Aubrey De Vere
MY acquaintance with Aubrey De Vere began twenty years ago. It was brought about through the kindly offices of Mrs. William Wordsworth of the Stepping Stones, Ambleside, while I was spending my first summer by the English Lakes at work upon an edition of Wordsworth’s Prelude. He took great delight in my devotion to the poet of his youth, and also in the thought that this great poem was to be used, not in every school in our land, as Professor Corson insists it should be, but in at least one. The suggestions which I received from him were invaluable to me, and the acquaintance thus auspiciously begun ripened into a friendship which I count the chief honor of my life. So unfailing was his courtesy, so true his appreciation, and so generous his recognition of even the simplest efforts to make literature and life more beautiful, that on receiving the works which I had edited he responded with volume after volume of his own great works, and those of his father and brother, until I became the proud and happy possessor of them all. Accompanying these gifts were the letters so full of wisdom and truth, so warm with interest in all the questions relating to the condition of literature and education in America, and so tender in personal allusions, that they are volumes in themselves, like his own gracious presence full of sunshine and happiness. Of The Legends of Ireland’s Heroic Age he wrote : “ There is a paganism in literature much more dangerous than that of these early days. It belongs to that corrupted civilization which uses against Christianity those intellectual and imaginative gifts, as well as social and scientific progress, which have been the gift of Christianity itself. Human nature, even in periods usually branded as barbaric, has qualities that reveal sympathy with the divine ; it has ardent affections, simple refinement, singleness of aim, a noble self-sacrifice, and the unblunted sensibilities of love and reverence, without which the highest revealed truths cease to have a meaning. The heroic in its loftiest manifestations stretches forth its hands to the spiritual ; its very deficiencies are a confession that it must needs be supplemented by a something higher than itself.”
Aubrey De Vere’s works are full of that spiritual passion which anticipated Christianity through the early ages, and has emanated from it in the succeeding ages. Only such calm and equable natures as his are able to forego the minute distractions, petty details, and external interests of life, to cultivate those energies of mind and heart which ripen into noble spiritual insight. It is because of the possession of such a faculty that De Vere has been able to re-create for us so much of the essential life of the ancient and mediæval world, and to reveal its vital relation to that of our own time.
De Vere’s many-sided power of historical sympathy which made him familiar with dissimilar ages of the past was early revealed in The Masque of Classical Greece, and in The Search after Proserpine. His knowledge of nature and human life in Greece gives this work a coherency, grace, and dignity which remind one of Landor, while his felicity of epithet, richness of imagery, and warmth of emotion suggest Shelley. In it there is more abandon, more spontaneity and lightness of lyrical movement than in those later poems intended to reveal the processes by which a human soul becomes regenerate. Here Imagination lays aside her philosophic garb, and wanders with a light and graceful step through the forest and by the sounding sea with unhappy Ceres in search of her child Proserpine : —
By sands of Libya brown and wrinkled,
And where for leagues, o’er Nile, is borne
The murmur of the yellow corn.”
The Christian element in The Children of Lir forms the connecting link between this group of poems and that of early Christianity in Ireland, — The Legends of Saint Patrick. Here we have a resetting of the fifteen legends of the life and teaching of Ireland’s great apostle. The grace and truth of these legends De Vere hoped would stimulate his people to high ideals of thought and action. In simple, graceful, and dignified verse is told the story of trial and achievement, of noble passions and tender affections, loyalty, generosity, and self-sacrifice, — human nature in transition to new faith out of a stormy, wild, but not wholly ungentle time. He dedicated the volume to the memory of Wordsworth. Of the many nobly beautiful passages in these poems, which retain such unique poetic unity, is that in which the aged saint exhorts his people to live nobly : —
Be true; for God hath graved on you his Name;
God, with a wondrous ring, hath wedded thee ;
Light of a darkling world! Lamp of the North!
My race, my realm, my great inheritance,
To lesser nations leave inferior crowns ;
Speak ye the thing that is ; be just, be kind ;
Live ye God’s Truth, and in its strength be free ! ”
This became the ideal of our poet, for he wrote: “One of the lessons taught to us by Irish history is this : that to the different nations different vocations are assigned by Providence ; to one the imperial vocation, to another a commercial one ; to Greece an artistic one, to Ireland a spiritual one.” In Innisfail he sought to impress this truth even more strongly upon his contemporary Irish folk, and here for the first time his own personality, the poet and patriot, shines clear. In this series of lyrical poems illustrative of Irish history from the twelfth to the eighteenth century we have poetical powers of the highest order. He creates these songs and ballads from legends and his own imagination ; they are such songs and ballads as might have sprung out of the experiences of a race imaginative, impassioned, loving social pastimes. It is a noble attempt to do for the Irish folk-song what Burns and Scott did for the Scotch. He says, “No other poem of mine was written more intensely, I may say painfully, from my heart than Innisfail.”
Imaginative faculty of a different kind is revealed in The Year of Sorrow. His Muse is not unfamiliar with the house of mourning, with national affliction. The devastating work of the Great Famine is touched with something like sombre beauty by the gentle absolution of nature. In the last of the four poems, Winter, he sings : —
On temple’s roof and cedar’s fan;
And mould thyself on pine and yew,
And on the awful face of man.
On quaking moor, and mountain moss,
With eyes upstaring to the sky,
And arms extended like a cross
The long expectant sufferers lie.
Bend o’er them, white-robed Acolyte !
Put forth thine hand from cloud and mist,
And minister the last sad rite
Where altar there is none nor priest.”
Poetry like this reveals the depth rather than the tumult of the soul. But it is not sad ; it is saved from the aspect of melancholy by the gleam which it throws on the poet’s idea of man’s lot, by the hope of life eternal. The spiritual element is nowhere divorced from human sympathies. His idea of the functions of great poetry is expressed in a letter which I received in May, 1896 : “ Poetry which unites the manly and thoughtful, and both with the graceful, serves as a very special antidote to that which tends but to stultify the intellect and make the imagination effeminate while it rather hardens the heart than makes it tender. To direct the attention of readers, especially of young readers, both in America and England to the claims of high poetry, is a noble work. In both countries there is a great battle going on between the two classes of literature, the influence of which for good or for evil is already immense, and every day is becoming greater and greater. There is no calculating the power for good that belongs to those books which develop the spiritual as well as the religious and the reasonable in our being, or the mischief done by what elicits the taste which feeds on garbage, whether in the form of the sensual, or of the merely conventional.”
In The Legends of Saxon Saints he has done a splendid and necessary service by giving artistic setting to the great movements in England’s civil and religious history from the landing of Saint Augustine at Thanet, in 597, to the death of Bede in 735. In sending me this volume he wrote of its inception as follows : “ When I was meditating a poem, which in the form of sequent legends should record the greatest of English events, England’s conversion to the Christian faith, it struck me that I might give to these legends a moral and philosophical character by grouping them around the legend of Odin. My aim was to make Odin’s form cross and recross the background of these legendary pictures, appearing at the beginning, middle, and end of the series. The aim being to add to the significance of Christian legends through the contrast afforded by a Pagan legend, illustrating the Pagan spirit at its best, and in its corruption and decline.”
In this series we have a beautiful blending of the powers which belong to the poet of primitive instincts and feelings on the one hand, and of culture and reflection on the other. There is more of the mild pastoral atmosphere here than in the legends of his own country, more variety of scene and character, giving opportunity for finer imaginative effects. That which presents all these characteristics with most charm of gladness, repose, and emotional beauty, art ministering at the altar of Nature and Religion, is Cædmon the Cowherd : —
The royal feast was holden : for below
A noisier revel dimmed the shore ; therein
The humbler guests made banquet. Many a tent
Gleamed on the yellow sands by ripples kissed ;
And many a savoury dish sent up its steam ;
The farmer from the field had brought his calf;
Fishers that increase scaled which green-gulfed seas
From womb crystalline teeming, yield to man ;
Aisd Jock, the Woodman, from his oaken glades
The tall stag, arrow-pierced. In gay attire
Now green, now crimson, matron sat, and maid.”
When the ruler of the feast called for a song, and each in turn had sung, the harp was passed to Cædmon, lowest at the board. He replied, “I cannot sing;” then some one taunted him : —
Our herdsman, grows to ox ! Behold, his eyes move slow,
Like eyes of oxen ! ”
At this Cædmon left the banquet saying : —
Then strode he to his cow-house in the mead,
Displeased though meek, and muttered, ‘Slow of eye!
My kine are slow: if rapid I, my hand
Might tend them worse.’ ”
Hearing his step, the kine
Went from him as a vapour. Straw he brought,
And strewed their beds; and they, contented well,
Laid down ere long their great bulks, breathing deep
Amid the glimmering moonlight. He with head
Propped on a favourite heifer’s snowy flank,
Rested, his deer-skin o’er him drawn. Hard days
Bring slumber soon. His latest thought was this:
‘ Though witless things we are, my kine and I,
Yet God it was who made us.’ ”
The songs, odes, and sonnets of De Vere are perhaps better known and therefore need less attention here. A few of his songs have a free, light, and bounding movement, a pleasant sportiveness which remind one of Shakespeare, as the songs in The Search after Proserpine, where the Zephyrs and the Hours sing:
Of pure Olympian springs,
We caught the airs up bubbling
And stayed them with our wings.”
May Carols, a series of meditative and descriptive poems in honor of the Virgin Mary, showing her relation to faith by the progress of her month, May, reveal the essence of delicacy and beauty upon a subject the most difficult and mysterious. Here is a picture of the Holy Mother and Child : —
Her Lamb matured his lowliness ;
’T was hers the lovely Sacrifice
With fillet and with flower to dress.
Who nightly to his cradle crept,
And lying like the moonbeams prone,
Worshipped her Maker as He slept.”
The former song lends itself naturally to popular appreciation, the latter will be admired only by the few.
The Odes, like that To the Daffodil, are full of subtle odors and flavors from nature. The feeling is so fine and strong that notwithstanding it is in the main descriptive, the lyrical impulse is powerful enough to bear it up. It reminds one of Tennyson : —
With golden surf is curdled o’er,
Ere yet the birch against the blue
Her silken tissue weaves anew,
Thou com’st.’”
The following from the Ode on the Ascent of the Alps is less descriptive but has more of the lyrical cry which suggests Shelley: —
The wild goats they bound ;
The resinous odours
Are wafted around;
With blue gaps are spangled ;
Green isles of the valley with sunshine are crowned.
How happy that shepherd, How happy the lass,
How freshly beside them
The pure Zephyrs pass !
Sing, sing, from the soil
Springs bubble and boil,
And sun-smitten torrents fall soft on the grass.”
In the art of sonnet-writing De Vere was a disciple of Wordsworth. His sonnets are chiefly memorial or political, and, like Wordsworth’s, are characterized by a concentration of thought and feeling into single pregnant lines. The sonnets on Wordsworth reveal this : —
With wild flowers only, singing Nature’s praise.”
The sonnets to Charles Eliot Norton, “On reading his Vita Nuova of Dante, March 28,1860,” are both patriotic and personal, and breathe hopes for America which De Vere often expressed to me in his letters: —
The destined bard of that great land of thine
Sole-seated ’neath the tempest-roughened pine,
In boyhood’s spring when genius first doth plume
Her wing, ’mid forest scents and insects’ hum
And murmurs from the far sea crystalline
May smell this blossom from the Tuscan vine,
May hear this voice from antique Christendom ;
For thus from love and purity and might
Shall he receive his armour, and forth fare
Champion elect in song, that country’s knight
Who early burst the chain weak nations bear
Weeping, ’mid trumpet blasts and standards torn
To manhood, with loud cries, thy land was born! ”
We must not forget that at this very time England’s rulers and men of wealth were in sympathy with those who were striving to destroy the Constitution. The following will reveal De Vere’s attitude toward America and her future : —
“ I have had so much pleasure quite recently in reading, or re-reading, works which you have been so very good as to send me, that I cannot resist the impulse to thank you for the gratification thus afforded me. One of these works is Principles of Criticism, the most valuable criticism in the English language. The substance of that book, valuable as it is in itself (for your high praise of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria is not more than that delightful book well deserves), is yet very much enhanced to me by the preface and notes with which it is enriched ; and I cannot but be very grateful to you for thus recalling to my memory the delight with which I first read it in my youth. With not less pleasure did I read his Ancient Mariner, and here again I find that delight with which I read it since, vividly renewed and enhanced. These are books which one never tires of reading, and which impart a deep interest to all that relates to them even when the relation between them is apparently a casual one. You are doing a great work for your country in thus making its youth well acquainted with the two greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The greatest prose thinkers of modern times I suppose were Burke and Cardinal Newman ; and, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, they were in one sense brothers, and in another were like and yet unlike. I trust that you will bring them, too, closer than you have done as yet. A great opportunity is afforded you by your position in connection with American education. More than anything else, a great and sound literature seems to be now the human means of promoting the cause of Divine Truth. It may be that a new Aquinas and a new Dante will rise, next, and rise in America, where a new and spacious standing ground has been thus provided for them.”
De Vere’s poetry can never be popular for the same reason that Wordsworth’s cannot. “ His life has been a soliloquy,” says Sir Henry Taylor, “and he has talked so long to himself in solitudes and wildernesses of thought that he often seems as if he understood no other audience. Still his poems must make themselves heard across whatever gulf or chasm.” He needs little of our praise after receiving it from such masters as Tennyson, Sir Henry Taylor, and Landor. The last of these sings : —
Forsaken by its Muses and their God !
Show us the way ; we miss it, young and old. ”
The best preparation for understanding the method and aim of De Vere’s dramatic work would be a study of his essays in which he reviews the dramas of his friend Sir Henry Taylor. He says: “ The great idea of all high Tragedy includes to a large degree what is preëminently in the Greek, viz., that of Fate : while the idea of the Historic Drama is that of Providence, — a Providence not oppressing and subduing man, but working with his strivings while it works beyond them. In Tragedy the problem of life is pressed upon our attention ; in the Historic Play it is solved.”
His two historic plays, Alexander the Great, and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, are philosophical studies of two great characters in dissimilar states of human society. They offer contrasts of action and passion, subjective and objective, pride and humility, success and failure; one is a type of pagan, the other of Christian greatness. The central characters are finely conceived and adequately portrayed ; a result of the unique blending of all the poet’s faculties in one creative effort. Both dramas abound in variety of interests and incidents, personal, heroic, political, ecclesiastical, and romantic ; and yet the effect is hardly that of the modern romantic drama, rather that of the classic. Strength and dignity, pathos and passion, subtle reflections and heroic actions, are the controlling forces. They abound in passages of great purity, power, and beauty, and reveal in every line the soul of the poet who fashions them.
When we study the past in the light of the great spirits who have made it worthy of our attention, giving it a vital human interest by manifesting that the history of man is one in all ages, we shall find that these poems have a unique value because they reveal what no mere history reveals, — the infinite play of various ideals in the life of the greatest periods. This revelation is very marked in the contrasted scenes on the death of the hero in each poem, — one in the palace at Babylon ; the other before the altar at Canterbury. When Alexander, whose ambition was to create a single kingdom, one o’er all the world, lies dead, it is a Ptolemy who praises him: —
O’er-rushed the globe. Expectant centuries
Condensed themselves into a few brief years
To work his will.”
When Becket, whose desire is to wait in patience for whate’er God has in store, is facing martyrdom, it is John of Salisbury who praises him : —
Saw nothing, great or wise — simply a servant.”
