"Hech gather, hech gather, hech gather around; The fame of his piping spread over the land: One morning the fidgety Sassenach swore Oh! loud were the wailings for ANGUS M'CLAN- It sorrowed poor PATTISON CORBY TORBAY He pitied the poor little fluttering birds, And solaced their souls with the following words: "Oh, maidens," said PATTISON, touching his hat, "Don't snivel, my dears, for a fellow like that: Observe, I'm a very superior man, A much better fellow than ANGUS M'CLAN." They smiled when he winked and addressed them as "dears," Especially ELLEN M'JONES ABERDEEN. THE JUDGE'S SONG [From Trial by Jury] When I, good friends, was called to the Bar, I'd an appetite fresh and hearty, But I was, as many young barristers are, An impecunious party. I'd a swallow-tail coat of a beautiful blue- In Westminster Hall I danced a dance, For I thought I should never hit on a chance But I soon got tired of third-class journeys, So I fell in love with a rich attorney's The rich attorney, he wiped his eyes, The rich attorney was as good as his word: At the Sessions or Ancient Bailey. And many a burglar I've restored To his friends and his relations. At length I became as rich as the GURNEYS- So I threw over that rich attorney's The rich attorney my character high And now, if you please, I'm ready to try THE POLICEMAN'S LOT [From The Pirates of Penzance] When a felon's not engaged in his employment, Is just as great as any honest man's. When the enterprising burglar's not a-burgling, When the coster's finished jumping on his mother, STEPHEN PHILLIPS [BORN at Summertown, near Oxford, July 28, 1864: eldest son of Stephen Phillips, D. D; Precentor and Hon. Canon of Peterborough. Educated at the Grammar School, Stratford-on-Avon, and Oundle School: was intended for the civil service but took to the stage, joining the travelling company of his cousin F. R. Benson. He had a genius for poetic reading and recitation, but small talent as an actor. Leaving the stage he joined the staff of an Army tutor near London. After a few experimental volumes of verse (Primavera, 1890; Eremus, 1894; Christ in Hades, 1896) he gained sudden reputation and success on being awarded in 1897 a prize for the best volume of poems of the year offered by the proprietors of The Academy. The volume included one of his finest things, Marpessa, and won immediate popularity, as did several of the poetical dramas which soon afterwards he wrote for the stage. Then the critical fashion changed; nor were his later works up to the standard of their predecessors. He continued to produce both dramas and volumes of occasional verse, and died at Hastings, December 9, 1915. The list of his published writings after the Poems of 1897 is as follows: Paolo and Francesca, 1899; Herod, 1900; Ulysses, 1902; New Poems, 1903; The Sin of David, 1904; Nero, 1906; The Last Heir (drama), 1908; Pietro of Siena, 1910; The New Inferno, 1910; The King, 1912; Lyrics and Dramas, 1913; Iole, 1913; Armageddon, 1915; Panama, 1915.] In regard to this poet the critical pendulum had for some years before his death swung sharply from the side of over-praise to that of over-neglect. It will some day recover its equilibrium, and Phillips will then be recognized as having belonged, by the gift of passion ("the all-in-all in poetry," as Lamb has it,) by natural largeness of style and pomp and melody of rhythm and diction, as well as by intensity of imaginative vision in those fields where his imagination was really awake, to the great lineage and high tradition of English poetry. Yes, too directly to the lineage and too faithfully to the tradition, the advocatus diaboli may interpose. It has been especially charged against him that his blank verse too closely reproduces the cadences of Milton and of Tennyson. But this is to mistake absorption, which is one thing, for imitation, which is quite another. It is true that he was no great metrical inventor or innovator, though some of his experiments in unrhymed lyric-for instance, A Gleam and The Revealed Madonna cited below-are to my mind among the most successful that have been tried in English. But he was able to stamp an individuality, strong though not revolutionary or eccentric, on blank verse whether narrative or dramatic, on the closed "heroic" couplet, that form almost disused since the romantic revival, and on such ancient and popular never-to-beworn out measures as the familiar alternately rhyming eight-and six. As to originality not of form but of matter, it may be observed that when Phillips chose to rehandle themes on which predecessors, even the greatest, had set their mark, so far from imitating, he for better or worse always attacked them according to conceptions of his own. His Endymion, a thing over-mannered and far from first-rate, is in conception and treatment wholly independent of Keats. Other good cases in point are the two short pieces, The Parting of Launcelot and Guinevere, a Tennysonian theme wrought without Tennyson's cunning technique but with an intensity of passion beyond his reach, and the admirably vivid tragic vision of Beatrice Cenci in the little lyric so named, which might have been written just as it is had Shelley not existed. Other criticisms directed against Phillips's work have more foundation than the charge of imitativeness. He worked more by gusts of inspiration than by sustained care in craftsmanship, and often allowed a lax or feeble line to intrude even into his finest passages. He was also too prone to self-repetition and to that form of poetical rhetoric which consists in trying to reinforce an idea or heighten an image by rewording it over again with no essential change of thought. Subject to these besetting flaws, he has left achievements of striking personality and power in a wide range of themes. In handling the simple, direct, universal human joys and sorrows, the longings and regrets, connected with the sexual and conjugal, the parental and filial relations, his touch is often as new and revealing as it is tender. For the sense of the past in the present, the stirrings of far-off legendary association, the apprehension of vibrating cosmic sympathies between the external universe and man aroused in the human spirit in moments of emotional tension or tragic passion-for these he found forms of utterance which were beautiful and entirely his own. Themes of mystical religion |