FullReads

Will it come with a rose or a brier?
Will it come with a blessing or curse?
Will its bonnets be lower or higher?
Will its morals be better or worse?

The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.

I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics who, however warily, admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. “One to one” is not “cursedly confined” in the relation of book and reader; and a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost mille e tre loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness. In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words, “the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life.” He is thus at the very antipodes of Wertherism and Byronism, a light but gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there is about him absolutely nothing artificial–the curse of the lighter poetry as a rule–and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and once or twice (notably in “The Red Fisherman”) to a kind of grim earnestness, neither of these things is his real forte. Playing with literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no very deep cares and no very passionate feeling, is Praed’s attitude whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems (an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest–

But Isabel, by accident,
Was wandering by that minute;
She opened that dark monument
And found her slave within it;
The clergy said the Mass in vain,

The College could not save me:

But life, she swears, returned again

With the first kiss she gave me.

Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an elderly youth, which is of all things most detestable, or a caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as the poet of Medora’s musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of the Abbot’s nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip–

And you’ll come–won’t you come?–to our Ball,

of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies, and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five. Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been, is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed’s verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 1. The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge. In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. Essays by Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young, Bart. London, 1887. 3. The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young. London, 1888.

[2] Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr. Mowbray Morris of Byron’s

I enter thy garden of roses,
Beloved and fair Haidee.

It is not impossible that this is the immediate original. But Praed has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent.