A Spectral Beauty: The Writings of Richard Middleton

185 A SPECTRAL BEAUTY: THE WRITINGS OF RICHARD MIDDLETON By Suzanne Ferguson (Ohio State University) Looking backward, in her preface to Early Stories (1951), for the models that might have shaped her own early work, Elizabeth Bowen recalls having read at school the stories of E. M. Forster and Richard Middleton.! Forster's name inspires little surprise in such a context; supported by his reputation as a novelist and one of the most prestigious English men of letters of his time, his allegorical fantasies have held a well defined if modest place in the canon of the short story. Middleton's stories, which share not only the mode of fantasy but Forster's central theme - the artist in revolt against suffocating obtuseness of a materialist society - had no brilliant successes in other genres to buttress them, and are now virtually forgotten. Born three years after Forster, in 1882, and like Forster the child of an upper middle-class family, Middleton died by his own hand in 19II. His works were collected and published posthumously . Two volumes of poetry, one of reminiscences, one of essays, and, best known, a book of short stories called The Ghost Ship were edited by Middleton's friend and literary executor , Henry Savage, and published by T. Fisher Unwin in a uniform edition in 1912. A play, The District Visitor, said by Savage to be a parody of Maeterlinck's Blue Bird of Happiness, was published in America in 1924; and a further volume of sketches, stories, and essays was collected by John Gawsworth in 1933·2 That Middleton had a natural bent for storytelling, The Ghost Ship bears evidence, but the body of his work as a whole does not suggest that, had he chosen to live, his career might have followed the distinguished course of Forster's. Rather than a beginning point, Middleton's stories - for all their successful technical experimentation - mark an end. Where Forster carried the aestheticist theme into the larger moral and social contexts of the first modern era, Middleton with few exceptions spun out the last thematic threads of the late Victorians until they became too tenuous to sustain fictional statement. An aesthete just a few years past the time when his gifts and prejudices might have been better appreciated, Middleton wrote poetry and essays that recall in general the best lyric poetry and the sophisticated magazine essays of the nineties. His imagery, in the poetry, is drawn from the most traditional of sources: sea and stars, flowers and rural landscapes, light and dark, music, especially the songs of birds, and sometimes from earlier poetic traditions, especially pastoralism. His poetic subjects are love and death; his chief influences apparently the Elizabethans, Donne and Marvell, and Keats, while the more recent models seem to be Swinburne and Dowson. Of their kind, his poems are pleasing, graceful, and even at times fairly striking. A passage will indicate some of their characteristic gestures: 186 Come, Death, and free me from these earthy walls That heaven may hold our final festivals The white stars trembling under! I am too small to keep this passionate wonder Within my human frame : I would be dead That God may be our bed. I feel her breath upon my eyes, her hair Falls on me like a blessing, everywhere I hear her warm blood leaping, And life it seems is but a fitful sleeping, And we but fretful shades that dreamed before, That love, and are no more. ("Love's Mortality," Poems and Songs, First Series, p. ?0.) Felicitous in sound and sense, it yet lacks the distinctive personal voice associated with the great lyric poets. Middleton was, of course, very young - not quite thirty at his death - and even Yeats, at that age, had not particularly distinguished himself. Yeats' early mythologizing of his personal love into a type of ideal love and beauty, in the contexts of Irish folklore and his eclectic occultism, foreshadow the later daring experiments with literary and legendary sources that produced the characteristic images and themes of his mature poetry, if not its language. Middleton's mythologizing, such as it is, derives from literary traditions so shopworn, in his time, as to have...