John Payne (poet)

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John Payne (poet) : biography

23 August 1842 – 11 February 1916

No estimate of Mr. Payne’s work, either as scholar or poet, would be complete without reference to the spell that the intellect and atmosphere of France — her language, her scenery, her great writers and foster- children, from Rabelais to Gltlck, and from Gautier to Auguste de Gobineau, have laid upon him. The newly edited poems bear the inscription : —

"

This spontaneous tribute is ofiset, in another letter, by one equally glowing to his mother-tongue : —

" My life is given up now to the building up of enormous monuments of English prose, like the ‘^ Nights," all that I can now do for that noble English language that I love with an irrepressible affection and reverence, so much so that I might wish my epitaph to be Linguam Anglicam dilexit (He loved the English tongue)."

Like many another Londoner, engrossed until near life’s summit with toil more or less uncongenial, Mr. Payne constantly betrajrs a pathetic worship of nature in her every mood and manifestation; as in ^London City Poems’*: —

Payne has — in Schumann’s elastic phrase — no kinder^ scenen is remarkable, in view of his intense love for children and animals, which — according to a saying of Charles Alston Collins, Dickens’s son-in-law — borders upon insanity.

In touching upon a few of the poems most salient features, if we mention first their melodious sweetness it is equally because, when all is said, we believe the singing faculty to be a poet’s chief requisite, and because, in the verse under consideration, the musical element already noted is, upon the whole, the most constant and characteristic.

Nor would it be easy to ignore the high finish of Payne’s work, no less sustained in his earliest than in his latest poems, and somehow conveying a sense of elaboration unspoilt by conscious effort. ^^The Masque

Mr. Payne seems always to have written with ease, and to have avoided lapses like those of Wordsworth, Swinburne and Rossetti into laboured and cumbrous phraseology. That one or more of his critics should have been misled into making the charge of artificiality is matter for wonder to at least two readers, who know the history of the poems, and are satisfied that however methodical the scholar^s mental processes, the poet’s own utterances are nothing more nor less than wild- flowers, whose purity and spontaneity are due to the fertile soil whence they sprang. As well say of the According to the Westminster Review : —

    • Mr. Payne still goes to the store-house of our elder

English poets for their old expressive words which we have forgotten, and sets them with fresh beauty to modern thought."

To the charge of habitual melancholy the poet him- self pleads guilty in many places, as in the sonnet " Ignis Fatuus": —

Apparently the main reason for the undercurrent of sadness encountered in the poems is to be found in the pathetic outpouring, " The Grave of my Songs ; " but there are other clues to the poet’s life of mediaeval seclusion and contemplation. Setting aside the question of temperament, loss of health and of a beloved com- panion );return false}catch(e){}”/>