‘Alors s'assit sur un monde en ruines une jeunesse soucieuse. … Et ils parlèrent tant et si longtemps, que toutes les illusions humaines, comme des arbres en automne, tombaient feuille à feuille autour d'eux, et que ceux qui les écoutaient passaient leur main sur leur front, comme des fiévreux qui s'éveillent.’ This is not a picture of post-war Europe; at least, not of our post-war Europe. The words are all but a century old. Thus wrote Alfred de Musset, middle-aged already in his twenties, just as Byron had been ‘a perfect Timon, not nineteen’. Even in his impudent little comedies, at moments, the same cry of anguish makes itself suddenly heard. ‘Ce que tu dis là’, exclaims Fantasio's friend, ‘ferait rire bien des gens; moi, cela me fait frémir; c'est l'histoire du siècle entier. L'éternité est une grande aire, d'où tous les siècles, comme de jeunes aiglons, se sont envolés tour à tour pour traverser le ciel et disparaître; le nôtre est arrivé à son tour au bord du nid; mais on lui a coupé les ailes, et il attend la mort en regardant l'espace dans lequel il ne peut s'élancer.’

It was no mere affectation. No doubt youth is often affected; but youth is also often bitterly sincere. No doubt it was a mood. It passed as moods do. But it is curious to find that the last century, which we tend to picture as populated by brisk business men with a blind confidence in God, themselves, and Progress, could be in its early twenties, as well as in its nineties, thus fin-de-siècle. Yet can we wonder? There are dawns, indeed, when to be young is ‘very heaven’; the morning after is apt to be less celestial. Then the young pass from excessive enthusiasm to excessive melancholy, feeling that they have been born out of due time and are making their first bow on a stage where all is over.

It was natural that the generation which came to birth with the nineteenth century should feel this disillusion. There seemed nothing but a puppet-show left in progress in the theatre of the world. It had been otherwise for their fathers. The Werthers had forgotten their own sorrows as they beheld the earth alight with Liberty, and the Rights of Man coming in glory on the clouds of Heaven. Like clouds, indeed, those Rights had vanished; in their place had risen in the same year, 1804, the pale and baleful stars of René and Obermann; but in their place also had ensued for twenty years, terrible and yet magnificently titanic, a Battle of the Gods. Disillusion was kept at bay. War still seemed intoxicatingly romantic then, however mistakenly; a field for genius, not merely for the muddling mediocrities that floundered through the slime of our last conflict. A Piedmontese private in the Grande Armée has told how, at the mere sight of that short grey-coated figure riding down the line before Moscow, he found himself breathing as hard as if he had been running, and bathed in sweat amid the cold of a Russian winter's day. It was not thus that the armies of 1917 felt about their generals. But after the romantic epic of Napoleon, there followed a poor farce of rejuvenated kings and reactionary governments. This was what the generation that had heard through boyhood the guns of Austerlitz and Jéna and Wagram sat down to contemplate, as they and the century together came of age. And so there were other caged eaglets in these years besides the Duc de Reichstadt; other smouldering firebrands, lit too late, besides the heroes of Stendhal. The enormous energy of a Balzac, a Dumas, a Hugo, might go trampling onward under that leaden sky after the lurid splendour of Byron had fallen from it like a final meteor; but others of the young, endowed with less vitality, felt weighed beneath a load of emotional, as well as political, reaction. Minor writers, like Maxime du Camp, bear out Musset's description; and though in England, so much less touched by the war and now at length victorious, we should not expect the same aftermath, it may be more than coincidence that so few writers are today remembered who were not either over twenty-five or under twelve—too old or too young to be vitally impressionable—when the year 1820 closed. In prose, between Carlyle (born in 1795) and Thackeray (born in 1811) the only names of any note are Macaulay (who would have been hard to damp in any age), Mill, Newman, and George Borrow. Similarly there is a gap in the lineage of English poets between the birth of Keats in 1795 and that of Tennyson in 1809. Such speculation about literary vintage-years must remain fanciful; yet there is one poet born between Keats and Tennyson who was certainly cramped by a despondency like Musset's, due in part, no doubt, to his own temperament, but partly also, I believe, to his time. Thomas Lovell Beddoes came into the world in an evil hour for him, on a July day in 1803.

That the grandson of Richard Edgeworth and son of Dr. Beddoes should be eccentric, can surprise nobody, steadying as it might well seem to have Maria Edgeworth for an aunt; but between him and his elders there is one great difference. He lacked, not their energy—he could drudge like an emmet at anatomy, then throw down his pen to take a vigorous part in revolutions and conspiracies—but their unquestioning self-confidence. To Richard Edgeworth and Dr. Beddoes the world was on the whole a friendly sort of place, to be succeeded here and hereafter by another better still. They thought well of it; they thought well of themselves; they were all the more successful in consequence. Certainly they were much happier. ‘Edgeworth’, said a contemporary, ‘must write, or he would burst.’ Edgeworth did not burst. ‘Her conversation’, wrote Byron after meeting his daughter Maria, ‘was as quiet as herself; no one would have guessed she could write her name. Whereas her father talked, not as if he could write nothing else, but as if he thought nothing else was worth writing.’ The Richard Edgeworths, if not their hearers, are happy after their fashion. Similarly Dr. Beddoes had bounded about with tireless zest and an undivided soul from bleaching negroes to blackening Mr. Pitt. Like Browning he had been one that ‘marched breast forward’. True, it is not easy to march in any other way—a point which Browning seems not to have quite considered; but at all events Dr. Beddoes marched; and discovered on the road many odd, and some useful, things. But when we turn to his son, the author of Death's Jest Book, the contrast is complete. In every apple of his Tree of Knowledge lay a little black wriggling worm of doubt. Outstanding as an anatomist, dazzling as a poet, he yet perished by his own hand at forty-five, bequeathing to Dr. Ecklin a stomach-pump and to the world only a wild heap of poetic fragments, blood and sawdust mixed with diamonds.

Left fatherless in his sixth year, the boy was sent at fourteen to Charterhouse. Long afterwards, when Beddoes was dead, his friend Kelsall extracted strange tales of his doings there from a certain C. D. Bevan who had been his fag. Two of these details have been repeated by Sir Edmund Gosse and Lytton Strachey—the boy's habit of declaiming speeches from Elizabethan drama at the little Bevan (who was forcibly enlisted as accomplice, enemy, or mistress) with a rain of kicks or caresses as required; and his vengeance on a certain locksmith, whose bad work was repaid with a dramatic interlude composed and recited for his benefit, and depicting his death-bed or horror-stricken remorse, his funeral, and his consignment by a legion of devils to the Bottomless Pit. But there are other less-known anecdotes from the same source, too characteristic, I think, to be forgotten. The inborn oddity, the rebelliousness, the eldritch humour, the Gothic grotesqueness, the love of Elizabethan poetry, the strange mastery of words—all these qualities of the poet we know, are already foreshadowed here at Charterhouse. Already he dominated his fellows. The nicknames he invented stuck like burs. His defiance, too, of authority had already begun. When the traditional liberty to play hockey in the cloisters was abolished, young Beddoes, who normally never played at all, appeared to lead one side in the now forbidden game, his head bedizened with feathers and his body adorned by a pasteboard shield where shone emblazoned a clenched fist, with the motto: Manus haec inimica tyrannis. This demonstration proved too much for the gravity of the authorities and the prohibition was dissolved in laughter. But if Beddoes could uphold the oppressed, he could also do his share of oppression. Readers of The Newcomes will recall how the old pensioners at Charterhouse were called ‘Codds’, and Colonel Newcome himself, ‘Codd Colonel’. Three of these old brethren the young Beddoes particularly loved to torment—‘Codd Curio’, whom he called so because he collected curiosities; ‘Codd Frolicsome’, a Trafalgar veteran who had St. Vitus's dance; and ‘Codd Sine-breech’, who was slightly crazed in the head. These old gentlemen, who were attended by the most Gampish of nurses, suffered such persecutions from their enemy that Codd Sine-breech was fain to hire a drummer of the Guards as reinforcement. Hostilities were not, however, continuous; every now and then both sides indulged in armistice feasts of oysters and lobsters, gin and porter, at which Beddoes would dance or give dramatic recitations. Another prank of his was to purloin all the fire-irons from the kitchen of the preacher's house, so that the infuriated cook went about cursing in a vain search for his pokers, tongs, and shovels; which were mysteriously restored to him at midnight, tied round the neck of Beddoes' fag, who was himself tied to the door-knocker with a resulting din, as the little boy struggled there, like a dozen coal-scuttles falling downstairs.

The same familiar imp of insubordination attended Beddoes to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he treated his fellows with cold aloofness and the college authorities, by Bevan's account, with ‘a course of studied impertinence’. On one occasion, we are told, a lecturer, tired of seeing him sitting and glowering in complete inattention, exclaimed: ‘I wish you would at least cut your book, Mr. Beddoes.’ At once the young man rose, walked out, and returned with the largest butcher's cleaver money could buy, with which he proceeded to do as requested. The ensuing uproar brought the lecture to an untimely end. Few, again, will forget that deadly stab, that poisoned ‘jewel five words long’, in one of his Oxford letters: ‘Mr. Milman (our poetry professor) has made me quite unfashionable here by denouncing me as “one of a villainous school.” I wish him another son.’

Such things are trivial, no doubt. But only in such glimpses does Beddoes loom upon us, like a red-hot fogbound sun, out of the mists which have engulfed for ever the secrets of his inner life. We catch sight again of the young poet, with his strange physical resemblance to Keats, helping to print the posthumous verse of the still neglected Shelley, whose aery spirit held so strange an appeal for his own earthy one; or scribbling imitations of Elizabethan drama, with a power that seems to spring from him full-grown; or stealthily hacking the pages of his first published volume from the bindings of the copies on his friends' shelves. Then there appears for a moment the young law-student, working at Southampton under that most poetic of solicitors, Kelsall, who was to struggle with heroic resistance to keep alive the memory of Beddoes' work for a generation after its author's death and right up to the eve of his own; next, the young doctor, learning to prefer ‘Apollo's pillbox to his lyre’ and Germany to England; growing into a stoic, prosaic, grim anatomist, and yet still turning at instants from skull and scalpel to retouch the everlasting Death's Jest Book; and last of all the obscure revolutionary, hunted from Bavaria to Zürich, from Zürich back to Germany, then deported in turn from Hanover, from Prussia, and from Bavaria once more. He has by now almost forgotten his country. His rare visits only inflame his indifference into active irritation with ‘this dull, idle, pampered isle’. He has become more and more bizarre. His talk shows a morbid preoccupation with death's-heads and skeletons. Sisters and cousins object to his habits of lying in bed all day, drinking perhaps (or, as he called it, ‘having neuralgia’); and then prowling like a spectre about the house all night. He arrived at the residence of one relative at Cheney Longville in Shropshire mounted, it is said, upon an ass. Was he sane, this sombre recluse whom the Procters one evening found struggling with the attendants at Drury Lane Theatre, which he had been trying to set on fire by holding a lighted five-pound note under a chair? There must have been sighs of relief among the Beddoeses of Bristol and Birkenhead when their disreputable relative went back to cutting up dead Germans at Frankfurt. There he now lost his health, by pricking his hand during a dissection; and lost his heart in addition to a young baker called Degen, whom he was set on turning into an actor, hiring the theatre at Zürich for him to play Hotspur. The rest is well known. The inhabitants of Zürich looked coldly on the heroics of Herr Degen; Degen in his turn grew cold towards Beddoes and went back to his dough in Frankfurt. The poet, bearded now and looking ‘like Shakespeare’, removed in deep despondency to Basel, where he tried to kill himself, first by stabbing his leg, then by tearing off the bandages in hospital, until the limb gangrened and had to be amputated. He recovered, in body, and seemingly in mind as well. Degen, too, had been persuaded to return to him. Yet as soon as he was well enough to go out, he took the opportunity to procure poison, came back to the hospital, and died unconscious the same night (26th January, 1849). In his bosom lay a pencilled bequest of a stomach-pump and a case of champagne: ‘I am food for what I am good for—worms … I ought to have been among other things a good poet. Life was too great a bore on one peg and that a bad one.’

But though Death's Jester lay now quiet at last in the cypress-shade of the hospital-cemetery at Zürich, the jest was not ended. His works remained, to become in their turn the tennis-balls of chance. His family wanted them safely destroyed—all except those of an innocuous medical nature. Only Zoe King, the cousin who is said to have felt for him an attachment he could not return, and the faithful Kelsall resisted this proposal; and, through Kelsall, Death's Jest Book appeared in 1850, followed a year later by a volume of poems. But a new generation of writers had appeared by now; and the world of 1850, watching the birth in swift succession of works like David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, and In Memoriam, had no eyes for this odd relic of the unknown dead. Only a few observers saw that something new had been added to English poetry; but among them were Tennyson and Browning. Years passed; Kelsall, devoted as ever, heard of Browning's admiration, met him (1867), begged him to write a preface for a new edition, sent him some of the manuscripts, offered to bequeath him all. Browning accepted; he contemplated, at a time when he seemed likely to be made Professor of Poetry at Oxford, giving his opening lecture on Beddoes. But nothing came of it, neither preface nor lecture; Browning had grown bored. And Kelsall, too, was growing old. In 1869 he made, with Zoe King, a pilgrimage to the scenes at Basel and Zürich where Beddoes' life had guttered out twenty years before; in July, 1872, he contributed an article on the dead poet to the Fortnightly; three months after this ‘last stroke for Beddoes', as he called it, he too was dead.

The manuscripts duly passed to Browning, with a message from Mrs. Kelsall revealing to him what had been hitherto kept dark—that Beddoes had died by his own hand. This grim addition made the poet of optimism more disposed than ever to play ostrich and forget the whole affair. The box of yellowing papers acquired in his eyes a sinister horror. Another decade went by; then he talked of it to his young neighbour, Edmund Gosse; and finally, one day in 1883, led him to the locked box, pressed the key into his hand, and fled. However, once Bluebeard's Cupboard was open, Browning's repugnance weakened sufficiently for him to read over the manuscripts with Gosse; who in consequence produced a new edition of the Works in 1890, followed by a volume of the poet's Letters in 1894. But, half a century after his death, misfortune still dogged Beddoes. The edition was perfunctorily carried out; and the manuscripts, returned to Browning's son in Italy, disappeared in the confusion that followed his death. What became of them remains to this day obscure; there seems no basis for the story once told, that ‘Pen’ Browning's servants ransacked their dead master's house, and that no one knew what scented tresses of some dark Italian beauty, faded now in their turn, the papers of Beddoes might have perished at last to curl. Finally in 1928 Gosse produced a grandiose new edition of The Letters and Poetical Works, ornamented with decorations from Holbein's Dance of Death; but before its completion he too died; and with this new edition reappeared—alas!—the errors and corruptions and mutilations of the old. Beddoes might well have laughed in his grave.

Not that it is much easier to know what the poet was really like, than what he really did. The letters are eccentric, cold, impersonal—all the more impersonal for being filled with a great deal of bitter badinage. His jests serve him, one feels, for shield as well as sword. That sardonic smile makes his face more than ever of a mask. Poetry, Anatomy, Liberty—he pursued each in turn, to disillusion at the last. There is little trace in his life of affection, apart from the mysterious Degen: ‘I fear I am a non-conductor of friendship, a not-very-likeable person, so that I must make sure of my own respect.’ And yet this coldness has an air of being studied rather than natural. There is a Byronic pose in his saturnine description of his behaviour on a voyage to Hamburg—how he ‘remained impenetrably proud and silent every wave of the way, dropping now and then a little venom into the mixture of conversation to make it effervesce’; and this impassivity is belied by passages in his poetry of a quivering tenderness:

                    Your love was much,
Your life but an inhabitant of his.
                    Cyrano, Cyrano,
I yearn, and thirst, and ache to be beloved,
As I could love,—through my eternal soul,
Immutably, immortally, intensely,
Immeasurably. Oh! I am not at home
In this December world, with men of ice,
Cold sirs and madams. That I had a heart,
By whose warm throbs of love to set my soul!
I tell thee I have not begun to live,
I'm not myself, till I've another self
To lock my dearest, and most secret thoughts in;
Change petty faults, and whispering pardons with;
Sweetly to rule, and Oh! most sweetly serve.

Surely, if the writer of that lived withdrawn into his shell, it was precisely because he was too sensitive, and had suffered. It is as if part of him had perished young. His very portrait, as an undergraduate, has a mummy-like air. He resembles his own Wolfram, a dead thing in a living world, gentle once but hardened now. Certainly his letters show him, if no lover, at all events a good hater. He reveals a particular dislike of British Philistinism, whether in individuals like ‘Mr. Milman’, or in the nation as a whole:

Drink, Britannia! Britannia, drink your tea,
For Britons, bores, and buttered toast, they all begin with B.
O flattering likeness on a copper-coin,
Sit still upon your slave-raised cotton ball
With upright toasting-fork and toothless cat!

But, for that matter, the whole world sickens him: ‘I am now so thoroughly penetrated with the conviction of the absurdity and unsatisfactory nature of human life, that I search with avidity for every shadow of a proof or probability of an after-existence both in the material and immaterial nature of man.’ One may wonder that a mind which found this life so tedious, should so sigh for eternity; but in such matters the human temperament is seldom very logical. Gnawed by the worm on earth, it speculates hopefully about the worm that never dies.

Still, if the letters throw but a glimmer on the poet's heart, they reveal very clearly those two qualities of his brain which go to make his poetry at times so astonishing—imagination and wit. Even as a child, his first favourite poet had been Cowley. And to read these letters brings home with fresh force how hardy a plant real originality is. Such a mind, read what it may, imitate whom it will, imposes as invincibly as a distorting mirror its own queer quality on all its reflections. It was a gift Sterne had. It belongs in our own day to Mr. E. M. Forster—who else but he would behold the United States, for example, with the most spontaneously innocent air in the world, as a brightly coloured apron tied chastely round the buxom waist of the American Continent? So with Beddoes. He too was born with this gift of seeing in every square a fifth corner; no doubt he cultivated his oddity, finding it succeed; but it always seems a natural part of him, as if he had had a mandrake for comforter in the cradle and made it his youthful hobby ‘to chat with mummies in a pyramid, and breakfast on basilisk's eggs’. ‘There is nothing of interest in town’, he will write, ‘except a pair of live crocodiles in St. Martin's Lane.’ ‘I will sacrifice my raven to you’, is his answer when Kelsall recoils from the sinister menagerie of Death's Jest Book, ‘but my crocky is really very dear to me.’ This is, indeed, one of the few expressions of affection in his whole correspondence. Or again: ‘Such verses as these and their brethren, will never be preserved to be pasted on the inside of the coffin of our planet.’ Such excessive preoccupation with the macabre may seem affected; yet the reader who looks back at that cadaverous portrait, and forward to the last scene at Zürich, must surely admit that the affectation, if such it was, went deep. But his fancy does not always glimmer thus coldly like a glow-worm on a grave; its flames can dance gaily enough, though still perhaps with a slight breath of sulphur: ‘Dear Kelsall. I have been in the native land of the unicorn about a week … I had no time to visit Procter … but am told that he is appointed to a high office in the government in the kingdom of ye moon.’ Such is Beddoes’ way of conveying his own arrival in England and Procter's new Commissionership of Lunacy. Or he will write home of a castle at Göttingen: ‘The date of the tower is said to be 963: if this be true, it may have earned a citizenship among the semi-eternal stony populace of the planet; at all events it will be older than some hills which pretend to be natural and carry trees and houses.’ Just so might another metaphysical physician have brooded two centuries before; we should feel how characteristic was such an idea if we found it in a letter written home by Sir Thomas Browne to Norwich. But there is a more flashing fancy than Browne's at work when Beddoes turns to describe fireflies at Milan: ‘as if the swift wheeling of the earth struck fire out of the black atmosphere; as if the winds were being set upon this planetary grindstone, and gave out such momentary sparks from their edges’. It might be a description of his own poetry. How many poets one might search from cover to cover without finding anything as brilliant as that round grindstone of a world!

Those, then, who know the poetry of Beddoes will have no difficulty in recognising the fainter shadow of his genius that lies across the pages of the letters; but there is one more disillusion here than even the poems show—disillusion about his poetry itself. He early expresses a sense of failure. He feels that he is trying to animate a corpse; that he is but the ghost of an Elizabethan dramatist, squeaking and gibbering in plays that are fit only for audiences long lapped in their winding-sheets. ‘The man who is to awaken the drama’, he writes of a remaniement of Massinger's Fatal Dowry, ‘must be a bold trampling fellow—no creeper in worm-holes—no reviser even, however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold—we want to see something that our great grandsires did not know.’ He must have felt the relevance of that judgement to himself. And if he is severe on his contemporaries, prophesying after Shelley's death ‘nothing but fog, rain, blight in due succession’, he is still harder on his own work: ‘I am essentially unpoetical in character, habits, and ways of thinking: and nothing but the desperate hunger for distinction so common to young gentlemen at the University ever set me upon rhyming’ (rather in the same way, it may be remembered, he denied himself a heart). Death's Jest Book he dismisses as ‘unentertaining, unamiable, and utterly unpopular’. He finds himself wanting in the two indispensable qualities of a dramatist, ‘power of drawing character, and humour’. Indeed at moments he feels ‘doubt of my aptitude for any higher literary or commercial occupation’. He cannot even finish his plays: ‘As usual I have begun a new tragedy’; ‘a new tragic abortion of mine has absolutely extended its foetus to a quarter of the fourth act’; ‘those three acts, which I cannot possibly show to any eye but that of Vulcan, are absolutely worthless’. What wonder if this hesitating Prince of Denmark begot no second Hamlet, but only dramatic fragments and brilliant incoherencies?

And yet I know no poet whose poetic moments are more rammed with poetry. How much one values this sort of spasmodic writer depends on temperament—whether one is ‘classical’ and asks for ordered beauty of form, or ‘romantic’ and prefers flashes of dazzling colour. But after all, why not love both? Beddoes can only give the second kind of pleasure; but he gives it so intensely, that I feel he is undervalued still. What he needs is a good selection of short passages, often of single lines. The anthologists have merely concentrated on a few of his lyrics, which have the sort of prettiness dear to their pussycat mentalities; just as they persist in representing, or misrepresenting, the author of The City of Dreadful Night by the cockney amenities of ‘Sunday up the River’. As a lyric poet Beddoes can be lovely; but it is in his verse dialogue that he shows his strength, not only that power of phrase and image with which his letters vibrate, but something also that they could not reveal—his grip of that Proteus among metrical forms, so simple-seeming, so mockingly elusive in a hundred poets' hands—dramatic blank verse.

The strange thing is that his most living poetry is a pastiche of dead work. As a contemporary of Keats, writing in the manner of 1820, he is usually unreadable; it is as a contemporary of Webster, risen from the dust of two centuries, that he quickens into a quivering vitality. A far more practical surgeon than Crabbe, he had none of Crabbe's power as a poet of treating living subjects. His Muse is a Witch of Endor, her magic a necromantic gift of waking to utterance a tongue long buried. Yet this becomes a little less strange when we remember how Chatterton too, hopeless when he writes in the poetic style of 1770, found himself only by escaping back to an England older still than Beddoes ever revisited. Think, too, of the whole Renaissance with its aping of the Classics. There are poets who can write vitally of, and in the style of, their own age; there remain others for whom it is equally essential to escape from it. Generations of critics have lost their heads and tempers squabbling which is right. Surely both. Surely it is understandable that a poet may wish to break away to some magic islet of his own, where he can feel himself monarch of all he surveys, because he shares it only with the dead. For they do not cramp our style as the living can. We can learn from them without fearing to become too imitatively like them; and the older the dead, the easier they are to elbow aside when we turn to write ourselves, as if their ghosts wore thinner and more shadowy with the years. Distance can lend enchantment also to the voice.

At all events it is on borrowed plumes that Beddoes soars his highest, and when masquerading as a Jacobean that he seems most himself. No one since Dryden has so recaptured the splendour of blank verse as a medium for dialogue, freeing it from that marmoreal stiffness which Milton imposed. For it is, indeed, almost as if the author of Paradise Lost had turned the verse of Hamlet into stone; to be carved and built by him and others after him into shapes of monumental nobility, but never again to seem like living flesh and blood, as once in Elizabethan hands. Milton's ‘organ-voice’ has no vox humana; and musical as a Wordsworth or a Tennyson may be, Shakespeare's Cleopatra speaks what has since become a dead language.

Beddoes alone seems to me to have re-discovered the old secrets of varied stress and fingering, of feminine ending and resolved foot, in all their elasticity. His lines run rippling like wind along the corn: his Muse moves with the grace of his Valeria:

She goes with her light feet, still as the sparrow
Over the air, or through the grass its shade.

All the stranger is the contrast which combines with this perfect music such a grimness of ideas; until his verse recalls that tragic conception of the Greek—the Gorgon Medusa, ‘the beautiful horror’, the lovely lips twisted with eternal pain:

          I have seen the mottled tigress
Sport with her cubs as tenderly and gay
As Lady Venus with her kitten Cupids.

So, too, the Muse of Beddoes, dagger and poison-cup in hand, goes gliding on her way with the light feet and swaying grace of Herrick's loves in their wild civility:

The snake that loves the twilight is come out,
Beautiful, still, and deadly.
          But now some lamp awakes,
And with the venom of a basilisk's wink
Burns the dark winds.
O that the twenty coming years were over!
Then should I be at rest, where ruined arches
Shut out the troublesome, unghostly day,
And idlers might be sitting on my tomb,
Telling how I did die.
You're young and must be merry in the world,
Have friends to envy, lovers to betray you,
And feed young children with the blood of your heart,
Till they have sucked up strength enough to break it.
I will go search about for Comfort,
Him that enrobed in mouldering cerements sits
At the grey tombstone's head, beneath the yew;
Men call him Death, but Comfort is his name.

The poison is given with a caress: the dagger tickles before it plunges home. It is interesting to compare the rhythm of Beddoes with the dramatic verse of a master of the metre in its statelier narrative form, Tennyson:

I once was out with Henry in the days
When Henry loved me, and we came upon
A wild-fowl sitting on her nest, so still
I reach'd my hand and touched; she did not stir;
The snow had frozen round her, and she sat
Stone-dead upon a heap of ice-cold eggs.
Look how this love, this mother, runs through all
The world God made—even the beast—the bird!

Any ear must notice the difference. Not only are the individual lines in Tennyson more regular and so more monotonous, and also slower through their avoidance of the feminine endings or extra syllables which lend speed to a verse like:

And feed young children with the blood of your heart;

they also for the same reason refuse to coalesce with one another into a verse-paragraph, in spite of the author's deliberate effort to make them do so by ending his lines with words like ‘upon’. Each decasyllable somehow persists in scanning itself separately, with a sort of conscious pride in its own virtuous avoidance of any undue licence. It is as if the passage were being written by a poetical typewriter, which very beautifully rang a little silver bell at the close of each line, and pulled itself elaborately back to begin each new one; whereas Beddoes has the sinuous onward gliding of a living adder through the grass. Open Webster:

                    O men
That lye upon your death-beds, and are haunted
With howling wives, neere trust them, they'le re-marry
Ere the worme pierce your winding sheete: ere the Spider
Make a thinne curtaine for your Epitaphes.

