremely vigorous onslaught of Hazlitt's
upon Gifford, which is better known than the poem which it
illustrates. In itself, in its preface, and in its notes alike this
very rare pamphlet presents us with a genuine curiosity of literature.
THE DUKE OF RUTLAND'S POEMS
ENGLAND'S TRUST AND OTHER POEMS. _By Lord John Manners. London:
printed for J.G. & J. Rivington, St. Paul's Church Yard, and Waterloo
Place, Pall Mall_. 1841.
My newspaper informed me this morning that Lord John Manners took his
seat last night, in the Upper House, as the Duke of Rutland. These
little romantic surprises are denied to Americans, who do not find
that old friends get new names, which are very old names, in the
course of a night. My Transatlantic readers will never have to grow
accustomed to speak of Mr. Lowell as the Earl of Mount Auburn, and I
firmly believe that Mr. Howells would consider it a chastisement to
be hopelessly ennobled. But my thoughts went wanderting back at my
breakfast to-day to those far-away times, the fresh memory of which
was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was
an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who never dreamed of being a
peer, and who hoped to refashion his country to the harp of Amphion.
So I turned, with assuredly no feeling of disrespect, to that corner
of my library where the _péchés de jeunesse_ stand--the little books
of early verses which the respectable authors of the same would
destroy if they could--and I took down _England's Trust_.
Fifty years ago a group of young men, all of them fresh from Oxford
and Cambridge, most of them more or less born in the purple of good
families, banded themselves together to create a sort of aristocratic
democracy. They called themselves "Young England," and the chronicle
of them--is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli's
_Coningsby_? In the hero of that novel people saw a portrait of the
leader of the group, the Hon. George Percy Sydney Smythe, to whom also
the poems now before us, _parvus non parvae pignus amicitiae_,
were dedicated in a warm inscription. The Sidonia of the story was
doubtless only echoing what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he
said: "Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never
irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." It was the
theory of Young England that the historic memory must be awakened in
the lower classes; that utilitarianism was sapping the very vitals of
society, and that ballads and May-poles and quaint festivities
and processions of a loyal peasantry were the proper things for
politicians to encourage. It was all very young, and of course it
came to nothing. But I do not know that the Primrose League is any
improvement upon it, and I fancy that when the Duke of Rutland looks
back across the half-century he sees something to smile at, but
nothing to blush for.
One of the notions that Young England had got hold of was that famous
saying of Fletcher of Saltoun's friend about making the ballads of
a people. So they set themselves verse-making, and a quaint little
collection of books it was that they produced, all smelling alike
at this time of day, with a faint, faded perfume of the hay-stack,
countrified and wild. Mr. Smythe, who presently became the seventh
Viscount Strangford and one of the wittiest of Morning Chroniclers,
only to die bitterly lamented before the age of forty, wrote _Historic
Fancies_, Mr. Faber, then a fellow of University College, Oxford, and
afterwards a leading spirit among English Catholics, published _The
Cherwell Water-Lily_, in 1840, and on the heels of this discreet
volume came the poems of Lord John Manners.
When _England's Trust_ appeared, its author had just left Cambridge.
Almost immediately afterward, it was decided that Young England ought
to be represented in Parliament, where its Utopian chivalries, it was
believed, needed only to be heard to prevail. Accordingly Lord John
Manners presented himself, in June 1841, as one of the Conservative
candidates for the borough of Newark. He was elected, and so was the
other Tory candidate, a man already distinguished, and at present
known to the entire world as Mr. W.E. Gladstone. On the hustings, Lord
John Manners was a good deal heckled, and in particular he was teased
excessively about a certain couplet in _England's Trust_. I am not
going to repeat that couplet here, for after nearly half a century
the Duke of Rutland has a right to be forgiven that extraordinary
indiscretion. If any of my readers turn to the volume for themselves,
which, of course, I have no power to prevent their doing, they will
probably exclaim:
"Was it the Duke of Rutland who wrote _that?_" for if frequency of
quotation is the hall-mark of popularity, his Grace must be one of the
most popular of our living poets.
There is something exceedingly pathetic in this little volume. Its
weakness as verse, for it certainly is weak, had nothing ignoble about
it, and what is weak without being in the least base has already a
negative distinction. The author hopes to be a Lovelace or a Montrose,
equally ready to do his monarch service with sword or pen. The Duke of
Rutland has not quite been a Montrose, but he has been something less
brilliant and much more useful, a faithful servant of his country,
through an upright and laborious life. The young poet of 1841,
thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the moment, looked for a
return of the high festivals of the Church, for a victory of faith
over all its Paynim foes. "The worst evils," he writes, "from which we
are now suffering, have arisen from our ignorant contempt or neglect
of the rules of the Church." He was full of Newman and Pusey, of the
great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind of fervour blowing through
England from the common-room of Oriel. Now all is changed past
recognition, and with, perhaps, the solitary exception of Cardinal
Newman, preserved in extreme old age, like some precious exotic, in
his Birmingham cloister, the Duke of Rutland may look through the
length and breadth of England without recovering one of those lost
faces that fed the pure passion of his youth.
The hand which brought the flame from Oriel to the Cambridge scholar
was that of the Rev. Frederick William Faber, and a great number
of the poems in _England's Trust_ are dedicated to him openly or
secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed to Faber, which is very pleasant
to read:
_Dear Friend! thou askest me to sing our loves,
And sing them fain would I; but I do fear
To mar so soft a theme; a theme that moves
My heart unto its core. O friend most dear!
No light request is thine; albeit it proves
Thy gentleness and love, that do appear
When absent thus, and in soft looks when near.
Surely, if ever two fond hearts were, twined
In a most holy, mystic knot, so now
Are ours; not common are the ties that bind
My soul to thine; a dear Apostle thou,
I a young Neophyte that yearns to find
The sacred truth, and stamp upon his brow
The Cross, dread sign of his baptismal vow!_
The Apostle was only twelve months older than the Neophyte, who was
in his twenty-third year, but he was a somewhat better as well as
stronger poet. _The Cherwell Water-Lily_ is rather a rare book now,
and I may perhaps be allowed to give an example of Faber's style.
It is from one of many poems in which, with something borrowed too
consciously from Wordsworth, who was the very Apollo of Young England,
there Is yet a rendering of the beauty and mystery of Oxford, and
of the delicate sylvan scenery which surrounds it, which is wholly
original;
_There is a well, a willow-shaded spot.
Cool in the noon-tide gleam,
With rushes nodding in the little stream,
And blue forget-me-not.
Set in thick tufts along the bushy marge
With big bright eyes of gold;
And glorious water-plants, like fans, unfold
Their blossoms strange and large.
That wandering boy, young Hylas, did not find
Beauties so rich and rare,
Where swallow-wort and pale-bright maiden's hair
And dog-grass richly twined.
A sloping bank ran round it like a crown,
Whereon a purple cloud
Of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd,
Had settled softly down.
And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells
From Oxford's holy towers
Came down the stream, and went among the flowers,
And died in little swells_.
These two extracts give a fair notion of the Tractarian poetry, with
its purity, its idealism, its love of Nature and its unreal conception
of life, Faber also wrote an _England's Trust_, before Lord John
Manners published his; and in this he rejoices in the passing away
of all the old sensual confidence, and in the coming of a new age of
humility and spirituality. Alas! it never came! There was a roll in
the wave of thought, a few beautiful shells were thrown up on the
shore of literature, and then the little eddy of Tractarianism was
broken and spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind. We
touch with reverend pity the volumes without which we should scarcely
know that Young England had ever existed, and we refuse to believe
that all the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which they are the
mere ashes have wholly passed away. They have become spread over a
wide expanse of effort, and no one knows who has been graciously
affected by them. Who shall say that some distant echo of the Cherwell
harp was not sounding in the heart of Gordon when he went to his
African martyrdom? It is her adventurers, whether of the pen or of the
sword, that have made England what she is. But if every adventurer
succeeded, where would the adventure be?
The Duke of Rutland soon repeated his first little heroic expedition
into the land of verses. He published a volume of _English Ballads_;
but this has not the historical interest which makes _England's Trust_
a curiosity. He has written about Church Rates, and the Colonies, and
the Importance of Literature to Men of Business, but never again of
his reveries in Neville's Court nor of his determination to emulate
the virtues of King Charles the Martyr. No matter! If all our
hereditary legislators were as high-minded and single-hearted as the
new Duke of Rutland, the reform of the House of Lords would scarcely
be a burning question.
IONICA
IONICA. _Smith Elder & Co., 65, Cornhill_. 1858.
Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds. You
throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a
deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, and by
and by it turns up again somewhere uninjured, with all the pure fire
lambent in its facets. No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do
get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of fashion, and never
thrown back again to light. But the quantity of excellent verse
produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very
fairly within the same proportions. The verse-market is never really
glutted, and while popular masses of what Robert Browning calls
"deciduous trash" survive their own generation, only to be carted
away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually pushes its path
up silently into fame.
These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing with the small
volume of 116 pages called _Ionica_, long ago ushered into the world
so silently that its publication did not cause a single ripple on the
sea of literature. Gradually this book has become first a rarity and
then a famous possession, so that at the present moment there is
perhaps no volume of recent English verse so diminutive which commands
so high a price among collectors. When the library of Mr. Henry
Bradshaw was dispersed in November 1886, book-buyers thought that they
had a chance of securing this treasure at a reasonable price, for it
was known that the late Librarian of Cambridge University, an old
friend of the author, had no fewer than three copies. But at the sale
two of these copies went for three pounds fifteen and three pounds
ten, respectively, and the third was knocked down for a guinea,
because it was discovered to lack the title-page and the index. (I do
not myself think it right to encourage the sale of imperfect books,
and would not have spent half a crown on the rarest of volumes if I
could not have the title-page. But this is only an aside, and does not
interfere with the value of _Ionica_.)
