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The Tragedy of Richard Middleton

Of all the critics of the universe, the poet is the finest, for not on the humbleness of origins does he dwell nor on the triumph of power, but, accepting these things as postulates, he creates links whereby he may bind together the myriad glories of sensation and emotion, making from them a daisy-chain of Nature. It is he who culls the flower of poesy whilst his readers obtain the perfume; who weaves that they may preserve the tapestry; who suffers until his name becomes a synonym for sin; who, to be remembered, has first to die. "Vita enim mortuorum in memoria vivorum est posita."

Such a one was Richard Middleton. His poetry rings true as a new sovereign. It is the expression of a thousand forms and fancies, showing him to be the shaper of his own temperament and the wielder of his own moods: it bursts forth like a butterfly, and one reads it thinking how soon the spirit is to pass away. It seems almost like one of those rare Hashes of inspiration which light for a moment the wrinkled face of God. Bewildered, have I strayed into the gallery of his mind, to stand entranced before those beautiful pen-pictures of which one, like a landscape of Lancret's, will suggest the subtle delicacy of a Keats—and another, deeper-toned like a picture of Watts, the spiritual ascendancy of a Francis Thomson; yet, withal, each claiming attention by reason of its harmony and originality, and each heralding the artist as "one of the small band." There was something inherent in them, some indefinable essence, which led me to seek information as to who he was and where he lived.

According to Mr. Frank Harris, Richard Middleton was educated at St. Paul's School, spent some years at a London insurance office, and gave up a good position to write poetry. In his last year (and this only twenty-nine!; he turned to writing stories, and, in depicting the character of boys, he ranks with Meredith, Barrie, and Farrar, and those two immortals, Mark Twain and Booth Takington. From Brussels came the news of his suicide. Little is known of it, but one can surmise it was the disgust of art and everything that drove him to it. Pantheism, he found, had been little better than a narcotic, and, in articula mortis, he turned towards Him, writing across a card, "A broken and a contrite spirit Thou wilt not despise" Let us hope that the select majority of the next world will not be as chary of handing him his laurels as it was in this one. The public—"ah! how many fools does it take to make a public!"—the public, proud of the fact that they are able to float, invariably drift down the current, knowing full well as they near the mill-pond that there will be somebody there to drag them from their precarious position, although no chance of escape may exist for such social outcasts as Parson Rosmer and his unfortunate Rebecca. The rescuer may be a genius, philantropist, or reformer—it is of small account: he will be left outside to dry his clothes whilst the rescued ones sit round a blazing fire, eating chestnuts and narrating what methods they would have adopted bad they not been saved too soon. The tragedy of Richard Middleton is but one of the many: he, too, like Clarence Mangan and Ernest Dowson, crossed early his Rubicon of unfulfilled desire.

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In his book, "Poems and Songs," there are chants of flowers and the seasons, poems of kings, galleons and pirates, of lovers, tears, dreams, of the glad women, regret, the blind cripple, and there are laments, lullabies, nocturnes, serenades, and an epithalamium. To no one can be more fittingly applied that line of Wordsworth's, "The world is too much for us"; for never was any man more world-forsaken, world-forgot. Those herbs which should have been soothing balm to his troubled senses were as so much salt in his wound, and in his mouth the fruits of existence were not alone bitter, but bad.

"Dear God, what means a poet more or less?"

Time after time, his imagination, drunken with beauty, seems to race away like a Bacchante on some festival night, and he becomes another Orpheus in her hands. Where there is consolation, he encounters suspicion; where philosophy, disquietude. In his extreme sensitiveness, he sees the emptiness of the passing show,—the tragic sadness lurking in the face of the clown, the poor attempt of the soubrette to disguise the chisellings of time, the senseless and unending cracking of whips by the tamer,—he see it all, but he turns away seeking white silence everywhere, and saying:

"We are but fretful shades that dreamed before
That love, and are no more."

In his "Chant-Pagan" does the poet clutch the thread of Ariadne and attempt to evade the minotaur of existence and escape from the labyrinth of his soul. He makes a painful and perilous ascent up the steeps of his memory, reaches security, and then stares wistfully at his steps as they crumble in a thin dust down to the sea. He would leap from his ledge that he might tear down the grinning stars, those unwearying spectators of his destiny, but ever there twines itself around him some briar which binds him, all-unwilling to the earth.

"And while the fat god panted in his sleep
And snorted centuries, I hated him."

Weariness has gained a mastery over him: it mocks at him until, like the Paris of .Rupert Brooke, he becomes tired in the presence of his goddess, tired of the honey of her voice, tired of her gifts and listless of her scorn: it drives its inquisitional gospel into his head until he is compelled to become a pantheist even in his belief of his own worth: it makes him fixate on Death, the strangest figure of all in the procession of woes, and from this he cannot avert his gaze. A Prince of thwarted ecstasy, he calls himself, little cognisant of the superficiality of joys with their phantom shadows of regret, little realising that, in appearing to have nothing he has everything, for to one, and only to one, who stares upward from his pit of suffering, can the small things appear in all the colours of their creation. With the dexterity of a conjurer, he changes the purple blossoms of love into a chalice of sweet wine: It spills over in golden tears before his eyes, and he is dazzled by the illusion, by the very immensity of his dreams. With their terrible simplicity, the colossal things of the word shout at him until, nevrose, tormente, sound-saturated, he hears nothing of their message and turns him to the children, to the mysteries of the infinite, thinking, "They are for me, surely for me." Yet even these he finds but fragrance, and like the knight who will loiter on the cold page 31 hill-side until the end of time, he is enthralled by the loveliness of a boy whom he follows into the woods:

And yet he wept and would not play,
And all the birds made moan above,
With well-a-day and well-a-day,
Ah! well-a-day for love.

He delves into the innocence and beauty of childhood for the wealth of childhood for the wealth of his thoughts, believing mysticism to be interwoven inextricably with Life and wondering whether the reflection that comes from the whiteness of sun-bathed flesh is more glorious than the death of an infant who has not known how sad it is to live. Only, indeed, next to his adoration of youth does he place his love of fairies, those inmates of the "pixie-haunted" woods. In his song, he becomes their Sylvanus: they are his disciples and his religion. He hears always the music of their Pandean pipes: he lies in wait for them, and when he thinks they are within his embrace, he looks down finding but a twig which screams with pain at being broken, as did Jacopo in the seventh circle of Dante's "Inferno."Perhaps it was their spirit of nothingness that appealed to him, for even his life, brimful as it was with hope, promise, and dispair, he counted but little more than a mistress for whom his passions had waned; until, finally., he became enamoured of the daughter of the dawn-to-come. She is a woman infinitely lovable and beautiful beyond all things:

But then she came, and lo! it seemed
I had forgotten life too long—
God had perfected while I dreamed
Another world, another song.

What, after all, can we know of one who knew so little of himself? Maybe the curtain did not. ring down too soon, for who knows, who can tell? Yet, at least, let this be said: the scene is empty and by his death the world is a poorer place. The shackles of the years have been lifted, and the melancholy warder, Existence, need no longer peer into his cell, for now his daily greeting would meet with no response save a ghostly chuckle from the stones.

W.E.L.