Born at Nottingham, 22 April 1816. Educated at schools in Nottingham. To Glasgow University, 1831. Student at Lincoln’s Inn 26 April 1834; called to Bar 7 May 1840. “Festus” written, 1836–39. Twice married. Works: “Festus” (anon.), 1839, “The Angel World,” 1850; “The Mystic,” 1855; “The Age,” 1858; “The Universal Hymn,” 1867; “The International Policy of the Great Powers,” 1861.
Personal
A dark, handsome, rather picturesque-looking man, with a grey beard, and dark hair, a little dimmed with grey. He is of quiet and very agreeable deportment, and I liked him and believed in him…. There is sadness glooming out of him, but no unkindness nor asperity.
Whether working at the University or elsewhere his studies were determinately, although tacitly directed towards the one object of his life, the development of his faculties as a poet. Habitual converse with speculations moral and metaphysical, embracing the whole orbit of mental philosophy, ancient and modern, both when at college and many years subsequently,—indeed throughout his life,—became with him an all-absorbing passion; and this blending with an impressionable nature, and a retiring and contemplative disposition, imparted no doubt ultimately that tinge of transcendentalism to his poetry which, sobered by those serious associations to which he had from his earliest years been accustomed at home, forms one of its chief and especial charms in the estimation of the most thoughtful of his admirers.
He was never in close touch with literary circles, though about 1870 he was sometimes present at Westland Marston’s symposia, where Rossetti, Swinburne, “Orion” Horne, and other celebrities were wont to meet. He was sweet, gentle, and rather timid in nature. Superbly handsome in physique and countenance, he rivalled Tennyson in the art of looking like a poet.
Festus, 1839
To most readers, the poem would appear a monstrous compound of blasphemy and licentiousness. Though evincing power, and variety of power, it excites the most wonder from its disregard of all the moral, religious and artistical associations of others. Pantheism and fatalism, in their most objectionable forms, are inculcated as absolute truth. The two flaming ideas in his mind, are God and Lucifer…. Doctrines of the most monstrous import, and doctrines of the utmost purity and holiness, so follow each other that the author evidently sees no discord in their connection. He can delineate the passion of love with great refinement, without seeming to distinguish it from the most unhallowed lust. If he be not mad, it is certain that all the rest of the world are. To accept the poem of “Festus” as the product of a sane mind, would be to declare other literature superficial, and P. J. Bailey the most miraculously gifted of all created men. Its madness is not altogether fine madness, but half comes from Parnassus and the rest from Bedlam. It is the madness of a mind unable accurately to distinguish the moral and intellectual differences of things.
Like most philosophical poems, as they are called, “Festus” is neither good science nor good poetry, but an indescribable medley, which, so far as we know, has never been appropriately named. The book contains neither prose nor verse—neither fact nor imagination; is made up neither of persons nor of propositions, instead of life-like characters and passions, we have a long, tedious masquerade of abstract ideas; and, generally, the only hint vouchsafed of a change of speakers, is in the names prefixed to the speeches. Lucifer, it is true, preaches some very strange doctrine; but not stranger than the hero, Festus. They seem, indeed, but duplicates of the same idea—twin apostles, giving a biform development of the same theory; and, for aught we can see, the discourses of both might as well have come from the same person. On the whole, they are a little the oddest man and devil we have ever encountered…. The book is not only without the moral elements of a poem on a sacred subject, but is without the literary elements of a poem on any subject…. His style has neither the rhythm of verse nor of prose; nay, it has not the rhythm of anything, unless of chaos or bedlam. We should suppose he had cultivated his musical ear in filing and rasping cast-iron plates. We had not imagined that such a crude, awkward, bungling, uncouth, grotesque piece of versification could be wrought out of the English language…. Theologically speaking, the book is in no wise a development of an idea or principle into a coherent, original system, but an eclecticism of whatever is most absurd and offensive in several systems: Calvinism, Fatalism, Universalism, Swedenborgianism, Pantheism, and Rationalism. Our author, as he informs us in the person of Festus, is “an ominist and believer in all religions.”
A poem of which the brave and earnest corn-law rhymer, Elliott, could say, “it contains poetry enough to set up fifty poets,” must be an extraordinary work; and the author is certainly a most remarkable man, if at the age of twenty-three he has actually won the high position which a critic, not prone to overpraise, has assigned to him, in saying, that “Wordsworth excepted, who belongs to the past generation, there are but two living poets in England, Taylor and Tennyson, who can be named near him.”… We are willing for our own part to confess, here in the outset, that taking “Festus” for all in all, we regard it as unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled by any creation of genius in the light literature of our age. This is a strong statement, but it is calmly made; and a thorough acquaintance with the book will, we are confident, establish the correctness of this judgment…. The first, superficial, outside impression of Festus Bailey, for the author and the book are wholly one, is of his extremely quick sensibility and of his prodigal expenditure of life. The creature is all nerve; he feels with agonizing intensity both pleasure and pain, and seems to be consuming, to use his own image,
| “Like a bright wheel, which burns itself away, | |
| Benighting even night with its grim limbs.”— |
We have made repeated attempts, but we cannot get through this poem. It beats us. We must want the Festus sense. Some of our best friends, with whom we generally agree on such matters, are distressed for us, and repeat long passages with great energy and apparent intelligence and satisfaction. Meanwhile, having read the six pages of public opinion at the end of the third and people’s edition, we take it for granted that it is a great performance, that, to use one of the author’s own words, there is a mighty “somethingness” about it—and we can entirely acquiesce in the quotation from “The Sunday Times,” that they “read it with astonishment, and closed it with bewilderment.” It would appear from these opinions, which from their intensity, variety, and number, (upwards of 50,) are to us very surprising signs of the times, that Mr. Bailey has not so much improved on, as happily superseded the authors of the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes, of the Divine Comedy, of Paradise Lost and Regained, of Dr. Faustus, of Hamlet, of Faust, of Don Juan, The Course of Time, St. Leon, the Jolly Beggars, and the Loves of the Angels. He is more sublime and simple than Job. More royally witty and wise, more to the point than Solomon. More picturesque, more intense, more pathetic than Dante. More Miltonic (we have no other word) than Milton. More dreadful, more curiously blasphemous, more sonorous than Marlowe. More worldly-wise and clever, and intellectually svelt than Goethe. More passionate, more eloquent, more impudent than Byron. More orthodox, more edifying, more precocious than Pollok. More absorptive and inveterate than Godwin, and more hearty, more tender, more of manhood all compact than Burns. More gay than Moore. More μυζιανους than Shakespeare. It may be so. We have made repeated and determined incursions in various directions into its substance, but have always come out greatly scorched and stunned and affronted. Never before did we come across such an amount of energetic and tremendous words, going “sounding on their dim and perilous way,” like a cataract—not flowing like a stream, nor leaping like a clear waterfall, but always among breakers—roaring and tearing and tempesting—a sort of transcendental din; and then what power of energizing and speaking, and philosophizing and preaching, and laughing and joking in vacuo.
As a poet in actual achievement, I can have no hesitation in placing him far above either Browning or Stirling. His Festus is in many respects a very remarkable production—remarkable alike for its poetic power, and its utter neglect of all the requirements of poetic art…. Yet with all these excesses and defects, we are made to feel that Festus is the work of a poet…. In The Angel World, we have the youthful poet more sobered down; and the consequent result has been one not exactly to be wished—its beauties and its defects are each alike less prominent.
He was known a few years since as the author of “Festus,” the rhapsodies and religiosities of which were so greedily absorbed by the spongy brains of his admirers.
Was “Faust” emasculated, trimmed and scented and sent forth on a harmless round among the circulating libraries, forty years ago.
I see that Mr. Bartlett, in his “Dictionary of Quotations,” preserves three from Bailey’s “Festus,” a book much in vogue in my early days, from which we remembered many passages. This shows that the book is now not wholly forgotten. But I suppose it would be safe to say that not ten copies have been sold in ten years.
The attraction which it manifestly holds for certain classes of readers is no doubt due to the blending of poetical elements that often attain to a high degree of beauty and imaginative force with theological and philosophical speculation concerning the profoundest questions of life, death, and immortality. A glowing fervour of spiritual passion, an exuberant wealth of imagery, and a magnificent sweep of diction are all strikingly present in this poem, but these are mixed with so much extravagance, unevenness, and mere frothy declamation, and are, moreover, so wanting in human interest and spontaneity as to justify the censure implied in the name “Spasmodic” which has been affixed to Bailey and the younger poets whom he is supposed to have influenced by his example.
“Festus” is not profound philosophy, and still less is it true poetry. The thought when probed is commonplace. A vigorous expression here and there is hardly enough to redeem the weak echoes of Goethe and Byron. Frequently the verse is distinguishable from prose only by the manner of printing. “Swearers and swaggerers jeer at my name” is supposed to be an iambic line. We are told that a thing is our “soul-blood” and our “soul-bones;” and we hear of “marmoreal floods” that “spread their couch of perdurable snow.” Yet this passes for poetry, and “Festus” has gone through many editions in this country, and still more in America. The aberration of taste is not quite as great as that which raised Martin Farquhar Tupper and his “Proverbial Philosophy” to the highest popularity, but it is similar in kind.
So far as it appears, there was nothing but irresistible vocation and a selective use of the most sympathetic models which led Bailey back to what had so long and so completely been neglected in English poetry, the record of the subtler action of the mind. In the midst of a fashion for scrupulous common sense, and “the equipoise of reason,” here was a young man of twenty who, without any sort of impetus from without, and in defiance of current criticism, devoted himself to the employment of clothing philosophic speculation with almost reckless imagery…. The “Festus” of 1901 is a very different affair from the volume of the same name of 1839. In the first place, it is very unlike it in size, since it contains about forty thousand verses, while the original edition has something less than ten thousand…. The effect made upon his own generation was not made by the huge and very unwieldy book, which one now buys as “Festus” in the shops, but by a poem which was already lengthy, yet perfectly within the bounds of easy reading. It seems essential, if we are to gauge that effect, to turn back to the first edition. This was a large octavo, with no name on the title-page, but with a symbolic back presenting a malignant snake flung downwards through the inane by the rays that dart from a triangle of light, a very proper preparation for the redundant and arcane invocations of the text within the covers.
