 24 The Duke of Rutland's Poems England's Trust and Other Poems by Lord John Manners, London, printed for J.G. and J. Rivington, St. Paul's Churchyard, and Waterloo Place, Paul Mall, 1841. My newspaper informed me this morning that Lord John Manners took his seat last night in the upper house as the Duke of Rutland. These little romantic surprises are denied to Americans who do not find that old friends get new names, which are very old names, in the course of a night. My transatlantic readers will never have to grow accustomed to speak of Mr. Lowell as the Earl of Mount Auburn, and I firmly believe that Mr. Howells would consider it a chastisement to be hopelessly unknowable. But my thoughts went wandering back at my breakfast today to those faraway times, the fresh memory of which was still reverberating about my childhood, when the last new Duke was an ardent and ingenuous young patriot who never dreamed of being a peer and who hoped to refashion his country to the harp of Ampheon. So I turned, with assuredly no feeling of disrespect, to that corner of my library where the Peche de Journès stand, the little books of early verses which the respectable authors of the same would destroy if they could, and I took down England's trust. Fifty years ago a group of young men, all of them fresh from Oxford and Cambridge, most of them more or less born in the purple of good families, banded themselves together to create a sort of aristocratic democracy. They called themselves Young England, and the chronicle of them, is it not patent to all men in the pages of Disraeli's Conningsby? In the hero of that novel, people saw a portrait of the leader of the group, the honorable George Percy Sidney Smythe, to whom also the poems now before us Parvus known Parv a pygnus amichitie, were dedicated in a warm inscription. The Sidonia of the story was doubtless only echoing what Smythe had laid down as a dogma when he said, quote, man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never irresistible, but when he appeals to the imagination, end quote. It was the theory of Young England that the historic memory must be awakened in the lower classes, that utilitarianism was sapping the very vitals of society, and that ballads and maypoles and quaint festivities and processions of its loyal peasantry were the proper things for politicians to encourage. It was all very young, and of course it came to nothing. But I do not know that the Primrose League is any improvement upon it, and I fancy that when the Duke of Rutland looked back across the half century, he sees something to smile at, but nothing to blush for. One of the actions that Young England had got hold of was that famous saying of Fletcher of Saltoon's friend about making the ballads of a people. So they set themselves verse making, and a quaint little collection of books it was that they produced, all smelling alike at this time of day, with a faint faded perfume of the haystack, contrived and wild. Mr. Smyth, who presently became the seventh Viscount Strangford, and one of the wittiest of morning chroniclers, only to die bitterly lamented before the age of 40, wrote historic fancies. Mr. Faber, then a fellow of University College Oxford, and afterwards a leading spirit among English Catholics, published The Churwell Water Lily in 1840, and on the heels of this discreet volume came the poems of Lord John Manners. When England's trust appeared, its author had just left Cambridge, almost immediately after when it was decided that Young England ought to be represented in Parliament, where its utopian chivalries, it was believed, needed only to be heard to prevail. Accordingly, Lord John Manners presented himself in June 1841 as one of the Conservative candidates for the borough of Newark. He was elected, and so was the other Tory candidate, a man already distinguished, and at present known to the entire world as Mr. W. E. Gladstone. On the hustings, Lord John Manners was a good deal heckled, and in particular he was teased excessively about a certain couplet in England's trust. I'm not going to repeat that couplet here, for after nearly half a century the Duke of Rutland has a right to be forgiven that extraordinary indiscretion. If any of my readers turn to the volume for themselves, which of course I have no power to prevent their doing, they will probably exclaim, well, was it the Duke of Rutland who wrote that? For a frequency of quotation is the hallmark of popularity, his grace must be one of the most popular of our living poets. There is something exceedingly pathetic in this little volume. Its weakness as verse, for it certainly is weak, had nothing ignoble about it, and what is weak without being in the least base, has already been a negative distinction. The author hopes to be a loveless or a mantrose, equally ready to do his monarch's service with sword or pen. The Duke of Rutland has not quite been a mantrose, but he has been something less brilliant and much more useful, a faithful servant of his country, through an upright and laborious life. The young poet of 1841, thrilled by the Tractarian