Anatomia Poetae .

The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Edited by H. W. Donner. (Oxford University Press. 25s.) "Tim science of psychology, and mental varieties, has long been used by physicians, in conjunction with the corresponding corporeal knowledge, for the investigation and removal of immaterial causes of disease ; it still remains for some one to exhibit the sum of his experience in mental pathology and

therapeutics, not in a cold technical dead description, but a living semiotical display, a series of anthropological experi- ments, developed for the purpose of ascertaining some important psychical principle—i.e., a tragedy .• . . Apollo has been barbarously separated by the moderns : I would endeavour to unite him." This was Beddoes's intention when he began to study medicine at Gtittingen in 1825.

For the next twenty years he lived with the image of that perfect tragedy, like a baffled Pygmalion whose marble was obstinate under the chisel while lie already prayed for its life : " Still, discontent,

Over his sensual kind the sculptor went • Walking his thoughts."

Here, from the letters and from Mr. Donner's magnificent

text of the play itself, we can sec his racking struggles in the writing and re-writing of heath's Jest Book. It never

really became a tragedy at all, but the aim to perfect it kept the stream of his verse running when doctoring or polities might have dammed it up, when "Apollo's pill box" might have won permanent preference over his lyre.

In answer to his friends' criticism of the first version of the play Beddocs said (April the last '29. Gatingen) :

"The charge of monotony in character is well grounded, but I can hardly do anything in this ease, for the power of drawing character and humour—two things absolutely indispensable for a good dramatist—are the two first articles in my deficiencies : and -even tho imaginative poetry I think you will find, in all my verse, always harping on the same two or three principles . . ."

He was aocepting for the moment too readily the character- criticism with which Coleridge, Lamb and others had deluged the Elizabethans. It was a thing of the time : the Eliza- bethans themselves had never heard of it—the chameleon poet was all characters, he didn't create any. So Beddocs's

ideal principle "to exhibit the sum of his experience in mental pathology" rather than a set of types or caricatures, grimly -consistent with themselves and different from each other,

was in essence truer and more feasible. The ultimate weakness of his own personae was due to the fact that his experience

of mental pathology was almost entirely confined to con- centrated speculation about death: he was largely excluded from a knowledge of mental varieties in himself, and pre-

peel p:ed for most of his life with only one important psychical principle : . and this one so important that it baffled him to ascertain it. , Death's Jest Book fails as a tragedy because the nodus is the one which no man has ever unravelled.

The preoccupation with death is most lurid in The improvisatore, published when he was 18, in which the hero of one of the narratives goes mad, lives in a charnel house and is reputed to eat human carrion : and in later life it was so strong (if the dating 1846 is correct) that when asked ex tempore to write something for his friend Kelsall in a notebook he wrote The Phantom Wooer-, the lovely poem beginning : "A ghost, that loved a lady fair . . ." : death is a good host, as well as a fool. The origin of this bias in his mind will never be known—it may have been due to some physical flaw in his own body—at least it was intensified and given content by his medical studies. It is more than likely that he hoped to find by dissection a clue to the principle of life ; but all his medical MSS. seem finally lost, and we arc left to conjecture. Mr. Donner is mildly flippant about this hope ; but it is clear that Beddoes was working seriously on the phsyical structure of the nervous system : even alchemists believed in the possibility of making gold. The horrors of his poems come nearer to the marrow than any Romantic skeleton-business ; and also his knowledge made them More intimate and essential to his thinking even than to Webster seeing a rotten and dead body hid beneath rich tissue. Anatomy was at his finger-tips. Medicine too saved him from the windy metaphysics on which Shelley

and Wordsworth dissipated so much energy, so many verses. " I am determined," he said, "never to listen to any meta- physician who is not both anatomist and physiologist of the first rank."

I think his terrible anticipations of death were partly due to a central Uncertainty about his own purposes and imagine• tive power :

"Dart eaglowise with open wings and fly, Until you meet the gods. Thus council I

The men who can, but tremble to be great . . ."

This verse-letter goes on at once to the plans for his great play, where he will make a fool of death and " uncypress him i' the light." It is partly death from poetic sterility he is thinking of : his Muse is old and sophisticated in her soul. ". . if I

were soberly and mathematically convinced of my own genuine- ness (inspiration as the ancients would say) I might possibly, though I won't promise, find spirit and stability enough to give up my time to the cultivation of literature." In some poets' lives the oppressive terror of sterility makes more damage than its incidence : I3eddoes's feverish walking, drinking and botanising must be looked on partly as emotional antidotes.

His very rationalising of the alternative possible lives shows that the creative impulse and its frequent stifling were too real to evade. Though he was contemptuous of a poet's life in that inky age—contemptuous, that is, of other poets—Apollo have mercy on them—he was sometimes filled with Miltonic confi- dence and pride :

"Yet, if I tread out of the Alpine shade, And once moro weave the web of thoughtful verse, May no vainglorious motive break my silence ; If I have sate unheard so long, it was in hope That mightier and bettor might assay

The potent spell to break, which has fair Truth

Banished so drear a while from mouths of song."

It is a man speaking who had learnt the technique of verse as far as could -be, and had learnt an academic love of freedom under the stupid tyrannies of the Holy Alliance.

The vagaries of his political life in Germany and Switzerland ; his changes of lodging ; his friendships and buffoonery ; the facts about his suicide, his delightful friend Kelsall, and the fate of the MSS. left to Browning must be learnt from Mr. Donner's three books. All that research into externals can do he has done, but he gives a policeman's account of the route to thc grave. Turnings and viewpoints ore marked and starred, the driVing tested by precedent and photograph ; but

the post morlem does not reveal the driver's strange formation, nor the coroner finally decide whether he was drunk at the time of the accident. "Here's a sweet comedy. "r begins with 0 Dolentis and concludes with ha, ha, he "

• Husirnnv Housn.