of court. Praed _is_ very nearly if not quite Prior's equal, but the
sphere of neither was politics. Prior's political pieces are thin and
poor beside his social verse, and with rare exceptions I could not put
anything political of Praed's higher than the shoe-string of "Araminta."
Neither of these two charming poets seems to have felt seriously enough
for political satire. Matthew, we know, played the traitor; and though
Mackworth ratted to my own side, I fear it must be confessed that he did
rat. I can only discover in his political verse two fixed principles,
both of which no doubt did him credit, but which hardly, even when taken
together, amount to a sufficient political creed. The one was fidelity
to Canning and his memory: the other was impatience of the cant of the
reformers. He could make admirable fun of Joseph Hume, and of still
smaller fry like Waithman; he could attack Lord Grey's nepotism and
doctrinairism fiercely enough. Once or twice, or, to be fair, more than
once or twice, he struck out a happy, indeed a brilliant flash. He was
admirable at what Sir George Young calls, justly enough, "political
patter songs" such as,
Young widowhood shall lose its weeds,
Old kings shall loathe the Tories,
And monks be tired of telling beads,
And Blues of telling stories;
And titled suitors shall be crossed,
And famished poets married,
And Canning's motion shall be lost,
And Hume's amendment carried;
And Chancery shall cease to doubt,
And Algebra to prove,
And hoops come in, and gas go out
Before I cease to love.
He hit off an exceedingly savage and certainly not wholly just "Epitaph
on the King of the Sandwich Islands" which puts the conception of George
the Fourth that Thackeray afterwards made popular, and contains these
felicitous lines:
The people in his happy reign,
Were blessed beyond all other nations:
Unharmed by foreign axe and chain,
Unhealed by civic innovations;
They served the usual logs and stones,
With all the usual rites and terrors,
And swallowed all their fathers' bones,
And swallowed all their fathers' errors.
When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives,
All swore that nothing should prevent them,
But that their representatives
Should actually represent them,
He interposed the proper checks,
By sending troops, with drums and banners,
To cut their speeches short, and necks,
And break their heads, to mend their manners.
Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between politics and society he
wrote in the "patter" style just noticed quite admirable things like
"Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." Throughout the great debates on Reform
he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless
superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been
shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an
ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching
"Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep" which affect one almost to tears
by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing
applicability of their matter.
Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it's surely fair,
If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair:
Longer and longer still they grow,
Tory and Radical, Aye and No;
Talking by night and talking by day;
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies
Light and brief on a Speaker's eyes--
Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two,
Some disorderly thing will do;
Riot will chase repose away;
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; Cobbett will soon
Move to abolish the sun and moon;
Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense
Of the House on a saving of thirteen-pence;
Grattan will growl or Baldwin bray;
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time
When loyalty was not quite a crime,
When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school,
And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool.
Lord, how principles pass away!
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men
Is the sleep that comes but now and then;
Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill,
Sweet to the children who work in a mill.
You have more need of sleep than they,
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.
But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to
be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the
trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful
turn to verse composed in his true vocation.
Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps
only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a
certain class of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may
have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are
foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake
Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Cassandra," or
"Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell
Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way.
"Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious comparison with
Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the
well-known
I curse him by our country's gods,
The terrible, the dark,
The scatterers of the Roman rods,
The quellers of the bark,
are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here
either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales
are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows
in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour
in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red
Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines
are good enough for anything:
But little he cared, that stripling pale,
For the sinking sun or the rising gale;
For he, as he rode, was dreaming now,
Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow,
Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted,
Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted,
Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes,
And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.
And these:
Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing,
Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string,
Into the wood Sir Rudolph went:
Not with more joy the schoolboys run
To the gay green fields when their task is done;
Not with more haste the members fly,
When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.
But in "The Red Fisherman" itself there is nothing that is not good. It
is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.
But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when "the Abbot
arose and closed his book" to the account of his lamentable and yet
lucky fate and punishment whereof "none but he and the fisherman could
tell the reason why." Neither of the two other practitioners who may be
called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself
elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the
breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a
foot.
Still not here was his "farthest," as the geographers say, nor in the
considerable mass of smaller poems which practically defy
classification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes
across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have
cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn "Time's
Song," the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming
"L'Inconnue." But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in
the verses of society proper, the second part of the "Poems of Life and
Manners" as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to
be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he
practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a
hundred pages, with a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found
some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English
language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments,
a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They
begin with "The Vicar," _vir nullâ non donandus lauru_.
[Whose] talk was like a stream, which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses:
It slipped from politics to puns,
It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
Beginning with the laws which keep
The planets in their radiant courses,
And ending with some precept deep
For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.
Three of the Vicar's companion "Everyday Characters" are good, but I
think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, "The Portrait of a
Lady," is quite his equal.
You'll be forgotten--as old debts
By persons who are used to borrow;
Forgotten--as the sun that sets,
When shines a new one on the morrow;
Forgotten--like the luscious peach
That blessed the schoolboy last September;
Forgotten--like a maiden speech,
Which all men praise, but none remember.
Yet ere you sink into the stream
That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr,
And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme,
And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter,
Here, of the fortunes of your youth,
My fancy weaves her dim conjectures,
Which have, perhaps, as much of truth
As passion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.
Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published
poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment
and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated
more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its
happiest form: nor is that form to be found in "Josephine" which is much
better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social,
half-political patter of "The Brazen Head," or in "Twenty-eight and
Twenty-nine." It sounds first in the "Song for the Fourteenth of
February." No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original[20]
for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later
in "The Letter of Advice," appears first in lighter matter still like
this:
Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia,
Whom no one e'er saw, or may see,
A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia,
An _ad libit_ Anna Marie?
Shall I court an initial with stars to it,
Go mad for a G. or a J.,
Get Bishop to put a few bars to it,
And print it on Valentine's Day?
But every competent critic has seen in it the origin of the more
gorgeous and full-mouthed, if not more accomplished and dexterous,
rhythm in which Mr. Swinburne has written "Dolores," and the even more
masterly dedication of the first "Poems and Ballads." The shortening of
the last line which the later poet has introduced is a touch of genius,
but not perhaps greater than Praed's own recognition of the
extraordinarily vivid and ringing qualities of the stanza. I profoundly
believe that metrical quality is, other things being tolerably equal,
the great secret of the enduring attraction of verse: and nowhere, not
in the greatest lyrics, is that quality more unmistakable than in the
"Letter of Advice." I really do not know how many times I have read it;
but I never can read it to this day without being forced to read it out
loud like a schoolboy and mark with accompaniment of hand-beat such
lines as
Remember the thrilling romances
We read on the bank in the glen:
Remember the suitors our fancies
Would picture for both of us then.
They wore the red cross on their shoulder,
They had vanquished and pardoned their foe--
Sweet friend, are you wiser or colder?
My own Araminta, say "No!"
· · · · ·
He must walk--like a god of old story
Come down from the home of his rest;
He must smile--like the sun in his glory,
On the buds he loves ever the best;
And oh! from its ivory portal
Like music his soft speech must flow!
If he speak, smile, or walk like a mortal,
My own Araminta, say "No!"
There are, metrically speaking, few finer couplets in English than the
first of that second stanza. Looked at from another point of view, the
mixture of the comic and the serious in the piece is remarkable enough;
but not so remarkable, I think, as its extraordinary metrical
accomplishment. There is not a note or a syllable wrong in the whole
thing, but every sound and every cadence comes exactly where it ought to
come, so as to be, in a delightful phrase of Southey's, "necessary and
voluptuous and right."
It is no wonder that when Praed had discovered such a medium he should
have worked it freely. But he never impressed on it such a combination
of majesty and grace as in this letter of Medora Trevilian. As far as
the metre goes I think the eight-lined stanzas of this piece better
suited to it than the twelve-lined ones of "Good Night to the Season"
and the first "Letter from Teignmouth," but both are very delightful.
