THE SHORT LYRIC.
Many Guides to Literature give no rules for the manufacture of short lyrics, and nearly all of them omit to furnish the student with an example of this kind of composition.
The cause of this unfortunate neglect (as I deem it) is not far to seek. Indeed in one Text Book (Mrs. Railston’s Book for Beginners. Patteson. 12s. 6d.) it is set down in so many words. “The Short Lyric,” says Mrs. Railston in her preface, “is practically innocent of pecuniary value. Its construction should be regarded as a pastime rather than as serious exercise; and even for the purposes of recreation, its fabrication is more suited to the leisure of a monied old age than to the struggle of eager youth, or the full energies of a strenuous manhood” (p. xxxiv.).
The judgment here pronounced is surely erroneous. The short Lyric is indeed not very saleable (though there are exceptions even to that rule—the first Lord Tennyson is said to have received £200 for The Throstle); it is (I say) not very saleable, but it is of great indirect value to the writer, especially in early youth. A reputation can be based upon a book of short lyrics which will in time procure for its author Reviewing work upon several newspapers, and sometimes, towards his fortieth year, the editorship of a magazine; later in life it will often lead to a pension, to the command of an army corps, or even to the governorship of a colony.
I feel, therefore, no hesitation in describing at some length the full process of its production, or in presenting to the student a careful plan of the difficulties which will meet him at the outset.
To form a proper appreciation of these last, it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that they all proceed from the inability of busy editors and readers to judge the quality of verse; hence the rebuffs and delays that so often overcast the glorious morning of the Poetic Soul.
At the risk of some tedium—for the full story is of considerable length—I will show what is their nature and effect, in the shape of a relation of what happened to Mr. Peter Gurney some years ago, before he became famous.
Mr. Peter Gurney (I may say it without boasting) is one of my most intimate friends. He is, perhaps, the most brilliant of that brilliant group of young poets which includes Mr. John Stewart, Mr. Henry Hawk, &c., and which is known as the “Cobbley school,” from the fact that their historic meeting-ground was the house of Mr. Thomas Cobbley, himself no mean poet, but especially a creative, seminal critic, and uncle of Mr. Gurney. But to my example and lesson:—
Mr. Gurney was living in those days in Bloomsbury, and was occupied in reading for the bar.
He was by nature slothful and unready, as is indeed the sad habit of literary genius; he rose late, slept long, eat heartily, drank deeply, read newspapers, began things he never finished, and wrote the ending of things whose beginnings he never accomplished; in a word, he was in every respect the man of letters. He looked back continually at the stuff he had written quite a short time before, and it always made him hesitate in his opinion of what he was actually engaged in. It was but six months before the events herein set down that he had written—
“The keep of the unconquerable mind”—
only to discover that it was clap-trap and stolen from Wordsworth at that. How, then, could he dare send off the sonnet—
“If all intent of unsubstantial art”—
and perhaps get it printed in the Nineteenth Century or the North American Review, when (for all he knew) it might really be very poor verse indeed?
These two things, then, his sloth and his hesitation in criticism, prevented Peter from sending out as much as he should have done. But one fine day of last summer, a kind of music passed into him from universal nature, and he sat down and wrote these remarkable lines:—
“He is not dead; the leaders do not die,
But rather, lapt in immemorial ease
Of merit consummate, they passing, stand;
And rapt from rude reality, remain;
And in the flux and eddy of time, are still.
Therefore I call it consecrated sand
Wherein they left their prints, nor overgrieve:
An heir of English earth let English earth receive.”
He had heard that Culture of Boston, Mass., U.S.A., paid more for verse than any other review, so he sent it off to that address, accompanied by a very earnest little letter, calling the gem “Immortality,” and waiting for the answer.
The editor of Culture is a businesslike man, who reads his English mail on the quay at New York, and takes stamped envelopes and rejection forms down with him to the steamers.
He looked up Peter’s name in the Red Book, Who’s Who, Burke, the Court Guide, and whatnot, and finding it absent from all these, he took it for granted that there was no necessity for any special courtesies; Peter therefore, fifteen days after sending off his poem, received an envelope whose stamp illustrated the conquest of the Philippines by an Armed Liberty, while in the top left-hand corner were printed these simple words: “If not delivered within three days, please return to Box 257, Boston, Mass., U.S.A.”
