By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects

FAMILIAR VERSE

There is a species of verse, hitherto not classified distinctively, for which it seems desirable to find a name. In the first place, it may be necessary, perhaps, to emphasize once more the simple distinction between verse and poetry. There are, indeed, excellent and happy people for whom there is no difference between the two – for whom all that is not prose is poetry, and who recognise no other varieties in literature. Fortunate are they, and great is their reward. They are not disturbed by the necessity of distinguishing between this and that – of pronouncing upon what is poetry, and what is not. And, no doubt, if the critic were careful only for his individual comfort, he would adopt this rough-and-ready classification, and say no more about it. Unluckily, the distinction must be made. Rhythmical poetry must needs be in verse of some sort, but verse need not be poetry. What rhythmical poetry is in essence, the critics have not yet agreed to say; but, roughly speaking, it may be described as the language of imagination and of passion, as opposed to verse which is the vehicle, merely, of fancy and of feeling. Many can attain to the latter; the former is open only to the few. The one is the natural expression of poetic genius; the other is that of the natures which can lay claim only to poetic sentiment. The one is exceptional; the other, luckily, is tolerably widespread. The writers of verse which is not poetry have been many and able, and much enjoyment is derivable from their work.

They must not, however, all be grouped together under one embracing appellation. If there is poetry and verse, there is also verse and verse. Poetry may be said to be a fixed quality; but that is not so with the inferior article. There are many different sorts of verse. There is that which is strongly sentimental, there is that which is broadly comic, and there is that which is something between the two – neither over-sentimental nor over-comic, but altogether light in tone, and marked in the main by wit and humour. Now, to this last class of verse has been given, in general, the name of vers de société or vers d’occasion– verse of society or for the moment. Mr. Frederick Locker, nearly twenty years ago, thus labelled his volume of ‘Lyra Elegantiarum’ – still, even at this distance of time, the best available collection of our lighter verse. But the label is not sufficiently distinguishing; it is too haphazard and too narrow. The term vers de société will not include all that is commonly ranged under it. For what, in reality, is vers de société? It is what it professes to be – it is the verse of society, the verse which deals with the various phenomena of the fashionable world. The writers of genuine vers de société have themselves been men and women of society, who had caught its tone and could reproduce it in their rhythmic exercises. Mr. Locker’s ‘St. James’s Street,’ Mr. Dobson’s ‘Rotten Row,’ Prior’s lines ‘To a Child of Quality,’ and Sir Charles Hanbury Williams’s ‘Ode to Miss Harriet Bunbury’ – these are the true vers de société, the true ‘poetry’ of the ball-room and the salon.

What, then, is to become of the large amount of verse which remains unaccounted for – which is neither distinctively sentimental nor distinctively comic, and yet has no right to the designation of society-verse? Well, this is the class of verse which, as we have said, has hitherto not been christened, and for which it is desirable to find a name. It is a very delightful species of rhythmic work, and deserves a denomination of its own. It has the tone, less of society and of the Court, than of the familiar intercourse of every day – of the intercourse, that is, which goes on between people of ordinary breeding and education. It does not dabble in the phrase of drawing-rooms, nor does it rise to the height of sentiment or sink to the depths of low comedy. It is ‘familiar, but by no means vulgar.’ Its first quality is ease – absence of effort, spontaneity, freedom, a dégagé air. It is in rhythm what the perfect prose letter should be and is – flowing and unpremeditated without slovenliness – having the characteristics of the best conversation, as differentiated from mere argument or harangue. Its second quality is playfulness – a refusal to be too much in earnest in any direction, and a determination not to go to any unwelcome extreme. It has touches of sentiment and traces of wit and humour; but its dominant note is one of tempered geniality. Sometimes it may lean to the sentimental, sometimes to the witty, sometimes to the humorous; but always the style and atmosphere are those of familiar life, of everyday reunions; and hence the suggestion that it should be recognised as ‘Familiar Verse.’

I have said how numerous are its producers. Often it has been written by those who were poets as well as verse-writers; often by those who are well-known as wits and humourists. It has flourished, naturally, in, periods of tolerance rather than in strenuous times, and has been at its best, therefore, in the Caroline, Augustan, and Victorian ages of our literature. There was not much of it in the Elizabethan days, though some bears the signature of rare Ben Jonson. It came in, in full force, with the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease – with Suckling, whose ‘Prithee, why so pale, fond lover?’ is in exactly the right tone; and with Dorset, whose ‘To all you ladies now on land’ is another typical specimen. By-and-by Dryden showed how well he could write in the familiar style, when he composed the song about fair Iris:

Then came the reign of Pope, and Swift, and Prior, and Peterborough – Pope, with his truly playful ‘What is Prudery?’ Swift, with his charming lines to Stella; Prior, with his ‘Dear Chloe, how blubber’d is that pretty face!’ and Peterborough, with that masterpiece of the familiar genre:

Then there were the Lady Wortley Montagu, with her lines to Congreve; and Chesterfield, with his ‘Advice to a Lady in Autumn’; Fielding, with his inimitable epistles to Walpole; and Goldsmith, with his incomparable ‘Retaliation.’ Later, again, came Cowper, with his ‘Nose and Eyes’ and ‘Names of Little Note’; Byron, with his verses ‘To Tom Moore’; Moore himself, with his ‘Time I’ve Lost in Wooing’; Barham, with his ‘Lines left at Hook’s’; Peacock, Canning, James Smith, Praed, and Mahony; and, still later, Hood, with his ‘Clapham Academy’; Brough, with his ‘Neighbour Nelly’; Mortimer Collins, with his tribute to his ‘Old Coat’; and a hundred others, all of whom could play delightfully on the familiar string.

And, happily, the manufacture of familiar verse still goes on swimmingly. The Laureate has engaged in it, and even Mr. Browning has condescended to it. It has never, in the whole course of its career, been written better than by Mr. Holmes and Mr. Lowell, and, among ourselves, by Mr. Frederick Locker and Mr. Austin Dobson. No age, indeed, was ever more favourable than our own for the composition of verse which should, above all things, never be betrayed into exaggeration – which may have, if it please, a soupçon of wit and humour, and even of sentiment, but which should, in particular, be tolerant and urbane.

SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND

It was with true instinct that one of our most vigorous orators, desiring the other day to emphasize by quotation an appeal to the patriotic sentiments of his audience, went to a play of Shakespeare’s for the passage. For the bard of Avon is par excellence the poet of England. Keen as, in later years, has been the love of country displayed by such men as Thomson, Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, and Mr. Swinburne, it is in the pages of Shakespeare that we find the most magnificent outbursts of national feeling. Let it be granted that the poet has not hesitated to throw a few satiric pebbles at his countrymen. Everybody will recall the amusing colloquy in ‘Hamlet,’ in which the Gravedigger humorously reflects upon the sanity of the English people, declaring that, if Hamlet be mad, it will not be noted in England, for there the men are as mad as he is. And then there is that other diverting colloquy in ‘Othello,’ wherein Iago stigmatizes Englishmen as ‘most potent in potting,’ asserting that they ‘drink with facility your Dane dead drunk,’ so expert is your Englishman in his drinking.

But these be the gibes of Danes and Italians – not of the man Shakespeare or of Englishmen speaking with his voice. True it is that if Shakespeare was strongly patriotic, he was so only in common with the Englishmen of his day. He lived in an age when the English people were consumed with a spirit of burning affection for the isle which they inhabited – when the great religious upheaval which we call the Reformation had set the blood coursing through their veins, and infused new life into their heart and brain – and when the fear of Spanish domination had joined all classes in an indissoluble bond of love and loyalty. Probably the English nation never was more thoroughly united, more profoundedly in earnest, more closely attached to its traditions and its soil, than in those spacious times of great Elizabeth. And if Shakespeare produced play after play dealing with the history of his country, and presenting on the boards many of the most famous Englishmen of the past, he was led to do so, no doubt, not only because the topic had attractions for him, but because the Englishmen of his day revelled in such reminders of the stirring years gone by – of the great soldiers, statesmen, clerics, and the like, who had shed lustre on the national name. There must have been a decided and continuous demand for these elaborate chronicle-dramas, and it may be argued that the poet, in supplying them, did but comply with the call made upon him by his public patrons.

The fact, however, that Shakespeare found historical plays a paying product will not wholly account for the powerfully patriotic strain in which they were composed. It is not only that the long series stretching from ‘King John’ to ‘Henry VIII.’ pulses from beginning to end with love of, and pride in, country; it is not only that the poet makes great Englishmen speak greatly – that, placing them in positions in which declarations of patriotism are natural and necessary, he makes those declarations eloquent and thrilling; – it is that he charges all his passages about England and the English with a passion of enthusiasm which can be explained only on the hypothesis that he was throwing his whole heart into the work, and sympathized deeply with the utterances of his creations. There is, for instance, something more than mere appropriateness to the character and the occasion in that marvellous piece of eulogy of which, in ‘Richard II.,’ John of Gaunt is made the spokesman. The poet seems unable to hold his admiration within bounds:

on what other country has such magnificent praise been poured out by her poets? One can see, too, how sincere Shakespeare was in his feelings as an Englishman by the phrases and the epithets he everywhere bestows upon his fatherland. There is Chorus’s famous description of it in ‘Henry V.’ as ‘Little body with a mighty heart;’ there is the Queen’s allusion, in ‘Henry VI.,’ to its ‘blessed shore.’ Now it is called ‘fair,’ now ‘fertile,’ and now ‘happy.’ ‘Dear mother England,’ cries the Bastard in ‘King John.’ Bolingbroke rejoices that, though banished, he yet can boast that he is ‘a true-born Englishman;’ and elsewhere we read of ‘our lusty English,’ our ‘noble English,’ our ‘hearts of England’s breed’ – Rambures, the Frenchman, admitting that ‘that island of England breeds very valiant creatures.’

And mark how Shakespeare causes one and all of his patriots to congratulate themselves that Britain is an island. Tennyson has called upon his countrymen to

and elsewhere has made a ‘Tory member’s elder son’ say —

Thomson, too, tells how ‘the rushing flood’ turned ‘this favoured isle’ ‘flashing from the continent aside,’ ‘its guardian she.’ But Shakespeare had been before both in these expressions of gratitude for our insularity. The Archduke of Austria, in ‘King John,’ speaks of England as

So, in ‘Richard II.,’ John of Gaunt describes England as

‘The silver sea,’ he says, serves it

while once again he refers to England as

There is one thing, however, without which, in Shakespeare’s view, even our lucky isolation cannot avail to save us, as a nation, from destruction. ‘If they (the English) were true within themselves they need not to fear, although all nations were set against them.’ So wrote Andrew Borde, when Henry VIII. was King; and in the old play of ‘John, King of England’ the author made one of his personæ say:

So Shakespeare, when he came to treat of the same subject, made the Bastard declare that

There is much virtue in an ‘if,’ and the poet repeats the warning in another play. In ‘3 Henry VI.’ Hastings says:

That, again, which most troubles John of Gaunt, in the passage already quoted, is the fact that England, which was wont to conquer others, ‘Hath made a shameful conquest of itself;’ while Chorus, in ‘Henry V.,’ laments that France has found in England ‘a nest of hollow bosoms, which he fills with treacherous crowns,’ adding,

Here, then, is a lesson for our times. What Shakespeare felt to be true in his own day is equally, nay more, true now – that England, ‘set in a silver sea,’ is safe from all assaults, save those which she may suffer at the hands of her own ‘degenerate and ingrate’ sons.

HEREDITY IN SONG

It is said that the verses in a recent number of Macmillan’s Magazine, entitled ‘In Capri,’ and signed ‘W. Wordsworth,’ are from the pen of a grandson of the famous author of ‘The Excursion.’ They are gracefully written, in an agreeable rhythm, and with much command of felicitous expression. If, therefore, the writer has indeed the relationship to the great Wordsworth which rumour assigns him, the fact is interesting, and suggests some considerations as to the transmission of the poetic faculty from one generation to another.

One might have thought that this transmission would have been tolerably common; that the sons at least, if not the grandsons, of a genuine poet could scarcely fail to inherit something of their progenitor’s peculiar powers. One might even have supposed that poetry would run – as other things have run – in families, making the ‘bards’ almost a gens, or class, by themselves. Poetry, after all, is an affair mainly of the temperament – of fancy and imagination, of feeling and passion; and these are qualities which one might have imagined would be handed down, not greatly impaired, from father to son, and so on, for at least a fairly prolonged period.

There have, indeed, been instances in which literary capacity has been a special characteristic of persons in close relationship to each other: one thinks at once of the Sheridans, the Coleridges, the Wordsworths, and others who have been notable for their productiveness in prose and verse. But the cases in which the purely poetic gift – the vision and the faculty divine – has been inherited and exercised are few indeed. A certain intellectual power will mark the members of a family, and exhibit itself in various attractive ways, but less in the domain of poetry than any other. It would seem that sheer mental force can be communicated, but that the higher qualities of the human spirit are not so readily transmitted; are, in fact, hardly transmissible, at any rate in quite the same degree. Not only are the examples of poetic heredity rare, but there are still fewer, certainly in the history of English literature, in which the son or the daughter has equalled the parent in poetic capacity.

The case of the Colmans and the Dibdins is one of literary rather than poetic faculty. In each instance the father and son wrote verse, much of it excellent in its way, but assuredly not of the first order. The one name will always be associated with admirably humorous performances, while the other will continue to shine resplendent on the roll of writers of sea-songs. But work of that sort is a matter of knack rather than of inspiration, and ‘poetry’ is a word hardly to be mentioned in remote connection with it. Very different are the circumstances when we come to the children of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – to Hartley and to Sara, and to Hartley in particular. Sara had less than a half share of the poetic patrimony. She penned very pleasant rhymes for children, and some still linger in the collections; but they are not of singular merit. Much better than these are the lyrics which are to be found scattered through her prose romance, ‘Phantasmion’ – lyrics which undoubtedly have imaginative value. They are much less known than they deserve to be, though a few of them have recently been reprinted. They are not, however, to be compared with the best that Hartley furnished. Sara had ideas, but her mode of expression inclined to the turgid. Hartley was clearer and smoother in his style, and now and then, as in some of his sonnets, and especially in the lines beginning,

he actually attained perfection. The last-named gem is likely to last as long as anything written by the elder Coleridge.

