Part 5

In 1825 (after being elected to the Athenaeum) Mr. Bayly "at last found favour in the eyes of Miss Hayes." He presented her with a little ruby heart, which she accepted, and they were married, and at first were well- to-do, Miss Hayes being the heiress of Benjamin Hayes, Esq., of Marble Hill, in county Cork. A friend of Mr. Bayly's described him thus:

"I never have met on this chilling earth So merry, so kind, so frank a youth, In moments of pleasure a smile all mirth, In moments of sorrow a heart of truth. I have heard thee praised, I have seen thee led By Fashion along her gay career; While beautiful lips have often shed Their flattering poison in thine ear."

Yet he says that the poet was unspoiled. On his honeymoon, at Lord Ashdown's, Mr. Bayly, flying from some fair sirens, retreated to a bower, and there wrote his world-famous "I'd be a Butterfly."

"I'd be a butterfly, living a rover, Dying when fair things are fading away."

The place in which the deathless strains welled from the singer's heart was henceforth known as "Butterfly Bower." He now wrote a novel, "The Aylmers," which has gone where the old moons go, and he became rather a literary lion, and made the acquaintance of Theodore Hook. The loss of a son caused him to write some devotional verses, which were not what he did best; and now he began to try comedies. One of them, Sold for a Song, succeeded very well. In the stage-coach between Wycombe Abbey and London he wrote a successful little lever de rideau called Perfection; and it was lucky that he opened this vein, for his wife's Irish property got into an Irish bog of dishonesty and difficulty. Thirty- five pieces were contributed by him to the British stage. After a long illness, he died on April 22nd, 1829. He did not live, this butterfly minstrel, into the winter of human age.

Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom Moore of much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of the most vapid and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits, trees, breeze, sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds, regret, deception, and so forth, into fervid anapaestics. Perhaps his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry composers will endure and singers will accept. Why, "words for music" are almost invariably trash now, though the words of Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister art, and don't know anything about it. But any one can see that words like Bayly's are and have long been much more popular with musical people than words like Shelley's, Keats's, Shakespeare's, Fletcher's, Lovelace's, or Carew's. The natural explanation is not flattering to musical people: at all events, the singing world doted on Bayly.

"She never blamed him--never, But received him when he came With a welcome sort of shiver, And she tried to look the same.

"But vainly she dissembled, For whene'er she tried to smile, A tear unbidden trembled In her blue eye all the while."

This was pleasant for "him"; but the point is that these are lines to an Indian air. Shelley, also, about the same time, wrote Lines to an Indian air; but we may "swear, and save our oath," that the singers preferred Bayly's. Tennyson and Coleridge could never equal the popularity of what follows. I shall ask the persevering reader to tell me where Bayly ends, and where parody begins:

"When the eye of beauty closes, When the weary are at rest, When the shade the sunset throws is But a vapour in the west; When the moonlight tips the billow With a wreath of silver foam, And the whisper of the willow Breaks the slumber of the gnome,-- Night may come, but sleep will linger, When the spirit, all forlorn, Shuts its ear against the singer, And the rustle of the corn Round the sad old mansion sobbing Bids the wakeful maid recall Who it was that caused the throbbing Of her bosom at the ball."

Will this not do to sing just as well as the original? and is it not true that "almost any man you please could reel it off for days together"? Anything will do that speaks of forgetting people, and of being forsaken, and about the sunset, and the ivy, and the rose.

"Tell me no more that the tide of thine anguish Is red as the heart's blood and salt as the sea; That the stars in their courses command thee to languish, That the hand of enjoyment is loosened from thee!

"Tell me no more that, forgotten, forsaken, Thou roamest the wild wood, thou sigh'st on the shore. Nay, rent is the pledge that of old we had taken, And the words that have bound me, they bind thee no more!

"Ere the sun had gone down on thy sorrow, the maidens Were wreathing the orange's bud in thy hair, And the trumpets were tuning the musical cadence That gave thee, a bride, to the baronet's heir.

"Farewell, may no thought pierce thy breast of thy treason; Farewell, and be happy in Hubert's embrace. Be the belle of the ball, be the bride of the season, With diamonds bedizened and languid in lace."

This is mine, and I say, with modest pride, that it is quite as good as--

"Go, may'st thou be happy, Though sadly we part, In life's early summer Grief breaks not the heart.

"The ills that assail us As speedily pass As shades o'er a mirror, Which stain not the glass."

Anybody could do it, we say, in what Edgar Poe calls "the mad pride of intellectuality," and it certainly looks as if it could be done by anybody. For example, take Bayly as a moralist. His ideas are out of the centre. This is about his standard:

"CRUELTY.

"'Break not the thread the spider Is labouring to weave.' I said, nor as I eyed her Could dream she would deceive.

"Her brow was pure and candid, Her tender eyes above; And I, if ever man did, Fell hopelessly in love.

"For who could deem that cruel So fair a face might be? That eyes so like a jewel Were only paste for me?

"I wove my thread, aspiring Within her heart to climb; I wove with zeal untiring For ever such a time!

"But, ah! that thread was broken All by her fingers fair, The vows and prayers I've spoken Are vanished into air!"

Did Bayly write that ditty or did I? Upon my word, I can hardly tell. I am being hypnotised by Bayly. I lisp in numbers, and the numbers come like mad. I can hardly ask for a light without abounding in his artless vein. Easy, easy it seems; and yet it was Bayly after all, not you nor I, who wrote the classic--

"I'll hang my harp on a willow tree, And I'll go to the war again, For a peaceful home has no charm for me, A battlefield no pain; The lady I love will soon be a bride, With a diadem on her brow. Ah, why did she flatter my boyish pride? She is going to leave me now!"

It is like listening, in the sad yellow evening, to the strains of a barrel organ, faint and sweet, and far away. A world of memories come jigging back--foolish fancies, dreams, desires, all beckoning and bobbing to the old tune: