EMMA

Are there not poisons, racks, and flames, and swords,

That Emma thus must die by Henry's words?
Yet what can swords, or poisons, racks, or flame,
But mangle and disjoint the brittle frame?

More fatal Henry's words: they mangle Emma's fame.
And fall these sayings from that gentle tongue,
Where civil speech and soft persuasion hung ;
Whose artful sweetness and harmonious strain,
Courting my grace, yet courting it in vain,
Called sighs, and tears, and wishes to its aid;
And whilst it Henry's glowing love conveyed,
Still blamed the coldness of the Nut-brown Maid?
Let envious jealousy, and cankered spite,
Produce my actions to severest light,
And tax my open day or secret night.

Did e'er my tongue speak my unguarded heart
The least inclined to play the wanton's part?
Did e'er my eye one inward thought reveal,
Which angels might not hear and angels tell?
And hast thou, Henry, in my conduct known
One fault, but that which I must never own,

That I of all mankind have loved but thee alone.

When Johnson, fixing his attention exclusively on this and other serious poems of Prior, goes on to criticise the latter's diction, his remarks inevitably raise a smile :

His diction is more his own than that of any among the successors of Dryden; he borrows no lucky turns or commodious modes of language from his predecessors. His phrases are original, but they are sometimes harsh; as he inherited no elegances, none has he bequeathed. His expression has every mark of laborious study: the line seldom seems to have been formed at once; the words did not come till they were called, and were then put by constraint into their places, where they do their duty, but do it sullenly.1

On this Cowper remarks with perfect justice and great felicity:

By your leave, most learned Doctor, this is the most disingenuous remark I ever met with, and would have come with a better grace from Curll or Dennis. Every man conversant

1 Lives of the Poets: Prior.

with verse writing knows, and knows by painful experience, that the familiar style is of all styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic -to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of rhyme -is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake. He that could accomplish this task was Prior; many have imitated his excellence in this particular, but the best copies have fallen far short of the original.1

The true estimate of Prior's genius seems to lie between the depreciation of Johnson and the appreciation of Cowper. Johnson, with a keen eye to the defects of Prior's serious style, and thinking especially of those in Solomon, exaggerated them, after his manner, by his trenchant epigrams, without regard to the poet's more characteristic excellences. Cowper, admiring warmly Prior's achievements in familiar verse, tried to persuade himself that the same qualities were to be found in his more elaborate compositions, such as Henry and Emma. Johnson observes of Prior's love poems :

Venus, after the example of the Greek epigram, asks when she was seen naked and bathing. Then Cupid is mistaken; then Cupid is disarmed; then he loses his darts to Ganymede; then Jupiter sends him a summons by Mercury. Then Chloe goes a-hunting with an ivory quiver graceful by her side; Diana mistakes her for one of her nymphs, and Cupid laughs at the blunder. All this is surely despicable.2

3

It scarcely seems a sufficient reply to say, with Cowper, that there "there is a fashion in such things"; for it is the aim of all true and permanent art to overcome fashion. Prior wrote, as an English poet, when the formal classical tide was running at its strongest throughout Europe, and he is sometimes at the mercy of the fashion. In his panegyrical verse, modelled on Cowley's pseudo- Pindaric manner, there is that straining after effect to which Johnson alludes. His Alexandrian epigrams on Chloe are often as puerile as the mythology 1 Letter to Unwin, January 17, 1782. 2 Lives of the Poets: Prior. 3 Letter to Unwin, January 5, 1782.

of Chiabrera in Italy, of Voiture in France, of Waller in England; his Henry and Emma makes a futile attempt to apply the external classical style to what is in its essence romantic, just as Pope's Messiah seeks to Hellenise ideas that are in spirit Hebraic. But it is unjust to judge Prior mainly by these comparative failures. Wherever he has thoroughly imbibed and assimilated the classical spirit, and has adapted it to his own civic surroundings, there— that is to say, in all his most characteristic poems-his poetic triumph is complete. He is a master in the art of blending the grave and gay, the humorous and pathetic, as may be best seen perhaps in his verses, To a Child of Quality, Five Years Old, the Author supposed Forty:—

Lords, knights, and 'squires, the numerous band
That wear the fair Miss Mary's fetters,
Were summoned by her high command
To show their passions by their letters.

My pen among the rest I took,

Lest those bright eyes, that cannot read,
Should dart their kindling fires, and look
The power they have to be obeyed.

Nor quality, nor reputation,

Forbid me yet my flame to tell;
Dear five-years-old befriends my passion,
And I may write till she can spell.

For while she makes her silk-worms' beds
With all the tender things I swear,
Whilst all the house my passion reads
In papers round her baby hair;

She may receive and own my flame,

For, though the strictest prudes should know it,

She'll pass for a most virtuous dame,

And I for an unhappy poet.

Then too, alas! when she shall tear

The lines some younger rival sends,
She'll give me leave to write, I fear,
And we shall still continue friends.

For as our different ages move,

'Tis so ordained (would Fate but mend it!)

That I shall be past making love,

When she begins to comprehend it.

The mellowed philosophy of life, in which Horace shows his sympathy with human infirmities, pervades Prior's poems of humorous reflection, a good specimen of which is the epigram Written in the beginning of Mezeray's History of France—

Whate'er thy countrymen have done
By law and wit, by sword and gun,
In thee is faithfully recited:
And all the living world, that view
Thy work, give thee the praises due,
At once instructed and delighted.

Yet for the fame of all these deeds,

What beggar in the Invalids,

With lameness broke, with blindness smitten,
Wished ever decently to die,

To have been either Mezeray,

Or any monarch he has written?

It strange, dear author, yet it true is,
That, down from Pharamond to Louis,
All covet life, yet call it pain;
All feel the ill, yet shun the cure;
Can sense this paradox endure ?

Resolve me Cambray or Fontaine.

The man in graver tragic known

(Though his best part long since was done)
Still on the stage desires to tarry:

And he who played the Harlequin
After the jest still loads the scene,

Unwilling to retire, though weary.

Not less charming, in a different style, is the description, with its touches of melancholy, of the travellers recalling old memories at an inn, in the ballad of Down Hall (the farm that Lord Harley presented to Prior) :

Into an old inn did this equipage roll

At a town they call Hodson, the sign of the Bull,
Near a nymph with an urn, that divides the highway,
And into a puddle throws mother of tea.

Come here, my sweet landlady, pray how d'ye do?
Where is Cicely so cleanly, and Prudence, and Sue?
And where is the widow that dwelt here below?
And the ostler that sung about eight years ago?

And where is your sister, so mild and so dear,
Whose voice to her maids like a trumpet was clear?
By my troth! she replies, you grow younger, I think :
And pray, Sir, what wine does the gentleman drink?

Why now let me die, Sir, or live upon trust,

If I know to which question to answer you first:

Why things since I saw you, most strangely have varied,
The ostler is hanged, and the widow is married.

And Prue left a child for the parish to nurse;
And Cicely went off with a gentleman's purse;
And as to my sister, so mild and so dear,

She has lain in the churchyard full many a year.

In poems like these we reach the high-water mark of the familiar style in English poetry. There is, however, scarcely less merit in the more strictly conversational form of octosyllabic verse which Prior employs for the reproduction of the Horatian manner. His longest poem in this kind is Alma, a humorous dialogue between himself and his friend Richard Shelton, the purpose of which is apparently to put forward, in a vein of gaiety, the Pyrrhonist opinions about science that he had expressed more seriously in Solomon. The conclusion as to the vanity of human pursuits is certainly the same in both poems :

Dick, thus we act; and thus we are,
Or tossed by hope, or sunk by care.
With endless pain this man pursues
What, if he gained, he could not use;
And t'other fondly hopes to see
What never was, nor e'er shall be.
We err by use, go wrong by rules,
In gesture grave, in action fools:
We join hypocrisy to pride,
Doubling the faults we strive to hide.
Or grant that with extreme surprise
We find ourselves at sixty wise;
And twenty pretty things are known,
Of which we can't accomplish one;
Whilst, as my system says, the mind
Is to these upper rooms confined :
Should I, my friend, at large repeat
Her borrowed sense, her fond conceit,
The bead-roll of her vicious tricks ;
My poems will be too prolix ;