Perhaps the first is the best known of all Praed's poems, and certainly
some things in it, such as
The ice of her ladyship's manners,
The ice of his lordship's champagne,
are among the most quoted. But this antithetical trick, of which Praed
was so fond, is repeated a little often in it; and it seems to me to
lack the freshness as well as the fire of the "Advice." On the other
hand, the "Letter from Teignmouth" is the best thing that even Praed has
ever done for combined grace and tenderness.
You once could be pleased with our ballads--
To-day you have critical ears;
You once could be charmed with our salads--
Alas! you've been dining with Peers;
You trifled and flirted with many--
You've forgotten the when and the how;
There was one you liked better than any--
Perhaps you've forgotten her now.
But of those you remember most newly,
Of those who delight or enthral,
None love you a quarter so truly
As some you will find at our Ball.
They tell me you've many who flatter,
Because of your wit and your song:
They tell me--and what does it matter?--
You like to be praised by the throng:
They tell me you're shadowed with laurel:
They tell me you're loved by a Blue:
They tell me you're sadly immoral--
Dear Clarence, that cannot be true!
But to me, you are still what I found you,
Before you grew clever and tall;
And you'll think of the spell that once bound you;
And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball!
Is not that perfectly charming?
It is perhaps a matter of mere taste whether it is or is not more
charming than pieces like "School and Schoolfellows" (the best of
Praed's purely Eton poems) and "Marriage Chimes," in which, if not Eton,
the Etonian set also comes in. If I like these latter pieces less, it
is not so much because of their more personal and less universal
subjects as because their style is much less individual. The resemblance
to Hood cannot be missed, and though I believe there is some dispute as
to which of the two poets actually hit upon the particular style first,
there can be little doubt that Hood attained to the greater excellence
in it. The real sense and savingness of that doctrine of the "principal
and most excellent things," which has sometimes been preached rather
corruptly and narrowly, is that the best things that a man does are
those that he does best. Now though
I wondered what they meant by stock,
I wrote delightful Sapphics,
and
With no hard work but Bovney stream,
No chill except Long Morning,
are very nice things, I do not think they are so good in their kind as
the other things that I have quoted; and this, though the poem contains
the following wholly delightful stanza in the style of the "Ode on a
Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy":
Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes
Without the fear of sessions;
Charles Medlar loathed false quantities
As much as false professions;
Now Mill keeps order in the land,
A magistrate pedantic;
And Medlar's feet repose unscanned
Beneath the wide Atlantic.
The same may even be said of "Utopia," a much-praised, often-quoted, and
certainly very amusing poem, of "I'm not a Lover now," and of others,
which are also, though less exactly, in Hood's manner. To attempt to
distinguish between that manner and the manner which is Praed's own is a
rather perilous attempt; and the people who hate all attempts at
reducing criticism to principle, and who think that a critic should only
say clever things about his subject, will of course dislike me for it.
But that I cannot help. I should say then that Hood had the advantage of
Praed in purely serious poetry; for Araminta's bard never did anything
at all approaching "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "The Haunted
House," or a score of other things. He had also the advantage in pure
broad humour. But where Praed excelled was in the mixed style, not of
sharp contrast as in Hood's "Lay of the Desert Born" and "Demon Ship,"
where from real pity and real terror the reader suddenly stumbles into
pure burlesque, but of wholly blended and tempered humour and pathos. It
is this mixed style in which I think his note is to be found as it is to
be found in no other poet, and as it could hardly be found in any but
one with Praed's peculiar talent and temper combined with his peculiar
advantages of education, fortune, and social atmosphere. He never had to
"pump out sheets of fun" on a sick-bed for the printer's devil, like
his less well-fated but assuredly not less well-gifted rival; and as his
scholarship was exactly of the kind to refine, temper, and adjust his
literary manner, so his society and circumstances were exactly of the
kind to repress, or at least not to encourage, exuberance or
boisterousness in his literary matter. There are I believe who call him
trivial, even frivolous; and if this be done sincerely by any careful
readers of "The Red Fisherman" and the "Letter of Advice" I fear I must
peremptorily disable their judgment. But this appearance of levity is in
great part due exactly to the perfect modulation and adjustment of his
various notes. He never shrieks or guffaws: there is no horse-play in
him, just as there is no tearing a passion to tatters. His slight
mannerisms, more than once referred to, rarely exceed what is justified
by good literary manners. His points are very often so delicate, so
little insisted on or underlined, that a careless reader may miss them
altogether; his "questionings" are so little "obstinate" that a careless
reader may think them empty.
