  I cannot sing the old songs, nor indeed any others, but I can read them, in the neglected works of Thomas Haynes Bayly. The name of Bayly may be unfamiliar, but every one almost has heard his ditties chanted—every one much over forty, at all events. “I’ll hang my Harp on a Willow Tree,” and “I’d be a Butterfly,” and “Oh, no! we never mention Her,” are dimly dear to every friend of Mr. Richard Swiveller. If to be sung everywhere, to hear your verses uttered in harmony with all pianos and quoted by the world at large, be fame, Bayly had it. He was an unaffected poet. He wrote words to airs, and he is almost absolutely forgotten. To read him is to be carried back on the wings of music to the bowers of youth; and to the bowers of youth I have been wafted, and to the old booksellers. You do not find on every stall the poems of Bayly; but a copy in two volumes has been discovered, edited by Mr. Bayly’s widow (Bentley, 1844). They saw the light in the same year as the present critic, and perhaps they ceased to be very popular before he was breeched. Mr. Bayly, according to Mrs. Bayly, “ably penetrated the sources of the human heart,” like Shakespeare and Mr. Howells. He also “gave to minstrelsy the attributes of intellect and wit,” and “reclaimed even festive song from vulgarity,” in which, since the age of Anacreon, festive song has notoriously wallowed. The poet who did all this was born at Bath in Oct. 1797. His father was a genteel solicitor, and his great-grandmother was sister to Lord Delamere, while he had a remote baronet on the mother’s side. To trace the ancestral source of his genius was difficult, as in the case of Gifted Hopkins; but it was believed to flow from his maternal grandfather, Mr. Freeman, whom his friend, Lord Lavington, regarded as “one of the finest poets of his age.” Bayly was at school at Winchester, where he conducted a weekly college newspaper. His father, like Scott’s, would have made him a lawyer; but “the youth took a great dislike to it, for his ideas loved to dwell in the regions of fancy,” which are closed to attorneys. So he thought of being a clergyman, and was sent to St. Mary’s Hall, Oxford. There “he did not apply himself to the pursuit of academical honours,” but fell in love with a young lady whose brother he had tended in a fatal illness. But “they were both too wise to think of living upon love, and, after mutual tears and sighs, they parted never to meet again. The lady, though grieved, was not heartbroken, and soon became the wife of another.” They usually do. Mr. Bayly’s regret was more profound, and expressed itself in the touching ditty:
[I beg Mr. Bayly’s pardon]
[And so she was, in fact.]
The temptation to parody is really too strong; the last lines, actually and in an authentic text, are:
Bayly had now struck the note, the sweet, sentimental note, of the early, innocent, Victorian age. Jeames imitated him:
We should do the trick quite differently now, more like this:
I declare I nearly weep over these lines; for, though they are only Bayly’s sentiment hastily recast in a modern manner, there is something so very affecting, mouldy, and unwholesome about them, that they sound as if they had been “written up to” a sketch by a disciple of Mr. Rossetti’s. In a mood much more manly and moral, Mr. Bayly wrote another poem to the young lady:
It is as easy as prose to sing in this manner. For example:
Among other sports his anxious friends hurried the lovelorn Bayly to Scotland, where he wrote much verse, and then to Dublin, which completed his cure. “He seemed in the midst of the crowd the gayest of all, his laughter rang merry and loud at banquet and hall.” He thought no more of studying for the Church, but went back to Bath, met a Miss Hayes, was fascinated by Miss Hayes, “came, saw, but did not conquer at once,” says Mrs. Haynes Bayly (nÉe Hayes) with widow’s pride. Her lovely name was Helena; and I deeply regret to add that, after an education at Oxford, Mr. Bayly, in his poems, accentuated the penultimate, which, of course, is short.
he carolled, when it would have been just as easy, and a hundred times more correct, to sing—
Miss Hayes had lands in Ireland, alas! and Mr. Bayly insinuated that, like King Easter and King Wester in the ballad, her lovers courted her for her lands and her fee; but he, like King Honour,
In 1825 (after being elected to the AthenÆum) Mr. Bayly “at last found favour in the eyes of Miss Hayes.” He presented her with a little ruby heart, which she accepted, and they were married, and at first were well-to-do, Miss Hayes being the heiress of Benjamin Hayes, Esq., of Marble Hill, in county Cork. A friend of Mr. Bayly’s described him thus:
Yet he says that the poet was unspoiled. On his honeymoon, at Lord Ashdown’s, Mr. Bayly, flying from some fair sirens, retreated to a bower, and there wrote his world-famous “I’d be a Butterfly.”
The place in which the deathless strains welled from the singer’s heart was henceforth known as “Butterfly Bower.” He now wrote a novel, “The Aylmers,” which has gone where the old moons go, and he became rather a literary lion, and made the acquaintance of Theodore Hook. The loss of a son caused him to write some devotional verses, which were not what he did best; and now he began to try comedies. One of them, Sold for a Song, succeeded very well. In the stage-coach between Wycombe Abbey and London he wrote a successful little lever de rideau called Perfection; and it was lucky that he opened this vein, for his wife’s Irish property got into an Irish bog of dishonesty and difficulty. Thirty-five pieces were contributed by him to the British stage. After a long illness, he died on April 22nd, 1829. He did not live, this butterfly minstrel, into the winter of human age. Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom Moore of much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of the most vapid and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits, trees, breeze, sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds, regret, deception, and so forth, into fervid anapÆstics. Perhaps his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry composers will endure and singers will accept. Why, “words for music” are almost invariably trash now, though the words of Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister art, and don’t know anything about it. But any one can see that words like Bayly’s are and have long been much more popular with musical people than words like Shelley’s, Keats’s, Shakespeare’s, Fletcher’s, Lovelace’s, or Carew’s. The natural explanation is not flattering to musical people: at all events, the singing world doted on Bayly.
This was pleasant for “him”; but the point is that these are lines to an Indian air. Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines to an Indian air; but we may “swear, and save our oath,” that the singers preferred Bayly’s. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal the popularity of what follows. I shall ask the persevering reader to tell me where Bayly ends, and where parody begins:
Will this not do to sing just as well as the original? and is it not true that “almost any man you please could reel it off for days together”? Anything will do that speaks of forgetting people, and of being forsaken, and about the sunset, and the ivy, and the rose.
This is mine, and I say, with modest pride, that it is quite as good as—
Anybody could do it, we say, in what Edgar Poe calls “the mad pride of intellectuality,” and it certainly looks as if it could be done by anybody. For example, take Bayly as a moralist. His ideas are out of the centre. This is about his standard:
Did Bayly write that ditty or did I? Upon my word, I can hardly tell. I am being hypnotised by Bayly. I lisp in numbers, and the numbers come like mad. I can hardly ask for a light without abounding in his artless vein. Easy, easy it seems; and yet it was Bayly after all, not you nor I, who wrote the classic—
It is like listening, in the sad yellow evening, to the strains of a barrel organ, faint and sweet, and far away. A world of memories come jigging back—foolish fancies, dreams, desires, all beckoning and bobbing to the old tune:
How does Bayly manage it? What is the trick of it, the obvious, simple, meretricious trick, which somehow, after all, let us mock as we will, Bayly could do, and we cannot? He really had a slim, serviceable, smirking, and sighing little talent of his own; and—well, we have not even that. Nobody forgets
Nobody remembers our cultivated epics and esoteric sonnets, oh brother minor poet, mon semblable, mon frÈre! Nor can we rival, though we publish our books on the largest paper, the buried popularity of
Of course this is, historically, a very incorrect rendering of a Languedoc crusader; and the impression is not mediÆval, but of the comic opera. Any one of us could get in more local colour for the money, and give the crusader a cithern or citole instead of a guitar. This is how we should do “Gaily the Troubadour” nowadays:—
Such is the romantic, esoteric, old French way of saying—
The moral of all this is that minor poetry has its fashions, and that the butterfly Bayly could versify very successfully in the fashion of a time simpler and less pedantic than our own. On the whole, minor poetry for minor poetry, this artless singer, piping his native drawing-room notes, gave a great deal of perfectly harmless, if highly uncultivated, enjoyment. It must not be fancied that Mr. Bayly had only one string to his bow—or, rather, to his lyre. He wrote a great deal, to be sure, about the passion of love, which Count TolstoÏ thinks we make too much of. He did not dream that the affairs of the heart should be regulated by the State—by the Permanent Secretary of the Marriage Office. That is what we are coming to, of course, unless the enthusiasts of “free love” and “go away as you please” failed with their little programme. No doubt there would be poetry if the State regulated or left wholly unregulated the affections of the future. Mr. Bayly, living in other times, among other manners, piped of the hard tyranny of a mother:
In future, when the reformers of marriage have had their way, we shall read:
For even when true love is regulated by the County Council or the village community, it will still persist in not running smooth. Of these passions, then, Mr. Bayly could chant; but let us remember that he could also dally with old romance, that he wrote:
When the bride unluckily got into the ancient chest,
so that her lover “mourned for his fairy bride,” and never found out her premature casket. This was true romance as understood when Peel was consul. Mr. Bayly was rarely political; but he commemorated the heroes of Waterloo, our last victory worth mentioning:
Could there be a more simple TyrtÆus? and who that reads him will not be ambitious of falling in a glorious war? Bayly, indeed, is always simple. He is “simple, sensuous, and passionate,” and Milton asked no more from a poet.
On his own principles Wordsworth should have admired this unaffected statement; but Wordsworth rarely praised his contemporaries, and said that “Guy Mannering” was a respectable effort in the style of Mrs. Radcliffe. Nor did he even extol, though it is more in his own line,
My own favourite among Mr. Bayly’s effusions is not a sentimental ode, but the following gush of true natural feeling:—
This is perfectly candid: we should all prefer a new face, if pretty, every fortnight:
For once Mr. Bayly uttered in his “New Faces” a sentiment not usually expressed, but universally felt; and now he suffers, as a poet, because he is no longer a new face, because we have welcomed his juniors. To Bayly we shall not return; but he has one rare merit,—he is always perfectly plain-spoken and intelligible.
Farewell to our Bayly, about whose songs we may say, with Mr. Thackeray in “Vanity Fair,” that “they contain numberless good-natured, simple appeals to the affections.” We are no longer affectionate, good-natured, simple. We are cleverer than Bayly’s audience; but are we better fellows? |
|