Mrs. Norton and Lady Dufferin are instances of ability descending from grandfather to granddaughters, and of ability, moreover, which, as regards poetical writing, grew and improved in the process of descent. The author of ‘The Duenna’ produced a number of neat and lively rhymes, but, great as Sheridan was as a dramatist, he was certainly not a poet. Now, his granddaughters were really poets, though by no means of the front rank. Scarcely any of Mrs. Norton’s verse is now habitually read, but some of it is well worth reading. On the other hand, Lady Dufferin, who published much less than her sister did, is much better remembered, if only because she was the author of ‘Katie’s Letter’ and ‘The Irish Emigrant’s Lament.’ These pieces are distinguished by true human feeling, and hence their continued popularity. Of Adelaide Anne Procter, daughter of ‘Barry Cornwall,’ it is not necessary to say much, for certain of her lyrics are familiar (in feminine mouths, at any rate) as household words. Everyone, alas! knows ‘The Lost Chord;’ many of us wish that we did not. That the ‘Legends and Lyrics’ of Adelaide are considerably more widely known than anything produced by her father is, it is to be feared, only too true; and yet, full as they are of tenderness and grace, they have not the claims to attention possessed by the songs and dramatic fragments of ‘Barry Cornwall.’ The latter are unduly neglected; while the songs are among the most virile and vigorous in the language. The father’s was altogether the stronger nature; the daughter set an example of gentle lachrymoseness, which has been followed, unfortunately, by too many female rhymers.

Of more recent years, several examples of heredity in song have been vouchsafed to us. The younger Hood had his father’s fluency, but, apparently, very little of his imaginative power. Philip Bourke Marston was, in the lyric vein, as successful, perhaps, as Dr. Westland Marston had been in the dramatic, and it is probable that he will always be more largely read, ‘sicklied o’er’ though his poetic outcome be ‘with the pale cast of thought.’ The works of the present Lord Lytton and of Mr. Aubrey de Vere are too well appreciated to need much characterization. These writers would no doubt deprecate any comparison of their products with those of the first Lord Lytton and Sir Aubrey de Vere, but it is one from which, on the score of absolute merit, they would have no occasion to shrink. Mr. Oscar Wilde and Mr. Eric Mackay have written verse, no doubt, because Lady Wilde and Dr. Charles Mackay wrote verse before them; and the Hon. Hallam Tennyson has shown, in a rhythmical version of a nursery tale, that some measure of poetic faculty has been meted out to him.

STINGS FOR THE STINGY

Few frailties of mankind have been more bitterly scouted than that of meanness in money matters. Of the two, prodigality has been thought the better. The man who is poor has not been censured for being careful; rather has he been praised for not being ashamed to own his poverty. But the spectacle of the rich man hoarding his wealth and not living according to his means has always excited the displeasure of mankind – not only, perhaps, because money kept in store seems for the time useless, but because if expended it would be very acceptable to its recipients. The world has commended the man who gives out of his superfluity, but it has condemned him who keeps too much to himself. All literature, from the earliest times, is full of denunciation of such a character. The miserly and the stingy have been impaled over and over again on the sword of the satirist.

Meanness has not been confined to the obscure; it has had some distinguished votaries – as, for example, his Gracious Majesty King James I., whose economical propensities were notorious. Of him it was admirably written that

Take, again, the great Duke of Marlborough, whose two chief qualities of mind were very happily hit off in the couplet ‘On a High Bridge over a Small Stream at Blenheim’:

Garrick was accused of money-grubbing, and his weakness in that respect was the subject of more than one smart jest by Foote. When somebody, àpropos of a remark made by Garrick on the parsimony of others, asked, ‘Why on earth doesn’t Garrick take the beam out of his own eye before attacking the mote in other people’s?’ – Foote replied, ‘He is not sure of selling the timber.’ And again, when Garrick, after dropping a guinea and failing to find it, said it had ‘gone to the devil, he thought,’ Foote remarked, ‘Well, David, let you alone for making a guinea go farther than anybody else’ – a repartee which was perhaps in the mind of Shirley Brooks when, referring to the excellence of Scotch shooting at long distances, he wrote: