The poet who features in A.A. Milne's play The Truth About Blayds, soon to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London, may have been Milne's own creation - but he did pinch the name.
If J.M. Barrie was Milne's main inspiration for writing in general the Victorian author C.S. Calverley was the man whose light verse he had sought, from his earliest days, to emulate. That's "light verse" as distinct from poetry proper: for Milne that meant the serious application of his craft to the lightest of trifles, and he had little time for the less punctilious efforts of others.
Also admired by Lewis Carroll - they had even considered collaborating - Calverley wrote poems which were comical, often parodic, mocking the cliches employed by other poets or - as in this example - songwriters:
In moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter
(And heaven it knoweth what that may mean;
Meaning, however, is no great matter) ...
Owen Seaman, editor of Punch for many years and a fellow devotee of Calverley, had seen the undergraduate Milne's potential, admiring the verses he wrote for Cambridge University's Granta; Milne later jokily described his juvenalia as:
The style that, week by blessed week,
Mixed Calverley and J.K. Stephen
With much that was (I hold) unique,
- Stephen being another Victorian writer of light verse.
Introducing an edition of Calverley, Seaman is confident his work will survive because of "the universality of his themes [and] the gentleness of his humour." Satirical poetry, he says, is "apt to have its levity impaired by the weight of years and the burdensome necessity of annotation" but Calverley's "themes make so catholic an appeal ... that their interest and intelligibility remain, and are likely to remain, untouched by time and change. His parodies are certain to endure by their intrinsic humour, even when the originals of some of them have passed ... into deserved oblivion."
Seaman was writing over a hundred years ago and it has to be admitted that the name of his subject is no longer on everyone's lips. But in the final chapter of A.A. Milne's final book, published in 1952, he too made a case for his idol, providing some choice examples of his work.
Before we get on to those, however, if you're wondering about the connection with Milne's play the answer is simple. Charles Stuart Calverley had been born Charles Stuart Blayds but took up Calverley, the original family name, after he had been sent down from Oxford and needed to reinvent himself. Milne's appropriation of the name for his bogus poet is, I think, both a private, or semi-private, joke and a bow in the direction of the one he acknowledged as the Master.
*
After writing the above a scrap of Calverley's wit began buzzing around in my head. I had known of it for a long time but couldn't remember the context, only the cleverness, until I came across a 1926 edition of the American magazine The Saturday Review which described the impact Calverley made in his Oxford days, when still going by the name of Blayds.
"Less an individual than a galloping contagion of scholarly achievement and mischievious intelligence", he was eventually sent down for a lampoon against the authorities - one provocation too many - only to pop up again in double-quick time at Cambridge (later Milne's alma mater).
This extract quotes the verse which had been nagging at me and suggests why Calverley might not have endeared himself to those in charge - nor, it would seem, to some of his fellow students.
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,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.
O scholar, redolent of weed,
This motto in thy meerschaum put,
The sharpest Blades are soonest cut.Your wit is tolerable, but
The case you understand ill;
The Dons would like their Blayds to cut,
But cannot find a handle.
That was the riposte which had been sticking in my mind. Rogers continues:
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.
I don't want to gave away too much about Milne's play here but in addition to a character called Blayds there is also a reference to one "Jenkins" (sic) - part of the joke or coincidence? Anyway, in contrast to Oxford's Doctor Jenkyns and his cohorts,
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 the aforementioned Verses and Translations, the latter including Latin reworkings of Tennyson as well as translations from Greek and Latin. A potentially dazzling career was cut short, however, when a skating accident meant that he was obliged to live out the remaining eighteen years of his life "in extreme quiet and seclusion"; he died in 1884, aged 53.
In an essay on Calverley included in Year In, Year Out, A.A. Milne refers to the "Great Thrill" in poetry, a phrase coined by Arthur Quiller-Couch to describe the sensation a particularly vivid line in a great poem can give its readers, arguing that
More examples are then provided of these comic shifts from the high-flown to the mundane: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,As Wordsworth said: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a verse so perfect in its mockery.*
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.
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.
AndOh sweet - as to the toilworn manIn the last example the breakdown is the more happy for being humorous in itself; as also in this:
The far-off sound of rippling river;
As to cadets in Hindostan
The fleeting remnant of their liver -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, briefly quoted earlier, Milne explains that
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 flatterAfter they had 'thrid God's cowslips as erst his heather', then 'Willie gan sing'; and in his song
(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 -Mists, bones, the singer himself, love-storiesAnd so to the Reflection.
And all least furlable things got 'furled';
Not with any design to conceal their 'glories',
But simply and solely to rhyme with 'world'.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 or other contributors to The Scottish Minstrel, a series of books published in the 1820s; 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 can't leave it there, however, seizing the opportunity to have a go at modern verse with his own alternative ending to Calverley's song-skit:
"But even he couldn't have parodied them," Milne concludes.**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!
And so to my own Reflection on my twin subjects.
Despite A.A. Milne's lasting fame there is a sense in which he and C.S. Calverley have suffered the same fate over the years. Only Milne's work for children has survived in the popular imagination, and although I'll be delighted if the forthcoming Finborough production should lead to a renewed interest in his theatre work I imagine it will be unlikely, for the reasons given in the previous post.
Milne was unfortunate enough to see his Calverley-inspired style of verse-making fall out of fashion during his lifetime when he was rejected by the very magazine which had once nurtured him. There is even a sense in which his poetic career at Punch was bookended by twin laments.
Assistant Editor of Punch when Owen Seaman presided as Editor, Milne was one of that publication's darlings, the poems which owed so much to Calverley's example attracting appreciative letters - and even gifts, as when he bemoaned the loss of his favourite preserve during the Great War:
O Northcliffe (Lord)! O Keiller! O Dundee!
O Crosse and Blackwell, Limited! O Seville!
O orange groves along the Middle Sea!
(O Jaffa, for example) O the devil —
Let Beef and Butter, Rolls and Rabbits fade,
But give me back my love, my Marmalade. ***
Replacement jellies continued to trickle in for quite some time as the magazine reached farther-flung outposts; Milne later quipped that the British Empire became for him a place in which marmalade was forever setting.
No corresponding tributes arrived in the Second World War, however, when Milne hymned the loss of another breakfast staple. A moment came when E.V. Knox, the then editor of Punch, broke it to him that the light verse he had been submitting each week was no longer wanted: he had lost his audience. The poems were later collected in hard covers by his faithful publisher as Behind the Lines, a few words of explanation or commentary appended to each one so that the collection could double as a diary of events at the start of the war. In his footnote to a new complaint about wartime shortages Milne sadly observed:
I like butter. I also like this poem. Strange to discover oneself in a world which could do so easily without either.
Links:
A.A. Milne's play The Truth About Blayds to be revived
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* Whenever Milne makes a playful allusion to Wordsworth there is always the possibility he is also enjoying the opportunity to tease his wife's uncle, Wordsworth authority Ernest de Selincourt, famous for an edition of The Prelude. Christopher Milne suggests, in his memoir The Enchanted Places, that in the Pooh books, when Rabbit says to Owl "You and I have brains. The others have fluff" his father had his intellectual in-law in mind as Owl.
Another piece in Year In, Year Out, Milne presents 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.
We are straying from Calverley in body if not in spirit, but you may remember that the undergraduate Milne's other acknowledged influence in his verses for Granta was J.K. Stephen, famous for this thunderous smack at Wordsworth:
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 even before he recked of academic uncles-in-law.
** 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.
*** This has echoes of Calverley's poem Beer:
Oh Beer! Oh Hodgson, Guinness, Allsop, Bass!
Names that should be on every infant's tongue!
Shall days and months and years and centuries pass,
And still your merits be unrecked, unsung?
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