Читать книгу Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the 'Quaker Poet' - Christopher Stokes W. - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION

In 1831 the poet laureate Robert Southey wrote simply ‘who has not heard of Bernard Barton?’¹ It is an ironic question for the modern reader – or even the modern scholar – for whom his poetry has passed into almost total obscurity. Yet certainly for the reader of the 1820s and 1830s, he would have been immediately familiar as the author of several volumes of verse, a key devotional poet, and a prolific contributor to periodicals and literary annuals. Reputedly, an English actor called Barton was announced in a Paris theatre in 1822 and ‘the audience called out to inquire if it was the Quaker poet’.² Indeed, one could argue that Barton did not even need to be named: a reference to ‘the Quaker Poet’ or ‘broad brims’ in the pages of a journal was enough to elicit instant recognition. Friendships and correspondence with the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb and Edward FitzGerald (translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám) ensured his work remained culturally visible after his death in 1849, but by the time of E. V. Lucas’s biography in 1893, his star was waning – before being eclipsed entirely. This occlusion is a shame. His is a unique nineteenth-century poetic voice: one of sun-dappled Suffolk woodland and heath; gentle reflections on history, time and loss; and affectionately painted domestic scenes. It is influenced by Wordsworth, Cowper and Pope; the sentimental conventions of late Romantic writing; and fellow county poets such as George Crabbe and Robert Bloomfield. Nor is he limited to one strain: across his work one finds devotional verse, political writing, ekphrasis and even zesty satire.

One special and distinctive element that shapes this poetic voice is Quakerism. Southey’s rhetorical question was asked in the context of a remarkable emergence: in 1815, William Hazlitt had concluded that ‘a Quaker poet would be a literary phenomenon’ and almost a contradiction in terms.³ The Society of Friends, a once revolutionary seventeenth-century sect that had retreated into quietism in the eighteenth century, appeared quintessentially unpoetic. They eschewed fashion and decoration, never attended concerts or dances, proscribed novels and tightly controlled practices of reading among members. They were plain, pious and, on their own account, ‘peculiar’. Although it is not true to say there were no Quaker poets whatsoever – Thomas Ellwood, John Scott of Amwell and the Lake District writer Thomas Wilkinson are three examples – the not entirely invalid perception was that Quakers had no poetic tradition of which to speak.⁴ Barton was therefore a trailblazer and helped lay the ground for a striking proliferation of Quaker poetry in the nineteenth century, such as that of William, Mary and Richard Howitt; Hannah Mary Rathbone; Jeremiah Wiffen; Sarah Hoare; Amelia Opie and others (including John Greenleaf Whittier in America). This volume aims to understand and present Barton as both a serious Romantic writer and a seminal Quaker poet – and indeed a Quaker Romantic – by collecting a modern selection of his verse for the first time.

‘A Maker of Literary Luxuries’: Barton’s Life

Barton was born on 31 January 1784 in Carlisle. He knew little of his parents, John and Mary (née Done) Barton. Mary died days after giving birth, and indeed Barton only learnt at school that his father’s second wife, Elizabeth Horne (1760–1833), was not his biological mother, although this appears to have had no traumatic effect whatsoever. His father – a manufacturer who had married into the Friends, and one of nine Quakers among those who founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade – died in 1789. Elizabeth moved to be close to her parents in Tottenham, and the young Barton hence spent his days between London and a short-lived but well-respected Quaker boarding school in Ipswich.⁵ At 14, he was apprenticed to an Essex shopkeeper, Samuel Jesup, and in 1807 married his master’s niece, Lucy Jesup (1781–1808). By this time, he had moved to Woodbridge in Suffolk, the small town that would effectively define his life: most of his poems refer no further than a 15-mile radius around it. However, tragedy struck and history repeated itself when his wife died giving birth to their daughter, also named Lucy. Grief-stricken, he dissolved his commercial interests (a corn and coal business with his brother-in-law Benjamin Jesup) and left to become a private tutor in Liverpool. When he returned, a year later, he became a clerk in a bank run by the Quaker Alexander family, a position he would hold until his death 40 years later.

It is about this time that Barton began to write. Initially, this appears to have been in the provincial press under the curious pen name ‘Marcus’: the earliest poem I have identified is ‘To Walter Scott, Esq., On Perusing His Lady of the Lake’, in the Suffolk Chronicle of 9 June 1810. By 1812 he had enough verses to compile his first volume Metrical Effusions; this was followed in 1818 by Poems, by an Amateur, printed for the author by subscription. Both these volumes were anonymous, as was all his work of this decade (or under the initials B.B.). The 1818 list of subscribers is a good indication of the poet’s social networks and the type of friendships he cultivated throughout his career, as well as his life in the 1810s specifically – the latter a period for which evidence like letters is scant. They include extended family, Quaker connections near and far, clergymen from Suffolk villages, individuals from Woodbridge and Ipswich (some of whom are also the subjects of poems in the volume), and influential gentry and other county worthies. Poets William Wordsworth, Thomas Moore and Robert Southey are also included. Yet the print run of Poems, by an Amateur was extremely limited at around 150 copies. It was only in the following decade that his poetic career truly prospered and he was catapulted into prominence, spurred by the first volume under his own name – Poems (1820), which gathered much of his best earlier verse with new material, and eventually ran to four editions with revisions and additions.

It was the beginning of a prolonged and prolific phase in his literary life. Across the 1820s, he published no fewer than six major volumes. He became a frequent contributor to the newly relaunched London Magazine, which printed Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and many other major figures. Not only did his contributions to the London raise his literary profile, but some accounts also suggest that he met one of his closest correspondents, Charles Lamb, at one of its dinners. The decade also saw the first of the literary annuals, Frederic Shoberl’s Forget-Me-Not, quickly followed by a slew of imitators. These were popular commercial offerings, released for Christmas and New Year, dominated by sentimental poetry and interspersed with engravings. Barton would go on to publish much of his poetry in such gift books. He was reviewed well, reprinted regularly and even received a generous annuity to support his work organised by sympathetic Quakers led by Joseph John Gurney. Although he followed some famous advice from Charles Lamb not to abandon his clerkship at the bank, his poetic labour was intensive: letters from the time are abuzz with concern about reviews and royalties, and Robert Southey even counsels him to avoid the fate of Henry Kirke White, the consumptive, proto-Keatsian genius supposedly destroyed by overwork.

His pace slackened in the 1830s. Although he never ceased to write, his late phase includes only two major volumes: The Reliquary (1836), jointly authored with his daughter, and 1845’s Household Verses. He continued living in Woodbridge, now in more spacious accommodation (his first cottage, which still stands, is a conspicuously narrow timber-framed house). He deepened old social connections and formed new ones, one of the most important being with Edward FitzGerald, who would go on to enter into an entirely unsuitable and short-lived marriage with Barton’s daughter Lucy after the Quaker poet’s death. Barton had been a keen walker, but was increasingly sedentary, grumbling half-comically about exercise – although he never lost his love for the local landscape and seascape. He rarely left Woodbridge and was an amiable fixture in town life. An 1855 article recalls his kind and cheerful demeanour on making a local visit, describing a deceptively young-looking man on whose knee the house’s cat, Stalker, was enthusiastically purring.⁶ We have a richer picture of his life and opinions at this time, due to the survival of far more letters now scattered across various archives. In 1849, after a few months of worsening health, he rang the bell from his room having gone to bed with a candle: a friend and his daughter ran upstairs to find him having a heart spasm, and he was laid to rest in the same Woodbridge burial ground where Lucy Jesup had been buried some four decades earlier. He was 65.

