Chapter XI

Collected Poems. Vigil and Vision

1902–1903

As we have seen, the shock occasioned by the death of Mrs. Snee (in 1880) rendered Payne for a very long period incapable of writing more original verse. The year 1896 was marked by the production of his lovely poem “The Grave of my Songs,” presently to be considered, and then he once more lapsed into silence. At last, however, at the beginning of 1902, the spell was really broken and “the Long Hiatus,” as we used to call it, became an event of the past. Set to work, poet! But he needed no spur, he began once more to write from the soul. He had awaked to life;

“Oh,” he exclaims,

Ardent in everything he attempted, he never forced his muse, but always waited until the sacred impulse visited him. Like the fabled griffin he never spread his wings when he had “sick feathers.” With M. Taine he held that “nothing can be absolutely beautiful that is not perfectly spontaneous.”²³⁴ This accounts for the ease and absence of effort that characterize all his poems. As he tells us in Vigil and Vision (p. 12) his soul flowered best in the winter’s night.²³⁵ “In the closing week of January 1902,” he writes,²³⁶ “I was suddenly taken with an attack of verse production (there’s no better comparison for the phenomenon, in its suddenness and lack of apparent cause, than to an access of fever) and for six weeks following verse poured through me literally day and night without cessation, the result being some three dozen poems of various lengths, amounting in all to 4,000 lines of verse. In this access, which began with the ‘Requiem’²³⁷ and ended with ‘Evensong,’²³⁸ my only conscious part was the labour of writing down what came to me; it ceased as suddenly as it came, in the middle of an unfinished poem, ‘The Death of Pan.’” Evidently this access of poetry is the one celebrated in Carol and Cadence (p. 217), where it is described as the verse-flow of “Forty Days,”²³⁹ during which he wandered “noon and night Song’s solitary ways.” In “Song-stress”²⁴⁰ he calls it “High-water Time,” and in a letter to Mrs. Tracy Robinson “a six weeks’ attack of poetry.”

In the middle of 1902 Payne published in two volumes his Collected Poems, with the title of The Poetical Works of John Payne. They contained the poems that had appeared in The Masque of Shadows, Intaglios, Songs of Life and Death, Lautrec and New Poems, together with “The Grave of my Songs” and the poems that had resulted from the January verse-flow, namely, the blithe and fascinating “Sir Winfrith,” the musical “Roses of Solomon,” “The Last of Hercules,” “Usque ad Portas,” “The Pact of the Twin Gods” and “Anchises.” The continued influence of the Arabian Nights on Payne revealed itself in the inclusion of a series of poems founded on some of the shorter tales in that work “Flowers from Syrian Gardens.”

Of the new poems in the collection the most beautiful and also the most pathetic is “The Grave of my Songs.”²⁴¹ Swinburne²⁴² and other friends of Payne had asked why he had ceased to write original and noble poetry.

And looking back beyond “the Long Hiatus” he continues:

Thinking of the grave at Kensal Green, he says:

In a later line he speaks of London as

Most tender and most beautiful are the lines in which he recalls the loved features of the lost divinity:

Mrs. Pritchard and Mrs. Byam regarded “Love’s Autumn” (Vol. 2, p. 298) as “one of the most perfect things” their brother ever wrote. Others have found special delight in “A Bacchic of Spring,” “A Soul’s Antiphon,” and “Trinitas Trinitatum,” but all the poems have Payne’s chemic and ethereal touch. The melody of the absolutely perfect “Roses of Solomon,” in which all the music of all the spheres seems crystallized, reminds that Payne, unlike most poets, was an able and enthusiastic musician. The piano was to him what the lyre was to Orpheus. He presents to us not only the deep thought and the choice phrase, but also marvellous rhythmic effects.

He also differs, as we have already shown, from most other poets in the absolute spontaneity of his productions. He did not, like FitzGerald and some other distinguished artists in verse, write out a few lines and then labour at them like a lapidary with a precious stone. He was no artificer in mosaic. A truly Orphic poet, his best work was performed in moments of complete objectivation, when the whole world and all that therein was, were entirely forgotten amid the riot of rhythmical conception. And so he is to be compared to the pythoness on the tripod; for, remarkable as are his melodic effects, his poems when once set down required little more than clerical correction. And yet almost invariably the fine thought is presented in exquisite phraseology. A glorious jewel in a glorious ouch. It is true that his ethereal soul welled forth in his poems, yet we feel in reading them that we are in the presence also of a great intellectual power​—​a nightingale with a Schopenhauer’s brain.

“My mode²⁴³ of original production both in prose and verse,” says Payne, “has been curiously inconscient, and it is only by an a posteriori process that I can trace any of the influences that affected it. My verse in particular has never been written in cold blood; ideas and subjects have lain dormant in my brain for months, and even years, till some unexplained influence has played the part of Vulcan’s hammer, and loosed the imprisoned Minerva, ready armed; and then there is no question of style or method, the pen can hardly move fast enough for the imprisoned flood of verse. The poem is committed to paper as in a dream, and I am surprised when I awake to find what I have done. I cannot, therefore, tell you anything about my method of labour as regards style, simply because labour there is practically none, correction being almost always only a matter of rectifying the mechanical slips of the pen consequent upon the furious haste with which the poem is committed to paper. I only set down what comes to me, whence I know not, and one might as justly describe the zinnias and tigridias of the Mexican plains or the ixias and sparaxis of the South African veldt as owing their gorgeous colourings and beautiful forms to elaborate gardening and painful cultivation as accuse me of artificial construction of verse and deliberate elaboration.”²⁴⁴ In short, Payne’s poems are the spontaneous outpouring of his soul. The best contain scarcely a word that one would wish altered. They are as irresponsible as the sea.

In this same year, 1902, Payne issued as a Supplement to Collected Poems “a slender sad-coloured” volume, The Descent of the Dove and other Poems, the contents of which subsequently appeared in Songs of Consolation.

The John Payne who took up his pen again in 1902 was a very different man from the John Payne of the early​—​the prehistoric​—​poems as he called them. “They are too Tennysonian,” he once said to me. ”Sine me liber”²⁴⁵ is useful as a psychological introduction to my new period.²⁴⁶ He also spoke of these early poems as “those pallid blossoms,”

The former Payne was a writer of beautiful verse, the latter Payne was not only a great poet but also a profound philosopher. He who obtains Collected Poems and imagines that he possesses the ripest fruit of Payne’s genius will have made a fatal mistake. These volumes contain for the most part only the poems written previous to the Long Hiatus. Many of them, it is true, are very beautiful, but nearly all Payne’s finest work is to be found in the volumes of his latter years: Vigil and Vision (1903), Songs of Consolation (1904), Carol and Cadence (1908), Flower o’ the Thorn (1909), and The Way of the Winepress.

Payne sent copies of his Collected Poems to Swinburne and Watts-Dunton. Swinburne’s acknowledgment I have not seen, but the following is Watts-Dunton’s:

At the end of Collected Poems we find the following announcement: “In Preparation​—​The Book of Kings (Shah Nameh), by Ferdausi; The Pentameron; The Life and Death of Cuculain; François Rabelais and other Prose Studies.” Burton’s Pentameron had appeared in 1893. Dissatisfied with it, Payne evidently intended to carry out his own original intention. None of these projects, however, reached the press. The François Rabelais and other Prose Studies would probably have consisted of the articles on Rabelais and Dolet already alluded to in this work.

At the time Payne was publishing his Collected Poems he possessed three Persian cats​—​Gruff, Top and Shireen (whose name recalls the lady sung by Nizami and the refrain “Alas! Shireen”), and a little Angora called Rover, all of which are immortalized in the poem Vere Novo,²⁴⁸ written in March 1902. Rover “died in her tenth year,” on 2 July, and the event gave origin to the sonnet “In Memoriam Rover.”²⁴⁹ Some of these cats had six claws instead of the customary five.

The subject of Payne’s Collected Poems leads one to a comment on his prose. Ordinarily, as will be seen from the specimens of it in this biography, it was both clear and beautiful. Finer English, indeed, no man could write. Ordinarily, too, his sentences were of moderate length, but occasionally he indulged, as a sort of literary gymnastic, in sentences that can only be described as Brobdingnagian. In the notes to Collected Poems is what is probably the longest sentence in the language. It consists of 603 words! It is, of course, grammatically perfect. Every clause hangs on its proper peg, every adjective, every adverb has a reason for its existence. But what a sentence! The very thought of it makes one perspire.

Payne and John Trivett Nettleship, whose name figures so conspicuously in the early pages of this work, had for long drifted apart. A true man of genius, Nettleship had obtained far less recognition than he deserved, and yet he achieved a certain measure of success. As we have already noticed he about 1870 ceased from the mystical work of his youth and became known as an animal painter. He differed from the school of Landseer as light differs from darkness. He painted animals as they were. His tigers were lithe, sly and savage​—​with teeth​—​oh, what teeth! His lions had no story to tell or moral to inculcate. They were not noble domestic animals such as one sees in Trafalgar Square or on the obverse of a shilling. They were bloody-minded brutes with eyes​—​oh, what eyes! You didn’t seem to want Nettleship’s lions on the hearthrug.²⁵⁰

Nettleship died on 31 August, 1902, at the age of 61. Though he and Payne had ceased to be friends, nevertheless, the news fell on Payne like a “sepulchral stone,” and the sonnet which the incident provoked bears witness that Payne had never ceased from kindly feelings towards his quondam friend. He says

and loving him Payne felt that somewhat of his “Spring of sooth²⁵¹ and dream” had sunk into the “darkling haze of the insatiable past.” The second of the Triumvirate had fallen.

In September 1902, just after he was 60, Payne wrote the Autobiography which has several times been cited in these pages, and which was given to me for the purposes of this work in the year 1905. On page 23 is a passage which allows us to look as through a window into the state of his mind at the time he was writing it. After referring to the “harsh treatment” doled out to him by his father, as related in our first chapter, he says: “Thus early was instilled into me the habits of solitude, self-concentration and self-abnegation, looking to no one for help and expecting no sympathy from anyone; and I cannot help feeling that it says a good deal for the native soundness of my nature that the unhappy experiences of my youth and, indeed, of my whole life, together with the injustice with which I feel that I have been treated by the literary world, have not been able to sour me and that, though an incurably melancholy man I am no misanthrope. Like Sir Adrian in The Light of Scarthey, if (as I fear) many or most people are distasteful to me, I hate no one and feel that my heart grows every year more readily open to pity and sympathy. Nor am I, on the whole, discontented with my life; though I have at times had a hard struggle, yet I am happier than many in having never been compelled to do for bread’s sake any literary work other than that which was congenial to me and in that I have always been able, without betraying my vocation, to earn enough to supply my modest wants, my only luxuries (or rather necessaries) being books and music, which fortunately are cheap. The one thing which is really a source of bitter regret to me is the feeling that, notwithstanding the immense mass of work which I have accomplished and every portion of which I am conscious of having done with my might, I am drawing near to the end of my working day (I was sixty the other day, 23 August, 1902) without having given the world anything like the measure of my real powers (in poetry especially), owing to the lack of that modest measure of appreciation and encouragement which is to aesthetic production as sunshine to the vegetable creation, and without which no artist can give forth the best which is in him, even as no plant can yield its true flowerage in the dark. This frame of mind (appeasement and resignation without discontent) is, I think, clearly manifest in my later poems, especially in the last-written ‘Evensong’²⁵² which may be my ‘Swan-song,’ and the last line of which ‘Duty done’ I am quite content should be the epigraph of my life work.”

Other passages from the Autobiography will be found scattered up and down the pages of this book.

About this time Mrs. Tracy Robinson conceived the idea of bringing out in America a selection from Payne’s poems, prefaced by introductions written by herself and her husband. Payne, in giving the required permission, expressed the pleasure he felt in being able to number Mrs. Robinson as well as her husband among those who appreciated his poems. He says, in a very long letter, 9 December, 1902²⁵³: “It is always a delight to a writer to find that his work​—​the virtue gone out of him​—​has made him yet another friend in a far land; and in this case it is especially grateful to me, as you are the wife of an old and devoted friend. I think your essay on my verse excellent, and thoroughly adapted to its original purpose of making my poems known to the American public through a magazine or the like, but you will, I fancy, find on proceeding to adopt it as an introduction to a volume of Selections, that it will need a good deal of remodelling.” In order to help her in this task he sent her a number of notes. After alluding to the death of Mrs. Snee, he says: “‘The Grave of my Songs’ of course refers to this episode of my life and was written some six years ago. The majority of the new poems in Collected Poems belong to January and March of this year (1902) when I had a six weeks’ attack of poetry, which produced some 4,000 lines. One of these, a quasi-dramatic poem of 750 lines, ‘The Descent of the Dove,’ I have relegated to a privately printed Supplement as it deals in too mediaeval a spirit of frankness with Christian mythology to be acceptable to those who find an anthropomorphic faith necessary to their comfort, and I should be sorry to hurt any sincere believer’s feelings, though I regret the omission, as I consider the poem my masterpiece.” He tells her that he leaves the selection entirely to her and an American man of letters, Dr. Burton, who had interested himself in the project. He goes on: “It is curious, by the by, how one may go all one’s life without voicing in verse one’s most devout preferences, e.g. my love for children and animals ‘borders’ (as Dickens’s son-in-law Charles Collins²⁵⁴ says) ‘well nigh on insanity,’ but there is no trace of either passion in my poems.²⁵⁵ Such are the ironies of fate!”

In connection with this subject I remember Mrs. Pritchard (his favourite sister) once saying to me: “I am not once referred to in connection with any poem he ever wrote with the exception of ‘May Margaret,’²⁵⁶ which is dedicated to me.”

Commencing at Christmas 1902 and continuing into 1903, came to Payne another access of poetry when 224 sonnets were produced in nine weeks. Some 150 of these were published in his next volume Vigil and Vision issued in the following October.

Writing to Mrs. Robinson 19 February, 1903,²⁵⁷ he condoles with her on account of certain disturbances at Colon where he thinks things “must still be somewhat topsy-turvy after all the ‘tyrannous fun’ (as Beddoes would call it) that has been agate there.” In connection with the proposal that his portrait should appear in the Selection he says: “Certainly, I have no objection; and if I can screw up my courage to that ordeal (and it is a grievous one to a nervous wretch like myself, whose first idea is always to hide away my personality) of having a new one taken; meanwhile I will send you a copy, otherwise you have, I think, a copy of that taken some 20 or 25 years ago. … I am sending you the Supplement.²⁵⁸ I have had only 25 copies printed for private gifts. Beyond the ‘Descent of the Dove,’ and the second poem, ‘A Grave at Montmartre’²⁵⁹ it contains only ‘curiosities’ which I have printed only as a contribution to future literary history.”

At the end of a long letter to Mrs. Robinson of 26 February, 1903,²⁶⁰ he mentions his descent from Sir John Hawkins and that Hawkins was the original name of the family “to which Payne was added (on marriage with an heiress of that name, we believe) many generations ago. The family name as borne by my father was Hawkins-Payne, but we of the younger generation have abandoned the double-barrelled name out of disgust at modern snobbish practice in this kind.”

Writing to Mrs. Robinson 24 April, 1903,²⁶¹ Payne says: “The verse visitation of January-March last (extending curiously enough over exactly the same period and producing the same amount​—​4,000 lines​—​of verse as that of 1902) resulted in the appearance of no fewer than 224 sonnets (beside nearly 1,000 lines of other verse), I think the best work I have ever done. The copying has given me a slight recurrence of writer’s cramp, of which I had a very severe attack in 1883, after the first nine vols. of the Nights, the whole of which I copied out three times with my own hand, horribile dictu! If the American edition comes off I hope to get a special portrait sketch drawn for it by a nephew of mine²⁶² who is a clever artist.” In a letter to Mrs. Robinson 26 May, 1903,²⁶³ Payne speaks of “the one piece of luck” which had befallen him in his literary career, namely, the grant to him “in 1898 of a Civil List Pension of £100 a year by the Government,” in acknowledgment of his “services to Oriental Literature.” He continues: “I am going through the sickening and tedious process of having my new volume of poems²⁶⁴ rejected by publisher after publisher, who won’t even trouble themselves to be quick about it.”

On 2 July, 1903, Payne sent Mrs. Robinson²⁶⁵ the prospectus of Vigil and Vision, of the sonnets in which he wrote: “Unless I am utterly incapable of judgment as regards poetry, they are unique since Milton, nevertheless I have been unable to get them published in the ordinary way.”

In March 1903 Yacoub Artin Pasha, Secretary of Education at Cairo, published his valuable work Contribution à l’Etude du Blason en Orient, illustrated in gold and colours, which he dedicated to Payne, whose copy arrived on 18 March. Artin Pasha and his wife often wrote to Payne, and never visited England without calling on him.²⁶⁶

In September 1903 Payne was shocked to hear of the death of Mrs. Robinson, and on the 9th he wrote to Mr. Robinson the following beautiful letter²⁶⁷:

“My poor friend, I find your sad letter with its terrible tidings on my return from a six weeks’ absence in Italy and Switzerland. What a cruel calamity! I, as you know, have passed through the same waters of bitterness and can therefore feel not alone for but with you in your piteous case. Though twenty years have, in my case, passed, my heart aches with memory. It is useless to attempt to comfort you. Time alone (and your little child) can do that perfectly or imperfectly. I wish I were near you that I could give you that silent hand-grasp of condoling friendship which is the only acceptable token of sympathy in such circumstances. In the sweet soul that is gone before I lose a friend, unseen yet dear. Of course I knew her only from her letters, but they amply showed her brave, sweet, generous nature. . . . At our age (at least such is my experience) most things in life have lost their savour and there is little or nothing left worth thinking of but work and duty; but they are true comforters and to their healing I commend you with all my heart.”

In Vigil and Vision, which was issued in October, Payne exhibits his continued devotion to Wagner in whose praise are written no fewer than five sonnets; and he pays also a warm tribute to the genius of Liszt, of whom he had written,²⁶⁸ “Liszt above all is my composer. With his transcendant purity of operation and his interstellar splendour of expression he appeals to my personality more than any other master.” Tributes are also paid to Dante, Spenser, Keats, Schopenhauer and other of his enthusiasms. The pathetic “My Lady Dead” is of autobiographic interest. Old friends such as Herman Melville, Mallarmé, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam, De Banville, E. J. W. Gibb,²⁶⁹ John Trivett Nettleship²⁷⁰ and others are feelingly commemorated. Of miscellaneous sonnets there are many​—​one of the finest being the following:

In the sonnet “Trinitas Anglica”²⁷¹ he says, “Three names o’er all do glorify our land”​—​the three being Shakespeare, Dickens and Turner; and he once told me that he preferred Turner’s water-colours to the oil paintings.

Bound up with some copies of Vigil and Vision is a Supplement consisting of a bitter poem on Gladstone²⁷² (“A Burial in Westminster Abbey”) and twelve sonnets. One of the sonnets is a tribute to Henley, who died 11 July, 1903, and most of the others are tirades against various literary men and musical composers.

Speaking of this book, Payne on one occasion²⁷³ said to me, “It is my finest work altogether,” and on another “It is the complete expression of my soul.” He lived, however, to write volumes far more splendid. H. H. Furness, the literary critic, who ranked Vigil and Vision very high, singled out for special praise the sonnets in the section entitled “Signs and Seasons” and those on Haydn²⁷⁴ and Wordsworth.²⁷⁵ “My Lady Dead”²⁷⁶ and “The Last of the Gods”²⁷⁷ were also favourites with him. “Re Infecta”²⁷⁸ is another notable sonnet.

To the charge of habitual melancholy Payne in various poems pleads guilty, as in the sonnet “Ignis Fatuus”²⁷⁹ where he likens his soul to

There is, however, no lack of brightness in Payne’s pages. All sunshine and joyous music, for example, are “Major Cadence,”²⁸⁰ “Kiss me, Sweetheart,”²⁸¹ “Straight and Swift the Swallows Fly,”²⁸² “Bells of Gold,”²⁸³ “A Birthday Song,”²⁸⁴ the magnificent “Chaunt Royal of the God of Love”²⁸⁵ “Trinitas Trinitatum,”²⁸⁶ “Indian Isle,”²⁸⁷ and “Hey for Arcady!”²⁸⁸ To the exaltation of his latter poems we shall have occasion on a later page to speak. “Payne,” observes Mrs. Robinson, “is no misanthrope, and in certain moods he becomes the spokesman of the people. No reader could look below the surface of ‘Shadow-Soul’²⁸⁹ without realizing that a broad humanity is the essential element underlying all the poems.”

Writing on 22 December, 1903,²⁹⁰ to Mr. Tracy Robinson, Payne says: “Do you know H. H. Furness, the Shakespearean scholar? If not, you ought to know him; he is as enthusiastic a ‘lover of my soul’ as yourself. I had a charming letter from him the other day about Vigil and Vision. He and dear old Canon Ebsworth²⁹¹ (a like enthusiast) form with you my special trinity of lovers. The Songs of Consolation will, I expect, be ready in about six weeks and I shall send you a copy for the sake of the dozen new poems contained, also a copy of the final sheet of Vigil and Vision, containing a Supplement of twelve sonnets de combat, omitted from the issue so as not to mar the gentle harmony of the book, and now privately printed (only twenty copies) for gifts to special friends like yourself.”²⁹²

Although an avowed pessimist, and we shall have more to say by and by on this subject, Payne delighted in the company of cheerful persons, and he had a constant hungering for colour and beauty. He took a delight in seeing accomplished dancing. Of Madame Adeline Genée,²⁹³ who made her debut in England in Monte Christo November 1897, and distinguished herself in The Dryad, and in a ballet called “The Dancing Doll” (first performed at the Empire Theatre on 3 January, 1905), he used to speak with great enthusiasm. Her gaiety and laughter impressed him even more than her marvellous technique.