Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 Part 11

The people in his happy reign, Were blessed beyond all other nations: Unharmed by foreign axe and chain, Unhealed by civic innovations; They served the usual logs and stones, With all the usual rites and terrors, And swallowed all their fathers' bones, And swallowed all their fathers' errors.

When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives, All swore that nothing should prevent them, But that their representatives Should actually represent them, He interposed the proper checks, By sending troops, with drums and banners, To cut their speeches short, and necks, And break their heads, to mend their manners.

Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between politics and society he wrote in the "patter" style just noticed quite admirable things like "Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." Throughout the great debates on Reform he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching "Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep" which affect one almost to tears by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing applicability of their matter.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it's surely fair, If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair: Longer and longer still they grow, Tory and Radical, Aye and No; Talking by night and talking by day; Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies Light and brief on a Speaker's eyes-- Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two, Some disorderly thing will do; Riot will chase repose away; Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker; Cobbett will soon Move to abolish the sun and moon; Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense Of the House on a saving of thirteen-pence; Grattan will growl or Baldwin bray; Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time When loyalty was not quite a crime, When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school, And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool.

Lord, how principles pa.s.s away!

Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men Is the sleep that comes but now and then; Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill, Sweet to the children who work in a mill.

You have more need of sleep than they, Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful turn to verse composed in his true vocation.

Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a certain cla.s.s of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Ca.s.sandra," or "Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way.

"Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious comparison with Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the well-known

I curse him by our country's G.o.ds, The terrible, the dark, The scatterers of the Roman rods, The quellers of the bark,

are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines are good enough for anything:

But little he cared, that stripling pale, For the sinking sun or the rising gale; For he, as he rode, was dreaming now, Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow, Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted, Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted, Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes, And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.

And these:

Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing, Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string, Into the wood Sir Rudolph went: Not with more joy the schoolboys run To the gay green fields when their task is done; Not with more haste the members fly, When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.

But in "The Red Fisherman" itself there is nothing that is not good. It is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.

But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when "the Abbot arose and closed his book" to the account of his lamentable and yet lucky fate and punishment whereof "none but he and the fisherman could tell the reason why." Neither of the two other pract.i.tioners who may be called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a foot.

Still not here was his "farthest," as the geographers say, nor in the considerable ma.s.s of smaller poems which practically defy cla.s.sification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn "Time's Song," the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming "L'Inconnue." But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in the verses of society proper, the second part of the "Poems of Life and Manners" as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a hundred pages, with a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments, a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They begin with "The Vicar," _vir nulla non donandus lauru_.

[Whose] talk was like a stream, which runs With rapid change from rocks to roses: It slipped from politics to puns, It pa.s.sed from Mahomet to Moses; Beginning with the laws which keep The planets in their radiant courses, And ending with some precept deep For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.

Three of the Vicar's companion "Everyday Characters" are good, but I think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, "The Portrait of a Lady," is quite his equal.

You'll be forgotten--as old debts By persons who are used to borrow; Forgotten--as the sun that sets, When s.h.i.+nes a new one on the morrow; Forgotten--like the luscious peach That blessed the schoolboy last September; Forgotten--like a maiden speech, Which all men praise, but none remember.

Yet ere you sink into the stream That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr, And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme, And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter, Here, of the fortunes of your youth, My fancy weaves her dim conjectures, Which have, perhaps, as much of truth As pa.s.sion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.

Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its happiest form: nor is that form to be found in "Josephine" which is much better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social, half-political patter of "The Brazen Head," or in "Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." It sounds first in the "Song for the Fourteenth of February." No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original[20]

for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later in "The Letter of Advice," appears first in lighter matter still like this:

Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia, Whom no one e'er saw, or may see, A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia, An _ad libit_ Anna Marie?

Shall I court an initial with stars to it, Go mad for a G. or a J., Get Bishop to put a few bars to it, And print it on Valentine's Day?

But every competent critic has seen in it the origin of the more gorgeous and full-mouthed, if not more accomplished and dexterous, rhythm in which Mr. Swinburne has written "Dolores," and the even more masterly dedication of the first "Poems and Ballads." The shortening of the last line which the later poet has introduced is a touch of genius, but not perhaps greater than Praed's own recognition of the extraordinarily vivid and ringing qualities of the stanza. I profoundly believe that metrical quality is, other things being tolerably equal, the great secret of the enduring attraction of verse: and nowhere, not in the greatest lyrics, is that quality more unmistakable than in the "Letter of Advice." I really do not know how many times I have read it; but I never can read it to this day without being forced to read it out loud like a schoolboy and mark with accompaniment of hand-beat such lines as

Remember the thrilling romances We read on the bank in the glen: Remember the suitors our fancies Would picture for both of us then.

They wore the red cross on their shoulder, They had vanquished and pardoned their foe-- Sweet friend, are you wiser or colder?

My own Araminta, say "No!"

He must walk--like a G.o.d of old story Come down from the home of his rest; He must smile--like the sun in his glory, On the buds he loves ever the best; And oh! from its ivory portal Like music his soft speech must flow!

If he speak, smile, or walk like a mortal, My own Araminta, say "No!"

There are, metrically speaking, few finer couplets in English than the first of that second stanza. Looked at from another point of view, the mixture of the comic and the serious in the piece is remarkable enough; but not so remarkable, I think, as its extraordinary metrical accomplishment. There is not a note or a syllable wrong in the whole thing, but every sound and every cadence comes exactly where it ought to come, so as to be, in a delightful phrase of Southey's, "necessary and voluptuous and right."

It is no wonder that when Praed had discovered such a medium he should have worked it freely. But he never impressed on it such a combination of majesty and grace as in this letter of Medora Trevilian. As far as the metre goes I think the eight-lined stanzas of this piece better suited to it than the twelve-lined ones of "Good Night to the Season"

and the first "Letter from Teignmouth," but both are very delightful.

Perhaps the first is the best known of all Praed's poems, and certainly some things in it, such as

The ice of her ladys.h.i.+p's manners, The ice of his lords.h.i.+p's champagne,

are among the most quoted. But this ant.i.thetical trick, of which Praed was so fond, is repeated a little often in it; and it seems to me to lack the freshness as well as the fire of the "Advice." On the other hand, the "Letter from Teignmouth" is the best thing that even Praed has ever done for combined grace and tenderness.

You once could be pleased with our ballads-- To-day you have critical ears; You once could be charmed with our salads-- Alas! you've been dining with Peers; You trifled and flirted with many-- You've forgotten the when and the how; There was one you liked better than any-- Perhaps you've forgotten her now.

But of those you remember most newly, Of those who delight or enthral, None love you a quarter so truly As some you will find at our Ball.

They tell me you've many who flatter, Because of your wit and your song: They tell me--and what does it matter?-- You like to be praised by the throng: They tell me you're shadowed with laurel: They tell me you're loved by a Blue: They tell me you're sadly immoral-- Dear Clarence, that cannot be true!

But to me, you are still what I found you, Before you grew clever and tall; And you'll think of the spell that once bound you; And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball!

Is not that perfectly charming?

It is perhaps a matter of mere taste whether it is or is not more charming than pieces like "School and Schoolfellows" (the best of Praed's purely Eton poems) and "Marriage Chimes," in which, if not Eton, the Etonian set also comes in. If I like these latter pieces less, it is not so much because of their more personal and less universal subjects as because their style is much less individual. The resemblance to Hood cannot be missed, and though I believe there is some dispute as to which of the two poets actually hit upon the particular style first, there can be little doubt that Hood attained to the greater excellence in it. The real sense and savingness of that doctrine of the "princ.i.p.al and most excellent things," which has sometimes been preached rather corruptly and narrowly, is that the best things that a man does are those that he does best. Now though

I wondered what they meant by stock, I wrote delightful Sapphics,

and

With no hard work but Bovney stream, No chill except Long Morning,

are very nice things, I do not think they are so good in their kind as the other things that I have quoted; and this, though the poem contains the following wholly delightful stanza in the style of the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy":

Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes Without the fear of sessions; Charles Medlar loathed false quant.i.ties As much as false professions; Now Mill keeps order in the land, A magistrate pedantic; And Medlar's feet repose unscanned Beneath the wide Atlantic.

The same may even be said of "Utopia," a much-praised, often-quoted, and certainly very amusing poem, of "I'm not a Lover now," and of others, which are also, though less exactly, in Hood's manner. To attempt to distinguish between that manner and the manner which is Praed's own is a rather perilous attempt; and the people who hate all attempts at reducing criticism to principle, and who think that a critic should only say clever things about his subject, will of course dislike me for it.

But that I cannot help. I should say then that Hood had the advantage of Praed in purely serious poetry; for Araminta's bard never did anything at all approaching "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "The Haunted House," or a score of other things. He had also the advantage in pure broad humour. But where Praed excelled was in the mixed style, not of sharp contrast as in Hood's "Lay of the Desert Born" and "Demon s.h.i.+p,"

where from real pity and real terror the reader suddenly stumbles into pure burlesque, but of wholly blended and tempered humour and pathos. It is this mixed style in which I think his note is to be found as it is to be found in no other poet, and as it could hardly be found in any but one with Praed's peculiar talent and temper combined with his peculiar advantages of education, fortune, and social atmosphere. He never had to "pump out sheets of fun" on a sick-bed for the printer's devil, like his less well-fated but a.s.suredly not less well-gifted rival; and as his scholars.h.i.+p was exactly of the kind to refine, temper, and adjust his literary manner, so his society and circ.u.mstances were exactly of the kind to repress, or at least not to encourage, exuberance or boisterousness in his literary matter. There are I believe who call him trivial, even frivolous; and if this be done sincerely by any careful readers of "The Red Fisherman" and the "Letter of Advice" I fear I must peremptorily disable their judgment. But this appearance of levity is in great part due exactly to the perfect modulation and adjustment of his various notes. He never shrieks or guffaws: there is no horse-play in him, just as there is no tearing a pa.s.sion to tatters. His slight mannerisms, more than once referred to, rarely exceed what is justified by good literary manners. His points are very often so delicate, so little insisted on or underlined, that a careless reader may miss them altogether; his "questionings" are so little "obstinate" that a careless reader may think them empty.

Will it come with a rose or a brier?