Famous Single Poems/Ben Bolt
BEN BOLT
Don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,—
Sweet Alice whose hair was so brown,
Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile,
And trembled with fear at your frown?
In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt,
In a corner obscure and alone,
They have fitted a slab of the granite so gray,
And Alice lies under the stone.
Under the hickory tree, Ben Bolt,
Which stood at the foot of the hill,
Together we’ve lain in the noonday shade,
And listened to Appleton’s mill.
The mill-wheel has fallen to pieces, Ben Bolt,
The rafters have tumbled in,
And a quiet which crawls round the walls as you gaze
Has followed the olden din.
Do you mind of the cabin of logs, Ben Bolt,
At the edge of the pathless wood,
And the button-ball tree with its motley limbs,
Which nigh by the doorstep stood?
The cabin to ruin has gone, Ben Bolt,
The tree you would seek for in vain;
And where once the lords of the forest waved,
Are grass and the golden grain.
And don’t you remember the school, Ben Bolt,
With the master so cruel and grim,
And the shaded nook in the running brook
Where the children went to swim?
Grass grows on the master’s grave, Ben Bolt,
The spring of the brook is dry,
And of all the boys who were schoolmates then
There are only you and I.
There is change in the things I loved, Ben Bolt,
They have changed from the old to the new;
But I feel in the depths of my spirit the truth,
There never was change in you.
Twelvemonths twenty have passed, Ben Bolt,
Since first we were friends—yet I hail
Your presence a blessing, your friendship a truth,
Ben Bolt of the salt-sea gale.
BEN BOLT
The story of the poet who struggles long years to convince the public that he wrote some poem which, quite possibly, he really did write, is not an uncommon one; but the writer who lives, decade after decade, in the hope that eventually the public will forget a metrical indiscretion of his youth, only to die at last, an old man, with the hope unfulfilled—that is far more unusual, and perhaps also far more tragic.
The history of the distressing controversies waged by John Luckey McCreery and Lizzie York Case has already been recounted in these pages. Set against this the story of Thomas Dunn English, who spent the last sixty years of his life striving vainly to make the public understand that he had claims upon fame far more serious (as he thought) than a sentimental ballad written at the age of twenty-three.
The labors of Hercules were as nothing beside the task of getting an idea out of the public mind once it has found firm lodgment there, and McCreery and Mrs. Case and English all died defeated and disappointed. To-day there are apparently as many people as ever who believe that Bulwer wrote “There Is No Death” and “There Is No Unbelief,” and few indeed who remember that English ever wrote anything except “Ben Bolt.”
Nothing is more devastating to a literary career than for a writer, early in it, to gain a reputation for a certain kind of work. He has started out, let it be supposed, to be a serious novelist; his aim is, of course, the novel of character; his ambition is to set upon paper a searching interpretation of life. But before one can interpret life one must understand it, and understanding requires experience and observation, which in their turn require time. Meanwhile he happens upon a plot, and, just to keep his hand in—or perhaps to keep the pot boiling—he casts it into the form of a detective story and sends it off. If it is a success, his fate is sealed. Ever afterwards, in the public mind, he will be labeled as a writer of detective stories, and his publishers will do all they can to persuade him to keep on writing them.
For the public is like a child—it insists on its stories being told “just-so,” and its authors must perform the same tricks over and over again. So Chesterton must keep on being witty and Shaw paradoxical and Barrie whimsical; nothing is wanted from Conan Doyle except Sherlock Holmes. When Mark Twain wrote a serious book, he was compelled to publish it anonymously to prevent it being treated as a joke. De Wolf Hopper might make an admirable Othello, but he would be greeted with shrieks of laughter. The audience would go into hysterics when he smothered Desdemona, and yell for “Casey at the Bat.” Such is the force of habit.
The poet is in peculiar peril. Perhaps in an unguarded moment he contributes some jingles to a comic weekly, or writes a sentimental song to oblige a friend, little suspecting the awful fate he is inviting. For it is quite within the range of possibility that those jingles or that song may dog his footsteps the remainder of his life and harry him into his grave.
There are many examples in American literature of promising novelists straying away along the primrose paths of crime or of sex, but the most horrible example of the poet overshadowed by an early bit of doggerel is undoubtedly Thomas Dunn English.
Now English was in no sense a great writer, nor even an important one, but he was industrious and he believed in his work. He produced a dozen novels, fifty plays and perhaps a thousand poems. Some of the poems are of considerable merit—as witness “The Charge by the Ford.” And yet, practically all his life, he was identified in the public mind only with a single song.
If it had been a good song, this would not have been so galling—Lovelace would, no doubt, be happy to know that he has come down through the ages as the author of “To Althea from Prison.” But “Ben Bolt” is unutterable bosh, and English knew it was bosh. He had written it at the very outset of his literary career, being in need presumably of the ten dollar bill which the editor of the New York Mirror was in the habit of handing out for poems of this sort.
In other words, he produced a pot-boiler and sold it in a good market—a thing which almost any needy young author would be glad to do if he could, and which has been done by many who were neither young nor needy, without incurring any special reprobation. One recalls that the Jove-like Sir Edwin Arnold once upon a time wrote some verses to be used in advertising Bovril (in consideration of an extra price), and that George du Maurier’s most widely circulated drawing is the one which adorns the Apollinaris bottle! Indeed, many of the world’s great masterpieces have been pot-boilers, written solely because their authors were in desperate need of money, and had to work or starve. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who ought to know, went so far as to assert that it was only under such circumstances a poet could hope to be visited by the Muse: A man should live in a garret aloof,
And have few friends and go poorly clad,
With an old hat stopping the chink in the roof,
To keep the Goddess constant and glad.
Most pot-boilers, of course, are not masterpieces and are soon forgotten, having served their purpose of providing their creators with a little ready cash. The Muse was certainly not present when English wrote “Ben Bolt,” and in the ordinary course of events, oblivion would have been its portion, but a strolling player named Nelson Kneass happened to see the verses and set them to an air adapted from a melancholy German melody. Kneass had gaged his public with a fiendish accuracy, verses and air exactly suited the taste of the day, and the song swept through America and England on such a wave of popularity that it netted its publishers over $60,000—of which neither English nor Kneass received any share.
Maudlin sentimentality was the prevailing, the indispensable, note in the popular songs of that epoch, but “Ben Bolt” outmaudlined the worst of them. Sweet Alice with her smiles and tears, her early grave and gray tombstone, the old mill, the ruined cabin, the little school, the purling brook—all the old tried properties are there, wedded to a mournful tune which suits them exactly—just the sort of tune to appeal not only to the tightly-laced, semi-hysterical, sex-suppressed denizens of the drawing-room, but also to the gay celebrants at stag parties when those present had reached that stage of inebriety where they longed to put their heads on the table and weep over their sins. Its range was not too exacting, its rhythm was slow and soothing, and its minors gave opportunity for pleasing variations by the bass and tenor. The present scribe recalls another song of a later generation called “The Picture That Is Turned to the Wall.” It was about a girl driven out into the storm by a relentless father, and it was in its day almost as popular as “Ben Bolt,” for exactly similar reasons; but its author had been wise enough to remain anonymous!
Poor English had had no such forethought, and he could not deny his child after he had given it his name. It confronted him at every turn; he was everywhere referred to as the author of “Ben Bolt.” It was popularly regarded as his supreme achievement, if not his only one. Think of a poet, a novelist, a dramatist, who took himself and his work seriously, being continually reminded that his only hold upon fame was as the author of a doggerel song!
Such, then, was the awful fate which English had unthinkingly brought upon himself. But even the worst reputation may in time be lived down, and as the years passed, new favorites crowded “Ben Bolt” off the programs and out of public recollection. So English picked up heart of hope and labored away at his plays and his poetry in the fond belief that he had at last managed to outlive that miserable song. Fifty years had passed since it appeared in the New York Mirror; surely it was buried beyond any possibility of resurrection, and his last years would be unshadowed by it.
But Fate held in reserve a truly terrific stroke.
In 1894, Harper’s Magazine began the publication of a story of Paris student life entitled Trilby, by George du Maurier, the great cartoonist of Punch. (These details are here set down because nobody reads Trilby nowadays, more’s the pity!) Its heroine, Trilby O’Ferrall—a light-hearted daughter of the Quarter, with all the virtues but one, who drifted in and out of the studios on the left bank posing for everything from a hand to the “altogether,” but chiefly remarkable for her feet which were masterpieces—happened to be the daughter of a convivial Irishman, Patrick Michael O’Ferrall, one-time fellow of Trinity, Cambridge. He, too, had all the virtues but one: he was a drunkard. So, after disgracing himself at home, he had drifted to Paris, married a bar-maid and found congenial haven behind her bar, where, in his cups, he had doted on “Ben Bolt,” and often sang it to the delight of his only child.
“Do you know ‘Ben Bolt?’” asks Trilby of the Three Musketeers of the Brush, after listening without enthusiasm to the “Rosemonde” of Schubert, as beautifully played by Svengali.
“Oh, yes, I know it well,” answers Little Billee. “It’s a very pretty song.”
“I can sing it,” announces Miss O’Ferrall with pride. “Shall I?”
“Oh, certainly, if you will be so kind,” says Little Billee in his best drawing-room manner.
So, gazing up at the ceiling with a sentimental smile, Trilby sings it with an utter absence of tune which stupefies her audience.
“It’s the only song I know,” she explains. “My father used to sing it just like that, when he felt jolly after hot rum and water. It used to make people cry; he used to cry over it himself. I never do.”
And when she has taken herself off, Little Billee sings the song in “his pleasant little throaty English barytone;” and then Svengali and Gecko play it as only those two great artists could, until “their susceptible audience of three was all but crazed with delight and wonder; and the masterful Ben Bolt, and his over-tender Alice, and his too submissive friend, and the old schoolmaster so kind and so true, and the rustic porch and the mill, and the slab of granite so gray, were all magnified into a strange, almost holy poetic dignity and splendor.”
And behold, “Ben Bolt” was once more the rage. For Trilby swept the country from end to end, and even contributed a new word to the language. Everybody, once again, after the lapse of half a century, was singing, or whistling, or playing “Ben Bolt.”
“That unsophisticated little song,” Du Maurier calls it, “which has touched so many simple British hearts that don’t know any better.” He little suspected that he was almost to break a simple American heart by resurrecting it! And yet, of course, it was exactly the song which Patrick Michael O’Ferrall would have sung in the circumstances mentioned. The vogue of the book ceased with a suddenness which still remains one of the puzzles of the publishing business, but a play had been made from it and lasted for several seasons—was even revived from time to time. It helped to keep “Ben Bolt” before the public, for a portion of the song was sung off-stage during the third act. And when the book got into the movies, “Ben Bolt” of course was part of the musical program.
Thomas Dunn English died in 1902, at the age of eighty-three, knowing that his song had outlived him. His collected works would fill many volumes; but of his fifty plays only one, The Mormons, was ever published, while his novels, Walter Woolfe, Ambrose Fecit, Jacob Schuyler’s Millions, and the rest, have long since dropped from public ken. Sometimes a collection devoted to patriotic or historical poetry will include one or two of his Civil War verses; but only one of his poems has achieved the sort of immortality which a general anthology can give. There, under the head of Old Favorites or Songs of Yester-Year, one always finds “Ben Bolt.”
There is a moral to this tale:
The only safe rule for the aspiring author is to publish everything he writes either anonymously or under a pen-name. Then, when his creative days are over, he can amuse his declining years by gathering together such of his work as he wishes to be associated with his name, and claim it as his own.
But if authors did that, how thin that final volume would often be!