The Vicar of Morwenstow as a Poet—His Epigrams—“The Carol of the Pruss”—“Down with the Church”—“The Quest of the Sangreal”—Editions of his Poems—Ballads—“The Song of the Western Men”—“The Cornish Mother’s Lament”—“A Thought”—Churchyards.

When the vicar of Morwenstow liked, he could fire off a pungent epigram. Many of these productions exist; but, as most of them apply to persons or events with whom or with which the general reader has no acquaintance, it is not necessary to quote them. Some also are too keenly sharpened to bear publication.

The Hon. Newton Fellowes^[35] canvassed for North Devon, at the time when the surplice controversy was at its height, and went before the electors as the champion of Protestantism, and “no washing of the parson’s shirt.”

On the hustings he declared with great vehemence that he “would never, never, never allow himself to be priest-ridden.” Mr. Hawker heard him, and, tearing a leaf from his pocket-book, wrote on it:—

And he slipped the paper into the hand of the excited but not eloquent speaker.

He had a singular facility for writing off an epigram on the spur of the moment. In the midst of conversation he would pause, his hand go to the pencil that dangled from his button-hole, and on a scrap of paper, the fly-leaf of a book, or a margin of newspaper, a happy, brilliant epigram was written on some topic started in the course of conversation, and composed almost without his pausing in his talk.

Many of his sayings were epigrammatical. On an extremely self-conceited man leaving the room one day, after he had caused some amusement by his self-assertion, Mr. Hawker said: “Conceit is the compensation afforded by benignant Nature for mental deficiency.”

His “Carol of the Pruss,” 1st Jan., 1871, is bitter:—

Sir R. Vyvyan and Sir C. Lemon were standing for East Cornwall in the Conservative and Church interest. The opposition party was that of the Dissenters; and their cry was “Down with the Church!” Thereupon Mr. Hawker wrote the lines:—

When the Irish Church was disestablished, the vicar was highly incensed, and at the election of 1873 voted for the Conservative candidate instead of holding fast in his allegiance to the Liberal. But when the Public Worship Bill was taken up by Mr. Disraeli, and carried through Parliament by the Conservative government, his faith in the Tory prime minister failed as wholly as it had in the leader of the Liberal party; and he wrote the following bitter epigram on the two prime ministers:—

There is another epigram attributed to him, but whether rightly or not I am not in a position to state:—

The following pretty lines were addressed to a child, the daughter of an attached friend, who was budding into beautiful womanhood. It was written in 1864.

A lady was very pressing that he should write something in her album—she thought his poems so charming, his ballads so delicious, his epigrams so delightful, etc. Mr. Hawker was impatient at this poor flattery, and, taking up her album, wrote in it:—

Mr. Hawker was a poet of no mean order. His “Quest of the Sangreal,” which is his most ambitious composition, is a poem of great power, and contains passages of rare beauty. It is unfortunate that he should have traversed the same ground as the Poet Laureate. The “Holy Grail” of the latter has eclipsed the “Quest” of the vicar of Morwenstow. But, if the two poems be regarded without previous knowledge of the name of their composers, I am not sure that some judges would not prefer the masterpiece of the Cornish poet to a piece in which Lord Tennyson scarcely rises to his true level. In his “Quest of the Sangreal” alone does the vicar of Morwenstow show his real power. His ballads are charming; but a ballad is never, and can never be, a poem of a high order; it is essentially a popular piece of verse, without any depth of thought; pleasing by its swing and spirit, but not otherwise a work of art or genius. Mr. Hawker was too fond of the ballad. His first successes had been won in that line, and he adhered to it till late. A few sonnets rise to the level of sonnets, also never a very exalted one. His “Legend of St. Cecily” and “St. Thekla,” somewhat larger poems, are pleasing; but there is nothing in them which gives token of there lying in the breast of the Cornish vicar a deep vein of the purest poetical ore. That was revealed only by the publication of “The Quest of the Sangreal,” which rose above the smaller fry of ballads and sonnets as an eagle above the songsters of the grove.

And yet this poem, belonging to the first order, as I am disposed to regard it, is disappointing—there is not enough of it. The poem is charged with ideas, crowded with conceptions full of beauty; but it is a torso, not a complete statue.

The subject of the poem is the Sangreal^[37], the true blood of Christ, gathered by Joseph of Arimathea in a golden goblet from the side of the Saviour as He hung on the cross. This precious treasure he conveyed to Britain, and settled with it at Avalon, or Glastonbury.

There it remained till

and all was gone.

After the lapse of centuries King Arthur sends his knights in quest of the miraculous vessel. There is a long account given by Arthur of its history, then of the drawing of the lots by his knights to decide the directions in which they are to ride in quest of it, then of the knights departing, and a description of the blazon and mottoes on their shields; and then—after some 400 lines has led us to the beginning of the Quest, and we expect the adventures of Sir Percival, Sir Tristan, Sir Launcelot and Sir Galahad—it all ends in a vision unrolled before the eyes of King Arthur, of the fate of Britain, in about eighty lines.

We are disappointed; for Sir Thomas Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur” supplies abundant material for a long and glorious poem on the achievements of the four knights.

The Poet Laureate’s “Holy Grail” did not appear till 1870, or we might suppose that the Cornish poet shrank from treading on the same ground. When we turn over Sir Thomas Malory’s pages, it is with a feeling of bitter regret that we have not his story glorified by Mr. Hawker’s poetry. The finding of the Grail by Sir Galahad, his coronation as King of Sarras, and his death, were subjects he could have rendered to perfection.

The name of the poem is a misnomer. There is no quest, only a starting on the quest.

But, in spite of this conspicuous fault, “The Quest of the Sangreal” is a great poem, containing passages of rare beauty. Of Joseph of Arimathea Mr. Hawker says,—

The idea of the poet:—

in reference to the miracle at Cana, occurs with a change in Mr. Hawker’s verses, with reference to the Last Supper:—

After the loss of the Holy Grail:—

The Eastward craving of Mr. Hawker, the point to which his heart and instincts turned, find expression in this poem repeatedly:—

In one passage Mr. Hawker seems to be speaking the feeling of loneliness that he ever felt in his own heart: he was, as he says in one of his letters, “the ever alone.”

Here are some beautiful lines on Cornwall:—

Mr. Hawker’s poems were republished over and over again, with a few, but only a few, additions.

The pieces written by him as a boy, Tendrils, by Reuben, were never reprinted, nor did they deserve it. He saw that clearly enough.

In 1832 he published his Records of the Western Shore; in 1836, the second series of the same. In these appeared his Cornish ballads.

They were republished in a volume entitled Ecclesia, in 1841; again, with some additions, under the title, Reeds Shaken by the Wind, in 1842; and the second cluster of the same in 1843.

They again appeared with “Genoveva,” in a volume called Echoes of Old Cornwall, in 1845. “Genoveva” is a poem founded on the beautiful story of Geneviève de Brabant, and appeared first in German Ballads, Songs, etc., edited by Miss Smedley, and published by James Burns, no date.

His Cornish Ballads, and the Quest of the Sangreal, containing reprints of the same poems, came out in 1869. The Quest of the Sangreal was first published in 1864.

In 1870 he collected into a volume, entitled Footprints of Former Men in Cornwall, various papers on local traditions he had communicated to Once a Week, and other periodicals.

Of his ballads several have been given in this volume. Two more only are given here; one, “The Song of the Western Men,” which deceived Sir Walter Scott and Lord Macaulay into the belief that it was a genuine ancient ballad.

Macaulay says, in speaking of the agitation which prevailed throughout the country during the trial of the seven bishops, of whom Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol, was one, “The people of Cornwall, a fierce, bold and athletic race, among whom there was a stronger provincial feeling than in any other part of the realm, were greatly moved by the danger of Trelawney, whom they reverenced less as a ruler of the Church, than as the head of an honourable house, and the heir, through twenty descents, of ancestors who had been of great note before the Normans set foot on English ground. All over the country the peasants chanted a ballad, of which the burden is still remembered:—

The miners from the caverns re-echoed the song with a variation:—

The refrain is ancient, but the poem itself was composed by Mr. Hawker. This is its earliest form: it afterwards underwent some revision.

The other is a touching little ballad, the lament of a Cornish mother over her dead child; which well illustrates the sympathy which always welled up in the kind vicar’s heart when he met with suffering or sorrow:—

The following beautiful verses, of very high order of poetical merit, have not previously been published:—

This poem was sent to an intimate friend with this letter:—

Dear Mrs. M——,—I record the foregoing thought for you, because it literally occurred to me as I looked from the windows of your house, across the sand towards the sea. Forgive the lines for the sake of their sincerity, etc....

He wrote a poem of singular beauty on the auroral display of the night of 10th Nov. 1870, which was privately printed. In it he gave expression to the fancy, not original, but borrowed from Origen, or from North American Indian mythology, that the underworld of spirits is within this globe, and the door is at the North Pole, and the flashing of the lights is caused by the opening of the door to receive the dead. The following passage from his pen refers to the same idea:—

Churchyards.—The north side is included in the same consecration with the rest of the ground. All within the boundary, and the boundary itself, is alike hallowed in sacred and secular law. It is because of the doctrine of the Regions, which has descended unbrokenly in the Church, that an evil repute rests on the northern parts. The East, from whence the Son of Man came, and who will come again from the Orient to judgment, was, and is, his own especial realm. The dead lie with their feet and faces turned eastwardly, ready to stand up before the approaching Judge. The West was called the Galilee, the region of the people. The South, the home of the noonday, was the typical domain of heavenly things. But the North, the ill-omened North, was the peculiar haunt of evil spirits and the dark powers of the air. Satan’s door stood in the north wall, opposite the font, and was duly opened at the exorcism in baptism for the egress of the fiend. When our Lord lay in the sepulchre, it was with feet towards the east, so that his right hand gave benediction to the South, and his left hand reproached and repelled the North. When the evil spirits were cast out by the voice of Messiah, they fled, ever more, northward. The god of the North was Baalzephon. They say that at the North Pole there stands the awful gate, which none may approach and live, and which leads to the central depths of penal life.

R. S. H.

Morwenstow.