London Lyrics

"Sole secret to jingle and scan,"

as an unduly severe critic says somewhere. One need hardly say that this is not Praed's sole secret: but technique is certainly his strong point.

"Where are my friends? I am alone: No playmate shares my beaker: Some lie beneath the churchyard stone And some--before the Speaker: And some compose a tragedy, And some compose a rondo: And some draw sword for Liberty, And some draw pleas for John Doe.

Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes Without the fear of sessions: Charles Medlar loathed false quantities As much as false professions: Now Mill keeps order in the land, A magistrate pedantic: And Medlar's feet repose unscanned Beneath the wide Atlantic."

This is the art which does not conceal itself. One may not be able to do the trick; but it is possible to see how the trick is done.

"No one," says Locker, when speaking of occasional or society verse, "has fully succeeded who did not possess a certain gift of irony." That is profoundly true. A would-be writer of light verse who has not an ironical habit of mind had better change his purpose and write an epic. Locker has his full share of the necessary gift. Half gay, half melancholy, always ironical--dissembling most of pain and some of pleasure--he is in certain ways the appropriate spokesman of a society like our own, which is really most natural when most dissembling, or dismissing with a smile, its deeper emotions. There is nothing about Locker which is not natural. As he is, so (apparently) does he speak: far more candidly and with more of self-revelation than Praed, more candidly than Mr Austin Dobson, who is apt to veil his personality behind a mask of elegant antiquarianism. But Locker is more artless and naive (which qualities are in him not the least inconsistent with irony) than any modern writer, except, perhaps, R. L. Stevenson now and then; and with the latter naivete itself is sometimes an artifice. Mr Brander Matthews rightly lays stress on this aspect of Locker's poetry; "individuality and directness of expression"--that is the true note of "London Lyrics." He is far more genuine and spontaneous than Praed. It is difficult and perhaps invidious to compare the two as "humorists." It may be that Locker's vein of humour is larger and truer than the earlier poet's. Praed belongs, as has been said, to a period of other men and other manners. Probably he is the wittier of the two; yet this might be contradicted. Locker's humour has the reflective vein, with a suggestion of pathos, of the great writers who flourished in the early and middle Victorian era. We are perhaps a little out of tune now with the sentiment of the middle of the nineteenth century and perhaps, too, with Praed's "antithetical rhetoric"; but Locker's humour can never be quite out of fashion. Readers will always smile (not laugh) at "The Housemaid" or "The Pilgrims of Pall Mall" or the lines "To my Grandmother"--

"With her bridal-wreath, bouquet, Lace farthingale, and gay Falbala,-- If Romney's touch be true, What a lucky dog were you, Grandpapa!

. . . . .

What funny fancy slips From atween these cherry lips? Whisper me, Fair Sorceress in paint, What canon says I mayn't Marry thee?"

But perhaps, for a nutshell's content of whimsical Lockerian humour, the gem which will occur to most is the delightful reminiscence of infancy:

"I recollect a nurse call'd Ann, Who carried me about the grass, And one fine day a fine young man Came up, and kiss'd the pretty Lass: She did not make the least objection! Thinks I. 'Aha! When I can talk I'll tell Mamma.' --And that's my earliest recollection."

(Locker's "mottoes," of which this is one, often contain his most characteristic lines.) Praed could no more have written that, or the lines "To my Grandmother," than Locker could have written "The Vicar." Both poets have other strings. Praed's more serious vein could win a contemporary reputation: but he would not have been remembered for this alone, after eighty years. In "At Her Window," which Mr Coulson Kernahan rightly calls "one of the most beautiful love-songs of the century," Locker is no longer ironical, but rises to the heights of real passion:

"Beating Heart! we come again Where my Love reposes: This is Mabel's window-pane: These are Mabel's roses.

. . . . .

Mabel will be deck'd anon, Zoned in bride's apparel; Happy zone! Oh hark to yon Passion-shaken carol! Sing thy song, thou tranced thrush, Pipe thy best, thy clearest;-- Hush, her lattice moves, O hush-- Dearest Mabel!--_dearest_" . . .

"I once tried," says Locker in "My Confidences," "to write like Praed." The effort was not wholly successful: Locker is weakest where his manner is most Praedian; and the poet, either realising this, or moulded by the temper of his time, appears to have altered most of the obviously imitative passages. Thus in "Tempora Mutantur" the last stanza runs, in 1857:

"What brought this wanderer here, and why Was Pamela away? It might be she had found her grave Or he had found her gay";

but the antithetical pun is excised in the 1893 edition, where the lines are:

"The pilgrim sees an empty chair Where Pamela once sat: It may be she had found her grave, It might be worse than that."