In 1821, while yet a freshman, he published a little volume of poems called The Improvisatore, of which he was soon ashamed. Long before he left Oxford he used to hunt the unfortunate volume through the libraries of his acquaintance, and cutting out all the pages leave the binding intact, a hollow mockery, upon their shelves. The next year, however, he published The Brides' Tragedy, a drama of very great originality and power, and a most extraordinary production for a boy of nineteen. The Edinburgh Review and the London Magazine. then at the height of their power, came out with critical and highly laudatory notices by Proctor (Barry Cornwall) and George Darley, and the former was ever after one of Beddoes' warmest personal friends. In July, 1825, he went to Göttingen, where his brilliant achievements as a student of medicine won him numerous honors. The rest of his life was spent in Germany and Switzerland, with occasional brief visits to England, but his heart was with the German radicals, and he found the united attractions of science, liberalism and Swiss scenery far more powerful than love of his native land. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the discussion of the scientific and political questions of the day, soon became a master of the language, wrote a great deal for the German newspapers, both in prose and verse, and used jestingly to call himself "a popular German poet."
About this time he began his finest tragedy, Death's Jest-Book, still undergoing correction and revision at the time of his death in his forty-sixth year. He was never weary of making alterations: never satisfied with the result of his labors, he tore up scene after scene, or struck out remorselessly the finest passage in a drama if he thought it inharmonious with the context. He had a theory that no man should devote himself entirely to poetry unless possessed of most extraordinary powers of imagination, or unfitted, by mental or bodily weakness, for severer scientific pursuits. The studies of the physician and the dramatist were to his mind allied by Nature, and he looked upon tragedy as the fitting and inevitable result of combined physiological and psychological researches. And he afterward declared himself determined "never to listen to any metaphysician who is not both anatomist and physiologist of the first rank." This was in 1825, when German and French scientists were just beginning to explore the hidden mysteries of matter, and to trace its intimate and subtle connections with the mind, and when protoplasm was still an unknown quantity toward whose discovery science was slowly feeling its way.
As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the arcana of anatomy and physiology his judgment of his own poetry grew more and more severe. The more he knew of Truth, the nearer absolute perfection must that Beauty be which would compete with her for his heart. Busy with a pursuit in which his progress was marked by absolute tests that even his modesty could not disown, he shrank from trying to reach vague eminences in poetry that he judged himself unable to attain. There is something in his style that recalls Heine when he writes, "Me you may safely regard as one banished from a service to which he was not adapted, but who has still a lingering affection for the land of dreams—as yet, at least, not far enough in the journey of science to have lost sight of the old two-topped hill." And again: "I am essentially unpoetical in character, habits and ways of thinking; and nothing but the desperate hanker for distinction so common to the young gentlemen at the university ever set me upon rhyming. If I had possessed the conviction that I could by any means become an important or great dramatic writer, I would have never swerved from the path to reputation; but seeing that others who had devoted their lives to literature, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth—men beyond a question of far higher originality and incomparably superior poetical feeling and genius—had done so little, you must give me leave to persevere in my preference of Apollo's pill-box to his lyre, and should congratulate me on having chosen Göttingen instead of Grub street for my abode.... It is good to be tolerable or intolerable in any other line, but Apollo defend us from brewing all our lives at a quintessential pot of the smallest ale Parnassian!"
There are so many racy bits of anecdote and opinion scattered through this correspondence, so many things worth keeping for their own sakes or as throwing new light upon the character of their writer, that it is hard to choose a single specimen, but with one more extract we must strive to be content. Beddoes' friend and editor had been trying to get from him some personal details about his daily life, pursuits and fancies, which, with his usual horror of the egotistical, he flatly declined to give. "I will not venture on a psychological self-portraiture," he writes, "fearing—and I believe with sufficient reason—to be betrayed into affectation, dissimulation or some other alluring shape of lying. I believe that all autobiographical sketches are the result of mere vanity—not excepting those of St. Augustine and Rousseau—falsehood in the mask and mantle of truth. Half ashamed and half conscious of his own mendacious self-flattery, the historian of his own deeds or geographer of his own mind breaks out now and then indignantly, and revenges himself on his own weakness by telling some very disagreeable truth of some other person; and then, re-established in his own good opinion, marches on cheerfully in the smooth path toward the temple of his own immortality. Yet even here, you see, I am indirectly lauding my own worship for not being persuaded to laud my own worship. How sleek, smooth-tongued, paradisaical a deluder art thou, sweet Self-conceit! Let great men give their own thoughts on their own thoughts: from such we can learn much; but let the small deer hold jaw, and remember what the philosopher says, 'Fleas are not lobsters: d——n their souls!'"
Caring nothing even for professional honors, Beddoes refused various professorships in Germany, and traveled about to Zurich, to Bâle, and to the other German centres of learning as his desires prompted him. Always the same independent and rebellious spirit that he had shown himself as a boy, he sympathized warmly with the democratic movements then agitating Switzerland and the Rhine provinces, and devoted both his purse and his pen to aid the anti-oligarchic and anti-clerical party. In 1848 he had intended to go back to England, but in the spring of that year a slight wound received while dissecting infused a poison into his system that undermined his health. In May, while seeking restoration in the purer air of Bâle, his horse fell with him, and his left leg was so badly broken that amputation became necessary. Until the autumn he seemed to be doing well, but then the poison imbibed at Frankfort declared itself once more, and a slow fever set in which terminated in death on the 26th of January, 1849.
Beddoes' great fault as a dramatist he was quite aware of himself, and had pointed out to the friend who was continually urging him to write: "The power of drawing character and humor—two things absolutely indispensable for a good dramatist—are the first two articles in my deficiencies; and even the imaginative poetry I think you will find in all my verse always harping on the same two or three principles; for which plain and satisfactory reasons I have no business to expect any great distinction as a writer." He could draw types of character, but not individuals: the power of making the creations of the mind seem as real as "our dear intimates and chamber-fellows" was denied him. But he was not wholly destitute of humor, though he was possessed of but one kind—that grim, sardonic quality which we find so often among the Elizabethans—that mocking irony most like the grin upon a skull. His fools are his best characters, so far as strength and originality go. Here is a snatch from the wise conversation of two of these worthies in Death's Jest-Book:
"Isbrand. Good-morrow, Brother Vanity! How? soul of a pickle-herring, body of a spagirical tosspot, doublet of motley, and mantle of pilgrim, how art thou transmuted! Wilt thou desert our brotherhood, fool sublimate? Shall the motley chapter no longer boast thee? Wilt thou forswear the order of the bell, and break thy vows to Momus? Have mercy on Wisdom and relent.
"Mandrake. Respect the grave and sober, I pray thee. To-morrow I know thee not. In truth, I mark that our noble faculty is in its last leaf. The dry rot of prudence hath eaten the ship of fools to dust: she is no more seaworthy. The world will see its ears in a glass no longer. So we are laid aside and shall soon be forgotten; for why should the feast of asses come but once a year, when all the days are foaled of one mother? O world! world! The gods and fairies left thee, for thou wert too wise; and now, thou Socratic star, thy demon, the great Pan, Folly, is parting from thee. The oracles still talked in their sleep, shall our grandchildren say, till Master Merriman's kingdom was broken up: now is every man his own fool, and the world's sign is taken down.
"Isbrand. Farewell, thou great-eared mind! I mark, by thy talk, that thou commencest philosopher, and then thou art only a fellow-servant out of livery."
Isbrand is the brother of the slain knight Wolfram: his foolery is but the disguise of his revenge, and thus he rails over the body of his brother: "Dead and gone! a scurvy burden to this ballad of life. There lies he, Siegfried—my brother, mark you—and I weep not, nor gnash the teeth, nor curse: and why not, Siegfried? Do you see this? So should every honest man be—cold, dead, and leaden-coffined. This was one who would be constant in friendship, and the pole wanders; one who would be immortal, and the light that shines upon his pale forehead now, through yonder gewgaw window, undulated from its star hundreds of years ago. That is constancy, that is life. O moral Nature!"