_To Mr. Gifted Hopkins_.
My Dear Hopkins,--The verses which you have sent me, with a request "to
get published in some magazine," I now return to you. If you are anxious
that they should be published, send them to an editor yourself. If he
likes them he will accept them from you. If he does not like them, why
should he like them because they are forwarded by _me_? His only motive
would be an aversion to disobliging a _confrere_, and why should I put
him in such an unpleasant position?
But this is a very boorish way of thanking you for the _premiere
representation_ of your little poem. "To Delia in Girton" you call it,
"recommending her to avoid the Muses, and seek the society of the Graces
and Loves." An old-fashioned preamble, and of the lengthiest, and how do
you go on?--
Golden hair is fairy gold,
Fairy gold that cannot stay,
Turns to leaflets green and cold,
At the ending of the day!
Laurel-leaves the Muses may
Twine about your golden head.
Will the crown reward you, say,
When the fairy gold is fled?
Daphne was a maid unwise--
Shun the laurel, seek the rose;
Azure, lovely in the skies,
Shines less gracious in the hose!
Don't you think, dear Hopkins, that this allusion to _bas-bleus_, if not
indelicate, is a little rococo, and out of date? Editors will think so,
I fear. Besides, I don't like "Fairy gold _that cannot stay_." If
_Fairy Gold_ were a _horse_, it would be all very well to write that it
"cannot stay." 'Tis the style of the stable, unsuited to songs of the
_salon_.
This is a very difficult kind of verse that you are essaying, you whom
the laurels of Mr. Locker do not suffer to sleep for envy. You kindly
ask my opinion on _vers de societe_ in general. Well, I think them a
very difficult sort of thing to write well, as one may infer from this,
that the ancients, our masters, could hardly write them at all. In Greek
poetry of the great ages I only remember one piece which can be called a
model--the AEolic verses that Theocritus wrote to accompany the gift of
the ivory distaff. It was a present, you remember, to the wife of his
friend Nicias, the physician of Miletus. The Greeks of that age kept
their women in almost Oriental reserve. One may doubt whether Nicias
would have liked it if Theocritus had sent, instead of a distaff, a fan
or a jewel. But there is safety in a spinning instrument, and all the
compliments to the lady, "the dainty-ankled Theugenis," turn on her
skill, and industry, and housewifery. So Louis XIV., no mean authority,
called this piece of _vers de societe_ "a model of honourable gallantry."
I have just looked all through Pomtow's pretty little pocket volumes of
the minor Greek poets, and found nothing more of the nature of the
lighter verse than this of Alcman's--[Greek text]. Do you remember the
pretty paraphrase of it in "Love in Idleness"?
"Maidens with voices like honey for sweetness that breathe desire,
Would that I were a sea bird with wings that could never tire,
Over the foam-flowers flying, with halcyons ever on wing,
Keeping a careless heart, a sea-blue bird of the spring."
It does not quite give the sense Alcman intended, the lament for his
limbs weary with old age--with old age sadder for the sight of the honey-
voiced girls.
The Greeks had not the kind of society that is the home of "Society
Verses," where, as Mr. Locker says, "a _boudoir_ decorum is, or ought
always to be, preserved, where sentiment never surges into passion, and
where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment." Honest women
were estranged from their mirth and their melancholy.
The Romans were little more fortunate. You cannot expect the genius of
Catullus not to "surge into passion," even in his hours of gayer song,
composed when
_Multum lusimus in meis tabellis_,
_Ut convenerat esse delicatos_,
_Scribens versiculos uterque nostrum_.
Thus the lighter pieces of Catullus, like the dedication of his book, are
addressed to _men_, his friends, and thus they scarcely come into the
category of what we call "Society Verses." Given the character of Roman
society, perhaps we might say that plenty of this kind of verse was
written by Horace and by Martial. The famous ode to Pyrrha does not
exceed the decorum of a Roman _boudoir_, and, as far as love was
concerned, it does not seem to have been in the nature of Horace to
"surge into passion." So his best songs in this kind are addressed to
men, with whom he drinks a little, and talks of politics and literature a
great deal, and muses over the shortness of life, and the zest that snow-
clad Soracte gives to the wintry fire.
Perhaps the ode to Leuconoe, which Mr. Austin Dobson has rendered so
prettily in a _villanelle_, may come within the scope of this Muse, for
it has a playfulness mingled with its melancholy, a sadness in its play.
Perhaps, too, if Horace is to be done into verse, these old French forms
seem as fit vehicles as any for Latin poetry that was written in the
exotic measures of Greece. There is a foreign grace and a little
technical difficulty overcome in the _English ballade and villanelle_, as
in the Horatian sapphics and alcaics. I would not say so much, on my own
responsibility, nor trespass so far on the domain of scholarship, but
this opinion was communicated to me by a learned professor of Latin. I
think, too, that some of the lyric measures of the old French Pleiad, of
Ronsard and Du Bellay, would be well wedded with the verse of Horace. But
perhaps no translator will ever please any one but himself, and of Horace
every man must be his own translator.
It may be that Ovid now and then comes near to writing _vers de societe_,
only he never troubles himself for a moment about the "decorum of the
_boudoir_." Do you remember the lines on the ring which he gave his
lady? They are the origin and pattern of all the verses written by
lovers on that pretty metempsychosis which shall make them slippers, or
fans, or girdles, like Waller's, and like that which bound "the dainty,
dainty waist" of the Miller's Daughter.
"Ring that shalt bind the finger fair
Of my sweet maid, thou art not rare;
Thou hast not any price above
The token of her poet's love;
Her finger may'st thou mate as she
Is mated every wise with me!"
And the poet goes on, as poets will, to wish he were this favoured, this
fortunate jewel:
"In vain I wish! So, ring, depart,
And say 'with me thou hast his heart'!"
Once more Ovid's verses on his catholic affection for all ladies, the
brown and the blonde, the short and the tall, may have suggested Cowley's
humorous confession, "The Chronicle":
"Margarita first possessed,
If I remember well, my breast,
Margarita, first of all;"
and then follows a list as long as Leporello's.
What disqualifies Ovid as a writer of _vers de societe_ is not so much
his lack of "decorum" as the monotonous singsong of his eternal elegiacs.
The lightest of light things, the poet of society, should possess more
varied strains; like Horace, Martial, Thackeray, not like Ovid and (here
is a heresy) Praed. Inimitably well as Praed does his trick of
antithesis, I still feel that it _is_ a trick, and that most rhymers
could follow him in a mere mechanic art. But here the judgment of Mr.
Locker would be opposed to this modest opinion, and there would be
opposition again where Mr. Locker calls Dr. O. W. Holmes "perhaps the
best living writer of this species of verse." But here we are straying
among the moderns before exhausting the ancients, of whom I fancy that
Martial, at his best, approaches most near the ideal.
Of course it is true that many of Martial's lyrics would be thought
disgusting in any well-regulated convict establishment. His gallantry is
rarely "honourable." Scaliger used to burn a copy of Martial, once a
year, on the altar of Catullus, who himself was far from prudish. But
Martial, somehow, kept his heart undepraved, and his taste in books was
excellent. How often he writes verses for the bibliophile, delighting in
the details of purple and gold, the illustrations and ornaments for his
new volume! These pieces are for the few--for amateurs, but we may all
be touched by his grief for the little lass, Erotion. He commends her in
Hades to his own father and mother gone before him, that the child may
not be frightened in the dark, friendless among the shades
"_Parvula ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras_
_Oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis_."
There is a kind of playfulness in the sorrow, and the pity of a man for a
child; pity that shows itself in a smile. I try to render that other
inscription for the tomb of little Erotion:
Here lies the body of the little maid
Erotion;
From her sixth winter's snows her eager shade
Hath fleeted on!
Whoe'er thou be that after me shalt sway
My scanty farm,
To her slight shade the yearly offering pay,
So--safe from harm--
Shall thou and thine revere the kindly _Lar_,
And _this_ alone
Be, through thy brief dominion, near or far,
A mournful stone!
Certainly he had a heart, this foul-mouthed Martial, who claimed for the
study of his book no serious hours, but moments of mirth, when men are
glad with wine, "in the reign of the Rose:" {9}
"_Haec hora est tua, cum furit Lyaeus_,
_Cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli_;
_Tunc mevel rigidi legant Catones_."
But enough of the poets of old; another day we may turn to Carew and
Suckling, Praed and Locker, poets of our own speech, lighter lyrists of
our own time. {10}