PRIZE POEMS, ETC.
In the course of my Oxford career I tried for two Newdigate Prize poems,
"The Suttees" and the "African Desert," won respectively by Claughton,
now Bishop of St. Albans, and Rickards, whose honours of course I ought
to know, but don't. A good-looking and well-speaking friend of mine,
E.H. Abney, now a Canon, was so certain that the said prizes in those
two successive years were to fall to me, that he learnt my poems by
heart in order to recite them as my speech-substitute in the Sheldonian
Theatre at Commemoration, and he used frequently to look in upon me to
be coached in his recital. It was rumoured that I came second on both
occasions,--one of them certainly had a 2 marked on it when returned to
me, but I know not who placed it there. However, my pieces were
afterwards printed; both separately, and among my "Ballads and Poems,"
by Hall and Virtue, and are now before me. As an impartial and veteran
judge of such _literaria_, I am bold to say they are far better than I
thought, and might fairly have won Newdigate prizes, even as friend
Abney & Co. were sure they would.
At the close of my University career came, of course, the Great Go,
which I had to do as I did the Little Go, all on paper; for I could not
answer _vivâ voce_. And this rule then, whatever may be the case now,
prevented me from going in for honours, though I had read for a first,
and hoped at least to get a second. Neither of these, nor even a third
class, was technically possible, if I could not stand a two days' ordeal
of _vivâ voce_ examination, part of the whole week then exacted.
However, I did all at my best on paper, specially the translations from
classic poets in verse: whereof I'll find a specimen anon. The issue of
all was that I was offered an honorary fourth class,--which I refused,
as not willing to appear at the bottom of the list of all,
alphabetically,--and so my tutor, Mr. Biscoe, not wishing to lose the
honour for our college, managed to get it transferred to another of his
pupils, Mr. Thistlethwaite, whose father wrote to thank me for this
unexpected though not unmerited luck falling to his son.
One short presentable piece of verse-making in the schools is as below
from Virgil: there were also three odes of Horace, a chorus from
Æschylus, and more from other Greek and Latin poets.
"Sicilian Muses, sing we loftier strains!
The humble tamarisk and woodland plains
Delight not all; if woods and groves we try,
Be the groves worthy of a consul's eye.
Told by the Sibyl's song, the 'latter time'
Is come, and dispensations roll sublime
In new and glorious order; spring again
With Virgo comes, and Saturn's golden reign.
A heavenly band from heaven's bright realm descends,
All evil ceases, and all discord ends.
Do thou with favouring eye, Lucina chaste,
Regard the wondrous babe,--his coming haste,--
For under him the iron age shall cease,
And the vast world rejoice in golden peace," &c. &c.
I select this bit, famous for being one of the places in Virgil which
goes to prove that the Sibylline books (to which the Augustan poets had
easy access) quoted Isaiah's prophecies of Christ and the Millennium. It
will be considered that my public versifying was quite extempore, as in
fact is common with me. For other college memories in the literary line,
I may just mention certain brochures or parodies, initialed or
anonymous, whereto I must now plead guilty for the first time;
reflecting, amongst other topics, on Montgomery's Oxford, St. Mary's
theology, Mr. Rickard's "African Desert," and Garbet's pronounced and
rather absurd aestheticism as an examiner. Here are morsels of each in
order:--
"Who praises Oxford?--some small buzzing thing,
Some starveling songster on a tiny wing,--
(_N.B._ They call the insect Bob, I know,
I heard a printer's devil call it so)--
So fondly tells his admiration vast
No one can call the chastened strains bombast,
Though epitheted substantives immense
Claim for each lofty sound the _caret_ sense," &c. &c.
Next, a bit from my Low Church onslaught on St. Mary's in the Hampden
case, being part of "The Oxford Controversy":--
"Though vanquished oft, in falsehood undismayed,
Like heretics in flaming vest arrayed
Each angry Don lifts high his injured head,
Or 'stands between the living and the dead.'
Still from St. Mary's pulpit echoes wide
Primó, beware of truth, whate'er betide;
Deinde, from deep Charybdis while you steer
Lest damned Socinus charm you with his sneer,
Watch above all, so not _Saint_ Thomas spake,
Lest upon Calvin, Scylla's rook, you break," &c. &c.
These forgotten trivials, wherein the allusions do not now show clear,
are, I know, barely excusable even thus curtly: but I choose to save a
touch or two from annihilation. Here is another little bit; this time
from a somewhat vicious parody on my rival Rickard's prize poem: it is
fairest to produce at length first his serious conclusion to the normal
fifty-liner, and then my less reverent imitation of it. Here, then, is
the end of Rickard's poem:--
"Bright was the doom which snatched her favourite son,
Nor came too soon to him whose task was done.
Long burned his restless spirit to explore
That stream which eye had never tracked before,
Whose course, 'tis said, in Western springs begun
Flows on eternal to the rising sun!
Though thousand perils seemed to bar his way,
And all save him shrunk backward in dismay,
Still hope prophetic poured the ardent prayer
To reach that stream, though doomed to perish there!
That prayer was heard; by Niger's mystic flood
One rapturous day the speechless dreamer stood,
Fixt on that stream his glistening eyes he kept,--
The sun went down,--the wayworn wanderer slept!"
So much for the prize-taker; the prize-loser vented his spleen as
thus:--
"Bright was the doom that diddled Mungo Park,
Yet very palpably obscure and dark.
Long burned his throat, for want of coming nigh
That stream he long'd and pray'd for wistfully,
Whose course, 'tis said, that no one can tell where
It flows eternal; guessing isn't fair.
Though miles a thousand had he tramp'd along,
And all, save him, were sure that path was wrong,
Still hope prophetic poured the ardent prayer
He'd find that stream,--if it was anywhere!
That prayer was heard, of course, though no one knows
Where this said Niger never flowed, or flows;
All that is known is, that a dreamer stood
In speechless transport by a mystic flood,
And after fixing on't his glistening eyes,
The sun goes down, and so the dreamer dies!"
For the fourth promised specimen, the best excuse is that Garbet really
did utter the words quoted,--and the answer he received about love is
exact, and became famous:--
"'Didst e'er read Dante!'--Never. 'Cruel man!
Take, take him, Williams,--I--I never can.'"
_N.B._--Williams was the other examiner. Garbet went on with a further
question nevertheless,--as he was affectedly fond of Italian:--
"'Dost know the language love delights in most?
If thou dost not, thy character is lost.'
'Yes, sir!'--the youth retorts with just surprise,
'Love's language is the language of the eyes!'"
In those days, as perhaps also in these, like Pope, "I spake in
numbers," verse being almost--well, not quite--easier than prose. In
fact, some of my critics have heretofore to my disparagement stumbled on
the printed truth that he is little better than an improvisatore in
rhyme. And this word "rhyme" reminds me now of a very curious question I
raised some years after my Oxford days in more than one magazine
article, as to when rhyme was invented, and by whom: the conclusion
being that intoning monks found out how easily the cases of Latin nouns
and tenses of verbs, &c., jingled with each other, and that troubadours
and trouveres carried thus the seeds of song all over Europe in about
the ninth century, until which time rhythm was the only recognised form
of versification, rhyme having strangely escaped discovery for more than
four thousand years. Is it not a marvel (and another marvel that no one
noticed it before) that not one of the old poets, Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
and I think Sanscrit, Arabic, and Celtic too, ever (except by manifest
accident, now intentionally ignored) stumbled upon the good idea of
terminating their metres with rhyme? Where is there any ode of Horace,
or Anacreon,--where any psalm of David; any epigram of Martial, any
heroic verse of Virgil, or philosophic argument of
Lucretius,--decorated, enlivened, and brightened by the now only too
frequent ornament of rhyme?
* * * * *
I have just found among my old archived papers, faded by nearly six
decades of antiquity, a treatise which I wrote at nineteen, styled by me
"A Vindication of the Wisdom of Scripture in Matters of Natural
Science." This has never seen the light, even in extracts; and probably
never can attain to the dignity of print, seeing it is written against
all compositor law on both sides up and down of a quarto paper book.
Therein are treated, from both the scriptural and the scientific points
of view, many subjects, of which these are some: Cosmogony, miracles (in
chief Joshua's sun and moon), the circulation of the blood revealed in
Ecclesiastes, magnetism as mentioned by Job, "He spreadeth out the
north over the empty space and hangeth the world upon nothing," the
blood's innate vitality--"which is the life thereof," the earth's
centre, or orbit, and inclination, astronomy, spirits, the rainbow, the
final conflagration of our atmosphere to purify the globe, and many
other matters terrestrial and celestial. Some day a patient scribe may
be found to decipher this decayed manuscript and set out orderly its
miscellaneous contents. I began it at eighteen, and finished it when at
Oxford.
There is also now before me another faded copybook of my early Christ
Church days containing ninety-one striking parallel passages between
Horace and Holy Writ; some being very remarkable, as Hor. _Sat._ i. 8,
and Isaiah xliv. 13, &c., about "making a god of a tree whereof he
burneth part:" also such well-known lines as "Quid sit futurum eras,
fuge quærere," and "Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ
Tempora Di superi?"--compared with "Take no thought for the morrow" and
"Boast not thyself of to-morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may
bring forth." With many more; in fact I collected nearly a hundred out
of Horace, besides a few from others of the classics.