‘Light winds sweeping o’er a late-reap’d field’: Barton’s Style

The judgements of Romantic-era contemporaries on Barton’s style are relatively consistent. He writes many different kinds of poems, and is surprisingly experimental in his variety of forms: rolling anapaestic rhythms broadly based on three syllable units (e.g. ‘On its sides no proud forests, their foliage waving’), polysyllabic or ‘feminine’ rhymes, and considerable variety in sonnet structure are just three stylistic traits he favours repeatedly. Despite this, the perception of Barton overall is clear. He does not aspire towards the force or ambition characteristic of ‘Romantic genius’, and there is a tendency to thematic repetition in his work. Lamb teasingly asks, ‘do children die so often, and so good in your parts?’⁷ Yet he is seen as sincere, lucid and tender. As critics understood it, his was the poetry of the affections rather than the passions, and he is marked as particularly successful in the pathetic and descriptive strains – indeed, we can detect a slight feminisation in his cultural reception. Above all, in an era which revalued simplicity – in peasant poets like John Clare and Suffolk-born Robert Bloomfield, and in Wordsworth’s aesthetic of common speech – his own simplicity found a ready resonance. Like William Cowper and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Barton’s diction and flow often veer towards the conversational, and his figuration is rarely excessive: things tend to bear straightforward allegorical morals while the verse’s texture is, with some interesting exceptions, not sensuous or visionary but delicate and reflective. Perhaps his favourite form is the nine-line Spenserian stanza, utilised in the Romantic period not so much for its past tendencies towards bejewelled richness, but for open and flexible simplicity.⁸

This unaffected aesthetic is one of the main ways in which readers began to negotiate the ‘phenomenon’ or paradox of a Quaker poet. The Society of Friends was known for several things in the period, ranging from their role in the abolition of slavery to a strong commercial reputation which would eventually underwrite well-known firms including Clarks, Cadbury and Barclays. However, the most conspicuous thing in everyday encounters would have been plain dress; this meant drab colours, simple and functional fabrics, no decorative embroidery or tailoring (e.g. frills, flounces, lace) and, famously, broad-brimmed hats for men and bonnets for the women. Nearly all of Barton’s initial reviews evoke the analogy of Quaker fashion, and, as the British Review commented in 1822, there is a sense that the quiet and reserved simplicity of his verse ‘is in some degree a new department, and it offers itself to the genius of this amiable Quaker as his own by right of occupancy and natural claim’.⁹ Other reviews talked about the Quaker muse or Quaker beauties. There is plenty of evidence that Barton himself also saw these affinities. For instance, in ‘The Quaker Poet, Verses on Seeing Myself So Designated’ (1821), he justifies Quaker poetry by arguing that quietly expressed feeling is more authentic than intense emotion superficially enfolded with ‘gayer robes’. In a characteristic analogy, the shaded stream is deeper and more beautiful than the sparkling brook open to the sunlight.

This latter comparison is also marked by Barton’s exemplary stylistic gesture, one which the reader will find articulated again and again: a version of litotes, understood in its classical sense of simplicity, understatement and strategic negation. Across his oeuvre, something lesser is privileged over something superficially more arresting, in the form that ‘X is not Y, but nevertheless…’ Thus, winter beauties can outmatch spring and summer, the Valley of Fern is more affecting than Romantic mountain scenery, Quaker bonnets delight over fashionable head-dresses, the modest ivy is chosen instead of spring-time birches, and the rustic pastoral of Crabbe and Bloomfield makes its own claim over classical traditions. Explicit or implicit litotes determines Barton almost completely as a Romantic-era nature poet. As E. V. Lucas argues, ‘Had [he] been painter instead of poet he would have given us landscapes in the style of Gainsborough.’¹⁰ His verse is shaped by the gentle topography of Suffolk, of its villages, fields, woodlands, meadows, heaths, winding rivers and North Sea beaches. This is not Snowdon or even the Lakes, but was never meant to be. Like Gainsborough’s early paintings of the same environs, Barton is heavily influenced by the notion of the picturesque: varied and irregular, often rustic, less perfect than beauty but less spectacular than the sublime. Such was a natural mode for him.

The other analogy Lucas offers with the visual arts – not inappropriately, since Barton loved pictures – was the painter George Morland, famed for his warm scenes of rural life, influenced by Dutch and Flemish styles. This speaks to another unpretentious side of Barton’s poetic output: his tendency to the domestic, and a modest sentimentality which made him a natural fit for the popular periodicals and annuals. Occasionally, this is expressed in narrative verse or pastoral registers – for example ‘The Yellow-Hammer’, framed as a Suffolk villager’s song, or the Wordsworthian ‘A Grandsire’s Tale’ – but more commonly it appears drawn from life. In particular, both his extensive correspondence and the already cited local networks generated many informal poems of friendship and sociability. Like many Romantics, he repeatedly idealises children and childhood, and as touchstones of pure feeling they are frequent addressees and subjects. These gentle affections predominate almost entirely over stronger passions. When all these strands of humble sensibility are combined with moral and pious sentiments, as they generally are in Barton’s work, we can see yet another set of poetic decisions that contribute to an overall aesthetic of simplicity. As the aforementioned poem ‘The Quaker Poet’ reminds us in one of its central images, the nightingale is a songbird ‘of sober plume’ who sings, even while the peacock slumbers.

‘I must e’en be a Quaker still’: Barton and Religion

If readers found it hard to disentangle Barton’s style from his Quakerism, there were also plenty of poems that took openly Quaker subjects and presented this world poetically to nineteenth-century audiences for arguably the first time. Poetic Vigils (1824) includes a triptych of memorials to Quaker martyrs, and the earlier ‘Verses, Supposed to be Written in a Burial-Ground Belonging to the Society of Friends’ is an explicitly Quaker re-writing of Gray’s famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. There are also more indirect motifs. In particular, vocabularies of light and silence, although hardly absent from other Romantic-era writing, have evocative resonance in the Quaker context. The former implicates one of its most important doctrines, the ‘inward Light’, or the presence of God within the individual which enacts a potentially prophetic discerning of spiritual truths. The latter cannot help but evoke the values of a Quaker spirituality based on silence: without form or liturgy, Friends’ meetings would often pass with no speech whatsoever, as a practice of prayerful waiting. It is hence notable that light and silence are frequently deployed in moments of sacramental feeling or expression within Barton’s verse.

Such theologies of light and silence had their origins in the seventeenth century, and it is worth underlining that Barton’s Quakerism generally adhered to the denomination’s most traditional forms, as can be seen in his letters to Quaker correspondent Mary Sutton. This is important because the nineteenth century was a period of fundamental transformation for the Friends: Evangelical Christianity was vibrant and expansive, and quietistic Quaker orthodoxy was being displaced due to its influence (see the ‘Note on Quakerism’ for further detail). Barton, however, held fast to the faith in which he had been brought up, even though many around him were leaving the Society of Friends or adopting Evangelical practices. To Sutton, he averred that ‘a sprinkling, or water sprinkled, sacrament-taking Quaker is a sort of incongruous medley I can neither classify nor understand.’¹¹ However, his traditionalist positions were not held in hostility or with any desire to enter conflict with others. He disliked polemic, division and vain dispute, and his one solely religious volume of poetry, the important Devotional Verses (1826), shows how he could smoothly transcend potentially fraught issues. The place of scripture was an inner fault-line for the Society of Friends, and lay behind the most significant schism of nineteenth-century British Quakerism, the Beaconite Controversy of the 1830s. Yet Devotional Verses is almost entirely structured around Biblical verses: Barton simply saw no incompatibility worth contending over between scripture and the Light, either in Quaker tradition, or in his present moment.