enthusiasm of the moment, looked for a return of the high festivals of the Church, for a victory of faith over all its pain and flows. Quote, the worst evils, he writes, from which we are now suffering, have arisen from our ignorant contempt or neglect of the rules of the Church, end quote. He was full of Newman and Pussy, of the great Oxford movement of 1837, of the wind of fervor blowing through England from the common room of Oriel. Now all has changed past recognition, and with perhaps the solitary exception of cardinal Newman, preserved in extreme old age, like some precious exotic in his Birmingham cloister, a Duke of Rutland may look through the length and breadth of England without recovering one of those lost faces that fed the pure passion of his youth. And which brought the flame from Oriel to the Cambridge scholar, was that of Reverend Frederick William Faber, and a great number of poems in England's trust are dedicated to him openly or secretly. Here is a sonnet addressed to Faber, which is very pleasant to read. Quote, Dear friend, thou askest me to sing our loves, and sing them fame, would I? But I do fear tomorrow so soft a theme, a theme that moves my heart unto its core. O friends, most dear, no light request is done, albeit it proves thy gentleness and love that do appear when absent thus, and in soft looks when near. Surely, if ever two fond hearts were twined in a most holy mystic knot, so now are ours. Not common ones are the ties that bind my soul to thine. A dear apostle thou, I, a young neophyte, that yearns to find the sacred truth, and stamp upon his brow the cross, dreads sign of his baptismal vow. End quote. The apostle was only 12 months older than the neophyte, who was in his 23rd year, but he was a somewhat better, as well as a stronger, poet. But sure well water lilies, rather a rare book now, and I may perhaps be allowed to give an example of Faber's style. It is from one of many poems in which, with something borrowed too consciously from Wordsworth, who was the very Apollo of young England, there is yet a rendering of the beauty and mystery of Oxford, and of the delicate silven scenery which surrounds it, which is wholly original. Quote. There is a well, a willow-shaded spot, cool in the noontide gleam, with rushes nodding in the little stream, and blue, forget me not, set in thick tufts along the bushy marge, with big bright eyes of gold and glorious water plants like fans unfold their blossoms strange and large. That wandering boy, young Highless, did not find beauty so rich and rare, where swallow wart and pale bright maiden's hair and dog grass richly twined. A sloping bank ran round it like a crown, whereon a purple cloud of dark wild hyacinths, a fairy crowd, had settled softly down. And dreamy sounds of never-ending bells from Oxford's holy towers came down the stream, and went among the flowers, and died in little swells. Quote. These two extracts give a fair notion of the Tractorian poetry, with its purity, its idealism, its love of nature, and its unreal conception of life. Faber also wrote at England's trust, before Lord John Manish published his, and in this he rejoices in the passing away of all the old sensual confidence, and in the coming of a new age of humility and spirituality. Alas, it never came. There was a roll in the wave of thought, a few beautiful shells were thrown up on the shore of literature, and then the little eddy of Tractorianism was broken and spent, and lost in the general progress of mankind. We touch with reverent pity the volumes without which we should scarcely know that young England had ever existed, and we refuse to believe that all the enthusiasm and piety and courage of which they are mere ashes have wholly passed away. They have become spread over a wide expanse of effort, and no one knows who has been graciously affected by them. Who shall say that some distant echo of the Sherwell harp was not sounding in the heart of Gordon when he went to his African martyrdom? It is her adventurers, whether of the pen or the sword, that have made England what she is. But if every adventurer succeeded, where would the adventure be? The Duke of Rutland soon repeated his first little heroic expedition into the land of verses. He published the volume of English Valance, but this has not the historical interest that makes England's trust a curiosity. He has written about church rates in the colonies and the importance of literature to men of business, but never again of his reveries in Neville's court nor of his determination to emulate the virtues of King Charles the martyr. No matter if all our hereditary legislators were as high-minded and single-hearted as the new Duke of Rutland, the reform of the House of Lords would scarcely be a burning question. Chapter 24. Chapter 25 of Gossip in a Library This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Eugene Smith. Gossip in a Library by Edmund Goss. Chapter 25. Ionica. Ionica, Smith Elder and Company, 65 Corn Hill, 1858. Good poetry seems to be almost as indestructible as diamonds. You throw it out of the window into the roar of London, it disappears in a deep brown slush, the omnibus and the growler pass over it, and by and by it turns up again somewhere, uninjured, with all the pure fire lambent in its facets. No doubt thoroughly good specimens of prose do get lost, drag down the vortex of a change of fashion, and never thrown back again to light. But the quantity of excellent verse produced in any generation is not merely limited, but keeps very fairly within the same proportions. The verse market is never really glutted, and while popular masses of what Robert Browning calls, quote, deciduous trash, end quote, survive their own generation only to be carted away, the little excellent unnoticed book gradually pushes its path up silently into fame. These reflections are not inappropriate in dealing with the small volume of 116 pages called Ionica. Long ago ushered into the world so silently that its publication did not cause a single ripple on the sea of literature. Gradually this book has become, first a rarity, and then a famous possession, so that at the present moment there is perhaps no volume of recent English verse so diminutive, which commands so high a price among collectors. When the Library of Mr. Henry Bradshaw was dispersed in November 1886, book buyers thought that they had a chance of securing this treasure at a reasonable price for it was known that the late librarian of Cambridge University, an old friend of the author, had no fewer than three copies. But at the sale two of these copies went for £3.15 and £3.10, respectively, and the third was knocked down for a guinea, because it was discovered to lack the title page and the index. I do not myself think it right to encourage the sale of imperfect books and would not have spent half a crown on the rarest of volumes if I could not have the title page, but this is only an aside and does not interfere with the value of Ionica. The little book has no name on the title page, but it is known that the author was Mr. William Johnson, formerly a master at Eaton, and a fellow of King's College, Cambridge. It is understood that this gentleman was born about 1823 and died in 1892. On coming into property, as I have heard in the west of England, he took the name of Cory, so that he is doubly concealed as a poet the anonymous pseudonymous. As Mr. William Cory, he wrote history, but there is but slight trace there of the author of Ionica in the face of the extreme rarity of his early book. Friends surged upon Mr. Cory its republication, and he consented. Probably he would have done well to refuse, for the book is rather delicate and exquisite than forcible, and to reprit it was to draw public attention to its inequality. Perhaps I speak with the narrow-mindedness of the collector who possesses a treasure, but I think the appreciators of Ionica will always be few in number, and it seems good for those few to have some difficulties thrown in the way of their delights. Shortly after Ionica appeared, great developments took place in English verse. In 1858 there was no Rossetti, no Swinburne. We may say that as far as the general public was concerned, there was no Matthew Arnold and no William Morris. This fact has to be taken into consideration in dealing with the tender humanism of Mr. Johnson's verses. They are less carouscating and flamboyant than what we became accustomed to later on. The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and melancholy. But where the author is at his best, he is not only, as it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The book is addressed to and intended for scholars, and the following piece, although really a translation, has no statement to that effect. Before I quote it, perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original is an epigram in the Greek anthology, and that it was written by the great Alexandrian poet Calimachus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the poet Heraclitus, not to be confounded with the philosopher, was dead. Quote, They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead. They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. And now that thou art lying, my dear old carrion guest, a handful of gray ashes long, long ago at rest, still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake. For death he taketh all away, but these he cannot take." No translation ever smelt less of the lamp and more of the violet than this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature, which is already very rich, a poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of a poet's grief at the death of a poet friend, grief mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man's songs, his, quote, nightingales, end quote, are outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship, the reward of one who, in Keith's wonderful phrase, has left, quote, great verse unto a little clan, end quote, the last service for the dead, to whom it was enough to be, quote, unheard, save of the quiet primrose and the span of heaven and few ears, end quote. To modern vulgarity, whose ideal of parnassus is a taproom of howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive, as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that a poet may hold his own comrades something dearer than the public. The author of Ionica would deserve well of his country if he had done no more than draw this piece of aromatic calamus root from the Greek waters. Among the lyrics, which are entirely original, there are several not less exquisite than this memory of calamicus. But the author is not very safe on modern ground. I confess that I shudder when I read, quote, oh, look at his jacket, I know him afar. How nice, cry the ladies, looks yonder hasar, end quote. It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers. And the author of Ionica is more at home in the dryad haunted forest with chromatists. In combining classic sentiment with purely English landscape, he is wonderfully happy. There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable to break the glassy surface of this plaintive dirge, quote, Nihad hid beneath the bank by the willowy river side, where Narcissus gently say, where unmarried echo died, unto thy serene repose waft the stricken anteros, where the tranquil swan is worn, imaged in the watering glass, where the sprays of fresh pink thorn stoop to catch the boats that pass, where the earliest orcus grows, very thou fair anteros. On a flickering wave we gaze, not upon his answering eyes, flower and bird we scarce can praise, having lost his sweet replies, cold and mute the river flows with our tears for anteros, end quote. We know well where this place of burial is to be, not in some glade of Attica or by Sicilian streams, but where a homier river gushes through the swollen lock at Bray or shades the smooth pastoral meadows at Bovedé, where Thames begins to draw longer breath for his passage between Eaton and Windsor. The prevailing sentiment of these poems is a wistful clinging to this present life, a pagan optimism which finds no fault with human existence save that it is so brief. It gains various expression and words that seem hot on a young man's lips, and warm on the same lips, even when no longer young. Quote, I'll borrow life and not grow old, and nightingales and trees shall keep me, though the veins be cold as young as Sophocles. End quote. And again, in poignant notes, quote, you promise heavens free from strife, pure truth and perfect change of will. But sweet, sweet is this human life, so sweet I Thame would breathe it still. You are chilly stars, I can forego. This warm kind world is all I know. End quote. This last quotation is from the poem called Nymnermus in Church. In this odd title he seems to refer to elegies of the Colophonian poet, who was famous in antiquity for the plaintive stress which he laid on the necessity of extracting from life all it had to offer, since there was nothing beyond mortal love which was the life of life. The author of Ionica seems to bring the old Greek fatalist to modern England and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning. But Nymnermus is impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that all earthly pleasures are fugitive. He has always confessed as much at home under the olive tree. It was because they were fugitive that he clung to them. All beautyous things for which we live, by laws of time and space, decay. But oh, the very reason why I class them is because they die. There is perhaps no modern book averse in which a certain melancholy phase of ancient thought is better reproduced than in Ionica. And this gives it slight versus their lasting charm. We have had numerous resuscitations of ancient matters and landscape in modern poetry, since the days of Keats and Andrei Shenye. Many of these have been so brilliantly successful that only pedantry would deny their value. But in Ionica something is given which the others have not known how to give. The murmur of antiquity, the sigh in the grass of meadows dedicated to Persephone. It seems to help us to comprehend the little rites and playful superstitions of the Greeks to see why Miro built a tomb for the grasshopper she loved and lost. Why the shining hair of Lucidici, when she was drowned, should be hung up with songs of pity and reproach in the dreadful vestibule of Aphrodite. The noisy blasphemers of the newest Paris strike the reader as Christian fanatics turned inside out. For all their vehemence they could never lose the experience of their religious birth. The same thing is true of the would-be pagans of the milder sensuous type. The cross prevailed at their nativity and has thrown its shadow over their conscience. But in the midst of the throng there walks this plaintive poet of the Ionica, the one genuine pagan, absolutely untouched by the traditions of the Christian past. I do not commend the fact. I merely note it as giving a strange interest to these forlorn and unpopular poems. Twenty years after the publication of Ionica and when that little book had become famous among the elect, the author printed at Cambridge a second part without a title page and without punctuation, one of the most eccentric-looking pamphlets I ever saw. The enthusiastic amateur will probably regard his collection incomplete without Ionica too, but he must be prepared for disappointment. There is a touch of the old skill here and there, as in such stanzas as this, quote, with half a moon and clouds rose pink and water lilies just in bud, with iris on the river brink and white weed garlands on the mud, and roses thin and pale as dreams and happy signets born in May. No wonder if our country seems dressed out for freedom's natal day, end quote. For these, quote, peace lit upon a fluttering vein and self-forgetting on the brain, unrifts by passion wrought again, splashed from the sky of childhood rain, and rid of afterthought were we, and from foreboding, sweetly free. Now falls the apple, bleeds the vine, and moved by some autumnal sign. I, who in spring was glad, repine, and ache without my anodyne. Oh, things that were, oh, things that are, oh, setting of my double star, end quote. But these are rare in the old unique Ionica of 30 years earlier is not repeated. End of Chapter 25 Chapter 26 of Gossip in a Library This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Eugene Smith. Gossip in a Library by Edmund Goss Chapter 26 The Shaving of Shagpop The Shaving of Shagpop, an Arabian entertainment by George Meredith Chapman and Hall, 1856. It is nearly forty years since I first heard of the shaving of Shagpop. I was newly come in all my callow ardor into the covenant of arts and letters, and I was moving about, still bewildered, in a new world. In this new world, one afternoon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, standing in front of his easel, remarked to all present whom it should concern that The Shaving of Shagpop was a book which Shakespeare might have been glad to write. I now understand that in the warm Rossetti language, this did not mean that there was anything specially reminiscent of the bard of Avon in this book, but simply that it was a monstrous fine production, and worthy of all attention. But at the time I expected, from such a title, something in the way of a belated Midsarmonite's dream, or Love's Labor's Lost. I was fully persuaded that it must be a comedy, and as the book even then was rare, that I was long pursuing the loan of it, I got this dramatic notion upon my mind, and to this day do still clumsily connected with the idea of Shakespeare. But in truth, The Shaving of Shagpop has no other analogy with those plays, which Bacon would have written if he had been so plaguely occupied, than that it is excellent in quality and of the finest literary flavor. The ordinary small collection of rarities has no room for three-volume novels, those signs manual of our British dullness and crafty disdain for literature, one or two of these simulacra, the sham semblances of books I possess, because honored friends have given them to me. Even so, I would value the gift more in the decency of a single volume. The dear little duo decimals of the last century, of course, are welcome in a library. That was a happy day when, by the discovery of a Ferdinand count fathom, I completed my set of small it in the original 15 volumes, but after the first generation of novelists, the sham system began to creep in. With Fanny Burney, novels grew too bulky, and it is a question whether even Scott or Jane Austen should be possessed in the original form. Of the moderns, only Thackeray is bibliographically desirable. Hence, even of Mr. George Meredith's fiction, I make no effort to possess first editions. Yet a shaving of shagpot is an exception. I toiled long to secure it, and now that I hold it, may its modest vermilion cover shine always like a lamp upon my shelves. It is not fiction to a bibliophile. It is worthy of all the honor done to verse. Within the last 10 years of his life, we had the great pleasure of seeing tardy justice done at length to the genius of Mr. George Meredith. I like to think that, after a long and noble struggle against the inattention of the public, after the pouring of high music for two generations into ears whose owners seem to have willfully sealed them with wax, so that only the most staccato and least happy notes ever reached their dullness, George Meredith did, before the age of seventy, reap a little of his reward. I am told that the movement in favor of him began in America. If so, more praise to American readers, who had to teach us to appreciate de Quincey in prayer before we knew the value of those men. Yet is there much to do? Had George Meredith been a Frenchman, what monographs had ere this been called forth by his work? In Germany or Italy or Denmark even, such gifts as his would long ago have found their classic place above further discussion. But England is a gallio, and in defiance of Mr. Legallion cares little for the things of literature. If a final criticism of George Meredith existed, where in it would the shaving of Shogpot find its place? There is fear that in competition with the series of analytical studies of modern life that stretches from the ordeal of Richard Feverell to one of our conquerors, it might chance to be pushed away with a few lines of praise. Now, I would not seem so paradoxical as to say that when an extravaganza is held up to me in one hand, and a masterpiece of morality, like the egoist and the other, I can doubt which is the greater book. But there are moods in which I am jealous of the novels, and wish to be left alone with my Arabian entertainment. Delicious in this harsh world of reality to fold a mist around us and out of it to evolve the yellow domes and black cypresses, the silver fountains and marble pillars of the fabulous city of Shogpot. I do not know any later book than the shaving, in which an Englishman has allowed his fancy untrammeled by any sort of moral or intellectual subterfuge to go arroaming by the light of the moon. We do this sort of thing no longer. We are wholly given up to realism. We are harshly pressed upon, on all sides, by the importunities of excess of knowledge. If we talk of marathons, zoologists, or upon us, of oob or ockless, the geographers flourish their maps at us and defiance. But the author of the Shaving of Shogpot, in the bloom of his happy youthful genius, defied all this pedantry. In a little address, which has been suppressed in later editions, he said, December 8th, 1855. Well, it has seemed to me that the only way to tell an Arabian story was by imitating the style and manner of the Oriental storytellers. But such an attempt, whether successful or not, may read like a translation. I therefore think it better to prelude this entertainment by an avowal that it springs from no eastern source and is in every respect an original work." If one reader of the Shaving of Shogpot were to confess the truth, he would say that to him, at least the other, the genuine Oriental tales appear the imitation, and not a very good imitation. The true genius of the East breathes in Meredith's pages, and the Arabian knights at all events in the crude literality of Sir Richard Burton pale before them like a mirage. The variety of scenes and images, the untiring evolution of plot, the kaleidoscopic shifting of harmonious colors, all these seem of the very essence of Arabia and to coil directly from some bottle of a genie. Ah, what a bottle. As we whirl along in the vast and glowing bacchanal, we cry like scannery. Quote, qu'ils sont deux, boutez joli, qu'ils sont deux, vos petits glous glous. Ah, boutez, mami, pourquoi vous videz-vous? End quote. Ah, why indeed. For the Shaving of Shogpot is one of those very rare modern books of which it is certain that they are too short, and even our excitement at the mastery of the event is tamed by a sense that the show is closing and that Shibli Bhagavad has been too promptly unsuccessful in smiting through the identical. But perhaps of all gifts, there is none more rare than this of clearing the board and leaving the reader still hungry. Who shall say, in dealing with such a book, what passage in it is best or worst? Either the fancy carried away utterly captive follows the poet whether he will, or the whole conception is a failure. Perhaps, after the elemental splendor and storm of the final scene, what cleans most to the memory is how Shibli Bhagavad, hard beset in the cave of Chrisillites, touched the great lion with the broken sapphire hair of Garavine. Or again, how on the black coast of the enchanted sea, wandering by moonlight, he found the sacred lily and tore it up, and lo, its bulb was a palpitating heart of human flesh. Or how Banavar called the unwilling serpents too often and failed to win her beauty back till, at an awful price, she once more, and for the last time, contrived to call her bodyguard of snakes hissing and screaming around her. There is surely no modern book so unsullied as this is, by the modern spirit, none in which the desire to teach a lesson, to refer knowingly to topics of the day, or worst of all, to be incontinently funny, interferes less, with the tender magic of Oriental fancy, or with the childlike earnest faith in what is utterly outside the limits of experience. It belongs to that infancy of the world when the happy guileless human being still holds that somewhere there is a flower to be plucked, a lamp to be rubbed, or a form of words to be spoken which will reverse the humdrum laws of nature, call up unwilling spirits bound to incredible services, and change all this brown life of ours to Scarlet and Azure and Mother of Pearl. Little by little, even our children are losing this happy gift of believing the incredible, and that class of writing which seems to require less effort than any other, and to be mere spinning of gold thread out of the poet's inner consciousness, is less and less at command, and when executed gives less and less satisfaction. The gnomes of Pope, the Faes, and quote Trilbees, and quote of Notier, even the fairy world of Doyle are breathed upon by a race that has grown up habituated to science. But even for such a race, it must be long before the sumptuous glow and rich triumph of humor of the shaving of Shagpat have lost all their attraction. End of Chapter 26. End of Gosset, been a library by Edmund Goss.