He was very pleased to get this letter. It was the first reply he had ever got from an editor, and he took it up unopened to the Holborn, to read it during lunch. But there was very little to read. The original verse had folded round it a nice half-sheet of cream-laid notepaper, with a gold fleur de lis in the corner, and underneath the motto, “Devoir Fera”; then, in the middle of the sheet, three or four lines of fine copperplate engraving, printed also in gold, and running as follows:—
“The editor of Culture regrets that he is unable to accept the enclosed contribution; it must not be imagined that any adverse criticism or suggestion is thereby passed upon the work; pressure of space, the previous acceptation of similar matter, and other causes having necessarily to be considered.”
Peter was so much encouraged by this, that he sent his verses at once to Mr. McGregor, changing, however, the word “rude” in the fourth line to “rough,” and adding a comma after “rapt,” points insignificant in themselves perhaps, but indicative of a critic’s ear, and certain (as he thought) to catch the approval of the distinguished scholar. In twenty-four hours he got his reply in the shape of an affectionate letter, enclosing his MSS.:—
“My dear Peter,
“No; I should be doing an injustice to my readers if I were to print your verse in the Doctrinaire; but you must not be discouraged by this action on my part. You are still very young, and no one who has followed (as you may be sure I have) your brilliant career at the University can doubt your ultimate success in whatever profession you undertake. But the path of letters is a stony one, and the level of general utility in such work is only reached by the most arduous efforts. I saw your Aunt Phœbe the other day, and she was warm in your praises. She told me you were thinking of becoming an architect; I sincerely hope you will, for I believe you have every aptitude for that profession. Plod on steadily and I will go warrant for your writing verse with the best of them. It is inevitable, my dear Peter, that one’s early verse should be imitative and weak; but you have the ‘inner voice,’ do but follow the gleam and never allow your first enthusiasms to grow dim.
“Always your Father’s Old Friend,
“Archibald Wellington McGregor.”
Peter was a little pained by this; but he answered it very politely, inviting himself to lunch on the following Thursday, and then, turning to his verses, he gave the title “Dead,” and sent them to the Patriot, from whom he got no reply for a month.
He then wrote to the editor of the Patriot on a postcard, and said that, in view of the present deplorable reaction in politics, he feared the verses, if they were held over much longer, would lose their point. Would the Patriot be so kind, then, as to let him know what they proposed to do with the Poem?
He got a reply the same evening:—
“Telephone 239. “36A, Clare Market,
“Telegraph, ‘Vindex.’ “W.C.
“Dr. Sir,
“Your estd. favor to hand. No stamp being enclosed with verses, we have retained same, but will forward on receipt of two stamps, including cost of this.
“Faithfully yrs.,
“Alphonse Riphraim.
“Please note change of address.”
By this Peter Gurney was so angered, that he walked straight over to his club, rang up No. 239, and told the editor of the Patriot, personally, by word of mouth, and with emphasis, that he was a Pro-Boer; then he rang off before that astonished foreigner had time to reply.
But men of Mr. Peter Gurney’s stamp are not cast down by these reverses. He remembered one rather low and insignificant sheet called the Empire, in which a vast number of unknown names had been appearing at the bottom of ballads, sonnets, and so forth, dealing mainly with the foreign policy of Great Britain, to which country (as being their native land) the writers were apparently warmly attached.
Peter Gurney flattered himself that he understood why the Empire made a speciality of beginners. It was a new paper with little capital, and thought (wisely enough) that if it printed many such juvenilia it would, among the lot, strike some vein of good verse. He had heard of such ventures in journalism, and remembered being told that certain sonnets of Mr. Lewis Morris, and even the earlier poems of Tennyson, were thus buried away in old magazines. He copied out his verses once more, gave them the new title “Aspiro,” and sent them to the Empire. He got a very polite letter in reply:—
“Dear Mr. —— I have read your verses with much pleasure, and see by them that the praise I have heard on all sides of your unpublished work was not unmerited. Unfortunately, the Empire cannot afford to pay anything for its verse; and so large has been the demand upon our space, that we have been compelled to make it a rule that all contributions of this nature should pay a slight premium to obtain a space in our columns. But for this it would be impossible to distinguish between competitors without the risk of heartburnings and petty jealousies. We enclose our scale of charges, which are (as you see) purely nominal, and remain, awaiting your order to print,
“Yours truly,
“William Power.”
I need hardly tell you that Peter, on receiving this letter, put two farthings into an envelope addressed to William Power, and was careful not to register or stamp it.
As for his Poem, he changed the title to “They Live!” and sent it to the editor of Criticism. Next day he was not a little astonished to get his verses back, folded up in the following waggish letter:—
“The Laurels,
“20, Poplar Grove,
“S.W.
“Monday, the 21st of April.
“Sir,
“I am directed by the editor
To say that lack of space and press of matter
Forbid his using your delightful verses,
Which, therefore, he returns. Believe me still
Very sincerely yours, Nathaniel Pickersgill.”
Now not a little disconsolate, young Mr. Gurney went out into the street, and thought of Shavings as a last chance. Shavings gave a guinea to the best poem on a given subject, and printed some of the others sent in. This week he remembered the subject was a eulogy of General Whitelock. He did not hesitate, therefore, to recast his poem, and to call it a “Threnody” on that commander, neglecting, by a poetic fiction, the fact that he was alive, and even looking well after his eight months of hard work against the Warra-Muggas. He went into the great buildings where Shavings is edited, and saw a young man opening with immense rapidity a hand-barrowful of letters, while a second sorted them with the speed of lightning, and a third tied them into neat bundles of five hundred each, and placed them in pigeon-holes under their respective initial letters.
“Pray, sir,” said Peter to the first of these three men, “what are you doing?” “I am,” replied the functionary, “just finishing my week’s work” (for it was a Saturday morning), “and in the course of these four hours alone I am proud to say that I have opened no less than seven thousand three hundred and two poems on our great Leader, some of which, indeed, have been drawn from the principal English poets, but the greater part of which are, I am glad to say, original.”
Embittered by such an experience, my friend Gurney returned to his home, and wrote that same afternoon the Satire on Modern Literature, in which he introduces his own verses as an example and warning, and on which, as all the world knows, his present fame reposes.
To-day everyone who reads these lines is envious of Mr. Peter Gurney’s fame. He is the leader of the whole Cobbley school, the master of his own cousin, Mr. Peter Davey, and without question the model upon which Mr. Henry Hawk, Mr. Daniel Witton, and Mr. John Stuart have framed their poetic manner. He suffered and was strong. He condescended to prose, and kept his verse in reserve. The result no poet can ignore.
I should but mislead the student were I to pretend that Mr. Peter Gurney achieved his present reputation—a reputation perhaps somewhat exaggerated, but based upon real merit and industry—by any spontaneous effort. Hard, regular, unflinching labour in this, as in every other profession, is the condition of success. But the beginner may say (and with justice), “It is not enough to tell me to work; how should I set about it? What rules should I follow?” Let me pursue my invariable custom, and set down in the simplest and most methodical form the elements of the Short Lyric.
The student will, at some time or another, have suffered strong emotions. He will have desired to give them metrical form. He will have done so—and commonly he will have gone no further. I have before as I write a verse, the opening of one of the most unsuccessful poems ever written. It runs:—
“I am not as my fathers were,
I cannot pass from sleep to sleep,
Or live content to drink the deep
Contentment of the common air.”
This is very bad. It is bad because it proceeded from a deep emotion only, and shot out untrammelled. It has no connection with verse as an art, and yet that art lies open for any young man who will be patient and humble, and who will learn.
His first business is to decide at once between the only two styles possible in manufactured verse, the Obscure and the Prattling. I say “the only two styles” because I don’t think you can tackle the Grandiose, and I am quite certain you couldn’t manage the Satiric. I know a young man in Red Lion Square who can do the Grandiose very well, and I am going to boom him when I think the time has come; but the Student-in-Ordinary cannot do it, so he may put it out of his head.
I will take the Simple or Prattling style first. Choose a subject from out of doors, first because it is the fashion, and secondly because you can go and observe it closely. For you must know that manufactured verse is very like drawing, and in both arts you have to take a model and be careful of details. Let us take (e.g.) a Pimpernel.
A Pimpernel is quite easy to write about; it has remarkable habits, it is not gross or common. It would be much harder to write about grass, for instance, or parsley.
First you write down anything that occurs to you, like this:—
“Pretty little Pimpernel,
May I learn to love you well?”
You continue on the style of “Twinkle, twinkle.”
“Hiding in the mossy shade,
Like a lamp of ¯ ˘ made,
Or a gem by fairies dropt
In their ...”
and there you stick, just as you had got into the style of the “L’Allegro.” I have no space or leisure to give the student the full treatment of so great a subject, how he would drag in the closing and opening of the flower, and how (skilfully avoiding the word “dell”) he would end his ten or fifteen lines by a repetition of the first (an essential feature of the Prattling style). I will confine myself to showing him what may be made of these ridiculous six lines.
