Gossip in a Library Part 11

ENGLAND'S TRUST AND OTHER POEMS. _By Lord John Manners. London: printed for J.G. & J. Rivington, St. Paul's Church Yard, and Waterloo Place, Pall Mall_. 1841.

My newspaper informed me this morning that Lord John Manners took his seat last night, in the Upper House, as the Duke of Rutland. These little romantic surprises are denied to Americans, who do not find that old friends get new names, which are very old names, in the course of a night. My Transatlantic readers will never have to grow accustomed to speak of Mr. Lowell as the Earl of Mount Auburn, and I firmly believe that Mr. Howells would consider it a chastis.e.m.e.nt to be hopelessly enn.o.bled. But my thoughts went wanderting back at my breakfast to-day to those far-away times, the fresh memory of which was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was an ardent and ingenuous young patriot, who never dreamed of being a peer, and who hoped to refas.h.i.+on his country to the harp of Amphion.

So I turned, with a.s.suredly no feeling of disrespect, to that corner of my library where the _peches de jeunesse_ stand--the little books of early verses which the respectable authors of the same would destroy if they could--and I took down _England's Trust_.

Fifty years ago a group of young men, all of them fresh from Oxford and Cambridge, most of them more or less born in the purple of good families, banded themselves together to create a sort of aristocratic democracy. They called themselves "Young England," and the chronicle of them--is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli's _Coningsby_? In the hero of that novel people saw a portrait of the leader of the group, the Hon. George Percy Sydney Smythe, to whom also the poems now before us, _parvus non parvae pignus amicitiae_, were dedicated in a warm inscription. The Sidonia of the story was doubtless only echoing what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he said: "Man is only truly great when he acts from the pa.s.sions, never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." It was the theory of Young England that the historic memory must be awakened in the lower cla.s.ses; that utilitarianism was sapping the very vitals of society, and that ballads and May-poles and quaint festivities and processions of a loyal peasantry were the proper things for politicians to encourage. It was all very young, and of course it came to nothing. But I do not know that the Primrose League is any improvement upon it, and I fancy that when the Duke of Rutland looks back across the half-century he sees something to smile at, but nothing to blush for.

One of the notions that Young England had got hold of was that famous saying of Fletcher of Saltoun's friend about making the ballads of a people. So they set themselves verse-making, and a quaint little collection of books it was that they produced, all smelling alike at this time of day, with a faint, faded perfume of the hay-stack, countrified and wild. Mr. Smythe, who presently became the seventh Viscount Strangford and one of the wittiest of Morning Chroniclers, only to die bitterly lamented before the age of forty, wrote _Historic Fancies_, Mr. Faber, then a fellow of University College, Oxford, and afterwards a leading spirit among English Catholics, published _The Cherwell Water-Lily_, in 1840, and on the heels of this discreet volume came the poems of Lord John Manners.

When _England's Trust_ appeared, its author had just left Cambridge.

Almost immediately afterward, it was decided that Young England ought to be represented in Parliament, where its Utopian chivalries, it was believed, needed only to be heard to prevail. Accordingly Lord John Manners presented himself, in June 1841, as one of the Conservative candidates for the borough of Newark. He was elected, and so was the other Tory candidate, a man already distinguished, and at present known to the entire world as Mr. W.E. Gladstone. On the hustings, Lord John Manners was a good deal heckled, and in particular he was teased excessively about a certain couplet in _England's Trust_. I am not going to repeat that couplet here, for after nearly half a century the Duke of Rutland has a right to be forgiven that extraordinary indiscretion. If any of my readers turn to the volume for themselves, which, of course, I have no power to prevent their doing, they will probably exclaim:

"Was it the Duke of Rutland who wrote _that?_" for if frequency of quotation is the hall-mark of popularity, his Grace must be one of the most popular of our living poets.

