SOURCE: "The Man and the Poet," in Samuel Rogers and His Circle, E. P. Dutton and Company, 1910, pp. 65-94.

[In the following excerpt, Roberts reviews Rogers's major poems.]

. . . Rogers' own poetry, while it is careful, regular, smooth, finished, full of the most unexceptionable sentiment, is almost entirely devoid of life and of personal truth. And it is in this last that we mark the distinction between accomplished verse and real poetry. Just as religion is not the repetition of creed or formula, not the acceptance of orthodoxy, not the following of a theological fashion, but an emotional truth personally discerned and followed: so true poetry is not the composition of pleasant verses, fortified by a correct taste and a due disposition of epithets and sentiments. It is emotional reality, personally discerned and personally expressed. Now until we come to Italy we scarcely ever get in Rogers' verse the conjunction between truth and personal feeling. We have, frequently, irreproachable truisms gracefully phrased; we have, less frequently, personal reminiscence pleasantly told—but the truisms have not been appropriated by the poet, and the personal stories have too little connection with the real side of life to be important, or else fail of adequate emotional expression.

I would set no one now to read The Pleasures of Memory, still less Jacqueline or Columbus, unless the reader was bent on studying the whole world of English poetry. They have nothing to yield save to the student of style, at its most polished and least forcible—they seem weaker to-day than such work as Haynes Bayly's.

Here is one of the best passages from the second part of The Pleasures of Memory:—

The beauteous maid, who bids the world adieu,
Oft of that world will snatch a fond review;
Oft at the shrine neglect her beads, to trace
Some social scene, some dear, familiar face:
And ere, with iron tongue, the vesper-bell
Bursts thro' the cypress-walk, the convent-cell,
Oft will her warm and wayward heart revive,
To love and joy still tremblingly alive;
The whispered vow, the chaste caress prolong,
Weave the light dance and swell the choral song:
With rapt ear drink the enchanting serenade,
And, as it melts along the moonlight-glade,
To each soft note return as soft a sigh,
And bless the youth that bids her slumbers fly.

Or again:—

Ah! why should Virtue fear the frowns of Fate!
Hers what no wealth can buy, no power create!
A little world of clear and cloudless day,
Nor wrecked by storms, nor mouldered by decay;
A world, with MEMORY'S ceaseless sunshine blest,
The home of Happiness, an honest breast.
But most we mark the wonders of her reign,
When Sleep has locked the senses in her chain.
When sober Judgment has his throne resigned,
She smiles away the chaos of the mind;
And, as warm Fancy's bright Elysium glows,
From Her each image springs, each colour flows.
She is the sacred guest! the immortal friend!
Oft seen o'er sleeping Innocence to bend,
In that dead hour of night to Silence given,
Whispering seraphic visions of her heaven.
When the blithe son of Savoy, journeying round,
With humble wares and pipe of merry sound,
From his green vale and sheltered cabin hies,
And scales the Alps to visit foreign skies;
Tho' far below the forked lightnings play,
And at his feet the thunder dies away,
Oft, in the saddle rudely rocked to sleep,
While his mule browses on the dizzy steep,
With MEMORY'S aid, he sits at home, and sees
His children sport beneath their native trees,
And bends to hear their cherub-voices call
O'er the loud fury of the torrent's fall.

How impossibly far away this style of verse seems: the great Romantic revival, the still more effectual modernist revolt has made this quiet, placid verse-making a thing that scarcely arouses even an antiquarian interest.

I think it was Scott who once showed how any decasyllable verse could be reduced to his favourite octosyllables by omitting otiose epithets. Without any doubt this is the greatest condemnation any style of verse can have—that it is not itself, only a sort of Procrustean imitation of a less dignified mode: see how easily this of Rogers can be altered:—

The maid, who bids the world adieu,
Often will snatch a fond review;
Often neglect her beads, to trace
Some social scene, some well-loved face:
And ere, with iron tongue, the bell
Bursts through the silent convent-cell,
Oft will her wayward heart revive,
To love and joy, ah! still alive;
The vow, the chaste caress prolong,
Weave the light dance and swell the song:
Drink the enchanting serenade,
And, as it melts along the glade,
To each soft note returns a sigh,
And bless the youth that bids her fly.

The last line is, perhaps, rather too ribald; as it offers the maiden something more substantial than memory's aid; and in certain places I admit the verse is spoiled, not improved by reducing to the octosyllabic form, noticeably in the omission of "moonlight." But the alterations were made currente calamo, and just imagine what a disastrous effort it would be similarly to alter any good modern poet, says Mr. Yeats' nervous decasyllables, or Mr. Robert Bridges', or Mr. Symons'; while, with a little ingenuity, I believe pages of eighteenth-century verse could be so altered, without any . serious change in the meaning of the poems. The whole of Rogers' earlier poetry is ridden by the spirit of the gradus, by the curse of poetical language from which Wordsworth had not yet freed English verse. In the second quotation—well representative of the whole poem—in those twenty-eight lines we have "clear and cloudless" sky, "sober" judgment, "warm" fancy, "bright" Elysium, "sleeping" innocence, "seraphic" visions, "blithe" peasant, "humble" wares, "green" vale, "forked" lightnings, "dizzy" steeps—a perfect galaxy of cliché epithets. Such a passage revives the memory of school-days when with the aid of Carey's Gradus ad Parnassum one built laborious mockeries of Horace, Virgil, or Ovid.

Human Life is of greater interest: it has a more Cowperlike quality, but it hardly reaches the quiet dignity of the other poet. Still in its quaint formal way, such a passage as this is not unworthy of the author of The Task:—

Soon through the gadding vine the sun looks in,
And gentle hands the breakfast-rite begin.
Then the bright kettle sings its matin-song,
Then fragrant clouds of Mocha and Souchong
Blend as they rise; and (while without are seen,
Sure of their meal, the small birds on the green;
And in from far a school-boy's letter flies,
Flushing the sister's cheek with glad surprise)
That sheet unfold (who reads, and reads it not?)
Born with the day and with the day forgot;
Its ample page various as human life,
The pomp, the woe, the bustle, and the strife!...

Until Rogers found his real work in the writing of Italy, all his best verse was that produced under the influence of Goldsmith, Pope, and Cowper. He had a certain faculty for expressing harmonious ideas in harmonious verse; and when those ideas are enlightened by some reference to personal experience, we get his best verse of that manner. For this reason I have put Human Life here out of its place—for it was not published till 1819. It represents the highest point reached by him in his reflective style, and before he had adopted the more colloquial, easier kind of writing that he used in Italy. Before, however, he came to Italy, he was led astray, under the powerful persuasiveness of the demand of the time, and the example of the newer men, into trespassing on the domains of Byron and Scott.

In his Columbus, over whose composition he was so unconscionable a time, Rogers made a new and most unsuccessful departure. He had no kind of talent for telling a long and connected story; he was far too occupied with sources, with authorities; and he never succeeded in getting the breath of life into the tale of the discovery of America. The poem—which, when published, after fourteen years' labour, was not completed—professes to be translated from a manuscript, written by a companion of Columbus. This device never convinces, and what little verisimilitude it might have possessed is ruined by Rogers' post-Columban notes referring to books and people. The poem is written in Cantos, giving a fragmentary account of the journey to and arrival in America; and it is almost as slow reading as it was slow writing. There is a certain amount of supernatural machinery, of which the following is a favourable specimen:—

CANTO III AN ASSEMBLY OF EVIL SPIRITS

Tho' changed my cloth of gold for amice grey —
In my spring-time, when every month was May,
With hawk and hound I coursed away the hour,
Or sung my roundelay in lady's bower.
And tho' my world be now a narrow cell,
(Renounced for ever all I loved so well)
Tho' now my head be bald, my feet be bare,
And scarce my knees sustain my book of prayer,
Oh I was there, one of that gallant crew,
And saw—and wondered whence his Power He drew,
Yet little thought, who by his side I stood,
Of his great Foes in earth and air and flood,
Then uninstructed—But my sand is run,
And the Night coming—and my Task not done!—

¹

'Twas in the deep, immeasurable cave
Of ANDES, echoing to the Southern wave,
Mid pillars of Basalt, the work of fire,
That, giant-like, to upper day aspire,
'Twas there that now, as wont in heaven to shine,
Forms of angelic mould and grace divine,
Assembled. All, exiled the realms of rest,
In vain the sadness of their souls suppressed;
Yet of their glory many a scattered ray
Shot thro' the gathering shadows of decay.
Each moved a God; and all, as Gods, possessed
One half the globe; from pole to pole confessed!

²³

. . . . .

Oh could I now—but how in mortal verse—
Their numbers, their heroic deeds rehearse!
These in dim shrines and barbarous symbols reign,
Where PLATA and MATAGNON meet the Main.
Those the wild hunter worships as he roves,
In the green shade of CHILI'S fragrant groves;
Or warrior-tribes with rites of blood implore,
Whose night-fires gleam along the sullen shore
Of HURON or ONTARIO, inland seas,
What time the song of death is in the breeze!

⁴⁵

. . . . .

'Twas now in dismal pomp and order due,
While the vast conclave flashed with lightnings blue,
On shining pavements of metallic ore,
That many an age the fusing sulphur bore,
They held high council. All was silence round,
When, with a voice most sweet yet most profound,
A sovereign Spirit burst the gates of night,
And from his wings of gold shook drops of liquid light!
MERION, commissioned with his host to sweep
From age to age the melancholy deep!

The whole thing is so terribly unspontaneous, the verse moves along with so halting a precision, the thought is so confused and turmoiled, the truth of the vision is so obscured by the vast amount of information, that it is difficult to retain any vivid impression at all of the significance of the events. . . .

Smooth and unemotional, the poem pursues its way, and we cannot wonder that a public which was by now used to the gallant rhythmical swing of Scott and the rhetorical sweep of Byron should fail to have been moved by this plodding Columbus.

The disappointment felt by Rogers must have been acute; but we must remember it was only the pressure of ill-advised friends caused him to publish it when he did. He had taken infinite pains over the work—we may notice that in a letter to Sharp about some passage in it, he adopts Smith's joke about his method of production: "My dear Friend, As I am a l'agonie you must not complain of my cries"—and he consulted friends over every nuance of expression, even over the punctuation. Probably he was trying to remove his own suspicions that the subject and style of the poem were really outside his range.

Under the prevailing influence of Byron, Rogers made one more excursion into a realm of poetry where he could never hope to achieve success. If Columbus is slow and difficult, it is positively lively beside Jacqueline; but we doubt if any one who bought the book read anything but Lara, which was issued in the same volume. The praise of his friends over his dull little tale in verse is impossible to understand. . . .

It is a relief to turn from this kind of writing to Rogers' last and best work, to Italy. Over this, as over the Columbus, he took years; but they were years far better spent. And the time of composition was justified in the case of a work of observation. It would be foolish to call Italy a great, or even a good, poem: but it is eminently readable, except very occasionally: it has a living interest both for writer and reader; and it contains many descriptive passages which still remain among the best objective pictures of Italian life and scenery. Certain parts of it, like the story of Ginevra, are well known; and though it is probable that only lovers of Italy ever read it through, it is equally true that, unlike most guide-books or descriptive writing, it is rendered not less but more interesting to those familiar with the places described.

The poem follows the route into Italy over the Great St. Bernard. . . .

Thence the poem goes to Como and Bergamo. The lines opening "Venice," to which the poet came from Padua, are almost worthy of the tranquil beauty of the city:—

There is a glorious City in the Sea.
The Sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,
Ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea-weed
Clings to the marble of her palaces.
No track of men, no footsteps to and fro,
Lead to her gates. The path lies o'er the Sea,
Invisible; and from the land we went,
As to a floating City—steering in,
And gliding up her streets as in a dream,
So smoothly, silently—by many a dome,
Mosque-like, and many a stately portico,
The statues ranged along an azure sky;
By many a pile in more than Eastern pride,
Of old the residence of merchant kings;
The fronts of some, though Time had shattered them,
Still glowing with the richest hues of art,
As though the wealth within them had run o'er.

These lines charmed the imagination of young Ruskin, although in a characteristic letter he once complained that there was another side to the beauty of Venice. He wrote from Venice in the June of 1850:—

The worst of it was that I lost all feeling of Venice, and this was the reason both of my not writing to you and of my thinking of you so often. For whenever I found myself getting utterly hard and indifferent, I used to read over a little bit of the 'Venice' in the Italy, and it put me always into the right tone of thought again, and for this I cannot be enough grateful to you. For though I believe that in the summer, when Venice is indeed lovely, when poem-granate blossoms hang over every garden wall, and green sunlight shoots through every wave, custom will not destroy or even weaken the impression conveyed at first, it is far otherwise in the length and bitterness of the Venetian winters. Fighting with frosty winds at every turn of the canals takes away all the old feelings of peace and stillness; the protracted cold makes the dash of the water on the walls a sound of simple discomfort, and some wild and dark day in February one starts to find oneself actually balancing in one's mind the relative advantages of land and water carriage, comparing the canal with Piccadilly, and even hesitating whether for the rest of one's life one would rather have a gondola within call or a hansom. When I used to get into this humour I always had recourse to those lines of yours—

The Sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, Ebbing and flowing,' &c;

and they did me good service for many a day; but at last came a time when the sea was not in the narrow streets, and was always ebbing and not flowing; and one day, when I found just a foot and a half of muddy water left under the Bridge of Sighs, and ran aground in the Grand Canal as I was going home, I was obliged to give the canals up. I have never recovered the feeling of them.

For students of Venice the "Stones" of Ruskin has long since replaced Rogers' poem; but I think, that even after the wonderful prose, this easy, rather conversational verse, with its occasional loftier passages, is not entirely worthy of neglect. Rogers intersperses his descriptive work with short narrative poems, and under Venice we have the story of Foscari, but it is not for these interludes that any one would claim today remembrance for Italy. It is for the touches of description, the affectionate hovering over distant remembered scenes, the calm meditation evoked by familiar places, where the natural charm of Rogers' nature peeps through his verse. How good, for instance, in its studied Latin, Horatian style—apart from "unpremeditated verse"—is this passage describing the effect of classical Rome on the nature of a cultured and educated man of that time:—

Ah! little thought I, when in school 1 sate,
A school-boy on his bench, at early dawn
Glowing with Roman story, I should live
To treat the Appian, once an avenue
Of monuments most glorious, palaces,
Their doors sealed up and silent as the night,
The dwelling of the illustrious dead—to turn
Towards Tibur, and, beyond the City-gate,
Pour out my unpremeditated verse
Where on his mule I might have met so oft
Horace himself—or climb the Palatine
Dreaming of old Evander and his guest,
Dreaming and lost on that proud eminence,
Long while the seat of Rome, hereafter found
Less than enough (so monstrous was the brood
Engendered there, so Titan-like) to lodge
One in his madness; and inscribe my name,
My name and date, on some broad aloe-leaf,
That shoots and spreads within those very walls
Where Virgil read aloud his tale divine,
Where his voice faltered and a mother wept
Tears of delight!

⁶⁷⁸

Another most successful feature of Italy are the prose notes, which are in Rogers' happiest vein. They entirely avoid the prolixity which is too often observable in his verse; and his prose better repays the polishing and finishing process to which he subjected all his work. They are invariably incisive and to the point, and show something of the brilliance of his conversation. How good this is for instance: "When a Despot lays his hand on a Free City, how soon must he make the discovery of the Rustic, who bought Punch of the Puppet-show man, and complained that he would not speak!" And there are scattered throughout the notes such excellent descriptive bits as these:

It is somewhere mentioned that Michael Angelo, when he set out from Florence to build the dome of St. Peter's, turned his horse round in the road to contemplate once more that of the cathedral, as it rose in the grey of the morning from among the pines, and that he said after a pause: 'Come te non voglio! Meglio di te non posso!' He never indeed spoke of it but with admiration; and, if we may believe tradition, his tomb by his own desire was to be so placed in the Santa Croce as that from it might be seen, when the doors of the church stood open, that noble work of Brunelleschi. . . .

I do not know that I can take leave of Italy better than in the words affixed to the poem in 1839. From their rather pathetic appeal, their prosaic, yet not undignified rhythm, we can surely gather a truer idea of Rogers in old age than in the ill-natured stories of his moments of pique and snappy irritability.

And now a parting word is due from him
Who, in the classic fields of Italy,
(If haply thou hast borne with him so long,)
Through many a grove by many a fount has led thee,
By many a temple half as old as Time;
Where all was still awakening them that slept,
And conjuring up where all was desolate,
Where kings were mouldering in their funeral urns,
And oft and long the vulture flapped his wings—
Triumphs and masques.
Nature denied him much,
But gave him at his birth what most he values;
A passionate love for music, sculpture, painting,
For poetry, the language of the gods,
For all things here, or grand or beautiful,
A setting sun, a lake among the mountains,
The light of an ingenuous countenance,
And what transcends them all, a noble action.
Nature denied him much, but gave him more;
And ever, ever grateful should he be,
Though from his cheek, ere yet the down was there,
Health fled; for in his heaviest hours would come
Gleams such as come not now; nor failed he then,
(Then and through life his happiest privilege)
Full oft to wander where the Muses haunt,
Smit with the love of song.
'Tis now long since;
And now, while yet 'tis day, would he withdraw,
Who, when in youth he strung his lyre, addressed
A former generation. Many an eye,
Bright as the brightest now, is closed in night,
And many a voice, how eloquent, is mute,
That, when he came, disdained not to receive
His lays with favour.

Notes

¹ Many of the first discoverers ended their days in a hermitage or a cloister.

² Vast indeed must be those dismal regions, if it be true, as conjectured (Kircher, Subt. I. 202) that Etna, in her eruptions, has discharged twenty times her original bulk. Well might she be called by Euripides (Troades, v. 222) the Mother of Mountains; yet Etna herself is but "a mere firework, when compared to the burning summits of the Andes."

³ Gods, yet confessed later (Milton). Ils ne laissent pas d'en être les esclaves, et de les honorer plus que le grand Esprit, qui de sa nature est non (Lafitau).

⁴ Rivers of South America. Their collision with the tide has the effect of a tempest.

⁵ Lakes of North America. Huron is above a thousand miles in circumference. Ontario receives the waters of the Niagara, so famous for its falls; and discharges itself into the Atlantic by the river St. Lawrence.

⁶ And Augustus in his litter, coming at a still slower rate. He was borne along by slaves; and the gentle motion allowed him to read, write, and employ himself as in his cabinet. Though Tivoli is only sixteen miles from the city, he was always two nights on the road (Suetonius).

⁷ Nero.

⁸ At the words "Tu Marcellus eris." The story is so beautiful that every reader must wish it to be true.