Chapter 4
"But vainly she dissembled, For whene'er she tried to smile, A tear unbidden trembled In her blue eye all the while."
This was pleasant for "him"; but the point is that these are lines to an Indian air. Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines to an Indian air; but we may "swear, and save our oath," that the singers preferred Bayly's. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal the popularity of what follows. I shall ask the persevering reader to tell me where Bayly ends, and where parody begins:
"When the eye of beauty closes, When the weary are at rest, When the shade the sunset throws is But a vapour in the west; When the moonlight tips the billow With a wreath of silver foam, And the whisper of the willow Breaks the slumber of the gnome,-- Night may come, but sleep will linger, When the spirit, all forlorn, Shuts its ear against the singer, And the rustle of the corn Round the sad old mansion sobbing Bids the wakeful maid recall Who it was that caused the throbbing Of her bosom at the ball."
Will this not do to sing just as well as the original? and is it not true that "almost any man you please could reel it off for days together"? Anything will do that speaks of forgetting people, and of being forsaken, and about the sunset, and the ivy, and the rose.
"Tell me no more that the tide of thine anguish Is red as the heart's blood and salt as the sea; That the stars in their courses command thee to languish, That the hand of enjoyment is loosened from thee!
"Tell me no more that, forgotten, forsaken, Thou roamest the wild wood, thou sigh'st on the shore. Nay, rent is the pledge that of old we had taken, And the words that have bound me, they bind thee no more!
"Ere the sun had gone down on thy sorrow, the maidens Were wreathing the orange's bud in thy hair, And the trumpets were tuning the musical cadence That gave thee, a bride, to the baronet's heir.
"Farewell, may no thought pierce thy breast of thy treason; Farewell, and be happy in Hubert's embrace. Be the belle of the ball, be the bride of the season, With diamonds bedizened and languid in lace."
This is mine, and I say, with modest pride, that it is quite as good as--
"Go, may'st thou be happy, Though sadly we part, In life's early summer Grief breaks not the heart.
"The ills that assail us As speedily pass As shades o'er a mirror, Which stain not the glass."
Anybody could do it, we say, in what Edgar Poe calls "the mad pride of intellectuality," and it certainly looks as if it could be done by anybody. For example, take Bayly as a moralist. His ideas are out of the centre. This is about his standard:
"CRUELTY.
"'Break not the thread the spider Is labouring to weave.' I said, nor as I eyed her Could dream she would deceive.
"Her brow was pure and candid, Her tender eyes above; And I, if ever man did, Fell hopelessly in love.
"For who could deem that cruel So fair a face might be? That eyes so like a jewel Were only paste for me?
"I wove my thread, aspiring Within her heart to climb; I wove with zeal untiring For ever such a time!
"But, ah! that thread was broken All by her fingers fair, The vows and prayers I've spoken Are vanished into air!"
Did Bayly write that ditty or did I? Upon my word, I can hardly tell. I am being hypnotised by Bayly. I lisp in numbers, and the numbers come like mad. I can hardly ask for a light without abounding in his artless vein. Easy, easy it seems; and yet it was Bayly after all, not you nor I, who wrote the classic--
"I'll hang my harp on a willow tree, And I'll go to the war again, For a peaceful home has no charm for me, A battlefield no pain; The lady I love will soon be a bride, With a diadem on her brow. Ah, why did she flatter my boyish pride? She is going to leave me now!"
It is like listening, in the sad yellow evening, to the strains of a barrel organ, faint and sweet, and far away. A world of memories come jigging back--foolish fancies, dreams, desires, all beckoning and bobbing to the old tune:
"Oh had I but loved with a boyish love, It would have been well for me."
How does Bayly manage it? What is the trick of it, the obvious, simple, meretricious trick, which somehow, after all, let us mock as we will, Bayly could do, and we cannot? He really had a slim, serviceable, smirking, and sighing little talent of his own; and--well, we have not even that. Nobody forgets
"The lady I love will soon be a bride."
Nobody remembers our cultivated epics and esoteric sonnets, oh brother minor poet, _mon semblable_, _mon frere_! Nor can we rival, though we publish our books on the largest paper, the buried popularity of
"Gaily the troubadour Touched his guitar When he was hastening Home from the war, Singing, "From Palestine Hither I come, Lady love! Lady love! Welcome me home!"
Of course this is, historically, a very incorrect rendering of a Languedoc crusader; and the impression is not mediaeval, but of the comic opera. Any one of us could get in more local colour for the money, and give the crusader a cithern or citole instead of a guitar. This is how we should do "Gaily the Troubadour" nowadays:--
"Sir Ralph he is hardy and mickle of might, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_! Soldans seven hath he slain in fight, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!
"Sir Ralph he rideth in riven mail, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_! Beneath his nasal is his dark face pale, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!
"His eyes they blaze as the burning coal, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_! He smiteth a stave on his gold citole, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!
"From her mangonel she looketh forth, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_! 'Who is he spurreth so late to the north?' _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!
"Hark! for he speaketh a knightly name, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_! And her wan cheek glows as a burning flame, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!
"For Sir Ralph he is hardy and mickle of might, _Ha_, _la belle blanche aubepine_! And his love shall ungirdle his sword to-night, _Honneur a la belle Isoline_!"
Such is the romantic, esoteric, old French way of saying--
"Hark, 'tis the troubadour Breathing her name Under the battlement Softly he came, Singing, "From Palestine Hither I come. Lady love! Lady love! Welcome me home!"
The moral of all this is that minor poetry has its fashions, and that the butterfly Bayly could versify very successfully in the fashion of a time simpler and less pedantic than our own. On the whole, minor poetry for minor poetry, this artless singer, piping his native drawing-room notes, gave a great deal of perfectly harmless, if highly uncultivated, enjoyment.
It must not be fancied that Mr. Bayly had only one string to his bow--or, rather, to his lyre. He wrote a great deal, to be sure, about the passion of love, which Count Tolstoi thinks we make too much of. He did not dream that the affairs of the heart should be regulated by the State--by the Permanent Secretary of the Marriage Office. That is what we are coming to, of course, unless the enthusiasts of "free love" and "go away as you please" failed with their little programme. No doubt there would be poetry if the State regulated or left wholly unregulated the affections of the future. Mr. Bayly, living in other times, among other manners, piped of the hard tyranny of a mother:
"We met, 'twas in a crowd, and I thought he would shun me. He came, I could not breathe, for his eye was upon me. He spoke, his words were cold, and his smile was unaltered, I knew how much he felt, for his deep-toned voice faltered. I wore my bridal robe, and I rivalled its whiteness; Bright gems were in my hair,--how I hated their brightness! He called me by my name as the bride of another. Oh, thou hast been the cause of this anguish, my mother!"
In future, when the reformers of marriage have had their way, we shall read:
"The world may think me gay, for I bow to my fate; But thou hast been the cause of my anguish, O State!"
For even when true love is regulated by the County Council or the village community, it will still persist in not running smooth.
Of these passions, then, Mr. Bayly could chant; but let us remember that he could also dally with old romance, that he wrote:
"The mistletoe hung in the castle hall, The holly branch shone on the old oak wall."
When the bride unluckily got into the ancient chest,
"It closed with a spring. And, dreadful doom, The bride lay clasped in her living tomb,"
so that her lover "mourned for his fairy bride," and never found out her premature casket. This was true romance as understood when Peel was consul. Mr. Bayly was rarely political; but he commemorated the heroes of Waterloo, our last victory worth mentioning:
"Yet mourn not for them, for in future tradition Their fame shall abide as our tutelar star, _To instil by example the glorious ambition_ _Of falling_, _like them_, _in a glorious war_. Though tears may be seen in the bright eyes of beauty, One consolation must ever remain: Undaunted they trod in the pathway of duty, Which led them to glory on Waterloo's plain."
Could there be a more simple Tyrtaeus? and who that reads him will not be ambitious of falling in a glorious war? Bayly, indeed, is always simple. He is "simple, sensuous, and passionate," and Milton asked no more from a poet.
"A wreath of orange blossoms, When next we met, she wore. _The expression of her features_ _Was more thoughtful than before_."
On his own principles Wordsworth should have admired this unaffected statement; but Wordsworth rarely praised his contemporaries, and said that "Guy Mannering" was a respectable effort in the style of Mrs. Radcliffe. Nor did he even extol, though it is more in his own line,
"Of what is the old man thinking, As he leans on his oaken staff?"
My own favourite among Mr. Bayly's effusions is not a sentimental ode, but the following gush of true natural feeling:--
"Oh, give me new faces, new faces, new faces, I've seen those around me a fortnight and more. Some people grow weary of things or of places, But persons to me are a much greater bore. I care not for features, I'm sure to discover Some exquisite trait in the first that you send. My fondness falls off when the novelty's over; I want a new face for an intimate friend."
This is perfectly candid: we should all prefer a new face, if pretty, every fortnight:
"Come, I pray you, and tell me this, All good fellows whose beards are grey, Did not the fairest of the fair Common grow and wearisome ere Ever a month had passed away?"
For once Mr. Bayly uttered in his "New Faces" a sentiment not usually expressed, but universally felt; and now he suffers, as a poet, because he is no longer a new face, because we have welcomed his juniors. To Bayly we shall not return; but he has one rare merit,--he is always perfectly plain-spoken and intelligible.
"Farewell to my Bayly, farewell to the singer Whose tender effusions my aunts used to sing; Farewell, for the fame of the bard does not linger, My favourite minstrel's no longer the thing. But though on his temples has faded the laurel, Though broken the lute, and though veiled is the crest, My Bayly, at worst, is uncommonly moral, Which is more than some new poets are, at their best."
Farewell to our Bayly, about whose songs we may say, with Mr. Thackeray in "Vanity Fair," that "they contain numberless good-natured, simple appeals to the affections." We are no longer affectionate, good-natured, simple. We are cleverer than Bayly's audience; but are we better fellows?
THEODORE DE BANVILLE
There are literary reputations in France and England which seem, like the fairies, to be unable to cross running water. Dean Swift, according to M. Paul de Saint-Victor, is a great man at Dover, a pigmy at Calais--"Son talent, qui enthousiasme l'Angleterre, n'inspire ailleurs qu'un morne etonnement." M. Paul De Saint-Victor was a fair example of the French critic, and what he says about Swift was possibly true,--for him. There is not much resemblance between the Dean and M. Theodore de Banville, except that the latter too is a poet who has little honour out of his own country. He is a charming singer at Calais; at Dover he inspires _un morne etonnement_ (a bleak perplexity). One has never seen an English attempt to describe or estimate his genius. His unpopularity in England is illustrated by the fact that the London Library, that respectable institution, does not, or did not, possess a single copy of any one of his books. He is but feebly represented even in the collection of the British Museum. It is not hard to account for our indifference to M. De Banville. He is a poet not only intensely French, but intensely Parisian. He is careful of form, rather than abundant in manner. He has no story to tell, and his sketches in prose, his attempts at criticism, are not very weighty or instructive. With all his limitations, however, he represents, in company with M. Leconte de Lisle, the second of the three generations of poets over whom Victor Hugo reigned.
M. De Banville has been called, by people who do not like, and who apparently have not read him, _un saltimbanque litteraire_ (a literary rope-dancer). Other critics, who do like him, but who have limited their study to a certain portion of his books, compare him to a worker in gold, who carefully chases or embosses dainty processions of fauns and maenads. He is, in point of fact, something more estimable than a literary rope- dancer, something more serious than a working jeweller in rhymes. He calls himself _un raffine_; but he is not, like many persons who are proud of that title, _un indifferent_ in matters of human fortune. His earlier poems, of course, are much concerned with the matter of most early poems--with Lydia and Cynthia and their light loves. The verses of his second period often deal with the most evanescent subjects, and they now retain but a slight petulance and sparkle, as of champagne that has been too long drawn. In a prefatory plea for M. De Banville's poetry one may add that he "has loved our people," and that no poet, no critic, has honoured Shakespeare with brighter words of praise.
Theodore de Banville was born at Moulin, on March 14th 1823, and he is therefore three years younger than the dictionaries of biography would make the world believe. He is the son of a naval officer, and, according to M. Charles Baudelaire, a descendant of the Crusaders. He came much too late into the world to distinguish himself in the noisy exploits of 1830, and the chief event of his youth was the publication of "Les Cariatides" in 1842. This first volume contained a selection from the countless verses which the poet produced between his sixteenth and his nineteenth year. Whatever other merits the songs of minors may possess, they have seldom that of permitting themselves to be read. "Les Cariatides" are exceptional here. They are, above all things, readable. "On peut les lire a peu de frais," M. De Banville says himself. He admits that his lighter works, the poems called (in England) _vers de societe_, are a sort of intellectual cigarette. M. Emile de Girardin said, in the later days of the Empire, that there were too many cigarettes in the air. Their stale perfume clings to the literature of that time, as the odour of pastilles yet hangs about the verse of Dorat, the designs of Eisen, the work of the Pompadour period. There is more than smoke in M. De Banville's ruling inspiration, his lifelong devotion to letters and to great men of letters--Shakespeare, Moliere, Homer, Victor Hugo. These are his gods; the memory of them is his muse. His enthusiasm is worthy of one who, though born too late to see and know the noble wildness of 1830, yet lives on the recollections, and is strengthened by the example, of that revival of letters. Whatever one may say of the _renouveau_, of romanticism, with its affectations, the young men of 1830 were sincere in their devotion to liberty, to poetry, to knowledge. One can hardly find a more brilliant and touching belief in these great causes than that of Edgar Quinet, as displayed in the letters of his youth. De Banville fell on more evil times.
When "Les Cariatides" was published poets had begun to keep an eye on the Bourse, and artists dabbled in finance. The new volume of song in the sordid age was a November primrose, and not unlike the flower of Spring. There was a singular freshness and hopefulness in the verse, a wonderful "certitude dans l'expression lyrique," as Sainte-Beuve said. The mastery of musical speech and of various forms of song was already to be recognised as the basis and the note of the talent of De Banville. He had style, without which a man may write very nice verses about heaven and hell and other matters, and may please thousands of excellent people, but will write poetry--never. Comparing De Banville's boy's work with the boy's work of Mr. Tennyson, one observes in each--"Les Cariatides" as in "The Hesperides"--the _timbre_ of a new voice. Poetry so fresh seems to make us aware of some want which we had hardly recognised, but now are sensible of, at the moment we find it satisfied.
It is hardly necessary to say that this gratifying and welcome strangeness, this lyric originality, is nearly all that M. De Banville has in common with the English poet whose two priceless volumes were published in the same year as "Les Cariatides?" The melody of Mr. Tennyson's lines, the cloudy palaces of his imagination, rose
"As Ilion, like a mist rose into towers,"
when Apollo sang. The architecture was floating at first, and confused; while the little theatre of M. De Banville's poetry, where he sat piping to a dance of nixies, was brilliantly lit and elegant with fresh paint and gilding. "The Cariatides" support the pediment and roof of a theatre or temple in the Graeco-French style. The poet proposed to himself
"A cote de Venus et du fils de Latone Peindre la fee et la peri."
The longest poem in the book, and the most serious, "La Voie Lactee," reminds one of the "Palace of Art," written before the after-thought, before the "white-eyed corpses" were found lurking in corners. Beginning with Homer, "the Ionian father of the rest,"--
"Ce dieu, pere des dieux qu'adore Ionie,"--
the poet glorifies all the chief names of song. There is a long procession of illustrious shadows before Shakespeare comes--Shakespeare, whose genius includes them all.
"Toute creation a laquelle on aspire, Tout reve, toute chose, emanent de Shakespeare."
His mind has lent colour to the flowers and the sky, to
"La fleur qui brode un point sur les manteau des plaines, Les nenuphars penches, et les pales roseaux Qui disent leur chant sombre au murmure des eaux."
One recognises more sincerity in this hymn to all poets, from Orpheus to Heine, than in "Les Baisers de Pierre"--a clever imitation of De Musset's stories in verse. Love of art and of the masters of art, a passion for the figures of old mythology, which had returned again after their exile in 1830, gaiety, and a revival of the dexterity of Villon and Marot,--these things are the characteristics of M. De Banville's genius, and all these were displayed in "Les Cariatides." Already, too, his preoccupation with the lighter and more fantastic sort of theatrical amusements shows itself in lines like these:
"De son lit a baldaquin Le soleil de son beau globe Avait l'air d'un arlequin Etalant sa garde-robe;
"Et sa soeur au front changeant Mademoiselle la Lune Avec ses grands yeux d'argent Regardait la terre brune."
The verse about "the sun in bed," unconsciously Miltonic, is in a vein of bad taste which has always had seductions for M. De Banville. He mars a fine later poem on Roncevaux and Roland by a similar absurdity. The angel Michael is made to stride down the steps of heaven four at a time, and M. De Banville fancies that this sort of thing is like the simplicity of the ages of faith.
In "Les Cariatides," especially in the poems styled "En Habit Zinzolin," M. De Banville revived old measures--the _rondeau_ and the "poor little triolet." These are forms of verse which it is easy to write badly, and hard indeed to write well. They have knocked at the door of the English muse's garden--a runaway knock. In "Les Cariatides" they took a subordinate place, and played their pranks in the shadow of the grave figures of mythology, or at the close of the procession of Dionysus and his Maenads. De Banville often recalls Keats in his choice of classical themes. "Les Exiles," a poem of his maturity, is a French "Hyperion." "Le Triomphe de Bacchus" reminds one of the song of the Bassarids in "Endymion"--
"So many, and so many, and so gay."
There is a pretty touch of the pedant (who exists, says M. De Banville, in the heart of the poet) in this verse:
"Il reve a Cama, l'amour aux cinq fleches fleuries, Qui, lorsque soupire au milieu des roses prairies La douce Vasanta, parmi les bosquets de santal, Envoie aux cinq sens les fleches du carquois fatal."
The Bacchus of Titian has none of this Oriental languor, no memories of perfumed places where "the throne of Indian Cama slowly sails." One cannot help admiring the fancy which saw the conquering god still steeped in Asiatic ease, still unawakened to more vigorous passion by the fresh wind blowing from Thrace. Of all the Olympians, Diana has been most often hymned by M. De Banville: his imagination is haunted by the figure of the goddess. Now she is manifest in her Hellenic aspect, as Homer beheld her, "taking her pastime in the chase of boars and swift deer; and with her the wild wood-nymphs are sporting the daughters of Zeus; and Leto is glad at heart, for her child towers over them all, and is easy to be known where all are fair" (Odyssey, vi.). Again, Artemis appears more thoughtful, as in the sculpture of Jean Goujon, touched with the sadness of moonlight. Yet again, she is the weary and exiled spirit that haunts the forest of Fontainebleau, and is a stranger among the woodland folk, the _fades_ and nixies. To this goddess, "being triple in her divided deity," M. De Banville has written his hymn in the characteristic form of the old French _ballade_. The translator may borrow Chaucer's apology--
"And eke to me it is a grete penaunce, Syth rhyme in English hath such scarsete To folowe, word by word, the curiosite Of _Banville_, flower of them that make in France."
"BALLADE SUR LES HOTES MYSTERIEUX DE LA FORET
"Still sing the mocking fairies, as of old, Beneath the shade of thorn and holly tree; The west wind breathes upon them pure and cold, And still wolves dread Diana roving free, In secret woodland with her company. Tis thought the peasants' hovels know her rite When now the wolds are bathed in silver light, And first the moonrise breaks the dusky grey, Then down the dells, with blown soft hair and bright, And through the dim wood Dian thrids her way.