Will it come with a rose or a brier?
Will it come with a blessing or curse?
Will its bonnets be lower or higher?
Will its morals be better or worse?
The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if
he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.
I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics who, however warily,
admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and
omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish
one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. "One to
one" is not "cursedly confined" in the relation of book and reader; and
a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost _mille
e tre_ loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those
among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a
very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous
company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the
ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness.
In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than
an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work
was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in
youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular
sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but
never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his
imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most
perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what
has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words,
"the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life." He is
thus at the very antipodes of Wertherism and Byronism, a light but
gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there
is about him absolutely nothing artificial--the curse of the lighter
poetry as a rule--and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and
once or twice (notably in "The Red Fisherman") to a kind of grim
earnestness, neither of these things is his real _forte_. Playing with
literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no
very deep cares and no very passionate feeling, is Praed's attitude
whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many
writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled
such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems
(an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest--
But Isabel, by accident,
Was wandering by that minute;
She opened that dark monument
And found her slave within it;
_The clergy said the Mass in vain,
The College could not save me:
But life, she swears, returned again
With the first kiss she gave me._
Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life
after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a
merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an
elderly youth, which is of all things most detestable, or a
caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods
mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but
slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as
the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of
the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of
the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip--
And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball,
of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies,
and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five.
Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been,
is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed's
verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he
for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices
of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in
which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] 1. _The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir by the
Rev. Derwent Coleridge._ In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. _Essays by
Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young,
Bart._ London, 1887. 3. _The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop
Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young._ London, 1888.
[20] Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr. Mowbray
Morris of Byron's
I enter thy garden of roses,
Beloved and fair Haidee.
It is not impossible that this _is_ the immediate original. But Praed
has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent.
XIII
GEORGE BORROW
In this paper I do not undertake to throw any new light on the
little-known life of the author of _Lavengro_. Among the few people who
knew Borrow intimately, surely some one will soon be found who will give
to the world an account of his curious life, and perhaps some specimens
of those "mountains of manuscript" which, as he regretfully declares,
never could find a publisher--an impossibility which, if I may be
permitted to offer an opinion, does not reflect any great credit on
publishers. For the present purpose it is sufficient to sum up the
generally-known facts that Borrow was born in 1803 at East Dereham in
Norfolk, his father being a captain in the army, who came of Cornish
blood, his mother a lady of Norfolk birth and Huguenot extraction. His
youth he has himself described in a fashion which nobody is likely to
care to paraphrase. After the years of travel chronicled in _Lavengro_,
he seems to have found scope for his philological and adventurous
tendencies in the rather unlikely service of the Bible Society; and he
sojourned in Russia and Spain to the great advantage of English
literature. This occupied him during the greater part of the years from
1830 to 1840. Then he came back to his native country--or, at any rate,
his native district--married a widow of some property at Lowestoft, and
spent the last forty years of his life at Oulton Hall, near the piece of
water which is thronged in summer by all manner of sportsmen and others.
He died but a few years ago; and even since his death he seems to have
lacked the due meed of praise which the Lord Chief Justice of the equal
foot usually brings, even to persons far less deserving than Borrow.