Part 3 (1/2)
Neither of them shows any sign of being particularly American, though Longfellow, in ”Evangeline” and ”Hiawatha,” and the ”New England Tragedies,” sought his topics in the history and traditions of the New World.
To me ”Hiawatha” seems by far the best of his longer efforts; it is quite full of sympathy with men and women, nature, beasts, birds, weather, and wind and snow. Everything lives with a human breath, as everything should live in a poem concerned with these wild folk, to whom all the world, and all in it, is personal as themselves. Of course there are lapses of style in so long a piece. It jars on us in the lay of the mystic Chibiabos, the boy Persephone of the Indian Eleusinia, to be told that
”the gentle Chibiabos _Sang in tones of deep emotion_!”
”Tones of deep emotion” may pa.s.s in a novel, but not in this epic of the wild wood and the wild kindreds, an epic in all ways a worthy record of those dim, mournful races which have left no story of their own, only here and there a ruined wigwam beneath the forest leaves.
A poet's life is no affair, perhaps, of ours. Who does not wish he knew as little of Burn's as of Shakespeare's? Of Longfellow's there is nothing to know but good, and his poetry testifies to it--his poetry, the voice of the kindest and gentlest heart that poet ever bore. I think there are not many things in poets' lives more touching than his silence, in verse, as to his own chief sorrow. A stranger intermeddles not with it, and he kept secret his brief lay on that insuperable and incommunicable regret. Much would have been lost had all poets been as reticent, yet one likes him better for it than if he had given us a new ”Vita Nuova.”
What an immense long way I have wandered from ”Sordello,” my dear Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books, his thoughts, like those of a boy, ”are long, long thoughts.” I have not written on Longfellow's sonnets, for even you, impeccable sonneteer, admit that you admire them as much as I do.
A FRIEND OF KEATS
_To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford_.
Dear Egerton,--Yes, as you say, Mr. Sidney Colvin's new ”Life of Keats”
{3} has only one fault, it's too short. Perhaps, also, it is almost too studiously free from enthusiasm. But when one considers how Keats (like Sh.e.l.ley) has been gushed about, and how easy it is to gush about Keats, one can only thank Mr. Colvin for his example of reserve. What a good fellow Keats was! How really manly and, in the best sense, moral he seems, when one compares his life and his letters with the vagaries of contemporary poets who lived longer than he, though they, too, died young, and who left more work, though not better, never so good, perhaps, as Keats's best.
However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write, but of his friend, John Hamilton Reynolds. _Noscitur a sociis_--a man is known by the company he keeps. Reynolds, I think, must have been excellent company, if we may judge him by his writings. He comes into Lord Houghton's ”Life and Letters of Keats” very early (vol. i. p. 30). We find the poet writing to him in the April of 1817, from the Isle of Wight. ”I shall forthwith begin my 'Endymion,' which I hope I shall have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the castle.” Keats ends ”your sincere friend,” and a man to whom Keats was a sincere friend had some occasion for pride.
About Reynolds's life neither time nor s.p.a.ce permits me to say very much, if I knew very much, which I don't. He was the son of a master in one of our large schools. He went to the Bar. He married a sister of Thomas Hood. He wrote, like Hood, in the _London Magazine_. With Hood for ally, he published ”Odes and Addresses to Great People;” the third edition, which I have here, is of 1826. The late relations of the brothers-in-law were less happy; possibly the ladies of their families quarrelled; that is usually the way of the belligerent s.e.x.
Reynolds died in the enjoyment of a judicial office in the Isle of Wight, some thirty years later than his famous friend, the author of ”Endymion.”
”It is to be lamented,” says Lord Houghton, ”that Mr. Reynolds's own remarkable verse is not better known.” Let us try to know it a little better.
I have not succeeded in getting Reynolds's first volume of poems, which was published before ”Endymion.” It contained some Oriental melodies, and won a careless good word from Byron. The earliest work of his I can lay my hand on is ”The Fancy, a Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray's Inn, Student at Law, with a brief memoir of his Life.” There is a motto from Wordsworth:
”Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive.” {4}
It was the old palmy time of the Ring. Every one knows how Byron took lessons from Jackson the boxer; how Sh.e.l.ley had a fight at Eton in which he quoted Homer, but was licked by a smaller boy; how Christopher North whipped the professional pugilist; how Keats himself never had enough of fighting at school, and beat the butcher afterwards. His friend Reynolds, also, liked a set-to with the gloves. His imaginary character, Peter Corcoran, is a poetical lad, who becomes possessed by a pa.s.sion for prize-fighting. It seems odd in a poet, but ”the stains are fugitive.”
We would liefer see a young man rejoicing in his strength and improving his science, than loafing about with long hair and giving anxious thought to the colour of his necktie. It is a disinterested preference, as fighting was never my _forte_, any more than it was Artemus Ward's. At school I was ”more remarkable for what I suffered than for what I achieved.”
Peter Corcoran ”fought nearly as soon as he could walk,” wherein he resembled Keats, and part of his character may even have been borrowed from the author of the ”Ode to the Nightingale.” Peter fell in love, wrote poetry, witnessed a ”mill” at the Fives-Court, and became the Laureate of the Ring. ”He has made a good set-to with Eales, Tom Belcher (the monarch of the _gloves_!), and Turner, and it is known that he has parried the difficult and ravaging hand even of Randall himself.” ”The difficult and ravaging hand”--there is a style for you!
Reynolds has himself the enthusiasm of his hero; let us remember that Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus have all described spirited rallies with admiration and good taste. From his dissipation in cider-cellars and coal-holes, this rival of Tom and Jerry wrote a sonnet that applies well enough to Reynolds's own career:
”Were this a feather from an eagle's wing, And thou, my tablet white! a marble tile Taken from ancient Jove's majestic pile-- And might I dip my feather in some spring, Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:-- And were my thoughts brought from some starry isle In Heaven's blue sea--I then might with a smile Write down a hymn to fame, and proudly sing!
”But I am mortal: and I cannot write Aught that may foil the fatal wing of Time.
Silent, I look at Fame: I cannot climb To where her Temple is--Not mine the might:-- I have some glimmering of what is sublime-- But, ah! it is a most inconstant light.”
Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood.
”About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang description of a fight he had witnessed to a lady.” Unlucky Peter! ”Was ever woman in this manner wooed?” The lady ”glanced her eye over page after page in hopes of meeting with something that was intelligible,” and no wonder she did not care for a long letter ”devoted to the subject of a mill between Belasco and the Brummagem youth.” Peter was so ill-advised as to appear before her with glorious scars, ”two black eyes” in fact, and she ”was inexorably cruel.” Peter did not survive her disdain. ”The lady still lives, and is married”! It is ever thus!
Peter's published works contain an American tragedy. Peter says he got it from a friend, who was sending him an American copy of ”Guy Mannering”