The kinship needs no stressing. Metrically, indeed, Beddoes may often seem even nearer to the slightly decadent softness of Fletcher or Shirley than to Webster's harsher rhythm; but in his style he shows the same swift and bitter strength:

I have huddled her into the wormy earth.
Let Heaven unscabbard each star-hilted lightning.
                    If you would wound your foe,
Get swords that pierce the mind; a bodily slice
Is cured with surgeon's butter.

Of the two supreme excellences of Beddoes, then, as a poet, this power of rhythm and phrase seems to me one; the other is sheer imagination. He has ideas that are poetic in and by themselves, quite apart from their expression; like the silence of Ajax before Odysseus in Hades, like the symbols of Ibsen in his later plays. Indeed, the cry Beddoes wrings from the lips of one of his characters might well be his own:

                    I'll go brood
And strain my burning and distracted soul
Against the naked spirit of the world
Till some portent's begotten.

It is a typically ‘metaphysical’ conception. Yet he escapes that frigid ingenuity which has so often been fatal to poets of this kind, in the seventeenth century, and in the twentieth—clever persons, who have yet been so simple as to suppose that their creations could live and breathe without a heart. Thus Beddoes, thinking of Noah's Deluge, sees it, characteristically enough, through the eye of the daisy on which its first raindrop fell; but he feels also for the daisy itself with the tenderness of Burns.

                    I should not say
How thou art like the daisy in Noah's meadow
On which the foremost drop of rain fell warm
And soft at evening; so the little flower
Wrapped up its leaves, and shut the treacherous water
Close to the golden welcome of its breast.

Time itself may be twisted by his visionary hands into a thing of space, with all the tortured ingenuity of a Donne—and yet one does not really have a sense of torture, so much does his mind seem at home in its own strange labyrinths:

                    I have said that Time
Is a great river running to Eternity.
Methinks 'tis all one water, and the fragments
That crumble off our ever-dwindling life,
Dropping into it, first make the twelve-houred circle,
And that spreads outward to the great round Ever.

Or again:

                    I begin to hear
Strange but sweet sounds, and the loud rocky dashing
Of waves where Time into Eternity
Falls over ruined worlds.

It is this unusual power of at once thinking so abstractly and seeing so concretely, that makes him master of the macabre. For the macabre only too easily becomes a little vulgar. Poe can be frightful in quite another sense of the word than he intended. Cemeteries are no very healthy dancing-ground for the Muses, and not much real music has been got from bones. But Beddoes, though he has his lapses, has learnt that the hinted can be far more terrible than the explicit. In one of his scenes, for instance, a festive gathering is haunted by spectres:

There were more shadows there, than there were men.

Or again, before his vision a plague-infected air becomes

Transparent as the glass of poisoned water
Through which the drinker sees his murderer smiling.

What a concentrated brevity of horror—as if the picture were drawn on the thumbnail of the assassin! Or again, the earth's roundness—what is its cause? The answer of Beddoes is all his own:

Ay, to this end the earth is made a ball—
Else, crawling to the brink, despair would plunge
Into the infinite eternal air
And leave its sorrows and its sins behind.

Here is the old melancholy of Burton, with his speculations on the space Hell occupies in the globe's interior, fermenting in a more modern mind. Why, again, have ghosts and apparitions ceased? There is the same fantastic ingenuity in Beddoes' reply, the same wild eloquence:

                    To trust in story,
In the old times Death was a feverish sleep,
In which men walked. The other world was cold
And thinly peopled, so life's emigrants
Came back to mingle with the crowds of earth.
But, now great cities are transplanted thither,
Memphis and Babylon and either Thebes
And Priam's towery town with its one beech,
The dead are most and merriest: so be sure
There'll be no more haunting till their towns
Are full to the garret: then they'll shut their gates
To keep the living out.

Such concreteness of vision combined with passionate concentration of speech lends the hiss of an arrow to his single lines of scorn:

The shallow, tasteless skimmings of their love …
And scratched it on your leaden memories …
And lay thee, worm, where thou shalt multiply.

Indeed, nothing in him has so much the air of being written con amore, as these hot gusts from a furnace-mouth of hatred. It is as if he had taken to himself that cry of one of his characters:

Unmilk me of my mother, and pour in
Salt scorn and steaming hate.

The passions he deals in may be often poisoned, but they are at least passion; lack of that might easily have become the besetting weakness of a poet with so much sheer cleverness, as it is today with the young who set out to imitate Donne's ingenuity without his intensity, in a way that suggests Blake's Lamb trying to frisk itself into the likeness of Blake's Tiger. Cleverness, it seems to me, has its place in poetry, but only a second place, as the tiring-maid of passion or of beauty. The cleverness of Beddoes makes his loveliness not inferior, but a more complex, artificial thing than that of Wordsworth's Lucy or Tennyson's Mariana. Not for him

The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

but

Crescented night and amethystine stars.

A violet is not for him a simple violet; it is like

          Pandora's eye
When first it darkened with immortal life

(as if life, like death—even more than death, perhaps—threw a sad shadow when it came). A pine-tree across the moon turns into a river before his agile gaze:

          One snowy cloud
Hangs like an avalanche of frozen light
Upon the peak of night's cerulean Alp,
And you still pine, a bleak anatomy,
Flows like a river on the planet's disk
With its black wandering arms.

(And yet there are persons who deny a visual imagination to be needed for enjoying poetry!) Even a moonlit water-drop holds for him within it the semblance of a whole world's unhappiness:

For what is't to the moon that every drop
Of flower-held rain reflects and gazes on her!
Her destiny is in the starry heavens,
Theirs here upon the ground, and she doth set
Leaving her shadow no more to delight them,
And cometh ne'er again till they are fled.

And even a lily of the valley becomes a jester with cap and bells, a symbol that motley is all men's wear. He follows beauty for ever through a maze, like some hidden Rosamond; he is himself

                                                                                the bird
That can go up the labyrinthine winds
Upon his pinions and pursues the summer.

He can to lucid grace the image of ambiguity itself:

                    I know not whether
I see your meaning; if I do, it lies
Upon the wordy wavelets of your voice
Dim as the evening shadow in a brook
When the least moon has silver on't no larger
Than the pure white of Hebe's pinkish nail.

There is nothing of which he cannot make music; even the streaks of rain seen in dark lines against the blue background of a showery sky become for his fingers the chords of a fantastic lyre. And yet with all his clever elaboration he can also be agonisingly simple:

They are both dead, and God has suffered it;

or again:

                    Now I shall see him
No more. All Hell is made of those two words.

Still, Beddoes is seldom thus direct. He writes less of what he sees than of his thoughts in seeing it; what he describes is not so much like itself as like something else; and so a great part of both his strength and his sweetness will be found stored in his metaphors and similes. Like the Lady of Shalott, he watches the world remotely, in a strange mirror; like the Emperor Domitian, he walks, with terror about him, in a gallery of looking-glass.

Magic beauty and terror—as in his style and rhythm, so in his mind and soul, these two seem to me his essential qualities, moving inseparably side by side. It might have been of him that Victor Hugo wrote:

A de certains moments toutes les jeunes flores
          Dans la forêt
Ont peur, et sur le front des blanches métaphores
          L'ombre apparaît.
C'est qu'Horace ou Virgile ont vu soudain le spectre
          Noir se dresser;
C'est que là-bas, derrière Amaryllis, Électre
          Vient de passer.

Only with Beddoes such moments are continual. In his own pages there are more shadows than there are men. This dualism moulds all his writing,

As out of the same lump of sunny Nile
Rises a purple-wingèd butterfly
Or a cursed serpent crawls.

His most characteristic work becomes like a duet between a raven and a nightingale upon a tree in Hell. Now they alternate; now they blend together, as in that lovely picture of a Love who is also Death—a thin, pale Cupid with ragged wings and, for his dart, a frozen Zephyr,

Gilt with the influence of an adverse star.
Such was his weapon, and he traced with it,
Upon the waters of my thoughts, these words:
‘I am the death of flowers and nightingales,
Of small-lipped babes, that give their souls to summer
To make a perfumed day with: I shall come,
A death no larger than a sigh to thee,
Upon a sunset hour.’ And so he passed
Into the place where faded rainbows are,
Dying along the distance of my mind.

At times, again, this duet becomes a duel. Just as in real life ‘he could be delightful if he chose’ (said Mrs. Procter), ‘but, oh, he chose so seldom’, so in his letters the sardonic side of him will sneer at some pathetic passage just added to a play, and in his verse his raven will croak derision at his nightingale:

I'll not be a fool like the nightingale
Who sits up till midnight without any ale,
Making noise with his nose.

At war within, he spared neither his country, nor his contemporaries, nor himself—poor dramatist devoid of dramatic gift! But he was too hard on his own work. It is difficult to read through. I have done so twice, and never shall again. But I return with ever fresh astonishment to his fragments. The unfinished traceries, the ruined aisles of this gaunt sham-Gothic cathedral that he left half-built and roofless to the scorn of Time, will outlast many a newer and more finished edifice; saved by the almost unearthly perfectness of here a carved line, there a sculptured monster; and by the strange owl-light of its atmosphere in which Death's Jester wandered to his early and disastrous end. There is often more quintessential poetry, I feel, in three lines of his than in as many pages of other poets not without repute. Only wreckage remains of him; but enough to sustain his memory in that sea of Eternity into which he heard Time's river falling, himself so soon to fall.