"I care not, Fortune, what you me deny:
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace;
You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns by living stream at eve.
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave;
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave."
Such is the _stanza_ in which are written Spenser's 'Faërie Queen,'
Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence,' and Byron's 'Childe Harold,' and it is
the highest flight of poetry: after which comes the heroic verse, in
which we lap the heavy poems we call epic--their Latin appellation; of
these the Iliads of Homer and the Æneids of Virgil are the ever
recurring aspirations of poets doomed to fall untimely. The charm of
Homer is that it is not only a poem, but it instructs us in the
history--all that we know of it--of those prehistoric days. It is full
of ballads, which are the ground-work by which we trace the manners and
the tenets of the pagan tribes. The truth involved in 'Homer' is the
charm of his epic poem, while the falsehood involved in the 'Henriade'
of Voltaire is amply sufficient to condemn it utterly. For a specimen
let us take Pope's 'Homer,' where Hector answers Andromache's appeal to
stay and guard the walls of Troy:--
"The chief replied, 'That post shall be my care;
Nor that alone, but all the works of war;
Still foremost let me stand to guard the throne,
To save my father's honours and my own:
Yet come it will, the day decreed by Fates--
How my heart trembles whilst my tongue relates--
That day when thou, imperial Troy, must bend,
Must see thy warriors fall, thy glories end.
And yet no presage dire so wounds my mind--
My mother's death, the ruin of my kind--
As thine, Andromache, thy griefs I dread.
I see thee weeping, trembling, captive led.
In Argive looms our battles to design,
Woes--of which woes so large a part was thine;
To bear the victor's hard commands, or bring
The waters from the Hypereian spring.
There, whilst you groan beneath the load of life,
They cry "Behold the Trojan Hector's wife!"
Some Argive, who shall live thy griefs to see,
Embitters thy great woe by naming me:
The thoughts of glory past and present shame,
A thousand griefs, shall waken at the name.
May I lie cold before that dreadful day,
Pressed by a load of monumental clay
Thy Hector, wrapped in everlasting sleep,
Shall neither hear thee sigh nor see thee weep.'"
Next in pathos is the _mournful_ elegy; of which none can surpass Gray's
elegy:--
"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Alike await the inevitable hour;
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Let not ambition mock our useful toil,
Our homely joys and destiny obscure,
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor:
Their names, their years spelt by the untaught Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply,
And many a holy text around she strews,
To teach the rustic moralist to die."
Nursery rhymes, old ballads, odes, sonnets, epigrams, travesties,
fables, satires, and eclogues, and, most of all, songs, provide daily
pleasure for us from our cradle to the grave. Every language has its
nursery rhymes, which are a sort of Delphian lot, sung in enigma from
'King Pittacus of Mytilene' and 'Le bon Roi Dagobert,' to the lullaby of
'Four-and-twenty Blackbirds.' There is as much sarcasm in nursery rhymes
as there is of pride and boast in the songs of bards at the feast of
heroes, and as there is of humble confession in the funeral psalm. Song
tends alike to evaporate exuberant spirits, and to soothe the soul in an
affliction--as Desdemona informs us so sweetly in her misery:--
"My mother had a maid called Barbara;
She was in love: and he she loved proved mad,
And did forsake her. She had a song of willow,
An old thing 'twas; but it expressed her fortune,
And she died singing it. That song to-night
Will not go from my mind: I have much to do,
But to go hang my head all of one side,
And sing it like poor Barbara."
Ophelia chanted as she floated down the brook, Arion tamed the flood,
and Orpheus the trees and rocks. It is a marvellous power which soothes
alike the babe in the arms and the hero at the feast, the lover and the
forsaken maiden, which leads to battle and returns from conquest;
therefore let us see the ODE, in 'Eton Revisited':--
"Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Ah, fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless boyhood strayed
A stranger yet to pain.
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.
Whilst some on earnest labour bent
Their business, murmuring, ply
'Gainst graver hours that bring constraint
To sweeten liberty;
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of the little reign
And unknown regions dare descry;
Still as they run they look behind,
And hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.
To each his sufferings, all are men
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender, for another's pain--
The unfeeling, for his own.
Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late;
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more: 'where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.'"
Let me add four lines from Denham's poem, 'On Cooper's Hill,' addressing
the River Thames:--
"O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."
Our old ballads are very fine: the opening of 'Chevy Chase' is equal to
'Wrath, Goddess sing the Wrath of Achilles,' or 'Arms and the Man:'--
"The Persé owt of Northumberland,
And a vowe to Godde made he,
That he would hunt in the mountains
Of Cheviot within days three.
In maugre of doughty Douglas
And all that ever with him be,
The fattest hartes in all Cheviot,
He said, to kill and bear away.
'By my faith!' quoth the doughty Douglas then,
'I will lette that hunting, gif I may.'
Worde is commen to Eddenburrowe
To James, the Scottish King,
That doughty Douglas, Lyfftenant of Marches,
Lay slain Chevyot hills within.
His handdes did James weal and wryng,
Sighing, 'Alas! and woe is me--
Such another captain Scotland within
I trow there will never be!'
Worde is commen to lovely Londone
Till the fourth Harry, our King,
That Lord Persé, Lyfftenant of Marches,
Lay slain Cheviot hills within.
'God have mercy on his soul!' said Kyng Harry,
'Good Lord, if thy will it be.
I have a hondrith Captains in Englonde
As good as ever was he;
But Persé, and I brook my lyffe
Thy death well quit shall be.'
This was the honting off the Cheviot
'That tear beganne this spurn:'
Old men that known the ground well enough
Call it the battle of Otterburn.
At Otterburn began this spurn
Upon a Monnynday;
There was the doughtie Douglas slain,
The Persé went captive away."
But of every species of poetry none are so rife with life and beauty as
the song. It conjoins music with words, and brevity with sweetness.
There is no position in which man does not sing,--in joy to express it,
and in woe to relieve it: in company in chorus, and alone for
companionship. Sir Walter Scott has imagined the minstrel to sing:--
"I have song of war for knight,
Lay of love for ladye bright,
Fairie tale to lull the heir,
Goblin grim the maid to scare.
If you pity kith or kin,
Take the wandering harper in."
But songs are like the flowers of the field: each age hath its own,
which fade and perish and make way for another crop, and every age
claims its own. For melody, terseness, and beauty of words, the song
excels more than any other form of poetry; and they are wise who have a
private collection of the songs which, like swallows, come and
disappear.
It may appear strange to print the Fables of Gay, and say no word of our
author; but the truth is that it is unkind to withdraw the veil of
privacy from any man's life. Doctor Johnson did an unkind deed when he
wrote the 'Lives of the Poets;' for which he was fully repaid when
Boswell flayed him bare as ever Apollo flayed Marsyas, and exposed all
the quivering nerves to the light of day. Of all classes of men, the
class of poets most need the concealing veil: the greatest have been
blind; the next greatest halt, and the remainder weak or deformed of
frame. Debarred the healthier paths of life, man rushes for employment
to the refuging muse; and rightly so, for he finds an employment
ornamental and useful still. But solitude does not nurture the virtues
of the soul more than physical defect does that of the body, and the
withdrawal of the curtain divulges a very sad sight of discontent and
envy. Homer himself is recorded to have ejaculated his aspiration to be
the favourite of the Greek girls and boys. A poet seer loves no brother
near his throne, and is but too apt to complain of non-appreciation of
his muse on the part of the world. The fault rather is in their own too
sensitive souls; and it is a fact that there is scarcely a name in the
roll of poets, whose fame is not harmed by divulging his exotic life.
The rural labourer's fate--
"Where to be born and die,
Of rich and poor, make all the history"--
is far better than to be paraded from the disobedience of youth, the
rebellion of manhood, and the disappointment of age, divulged in the
storied lives of the few hundred names admitted to be British poets; and
the reading of whose works is, as a rule, a task of weariness. The
career of Gay is a very fair one as an average of the poetic. He mainly
avoided the enumerated ills--enumerated by Dr. Johnson--
"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."
The poetic element in Britain was very strong in the days of Gay. Pope,
Swift, Prior, Addison were the petted servants of the Ministers. They
were all far more successful in their careers than was Gay, who from his
boyhood refused to labour for his bread. Very early he found a patroness
in the Duchess of Monmouth, who had
"Wept over Monmouth's bloody tomb,"
with whom he enjoyed a sort of honorary post--secretary to the shadow
of a princess; next he became a real secretary to the Earl of Clarendon,
Ambassador at Hanover, as Prior had been to the Ambassador at Paris. We
easily trace in Gay's career the unsatisfied overweening poetic soul,
like a Charybdis, insatiable of adulation. In 1716, the Earl of
Burlington cheered him at his seat in Devon; in 1717, he accompanied Mr.
Pulteney to Aix; in 1718, Lord Harcourt soothed his spirits. Then he
made money, which burnt holes in his pockets. He called his friends
together, to ask how he should invest. His poetic friends Pope and Swift
advised him to sink it in an annuity. But fate or fortune cast him in
with Secretary Craggs and the South Sea scheme, and, from the possessor
of 20,000_l._, his capital collapsed to _nil_. In vain he had been
bidden to sell and to realize. He had visions of wealth, and held on to
be accidentally an honester man than if he had enriched himself by that
delusive scheme; but he nearly sunk beneath his disappointment, and his
health was endangered. Hope and the Muse restored him to more life and
to more disappointment. He then wrote 'The Captive,' obtained an
appointment to read it to the Princess of Wales, stumbled, like Cæsar,
over a stool; the princess screamed, the omen was a true one--'The
Captive' pined and died.
In 1726 he wrote these Fables, dedicating them to the Duke of
Cumberland, and in 1727 his royal patron succeeded to the crown; when he
was offered the post of Gentleman Usher to the Princess Louisa. Gay was
hurt and indignant, and made court to Mrs. Howard (afterwards Countess
of Suffolk), one of the anomalous favourites alluded to in page 131, but
in vain.
Then came the great success of his 'Beggars' Opera,' which was followed
by 'Polly,' its sequel. 'Polly' was forbidden by the Lord Chamberlain,
and a private subscription raised 1200_l._ to recompense Gay for not
being suffered to please the mob with his immorality. And, lastly, the
Duke and Duchess of Queensberry took this child of nature by the
hand--the duke to manage his worldly substance, and the duchess to
soothe his insatiable vanity--and so he died at the early age of 45, and
has a very pretty tomb, with "Queensberry weeping o'er his urn," in
Poets' Corner. Pope's epitaph runs thus:--
"Blest be the gods for those they took away,
And those they left me, for they left me Gay.
Left me to see deserted genius bloom,
Neglected die, and tell it on his tomb;
Of all his blameless life the sole return
My verse and Queensberry weeping o'er his urn."
Peace with his dust! Another couplet of Pope's, methinks, has more of
moral truth and justice:--
"A wit's a feather, and a chief's a rod;
An honest man's the noblest work of God."
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|Transcriber's Note: |
| |
|Inconsistencies in the use of hyphens and accents,|
|as well as in the title of fables in the table of |
|contents and in the body of the text, have been |
|retained as in the original book. |
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