The first has an obvious fault. It runs too quickly, and one falls all over it. We will keep “Little” and put it first, so one might write “Little Purple Pimpernel.” But even that won’t do, though the alliteration is well enough. What change can we make?
It is at this point that I must introduce you to a most perfect principle. It is called the Mutation of Adjectives—it is almost the whole art of Occ. verse. This principle consists in pulling out one’s first obvious adjective, and replacing it by another of similar length, chosen because it is peculiar. You must not put in an adjective that could not possibly apply; for instance, you must not speak of the “Ponderous Rabbit” or the “Murky Beasts;” your adjective must be applicable, but it must be startling, as “The Tolerant Cow,” “The Stammering Minister,” or “The Greasy Hill”—all quite true and most unexpected.
Now, here it is evident that Purple is commonplace. What else can we find about the Pimpernel that is quite true and yet really startling? Let us (for instance) call it “tasteless.” There you have it, “Little tasteless Pimpernel”—no one could read that too quickly, and it shows at the same time great knowledge of nature.
I will not weary you with every detail of the process, but I will write down my result after all the rules have been properly attended to. Read this, and see whether the lines do not fit with my canons of art, especially in what is called the “choice of words:”—
“Little tasteless Pimpernel,
Shepherd’s Holt and warning spell
Crouching in the cushat shade
Like a mond of mowry made....”
and so forth. There you have a perfect little gem. Nearly all the words are curious and well chosen, and yet the metre trips along like a railway carriage. The simplicity lies in the method; the quaint diction is quarried from Mr. Skeats’ excellent book on etymology; but I need not point out any particular work, as your “Thesaurus” in this matter is for your own choosing.
So much for the Prattling style.
As for the Obscure style, it is so easy that it is getting overdone, and I would not depend too much upon it.
In its origins, it was due to the vagaries of some gentlemen and ladies who suffered from an imperfect education, and wrote as they felt, without stopping to think.
But that first holy rapture cannot be recovered. We must work by rule. The rules attaching to this kind of work are six:—
(1) Put the verb in the wrong place (some leave it out altogether);
(2) Use words that may be either verbs or nouns—plurals are very useful;
(3) Punctuate insufficiently;
(4) Make a special use of phrases that have two or three meanings;
(5) Leave out relatives;
(6) Have whole sentences in apposition.
Some of our young poets have imagined that the mere use of strange words made up the Obscure style. I need not say that they were wrong. Thus, the lines—
“And shall I never tread them more,
My murrant balks of wealden lathes?”
are singularly bad. Anyone could be obscure in so simple a fashion. It behoves the student rather to read carefully such lines as the following, in which I have again tackled the Pimpernel, this time in the Obscure manner.
I begin with “What Pimpernels,” which might mean “What! Pimpernels?” or, “What Pimpernels?” or again, “What Pimpernels!”; expressing surprise, or a question, or astonished admiration: but do you think I am going to give the show away by telling the reader what I mean? Not a bit of it. There is something in our island temper which loves mystery: something of the North. I flatter myself I can do it thoroughly:—
“What Pimpernels; a rare indulgence blesses
The winter wasting in imperfect suns
And Pimpernels are in the waning, runs
A hand unknown the careless winter dresses,
Not for your largess to the ruined fells,
Her floors in waste, I call you, Pimpernels.”
There! I think that will do very fairly well. One can make sense out of it, and it is broad and full, like a modern religion; it has many aspects, and it makes men think. There is not one unusual word, and the second line is a clear and perfect bit of English. Yet how deep and solemn and thorough is the whole!
And yet, for all my ability in these matters, I may not offer an example for the reader to follow. I am conscious of something more powerful (within this strict channel), and I am haunted reproachfully by a great soul. May I quote what none but She could have written? It is the most perfect thing that modern England knows. Every lesson I might painfully convey there stands manifest, of itself, part of the Created Thing.
THE YELLOW MUSTARD.
Oh! ye that prink it to and fro,
In pointed flounce and furbelow,
What have ye known, what can ye know
That have not seen the mustard grow?
The yellow mustard is no less
Than God’s good gift to loneliness;
And he was sent in gorgeous press,
To jangle keys at my distress.
I heard the throstle call again
Come hither, Pain! come hither, Pain!
Till all my shameless feet were fain
To wander through the summer rain.
And far apart from human place,
And flaming like a vast disgrace,
There struck me blinding in the face
The livery of the mustard race.
To see the yellow mustard grow
Beyond the town, above, below;
Beyond the purple houses, oh!
To see the yellow mustard grow!
THE INTERVIEW.