BRYAN WALLER PROCTER:

(1787-1874) 1

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BARRY CORNWALL

WHEN Leigh Hunt reviewed the 'Lamia' volume of Keats in the 'Examiner,' in the summer of 1820, he did not think it necessary to tell the story of 'Isabella,' as the public had 'lately been familiarized with it in the "Sicilian Story" of Mr. Barry Cornwall.' How lately, we know from a letter of Keats to Reynolds, at the end of February, 1820, in which he says that Barry Cornwall has sent him not only his 'Sicilian Story,' but his 'Dramatic Scenes.' 'I confess they tease me,' he says; 'they are composed of amiability, the Seasons, the Leaves, the Moon, etc., upon which he rings (according to Hunt's expression) triple bob majors. However that is nothing -I think he likes poetry for its own sake, not his.' The 'Sicilian Story' is a faint, pretty telling, rather in the manner of Leigh Hunt, of the story out of Boccaccio which Keats had been telling in his own way. The difference between them may be sufficiently indicated by Barry Cornwall's note: 'I have ventured to substitute the heart for the head of the lover. The latter appeared to me to be a ghastly object to preserve.' In the same volume is an equally faint, but not even pretty, Spanish tale done after Byron in ottava rima. Of this poem Shelley wrote to Peacock: 'The man whose critical gall is not stirred up by such ottava rima as Barry Cornwall's, may safely be conjectured to possess no gall at all. The world is pale with the sickness of such stuff.' 'Marcian Colonna,' which preceded 'A Sicilian Story,' is indistinguishable from it in manner; both are the kind of work which follows closely upon good originals, and often gets the earliest credit; for Byron is in the story, and Leigh Hunt and Keats are both in

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1 (1) Dramatic Scenes, 1819. (2) A Sicilian Story, 1820. (3) Marcian Colonna, 1820. (4) Mirandola, 1821. (5) Poetical Works, 3 vols., 1822. (6) The Flood in Thessaly, 1823. (7) English Songs, 1832.

the style. In the same volume there is a curious fragment in modern drama, called 'Ametra Wentworth,' which in its attempt at a kind of plaintive realism may have filled some intermediate gap between the romantic group and Tennyson. 'Mirandola' followed, and was acted, and had its success, as everything of Barry Cornwall had, for its moment. The particular dim echo which he contrived to get from the Elizabethan drama, which Lamb had not so long ago revealed to the poets of that time, seemed to give out a real music, and the tune was easy to follow. When that tune turned to the borrowed but easier jig of the 'English Songs,' Barry Cornwall seemed to have found his place among English poets.

"Taken altogether,' said Lamb, of the 'English Songs,' ''t is too Lovey'; but he immediately qualifies this good criticism by adding: 'But what delicacies!' And he names his favourites, of which one is 'glorious 'bove all.' If we read the particular songs which Lamb liked we shall see perhaps a kind of novelty, or what was a novelty in 1832, and must remember that it is not always easy to appreciate such things immediately at their true value. The songs are indeed 'too Lovey'; they are also as much too diluted in sentiment as they are too carelessly improvised in form. Such music as is in them is rarely more than a child's forefinger could pick out on a piano. It has been let out by candid friends that they have no personal sincerity; but this is a secondary matter, for such a song as 'The sea! the sea! the open sea!' is not more worthless as a poem because the author was only once on the sea, and was then seasick. Sincerity to his art is what was not in Barry Cornwall; he liked it, as Keats said, for its own sake, but his liking was far too platonic ever to become creative.

Few writers were more loved in their own day, or more quickly forgotten, than Barry Cornwall. Praised by Landor, who said:

'No other in these later times

Has bound me in so potent rhymes,'

and by Mr. Swinburne in a lovely elegy, there is scarcely one of his contemporaries who did not know and like him, and few who did not confuse that personal liking with literary esteem. When the last of his friends is gone, will any one have a good word to say for him? In the course of a long life he went through many schools and periods of poetry; all left their influence on him, and some sympathetic, attaching quality in him caught up the hints from one which he seems to have passed on to another. He accompanies the general movement, and it is instructive to see one who began with pale romantic elegances falling at last into the clash and colloquialism of Browning. He speaks with affection of 'Landor's verse and Browning's rhyme,' and he imitated the very tricks of both: Browning badly and with almost an anticipation of Robert Buchanan; Landor, in perhaps his best piece of verse, an 'Inscription for a Fountain,' to better effect. It is not at all certain that there are not suggestions in his work which may have affected later and greater men, as what is worthless in itself has a way of doing. I should be surprised if the opening lines of a poem of Browning, published in 1845:

'I've a friend over the sea,

I like him but he loves me,'

did not come into his head, consciously or unconsciously, as an echo of some doggerel of Barry Cornwall, published in 1832, which begins

'I've a friend who loveth me,

And sendeth me Ale of Trinitie.'

