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Letters on Literature : OF VERS DE SOCIETE

OF VERS DE SOCIETE

To Mr. Gifted Hopkins.

My Dear Hopkins,—The verses which you have sent me, with a request "to get published in some magazine," I now return to you. If you are anxious that they should be published, send them to an editor yourself. If he likes them he will accept them from you. If he does not like them, why should he like them because they are forwarded by me? His only motive would be an aversion to disobliging a confrere, and why should I put him in such an unpleasant position?

But this is a very boorish way of thanking you for the premiere representation of your little poem. "To Delia in Girton" you call it, "recommending her to avoid the Muses, and seek the society of the Graces and Loves." An old-fashioned preamble, and of the lengthiest, and how do you go on? -

Golden hair is fairy gold, Fairy gold that cannot stay, Turns to leaflets green and cold, At the ending of the day! Laurel-leaves the Muses may Twine about your golden head. Will the crown reward you, say, When the fairy gold is fled?

Daphne was a maid unwise - Shun the laurel, seek the rose; Azure, lovely in the skies, Shines less gracious in the hose!

Don't you think, dear Hopkins, that this allusion to bas-bleus, if not indelicate, is a little rococo, and out of date? Editors will think so, I fear. Besides, I don't like "Fairy gold that cannot stay." If Fairy Gold were a horse, it would be all very well to write that it "cannot stay." 'Tis the style of the stable, unsuited to songs of the salon.

This is a very difficult kind of verse that you are essaying, you whom the laurels of Mr. Locker do not suffer to sleep for envy. You kindly ask my opinion on vers de societe in general. Well, I think them a very difficult sort of thing to write well, as one may infer from this, that the ancients, our masters, could hardly write them at all. In Greek poetry of the great ages I only remember one piece which can be called a model—the AEolic verses that Theocritus wrote to accompany the gift of the ivory distaff. It was a present, you remember, to the wife of his friend Nicias, the physician of Miletus. The Greeks of that age kept their women in almost Oriental reserve. One may doubt whether Nicias would have liked it if Theocritus had sent, instead of a distaff, a fan or a jewel. But there is safety in a spinning instrument, and all the compliments to the lady, "the dainty-ankled Theugenis," turn on her skill, and industry, and housewifery. So Louis XIV., no mean authority, called this piece of vers de societe "a model of honourable gallantry."

I have just looked all through Pomtow's pretty little pocket volumes of the minor Greek poets, and found nothing more of the nature of the lighter verse than this of Alcman's—[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]. Do you remember the pretty paraphrase of it in "Love in Idleness"?