I cannot sing the old songs, nor indeed any others, but I can read them, in the neglected works of Thomas Haynes Bayly. The name of Bayly may be unfamiliar, but every one almost has heard his ditties chanted--every one much over forty, at all events. "I'll hang my Harp on a Willow Tree," and "I'd be a Butterfly," and "Oh, no! we never mention Her," are dimly dear to every friend of Mr. Richard Swiveller. If to be sung everywhere, to hear your verses uttered in harmony with all pianos and quoted by the world at large, be fame, Bayly had it. He was an unaffected poet. He wrote words to airs, and he is almost absolutely forgotten. To read him is to be carried back on the wings of music to the bowers of youth; and to the bowers of youth I have been wafted, and to the old booksellers. You do not find on every stall the poems of Bayly; but a copy in two volumes has been discovered, edited by Mr. Bayly's widow (Bentley, 1844).
They saw the light in the same year as the present critic, and perhaps they ceased to be very popular before he was breeched. Mr.
Bayly, according to Mrs. Bayly, "ably penetrated the sources of the human heart," like Shakespeare and Mr. Howells. He also "gave to minstrelsy the attributes of intellect and wit," and "reclaimed even festive song from vulgarity," in which, since the age of Anacreon, festive song has notoriously wallowed. The poet who did all this was born at Bath in Oct. 1797. His father was a genteel solicitor, and his great-grandmother was sister to Lord Delamere, while he had a remote baronet on the mother's side. To trace the ancestral source of his genius was difficult, as in the case of Gifted Hopkins; but it was believed to flow from his maternal grandfather, Mr. Freeman, whom his friend, Lord Lavington, regarded as "one of the finest poets of his age." Bayly was at school at Winchester, where he conducted a weekly college newspaper. His father, like Scott's, would have made him a lawyer; but "the youth took a great dislike to it, for his ideas loved to dwell in the regions of fancy," which are closed to attorneys. So he thought of being a clergyman, and was sent to St. Mary's Hall, Oxford. There "he did not apply himself to the pursuit of academical honours," but fell in love with a young lady whose brother he had tended in a fatal illness. But "they were both too wise to think of living upon love, and, after mutual tears and sighs, they parted never to meet again.
The lady, though grieved, was not heartbroken, and soon became the wife of another." They usually do. Mr. Bayly's regret was more profound, and expressed itself in the touching ditty:
"Oh, no, we never mention her, Her name is never heard, My lips are now forbid to speak That once familiar word;From sport to sport they hurry me To banish my regret, And when they only worry me -[I beg Mr. Bayly's pardon]
"And when they win a smile from me, They fancy I forget.
"They bid me seek in change of scene The charms that others see, But were I in a foreign land They'd find no change in me.
'Tis true that I behold no more The valley where we met;I do not see the hawthorn tree, But how can I forget?"* * *
"They tell me she is happy now, [And so she was, in fact.]
The gayest of the gay;They hint that she's forgotten me;But heed not what they say.
Like me, perhaps, she struggles with Each feeling of regret:
'Tis true she's married Mr. Smith, But, ah, does she forget!"The temptation to parody is really too strong; the last lines, actually and in an authentic text, are:
"But if she loves as I have loved, She never can forget."Bayly had now struck the note, the sweet, sentimental note, of the early, innocent, Victorian age. Jeames imitated him:
"R. Hangeline, R. Lady mine, Dost thou remember Jeames!"We should do the trick quite differently now, more like this:
"Love spake to me and said:
'Oh, lips, be mute;Let that one name be dead, That memory flown and fled, Untouched that lute!
Go forth,' said Love, 'with willow in thy hand, And in thy hair Dead blossoms wear, Blown from the sunless land.
"'Go forth,' said Love; 'thou never more shalt see Her shadow glimmer by the trysting tree;But SHE is glad, With roses crowned and clad, Who hath forgotten thee!'
But I made answer: 'Love!
Tell me no more thereof, For she has drunk of that same cup as I.
Yea, though her eyes be dry, She garners there for me Tears salter than the sea, Even till the day she die.'
So gave I Love the lie."
I declare I nearly weep over these lines; for, though they are only Bayly's sentiment hastily recast in a modern manner, there is something so very affecting, mouldy, and unwholesome about them, that they sound as if they had been "written up to" a sketch by a disciple of Mr. Rossetti's.
In a mood much more manly and moral, Mr. Bayly wrote another poem to the young lady:
"May thy lot in life be happy, undisturbed by thoughts of me, The God who shelters innocence thy guard and guide will be.
Thy heart will lose the chilling sense of hopeless love at last, And the sunshine of the future chase the shadows of the past."It is as easy as prose to sing in this manner. For example:
