Evening Post. SATURDAY, MAY 17, 1930. VERSES TO ORDER

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 115, 17 May 1930, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, MAY 17, 1930. VERSES TO ORDER

The British Government lias not taken long to fill the office vacated by the death of Dr. Robert Bridges. The "Daily Express," which often seems to be more anxious to say something smart and unconventional than to be quite sure that it is talking sense, had expressed the hope that the office would remain vacant. Why saddle the country, it asked, with the laughing-stock of a public poot as though poetry were a form, of activity to bo supervised and turned on and turned off by the Lord Chamberlain aiid the Office of Works? The argument of the "Daily Express" would have been less out of place in Russia, where poetry appears to be becoming Sovietized under the care of a Government Department, and private trading in verse may soon put a man in the hands of the Tcheka as surely as the infringement of the State monopoly in bread or meat. But Mr. Mac Donald's Government is not so Red as to be contemplating an application of its theories about "the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange" to the sphere ""of literary production. In its attempt to make the plain prose of, the "Daily Herald" marketable, British Labour has a sufficiently arduous contract in hand just now without adding a Poetical Branch to the Board of Trade or inviting its benevolent Commissioner of Works, Mr. Lansbury, to establish a Statecontrolled Helicon in Hyde Park as well as a Lido. The establishment of a Poetry Department under the care of the Commissioner of Works is not further removed from practical politics than the appointment of a Poet Laureate condemned to turn the tap of his inspiration on o^ off at his employers' bidding. If the one is a possibility of the remote future, the other is an impossibility of a remote past which can never be, recalled. In its eager endeavour to be thoroughly up to date the "Daily Express" has put itself about a century behind the times. To produce verses to order was one of the obligations of the office* in, the eighteenth century, and the results were' appalling. No celebration of a Royal Birthday or 'a New Year's. Day was complete in those dark days without an official ode, which was usually set to music. Rhymed loyalty without inspiration was a modern equivalent of bricks without straw. Year by year, in conscientious compliance with the specifications of their contracts, the Eusdens and the Pyes of the period duly delivered the bricks which have recently supplied the anthologists of bad verse with a delectable quarry. But while we laugh over the shocking stuff we may surely spare a tear of sympathy and admiration for the fidelity with which, for about £100 a year, these loyal practitioners laboured at their exhausting and nauseating task," With the passing of Pye and the dawn of a new century come the hope of a change. Pye had held the office for 23 years, and during that time he turned out loyal odes iat the rate of two a year which bore no stronger marks of the poetic afflatus than his prose treatise entitled "A Summary of the Duties of a Justice of the Peace," which also appeared during his term of office. On the death of Pye in 1813, the position was offered to Sir Walter Scott, who hesitated to accept, partly because "the office is a ridiculous one" and partly because he did not wish to appear as "engrossing : a petty emolument which might do real service to some poorer brother of the Muses." His doubts were confirmed by the very strong advice he received from the Duke of Buccleuch. , Walter Scott, Poet Laureate, wrote the Duke, ceases to be the Walter Scott of the "Lay," "Marmion," etc. . . . The Poet Laureate would stick to you and your productions like a piece of court plaster. . . . Only think of being chaunted and recitatived by a parcel of hoarse and squeaking choristers on a birthday for the edification of the bishops, pages, maids of honour, and gentlemen-pensioners! Oh,1 horrible! Thrice horrible! So Scott, feeling himself "inadequate to the fitting discharge of the regularly recurring duty of periodical composition," let the prize go and suggested that it should be given to his young friend Southey. In his letter to Southey on the subject he admitted that the laurel has certainly been tarnished by some of its wearers, and as at present managed its duties are inconvenient and somewhat liable to ridicule. But Scott thought that "the Regent's good sense would lead him to lay aside these regular commemorations," and Southey, thinking that he had made a valid stipulation to that effect, accepted. But the emoluments which Scott had estimated at £300 or £400 proved to be about £90, and no sooner was Southey's appointment known than he received a note from Sir William Parsons, the Court Musician, requesting that I would let him have the ode as soon as possible, Mr._ Pyo having always provided him with it six weeks before New Year's Day, Mxaa it was that Southey inherited

the chains, as well as the laurels of his predecessors, and he continued to wear them both for thirty years. But on his death in 1843 there was no question about the freedom of his successor. When the position was offered to Wordsworth the responsibilities naturally appeared too onerous to an old man of 73, but the offer was pressed upon him hy Queen Victoria and her advisers as a recognition of what he had' already done and not as a call to further service. Do not bo deterred, wrote Sir Eobert Poel, by the fear of any obligations which the appointment may bo supposed to imply. I will undertake that you shall have nothing required from you. The promise was faithfully kept, and Woodsworth, as Frederick Myers says, , filled with silent dignity the post of Laureate till after seven years' space a worthy successor roeeived This laurel greener from the brows Of him that uttered nothing base. .Those lines from the Dedication to the Queen of Tennyson's first laureate volume have been much admired, but they are open to the objection that in the capacity of laureate, to which he is expressly referring, it was inevitable that Wordsworth should have uttered nothing base; seeing that he had uttered nothing at all. On the death of Wordsworth at the age of 80, Queen Victoria, still acting on the principle of "safety first," offered the position to Samuel Rogers, whose age was 87, and the fact that it was to be regarded as an honour and a sinecure was emphasised more precisely than before in a letter written by Prince Albert on her behalf: Although the spirit of the times has put an end to the practice (at all times objectionable) of exacting laudatory odea from the holder of that office, the Queen attaches importance to its maintenance from its historical antiquity and the means it affords to the Sovereign of a more personal connection with the poets of the country through one. of their chiefs. I am authorised, accordingly, to offer to you this honorary post, and can toll you that it will give Her Majesty great pleasure if it were accepted by one whom she 'has known so long, and who would so much adorn it; but that she would not have thought of offering it to you at' your advanced age if any duties or trouble were attached to it. When the veteran of 87 declined the compliment, it was offered on his recommendation to a young man of 41 in similar terms. Tennyson was reminded that the ancient duties of this Office, which consisted in laudatory Odes to the Sovereign, have been long, as you are probably aware, in abeyance, and have nevor been called for during the' Reign of Her present Majesty. Tennyson took the office as a free man, and it has retained its freedom ever since. By an odd coincidence he declared in a volume published in the very same year (1850) in which he accepted the appointment: I do but sing because t must And pipe but as the linnet sing. In these words the "Daily Express" might perhaps discover a confession that the young laureate's bonds were, always beginning to chafe; that he was singing not because he wanted to sing, but because his employers said that he must; and that his singing was that of the song-bird in a cage which, as another poet says, "puts high Heaven in a, rage." Unfortunately for this theory, however, "In Mempriam" was written and published before the Laureateship was vacant, and Prince Albert's enthusiastic admiration of the poem^waS one of the reasons why Tennyson got the appointment. Thq bonds from which the office was freed in honour of Wordsworth and Tennyson have never been restored. Bridges was as free after acceptance of the office as he was before, and Mr. John Masefield, in whom he has a'worthy successor, will write or sing or be silent as his inspiration or lack of inspiration moves him, and not at the dictation of the Lord Chamberlain or the Office of Works.,