There is something exceedingly pathetic in this little volume. Its weakness as verse, for it certainly is weak, had nothing ign.o.ble about it, and what is weak without being in the least base has already a negative distinction. The author hopes to be a Lovelace or a Montrose, equally ready to do his monarch service with sword or pen. The Duke of Rutland has not quite been a Montrose, but he has been something less brilliant and much more useful, a faithful servant of his country, through an upright and laborious life. The young poet of 1841, thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the moment, looked for a return of the high festivals of the Church, for a victory of faith over all its Paynim foes. "The worst evils," he writes, "from which we are now suffering, have arisen from our ignorant contempt or neglect of the rules of the Church." He was full of Newman and Pusey, of the great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind of fervour blowing through England from the common-room of Oriel. Now all is changed past recognition, and with, perhaps, the solitary exception of Cardinal Newman, preserved in extreme old age, like some precious exotic, in his Birmingham cloister, the Duke of Rutland may look through the length and breadth of England without recovering one of those lost faces that fed the pure pa.s.sion of his youth.

The hand which brought the flame from Oriel to the Cambridge scholar was that of the Rev. Frederick William Faber, and a great number of the poems in _England's Trust_ are dedicated to him openly or secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed to Faber, which is very pleasant to read:

_Dear Friend! thou askest me to sing our loves, And sing them fain would I; but I do fear To mar so soft a theme; a theme that moves My heart unto its core. O friend most dear!

No light request is thine; albeit it proves Thy gentleness and love, that do appear When absent thus, and in soft looks when near.

Surely, if ever two fond hearts were, twined In a most holy, mystic knot, so now Are ours; not common are the ties that bind My soul to thine; a dear Apostle thou, I a young Neophyte that yearns to find The sacred truth, and stamp upon his brow The Cross, dread sign of his baptismal vow!_

The Apostle was only twelve months older than the Neophyte, who was in his twenty-third year, but he was a somewhat better as well as stronger poet. _The Cherwell Water-Lily_ is rather a rare book now, and I may perhaps be allowed to give an example of Faber's style.

It is from one of many poems in which, with something borrowed too consciously from Wordsworth, who was the very Apollo of Young England, there Is yet a rendering of the beauty and mystery of Oxford, and of the delicate sylvan scenery which surrounds it, which is wholly original;

_There is a well, a willow-shaded spot.

Cool in the noon-tide gleam, With rushes nodding in the little stream, And blue forget-me-not.

Set in thick tufts along the bushy marge With big bright eyes of gold; And glorious water-plants, like fans, unfold Their blossoms strange and large.

That wandering boy, young Hylas, did not find Beauties so rich and rare, Where swallow-wort and pale-bright maiden's hair And dog-gra.s.s richly twined.

A sloping bank ran round it like a crown, Whereon a purple cloud Of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd, Had settled softly down.

And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells From Oxford's holy towers Came down the stream, and went among the flowers, And died in little swells_.

These two extracts give a fair notion of the Tractarian poetry, with its purity, its idealism, its love of Nature and its unreal conception of life, Faber also wrote an _England's Trust_, before Lord John Manners published his; and in this he rejoices in the pa.s.sing away of all the old sensual confidence, and in the coming of a new age of humility and spirituality. Alas! it never came! There was a roll in the wave of thought, a few beautiful sh.e.l.ls were thrown up on the sh.o.r.e of literature, and then the little eddy of Tractarianism was broken and spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind. We touch with reverend pity the volumes without which we should scarcely know that Young England had ever existed, and we refuse to believe that all the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which they are the mere ashes have wholly pa.s.sed away. They have become spread over a wide expanse of effort, and no one knows who has been graciously affected by them. Who shall say that some distant echo of the Cherwell harp was not sounding in the heart of Gordon when he went to his African martyrdom? It is her adventurers, whether of the pen or of the sword, that have made England what she is. But if every adventurer succeeded, where would the adventure be?

The Duke of Rutland soon repeated his first little heroic expedition into the land of verses. He published a volume of _English Ballads_; but this has not the historical interest which makes _England's Trust_ a curiosity. He has written about Church Rates, and the Colonies, and the Importance of Literature to Men of Business, but never again of his reveries in Neville's Court nor of his determination to emulate the virtues of King Charles the Martyr. No matter! If all our hereditary legislators were as high-minded and single-hearted as the new Duke of Rutland, the reform of the House of Lords would scarcely be a burning question.

