I.
In the death of Lord de Tabley, the English world of letters has lost a true poet and a scholar of very varied accomplishments. His friends have lost much more. Since his last attack of influenza, those who knew him and loved him had been much concerned about him. The pallor of his complexion had greatly increased; so had his feebleness. As long ago as May last, when I called upon him at the Athenæum Club in order to join him at a luncheon he was giving at the Café Royal, I found that he had engaged a four-wheeled cab to take us over those few yards. The expression in his kind and wistful blue-grey eyes showed that he had noted the start of surprise I gave on seeing the cab waiting for us. “You know my love of a growler,” he said; “this is just to save us the bother of getting across the Piccadilly cataracts.” I thought to myself, “I wish it were only the bother of crossing the cataracts which accounts for the growler.”
Another sign that the physical part of him was in the grip of the demon of decay was that, instead of coming to the Pines to luncheon, as had been his wont, he preferred of late to come to afternoon tea, and return to Elm Park before dinner. And on the occasion when he last came in this way it seemed to us here that he had aged still more; yet his intellectual forces had lost nothing of their power. And as a companion he was as winsome as ever. That fine quality with which he was so richly endowed, the quality which used to be called “urbanity,” was as fresh when I saw him last as when I first knew him. That sweet sagacity, mellowed and softened by a peculiarly quiet humour, shone from his face at intervals as he talked of the pleasant old days when he was my colleague on The Athenæum, and when I used to call upon him so frequently on my way to Rossetti in Cheyne Walk to chat over “the walnuts and the wine” about poetry.
My own friendship with him began at my first meeting him, and this was long ago. Being at that time a less-known man of letters than I am now, supposing that to be possible, I was astonished one day when my friend Edmund Gosse told me that his friend Leicester Warren had expressed a wish to meet me on account of certain things of mine which he had read in The Examiner and The Athenæum. I accepted with alacrity Mr. Gosse’s invitation to one of those
charming salons of his on the banks of Westbournia’s Grand Canal which have become historic. I was surprised to find Warren, who was then scarcely above forty, looking so old, not to say so old-fashioned. At that time he did not wear the moustache and beard which afterwards lent a picturesqueness to his face. There was a kind of rural appearance about him which had for me a charm of its own; it suited so well with his gentle ways, I thought. This being the impression he made upon me, it may be imagined how delighted I was shortly afterwards to see him come to the door of Ivy Lodge, Putney, where I was then living alone. Nor was I less surprised than delighted to see him. On realizing at Gosse’s salon that my new acquaintance was a botanist, I had fraternized with him on this point, and had described to him an extremely rare and lovely little tree growing in the centre of my garden, which some unknown lover of trees had imported. I had given Warren a kind of general invitation to come some day and see it. So early a call as this I had not hoped to get. Perhaps I thought so reclusive a man as he even then appeared would never come at all.
After having duly admired the tree he turned to the Rossetti crayons on the walls of the rooms; but although he talked much about ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow’ and the design from the same beautiful model which William
Sharp has christened ‘Forced Music,’ the loveliness of which attracted him not a little, I perceived that he had something else that he wanted to talk about, and allowed him to lead the conversation up to it. To my surprise I found that, so far from having perceived how much he had interested me, he had imagined that my attitude towards him was constrained, and had explained it to his own discomfort after the following fashion: “Watts has an intimate friend of whose poetry I am a deep admirer—so deep indeed that some people, and not without reason, have said that my own poetry is unduly influenced by it. But an article by me in The Fortnightly goes out of its way to dub as a ‘minor poet’ the very writer to whose influence I have succumbed. It is the incongruity between my dubbing my idol a ‘minor poet’ and my real and most obvious admiration of his work that makes Watts, in spite of an external civility, feel unfriendly towards me. Yet there is no real incongruity, for it was the editor, G. H. Lewes, who, after my proof had been returned for press, interpolated the objectionable words about the minor poet.”
This was how he had been reasoning. When I laughed and told him to recast his syllogism—told him that I had never seen the article in question, and doubted whether my friend had—matters became very bright between us. He stayed to luncheon; we walked
on the Common; I showed him our Wimbledon sun-dews; in a word, I felt that I had discovered a richer gold mine than the richest in the world, a new friend. Had I then known him as well as I afterwards did, I should have been aware that he had a strong dash of the sensitive, not to say the morbid, in his nature. He had a habit of submitting almost every incident of his life to such an analysis as that I have been describing.
