Stories in verse

Front matter

Glass uU-

Book_

By bequest of ^*

Canto IV. — How The Beide Eetuened To Eavenna 106

PAGE BALLADS OF EOBIN HOOD :

BOBIN HOOD A CHILD 145

BOBIN hood's FLIGHT 152

BOEIN HOOD AN OUTLAW 159

HOW BOBIN AND HIS OUTLAWS LIVED IN THE

WOODS 161

THE GENTLE ABMOUE ; OB, THBEE E:NIGHTS IN STEEL

AGAINST ONE IN LINEN 169

THE PALFEEY 185

THE GLOVE AND THE LIONS 226

ABOU BEN ADHEM 229

THE BITTEB GOUBD 236

THE INEVITABLE 238

EIILSPINDIE 248

THE TEUMPETS OF DOOLKABNEIN 252

DEATH AND THE BUFFIANS 262

CONTENTS. IX

&xnrt$lntiaxtz.

PAGE

THE INFANT HEECULES AND THE SERPENTS . . . 298

PAULO AND FEANCESCA 303

LAZY CORNER; OR, BED VERSUS BUSINESS .... 335

THE CURATE AND HIS BISHOP 346

CONTAINING REMARKS ON THE FATHER OF ENGLISH NARRATIVE POETRY ; ON THE ILL-UNDERSTOOD NATURE OF HEROIC VERSE \ ON THE NECESSITY, EQUALLY ILL-UNDERSTOOD, OF THE MUSICAL ELEMENT IN POETRY TO POETRY IN GENERAL; AND ON THE ABSURDITY OF CONFINING THE NAME OF POETRY TO ANY ONE SPECIES OF IT IN PARTICULAR.

As this book, in issuing from the house of Messrs. Routledge, acquires a special chance of coming under the cognizance of travellers by the railway, I have pleased myself with fancying, that it gives me a kind of new link, however remote like the rest, with my great master in the art of poetry; that is to say, with the great master of English narrative in verse, the Father of our Poetry itself, Chaucer.

Nay, it gives me two links, one general, and one particular; for as Chaucer's stories, in default of there being any printed books and travelling carriages in those days, were related by travellers to one another,

B

A PREFACE.

and as these stories will be read, and (I hope) shown to one another, by travellers who are descendants of those travellers, (see how the links thicken as we advance!) so one of Chaucer's stories concerned a wonderful Magic Horse; and now, one of the most wonderful of all such horses will be speeding my readers and me together to all parts of the kingdom, with a fire hitherto unknown to any horse whatsoever.

How would the great poet have been delighted to see the creature ! — and what would he not have said of it!

I say " creature," because though your fiery Locomotive is a creation of man's, as that of the poet was, yet as the poet's "wondrous Horse of Brass" was formed out of ideas furnished him by Nature, so, out of elements no less furnished by Nature, and the first secrets of which are no less amazing, has been formed this wonderful Magic Horse of Iron and Steam, which, with vitals of fire, clouds literally flowing from its nostrils, and a bulk, a rushing, and a panting like that of some huge antediluvian wild beast, is now heard and seen in all parts of the country, and in most parts of civilized Europe, breaking up the old grounds of alienation, and carrying with it the seeds of universal

brotherhood.

Yerily, something even of another, but most grating

link, starts up out of that reflection upon the poet's

miracle; for the hero who rode his horse of brass

made war with Russia; and we Englishmen, the

creators of the Horse of Iron, are warring with the

despot of the same barbarous country, pitting the

indignant genius of civilization against his ruffianly

multitudes.

" At Sana, in the land of Tartarie, There dwelt a king that warried Russie, Through which there died many a doughty man."

Many a doughty man, many a noble heart of captain and of common soldier,* has perished in this new war against the old ignorance ; — an ignorance, that by its sullen persistence in rejecting the kindly advice of governments brave and great enough to be peaceful, forced the very enthusiasts of peace (myself among the number) into the conviction, that out of hatred and loathing of war itself, war must be made upon him.

