In the closing years of my favourite last century, when poetry was more discussed than it is now (at all events as a marketable commodity), few verse-writers were overlooked. Bosola’s observation about ‘the neglected poets of your time’ could not be quoted with any propriety. Mr. John Lane would make long and laborious journeys on the District Railway, armed bag-À-pied, in order to discover the new and unpublished. Now he has shot over all the remaining preserves; laurels and bays, so necessary for the breed ‘of men and women over-wrought,’ have withered in the London soot. There was one bright creature, however, who escaped his rifle; she was brought down by another sportsman, and thus missed some of the fame which might have attached to her had she been trussed and hung in the Bodley Head. Poaching in the library at Thelema, I came across her by accident. Her song is not without significance.

In 1878 Georgiana Farrer mentioned on page 190 of her Miscellaneous Poems, ‘I am old by sin entangled;’ but this was probably a pious exaggeration. Only some one young and intellectually very vigorous could have penned her startling numbers. I suggest that she retained more of her youth than, from religious motives, she thought it proper to admit. In the ’eighties, when incense was burned in drawing-rooms, and people were talking about ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ she could write of Paradise:—

A home where Jesus Christ is King,
A home where e’en Archangels sing,
Where common wealth is shared by all,
And God Himself lights up the Hall.

She was philosemite, and from the reference to Lord Beaconsfield we can easily date the following:—

You who doubt the truth of Scripture,
Pray tell me, then, who are the Jews?
Scattered in all lands and nations,
Pray why their evidence refuse?

It seems to me you must be blind;
Are they not daily gaining ground?
We find them now in every land,
And well-nigh ruling all around.

Their music is most sweet to hear;
Jews were Rossini and Mozart,
Mendelssohn, too, and Meyerbeer;
Grisi in song could charm the heart.

The funds their princes hold in hand;
Their merchants trade both near and far;
Ill-used and robbed they long have been,
Yet wealthy now they surely are.

In Germany who has great sway?
Prince Bismarck, most will answer me;
Our own Prime Minister retains
A name that shows his pedigree.

Who after this will dare to say
They nought in these strange people see;
Do they not prove the Scripture true,
And throw a light on history?

The twenty-five years that have elapsed since the poem was written must have convinced those innocent persons who ‘saw nought’ in our Israelitish compatriots. I never heard before that Prince Bismarck or Mozart was of Jewish extraction!

Mrs. Farrer was, of course, an evangelical, somewhat old-fashioned for so late a date; and fairly early in her volume she warns us of what we may expect. She is anxious to damp any undue optimism as to the lightness of her muse. When worldly, foolish people like Whistler and Pater were talking ‘art for art’s sake,’ she could strike a decisive didactic blow:—

My voice like thunder may appear,
Yet oft-times I have shed a tear
Behind the peal, like rain in storm,
To moisten those I would reform.

Then pardon if my stormy mood,
Instead of blighting, does some good.
Sooner a thunder-clap, think me,
Than sunstroke sent in wrath on thee.

With a splendid Calvinism, too rare at that time, she would not argue beyond a certain limit; there was an edge, she realised, to every platform; an ounce of assertion is worth pounds of proof. Religious discussion after a time becomes barren:—

Then hundredfolds to sinners
Must be repaid in Hell.
If you think such men winners,
We disagree. Farewell.

But to the person who is right (and Mrs. Farrer was never in a moment’s doubt, though her prosody is influenced sometimes by the sceptical Matthew Arnold) there is no mean reward:—

I sparkle resplendent,
A star in His crown,
And glitter for ever,
A gem of renown.

From internal evidence we can gauge her social position, while her views of caste appear in these radical days a trifle demodÉ. Her metaphors of sin are all derived from the life of paupers:—

Paupers through their sinful folly
Are workers of iniquity,
Living on Jehovah’s bounty,
Wasting in abject poverty.

A pauper’s funeral their end,
No angels waft their souls on high;
Rich they were thought on earth, perhaps,
Yet far from wealth accursed they lie.

Who are the rich? God’s Word declares,
The men whose treasure is above—
Those humble working gentlefolk
Whose life flows on in deeds of love.

Despised in life I may remain,
Misunderstood by rich and poor;
An entrance yet I hope to gain
To wealthy plains on endless shore.

No paupers in that heavenly land,
The sons of God are rich indeed;
His daughters all His treasures share;
It will their highest hopes exceed.

Those paupers who are ‘saved’ are rewarded by material comforts such as graced the earthly home of Georgiana herself, one of the ‘humble working gentlefolk.’ She enjoys her own fireside with an almost Pecksniffian relish, and she profoundly observes, as she sits beside her hearth:—

Like forest trees men rise and grow:
Good timber some will prove,
Others decayed as fuel piled,
Prepared are for that stove

That burns for ever, Tophet called,
Heated by jealous heat,
Adapted to destroy all chaff,
And leaves unscorched the wheat.

Excellent Georgiana! She could not stand very much chaff of any kind, I suspect.

The alarming progress of ritualism in the ’eighties disturbed her considerably, though it inspired some of her more weighty verses. They should be favourites with Dr. Clifford and Canon Hensley Henson:—

Some men in our days cover over
A body deformed with their sin:
A cross worked in various colours,
Forgetting that God looks within.

Alas! in our churches at present
Simplicity seems quite despised;
To represent things far above us
Are heathenish customs revived.

This evil is spreading among us,
And where will it end, can you tell?
Join not with the misled around us,
Take warning, my readers . . .

The veneration of the Blessed Virgin goaded her into composition of stanzas unparalleled in the whole literature of Protestantism:—

My readers, can you nowhere see
A parallel to Israel’s sin?
The House of God, at home, abroad:
Idols are there—that house within.

Who incense burns? are strange cakes made?
What woman’s chapel, decked with gold,
Stands full of unchecked worshippers
Like those idolaters of old?

The Blessed Virgin—blest she is
That does not make her Heaven’s Queen!
Yet some are taught to worship her;
What else does all this teaching mean?

What she denied to the Mother of God she accorded (rather daringly, I opine) to one Harriet, whose death and future are recorded in the following lines:—

Declining like the setting sun
After a course divinely run,
I saw a maiden passing fair
Reposing on an easy chair.

A Bridegroom of celestial mien
Came forth and claimed her for His Queen;
One with His Father on His throne
She lives entirely His own.

Harrietolatry, I thought, was confined to the members of the defunct Shelley Society. But every reader will feel the poignant truth of Mrs. Farrer’s view of the Church of England—truer to-day than it could have been in the ’eighties:—

The Church of England—grand old ship—
Toss’d is on a troubled sea!
Her sails are rent, her decks are foul’d,
Mutiny on board must be.

The winds of discord howl around,
Wild disputers throw up foam,
From high to low she’s beat about;
Frighten’d some who love her roam.

I do not know if the last word is intended for a pun, but I scarcely think it is likely.

I would like to reconstruct Mrs. Farrer’s home, with its stiff Victorian chairs, its threaded antimacassars, its pictorial paper-weights, its wax flowers under glass shades, and the charming household porcelain from the Derby and Worcester furnaces. There must have been a sabbatic air of comfort about the dining-room which was soothing. I can see the engravings after Landseer: ‘The Stag at Bay,’ ‘Dignity and Impudence’; or those after Martin: ‘The Plains of Heaven,’ and ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’; and ‘Blucher meeting Wellington,’ after Maclise. I can see on each side of the mirror examples of the art of Daguerre, which have already begun to produce in us the same sentiment that we get from the early Tuscans; and on the mantelpiece a photograph of Harriet in a plush frame, the one touch of modernity in a room which was otherwise severely 1845. Then, on a bookshelf which hung above the old tea-caddy and cut-glass sugar-bowl, Georgiana’s library—‘Line upon Line,’ ‘Precept upon Precept,’ ‘Jane the Cottager,’ ‘Pinnock’s Scripture History,’ and a few costly works bound in the style of the Albert Memorial. The drawing-room, just a trifle damp, must have contained Mr. Hunt’s ‘Light of the World,’ which Mrs. Farrer never quite learned to love, though it was a present from a missionary, and rendered fire and artificial light unnecessary during the winter months. Would that Mrs. Farrer’s home-life had come under the magic lens of Mr. Edmund Gosse, for it would now be classic, like the household of Sir Thomas More.

Whatever its attractions, Mrs. Farrer was at times induced to go abroad, visiting, I imagine, only the Protestant cantons of Switzerland. She stayed, however, in Paris, which she apostrophises with Sibyllic candour:—

O city of pleasure, what did I see
When passing through or staying in thee.
Bright shone the sun above, blue was the sky,
Everywhere music heard, none seemed to sigh.
Beautiful carriages in Champs ElysÉe
Filled with fair maidens on cushions easy.
Such was the outer side; what was within?
Most I was often told revelled in sin.
Sad its fate since I left, sadder ’twill be
If they go on in sin as seen by me.
Let us hope, ere too late, warned by the past,
They may seek pleasures more likely to last,
Or, like to Babylon, it must decline,
And o’er its ruins its lovers repine.

But London hardly fares much better, in spite of Mrs. Farrer’s own residence, at Campden Hill, if I may hazard the locality:—

To the tomb they must go,
Rich and poor all in woe,
Strange motley throng.
Wealth in its splendour weeps,
Poverty silence keeps;
None last here long. . . .
So much for thee, London.

Except in a spiritual sense, her existence was not an eventful one. It was, I think, the loss of some neighbour’s child which suggested:—

Nellarina, forced exotic,
Born to bloom in region fair,
Thou wert to me a narcotic,
Hope I did thy lot to share.

Any near personal sorrow she does not seem to have experienced, I am glad to say, else she might have regarded it as a grievance the consequences of which one dares not contemplate; you feel that Some One would have heard of it in no measured terms. Certainty and content are, indeed, the dominating notes of her poetry rather than mere commonplace hope:—

I am bound for the land of Beulah,
There all the guests sing Hallelujah.
No longer time here let us squander,
But on the good things promised ponder.

It would be futile to discuss the exact position on Parnassus of a lady whose throne was secured on a more celestial mountain, even more difficult of access. But I think we may claim for her an honourable place in that new Oxford school of poetry of which Professor Mackail officially knows little, and of which Dr. Warren (the President of Magdalen) is the distinguished living protagonist. With all her acrid Evangelicalism she was a good soul, for she was fond of animals and children, and kind to them both in her own way; so I am sure some of her dreams have been realised, even if there has reached her nostrils just a whiff of those tolerating purgatorial fires which, spelt differently, she believed to be permanently prepared for the vast majority of her contemporaries.

To Mrs. Carew.