On another occasion, when years later he had a difference with a friend, I reminded him of the incident recorded above, and made him laugh by saying, “My dear Warren, you are so afraid of treading on people’s corns that you tread upon them.”
On first visiting him, as on many a subsequent occasion, I was struck by the variety of his intellectual interests, and the thoroughness with which he pursued them all. I have lately said in print what I fully believe—that he was the most learned of English poets, if learning means something more than mere scholarship. He was a skilled numismatist, and in 1862 published, through the Numismatic Society, ‘An Essay on Greek Federal Coinage,’ and an essay ‘On Some Coins of Lycia under Rhodian Domination and of the Lycian League.’ He even took an interest in book-plates, and actually, in 1880, published ‘A Guide to the Study of Book-Plates.’ I should not have been
at all surprised to learn that he was also writing a guide for the collectors of postage stamps.
At this time he had published a good deal of verse; for instance, ‘Eclogues and Monodramas’ in 1865; ‘Studies in Verse’ in 1866; ‘Orestes’ in 1867; a collection of poems called ‘Rehearsals’ in 1873; another collection, called ‘The Searching Net,’ in 1876. From this time, during many years, I saw him frequently, although, for a reason which it is not necessary to discuss here, he became seized with a deep dislike of the literary world and its doings, and I am not aware that he saw any literary man save myself and the late W. B. Scott, the bond between whom and himself was “book-plates”! Then he took to residing in the country. As a poet he seemed to be quite forgotten, save by students of poetry, until his name was revived by means of Mr. Miles’s colossal anthology ‘The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century,’ Mr. Miles, it seems, was a great admirer of Lord de Tabley’s poetry, and managed to reach the hermit in his cell. In the sixth volume of his work Mr. Miles gave a judicious selection from Lord de Tabley’s poems and an admirable essay upon them. The selection attracted a good deal of attention.
On finding that the public would listen to him, I urged him to bring out a volume of selected pieces from all his works, an idea which for some time he contested with his usual
pessimistic vigour. Having, however, set my heart upon it, I spoke upon the subject to Mr. John Lane, who at once saw his way to bring out such a volume at his own risk. To the poet’s astonishment the book was a success, and it at once passed into a second edition. In the spring of this year he was emboldened to bring out another volume of new poems, and his name became firmly re-established as a poet. It was after the success of the first book that he consulted me upon a question which was then upon his mind: Should he devote his future energies to literature or to making himself a position as a speaker in the Lords? He had lately had occasion to speak both in the country and in the Lords upon some local matter of importance, and his success had in some slight degree revived an old aspiration to plunge into the world of politics. He was a Liberal, and in 1868 he had contested—but unsuccessfully—Mid-Cheshire. This was on the first election for that division after the Reform Act of 1867. His support in a county so Conservative as Cheshire had really been very strong, but he never made another effort to get into Parliament. “You know my way,” he used to say. “I can make one spring—perhaps a pretty good spring—but not more than one.”
On the whole, he leaned towards the idea of going into politics. The way in which he put the case to me was thoroughly characteristic of
him: “Even if my verse were strong and vital, which I fear it is not, there is almost no chance for men of my generation receiving more than a slight attention at the present day. Things have altogether changed since the sixties and seventies, when I published my most important work—at a time when the prominent names were Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. The old critical oracles are now dumb; the reviewers are all young men whose knowledge of poetry does not go back so far as the sixties. Those who reviewed the selection from my work in Miles’s book showed themselves to be entirely unconscious of the name of Leicester Warren, and treated the poems there selected as being the work of a new writer; and even when the poems published by Lane came out, no one seemed to be aware that they were by a writer who was very much to the fore a quarter of a century ago. That book has had a flutter of success, but in how large a degree was the success owing to the curiosity excited by the book of a man of my generation being brought out now, and by the publisher of the men of this? With all my sympathy with the work of the younger men and my admiration of some of it, things, I say, have changed since those days.”
I did not share these pessimistic views. Moreover, knowing as I did how extremely
sensitive he was, I knew that his figuring in Parliament would result in the greatest pain to him, and if I gave a somewhat exaggerated expression with regard to my hopes of him in the literary world, it was a kindly feeling towards himself that impelled me to do so. He took my advice and proceeded to gather material for another volume.
To define clearly the impression left upon one by intercourse with any man is difficult. In De Tabley’s case it is almost impossible. His remarkable modesty, or rather diffidence, was what, perhaps, struck me most. It was a genuine lack of faith in his own powers; it had nothing whatever to do with “mock-modesty.” I had a singular instance of this diffidence in the autumn of last year. Lord de Tabley, who was staying at Ryde, having learnt that I was staying with a friend near Niton Bay, wrote to me there saying that he somewhat specially wanted to see me, and proposed our lunching together at an hotel at Ventnor. I was delighted to accede to this, for, like all who fully knew Lord de Tabley, I was thoroughly and deeply attached to him. He was so genuine and so modest and so genial—unsoured by the great and various sorrows of which he used sometimes to talk to me by the cosy study fire—nay, sweetened by them, as I often thought—so grateful for the smallest service rendered in an arena where ingratitude sometimes seems
to be the vis motrix of life—a truly lovable man, if ever there was one.
I drove over to Ventnor. As I chanced to reach the hotel somewhat before the appointed time, and he had not arrived, I drove on to Bonchurch along the Shanklin road. On my way back, I passed a four-wheel cab; but not dreaming that his love of the “growler” reached beyond London, I never thought of him in connexion with it until I saw the well-known face with its sweet thoughtful expression looking through the cab window. On this occasion it looked so specially thoughtful that I imagined something serious had occurred. At the hotel I found that he had secured a snug room and a luxurious luncheon. An ominous packet of writing-paper peering from his overcoat pocket convinced me that it was a manuscript brought for me to read, and feeling that I should prefer to get it over before luncheon, I asked him to show it to me. He then told me its history. Having sent by special invitation a poem to The Nineteenth Century, the editor had returned it—returned it with certain strictures upon portions of it. This incident he had at once subjected to the usual analysis, and had come to the conclusion that certain outside influences of an invidious kind had been brought to play upon the editor.
Time was when I should have shrunk with terror from so thankless a task as that of reading
a manuscript with such a frightful history, but it is astonishing what a long experience in the literary world will do for a man in perplexities of this kind. I read the manuscript and the editor’s courteous but sagacious comments, and I found that the poet had undertaken a subject which was utterly and almost inconceivably alien to his genius. As I read I felt the wistful gaze fixed upon me while the waiter was moving in and out of the room, preparing the luncheon table. “Well,” said he, as I laid the manuscript down, “what do you think? do you agree with the editor?” “Not entirely,” I said. “Not entirely!” he exclaimed; then turning to the waiter, he said, “You can leave the soup, and I will ring when we are ready.” “Not entirely,” I repeated. “With all the editor’s strictures I entirely agree, but he says that by working upon it you may make it into a worthy poem: there I disagree with him. I consider it absolutely hopeless. I regret now that we did not leave the matter until after luncheon, but we will not let it spoil our appetites.”
I am afraid it did spoil our appetites nevertheless, for I felt that I had been compelled, for his own sake, to give him pain. He was much depressed, declared that the success of his late book was entirely factitious, and vowed that nothing should ever persuade him to write another line of verse, and that he would now devote his attention to a peer’s duties in the
House of Lords. I was so disturbed myself at thus paining so lovable a friend that next day I wrote to him, trying to soften what I had said, and urged him to do as the editor of The Nineteenth Century had suggested, write another poem—a poem upon some classical subject, which he would deal with so admirably. The result of it all was that he found the editor’s strictures on the unlucky poem to be absolutely well grounded, and wrote for The Nineteenth Century ‘Orpheus,’ one of the finest of his later poems.
I think these anecdotes of Lord de Tabley will show why we who knew him were so attached to him.
II.
Can it be claimed for Lord de Tabley that in the poetical firmament which hung over the days of his youth—when the heavens were bright with such luminaries as Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris—he had a place of his own? We think it can. And in saying this we are fully conscious of the kind of praise we are awarding him. Whatever may be said for or against the artistic temper of the present hour, it must certainly be said of the time we are alluding to that it was great as regards its wealth of poetic genius, and as regards its artistic temper greater still. It was a time when “the beauteous damsel Poesy, honourable and retired,” whom Cervantes described, dared still roam the English Parnassus, “a friend of solitude,” disturbed by no clash of Notoriety’s brazen cymbals, “where fountains entertained her, woods freed her from ennui, and flowers delighted her”—delighted her for their own sakes. In order to write such verses as the following from the concluding poem of the volume before us [231] a man must really have passed
into that true mood of the poet described by the great Spanish humourist:—
How idle for a spurious fame
To roll in thorn-beds of unrest;
What matter whom the mob acclaim,
If thou art master of thy breast?If sick thy soul with fear and doubt,
And weary with the rabble din,—
If thou wouldst scorn the herd without,
First make the discord calm within.If we are lords in our disdain,
And rule our kingdoms of despair,
As fools we shall not plough the main
For halters made of syren’s hair.We need not traverse foreign earth
To seek an alien Sorrow’s face.
She sits within thy central hearth,
And at thy table has her place.So with this hour of push and pelf,
Where nought unsordid seems to last,
Vex not thy miserable self,
But search the fallows of the past.In Time’s rich track behind us lies
A soil replete with root and seed;
There harvest wheat repays the wise,
While idiots find but charlock weed.
Between the writer of the above lines and those great poets who in his youth were his contemporaries there is this point of affinity: like them his actual achievements do not strike the reader so forcibly as the potentialities which those achievements reveal. In the same way that Achilles was suggested by his “spear” in the picture in the chamber of Lucrece, the poet who writes not for fame, but writes to
please himself, suggests unconsciously his own portrait by every touch:—
For much imaginary work was there;
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles’ image stood his spear
Grip’d in an armèd hand; himself behind
Was left unseen save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,
Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.
Poets, indeed, have always been divisible into those whose poetry gives the reader an impression that they are greater than their work, and those whose poetry gives the reader a contrary impression. There have always been poets who may say of themselves, like the “Poet” in ‘Timon of Athens,’
Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes
From whence ’tis nourished: the fire i’ the flint
Shows not till it be struck.
And there have always been poets whose verse, howsoever good it may be, shows that, although they have been able to mould into poetic forms the riches of the life around them, and also of the literature which has come to them as an inheritance, they are simply working for fame, or rather for notoriety, in the markets of the outer world. The former can give us an impression of personal greatness such as the latter cannot.
With regard to the originality of Lord de Tabley’s work, it is obvious that every poet must in some measure be influenced by the
leading luminaries of his own period. But at no time would it have been fair to call Lord de Tabley an imitator; and in the new poems in this volume the accent is, perhaps, more individual than was the accent of any of his previous poetry. The general reader’s comparatively slight acquaintance with Greek poetry may become unfortunate for modern poets. Often and often it occurs that a poet is charged with imitating another poet of a more prominent position than his own when, as a matter of fact, both poets have been yielding to the magic influence of some poet of Greece. Such a yielding has been held to be legitimate in every literature of the modern world. Indeed, to be coloured by the great classics of Greek and Roman literature is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of all the best poetry of the modern world, as it is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of the far-off waters of the Nile to be enriched and toned by the far-off wealth of Ruwenzori and the great fertilizing lakes from which they have sprung. But in drawing from the eternal fountains of beauty Lord de Tabley’s processes were not those of his great contemporaries; they were very specially his own, as far removed from the severe method of Matthew Arnold on the one hand as from Tennyson’s method on the other.