Devotional Verses also speaks to Barton’s wider religious reach. As the Athenaeum noted in an 1827 review of A Widow’s Tale, extracted in this volume, there was an irony in the fact that despite coming from a small and distinctive sect Barton was one of the leading religious poets of the day. Although Barton’s Quakerism is orthodox (in both loose and technical senses of the word), his religious sensibility was broad, sensitive and Biblically literate. At a time when the amorality and infidelity of literature (most obviously in the pervasive shadow cast by Byronism) was an anxiety for many readers, Barton’s religious verse and the more or less oblique religiosity of much of his other poetry appeared pure and even pleasingly chaste. It probably helped that Barton – an irenically tolerant member of a denomination already known for its toleration – conceived faith in open and generous terms. He had keen friendships with many Anglican clergy, and his poetry could be sympathetic to Roman Catholics, Methodists and others. The long poem ‘Leiston Abbey’, set amongst a Suffolk ruin and written in 1819, is an excellent example of his reflections on religious identity, shared Christianity and the violent upheavals and persecutions of sectarian history.

A final aspect of Barton’s religion with a clear effect on his poetry is Quakerism’s forceful commitment to social causes of the period. Barton’s politics in the conventional sense were predictable and unassuming: he was a Whig, like most Dissenters, and had close connections with the liberal MP for East Suffolk, Robert Newton Shawe, and his family. He could write direct and even stinging political poetry (e.g. ‘A Clerico-Politico Portrait’). Yet more important and certainly more overt was the larger Quaker humanitarian impulse which shaped poems from 1812’s ‘Stanzas on the Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ onward. The Society of Friends had been at the centre of eighteenth-century opposition to the slave trade and continued to address a range of political and social issues, including the continuation of slavery in the British Empire and elsewhere, the working condition of chimney sweeps, and prison reform. In 1796 they founded the first modern asylum for the mentally ill, the York Retreat, based on William Tuke’s ‘moral treatment’. And the Quakers had maintained the tenet of radical pacifism in their opposition to the long, gruelling Napoleonic Wars. Barton supported many of these causes, and poems involving one or the other of them appear across his many volumes. It is a reminder that quietism in the spiritual sense need not mean retreat from the world in an ethical sense: although no-one would position Barton as a radical, in the sense John Thelwall or Percy Bysshe Shelley were radicals, his instincts were fundamentally humane.

An Edition of Bernard Barton

Almost immediately after Barton’s death, Lucy Barton and Edward FitzGerald collaborated on a volume entitled Selections from the Poems and Letters of Bernard Barton, published by Hall, Virtue & Co. While 1818’s Poems, by an Amateur by the virtually unknown Barton had possessed a short list of subscribers, the list in 1849 goes on for 24 pages and includes Queen Victoria and 10 copies for Sir Robert Peel, the former Prime Minister who had gifted Barton a £100 pension in 1846. It is a fascinating text, containing a useful memoir penned by FitzGerald and many interesting footnotes. As a collection of poetry, however, it is very limited even taking into account its Victorian provenance. Its selection is biased towards the work of the 1840s and one senses poems about local acquaintances and friends have been privileged. Moreover, while its editors have a conscious and perceptive sense of Barton’s aesthetic weaknesses – notably dragging out fine descriptive verses with a somewhat trite moral – they act on this by radically altering and shortening many of the texts included.

This edition attempts instead to give a selection of Barton’s work underpinned by modern scholarship and a retrospective critical standpoint. Out of over seven hundred poems from his major volumes alone, I have picked out around 80. In making the selection several principles have guided me. Firstly, I have drawn from all periods of his career (albeit with an inevitable concentration on the 1820s) and striven to represent a full range of tonal and thematic variety. This means giving roughly equal weight to his three major modes: nature poetry, religious verse (both specifically Quaker and more generally devotional), and texts of friendship, domesticity and feeling. In addition, I have sought to represent his historical and political engagement (not least via a very substantial extract from his longest work ‘Napoleon’), as well as including several pieces that engage the arts, such as poems on paintings and verses addressed to other writers. Secondly, I have attempted to mirror both nineteenth-century and contemporary interests. On one hand, if a poem appeared especially striking to Barton’s contemporaries or was repeatedly noted by reviewers (e.g. ‘The Ivy’ or ‘A Dream’), I have usually included it. On the other hand, I have also tried to select pieces that will most engage a modern readership and reflect up-to-date scholarly concerns: hence, for example, I give considerable attention to his anti-slavery poetry, and include a generous illustrated selection from the posthumous Natural History of the Holy Land. Last but not least, I have opted for poems that seem aesthetically striking and which I personally enjoy. Barton was not a poet of the first rank, as his contemporaries would put it, but he is a fascinating writer capable of delicately arresting beauty.

In textual terms, Barton does not present an editor with a vast array of variation. Even at the compositional stage, he preferred the immediacy of the initial expression. As he states apologetically in his preface to Napoleon, and Other Poems (1822):

It has not been from indolence that the author has not bestowed more elaborate revision on his compositions; nor is it with any affected contempt of refined taste, or in wilful disrespect of critical opinion […] in his judgement, his poetry is not of a description which long and laborious revision would essentially improve (p. xiv).

It is clear that much the same judgement applied later on in the literary process too. There are inevitably slight changes in wording when multiple versions exist, and the Advertisement to the fourth edition of Poems notes that his publisher had refined its typographical appearance. Nevertheless, it is a relatively simple editorial decision to consistently base reading texts on the first printed appearance of the poem – or at least the first appearance my research has been able to uncover. Not only does this locate the reading text close to each poem’s origin, it better evidences the diverse range of print contexts – literary annuals, periodicals, anthologies, provincial newspapers – in which his work was met and oeuvre evolved. In a few cases, I have departed from this practice and used a later base text, giving further explanation in the head-note. There is a limited set of Barton manuscript poems in archives: I have consulted these wherever possible. My notes indicate any significant variations between versions of a poem: very minor verbal variants and differences in typography and punctuation have not been recorded. Due to the posthumous nature of the 1849 Selections from the Poems and Letters, and the editorial interventions of Lucy Barton and Edward FitzGerald in the preparation of that text, those variants are not noted.

The date of first printed publication also determines the chronological arrangement of the poems, not least because the evidence for when Barton wrote a given piece is usually non-existent. While this does create a few minor anomalies when a date of composition is known – particularly notable where Barton himself has provided one at the foot of the poem, which is reproduced – it is a more consistent approach than trying to combine clashing chronologies. I have attempted to reflect these other dates to some extent when sequencing poems from the same source; in most other cases I simply follow the volume’s own original ordering. The reader is advised to consult the notes if interested in the precise detail of what is known about textual and publication histories. In any case, this volume accurately charts Barton’s unfolding career and can be used to trace what phases do exist in his work. The table of contents has been structured to suggest one fourfold division: the early anonymously published work of the 1810s; the period of emergence between 1820 and 1825 which begins with his contributions to the London Magazine and concludes with the final revised edition of Poems; the intensely productive phase in the late 1820s that encompasses three major volumes and much of his literary annual verse; and finally the less prolific output of the 1830s and 1840s crowned by Household Verses. While it is true that his aesthetic does not develop as radically as some poets, one can detect subtle thematic and stylistic changes: the slow fading of initially raw grief for his wife Lucy, greater imaginative ambition and stylistic range in volumes of the late 1820s, or the emergence of increasingly condensed and allegorical nature poetry, to name but three. Whilst E. V. Lucas, aiming to characterise Barton as an artist out of the flow of time, claimed that his literary identity was utterly static – ‘from the death of his wife in 1808, until his own death in 1849, he lived through one long, level day’ – it is hoped that this selected poems will illustrate a poet whose undoubted continuities do nonetheless contain multitudes.¹²