Essays in Little Part 3

The place in which the deathless strains welled from the singer's heart was henceforth known as "b.u.t.terfly Bower." He now wrote a novel, "The Aylmers," which has gone where the old moons go, and he became rather a literary lion, and made the acquaintance of Theodore Hook. The loss of a son caused him to write some devotional verses, which were not what he did best; and now he began to try comedies. One of them, _Sold for a Song_, succeeded very well. In the stage-coach between Wycombe Abbey and London he wrote a successful little _lever de rideau_ called _Perfection_; and it was lucky that he opened this vein, for his wife's Irish property got into an Irish bog of dishonesty and difficulty. Thirty- five pieces were contributed by him to the British stage. After a long illness, he died on April 22nd, 1829. He did not live, this b.u.t.terfly minstrel, into the winter of human age.

Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom Moore of much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of the most vapid and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits, trees, breeze, sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds, regret, deception, and so forth, into fervid anapaestics. Perhaps his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry composers will endure and singers will accept. Why, "words for music" are almost invariably trash now, though the words of Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister art, and don't know anything about it. But any one can see that words like Bayly's are and have long been much more popular with musical people than words like Sh.e.l.ley's, Keats's, Shakespeare's, Fletcher's, Lovelace's, or Carew's. The natural explanation is not flattering to musical people: at all events, the singing world doted on Bayly.

"She never blamed him--never, But received him when he came With a welcome sort of s.h.i.+ver, And she tried to look the same.

"But vainly she dissembled, For whene'er she tried to smile, A tear unbidden trembled In her blue eye all the while."

This was pleasant for "him"; but the point is that these are lines to an Indian air. Sh.e.l.ley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines to an Indian air; but we may "swear, and save our oath," that the singers preferred Bayly's. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal the popularity of what follows. I shall ask the persevering reader to tell me where Bayly ends, and where parody begins:

"When the eye of beauty closes, When the weary are at rest, When the shade the sunset throws is But a vapour in the west; When the moonlight tips the billow With a wreath of silver foam, And the whisper of the willow Breaks the slumber of the gnome,-- Night may come, but sleep will linger, When the spirit, all forlorn, Shuts its ear against the singer, And the rustle of the corn Round the sad old mansion sobbing Bids the wakeful maid recall Who it was that caused the throbbing Of her bosom at the ball."

Will this not do to sing just as well as the original? and is it not true that "almost any man you please could reel it off for days together"?

Anything will do that speaks of forgetting people, and of being forsaken, and about the sunset, and the ivy, and the rose.

"Tell me no more that the tide of thine anguish Is red as the heart's blood and salt as the sea; That the stars in their courses command thee to languish, That the hand of enjoyment is loosened from thee!

"Tell me no more that, forgotten, forsaken, Thou roamest the wild wood, thou sigh'st on the sh.o.r.e.

Nay, rent is the pledge that of old we had taken, And the words that have bound me, they bind thee no more!

"Ere the sun had gone down on thy sorrow, the maidens Were wreathing the orange's bud in thy hair, And the trumpets were tuning the musical cadence That gave thee, a bride, to the baronet's heir.

"Farewell, may no thought pierce thy breast of thy treason; Farewell, and be happy in Hubert's embrace.

Be the belle of the ball, be the bride of the season, With diamonds bedizened and languid in lace."

This is mine, and I say, with modest pride, that it is quite as good as--

"Go, may'st thou be happy, Though sadly we part, In life's early summer Grief breaks not the heart.

"The ills that a.s.sail us As speedily pa.s.s As shades o'er a mirror, Which stain not the gla.s.s."

Anybody could do it, we say, in what Edgar Poe calls "the mad pride of intellectuality," and it certainly looks as if it could be done by anybody. For example, take Bayly as a moralist. His ideas are out of the centre. This is about his standard:

"CRUELTY.

"'Break not the thread the spider Is labouring to weave.'

I said, nor as I eyed her Could dream she would deceive.

"Her brow was pure and candid, Her tender eyes above; And I, if ever man did, Fell hopelessly in love.

"For who could deem that cruel So fair a face might be?

That eyes so like a jewel Were only paste for me?

"I wove my thread, aspiring Within her heart to climb; I wove with zeal untiring For ever such a time!

"But, ah! that thread was broken All by her fingers fair, The vows and prayers I've spoken Are vanished into air!"

Did Bayly write that ditty or did I? Upon my word, I can hardly tell. I am being hypnotised by Bayly. I lisp in numbers, and the numbers come like mad. I can hardly ask for a light without abounding in his artless vein. Easy, easy it seems; and yet it was Bayly after all, not you nor I, who wrote the cla.s.sic--

"I'll hang my harp on a willow tree, And I'll go to the war again, For a peaceful home has no charm for me, A battlefield no pain; The lady I love will soon be a bride, With a diadem on her brow.

Ah, why did she flatter my boyish pride?

She is going to leave me now!"

It is like listening, in the sad yellow evening, to the strains of a barrel organ, faint and sweet, and far away. A world of memories come jigging back--foolish fancies, dreams, desires, all beckoning and bobbing to the old tune:

"Oh had I but loved with a boyish love, It would have been well for me."

How does Bayly manage it? What is the trick of it, the obvious, simple, meretricious trick, which somehow, after all, let us mock as we will, Bayly could do, and we cannot? He really had a slim, serviceable, smirking, and sighing little talent of his own; and--well, we have not even that. n.o.body forgets

"The lady I love will soon be a bride."

n.o.body remembers our cultivated epics and esoteric sonnets, oh brother minor poet, _mon semblable_, _mon frere_! Nor can we rival, though we publish our books on the largest paper, the buried popularity of

"Gaily the troubadour Touched his guitar When he was hastening Home from the war, Singing, "From Palestine Hither I come, Lady love! Lady love!

Welcome me home!"

Of course this is, historically, a very incorrect rendering of a Languedoc crusader; and the impression is not mediaeval, but of the comic opera. Any one of us could get in more local colour for the money, and give the crusader a cithern or citole instead of a guitar. This is how we should do "Gaily the Troubadour" nowadays:--

"Sir Ralph he is hardy and mickle of might, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_!

Soldans seven hath he slain in fight, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!

"Sir Ralph he rideth in riven mail, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_!

Beneath his nasal is his dark face pale, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!

"His eyes they blaze as the burning coal, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_!

He smiteth a stave on his gold citole, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!

"From her mangonel she looketh forth, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_!

'Who is he spurreth so late to the north?'

_Honneur a la belle Isoline_!

"Hark! for he speaketh a knightly name, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_!

And her wan cheek glows as a burning flame, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!

"For Sir Ralph he is hardy and mickle of might, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_!

And his love shall ungirdle his sword to-night, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!"

Such is the romantic, esoteric, old French way of saying--

"Hark, 'tis the troubadour Breathing her name Under the battlement Softly he came, Singing, "From Palestine Hither I come.

Lady love! Lady love!

Welcome me home!"

The moral of all this is that minor poetry has its fas.h.i.+ons, and that the b.u.t.terfly Bayly could versify very successfully in the fas.h.i.+on of a time simpler and less pedantic than our own. On the whole, minor poetry for minor poetry, this artless singer, piping his native drawing-room notes, gave a great deal of perfectly harmless, if highly uncultivated, enjoyment.

It must not be fancied that Mr. Bayly had only one string to his bow--or, rather, to his lyre. He wrote a great deal, to be sure, about the pa.s.sion of love, which Count Tolstoi thinks we make too much of. He did not dream that the affairs of the heart should be regulated by the State--by the Permanent Secretary of the Marriage Office. That is what we are coming to, of course, unless the enthusiasts of "free love" and "go away as you please" failed with their little programme. No doubt there would be poetry if the State regulated or left wholly unregulated the affections of the future. Mr. Bayly, living in other times, among other manners, piped of the hard tyranny of a mother:

"We met, 'twas in a crowd, and I thought he would shun me.

He came, I could not breathe, for his eye was upon me.

He spoke, his words were cold, and his smile was unaltered, I knew how much he felt, for his deep-toned voice faltered.