* This passage was written before one to similar purport, which is quoted further on.

b2

If a lunatic will not put down his sword, and there is no other mode of restraining him, the sword must put down the lunatic.

May there be such a tale to tell of him, as shall surpass in its results the most compensating terminations of story-books, and even the marvels of the affecting heroism with which his multitudes have been overthrown ! I am not sure that the friendship which the war has occasioned between France and England is not alone sufficient to pay for it; yet war is so atrocious an evil, and those who personally and mentally suffer by it have alone such a right to the casting votes in its question, that all who sit at home by their firesides in safety and in comfort ought finally to contemplate nothing but its extinction. Gather those votes on fields of battle, on fields after the battle, in hospitals, in bereaved homes, in sorrowing and sicklied generations, and then talk of "opinions" on the subject.

How can the man Nicholas lie in his bed, and think of the miseries, in body and in soul, which he inflicts on millions of his fellow-creatures !

But he talks of " God !" and when such a man talks of God, the case becomes hopeless. Assassins talk so.

PEEFACE. Q

Massacrers of Protestant and of Papist talked so. His ancestors talked so, when they slew one another; and other murderers talked so, when they slew others of the ancestors. The strangulations by which Nicholas's father and grandfather, and some think even his brother Alexander perished, were justified by such talk. Will nothing teach him the peril of it ? Are " instruments in the hands of Providence " never chucked away into corners, and treated with the greatest contempt?

But I must not be forgetting story for history.

Let me take this opportunity of recommending such readers as are not yet acquainted with Chaucer, to make up for their lost time. The advice is not to my benefit, but it is greatly to theirs, and loyalty to him forces me to speak. The poet's " old English " is no difficulty, if they will but believe it. A little study would soon make them understand it as easily as that of most provincial dialects. Chaucer is the greatest narrative poet in the language ; that is to say, the greatest and best teller of stories, in the understood sense of that term. He is greatest in every respect, and in the most opposite qualifications; greatest in pathos, greatest in pleasantry, greatest in character, greatest in plot, greatest even in versification, if the unsettled state of the language in his time, and the want of all native precursors in the art, be considered ; for his verse is anything but the rugged and formless thing it has been supposed to be ; and if Dryden surpassed him in it, not only was the superiority owing to the master's help, but there were delicate and noble turns and cadences in the old poet, which the poet of the age of Charles the Second wanted spirituality enough to appreciate.

There have been several Chancers, and Helps to Chaucer, published of late years. Mr. Moxon has printed his entire works in one double-columned large octavo volume ; Messrs. Houtledge have published the Canterbury Tales in a smaller volume, with delicate illustrations by Mr. Corbould, the best (as far as I am aware) that ever came from his pencil; and there is a set of the poet's works now going through the press, more abundant than has yet appeared in commentary and dissertation, in Robert Bell's Annotated Edition of the English Poets, — the only collection of the kind in the language, though it has so long been a desideratum.

Chaucer's country disgraced itself for upwards of a century by considering the Father of its Poetry as nothing but an obsolete jester. Even poets thought so, in consequence of a prevailing ignorance of ninetenths of his writings, originating in the gross tastes of the age of Charles the Second. There are passages, it is true, in Chaucer, which for the sake of all parties, persons of thorough delicacy will never read twice; fur they were compliances with the licence of an age, in which the court itself, his sphere, was as clownish in some of its tastes as the unqualified admirers of Swift and Prior are now ; and the great poet lamented that he had condescended to write them. But by far the greatest portion of his works is full of delicacies of every kind, of the noblest sentiment, of the purest, most various, and most profound entertainment.

Postponing, however, what I have to say further on the subject of Chaucer, it becomes, I am afraid, a little too obviously proper, as well as more politic, to return, in this Preface, to the book of the humblest of his followers.

I have taken occasion from this collection of my narrative poems to reprint the Story of Rimini ac-

O PREFACE.

cording to its first size and treatment. T have done this in compliance not only with my own judgment, but with that (as far as I could ascertain it) of the majority of my readers. The refashionment of the poem was always an unwilling, and I now believe was a mistaken concession, to what I supposed to be the ascertained facts of the story and the better conveyance of the moral. I have since discovered that there are no ascertained facts which disallow my first conceptions of either; and it is with as much pleasure as a modest sense of the pretensions of my performance will allow, that I restore those passages relating to the sorrows of the wife, and to the fatal conflict of the brothers, which have been honoured with the tears of some of the manliest as well as tenderest eyes.

The occasional alterations or additions which have been made in the context, I hope for the better, are only such as might naturally suggest themselves to an author while giving a republication its last corrections.

The few remarks which it seemed proper to make on the other stories will be found accompanying them as notes or introductions.

I have not considered as stories those pieces of fancy

PREFACE. y

which, however related as such, could, under no circumstances, be supposed to be matters of fact. These, such as Captain Sivord and Captain Pen, the Feast of the Poets, Blue Stocking Bevels, the Fancy Concert, and many other pieces which have also been never before collected, will appear in a subsequent volume, containing the whole of the author's Miscellaneous Poems, should the sale of the present volume render it advisable. And the Miscellaneous Poems would be followed by a collection of Dramas, partly also hitherto unpublished; thus completing the whole of the authors productions in verse.

The stories are put in the order in which they were written; partly, because this mode of arrangement is easiest as well as best, where it interferes with no classification; and partly, because it enables readers who are curious on such points to see the progress of an author's style, his changes from one manner to another, or his modifications of the manner that may be peculiar to himself. I do not assume that the object of such a curiosity must needs be commensurate with it in point of worth.

When I wrote the Story of Rimini, which was between the years 1812 and 1815, I was studying versification in the school of Dryden. Masterly as my teacher was, I felt, without knowing it, that there was a want in him, even in versification; and the supply of this want, later in life, I found in his far greater master, Chaucer; for though Dryden's versification is noble, beautiful, and so complete of its kind, that to an ear uninstructed in the metre of the old poet, all comparison between the two in this respect seems out of the question, and even ludicrous, yet the measure in which Dryden wrote not only originated, but attained to a considerable degree of its beauty, in Chaucer; and the old poet's immeasurable superiority in sentiment and imagination, not only to Dryden, but to all, up to a very late period, who have written in the same form of verse, left him in possession of beauties, even in versification, which it remains for some future poet to amalgamate with Dryden's in a manner worthy of both, and so carry England's noble heroic rhyme to its pitch of perfection.

Critics, and poets too, have greatly misconceived the rank and requirements of this form of verse, who have judged it from the smoothness and monotony which it died of towards the close of the last century, and from which nothing was thought necessary for its resuscitation but an opposite unsystematic extreme. A doubt, indeed, of a very curious and hitherto unsuspected, or at least unnoticed nature, may be entertained by inquirers into the musical portion of the art of poetry (for poetry is an art as well as a gift) ; namely, whether, since the time of Dryden, any poets whatsoever, up to the period above alluded to (and very few indeed have done otherwise since then), thought of versification as a thing necessary to be studied at all, with the exceptions of Gray and Coleridge.

The case remains the same at present; but such assuredly was not the case either with Dryden himself, or with any of the greater poets before him, the scholarly ones in particular, such as Spenser, Milton, and their father Chaucer, who was as learned as any of them for the time in which he lived, and well acquainted with metres, French, Latin, and Italian.

Poets less reverent to their art, out of a notion that the gift, in their instance, is of itself sufficient for all its purposes, (which is much as if a musician should think he could do without studying thorough-bass, or a painter without studying drawing and colours,) trust to an ear which is often not good enough to do justice to the amount of gift which they really possess; and hence comes a loss, for several generations together, of the whole musical portion of poetry, to the destruction of its beauty in tone and in movement, and the peril of much good vitality in new writers. For proportions, like all other good things, hold together; and he that is wanting in musical feeling where music is required, is in danger of being discordant and disproportionate in sentiment, of not perceiving the difference between thoughts worthy and unworthy of utterance. It is for this reason among others, that he pours forth " crotchets" in abundance, not in unison with his theme, and wanting in harmony with one another.

There is sometimes a kind of vague and (to the apprehensions of the unmusical) senseless melody, which in lyrical compositions, the song in particular, really constitutes, in the genuine poetical sense of the beautiful, what the scorner of it says it falsely and

PEEFACE. 13

foolishly constitutes — namely, a good half of its merit. It answers to variety and expression of tone in a beautiful voice, and to "air/' grace, and freedom in the movements of a charming person, The Italians, in their various terms for the beautiful, have a word for it precisely answering to the first feeling one has in attempting to express it — vago, — vague; something wandering, fluctuating, undefinable, undetainable, moving hither and thither at its own sweet will and pleasure, in accordance with what it feels. It overdoes nothing and falls short of nothing ; for itself is nothing but the outward expression of an inward grace. You perceive it in all genuine lyrical compositions, of whatever degree, and indeed in all compositions that sing or speak with true musical impulse, in whatsoever measure, in the effusions of Burns, of Ben Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Allan Bamsay, of Metastasio, of Coleridge; and again in those of Dryden, of Spenser, of Chaucer, of Ariosto; in poems however long, and in passages however seemingly unlyrical; for it is one of the popular, and I am afraid, generally speaking, critical mistakes, in regard to rhymed verse, that in narrative and heroic poems there is nothing wanting to the music, provided the line or the couplet be flowing, and the general impression not rude or weak; whereas the best couplet, however admirable in itself and worthy of quotation, forms but one link in the chain of the music to which it belongs. Poems of any length must consist of whole strains of couplets, whole sections and successions of them, brief or prolonged, all as distinct from one another and complete in themselves, as the adagios and andantes of symphonies and sonatas, each commencing in the tone and obvious spirit of commencement, proceeding through as great a variety of accents, stops, and pauses, as the notes and phrases of any other musical composition, and coming at an equally fit moment to a close.

Enough stress has never yet been laid on the analogies between musical and poetical composition. All poetry used formerly to be sung; and poets still speak of " singing" what they write. Petrarch used to " try his sonnets on the lute ;" that is to say, to examine them in their musical relations, in order to see how they and musical requirement went together; and a chapter of poetical narrative is called to this day a canto, or chant. Every distinct section or paragraph of a long poem ought to form a separate, interwoven, and varied melody ; and every very short poem should, to a fine ear, be a still more obvious melody of the same sort, in order that its brevity may contain as much worth as is possible, and show that the poet never forgets the reverence due to his art.

I have sometimes thought that if Chaucer could have heard compositions like those of Coleridge's Christahel, he might have doubted whether theirs was not the best of all modes and measures for reducing a narrative to its most poetic element, and so producing the quintessence of a story. And for stories not very long, not very substantial in their adventures, and of a nature more imaginary than credible, so they might be. But for narrative poetry in general, for epic in particular, and for stories of any kind that are deeply to affect us as creatures of flesh and blood and human experience, there is nothing for a sustained and serious interest comparable with our old heroic measure, whether in blank verse or rhyme, in couplet or in stanza. An epic poem written in the Christabel, or any other brief lyrical measure, would acquire, in the course of perusal, a comparative tone of levity, an air of too great an airiness. The manner would turn to something like not being in earnest, and the matter resemble a diet made all of essences. We should miss pieces de resistance, and the homely, but sacred pabulum of " our daily bread." You could as soon fancy a guitar put in place of a church organ, as an Iliad or Paradise Lost written in that manner. You would associate with it no tone of Scripture, nothing of the religious solemnity which Chaucer has so justly been said to impart to his pathetic stories. When poor Griselda, repudiated by her husband, and about to return to her father's cottage, puts off the clothes which she had worn as the consort of a great noble, she says, —

" My lord, ye wot that in my father's place, Ye did me strip out of my poore weed, And richely me cladden of your grace. To you brought I nought elles, out of dreed, [else doubt But faith, and nakedness, and maidenheed ; And here again my clothing I restore, And eke my wedding-ring for evermore.