IONICA

IONICA. _Smith Elder & Co., 65, Cornhill_. 1858.

Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds. You throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pa.s.s over it, and by and by it turns up again somewhere uninjured, with all the pure fire lambent in its facets. No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do get lost, dragged down the vortex of a change of fas.h.i.+on, and never thrown back again to light. But the quant.i.ty of excellent verse produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very fairly within the same proportions. The verse-market is never really glutted, and while popular ma.s.ses of what Robert Browning calls "deciduous trash" survive their own generation, only to be carted away, the little excellent, unnoticed book gradually pushes its path up silently into fame.

These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing with the small volume of 116 pages called _Ionica_, long ago ushered into the world so silently that its publication did not cause a single ripple on the sea of literature. Gradually this book has become first a rarity and then a famous possession, so that at the present moment there is perhaps no volume of recent English verse so diminutive which commands so high a price among collectors. When the library of Mr. Henry Bradshaw was dispersed in November 1886, book-buyers thought that they had a chance of securing this treasure at a reasonable price, for it was known that the late Librarian of Cambridge University, an old friend of the author, had no fewer than three copies. But at the sale two of these copies went for three pounds fifteen and three pounds ten, respectively, and the third was knocked down for a guinea, because it was discovered to lack the t.i.tle-page and the index. (I do not myself think it right to encourage the sale of imperfect books, and would not have spent half a crown on the rarest of volumes if I could not have the t.i.tle-page. But this is only an aside, and does not interfere with the value of _Ionica_.)

The little book has no name on the t.i.tle-page, but it is known that the author was Mr. William Johnson, formerly a master at Eton and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. It is understood that this gentleman was born about 1823, and died in 1892. On coming into property, as I have heard, in the west of England, he took the name of Cory, So that he is doubly concealed as a poet, the anonymous-pseudonymous. As Mr. William Cory he wrote history, but there is but slight trace there of the author of _Ionica_. In face of the extreme rarity of his early book, friends urged upon Mr. Cory its republication, and he consented. Probably he would have done well to refuse, for the book is rather delicate and exquisite than forcible, and to reprint it was to draw public attention to its inequality. Perhaps I speak with the narrow-mindedness of the collector who possesses a treasure; but I think the appreciators of _Ionica_ will always be few in number, and it seems good for those few to have some difficulties thrown in the way of their delights.

Shortly after _Ionica_ appeared great developments took place in English verse. In 1858 there was no Rossetti, no Swinburne; we may say that, as far as the general public was concerned, there was no Matthew Arnold and no William Morris. This fact has to be taken into consideration in dealing with the tender humanism of Mr. Johnson's verses. They are less coruscating and flamboyant than what we became accustomed to later on. The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and melancholy. But where the author is at his best, he is not only, as it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The book is addressed to and intended for scholars, and the following piece, although really a translation, has no statement to that effect. Before I quote it, perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original is an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and that it was written by the great Alexandrian poet Callimachus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the poet Herac.l.i.tus--not to be confounded with the philosopher--was dead.

_They told me, Herac.l.i.tus, they told me you were dead; They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take_.

No translation ever smelt less of the lamp, and more of the violet than this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature, which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of a poet's grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man's songs, his "nightingales," are outliving him. It is the requiem of friends.h.i.+p, the reward of one who, in Keats's wonderful phrase, has left "great verse unto a little clan," the last service for the dead to whom it was enough to be "unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven, and few ears." To modern vulgarity, whose ideal of Parna.s.sus is a tap-room of howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive, as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that a poet may hold his own comrade something dearer than the public. The author of _Ionica_ would deserve well of his country if he had done no more than draw this piece of aromatic calamus-root from the Greek waters.

Among the lyrics which are entirely original, there are several not less exquisite than this memory of Callimachus. But the author is not very safe on modern ground. I confess that I shudder when I read:

"_Oh, look at his jacket, I know him afar; How nice," cry the ladies, "looks yonder Hussar_!"

