Part 11 (1/2)

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 armed 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 imagined.

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 cla.s.sics 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 ill.u.s.trate a story of h.e.l.lenic myth by symbols and a.n.a.logies 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 scholars.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+mmer 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 Phaethon' 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 j.a.pan 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 cla.s.sic, 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 pa.s.sionate,” 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 pa.s.sionate. 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,