With the strange fortune that always
accompanied him, in life and in death, Beddoes has
not merely escaped the indiscriminate applause which
he would never have valued, but he has remained a bibliographical
rather than a literary rarity. Few except the
people who collect first editions-not,
as a rule, the public for a poet-have had
the chance of possessing Death’s Jest-Book
(1850) and the Poems (1851). At last Beddoes
has been made accessible, the real story of his death,
that suicide so much in the casual and determined
manner of one of his own characters.
‘The power of the man is immense
and irresistible.’ Browning’s emphatic
phrase comes first to the memory, and remains always
the most appropriate word of eulogy. Beddoes
has been rashly called a great poet. I do not
think he was a great poet, but he was, in every sense
of the word, an astonishing one. Read these lines,
and remember that they were written just at that stagnant
period (1821-1826) which comes between the period
of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and the period of Browning
and Tennyson. It is a murderer who speaks:
I am unsouled, dishumanised,
uncreated;
My passions swell and
grow like brutes conceived;
My feet are fixing roots,
and every limb
Is billowy and gigantic,
till I seem
A wild, old, wicked
mountain in the air:
And the abhorred conscience
of this murder,
It will grow up a lion,
all alone,
A mighty-maned, grave-mouthed
prodigy,
And lair him in my caves:
and other thoughts,
Some will be snakes,
and bears, and savage wolves,
And when I lie tremendous
in the desert,
Or abandoned sea, murderers
and idiot men
Will come to live upon
my rugged sides,
Die, and be buried in
me. Now it comes;
I break, and magnify,
and lose my form,
And yet I shall be taken
for a man,
And never be discovered
till I die.
How much this has of the old, splendid
audacity of the Elizabethans! How unlike timid
modern verse! Beddoes is always large, impressive;
the greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim
on respectful consideration. That his talent
achieved itself, or ever could have achieved itself,
he himself would have been the last to affirm.
But he is a monumental failure, more interesting than
many facile triumphs.
The one important work which Beddoes
actually completed, Death’s Jest-Book,
is nominally a drama in five acts. All the rest
of his work, except a few lyrics and occasional poems,
is also nominally dramatic. But there never was
anything less dramatic in substance than this mass
of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes’
genius was essentially lyrical: he had imagination,
the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a strange
choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really
dramatic power he had nothing. He could neither
conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a credible situation.
He had no grasp on human nature, he had no conception
of what character might be in men and women, he had
no faculty of expressing emotion convincingly.
Constantly you find the most beautiful poetry where
it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you find
one of those brief and memorable phrases, words from
the heart, for which one would give much beautiful
poetry. To take one instance: an Arab slave
wishes to say that he has caught sight of a sail nearing
the coast. And this is how he says it:
I looked abroad upon
the wide old world,
And in the sky and sea,
through the same clouds,
The same stars saw I
glistening, and nought else,
And as my soul sighed
unto the world’s soul,
Far in the north a wind
blackened the waters,
And, after that creating
breath was still,
A dark speck sat on
the sky’s edge: as watching
Upon the heaven-girt
border of my mind
The first faint thought
of a great deed arise,
With force and fascination
I drew on
The wished sight, and
my hope seemed to stamp
Its shade upon it.
Not yet is it clear
What, or from whom,
the vessel.
In scenes which aim at being passionate
one sees the same inability to be natural. What
we get is always literature; it is never less than
that, nor more than that. It is never frank, uncompromising
nature. The fact is, that Beddoes wrote from
the head, collectively, and without emotion, or without
inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes’
characters speak precisely the same language, express
the same desires; all in the same way startle us by
their ghostly remoteness from flesh and blood.
‘Man is tired of being merely human,’ Siegfried
says, in Death’s Jest-Book, and Beddoes
may be said to have grown tired of humanity before
he ever came to understand it.
Looked at from the normal standpoint,
Beddoes’ idea of the drama was something wildly
amateurish. As a practical playwright he would
be beneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something
peculiar to himself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia.
He would have admitted his obligations to Webster
and Tourneur, to all the macabre Elizabethan
work; he would have admitted that his foundations were
based on literature, not on life; but he would have
claimed, and claimed justly, that he had produced,
out of many strange elements, something which has
a place apart in English poetry. Death’s Jest-Book
is perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature.
There is not a page without its sad, grotesque, gay,
or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A slave cannot
say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a
parable of death:
Sleeping,
or feigning sleep,
Well done of her:
’tis trying on a garb
Which she must wear,
sooner or later, long:
’Tis but a warmer,
lighter death.
Not Baudelaire was more amorous of
corruption; not Poe was more spellbound by the scent
of graveyard earth. So Beddoes has written a new
Dance of Death, in poetry; has become the chronicler
of the praise and ridicule of Death. ‘Tired
of being merely human,’ he has peopled a play
with confessed phantoms. It is natural that these
eloquent speakers should pass us by with their words,
that they should fail to move us by their sorrows
or their hates: they are not intended to be human,
except, indeed, in the wizard humanity of Death.
I have said already that the genius
of Beddoes is not dramatic, but lyrical. What
was really most spontaneous in him (nothing was quite
spontaneous) was the impulse of song-writing.
And it seems to me that he is really most successful
in sweet and graceful lyrics like this Dirge,
so much more than ‘half in love with easeful
death.’
If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep;
And not a sorrow
Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
Lie still and deep,
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o’ the sun to-morrow,
In eastern sky.
But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then die, dear, die;
’Tis deeper, sweeter,
Than on a rose-bank to lie dreaming
With folded eye;
And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love’s stars, thou’lt meet her
In eastern sky.
A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming,
morbid, and magnificent poetry in dramatic form, Beddoes
will survive to students, not to readers, of English
poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer
Jones and Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly
more of a dramatist, a writer of more sustained and
Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had certainly
a more personal passion to express in his rough and
tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had
more of actual poetical genius than either. And
in the end only one thing counts: actual poetical
genius.
1891.