It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers, and the author of _Ionica_ is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining cla.s.sic sentiment with purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy.

There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable to break the gla.s.sy surface of this plaintive _Dirge_:

_Naiad, hid beneath the bank By the willowy river-side, Where Narcissus gently sank, Where unmarried Echo died, Unto thy serene repose Waft the stricken Anteros.

Where the tranquil swan is borne, Imaged in a watery gla.s.s, Where the sprays of fresh pink thorn Stoop to catch the boats that pa.s.s, Where the earliest orchis grows, Bury thou fair Anteros.

On a flickering wave we gaze, Not upon his answering eyes: Flower and bird we scarce can praise, Having lost his sweet replies: Cold and mute the river flows With our tears for Anteros_.

We know well where this place of burial is to be. Not in some glade of Attica or by Sicilian streams, but where a homelier river gushes through the swollen lock at Bray, or shaves the smooth pastoral meadows at Boveney, where Thames begins to draw a longer breath for his pa.s.sage between Eton and Windsor.

The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a wistful clinging to this present life, a Pagan optimism which finds no fault with human existence save that it is so brief. It gains various expression in words that seem hot on a young man's lips, and warm on the same lips even when no longer young:

_I'll borrow life, and not grow old; And nightingales and trees Shall keep me, though the veins be cold, As young as Sophocles_.

And again, in poignant notes:

_You promise heavens free from strife, Pure truth, and perfect change of will; But sweet, sweet is this human life, So sweet, I fain would breathe it still; Your chilly stars I can forego, This warm, kind world is all I know_.

This last quotation is from the poem called _Mimnermus in Church_. In this odd t.i.tle he seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet, who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid on the necessity of extracting from life all it had to offer, since there was nothing beyond mortal love, which was the life of life. The author of _Ionica_ seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to modern England, and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning. But Mimnermus is impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that all earthly pleasures are fugitive. He has always confessed as much at home under the olive tree; it was because they were fugitive that he clung to them:

_All beauteous things for which we live By laws of time and s.p.a.ce decay.

But oh! the very reason why I clasp them, is because they die_.

There is perhaps no modern book of verse in which a certain melancholy phase of ancient thought is better reproduced than in _Ionica_, and this gives its slight verses their lasting charm. We have had numerous resuscitations of ancient manners and landscape in modern poetry since the days of Keats and Andre Chenier. Many of these have been so brilliantly successful that only pedantry would deny their value. But in _Ionica_ something is given which the others have not known how to give, the murmur of antiquity, the sigh in the gra.s.s of meadows dedicated to Persephone. It seems to help us to comprehend the little rites and playful superst.i.tions of the Greeks; to see why Myro built a tomb for the gra.s.shopper she loved and lost; why the s.h.i.+ning hair of Lysidice, when she was drowned, should be hung up with songs of pity and reproach in the dreadful vestibule of Aphrodite. The noisy blasphemers of the newest Paris strike the reader as Christian fanatics turned inside out; for all their vehemence they can never lose the experience of their religious birth. The same thing is true of the would-be Pagans of a milder sensuous type. The Cross prevailed at their nativity, and has thrown its shadow over their conscience.

But in the midst of the throng there walks this plaintive poet of the _Ionica_, the one genuine Pagan, absolutely untouched by the traditions of the Christian past. I do not commend the fact; I merely note it as giving a strange interest to these forlorn and unpopular poems.

Twenty years after the publication of _Ionica_, and when that little book had become famous among the elect, the author printed at Cambridge a second part, without a t.i.tle-page, and without punctuation, one of the most eccentric looking pamphlets I ever saw. The enthusiastic amateur will probably regard his collection incomplete without _Ionica II_., but he must be prepared for a disappointment. There is a touch of the old skill here and there, as in such stanzas as this:

_With half a moon, and clouds rose-pink, And water-lilies just in bud, With iris on the river-brink, And white weed-garlands on the mud, And roses thin and pale as dreams, And happy cygnets born in May, No wonder if our country seems Drest out for Freedom's natal day_.

Or these: