The sharpest blade: C.S. Calverley

 

After mentioning the Victorian writer C.S. Calverley in the previous post a scrap of his work began buzzing around in my head. I couldn't remember the context, only the cleverness, until I came across a 1926 edition of the American magazine the Saturday Review. This contained a piece charting the impact made in his early days by the poet who was regarded by A.A. Milne as the master of light verse; a fulsome tribute to him can be found in the final chapter of Milne's final book.

If you thought that Ken Tynan was precocious as an undergraduate it's as nothing compared to Calverley, judging from the account in the Saturday Review. He was sent down from Oxford for only to pop up again in double-quick time at Cambridge, later to become Milne's alma mater. 

Here's an extract from the magazine which quotes the verse which had been nagging at me and gives an idea of why Calverley (known as Blayds while at Oxford) might not have endeared himself to those notionally in charge of him.

The information seems to be drawn from an 1885 memoir by Walter J. Sendall although the 1926 retelling by Cameron Rogers is more stylishly done, with some phrasemaking to savour:

He went up from Harrow to Oxford a marked youth and most definitely, a youth of mark. He appeared like a comet in a sky already well stocked with luminaries and like a comet he soon attracted all eyes from previous scrutinies upon himself. A fresher, he occasioned at Balliol a commotion the joyful hysteria of which tinged the distinguished Master of that college, Doctor Jenkyns, with a reflective melancholy. Young Mr. Blayds seemed less an individual than a galloping contagion of scholarly achievement and mischievious intelligence. The Latin verses that won the Balliol Scholarship had been written off so rapidly, the Master had heard, that they were practically extempore, and yet in spite of this brilliance the scholar was addicted to tobacco. Dr. Jenkyns himself abominated tobacco. It was a filthy habit, filthy and injurious. In a way hardly respectable. Blayds, however, won the Chancellor's Prize in 1851 with Hexameters that dazzled the judges and when he was elected to a scholarship at Balliol presented himself before the Master "redolent," so the latter passionately objected, "even now of the weed."

Going forth some days later Blayds observed upon a wall convenient for such notices the following admonition, not uncleverly conceived: 

O freshman, running fast to seed,
O scholar, redolent of weed, 
This motto in thy meerschaum put, 
The sharpest Blades are soonest cut. 

A riposte was not difficult for one who as a sixth former at school had achieved epigrams considered not unworthy of Martial. Blayds, whistling gently, made his thrust and went upon his way. 

Your wit is tolerable, but 
The case you understand ill; 
The Dons would like their Blayds to cut, 
But cannot find a handle. 

Dr. Jenkyns, somewhat put about, concentrated upon this business of finding a handle. He noted that though dogs were strictly forbidden at Balliol Mr. Blayds went constantly with a woolly oddity at heel. One day he stopped him and peering, exclaimed, "What! another dog, Mr. Blayds?" The dog confidently awaited vindication but its master with a renouncing gesture of the foot, betrayed it. "Well, master, they do tell me that some people think it is a squirrel." Doctor Jenkyns passed on, fussily bewildered. Of course there were dogs and dogs and it had been a long time since he had seen a squirrel, a very long time, but still —. He halted, but Mr. Blayds had melted serenely into the distance. 
...

But inevitably the day came when Doctor Jenkyns and the Dons found their handle. Blayds went down in the early months of 1852, followed by the admiration and astonishment of the entire University. There was connected with his going no hint of disgrace. Oxford had merely proved bottling a trifle old for this new wine still in the tumult of fermentation. It reappeared in the fall of the year at Christ's College, Cambridge, this time labelled Calverley and of a body and a savour, if anything, more intoxicating than before.

... 

The [Cambridge] Dons preserved towards him an attitude justly commingled of admiration and apprehension, affection and respect ... When Calverley took his degree and became a fellow of his college, he successfully combined into one solid lever of fortune, the numbers of his admirers. 

Calverly's light verse can be found in two volumes: Fly Leaves, and Verses and Translations, the latter including translations of the poems of others into Latin as well as translations from Greek and Latin. A potentially dazzling career was cut short, however, after a blow to the head while skating meant his needing to live "in extreme quiet and seclusion" for the last eighteen years of his life; he died in 1884, aged 53.

In an essay on Calverley included in the book Year In, Year Out A.A. Milne referred to  the Great Thrill in poetry, a phrase coined by Arthur Quiller-Couch to describe the sensation that a particularly vivid line in a poem might give a reader. Earlier in the book Milne had provided examples of such lines in serious poetry but now went on to argue that

Light verse in its different way can produce its own Great Thrill for those who appreciate its ardours: a shock of delighted surprise, sometimes at an unexpected rhyme: an effect which Calverley gets so happily by a sudden breakdown from a mocked high-falutery to a deliberate matter-of-factness.

Ere the morn the East has crimsoned, 
When the stars are twinkling there 
(As they did in Watts's hymns, and 
Made him wonder what they were): 
When the forest nymphs are beading 
Fern and flower with silvery dew —
My infallible proceeding 
Is to wake and think of you.

As Wordsworth said: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a verse so perfect in its mockery.

Incidentally, whenever Milne alludes to Wordsworth, as above, there is always the possibility he is also enjoying the opportunity to tease his wife's uncle, the Wordsworth authority Ernest de Selincourt, famous for an edition of The Prelude. And Christopher Milne suggests, in his memoir The Enchanted Places, that when Rabbit says to Owl "You and I have brains. The others have fluff" in the Pooh books Milne pere is characterising Owl as Uncle Ernest. 

Elsewhere in Year In, Year Out, Milne invents one Harold Appleby-Dodds, author of numerous scholarly books about Wordsworth, who has discovered a rare manuscript "in a crevice in a little outcrop of rock half-way up the slope of Loughrigg Fell". The title is enough to convince the academic of its provenance:

"JONES! WHEN I WALKED WITH YOU AND WILKINSON"

That trumpet voice cannot be mistaken. It is Wordsworth himself who speaks to us. 

Later, however, Appleby-Dodds comes to the conclusion that the MS is in fact a jeu d'esprit by Robert Southey - once Milne has had his fun with a mashup of Wordsworth and Robert Herrick:

The world is too much with us; late and soon 
I think of Julia, and am like to swoon.

And so on. 

This may seem as though we are straying from Calverley, but the undergraduate Milne's other acknowledged influence in his verse for Granta was J.K. Stephen, famous for this not-so-little smack at Wordsworth: [apologies: I can't seem to de-bold the following section]

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;

It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,

Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,

Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:

And one is of an old half-witted sheep

Which bleats articulate monotony,

And indicates that two and one are three,

That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:

And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times

Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,

The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:

At other times - good Lord! I'd rather be

Quite unacquainted with the ABC

Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.  

So it may be that the young Milne had already been primed to feel a healthy scepticism about Wordsworth's oeuvre even before he recked of academic uncles-in-law.

 

Returning to Milne's essay about Calverley, he goes on to provide more examples of the poet's abrupt transitions from high-flown language to mundanity:

O my earliest love, who, ere I numbered 
Ten sweet summers, made my bosom thrill! 
Will a swallow — or a swift or some bird —
Fly to her and say I love her still? 

O my earliest love, still unforgotten, 
With your downcast eyes of dreamy blue! 
Never, somehow, could I seem to cotton 
To another as I did to you. 

And 

Oh sweet - as to the toilworn man 
The far-off sound of rippling river; 
As to cadets in Hindostan 
The fleeting remnant of their liver -

In the last example the breakdown is the more happy for being humorous in itself; as also in this: 

Once, a happy child, I carolled 
O'er green lawns the whole day through, 
Not unpleasingly apparelled 
In a tightish suit of blue. 

In Lovers, and a Reflection [Milne continues,] the mockery is more particularly aimed; this time at the drawing-room ballad of those days: sung by eligible young men, who were reminded to bring their music with them when asked out to dinner. 

In moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter 
(And Heaven it knoweth what that may mean; 
Meaning, however, is no great matter) 
Where woods are a-tremble with rifts atween ; 

Through God's own heather we wonn'd together, 
I and my Willie (O love, my love!): 
I need hardly remark it was glorious weather, 
And flitterbats waver'd alow, above: ... 

Through the red heather we danced together 
(O love, my Willie!) and smelt for flowers: 
I must mention again it was gorgeous weather, 
Rhymes are so scarce in this world of ours -

After they had 'thrid God's cowslips as erst his heather', then 'Willie gan sing'; and in his song

Mists, bones, the singer himself, love-stories 
And all least furlable things got 'furled'; 
Not with any design to conceal their 'glories', 
But simply and solely to rhyme with 'world'. 

And so to the Reflection. 

O if billows and pillows and hours and flowers 
And all the brave rhymes of an elder day, 
Could be fitted together, this genial weather 
And carted or carried on 'wafts' away, 
Nor ever again trotted out — ah me! 
How much fewer volumes of verse there'd be!

The above parody is possibly a little smack at Lady Nairne, whose work is occasionally mistaken for that of Robert Burns; she wrote or adapted nearly 100 songs and poems in her lifetime, adding new lyrics to popular melodies whose original words were deemed too crude for genteel ears. 

Milne then takes the opportunity to have a go at modern verse with his own alternative ending to Calverley's parlour song skit:

When rhyme and any discernible rhythm,
Victorian chains, are filed away,
And form and grammar and sense go with 'em, 
Those harsh restraints of an elder day,
And 'inspiration' at last is free,
How packed with 'poets' the world will be!

"But even he couldn't have parodied them," Milne concludes. Which reminds me that he wasn't too keen on jazz either. In a poem in his wartime collection Behind the Lines, featuring poems originally published in Punch, he criticised the general quality of the BBC Home Service. At first he was content to have a go at comics who affected unconvincing cockney accents and actresses playing charladies but it was all building up to this final declaration:

And if they thoughtfully instal
Death penalty by axe for all
Who have (and boast about it) "RHYTHM,"
Then I am definitely with 'em.

In the previous post, you may remember, I quoted Owen Seaman's estimate of Calverley's durability:

His parodies are certain to endure by their intrinsic humour, even when the originals of some of them have passed ... into deserved oblivion.

I still have hopes for the revival of The Truth About Blayds but I suppose it has to be faced that as far as poetry goes only Milne's verse for children has survived the years, and the name of Calverley is all but unknown these days. 

Milne was unfortunate enought to see his style of comic verse fall out of fashion during his lifetime. At the time of the Great War he had been the darling of Punch, the poems which owed so much to Calverley's example attracting fan mail and gifts; there came a moment during WW2, however, when E.V. Knox, the then editor of Punch, had to break it to Milne that his light verse was no longer wanted in the magazine: there wasn't enough of an audience. The poems were collected in hard covers as Behind the Lines with a few words of explanation or commentary added after each one, the idea being that the collection would double as a diary of events. Following a lament about wartime shortages which had presumably been rejected by Knox Milne wrote the following words: 

I like butter. I also like this poem. Strange to discover oneself in a world which could do so easily without either.

 

The previous post, A.A. Milne's play The Truth About Blayds to be revived , also contains some discussion of Calverley.