Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke
Lord de Tabley (John Byrne Leicester Warren) (18351895)Critical Introduction by John Drinkwater
[John Byrne Leicester Warren was born at Tabley House, Cheshire, on April 26, 1835, and succeeded to his title in 1887. He was a distinguished bibliophil, numismatist, and botanist, being a leading authority on brambles. Always of secluded habits, he spent his later years in close retirement, and died at Ryde on November 22, 1895. His earlier books of poems were published under the names of G. F. Preston and William Lancaster, while Philoctetes (1866) had merely “M. A.” on the title-page, with the not unnatural result that the poem was for a moment attributed to Matthew Arnold, greatly to the concern of de Tabley’s modesty. Rehearsals (1870) and Searching the Net (1873) bore the poet’s name, but it was not until 1893, when Poems Dramatic and Lyrical collected the best of his work, that he won anything like due public recognition. A second series with the same title appeared in 1895, and a posthumous collection, Orpheus in Thrace in 1901, was followed by Collected Poems in 1903.]
No more striking illustration of this fact could be well found than the work of Lord de Tabley. Of the essential elements of poetry there is scarcely one with which he was not richly, very richly, endowed. It was in no thin vein that poetry worked in his spirit; it flowed abundantly and was liberal of its many virtues. He perceived the world clearly and intensely as a poet, he was fortunate in a scholarship that quickened and mellowed his vision, he had an exquisitely inherited and trained manner, he had a great sense of diction and an almost phenomenal vocabulary, and his poetic temper was nobly sensitive to all thrilling and poignant beauty. And yet, for all his splendid qualities, his is not among the great names. In reading through his work, imposing in volume, there is scarcely a page that does not reward us with some notable excellence; scarcely one that does not force us to the opinion that never was there more exasperating genius. The poetry is disturbed in its movement by something over which it seems to have no dominion. As is generally the case, this disturbing factor is not constant, though with de Tabley it is commonly the product of one characteristic disability—a kind of intellectual inertia, a refusal, that in the light of his proved judgment and gifts must seem to be almost deliberate, to spend that last ounce of energy that must always go to the achievement of perfection, in poetry as in other things. From positive blemishes his work is remarkably free; indeed he may, in comparison with almost any poet of whom one can think, be said to be almost impeccable in this matter. Poor or false images such as—
When, however, every deduction has been made on account of his general weakness,—and the penalty is a heavy one, depriving a poet, who we feel might so easily have secured them, of the highest honours—de Tabley remains a poet of great distinction, one whose place in the history of English poetry is secure. Of detailed felicities his work is full.
In his shorter poems one might perhaps wish that he turned less constantly for his subjects to classical mythology. Not that he handled these subjects ill; on the contrary, he moves here with his most assured ease. And yet the frequent remoteness of interest, the reiteration of established imagery, the evocation of an emotion from a literary memory rather than from direct experience, are apt to grow a little enervating. His poetry in this kind, though it would be folly to question its sincerity, loses some companionable quality. We remember then that de Tabley was a lonely and secluded man, and we feel that here is rather a lonely and secluded poetry. His poems of the English country-side, however, are quite another matter. He is one of the rare poets who can bring all the precision of a trained naturalist to the service of poetry, and with him the display of minute knowledge is as delightful as it commonly is tedious. He made successful experiments too, such as The Sale at the Farm, in a homely manner not altogether apt to his genius, and in one at least of his more whimsical moods he achieved, in the Study of a Spider, a masterpiece of its kind.