Chapter C: S. Calverley

Imitating the now-forgotten Martin Tupper.

* * * * *

Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony.... Even that vulgar and Tavern Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.... There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as the whole World, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE (_Religio Medici_).

* * * * *

(Speaking of an Essay on Wordsworth he is about to write for some Melbourne society) I purpose describing briefly the poetic tendencies, or rather the unpoetic tendencies, of the 18th Century, and the new school beginning to manifest itself in Cowper. I shall then refer to W.’s principles—shall banish to a future time the working out of the _psychological_ connection between forms of nature and the human soul—shall banish also the feelings, the elementary feelings, of humanity, which W. drew _powerful_ attention to, and confine myself to pointing out those characteristics in external nature which he took note of. These produce corresponding feelings in the “human,” and some of them are _beauty_, _silence and calm_, _joyousness_, _generosity_, _freedom_, _grandeur_, and _Spirituality_. These are found in Nature, and W. saw them, and in the growing familiarity with them a man’s soul becomes _beautiful_, _calm_, _joyous_, _generous_, _free_, _grand_, and _spiritual_. The first ones, of course, all depend on and grow from the last, and the Spirituality is God immanent. This last, as the root of all the others, will merit special attention—it exhibits W.’s poetico-philosophy so far as it regards the work of Nature upon man; and includes too the Platonic Reminiscence business. (_Here follows personal chit-chat._) I think we might add the “supreme loftiness of _labour_” to the foregoing elements in Nature. In the _Gipsies_ (I give both readings)

O better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds or evil than such life!
The silent heavens have goings-on;
The stars have tasks—but these have none!

Oh, better wrong and strife
(By nature transient) than this torpid life:
Life which the very stars reprove
As on their silent tasks they move.

R. HODGSON (_Letter_, 1877, when aged 21).

In 1877 Blake was little appreciated. (I remember only that in
our children’s books we had “Tiger, Tiger burning bright”—and
it was a strange thing to include in such books a poem which
raises the problems of the existence of evil and the nature of
God). Hence it will be evident why so keen a student of poetry
as Hodgson did not couple Blake with Cowper as a precursor of
the Romantic Revival. As a matter of fact Blake had more of the
“Romantic” spirit than Cowper, and really preceded him, for
the poor verse that Cowper published the year before Blake’s
_Poetical Sketches_ need not be considered. While still in his
teens Blake wrote (“To the Muses”):

... Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry,
How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few.

Curiously enough Gray also had in him an element of the
Romantic _which he suppressed_. It is very remarkable that in
his Elegy (published 1751) he cut out the following verse:

There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.

* * * * *

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

WORDSWORTH (_Song at the Feast of Brougham
Castle_).

* * * * *

Ambition tempts to rise,
Then whirls the wretch from high
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice
And grinning Infamy.

THOMAS GRAY (_On a Distant Prospect of Eton
College_).

Slightly altered verbally to admit of quotation.

* * * * *

MEDITATIONS OF A HINDU PRINCE

All the world over, I wonder, in lands that I never have trod,
Are the people eternally seeking for the signs and steps of a God?
Westward across the ocean, and Northward across the snow,
Do they all stand gazing, as ever, and what do the wisest know?

Here, in this mystical India, the deities hover and swarm
Like the wild bees heard in the tree-tops, or the gusts of a gathering
storm;
In the air men hear their voices, their feet on the rocks are seen,
Yet we all say, “Whence is the message, and what may the wonders mean?”

A million shrines stand open, and ever the censer swings,
As they bow to a mystic symbol, or the figures of ancient kings;
And the incense rises ever, and rises the endless cry
Of those who are heavy-laden, and of cowards loth to die.

For the Destiny drives us together, like deer in a pass of the hills,
Above is the sky, and around us the sound of the shot that kills;
Pushed by a Power we see not, and struck by a hand unknown,
We pray to the trees for shelter, and press our lips to a stone.

The trees wave a shadowy answer, and the rock frowns hollow and grim,
And the form and the nod of the demon are caught in the twilight dim;
And we look to the sunlight falling afar on the mountain crest,
Is there never a path runs upward to a refuge there and a rest?

The path, ah! who has shown it, and which is the faithful guide?
The haven, ah! who has known it? for steep is the mountain side.
Forever the shot strikes surely, and ever the wasted breath
Of the praying multitude rises, whose answer is only death.

Here are the tombs of my kinsfolk, the fruit of an ancient name,
Chiefs who were slain on the war-field, and women who died in flame;
They are gods, these kings of the foretime, they are spirits who guard
our race,
Ever I watch and worship—they sit with a marble face.

And the myriad idols around me, and the legion of muttering priests,
The revels and rites unholy, the dark, unspeakable feasts!
What have they wrung from the Silence? Hath even a whisper come
Of the secret, Whence and Whither? Alas! for the gods are dumb.

Shall I list to the word of the English, who come from the uttermost sea?
“The Secret, hath it been told you, and what is your message to me?”
It is nought but the wide-world story how the earth and the heavens
began,
How the gods are glad and angry, and a Deity once was man.

I had thought, “Perchance in the cities where the rulers of India dwell,
Whose orders flash from the far land, who girdle the earth with a spell,
They have fathomed the depths we float on, or measured the unknown main—”
Sadly they turn from the venture, and say that the quest is vain.

Is life, then, a dream and delusion, and where shall the dreamer awake?
Is the world seen like shadows on water, and what if the mirror break?
Shall it pass as a camp that is struck, as a tent that is gathered and
gone
From the sands that were lamp-lit at eve, and at morning are level and
lone?

Is there nought in the heaven above, whence the hail and the levin are
hurled,
But the wind that is swept around us by the rush of the rolling world?
The wind that shall scatter my ashes, and bear me to silence and sleep
With the dirge, and the sounds of lamenting, and the voices of women who
weep.

SIR ALFRED LYALL.

* * * * *

MEDITATION OF A HINDU PRINCE AND SCEPTIC

I think till I weary with thinking, said the sad-eyed Hindu King,
But I see but shadows around me, illusion in everything.

How knowest thou aught of God, of his favour or his wrath?
Can the little fish tell what the lion thinks, or map out the eagle’s
path?

Can the finite the infinite search,—did the blind discover the stars?
Is the thought that I think a thought, or a throb of the brain in its
bars?

For aught that my eye can discern, your god is what you think good,
Yourself flashed back from the glass when the light pours on it in flood!

You preach to me of his justice, and this is his realm, you say,
Where the good are dying of hunger, and the bad gorge every day.

You tell me he loveth mercy, but the famine is not yet gone,—
That he hateth the shedder of blood, yet he slayeth us, everyone.

You tell me the soul must live, that spirit can never die,
If he was content when I was not, why not when I’ve passed by?

You say that I must have a meaning! So has dung,—and its meaning is
flowers:
What if our lives are but nurture for souls that are higher than ours?

When the fish swims out of the water, when the bird soars out of the
blue,
Man’s thought shall transcend man’s knowledge, and your God be no reflex
of you!

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

The preceding poem by Lyall had the same title as these
verses, “Meditation of a Hindu Prince _and Sceptic_” when
first published in the _Cornhill_, September, 1877. I was
fully convinced, for reasons that would take too long to set
out here, that these verses were by Hodgson. But Mrs. Piper,
the well-known trance-medium, says that Hodgson gave her a
copy signed with other initials than his, and that she is sure
he was not the author. She has mislaid the copy she refers
to. In view of this statement I must not attribute the verses
to Hodgson, although I cannot but doubt whether Mrs. Piper’s
recollection is correct.

* * * * *

One summer hour abides, what time I perched,
Dappled with noon-day, under simmering leaves,
And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof
An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,
Denouncing me an alien and a thief.

J. R. LOWELL (_The Cathedral_).

* * * * *

The present writer ... was seated in a railway-carriage, five minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore a much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes,—for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speak of intervening,—a feeling of puzzlement arose in his mind.... The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objects they had some unknown cognizance; but he could not get behind the melancholy eye within a yard of him and look through it. How, from that window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could not even fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror. These wild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love and hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition of a life akin so far with his own. But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to conceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, but the one could not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,—what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could meet and compare notes? Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash into vegetarianism!

ALEXANDER SMITH (_On the Importance of Man to Himself_).

Does not this give the reason why we do not eat dogs and
horses? We, more than other nations, recognize in the horse, as
well as in the dog, a life and intelligence akin to our own.
We also believe that both animals reciprocate the affection
we feel towards them. (Coleridge in _Table Talk_ says: “The
dog alone, of all brute animals, has a στοργή or affection
_upwards_ to man.”)

* * * * *

When I am playing with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her? We entertaine one another with mutual apish trickes: If I have my houre to begin or to refuse, so hath she hers.

MONTAIGNE (_Bk. II, ch. 12_).

* * * * *

O what are these Spirits that o’er us creep,
And touch our eyelids and drink our breath?
The first, with a flower in his hand, is Sleep;
The next, with a star on his brow, is Death.

R. BUCHANAN (_Balder the Beautiful_).

* * * * *

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life—
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable life.

SHELLEY (_Adonaïs_ XXXIX).

* * * * *

Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did—and does—smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fails me, I’ll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.

R. BROWNING (_At the Mermaid_).

“My life did—and does—smack sweet”—see note p. 236.

* * * * *

THE LAMB

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bade thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
He is called by thy name.
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!

W. BLAKE (1757-1827).

* * * * *

Who can wrestle against Sleep? Yet is that giant very gentleness.

MARTIN TUPPER (_Of Beauty_).

* * * * *

ON A FINE MORNING

I.

Whence comes Solace?—Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the Gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

II.

Thus do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its iridized embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.

THOMAS HARDY.

This is not in the _Selected Poems_. It is interesting as
showing Mr. Hardy in an optimistic mood.

* * * * *

Without the smile from partial beauty won,
Oh, what were man? a world without a sun!

THOMAS CAMPBELL (_Pleasures of Hope, Pt. II_).

* * * * *

Of two opposite methods of action, do you desire to know which should have the preference? Calculate their effects in pleasures and pains, and prefer that which promises the greater sum of pleasures.

* * * * *

Think not that a man will so much as lift up his little finger on your behalf, unless he sees his advantage in it.

JEREMY BENTHAM (1748-1832).

These cold-blooded and repulsive aphorisms are typical of
Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy, from which all sense of duty
and moral aspiration were excluded. It is strange that these
views should be held by a great thinker who was himself of
benevolent character. Such a doctrine could not have survived
to my time, had it not been supplemented by John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873), who gave a different place to the humanist
element. While still adhering to Bentham’s doctrine that there
is no good but pleasure and no evil but pain, he introduced as
the higher forms of pleasure those derived from the wish for
self-culture and the desire to satisfy our mental and moral
aims. He gave priority to all the sympathetic and altruistic
motives that govern our actions. Whereas Bentham held that all
pleasures were equal and could be counted in one column, Mill
said that they differed in quality, that they could no more be
added up in one column than pounds, shillings and pence; that,
in fact, there is no equivalent for a higher pleasure in any
quantity of a lower one. This was typical of Mill’s sincerity:
but he did not see that his additions were fatal to Bentham’s
doctrine and to hedonism generally. How, for instance, is a
higher pleasure to be known for a higher? In what respect is
an intellectual pleasure or the satisfaction of doing one’s
duty of higher quality than the gratification of the senses? To
ascertain this it is necessary to pass from the pleasure itself
to the thing that gives the pleasure or, in other words, to the
character that finds the pleasure. Many illustrations of this
might be given. In one of Sir Alfred Lyall’s poems, which is
founded on fact, an Englishman who has been captured by Arabs
has no religious belief; his loved ones are waiting his return;
he can save his life if he will only repeat the Mahomedan
formula; if he dies no one will know of his self-sacrifice: yet
he decides to die for the honour of England. However, Bentham’s
careful calculus of equal pleasures and pains, “push-pin” being
“worth as much as poetry,”[18] came to an end through Mill, and
Mill at once made way for Spencer on the one hand, and T. H.
Green on the other; both of these rejected the calculation of
pleasures or happiness as the standard of right either for the
individual or the greatest number. In all directions the low
moral stage of philosophic thought represented by Benthamism
has been passed through and forgotten. We no longer hold the
belief that the only sphere of Government is to protect our
persons and property, but follow loftier ideals; and in art and
poetry we look for higher aims than mere luxury and sensuous
pleasure.

* * * * *

LIFE

We are born; we laugh; we weep;
We love; we droop; we die!
Ah! wherefore do we laugh, or weep?
Why do we live, or die?
Who knows that secret deep?
Alas, not I!

Why doth the violet spring
Unseen by human eye?
Why do the radiant seasons bring
Sweet thoughts that quickly fly?
Why do our fond hearts cling
To things that die?

We toil,—through pain and wrong;
We fight,—and fly;
We love; we lose; and then, ere long,
Stone dead we lie.
Life! is _all_ thy song
Endure and—die?

B. W. PROCTER (_Barry Cornwall_).

* * * * *

Stop and consider! Life is but a day;
A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way
From a tree’s summit; a poor Indian’s sleep
While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep
Of Montmorenci,—Why so sad a moan?
Life is the rose’s hope while yet unblown;
The reading of an ever-changing tale;
The light uplifting of a maiden’s veil;
A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air;
A laughing school boy, without grief or care,
Riding the springy branches of an elm.

KEATS (_Sleep and Poetry_).

Life is compared to the brief fall of a dewdrop, the Indian’s
unconscious sleep while his boat hastens to destruction; but
life also is Hope, Intellect, Beauty, and Physical Enjoyment.

* * * * *

When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit
Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay—
To-morrow’s falser than the former day;
Lies worse and, while it says we shall be blessed
With some new joys, cuts off what we possesst.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And, from the dregs of life, think to receive
What the first sprightly running would not give,
I’m tired with waiting for this chymic gold,
Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.

JOHN DRYDEN (_Aureng-zebe_).

* * * * *

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

R. BROWNING (_Home-Thoughts from Abroad_).

* * * * *

PEU DE CHOSE ET PRESQUE TROP.

La vie est vaine:
Un peu d’amour,
Un peu de haine ...
Et puis—bonjour!

La vie est brève:
Un peu d’espoir,
Un peu de rêve ...
Et puis—bonsoir!

(Life is vain: A little love, A little hate, ... And then—good-day!)
(Life is short: A little hope, A little dream, ... And then—good night!)

LEON MONTENAEKEN.

This haunting little lyric is a literary curiosity from one
point of view. In spite of expostulations from the author (a
Belgian poet), and repeated public statements by others from
time to time, the poem is constantly being wrongly attributed
to one or another of the French poets. It appeared in _Le
Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique_, 1887, but had probably been
written and published some years before that date. In the
_Nineteenth Century_, September, 1893, William Sharp pointed
out that the poem was always being attributed to the wrong
author—even Andrew Lang being one of the culprits. The author
himself wrote to _The Literary World_ of June 3, 1904, to
the same effect. The subject was again spoken of in _Notes
and Queries_, January 5, 1907, when the author’s letter was
republished. London _Truth_ also brought the matter up at one
time, and probably the same fact has been publicly pointed
out elsewhere a hundred times—but the poem continues to be
attributed to the wrong author! In the _Dictionary of Foreign
Phrases and Classical Quotations_, by H. P. Jones, published so
recently as 1913, the verses are ascribed to Alfred de Musset.

There is a third verse, which reads like an answer or retort to
the other two:

La vie est telle,
Que Dieu la fit;
Et telle, quelle,
Elle suffit!

(Life is such As God made it, And, just as it is, ... It
suffices!)

One of the writers to _Notes and Queries_ quotes the following
lines:

On entre, on crie,
Et c’est la vie!
On baîlle, on sort,
Et c’est la mort!

(_Ausone de Chancel_, 1836)

(You enter, you cry, and that is life: you yawn, you go out,
and that is death.)

* * * * *

A very strange, fantastic world—where each one pursues his own golden bubble, and laughs at his neighbour for doing the same. I have been thinking how a moral Linnæus would classify our race.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

TWO LOVERS

Two lovers by a moss-grown spring:
They leaned soft cheeks together there,
Mingled the dark and sunny hair.
And heard the wooing thrushes sing,
O budding time!
O love’s blest prime!

Two wedded from the portal stept:
The bells made happy carollings,
The air was soft as fanning wings,
White petals on the pathway slept.
O pure-eyed bride!
O tender pride!

Two faces o’er a cradle bent:
Two hands above the head were locked;
These pressed each other while they rocked.
Those watched a life that love had sent.
O solemn hour!
O hidden power!

Two parents by the evening fire:
The red light fell about their knees
On heads that rose by slow degrees
Like buds upon the lily spire.
O patient life!
O tender strife

The two still sat together there,
The red light shone about their knees:
But all the heads by slow degrees
Had gone and left that lonely pair.
O voyage fast!
O vanished past!

The red light shone upon the floor
And made the space between them wide;
They drew their chairs up side by side,
Their pale cheeks joined, and said, “Once more!”
O memories!
O past that is!

GEORGE ELIOT.

* * * * *

Some of your griefs you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived;
But what torments of pain you endured
From evils that never arrived!

R. W. EMERSON (_From the French_).

This sentiment has been expressed by many different authors.
Some friends of mine have as their favourite motto, “I have had
many troubles in my life, and most of them never happened.”

* * * * *

With him ther was his son, a yong Squyer,[19] Squire
A lovyere and a lusty bachelor, lover
With lokkès crulle, as they were leyd in presse. curly locks
Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse....
Singinge he was, or floytinge, al the day; playing the flute
He was as fresh as is the month of May.
Short was his goune, with slevès long and wide,
Well coude he sitte on hors and fairè ride.

CHAUCER (_Canterbury Tales—Prologue_).

* * * * *

With a waist and with a side
White as Hebe’s, when her zone
Slipt its golden clasp, and down
Fell her kirtle to her feet,
While she held her goblet sweet,
And Jove grew languid.

KEATS (_Fancy_).

* * * * *

Like Angels stopped upon the wing by sound
Of harmony from heaven’s remotest spheres.

WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude, Bk. XIV._)

* * * * *

Stepping down the hill with her fair companions,
Arm in arm, all against the raying West,
Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches,
Brave is her shape, and sweeter unpossess’d.

G. MEREDITH (_Love in the Valley_).

* * * * *

The blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.