There are some writers whom the judicious reader forgets by name, with
the express intention of clearing them away. For oblivion is not always
a slovenly thing. It is sometimes directed with no slight care, and has
regard to all the distinctive characteristics of the one to be
forgotten, effacing him with every possible precision, good aim, and
attention. Others, again, it is more convenient to forget in little
companies, according to their ‘school’; and there is no great precision
necessary for picking them off. You shoot, as it were, ‘into the brown’,
for they go close-ranked.
Of Beddoes it must be said that if he is to be virtually forgotten—and
there is hardly a doubt as to that—the act has to be a single and
separate one. And yet this measure of distinction is not quite fairly
come by. He gains it chiefly because he wrote Elizabethan tragedy in the
early nineteenth century, and so gained a kind of isolation. But
inasmuch as he wrote couplets to be like Keats, and lyrics to be like
Shelley, he might disappear with a batch, and need give no trouble. He
was not without talent, and he should have our cordial pity for living
in a time when the inspiration of English poetry was withdrawn. When—for
a far longer period—this had befallen before, there had been no one
living aware of the lapse. When Shelley and Keats were gone, Wordsworth
and Coleridge at an end, Beddoes was aware of what had happened, and
knew all the conditions in which his own life had come to pass. He may
remind you of a poor rabbit that came to consciousness in the midst of a
physiological experiment. Generally the anaesthetic lasts as long as the
trouble. But Beddoes had the distress of being an Englishman during a
pause of poetry that must have seemed a final loss to his solitary
consciousness. We know the shortness of the time, but if the struggle of
his dismay was violent, and if he caught at the past—the immediate past
and the distant—with a frantic gesture, shall we deride him who did not
know the future that is now our past? The gap hardly shows in our view
of the mountain range of poets.
If Beddoes thought that he was called upon to live a citizen of an
England with no present literature, it is not wonderful that he should
have been a desperate man. It was desperate to be so unwilling to
confess that Keats would write no more couplets as to make this after
Keats was dead:
And none went near; none in his sweep would venture,
For you might feel that he was but the centre
Of an inspired round, &c.
It is not, perhaps, quite Keats’s rhyme; but the helpless leaning on the
rhyme, the unbraced couplings, the slipping, the giving way of those two
poor props of lines ill-built, are all proper to _Endymion_. So are the
same things in this couplet, where the character of the words chosen for
rhyming is also, almost subtly, a piece of Keats:
Thou know’st it not; it is a fearful coop—
Dark, cold, and horrible—a blinded loop
In Pluto’s, &c.
Here, again, is a passage so full of all the errors of this deplorable
way of couplet writing that it shall be put upon record here as a final
warning before it is finally forgotten. The passage begins in the course
of a line (and therefore after another wretched couplet has fallen down
just above), and the phrase, quite unable to stop itself, needs two and
a half more couplets to come before it is precipitated, and reaches a
stable equilibrium by coming to the bottom:
There sits,
Or stands, or lounges, or perhaps on bits
Of this rag’s daughter, paper, &c.
Beddoes studied Elizabethan blank verse, and achieved no small measure
of imitation, if hardly the astonishing success of these unheroic
couplets. In _The Bride’s Tragedy_ he imitates more than the
versification. The large passions, removed from the conditions of human
life and yet closing in that human accident—madness—the playing with
flowers and prettiness in the horrors of a murder, the curiously aloof
appeal to the intimate replies of pity and terror; the state, the
royalty; the barbaric convention, the savage and noble unnaturalness,
where naturalness would seem to be the looked-for motive, justification,
crown, and end—for the sake of these Elizabethan characters Beddoes
wrote his tragedy, and, but for a wavering into sentimentalism (less
than any of his contemporaries would have shown, no doubt), he would
have made something wonderfully like his model. But sentimentalism was
generally a vice of his time from which Beddoes was strangely free. It
is in his imitation of that inimitable favour and prettiness, and in the
kind of aristocratic madness of a song, that the mistake comes to
pass—the mistake of this overwrought decoration for the sentiment that
is so near and yet so unlike to it. When Hesperus, who has murdered his
bride and is to die, lies down before his distraught father and covers
himself with the loose earth, he undoubtedly does an Elizabethan action.
And when his father, dying of grief, lies down beside him, that too is
Elizabethan, more Elizabethan still than the other. But when Hesperus
says:
But I shall die the better for this meeting,
then, it seems to me, the feeling is modern; and so it is elsewhere.
Then it seems inconsistent to reproach Beddoes because he is not modern
enough, and writes of dragons and not of men. But yet, who has not
acknowledged the effect of Rossetti’s phrase, ‘lidless eyes in hell’?
That human eyes should ever be lidless—that is Rossetti’s frightful
thought. Beddoes also has ‘lidless eyes’, but he gives them to a dragon,
and it matters less than nothing that a dragon should have lidless eyes.
Coleridge, by the way, had ‘her lidless dragon eyes’.
Neither passion nor sweetness is frequent with Beddoes, but once or
twice in the course of many lyrics on the subject of death he apprehends
Shelley’s thought of death, and sometimes there is a Shelley-shyness, an
escape in the moment of capture, or an alien nestling and murmuring,
close and strange:
What hast caught, then? What hast caught?
Nothing but a poet’s thought!
There is something more than his customary fancy in his phrase for love,
‘Bee of hearts’; and in the almost tender song, _Dream-Pedlary_:
If there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell,
Some a light sigh.
This, too, of a sad romantic story:
Like a ruffled nightingale
Balanced upon dewy wings,
Through the palace weeps the tale,
Leaving tears where’er she sings.
This is a strong image in a fragment, _Concealed Joy_:
Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash;
But as I looked it sank into his eye,
Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings
Into a darkening hole.
The poetry of madness is, needless to say, one of the peculiar choruses
of English literature. To the centuries of wild conventions, of
distracted majesties, of artifice outfacing nature and astonishing the
untamed heart, to the greatness and the liberty of the English fancy,
the world owes those musical light discords, from the song of Tom
o’Bedlam, quoted by Isaac D’Israeli, to the mad song by Aubrey de Vere,
and the stanzas added to the first-named by Francis Thompson; for he
seems to be the latest of a long line of English poets to make music for
the distracted. Beddoes addresses himself to the kind of resolute pathos
that set all these singers to singing. For the pathos was most resolute;
however sweetly it sounded at the full, it had cold origins. Imagination
and simplicity, not passion, made all its virtue. I cannot think that
Beddoes in _Emily’s Plaint_ has fancy or simplicity fine enough for the
addition of this song to the heart-broken, heart-released lyrics of
Ophelia and her sisters.
Beddoes’ lyrics of death are rather German than magical—I feel these
adjectives to be somewhat antithetical in this connexion; and they call
him ‘grim’. But he lacked humour. His reference to a place—
That’s not genteel to tell,
Where demonesses go to church,
is the best thing I can find in that temper.