II.—AS A POET.
There are several among our foremost prose writers in the present century, who, possessing high imagination, and a considerable power of rhythmical expression, have occasionally produced verse of a high though not of the first order. Lord Macaulay will not be remembered either by his prize poems, or by his “Lays of Ancient Rome,” but one who wrote such eloquent prose could hardly fail ignobly when he attempted verse. Thomas Carlyle, in spite of his energetic denunciation of modern poetry as mere dilettantism and trifling, has occasionally courted the muse, and were the original pieces and translations from the German which lie scattered through his earlier writings, collected together, they would by themselves form a volume of no mean value. They have a wild, rugged melody of their own, as have also the occasional verses of Emerson; the latter bear in many respects a remarkable resemblance to those of Blake. The author of Modern Painters might also have gained some reputation as a poet, had he chosen to preserve in a more permanent form his scattered contributions to annuals. Indeed, it would seem that no eloquent writer of prose is altogether devoid of the lyric gift if he chooses to exercise it. The only attempt at poetry by Charles Dickens which is at all known to the general public is the famous song of “The Ivy Green,” in the Pickwick Papers. This exquisite little lyric, with its beautiful refrain, so often wedded to music and so familiar to us all, would alone suffice to give him no mean rank among contemporary writers of verse. But in the Comic Opera of the Village Coquettes, [334] to which we alluded in our Introduction, there were a dozen songs of equal tenderness and melody, though, as the author has never thought fit to reprint the little piece, they are now forgotten.
The first is a song of Harvest-Home, supposed to be sung by a company of reapers.
It must be mentioned that this and the other songs had the advantage of being set to music by John Hullah. The next, “Love is not a feeling to pass away,” was a great favourite at the time. We quote the first stanza, the last line of which recalls the little song in the Pickwick Papers:
“Love is not a feeling to pass away,
Like the balmy breath of a summer day;
It is not—it cannot be—laid aside;
It is not a thing to forget or hide.
It clings to the heart, ah, woe is me!
As the ivy clings to the old oak tree.”
The next is a Bacchanalian song, supposed to be sung by a country squire.
But the gem of all these little lyrics, in our opinion, is that of “Autumn Leaves,” of which the refrain strikes us as being peculiarly happy. The reader, however, shall judge for himself, from the following quotation:—
“Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here;
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!
How like the hopes of childhood’s day,
Thick clustering on the bough!
How like those hopes is their decay,
How faded are they now!
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, lie strewn around me here
Autumn leaves, autumn leaves, how sad, how cold, how drear!”
The next lyric, “The Child and the Old Man,” was sung by Braham at different concerts, long after the piece from which it is taken, had been forgotten, and was almost invariably encored.
Mr. Dickens’s poetical attempts have not, however, been confined to song-writing. In 1842 he wrote for a friend a very fine Prologue to a new tragedy. Mr. Westland Marston came to London in his twenty-first year, and resolved to try his success in the world of letters: after writing for several of the second-class magazines, he finished his tragedy of the “Patrician’s Daughter,” and introduced himself to Mr. Dickens, who became interested in the play. Struck with the novelty of “a coat-and-breeches tragedy,” the good-tempered novelist recommended Macready to produce it, and after some little hesitation, this distinguished actor took himself the chief character—Mordaunt,—and also recited a prologue by Mr. Dickens, [336] from which we quote a few lines.
Impressing the audience strongly with the scope and purpose of what they had come to see, this prologue thoroughly prepared them for welcome and applause. The strength and truth of some of the concluding lines address themselves equally to a larger audience.
“No tale of streaming plumes and harness bright
Dwells on the poet’s maiden theme to-night.
* * * *
* * * *
But musing with a calm and steady gaze
Before the crackling flame of living days,
He hears it whisper, through the busy roar
Of what shall be, and what has been before.
Awake the Present! Shall no scene display
The tragic passion of the passing day?
Is it with man as with some meaner things,
That out of death his solemn purpose springs?
Can this eventful life no moral teach,
Unless he be for aye beyond its reach?
* * * *
Awake the Present! What the past has sown
Is in its harvest garner’d, reap’d, and grown.
How pride engenders pride, and wrong breeds wrong,
And truth and falsehood hand in hand along
High places walk in monster-like embrace,
The modern Janus with a double face;
How social usage hath the power to change
Good thought to evil in its highest range,
To cramp the noble soul, and turn to ruth
The kindling impulse of the glowing youth,
Crushing the spirit in its house of clay,—
Learn from the lesson of the present day.
Not light its import, and not poor its mien,
Yourselves the actors, and your home the scene.”
We now come to a very curious fact. Mr. R. H. Horne pointed out twenty-five years ago, [337] that a great portion of the scenes describing the death of Little Nell in the “Old Curiosity Shop,” will be found to be written—whether by design or harmonious accident, of which the author was not even subsequently fully conscious—in blank verse, of irregular metre and rhythms, which Southey, Shelley, and some other poets have occasionally adopted. The following passage, properly divided into lines, will stand thus:
NELLY’S FUNERAL.
“And now the bell—the bell
She had so often heard by night and day,
And listen’d to with solemn pleasure,
Almost as a living voice—
Rung its remorseless toll for her,
So young, so beautiful, so good.“Decrepit age, and vigorous life,
And blooming youth and helpless infancy,
Pour’d forth—on crutches, in the pride of strength
And health, in the full blush
Of promise, the mere dawn of life—
To gather round her tomb. Old men were there,
Whose eyes were dim
And senses failing—
Grandames, who might have died ten years ago,
And still been old—the deaf, the blind, the lame,
The palsied,
The living dead in many shapes and forms,
To see the closing of this early grave.
What was the death it would shut in,
To that which still could crawl and creep above it!“Along the crowded path they bore her now;
Pure as the new-fall’n snow
That cover’d it; whose day on earth
Had been as fleeting.
Under that porch, where she had sat when Heaven
In mercy brought her to that peaceful spot,
She pass’d again, and the old church
Received her in its quiet shade.”
Throughout the whole of the above, only two unimportant words have been omitted—in and its; and “grandames” has been substituted for “grandmothers.” All that remains is exactly as in the original, not a single word transposed, and the punctuation the same to a comma.
Again, take the brief homily that concludes the funeral:
“Oh! it is hard to take to heart
The lesson that such deaths will teach,
But let no man reject it,
For it is one that all must learn,
And is a mighty, universal Truth.
When Death strikes down the innocent and young,
For every fragile form from which he lets
The parting spirit free,
A hundred virtues rise,
In shapes of mercy, charity, and love,
To walk the world and bless it.
Of every tear
That sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves
Some good is born, some gentler nature comes.”
Not a ward of the original is changed in the above quotation, which is worthy of the best passages in Wordsworth, and thus, meeting on the common ground of a deeply truthful sentiment, the two most dissimilar men in the literature of the century are brought into the closest approximation.
Something of a similar kind of versification in prose may be discovered in Chapter LXXVII. of “Barnaby Rudge,” and there is an instance of successive verses in the Third Part of the “Christmas Carol,” beginning
“Far in this den of infamous resort.”
The following is from the concluding paragraph of “Nicholas Nickleby”:—
“The grass was green above the dead boy’s grave,
Trodden by feet so small and light,
That not a daisy droop’d its head
Beneath their pressure.
Through all the spring and summer time
Garlands of fresh flowers, wreathed by infant hands,
Rested upon the stone.”
The following stanzas, entitled “A Word in Season,” were contributed by Mr. Dickens in the winter of 1843 to an annual edited by his friend and correspondent, the Countess of Blessington. Since that time he has ceased to write, or at any rate to publish anything in verse.
This poem savours much of the manner of Robert Browning. Full of wit and wisdom, and containing some very remarkable and rememberable lines, an extract from it will fitly close this chapter of our volume.
A WORD IN SEASON.
BY CHARLES DICKENS.“They have a superstition in the East,
That Allah, written on a piece of paper,
Is better unction than can come of priest
Of rolling incense, and of lighted taper:
Holding, that any scrap which bears that name,
In any characters, its front impress’d on,
Shall help the finder thro’ the purging flame,
And give his toasted feet a place to rest on.“So have I known a country on the earth,
Where darkness sat upon the living waters,
And brutal ignorance, and toil, and dearth
Were the hard portion of its sons and daughters:
And yet, where they who should have oped the door
Of charity and light, for all men’s finding,
Squabbled for words upon the altar-floor,
And rent The Book, in struggles for the binding.” [341]