Born, in London, 14 March 1844. Educated privately. Junr. Assistant, British Museum Library, June 1861; Assistant in Zoology Dept., Aug. 1863. Married Eleanor Marston, 1873. Died, 30 Jan. 1881. Works: “An Epic of Women,” 1870; “Lays of France,” 1872; “Music and Moonlight,” 1874; “Toyland” (with his wife), 1875. Posthumous: “Songs of a Worker,” ed. by A. W. N. Deacon, 1881. Life: by L. C. Moulton, with selections from his poems, 1894.

Personal

  Mr. O’Shaughnessy was a rapid, nervous talker, with an American earnestness of manner. He seemed quite sure of his ground, and not one to be easily diverted from it by criticism, but was an impulsive, kind-hearted gentleman, and conscientious in the treatment of his lightest work.

  With his handsome, sensitive, clearly cut face, his bright, earnest eyes, behind the glasses which gave him a student-like aspect, his rather slight but well-knit figure, with the noticeably small feet and hands, so well-shod and gloved, in which he took an innocent pride. He was full of enthusiasm, and I think, had length of days been given him, he would always have been the youngest man in every company. What pleasure he had in things small and great! He was as simply frank in his appreciation of his own work as in that of other people, and I shall never forget the quick “Like it, eh?” and the sudden light in his eyes when he perceived that something he was reading or reciting had found its way to his listener’s interest. He was half a Frenchman in his love for and mastery of the French language; and many of his closest affiliations were with the younger school of French poets.

General

  As regards the invention and use of metres the author is particularly happy. Those of his own originating are at the same time simple, musical, and individual; and it is not very often that metric ease and beauty are sacrificed to crotchets of diction and roughness of cadence throughout his book. The main fault one has to find in the miscellaneous poems is a vagueness, not of form, but of thought or sentiment: the poet is frequently obscure; and the worst of it is that those poems which demand most pains to get to the centre of are least worth the pains. To say that Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s style is already absolutely individual or by any means perfect would be rash; but that it holds sufficient good qualities and few enough bad qualities to give sure token that he can, with earnest work, get himself a complete and self-sufficient manner, one need not hesitate to affirm; and it seems probable that, as years go on, he will have that to tell to men which will be well worth the garment of a perfect poetic manner of speech.

  In the “Epic of Women” we felt some reflection of the colour of Swinburne; in the “Lays of France” a much fainter tinge of Morris was apparent to careful eyes. In “Music and Moonlight” it would be difficult to detect any foreign influence of this kind. The book belongs to a certain class of art, and runs parallel, as may be pointed out, to the work of other men, but these do not belong to a living, or even English generation, and the similitude is one more of temperament than of style. In Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s earliest book, attentive eyes saw beneath the high tone of general colouring an outline of individuality that had little in common with the sensuousness of surface…. As revealed in this new volume, Mr. O’Shaughnessy resembles no English writer, and he no longer has much fellowship with the French Romanticists. It sounds like a paradox, and yet is true, that this most modern of modern singers approaches no one so nearly as one whom we are apt to regard as the most old-fashioned of writers, the veritable poet of moonlight, Novalis!… There is an atmosphere about one class of these lyrics that reminds one of the mood one falls into on a summer afternoon, lying in a low warm nook among the rushes, close to the shining level of some river. The uniform golden tone of the foreground, the monotonous blue haze behind, paralyse more than they stimulate the imagination; and if one is alone, one slips into a sad kind of trance, longing, one knows not for what, to complete what ought to be, and is not, pleasure. One would analyse the regretful sense of incompleteness, but in that enervating air any mental effort is impossible…. We should, however, be giving an entirely false idea of the poetic attainment reached in this volume if we led our readers to suppose that its contents were mainly vague or intangible. There is very much here that will please even those readers for whom what is merely visionary, however musical or tender, has little charm…. When Mr. O’Shaughnessy is thoroughly true to his individuality he is infinitely charming. One longs to quote stanza upon stanza where it is difficult to say which is the more exquisite, the technical perfection of structure and melody, or the delicate pathos of thought.

  The original poems in this book [“Songs of a Worker”] are in a measure disappointing to those who looked for a richer yield from O’Shaughnessy’s lyrical genius after it had lain fallow during seven years. They scarcely show that hold upon thought and imagination which a poet should gain after enjoying the full period in which he reasonably may occupy himself with the dexterities of his craft.

  It displays that fatal lack of the power of rigid self-criticism which kept him from knowing what not to include; and it therefore failed to add materially to his reputation. The ode with which it opens is so noble that, in justice to the varied powers of this man whom, so far, you have seen chiefly as the poet of love and sorrow, it must be included in my selections…. This volume seems to me largely the tentative work of a poet in a transition state. In the group of poems called by a singular misnomer “Thoughts in Marble,” we certainly find little of the cold chastity of sculpture. The poems are, indeed, oversensuous—going beyond even the not too rigid boundaries the author set for himself in “An Epic of Women.” The book, I must take leave to say, was too indulgently edited by O’Shaughnessy’s cousin, the Reverend Newport Deacon, who avows, in his introduction, that of the poems evidently intended for publication left in manuscript by the poet, not one has been omitted. This too lavish inclusiveness was certainly in some instances a grave mistake. Instead of a well-pruned garden of choice flowers, we have a riotous plot of blossoms, desperately sweet, some of them, but overrun, here and there, with weeds, and with, sometimes, more thorns than roses. Still we can but be thankful for a volume that gives us the “Song of a Fellow Worker;” a poem so blood-red with humanity as “Christ Will Return,” and, above all, anything so noble as the first part of “En-Soph,” in which, I think, the author approaches actual sublimity more nearly than in any other of his poems.

  For my part, I will make bold to confess that Marston himself has, if anything, been a little over-appreciated. At any rate, he has had his full share of the good things of praise; while, on the other hand, his brother-poet, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, has received a great deal less than his due. Unforgivable as I fear the remark may seem to Marston’s extreme admirers, I am bound to say that, little as has been made of O’Shaughnessy, and much as has been made of Marston, O’Shaughnessy is really the finer poet of the two. Both of them suffer rather tiresomely from that lack of thought and excess of music and other sensuous qualities which are the marks of the æsthetic school to which they belong. But Marston’s verbiage (his constantly beating out thin themes of sorrow into utter tenuity of thought or fancy) is less varied by verbal or metrical magic than O’Shaughnessy’s. Both poets had constantly nothing or very little to say; but whereas of his nothing Marston would turn out an uninspired, uninspiring sonnet, heavy as with a very London fog of melancholy, O’Shaughnessy of his nothing would contrive a dancing, glinting little lyric—little more than words, you may say; but is not that the very secret of the lyric?

  O’Shaughnessy’s temperament was that of a genuine poet. His slender frame and spiritual expression recalled Chopin, and his best poetry has the characteristics of Chopin’s music—dreamy and sometimes weird, with an original, delicious, and inexhaustible melody. Some pieces, such as “Palm Flowers,” display, in addition, a remarkable faculty of gorgeous word-painting; others, such as the “Daughter of Herodias,” possess much dramatic intensity, others fascinate by a semi-sensuous mysticism, and “Chaitivel” and “Bisclavaret” are wildly imaginative. All these gifts, however, except that of verbal music seemed to dwindle as the poet advanced in years, and their decay was not compensated by growth in intellectual power. The range of O’Shaughnessy’s ideas and sympathies was narrow, and when the original lyrical impulse had subsided, or degenerated into a merely mechanical fluency, he found himself condemned, for the most part, to the sterile repetition. He might not improbably have forsaken poetry for criticism, in which he could have performed an important part. Enthusiastically devoted to modern French belles-lettres, and writing French with the elegance and accuracy of an accomplished native, he possessed unusual qualifications for interpreting the literature of either country to the other, and might have come to exert more influence as a critic than he could have obtained as a poet.

  Sometimes either of deliberate conviction or through corrupt following of others, he indulged in expressions of opinion about matters on which the poet is not called upon to express any, in a manner which was always unnecessary and sometimes offensive. But judged as a poet he has the unum necessarium, the individual note of song. Like Keats, he was not quite individual…. But the genuine and authentic contribution is sufficient, and is of the most unmistakable kind.

  To the most modern phase of landscape in poetry, yet with a quality which brings him into a certain relation with Shelley, belongs Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844–81); that gifted, unhappy youth, who, in delicate metrical skill and melody of words, in my eyes, stands second to Tennyson only during the last half century; whilst he is also high in pure imaginative faculty, wasted as it often was on doleful dreams and extravagant fantasies. He took Nature, if I may use the word, into his soul like a mistress; although known to him solely through books, he was intoxicated with tropical scenery.

  O’Shaughnessy emerges most distinctly from the group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyrical gift.