His way of work was always to illustrate a story of Hellenic myth by symbols and
analogies drawn not from the more complex economies of a later world, as was Tennyson’s way, but from that wide knowledge of the phenomena of nature which can be attained only by a poet whose knowledge is that of the naturalist. His devotion to certain departments of natural science has been running parallel with his devotion to poetry, and if learning is something wider than scholarship, he is the most learned poet of his time. While Tennyson’s knowledge of natural science, though wide, was gathered from books, Lord de Tabley’s knowledge, especially in the department of botany, is derived largely from original observation and inquiry. And this knowledge enables him to make his poetry alive with organic detail such as satisfies the naturalist as fully as the other qualities in his works satisfy the lover of poetry. The leading poem of the present volume, ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ is full of a knowledge of the ways of nature beyond the reach of most poets, and yet this knowledge is kept well in governance by his artistic sense; it is never obtruded—never more than hinted at, indeed:—
Soon, soon I saw the spectral vanguard come,
Coasting along, as swallows, beating low
Before a hint of rain. In buoyant air,
Circling thy poise, and hardly move the wing,
And rather float than fly. Then other spirits,
Shrill and more fierce, came wailing down the gale;
As plaintive plovers came with swoop and scream
To lure our footsteps from their furrowy nest,
So these, as lapwing guardians, sailed and swung
To save the secrets of their gloomy lair.* * * * *
I hate to watch the flower set up its face.
I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea,
Its heaving roods of intertangled weed
And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit;
The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn,
The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones,
The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves,
Rotting the floors of Autumn.
‘The Death of Phaëthon’ is another poem in which Lord de Tabley succeeds in mingling a true poetic energy with that subtle dignity of utterance which can never really be divorced from true poetry, whether the poet’s subject be lofty or homely.
The line
With sudden ray and music across the sea
and the opening line of the poem,
Before him the immeasurable heaven,
cause us to think that Lord de Tabley has paid but little attention to the question of elision in English poetry. In the second of the lines above quoted elision is impossible, in the first elision is demanded. The reason why elision is sometimes demanded is that in certain lines, as in the one which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ the hiatus which occurs when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a vowel beginning the next word may be so great as to
become intolerable. The reason why elision is sometimes a merely allowable beauty is that when a word ends with w, r, or l, to elide the liquids is to secure a kind of billowy music of a peculiarly delightful kind. Now elision is very specially demanded in a line like that which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ where the pause of the line fall upon the. To make the main pause of the line fall upon the is extremely and painfully bad, even when the next word begins with a consonant; but when the word following the begins with a vowel, the line is absolutely immetrical; it has, indeed, no more to do with English prosody than with that prosody of Japan upon which Mr. Basil Chamberlain discourses so pleasantly. On the other hand, the elision of the second syllable of the word music in the other line quoted above is equally faulty in another direction. But as we said when reviewing Mr. Bridges’s treatise on Milton’s prosody, nothing is more striking than the helplessness of most recent poets when confronted with the simple question of elision.
In an ‘Ode to a Star’ there is great beauty and breadth of thought and expression. Its only structural blemish, that of an opening stanza whose form is not distinctly followed, can be so easily put right that it need only be mentioned here in order to emphasize the canon that it is only in irregular odes that variation of stanza is permissible. Keats, no doubt, in
one at least of his unequalled odes, does depart from the scheme of structure indicated by the opening stanza, and without any apparent metrical need for so doing. But the poem does not gain by the departure. Besides, Keats is now a classic, and has a freedom in regard to irregularities of metre which Lord de Tabley would be the last to claim for himself. Another blemish of a minor kind in the ‘Ode to a Star’ is that of rhyming “meteor” with “wheatear.”
If the poetry in Lord de Tabley’s volume answers as little to Milton’s famous list of the poetic requirements, “simple, sensuous, and passionate,” as does Milton’s own poetry, which answers to only the second of these demands, very high poetry might be cited which is neither sensuous nor passionate. The so-called coldness displayed by ‘Lycidas’ arises not, it may well be supposed, from any lack on Milton’s part of sorrow for his friend, but from his determination that simple he would not be, and yet his method is justified of its own beauty and glory. Of course poetry may be too ornate, but in demanding a simplicity of utterance from the poet it is easy for the critic to forget how wide and how various are poetry’s domains. For if in one mood poetry is the simple and unadorned expression of nature, in another it is the woof of art,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings.
In the matter of poetic ornament, all that the reader has any right to demand is that the decoration should be poetical and not rhetorical. Now, as a matter of fact, there is no surer sign of the amount of the poetical endowment of any poet than the insight he shows into the nature of poetry as distinguished from rhetoric when working on ornate poetry. It is a serious impeachment of latter-day criticism that in very many cases, perhaps in most cases, the plaudits given to the last new “leading poet” of the hour are awarded to “felicitous lines,” every felicity of which is rhetorical and not poetical.