The Death-Wake Part 1

The Death-Wake.

by Thomas T Stoddart.

_Piscatori Piscator_

_An angler to an angler here, To one who longed not for the bays, I bring a little gift and dear, A line of love, a word of praise, A common memory of the ways, By Elibank and Yair that lead; Of all the burns, from all the braes, That yield their tribute to the Tweed.

His boyhood found the waters clean, His age deplored them, foul with dye; But purple hills, and copses green, And these old towers he wandered by, Still to the simple strains reply Of his pure unrepining reed, Who lies where he was fain to lie, Like Scott, within the sound of Tweed._

A.L.

INTRODUCTION

The extreme rarity of _The Death-Wake_ is a reason for its republication, which may or may not be approved of by collectors. Of the original edition the Author says that more than seventy copies were sold in the first week of publication, but thereafter the publisher failed in business. Mr. Stoddart recovered the sheets of his poem, and his cook gradually, and perhaps not injudiciously, expended them for domestic purposes.

Apart from its rarity, _The Death-Wake_ has an interest of its own for curious amateurs of poetry. The year of its composition (1830) was the great year of _Romanticisme_ in France, the year of _Hernani_, and of Gautier's _gilet rouge_. In France it was a literary age given to mediaeval extravagance, to the dagger and the bowl, the cloak and sword, the mad monk and the were-wolf; the age of Petrus Borel and MacKeat, as well as of Dumas and Hugo. Now the official poetry of our country was untouched by and ignorant of the virtues and excesses of 1830. Wordsworth's bolt was practically shot; Sir Walter was ending his glorious career; Sh.e.l.ley and Byron and Keats were dead, and the _annus mirabilis_ of Coleridge was long gone by. Three young poets of the English-speaking race were producing their volumes, destined at first to temporary neglect. The year 1830 was the year of Mr.

Tennyson's _Poems, chiefly Lyrical_, his first book, not counting _Poems by Two Brothers_. It was also the year of Mr. Browning's _Pauline_ (rarer even than _The Death-Wake_); and it was the year which followed the second, and perhaps the most characteristic, poetical venture of Edgar Allan Poe. In Mr. Tennyson's early lyrics, and in Mr. Poe's, any capable judge must have recognised new notes of romance. Their accents are fresh and strange, their imaginations dwell in untrodden regions. Untouched by the French romantic poets, they yet unconsciously reply to their notes, as if some influence in the mental air were at work on both sides of the Channel, on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, in my opinion, this indefinite influence was also making itself felt, faintly and dimly, in Scotland. _The Death-Wake_ is the work of a lad who certainly had read Keats, Coleridge and Sh.e.l.ley, but who is no imitator of these great poets. He has, in a few pa.s.sages, and at his best, an accent original, distinct, strangely musical, and really replete with promise. He has a fresh unborrowed melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable sign of a true poet. His rhymed heroic verse is no more the rhymed heroic verse of _Endymion_, than it is that of Mr. Pope, or of Mr. William Morris. He is a new master of the old instrument.

His mood is that of Scott when Scott was young, and was so anxious to possess a death's head and cross-bones. The malady is "most incident"

to youth, but Mr. Stoddart wears his rue with a difference. The mad monkish lover of the dead nun Agathe has. .h.i.t on precisely the sort of fantasy which was about to inspire Theophile Gautier's _Comedie de la Mort_, or the later author of _Gaspard de la Nuit_, or Edgar Poe.

There is here no "criticism of life;" it is a criticism of strange death; and, so far, may recall Beddoes's _Death's Jest-Book_, unpublished, of course, in 1830. Naturally this kind of poetry is "useless," as Mr. Ruskin says about Coleridge, but, in its _bizarre_ way, it may be beautiful.

The author, by a curious a.n.a.logy with Theophile Gautier, was, in these days, a humourist as well as a poet. In the midst of his mad fancies and rare melodies he is laughing at himself, as Theophile mocked at _Les Jeunes France_. The psychological position is, therefore, one of the rarest. Mr. Stoddart was, first of all and before all, a hardy and enthusiastic angler. Between 1830 and 1840 he wrote a few beautiful angling songs, and then all the poetry of his character merged itself in an ardent love of Nature: of hill, loch and stream--above all, of Tweed, the fairest of waters, which he lived to see a sink of pollution. After 1831 we have no more romanticism from Mr. Stoddart.

The wind, blowing where it listeth, struck on him as on an aeolian harp, and "an uncertain warbling made," in the true Romantic manner.

He did write a piece with the alluring name of _Ajalon of the Winds_, but not one line of it survives. The rest is not silence, indeed, for, in addition to his lays of trout and salmon, of Tweed and Teviot, Mr.

Stoddart wrote a good deal of prose, and a good deal of perfectly common and uninspired verse. The Muse, which was undeniably with him for an hour, abandoned him, or he deserted her, being content to whip the waters of Tweed, and Meggat, and Yarrow. Perhaps unfavourable and unappreciative criticism, acting on a healthy and contented nature, drove him back into the common paths of men. Whatever the cause, the _Death-Wake_ alone (save for a few angling songs) remains to give a.s.surance of a poet "who died young." It is needless to rewrite the biography, excellently done, in _Angling Songs_, by Miss Stoddart, the poet's daughter (Blackwoods, Edinburgh, 1889). Mr. Stoddart was born on St. Valentine's Day 1810, in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, nearly on the site of the Kirk of Field, where Darnley was murdered. He came of an old Border family. Miss Stoddart tells a painful tale of an aged Miss Helen who burned family papers because she thought she was bewitched by the seals and decorated initials. Similar follies are reported of a living old lady, on whose hearth, after a night of destruction, was once found the impression of a seal of Mary of Modena. I could give only too good a guess at the _provenance_ of _those_ papers, but n.o.body can interfere. Beyond 1500 the family memories rely on tradition. The ancestors owned lands in the Forest of Ettrick, and Williamhope, on the Tweed hard by Ashestiel. On the Glenkinnon burn, celebrated by Scott, they hid the prophets of the Covenant "by fifties in a cave." One Williamhope is said to have been out at Drumclog, or, perhaps, Bothwell Brig. This laird, of enormous strength, was called the Beetle of Yarrow, and was a friend of Murray of Philiphaugh. His son, in the Fifteen, was out on the Hanoverian side, which was _not_ in favour with the author of _The Death-Wake_.

He married a daughter of Veitch of The Glen, now the property of Sir Charles Tennant. In the next generation but one, the Stoddarts sold their lands and took to commerce, while the poet's father won great distinction in the Navy. The great-great-grandfather of the poet married a Miss Muir of Anniston, the family called cousins (on which side of the blanket I know not) with Robert II. of Scotland, and, by another line, were as near as in the sixth degree of James III.

As a schoolboy, Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost, fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed _The Death-Wake_ in _Blackwood_. He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary's and the Loch of the Lowes. In verses of this period (1827) Miss Stoddart detects traces of Keats and Byron, but the lines quoted are much better in _technique_ than Byron usually wrote.

The summer of 1830 Mr. Stoddart pa.s.sed in Hogg's company on Yarrow, and early in 1831 he published _The Death-Wake_. There is no trace of James Hogg in the poem, which, to my mind, is perfectly original.

Wilson places it "between the weakest of Sh.e.l.ley and the strongest of Barry Cornwall." It is really nothing but a breath of the spirit of romance, touching an instrument not wholly out of tune, but never to be touched again.

It is unnecessary to follow Mr. Stoddart through a long and happy life of angling and of literary leisure. He only blossomed once. His poem was plagiarised and inserted in _Graham's Magazine_, by a person named Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro (vol. xx.). Mr. Ingram, the biographer of Edgar Poe, observes that Poe praised the piece while he was exposing Tasistro's "barefaced robbery."

The copy of _The Death-Wake_ from which this edition is printed was once the property of Mr. Aytoun, author of _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, and, I presume, of _Ta Phairshon_. Mr. Aytoun has written a prefatory sonnet which will be found in its proper place, a set of rhymes on the flyleaf at the end, and various cheerful but unfeeling notes. After some hesitation I do not print these frivolities.

The copy was most generously presented to me by Professor Knight of St. Andrews, and I have only seen one other example, which I in turn contributed to fill the vacant place in the shelves of Mr. Knight. His example, however, is far the more curious of the twain, by virtue of Aytoun's annotations.

I had been wanting to see _The Death-Wake_ ever since, as a boy, I read the unkind review of it in an ancient volume of _Blackwood's Magazine_. In its "pure purple mantle" of glazed cloth, with paper label, it is an unaffectedly neat and well-printed little volume.

It would be unbecoming and impertinent to point out to any one who has an ear for verse, the charm of such lines as--

"A murmur far and far, of those that stirred Within the great encampment of the sea."

Or--

"A love-winged seraph glides in glory by, Striking the tent of its mortality."

(An idea antic.i.p.ated by the as yet unknown Omar Khayyam).

Or--

"Dost thou, in thy vigil, hail Arcturus in his chariot pale, Leading him with a fiery flight Over the hollow hill of night?"

These are wonderful verses for a lad of twenty-one, living among anglers, undergraduates, and, if with some society of the lettered, apparently with none which could appreciate or applaud him.

For the matter of the poem, the wild voyage of the mad monkish lover with the dead Bride of Heaven, it strikes, of course, on the common reef of the Romantic--the ridiculous. But the recurring contrasts of a pure, clear peace in sea and sky, are of rare and atoning beauty. Such a pa.s.sage is--

"And the great ocean, like a holy hall, Where slept a seraph host maritimal, Was gorgeous with wings of diamond."

Once more, when the mad monk tells the sea-waves

"That ye have power and pa.s.sion, and a sound As of the flying of an angel round, The mighty world, that ye are one with Time,"

we recognise genuine imagination.

A sympathetic reader of _The Death-Wake_ would perhaps have expected the leprosies and lunacies to drop off, and the genius, purged of its accidents, to move into a pure transparency. The abnormal, the monstrous, the boyish elements should have been burned away in the fire of the genius of poetry. But the Muses did not so will it, and the mystic wind of the spirit of song became of less moment to Mr.

Stoddart than the breeze on the loch that stirs the trout to feed.

Perhaps his life was none the less happy and fortunate. Of the many brilliant men whom he knew intimately--Wilson, Aytoun, Ferrier, Gla.s.sford Bell, and others--perhaps none, not even Hogg, recognised the grace of the Muse which (in my poor opinion) Mr. Stoddart possessed. His character was not in the least degree soured by neglect or fretted by banter. Not to over-estimate oneself is a virtue very rare among poets, and certainly does not lead to public triumphs.

Modesty is apt to accompany the sense of humour which alleviates life, while it is an almost insuperable bar to success.

Mr. Stoddart died on November 22nd, 1880. His last walk was to Kelso Bridge "to look at the Tweed," which now murmurs by his grave the self-same song that it sings beside Sir Walter's tomb in Dryburgh Abbey. We leave his poem to the judgment of students of poetry, and to him we say his own farewell--

Sorrow, sorrow speed away To our angler's quiet mound, With the old pilgrim, twilight grey, Enter thou the holy ground.

There he sleeps, whose heart was twined With wild stream and wandering burn, Wooer of the western wind, Watcher of the April morn.

A.L.

THE DEATH-WAKE

OR LUNACY

_Sonnet to the Author_

_O wormy Thomas Stoddart who inheritest Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words, & rare!