De Vere’s prose work naturally divides itself into three classes, Critical, Philosophical, and Political. As to the mission of great poetry he had ideals as high and holy as those of Milton, Wordsworth, and Arnold, and he consequently brought to its interpretation the spirit of reverence and sympathy which involved his whole nature, intellectual, moral, æsthetic. He was therefore a follower of Coleridge, and sought in all his criticism, whether of Spenser, Milton, or Wordsworth, to penetrate through the vestments of poetry to the moral and spiritual content where the convictions of the man are revealed in their entirety. With all the strength and charm of one inspired by the teachings of the great masters of our literature he pleads with sweet persuasiveness that poetry be used for its power to stimulate, to chasten, to ennoble our whole being. The thought that he might be able to guide others into the region of permanent love and wholesome joy of the things that are more excellent in the life of man was a source of pleasure to him; and though modest to a fault, every recognition of his work gave him the most intense pleasure. Granting me the privilege of dedicating my edition of Wordsworth’s Prefaces to him he wrote : “ The compliment which you pay me will be all the more valuable to me as in some measure associating me with Wordsworth, whom I regard as far the greatest of English poets since Shakespeare. It is indeed as a friend of Wordsworth, and as one who from youth to age has endeavored to make known to others the transcendent value of his poetry, that I should wish to be remembered, if remembered at all. The Prefaces are most valuable contributions to our literature of criticism, which for the most part, I fear, has been more pretentious than marked by solid thought or genuine insight, though of course the criticisms of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Sir Henry Taylor are serious helps to any one who would get at the heart of high poetry and understand its appeal to the moral and spiritual, as well as to the intellectual part of our being.” De Vere’s work in criticism is but an unfolding of the fundamental principles expressed here, and is especially valuable at the present time, when literature is busy with material occupations and conventional pleasures and neglects the source from which it sprang, — the depth of the human heart. If we were to select those works which will be more and more valuable as time goes on, we should include the series of essays on Wordsworth, and that given at the request of Cardinal Newman, when Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, on Literature in its Social Aspects. In 1889 De Vere wrote of the former: “ There are three papers on Wordsworth in the volumes which I am ordering sent to you. They were written in the hope that I might thus contribute to an appreciation of what I consider to be the most characteristic merits of a poet whom I regard as the greatest since Shakespeare, profounder and wider in grasp than Milton, if less stately. One of the merits I have insisted on most is that for the supposed absence of which even ardent admirers of Wordsworth often apologize, namely, passion.”
De Vere’s political prose everywhere reveals the lofty moral and political philosophy of Burke. If Ireland had only been wise enough to learn from her best friend and safest teacher she would not now be rent with civil discord. Such brave words as the following brought upon him the bitterest denunciation of the extremists: “ The Ireland that did not confound license with liberty, that reverenced law, and therefore made no man judge in his own cause, is my Ireland ; and I have a right to remain faithfid to what I have loved long, and to resent those who would set up a Pretender as her rival. I deem it a Patriot’s duty not to flatter his .country, and not to withhold unpopular counsel when it is needful.” Again, writing of an edition of Burke’s American Oration which I sent him, he said : “ Burke was incomparably the greatest political philosopher and also the most noble - hearted statesman that England has ever had, — a present to her from Ireland : the greatest political writer the world has ever known. Nearly all the great errors which England has committed, positive and negative, since his time and during it, would have been averted if his counsels had been adopted.”
De Vere’s philosophical prose we have no time to consider now ; suffice it to say that it is filled with that large and generous spirit winch welcomes every ally that will advance the happiness and increase the nobility of man. He was tolerant of the opinions of others while holding with firmness and fidelity what he believed to be true. “ Our aspiration,” says he, “ has ever been to raise the lowly, not to pull down the lofty ; to abolish caste by opening the ranks to the energies of all, but not to destroy gradation ; to strengthen both liberty and privilege by resting both on a wider basis.”
The elements in the character of Aubrey De Vere which gained for him the love and admiration of all the great men of his time were those which he most admired in Wordsworth, — simplicity, frankness, childlike faith, and lofty moral rectitude. He was generous in his recognition of the greatness of others, and no word of his was ever tainted with jealousy or the spirit of rivalship ; odium literarium he despised. His ideal is so lofty, and his tone so pure and elevated, that he must needs be the poet of the few, at least until the ends for which he lived and loved and sang shall have been attained. He felt this, and once said, “I am doing what in me lies to keep alive poetry with a little conscience in it; if I fail in that attempt, I shall not fret about it; others will do it later, — what I have aimed at doing, and will probably do it better.” The tribute of his aged brother, Sir Stephen De Vere, which I have just received, is as true as it is tender and beautiful: “He left not one enemy. His high principles, his careful moderation, and the character of his poetry innocent and sublime won for him the admiration and, what is better, the esteem of all.”
Andrew J. George.