And it is not less possible that some of the crudest of Mr. Swinburne's 'Poems and Ballads' owed, for all their magnificence, a certain impulse to the showy attempts to be dramatically and passionately lyrical which we find in some of Barry Cornwall's later work. Anticipation or imitation, it matters little to us now; but if Barry Cornwall really did throw out hints to others, incapable as he was of realising them himself, the fact may explain some of the pleasant things which were said about him.

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824) 1

THE life of Byron was a masque in action, to which his poetry is but the moralising accompaniment of words. 'One whose dust was once all fire' (words which Byron used of Rousseau, and which may still more truthfully be used of himself), Byron still lives for us with such incomparable vividness because he was a man first and a poet afterwards. He became a poet for that reason, and that reason explains the imperfection of his poetry. Most of his life he was a personality looking out for its own formula, and his experiments upon that search. were of precisely the kind to thrill the world. What poet ever had so splendid a legend in his lifetime? His whole life was lived in the eyes of men, and Byron had enough of the actor in him to delight in that version of 'all the world's a stage.' His beauty and his deformity, his 'tenderness, roughness, delicacy, coarseness, sentiment, sensuality, soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity, all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay' (it is his own summary of Burns), worked together with circumstances to move every heart to admiration and pity. He was a poet, and he did what others only wrote;

1 (1) Poems on Various Occasions, 1807. (2) Hours of Idleness, 1807. (3) English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, 1809. (4) Childe Harold, a Romaunt, 1812. (5) The Curse of Minerva, 1812. (6) The Waltz, 1813. (7) The Giaour, 1813. (8) The Bride of Abydos, 1813. (9) The Corsair, 1814. (10) Ode to Napoleon, 1814. (11) Lara, with Rogers' Jacqueline, 1814. (12) Hebrew Melodies, 1815. (13) The Siege of Corinth, 1816. (14) Parisina, 1816. (15) Poems, 1816. (16) The Prisoner of Chillon, 1816. (17) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III, 1816. (18) Monody on the Death of Sheridan, 1816. (19) Manfred, 1817. (20) The Lament of Tasso, 1817. (21) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV, 1818. (22) Beppo, a Venetian Story, 1818. (23) Mazeppa, 1819. (24) Marino Faliero, 1820. (25) The Prophecy of Dante, 1821. (26) Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, Cain, 1821. (27) Werner, 1822. (28) The Age of Bronze, 1823. (29) The Island, 1823. (30) The Deformed Transformed, 1824. (31) Don Juan, Cantos I, II, 1819; Cantos III, IV, V, 1821; Cantos VI, VII, VIII, 1823; Cantos IX, X, XI, 1823; Cantos XII, XIII, XIV, 1823; Cantos XV, XVI, 1824.

he seemed to write what others dared not think. It was a romantic time, 'gigantic and exaggerated,' as he said, the age of the French Revolution, the age of Napoleon; Trafalgar and Waterloo were contemporary moments. The East was the new playground of the imagination: Byron, and Byron alone of the Orientalising poets, had been there. He was a peer and a republican, at twenty-four the most famous poet of the day, the idol of one London season and cast out with horror by the next, an exile from his country, equally condemned and admired, credited with abnormal genius and abnormal wickedness, confessing himself defiantly to the world, making a public show of a very genuine misery, living with ostentatious wildness in Venice, reclaimed to a kind of irregular domesticity, giving up everything, life itself, in the cause of liberty and for a nation with a tradition of heroes, a hero in death; and he was one whom Scott could sum up, as if speaking for England, at the news of that death, as 'that mighty genius, which walked amongst us as something superior to ordinary mortality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something approaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or evil.'

Circumstances made Byron a poet; he became the poet of circumstance. But with Byron, remember, a circumstance was an emotion; the idealist of real things, and an imperfect idealist, never without a certain suspicion of his ideal, he turned life, as it came to him, into an impossible kind of romance, invented by one who was romantic somewhat in the sense that a man becomes romantic when he loves. Such an experience does not change his nature; it does not give him sincerity in romance. Byron's sincerity underlies his romance, does not transmute it. This is partly because the style is the man; and Byron had not style, through which alone emotion can prove its own sincerity. 'All convulsions end with me in rhyme,' he writes; and all through his letters we see the fit working itself out. 'I wish I could settle to reading again,' he