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The accident that cut short his career is not wholly to blame, I think. At any rate, it will not explain away the exception I have taken to his verse. Had that been destined to exhibit the humanity which we seek, some promise of it would surely be discoverable; for he was a full-grown man at the time of that unhappy tumble on the ice. But there is none. It is all sheer wit, impish as a fairy changeling’s, and always barren of feeling. Mr. Birrell has not supplied the explanatory epithet, so I will try to do so. It is “donnish.” Cambridge, fondly imagining that she was showing right appreciation of Calverley thereby, gave him a Fellowship. Mr. Walter Besant, another gentleman from Calverley’s college, complained, the other day, that literary distinction was never marked with a peerage. It is the same sort of error. And now Cambridge, having made Calverley a don, claims him as a Cambridge poet; and the claim is just, if the epithet be intended to mark the limitations imposed by that University on his achievement.

“J.K.S.”

Of “J.K.S.,” whose second volume, Quo Musa Tendis? (Macmillan & Bowles), has just come from the press, it is fashionable to say that he follows after Calverley, at some distance. To be sure, he himself has encouraged this belief by coming from Cambridge and writing about Cambridge, and invoking C.S.C. on the first page of his earlier volume, Lapsus Calami. But, except that J.K.S. does his talent some violence by constraining it to imitate Calverley’s form, the two men have little in common. The younger has a very different wit. He is more than academical. He thinks and feels upon subjects that were far outside Calverley’s scope. Among the dozen themes with which he deals under the general heading of Paullo Majora Canamus, there is not one which would have interested his “master” in the least. Calverley appears to have invited his soul after this fashion–“Come, let us go into the King’s Parade and view the undergraduate as he walks about having no knowledge of good or evil. Let us make a jest of the books he admires and the schools for which he is reading.” And together they manage it excellently. They talk Cambridge “shop” in terms of the wittiest scholarship. But of the very existence of a world of grown-up men and women they seem to have no inkling, or, at least, no care.

The problems of J.K.S. are very much more grown-up. You have only to read Paint and Ink (a humorous, yet quite serious, address to a painter upon the scope of his art) or After the Golden Wedding (wherein are given the soliloquies of the man and the woman who have been married for fifty years) to assure yourself that if J.K.S. be not Calverley’s equal, it is only because his mind is vexed with problems bigger than ever presented themselves to the Cambridge don. To C.S.C., Browning was a writer of whose eccentricities of style delicious sport might be made. J.K.S. has parodied Browning too; but he has also perpended Browning, and been moulded by him. There are many stanzas in this small volume that, had Browning not lived, had never been written. Take this, from a writer to a painter:–

“So I do dare claim to be kin with you,
And I hold you higher than if your task
Were doing no more than you say you do:
We shall live, if at all, we shall stand or fall,
As men before whom the world doffs its mask
And who answer the questions our fellows ask.”

Many such lines prove our writer’s emancipation from servitude to the Calverley fetish, a fetish that, I am convinced, has done harm to many young men of parts. It is pretty, in youth, to play with style as a puppy plays with a bone, to cut teeth upon it. But words are, after all, a poor thing without matter. J.K.S.’s emancipation has come somewhat late; but he has depths in him which he has not sounded yet, and it is quite likely that when he sounds them he may astonish the world rather considerably. Now, if we may interpret the last poem in his book, he is turning towards prose. “I go,” he says–

“I go to fly at higher game:
At prose as good as I can make it;
And though it brings nor gold nor fame,
I will not, while I live, forsake it.”

It is no disparagement to his verse to rejoice over this resolve of his. For a young man who begins with epic may end with good epic; but a young man who begins with imitating Calverley will turn in time to prose if he means to write in earnest. And J.K.S. may do well or ill, but that he is to be watched has been evident since the days when he edited the Reflector.[B]

FOOTNOTES:

[A] I am bound to admit that the only authority for this is a note written into the text of Aubrey’s Lives.

[B] The reader will refer to the date at the head of this paper:–

“Heu miserande puer! signa fata aspera rumpas,
Tu Marcellus eris.
* * * * *
Sed nox atra caput tristi circumvolat umbra.”