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. Nobody forgets
“The lady I love will soon be a bride.”
Nobody remembers our cultivated epics and esoteric sonnets, oh brother minor poet, mon semblable, mon frère! 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 mediæval, 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 aubépine!
Soldans seven hath he slain in fight,
Honneur à la belle Isoline!“Sir Ralph he rideth in riven mail,
Ha, la belle blanche aubépine!
Beneath his nasal is his dark face pale,
Honneur à la belle Isoline!“His eyes they blaze as the burning coal,
Ha, la belle blanche aubépine!
He smiteth a stave on his gold citole,
Honneur à la belle Isoline!“From her mangonel she looketh forth,
Ha, la belle blanche aubépine!
‘Who is he spurreth so late to the north?’
Honneur à la belle Isoline!“Hark! for he speaketh a knightly name,
Ha, la belle blanche aubépine!
And her wan cheek glows as a burning flame,
Honneur à la belle Isoline!“For Sir Ralph he is hardy and mickle of might,
Ha, la belle blanche aubépine!
And his love shall ungirdle his sword to-night,
Honneur à 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 fashions, and that the butterfly Bayly could versify very successfully in the fashion 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 passion of love, which Count Tolstoï 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: