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LINES WRITTEN IN LONDON.

Yet not for thee her coming, nor for: thee the April gleam:

for thee!

If you should cross the moor to-day- Only winter winds and waters, heart,.

By the old track I mean

And if you meet me on the way

No ghost will you have seen.

For here it is my ghost does flit,
While, from these shadows far,
On heathered hills with sunbeams lit
I am where now you are.

Ella Fuller Maitland.

The Spectator.
WHO IS SHE THAT COMETH?

Who is she that cometh from the waters of the west?

Who is she that cometh from the land beyond the sea

With eyes of waking spring-tide, full of April's bright unrest? Wandering winds and waters, tell me, who is she?

Who is she that cometh with the wind

about her blown,

Restless raiment gleaming full of colors of the sea,

Green as under-curve of wave, white as waters overthrown, Wandering winds and waters, tell me, who is she?

Who is she that cometh with the dawn

upon her brow,

Dawn of April moving with white footsteps o'er the sea

To light the land with glory of green branch and leafy bough? Wandering winds and waters, tell me, who is she?

Who is she that cometh all among the bannered throng

Triumph of bright banners o'er the

sand dunes by the sea

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Who is she that wakens my wild harp In my beggar-clouts of sin,

to wondering song?

Wandering winds and waters, tell me,

who is she?

O my heart! she cometh-she whom thou hast seen in dream

And gross with this world's grime,
I could not enter in,

Though I waited times and a time.
Nor sight of glory nor sound
Of rapture should reach me there;
Only the common ground,

In lonely moonlight wandering by Only the old despair.
shimmering gray sea,

F. W. Bourdillon......

THE LIVING AGE:

A Weekly Magazine of Contemporary Literaturi and Thought.

(FOUNDED BY E. LITTELL IN 1844.)

SEVENTH SERIES VOLUME XVII.

NO. 3051. DEC. 27, 1902.

FROM BEGINNING Vol. CCXXXV.

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY.

At the opening of the present year there were still alive amongst us two men who survived as representatives of what poetry was in these islands before the commencement of the Victorian era. Both have left us-Mr. Aubrey de Vere, having reached his eighty-ninth year, passed away on the 20th of January; Mr. Philip James Bailey, in his eighty-seventh, on the 7th of September. So, as we sit quietly and watch, we see history unrolling, since, in the chronicle of our literature, the closure of a great and complicated system of poetic activity is, in a sense, defined by the deaths of these venerable men. Moreover-and this is curious-in each of these survivors we had, living before us, types-not quite of the first order, indeed, but yet vivid types -of the two main divisions of the English poetry of the first half of the nineteenth century. That, namely, which was devoted to a reasonable grace, and that which was uplifted on a mystical enthusiasm. So that a sermon on the verse of that time might well take as its text the opposed and yet related names of De Vere and Bailey.

Nothing so extensive is to be attempted here. But before endeavoring to define the character of the talent of the younger of these veterans, and to note the place of Festus in the history

of letters, we may linger a moment on what resemblance there was betweeir the two aged men, so intensely opposed in their general disposition of mind and their walk in the world. They had in common an exquisite personal dignity, Mr. de Vere moving both in Ireland and in London in the genial companionship of like-minded friends, Mr. Bailey stationary in his cloister or hermitage at Nottingham. They had in common the happy fate which preserved to each in extreme old age all the faculties of the mind, the sweetest cheerfulness, the most ardent hopefulness, an optimism that nothing could assail and that disease itself avoided. Each, above all, to a very remarkable degree, preserved to the last his religious devotion to that art to which his life had been dedicated, each to the very end was full of a passionate love of verse. Song-intoxicated men they were, both of them; retaining their delight in poetry far beyond the common limits of an exhilaration in any mental matter.

When this has been said, it is the difference far more than the resemblance between them which must strike the memory. Of the imaginative opposition which the author of Festus offered to the entire school of which Mr. de Vere was a secondary ornament,

more will be said later. But the physical opposition was immense, between the slightness of figure and flexible elegance of the Irish poet, with his mundane mobility, and the stateliness of Mr. Bailey. Mr. de Vere never seemed to be an old man, but a young man dried up; Mr. Bailey, of whose appearance my recollections go back at least five-and-twenty years, always during that time looked robustly aged, a sort of prophet or bard, with a cloud of voluminous white hair and curled silver beard. As the years went by, his head seemed merely to grow more handsome, almost absurdly, almost irritatingly so, like a picture of Connal, "first of mortal men," in some illustrated edition of Ossian. The extraordinary suspension of his gaze, his gentle, dazzling aspect of uninterrupted meditation combined with a curious downward arching of the lips, seen through the white rivers of his beard, gave a distinctly vatic impression. He had an attitude of arrested inspiration, as if waiting for the heavenly spark to fall again, as it had descended from 1836 to 1839, and as it seemed never inclined to descend again. But the beauty of Mr. Bailey's presence, which was so marked as to be an element that cannot be overlooked in a survey of what he was, had an imperfection in its very perfectness. It lacked fire. What the faces of Milton and Keats possessed, what we remember in the extraordinary features of Tennyson, this was just missing in Mr. Bailey, who, nevertheless, might have sat to any painter in Christendom as the type of a Poet.

I.

English literature in the reign of William IV. is a subject which has hitherto failed to attract a historian. It forms a small belt or streak of the most colorless, drawn across our va

riegated intellectual chronicle. The romantic movement of the end of the preceding century had gradually faded into emotional apathy by 1830, and the years which England spent under the most undignified and inefficient of her monarchs were few indeed, but highly prosaic. Most of the mental energy of the time went out in a constitutional struggle which was necessary, but was not splendid. A man is hardly at his best when his own street-door has been slammed in his face, and he stands outside stamping his feet and pulling the bell. The decade which preceded the accession of Victoria was, in literature, a period of cold reason: the best that could be said of the popular authors was that they were sensible. A curious complacency marked the age, a self-sufficiency which expressed itself in extraordinary unemotional writing. To appreciate the heavy and verbose deadness of average English prose in the thirties, we must dip into the books then popular. No volume of the essay class was so much in vogue as the Lacon of the Rev. Mr. Colton, a work the aridity of which can only be comprehended by those who at this date have the courage to attack it. Mr. Colton, although he preached the loftiest morality, was a gambling parson, and shot himself, in 1832, in the forest of Fontainebleau. But that did not affect the popularity of his chain of dusty apophthegms.

The starvation of the higher faculties of the mind in the William IV. period was something which we fail to-day to realize. No wonder Carlyle thought, in 1835, that "Providence warns me to have done with literature," and in 1837 saw nothing for it but to "buy a rifle and a spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In the letters of Tennyson we may easily read what it was that, after the failure of his enchanting volumes of 1830 and 1833, kept him silent in despair for ten

of his best years. This was the dead lull during which the moral storms of 1840-1850 were preparing to gather. It was the time when the Puseyite controversy was beginning, when Tracts for the Times, under an oppressive obloquy and miscomprehension, were making a struggle for religious warmth and air. A chilly light of reason applied to morals, that was what the subjects of William IV. desired to contemplate, and poetry itself was called upon to make a definite concession to the gospel of utility. Romance was at its lowest ebb, and even

the ghost of Miltiades rose by night And stood by the bed of the Benthamite.

Among poets who possessed the public ear at that time, the aged Wordsworth stood first, but the prestige of the laureate, Southey, who had been one of the most active and authoritative of reviewers, was, in many circles, paramount. Now Southey-as his most prominent disciple, Sir Henry Taylor, has proudly told us-"took no pleasure in poetic passion." By the time of which we are speaking, however, Southey and even Wordsworth had passed into the background of active life, but there had been no reaction against the quietism of their later days. That quietism had taken possession of the taste of the country, and had gradually ousted the only serious rival it had seemed to possess, the violence of Byron. It was at this time, in the full tide of Benthamism, that Henry Taylor attempted a poetical coup d'état which demands close attention from the student of our literary history.

In publishing his enormous drama of Philip van Artevelde, in 1834, Henry Taylor took occasion to issue a preface which is now far more interesting to read than his graceful verse. He thought the time had come to stamp out what he called "the mere luxuries

of poetry." He was greatly encouraged by the general taste of the public, which obviously was finding highlycolored literature inacceptable, and in a preface of singular boldness, not unadroit in its logic, Taylor presumed to dictate terms to the poets. He begged them, for the future, to walk the com. mon earth and breathe the common air. He entreated them to believe that forcible expression, fervid feeling, and beautiful imagery are useless if employed in connection with thoughts that are not "sound." There was to be no health for us unless reason had full supremacy over imagination. Reflection must take the place of mere "feeling," thought the place of imagery. Passion, so this faithful disciple of Southey considered, was to be regarded as a direct danger and disadvantage.

Nor did the preface of 1834 confine itself to the encouragement of what was tame and good; it descended into the dust, and wrestled with lions that were wild and bad. It fought with Byron, as Christian fought with Apollyon, conscious of the awful strength of its supernatural opponent. It fought, less strenuously, and with a touch of contempt, with "the brilliant Mr. Shelley," to whom it could afford to be condescending. It glanced round the arena without being able so much as to observe an antagonist who, to our eyes, fills the picture, and is alone sufficient to condemn all the Philip van Artevelde arguments and theories. This is Keats, of whom, so far as we can discover from this preface, Taylor had, in 1834, never even heard, or else despised so entirely that it did not occur to him to mention his name.

The Preface to Philip van Artevelde enjoyed a great success. Its assumptions were accepted by the reviews as poetic canon law. It was admitted without reserve that the function of poetry was "to infer and to instruct." The poets were warned to occupy them

selves in future mainly with what was rational and plain. Henry Taylor had made a sweeping suggestion that the more enthusiastic species of verse was apt to encourage attention by fixing it on what is "puerile, pusillanimous, or wicked." There was a great searching of heart in families; the newspapers were immense. A large number of copies of Childe Harold and of Manfred were confiscated, and examples of Pollock's Course of Time (by many persons preferred to Paradise Lost, as of a purer orthodoxy) were substituted for them. Even the young Macaulay, who had suddenly become a power, joined the enemy, and declared that "perhaps no person can be a poet, or can ever enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind." Ah, but, cries in effect the excellent Henry Taylor, we will so coerce and browbeat and depress the poets that they shall not think a thought or write a line that is not "sound," and the Benthamite himself. (the stupendous original Jeremy had died, of course, in 1832) shall pluck, unhandily enough, at the lyre now consecrated to utility and decorum.

It was the old balance between "stasy" and "ec-stasy," and Henry Taylor was, to a certain extent, justified by the character of such contemporary works as might be held to belong to the ecstatic species. It did not seem a moment at which great subjects and a great style were prepared to commend themselves. The most prominent indulgers in "the mere luxury of poetry" were Heraud and Reade, whose efforts were calculated to bring instant ridicule upon imaginative writing by their hollow grandiloquence. There were the Byronisms of Croly, the once-famous author of that gorgeous romance, Salathiel, and there was the never-to-be-forgotten Robert Montgomery. All these poetasters merely emphasized and justified Henry Taylor's protest. In genuine poetry of a

highly imaginative cast there appeared, almost wholly unregarded, Pauline and Paracelsus, and in 1838 Miss Barrett produced, in defiance of the taste of the age, her irregular and impassioned Seraphim. None of these publications, however, disturbed in the least degree the supremacy of the school of good sense, or threatened that "equipoise of reason" which the disciples of Southey thought that they had fixed for ever. Poetry was to preserve its logical judgment; it was never to "let itself go." The cardinal importance of Mr. Bailey's Festus is that it was the earliest direct counterblast to this scheme of imaginative discipline, and that when it appeared in 1839 the walls built up by Henry Taylor's arrogant preface immediately began to crumble down.

II.

The extraordinary poem which thus recalled English literature to the ecstatic after a period of bondage to the static, and attracted the astonishment of the public by leading a successful revolt against baldness, against what a critic of the time called "the pride of natural barrenness," was the work of an extremely young man. Philip James Bailey was born in Nottingham on the 22nd of April, 1816. He was the son of a journalist of an excellent provincial type, a sturdy local politician, antiquary, and philanthropist, himself an amateur in verse, "an inveterate rhymer," we are told, and full of enthusiasm for new ideas as they revealed themselves to active-thinking persons in those repressed and stunted "thirties." The father of Philip James Bailey promptly acquiesced, like the father of Robert Browning, in the decision of his son to adopt "the vocation of a poet," and the boy seems to have been educated to that end, as others to become chartered accountants or solicitors. Nominally, indeed, the lat

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