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,’