The remnant of your jewels ready be Within your chamber, dare I safely sayn ; [say 1 Naked out of my father's house (quoth she) I came, and naked must I turn again.' "*

* The spelling is modernized in the quotations which I have made from Chaucer in this Preface, in order that while producing

This quotation from the Bible would have been injured by a shorter measure.

Griselda, in words most proper and affecting, but which cannot so well be quoted, apart from the entire story, goes on to say, that she must not deprive of every one of its clothes the body which had been made sacred by motherhood. She tells the father of her children, that it is not fit she should be seen by the people in that condition.

* ' Wherefore I you pray,

Let me not like a worm go oy the way.1'

This is one of the most imploring and affecting lines that ever were written. It is also most beautifully

samples of his "beauties, no baulk may be given to a ready perception of them on the part of readers unacquainted -with him in print. It is best, doubtless, to become intimate with Chaucer in his own spelling, for many reasons, more than philological ; and it is so easy to do this with a little painstaking, that the charge of the reverse is really a thing to be ashamed of. But in a first introduction, it is desirable to put a visitor at his ease.

Readers who may wish for as long a first visit of this kind as possible, will find it indulged in the modernized spelling of Mr. Cowden Clarke's Riches of Chaucer, which is an admirable selection of all the best things in the great man, to the exclusion of what the licence of his times has rendered not so proper to be read.

modulated, though not at all after the fashion of the once all in all "smooth" couplet. But the masterly accents throughout it, particularly the emphasis on "worm," would have wanted room, and could have made no such earnest appeal, in a measure of less length and solemnity.

Irony itself gains by this measure. There is no sarcasm in Hudibras, exquisite as its sarcasm is, comparable for energy of tone and manner with Dryden's denunciation (I do not say just denunciation) of every species of priest. I allude to the last four lines of the following passage : —

" Thus worn, or weaken' d, well or ill content, Submit they must to David's government, Impoverish' d, and depriv'd of all command, Their taxes doubled as they lost their land, And what was harder yet to flesh and blood, Their gods disgrac'd, and burnt like common wood. This set the heathen priesthood in a flame ; For priests of all religions are the same. Of ivhatsod er descent their godhead be, Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree, In his defence his servants are as bold, As if he had been born of beaten gold."

It is worth the while of a student in versification to consider those four lines. They are perfect in music, expression, and force. The last, in particular, is a

model, both for the image and the treatment; the

image new, apposite, and surprising ; the place in which

it is put giving musical fulness to the cadence; its

utterance bold, strong, and beautiful to the last degree,

both of melody and power. The b's beat it as if it was

on an anvil ; as if the gold they speak of were under

their hammers; and the variety and toning of the

vowels gives sweetness to the hangs. Mark the variety

of accent which the poet has put into the space of four

lines, and the strength which the slight sound on the

last syllable of pedigree gives to the word bold, in the

line ensuing :

" Of whatsoe'er descent their godhead be, Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree, In his defence his servants are as bold, As if he had been born of beaten gold."

I have dwelt more than is customary on this musical portion of the subject of poetry, for two reasons: first, because, as I have before intimated, it has a greater connexion than is commonly thought, both with the spiritual and with the substantial portions of the art ; and second, because, as I have asserted, and am prepared to show, versification, or the various mode of

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Preface

uttering that music, has been neglected among us to a degree which is not a little remarkable, considering what an abundance of poets this country has produced.

England, it is true, is not a musical country ; at any rate not yet, whatever its new trainers may do for it. But it is a very poetical country, minus this requisite of poetry; and it seems strange that the deficit should be corporately, as well as nationally characteristic. It might have been imagined, that superiority in the one respect would have been accompanied by superiority in the other; — that they who excelled the majority of their countrymen in poetical perception, would have excelled them in musical. Is the want the same as that which has made us inferior to other great nations in the art of painting ? Are we geographically, commercially, statistically, or how is it, that we are less gifted than other nations with those perceptions of the pleasurable, which qualify people to excel as painters and musicians'? It is observable, that our poetry, compared with that of other countries, is deficient in animal spirits.

At all events, it is this ignorance of the necessity of the whole round of the elements of poetry for the production of a perfect poetical work, and the non-perception, at the same time, of the two-fold fact, that there is no such work in existence, and that the absence of no single element of poetry hinders the other elements from compounding a work truly poetical of its kind, which at different periods of literature produce so many defective and peremptory judgments respecting the exclusive right of this or that species of poetry to be called poetry. In Chaucer's time, there were probably Chaucerophilists who would see no poetry in any other man's writing. Sir Walter Raleigh, nevertheless, who, it might be supposed, would have been an enthusiastic admirer of the Knight's and Squire's Tales, openly said, that he counted no English poetry of any value but that of Spenser. In Cowley's time, " thinking" was held to be the all in all of poetry : poems were to be crammed full of thoughts, otherwise intellectual activity was wanting ; and hence, nothing was considered poetry, in the highest sense of the term, that did not resemble the metaphysics of Cowley. His " language of the heart," which has survived them, went comparatively for nothing. When the Puritans brought sentiment into discredit, nothing was considered comparable, in any species of poetry, with, the noble music and robust sensuous perception of Dry den. Admirable poet as he was, he was thought then, and long afterwards, to be far more admirable,— indeed, the sole

"Great high-priest of all the Nine."

Then " sense" became the all in all ; and because Pope wrote a great deal of exquisite sense, adorned with wit and fancy, he was pronounced, and long considered, literally, the greatest poet that England had seen. A healthy breeze from the unsophisticate region of the Old English Ballads suddenly roused the whole poetical elements into play, restoring a sense of the combined requisites of imagination, of passion, of simple speaking, of music, of animal spirits, <fec, not omitting, of course, the true thinking which all sound feeling implies ; and though, with the prevailing grave tendency of the English muse, some portions of these poetical requisites came more into play than others, and none of our poets, either since or before, have combined them all as Chaucer and Shakspeare did, yet it would as ill become poets or critics to ignore any one of them in favour of exclusive pretensions on the part of any others, as it would to say, that all the music, and animal spirits, and comprehensiveness might be taken out of those two wonderful men, and they remain just what they were.

To think that there can be no poetry, properly so called, where there is anything " artificial," where there are conventionalisms of style, where facts are simply related without obviously imaginative treatment, or where manner, for its own sake, is held to be a thing of any account in its presentation of matter, is showing as limited a state of critical perception as that of the opposite conventional faction, who can see no poetry out of the pale of received forms, classical associations, or total subjections of spiritual to material treatment. It is a case of imperfect sympathy on both sides; — of incompetency to discern and enjoy in another what they have no corresponding tendency to in themselves. It is often a complexional case; perhaps always so, more or less: for writers and critics, like all other human creatures, are physically as well as morally disposed to be what they become. It is the entire man that writes and thinks, and not merely the head. His leg has often as much to do with it as his head ; — the state of his calves, his vitals, and his nerves.

There is a charming line in Chaucer : — " Uprose the sun, and uprose Emily." Now here are two simple matters of fact, which happen to occur simultaneously. The sun rises, and the lady rises at the same time. Well, what is there in that, some demanders of imaginative illustration will say? Nothing, answers one, but an hyperbole. Nothing, says another, but a conceit. It is a mere commonplace turn of gallantry, says a third. On the contrary, it is the reverse of all this. It is pure morning freshness, enthusiasm, and music. Writers, no doubt, may repeat it till it becomes a commonplace, but that is another matter. Its first sayer, the great poet, sees the brightest of material creatures, and the beautifulest of human creatures, rising at dawn at the same time. He feels the impulse strong upon him to do justice to the appearance of both; and with gladness in his face, and music on his tongue, repeating the accent on a repeated syllable, and dividing the rhythm into two equal parts, in order to leave nothing undone to show the merit on both sides, and the rapture of his impartiality, he utters, for all time, his enchanting record.*