The little book has no name on the title-page, but it is known that the
author was Mr. William Johnson, formerly a master at Eton and a fellow
of King's College, Cambridge. It is understood that this gentleman was
born about 1823, and died in 1892. On coming into property, as I have
heard, in the west of England, he took the name of Cory, So that he is
doubly concealed as a poet, the anonymous-pseudonymous. As Mr. William
Cory he wrote history, but there is but slight trace there of the author
of _Ionica_. In face of the extreme rarity of his early book, friends
urged upon Mr. Cory its republication, and he consented. Probably he
would have done well to refuse, for the book is rather delicate and
exquisite than forcible, and to reprint it was to draw public attention
to its inequality. Perhaps I speak with the narrow-mindedness of the
collector who possesses a treasure; but I think the appreciators of
_Ionica_ will always be few in number, and it seems good for those few
to have some difficulties thrown in the way of their delights.
Shortly after _Ionica_ appeared great developments took place in
English verse. In 1858 there was no Rossetti, no Swinburne; we may say
that, as far as the general public was concerned, there was no
Matthew Arnold and no William Morris. This fact has to be taken into
consideration in dealing with the tender humanism of Mr. Johnson's
verses. They are less coruscating and flamboyant than what we became
accustomed to later on. The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and
melancholy. But where the author is at his best, he is not only, as
it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the
perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The book is addressed to and
intended for scholars, and the following piece, although really a
translation, has no statement to that effect. Before I quote it,
perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original is an epigram in the
Greek Anthology, and that it was written by the great Alexandrian
poet Callimachus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the poet
Heraclitus--not to be confounded with the philosopher--was dead.
_They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take_.
No translation ever smelt less of the lamp, and more of the violet
than this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English
literature, which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal
regret. I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer
expression of a poet's grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief
mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man's songs, his
"nightingales," are outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship,
the reward of one who, in Keats's wonderful phrase, has left "great
verse unto a little clan," the last service for the dead to whom it
was enough to be "unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the span of
heaven, and few ears." To modern vulgarity, whose ideal of Parnassus
is a tap-room of howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive,
as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that a poet may
hold his own comrade something dearer than the public. The author of
_Ionica_ would deserve well of his country if he had done no more than
draw this piece of aromatic calamus-root from the Greek waters.
Among the lyrics which are entirely original, there are several not
less exquisite than this memory of Callimachus. But the author is not
very safe on modern ground. I confess that I shudder when I read:
"_Oh, look at his jacket, I know him afar;
How nice," cry the ladies, "looks yonder Hussar_!"
It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these
colloquial numbers, and the author of _Ionica_ is more at home in the
dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining classic sentiment with
purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy.
There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable to break the
glassy surface of this plaintive _Dirge_:
_Naiad, hid beneath the bank
By the willowy river-side,
Where Narcissus gently sank,
Where unmarried Echo died,
Unto thy serene repose
Waft the stricken Anterôs.
Where the tranquil swan is borne,
Imaged in a watery glass,
Where the sprays of fresh pink thorn
Stoop to catch the boats that pass,
Where the earliest orchis grows,
Bury thou fair Anterôs.
On a flickering wave we gaze,
Not upon his answering eyes:
Flower and bird we scarce can praise,
Having lost his sweet replies:
Cold and mute the river flows
With our tears for Anterôs_.
We know well where this place of burial is to be. Not in some glade
of Attica or by Sicilian streams, but where a homelier river gushes
through the swollen lock at Bray, or shaves the smooth pastoral
meadows at Boveney, where Thames begins to draw a longer breath for
his passage between Eton and Windsor.
The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a wistful clinging to
this present life, a Pagan optimism which finds no fault with human
existence save that it is so brief. It gains various expression in
words that seem hot on a young man's lips, and warm on the same lips
even when no longer young:
_I'll borrow life, and not grow old;
And nightingales and trees
Shall keep me, though the veins be cold,
As young as Sophocles_.
And again, in poignant notes:
_You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forego,
This warm, kind world is all I know_.
This last quotation is from the poem called _Mimnermus in Church_. In
this odd title he seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet,
who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid on
the necessity of extracting from life all it had to offer, since there
was nothing beyond mortal love, which was the life of life. The author
of _Ionica_ seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to modern England,
and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning. But Mimnermus is
impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that
all earthly pleasures are fugitive. He has always confessed as much at
home under the olive tree; it was because they were fugitive that he
clung to them:
_All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh! the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die_.