Poems (Shore)/In Memoriam
IN MEMORIAM
L. S.
The Editor's best thanks are due to Mr. Frederic Harrison for the following Note, kindly supplied at request, and with his permission inserted here.
IN MEMORIAM
L. S.
The author of these poems was one who lived continuously a life of pure imagination in an ideal world of her own—one whose conceptions the busy world of to-day found little leisure to study, until she had withdrawn from it finally into the long silence. It is often said, how little do we know of many a rare quality in our midst, which the turmoil of life prevents us from valuing as we should. It was thus that the life and work of Louisa Shore passed almost unknown to the world at large.
Audience fit, though few, she had. But neither they, nor indeed she herself, quite understood the rank she might have held amongst contemporary poets, if she could have brought herself to claim her place—even to know what she might have claimed; if her health, energies, and temperament had been more buoyant; had not early bereavement and isolation from the active world cast her whole lyric mood into a permanent minor key. She had one of those delicate natures in which sorrow does not make itself strongly apparent, but sinks quietly and lastingly into the depths of their being. The death in their first youth of a loved sister, and then of a brother, the early loss of her mother, and the seclusion from the world of her father—and all this, together with uncertain health and a singular indifference (nay, rather an aversion) to the pleasures and distractions of conventional society—stamped upon all her intellectual products a note of uniform pathos, which the unthinking might easily mistake for hopelessness.
This tone is very marked even in her first verses as a girl in her 'teens, and it is maintained in "Gemma," in "Hannibal," in the "Elegies," and in the other dramas and lyrics. It was, I should have thought, rather a characteristic of her imagination than of her disposition, which, if far from elastic, was not otherwise prone to melancholy. But I speak from imperfect knowledge, as one who came to be a friend of her family after the completion of her principal literary work. I did not make her acquaintance until she was somewhat past middle age, being myself much her junior, and of her retired life in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire I saw nothing. But, during the comparatively short period of her life when we often met, I learned to know something of the rare gifts of imagination and poetic instinct which she joined to a peculiar refinement and nobility of spirit.
It is this last feature of her mind and work—this ideality and nobility of spirit—which is, I think, the special distinction of Louisa Shore. Of all the men and women with whom in my literary life I have been thrown, she, I think, lived the most continuously alone with her own creations of great tragedies and fine aspirations. All her mental and moral characteristics, her own set purpose and outer circumstances, combined to detach her life from the world around, to plant it in an island of fancy, where her spirit refreshed itself from the great sources of all tragedy—pity and horror.
In this world of her own she chose to live, writing at long intervals to please herself, now and then printing some pieces at the request of her sister, but always without her name, and hardly making them known even to her near friends. This strict withdrawal from the public eye reminds us of a like peculiarity in a man of genius—Edward Fitzgerald, whose rare genius was only known to the general public after his death. He, as we know, wrote only to please himself; he destroyed, or sought to destroy, many a fine piece of his own work, even after it was in type. The friends of Edward Fitzgerald have saved his name from the public indifference to which he strove to consign it. And her friends very justly hope to do some such thing for the memory of Louisa Shore.
I knew her shortly after the publication of "Hannibal" (1861 ),which I read and re-read with admiration. It is rather a historical romance in verse than a drama proper. Its two parts, its length (more than 6000 lines), with more than forty personages, take it out of that order of poetry. As a historical romance, carefully studied from the original histories; it is a noble conception of a great hero; and the tragedy of the fall of Carthage and her glorious martyr-chief, is one of the grandest themes in ancient history. The merit of this piece, thought out for long years in retirement by a young woman (and, as a drama, overladen with thought and knowledge), is to seize the historical conditions with such reality and such truth, and to have kept so sustained a flight at a high level of heroic dignity. The interest lies in the conception of Hannibal's career and genius; but the execution is far from inadequate. And there is true vigour and nobility in such scenes as the conference between Hannibal and Scipio, in the last scene in the senate of Carthage, and especially in the last farewell of Ada and Hannibal—which is essentially romantic rather than classical or dramatic.
In "Gemma of the Isles," in "The Lost Son," and in the unfinished dramas, we find the same tragic situations, the cruel alternatives of destiny, presented with an equal absorption in noble aspirations and in self-renunciation before the altar of Duty. There are musical lyrics, graceful fancies, and pathetic legends, scattered through them all. But the quality which I find most constant and most marked is an air of sustained fellowship with a company of imagined beings in an ideal world of larger mould and loftier souls. A true poet who is also a fine critic has called poetry the "criticism of life," and he has even gone on to say "that the strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry." The dominant and absorbing idea of Louisa Shore in poetry was to treat it as a school for the great problems of life—to hold on to the heroic, to the religious, in poetry—religious, be it said, in a human, not in a theological sense.
She reached her highest mark, I think, in the third and final part of the poem called Elegies, embodying her life-long memory of the sister and the brother lost in her earlier years. These noble verses have thought, passion, fancy, and music. I speak of the lines beginning—
Vain broken promise of unfinished lives!
and which end—
Forget not the Forgotten and Unknown.
These truly grand lines were inspired by the same thought that created the well-known poem of George Eliot which opens thus—
Oh! may I join the choir invisible.
But the lines by L. on this splendid theme are, I hold, superior in force, in sincerity and fervour, and assuredly in rhythmical beauty. They recall also the fine lines on the same motive of Margaret Woods,
Praise to the unknown Dead!
All three poems have been, by permission, inserted in the hymn-book styled "The Service of Man," and they are frequently recited at Newton Hall, especially on the last day of the year, the day of all the Dead.
The three poems in the same tone which follow were first published in the little volume called "Elegies and Memorials," and contain some poetry of a very fine quality. I feel a special interest in the piece called "A Requiem," which turns on a pathetic scene I witnessed in a country churchyard, and had suggested to her as a subject. It would be very wrong to condemn as pessimism even such a mournful dirge as this, inasmuch as it ends with these inspiring words:
Pray for all souls that they may see
A light from the great time to be
Already streak the East with red;
A perfect earth, perfected man,
To finish all that we began,
To be what we would fain have been.
This indeed was her constant thought. Her most sombre visions ever saw the east streaked with red.
I have left myself small space to dwell on the poems and fragments now first published in this volume; but they will answer for themselves. The unfinished dramas cannot but awaken regrets that they should remain fragments. It is evidently not that imagination was failing but that the author's own views of poetic perfection were in constant development. The scheme of "Pedro the Cruel" was a fine one—the struggles of a nature of generous instincts and violent temperament subdued by the love of a noble-hearted woman, but turned finally by uncontrolled power and a sense of early and repeated wrong to ambition and revenge. It would have been impressive to have traced step by step this change into the historic tyrant. What we have are some powerful scenes, worked out in stately verses, between Don Pedro and his beloved Maria, and between the brothers Fadrique and Henriquez.
The "Irene" displays better than any other piece the writer's intense worship of Nature, which in this poem she was pleased to people with a world of imaginary beings. The Nature worship she continued to the end; whilst the fairy visions which had been the fancy of her childhood, thus once recalled, died quite away and were succeeded, as we see in her later verses, by imaginings more human and concrete.
But the dramatic piece that will attract the chief interest is "Olga," which, though not complete, has its scheme and dénouement so worked out that its effect as a drama can be judged. It is, I think, the most original, and perhaps the most powerful, of her dramatic efforts. The plot, however startling in its incidents and tragic in its issues, is entirely within the range of practicable things, and is not as improbable as many nearly desperate deeds which have been committed and attempted in our own age. The concluding scenes are grandly conceived, and worked out with real tragic rapidity of action. Indeed, it is not saying too much to expect that they would furnish the basis of a powerful piece for the stage. It would require a Sarah Bernhardt to do justice to the conflict in Olga's soul of love, horror, heroism, and remorse.
Our memories charged with a sense of rare poetic endowment in one whom temperament and circumstances stinted in achievement during life, her friends, with whom I am permitted to join myself] stand round her grave; and each of us must in silence recall those typical words of elegy over the "vain broken promise of unfinished lives:"
His saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inani
Munere———
F. H.