Stephen Phillips

The announcements of Stephen Phillips’s death must have carried many people’s thoughts backward. Me personally it took back to a time, years ago, when I was in the first flush of my youthful beauty and sitting out at a country dance. Coloured lamps burned between boughs, trees gently swished under a summer sky, the sound of violins and the glide of many feet penetrated softly from a distance; and a partner, whose face was shadowy pale in the faint light, sat clasping her knees, looking out into the night, and talking in a deep ecstatic voice of Marpessa, Herod, and Paolo and Francesca. It was not merely that she thought that I was that sort of person: the same thing was happening in every county in England. Phillips had the biggest boom that any English poet has had for a generation. The extravagance of the eulogies seems very strange now. There was scarcely a critic who did not lose his balance. I have just been looking up some of these panegyrics, and the pitch of them makes one feel a little sadly for a man who outlived so great and so early a fame. The history of literature was ransacked for comparisons. Chapman, Webster, Wordsworth, Shakespeare himself were brought in: and almost the most modest of the assessors was Mr. William Archer, who described Phillips as “the elder Dumas speaking with the voice of Milton.” I remember the Daily Mail devoting its magazine page to a description of the poet, in the course of which it explained, with characteristic love of figures, that here was a man who had discovered how to make £1000 a year out of poetry. But it did not last. The climax of Phillips’s success came with Paolo and Francesca; the subsequent plays were received with a diminuendo of warmth; and in the last few years he was comparatively ignored.

The early adoration was absurd but not incomprehensible. It was due, one might say, to the fact that Phillips was not an original writer. Much used to be made of a certain trick he had of accenting occasional lines of blank verse in a strange manner: on the strength of this he was treated as a revolutionary innovator in English prosody. In reality, in spite of this one peculiarity, he was anything but an innovator. He had an ear for the magniloquent progress of Milton’s verse and the crooning music of Tennyson’s; he had a great facility for reproducing them; and to those who are susceptible only to artistic effects which (though they are unconscious of it) remind them of effects previously experienced, he seemed, therefore, to be a consummate artist. He gave them precisely what they had learnt to desire and expect from a poet, the familiar splendours and the familiar silences, the familiar agonies and the familiar tendernesses, the scents, the flowers, the gems, the old words with their unmistakable associations, the brilliant single lines, with here and there an alliteration and here and there an onomatopœia. His work was not, of course, a mere compost. He added something. His emotions, though not deep, were genuine enough; he had a pretty fancy; and he had a considerable knowledge of how to produce effects on the stage. Paolo and Francesca was certainly in every way superior to most of the other attempts which have been made in our time at stage-plays in blank verse. It was effective in the theatre. One remembers the excitement about the skilful ending: the murder behind the scenes, the bodies brought in, the murderer’s revulsion:

But those who did not shrink from comparing it with Romeo and Juliet omitted to notice the same deficiencies as appeared in all his work. He was largely derivative and there was very little hard brainwork behind his verse.

Herod, Ulysses, and Nero were all less well made: the last two were panoramas. In all three the author depended on succulent or flamboyant “purple patches” for his effects, descriptions too full of redundant metaphor and violent outbursts of picturesque but too flimsy rhetoric. There was little characterization in them, the persons were puppets in the hands of the contriver of stage spectacles: they were carried off by brilliant and exotic scenery and costumes, by the romantic language, and by the real and skilful, if conventional, melody of the verse. All the best qualities of Stephen Phillips, the qualities that gave people a thrill they were unaccustomed to in the theatre of his time, are quintessentialized in Herod’s megalomaniac speeches and in the oratorical Marlowesque remark that one of the suitors in Ulysses made to Penelope:

His defects were observed by few when he was a popular dramatist: but those readers who only know him by his later work will misjudge him if they think that he never had more power than he showed in that. His more recent volumes, written in ill-health, would never have got him a reputation. Here and there the old bravura appeared, and there is a short lyric in the volume of 1913 which is certainly equal to anything in the early book of poems with which he made his name—and in which he showed signs of contact with the “movement” of the ’nineties. But from most of these later poems the life had gone, leaving the imitative structure naked to the eye. His last volume, Panama and other Poems, was issued just before he died by his original publisher, Mr. John Lane; and the way in which he had succumbed to his influences was very evident. Lines on the Canal such as

not merely remind one of Milton but are exact mechanical reproductions of Milton.

Incidentally the difficulties of literary biography are illustrated by his obituary notices. My Daily News gave his age as forty-nine, my Times gave it as fifty-one; and looking into the Encyclopædia Britannica to see which of these estimates it would confirm, I found that it alleged him to be forty-seven. The Encyclopædia says that he was at Queens’ College, Cambridge, when he joined Mr. Benson’s company; the Times that he was cramming at Scoones’. When we have this conflict of evidence about a contemporary who was known personally to hundreds of people in London, where are we with Elizabethans and Romans? Personally I believe that, in the matter of birth-dates, nothing is really reliable—not even a man’s own statement—except public registers.