Stephen Phillips

Stephen Phillips (28 July 1864 - 9 December 1915) was an English poet, actor, and playwright, who enjoyed considerable popularity in his lifetime.

Stephen Phillips (1864-1915), from The Book-Lover's Magazine, circa 1905. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Life

Youth and education

Phillips was born at Summertown near Oxford, the son of Rev. Stephen Phillips, precentor of Peterborough Cathedral. From his mother, Agatha Sophia (Dockray), who was related to the Wordsworths, he inherited a feeling for poetry, and also a contemplative melancholy which is the keynote of his life and of his poems.

From Trinity College School, Stratford-on-Avon, he passed, after 6 months at the King's School, Peterborough, into Oundle School (1878).

In 1883 he was recommended for a minor scholarship in classics at Queens' College, Cambridge. But, formal difficulties precluding residence at Cambridge, he read for the civil service with a London coach, W.B. Scoones, a member of whose staff, John Churton Collins, helped him to discover that poetry had claims on him.

Career

In 1884 Phillips's debut collection of poetry, Orestes, and other poems was privately printed.

In 1885, he joined his cousin F.R. Benson's dramatic company, and for 6 years he played various small parts. His only histrionic assets were a 6-foot athletic figure, a gift for mimicry, and a genius for speaking verse. But he began to think of writing plays to restore poetic drama to the stage. Nothing came of a play which he submitted to Benson, and there is more of lyric mood than dramatic circumstance in his next 2 poems, To a Lost Love and A Dream (in Primavera, 1890). Eremus (1894), in theme and texture, anticipates Christ in Hades rather than the dramas.

Leaving the stage in 1892, Phillips lectured on history at an army tutor's, until the success of his Poems (1898) encouraged him to take to letters as a profession.

In 1890 a slender volume of verse was published at Oxford with the title Primavera, which contained contributions by him and by his cousin Laurence Binyon and others. In 1894 he published Eremus, a long poem of loose structure in blank verse of a philosophical complexion.

In 1896 appeared "Christ in Hades", forming with a few other short pieces a slim paper-covered volume of Elkin Mathews's Shilling Garland. This poem arrested the attention of watchful critics of poetry, and when it was followed by a collection of Poems in 1897 the writer's position as a new poet of exceptional gifts was generally recognized. This volume contained a new edition of "Christ in Hades", together with "Marpessa", "The Woman with the Dead Soul", "The Wife", and shorter pieces, including "To Milton, Blind". The volume ran through half a dozen editions in 2 years, and established Phillips's rank as poet, which was sustained by the publication, in the Nineteenth Century in 1898, of his poem Endymion.

The success of Poems revived Phillips's ambition to write poetic drama; and for the next 10 years this was his chief occupation. In the meantime his fame as a non-dramatic poet stood high, until his next collected volume, New Poems (1908), justified the few sceptics. Meanwhile, Phillips gained a stupendous reputation as a dramatic poet.

Delays in the staging of his Paolo and Francesca, commissioned by (Sir) George Alexander in 1898, allowed it to be applauded initially as a printed book (1900). Eagerness to see it played was increased by the success both in the theatre (1900) and in print (1901) of his Herod, which (Sir) H.B. Tree produced with sumptuous accessories. When Paolo and Francesca was at last performed in 1902, the author was greeted as the successor of Sophocles and Shakespeare, and his royalties rose to £150 a week.

But affluence was not good for a person of his generous and pleasure-loving nature. Always indolent and careless of his proof-sheets, he now left his producer to fix the fashion of his plays; and Tree's fashion is known. In Paolo and Francesca theatricality is thriftily employed to relieve an austere theme. In Herod it is more patent, but still legitimate, limelight. In Ulysses (1902) the Olympian prologue and the descent to Hades are merely kaleidoscopic extras. Nero (1906) is intermittently ablaze with melodramatic flares and wreathed in the smoke of rhetoric; while Faust (in which Phillips collaborated with J. Comyns Carr, 1908) is a pyrotechnic pantomime. In Pietro of Siena (1910) there are only fitful echoes of his earliest and best play.

Phillips's day was over. The Sin of David (1904, revised 1912) seems initially a return to the severity of his earlier manner; but the sterner air is accidental, due only to the Commonwealth setting (itself a device to overcome the Lord Chamberlain's ban on Biblical subjects), and there is greater effort in the play to force melodramatic situations than to depict austerity in passion. Aylmer's Secret (1905), a 1-act prose play, and The Bride of Lammermoor (1908, also called The Last Heir) are bids for profit rather than for fame.

From 1908 Phillips passed out of sight for a while. He was penniless, and had separated from his wife. Odd guineas for poems in the press frequently saved him from starvation. Yet by nature he was open, hearty, and sociable, except when afflicted by recurrent fits of depression; he had a keen sense of humor, was an excellent raconteur, and a fine cricketer.

In 1912 a brighter period opened, as chance then allowed his friends to take his regeneration in hand. From January 1913 to his death, Phillips was editor of the Poetry Review, and in it once more urged the claims of poetic drama. In 1913 the Drama Society projected performances of 3 of his shorter pieces, Iole (written 1907), The King (1912), and The Adversary (1913) — plays recalling his finer powers, but perhaps only because their brevity confined him to simplicity of situation and of theme.

The last of his plays to reach the stage, Armageddon (1915), has no merit beyond that of patriotic intention.

Shortly before his death Phillips completed a verse play on the Norman Conquest, Harold, and wrote the scenario of another on John the Baptist. He died at Deal, Kent, on 9 December 1915, and was buried at Hastings. He was survived by his wife, May (Lidyard), whom he married in 1892, and by a son.

Writing

Poetry

Phillips felt his life to be a losing struggle against a destiny which was himself: this is the theme of his earliest poem, written when 15 ("Destiny" in Orestes, and other poems), and recurs as a striking dramatic motif in "The Adversary". As a poet, he was continually urged by varied influences to efforts alien from the bent of his genius. In the upshot, a gift for the simple and the elemental was subjected to all manner of sophistications. His shorter lyrics, in which the form itself imposes terseness and directness, are amongst his best works.

Amongst the contents of Poems are "The Apparition" and "Christ in Hades" (both reprinted from a booklet of 1897), Marpessa, and "The Wife", 4 poems, each in its own distinct and non-dramatic form, but all alike illustrating Phillips's gift for charging lyric or narrative matter with dramatic sense.

In New Poems (1908), "Endymion" has less, and its "Quest of Edith" none, of the dramatic sense which gave vitality to "Marpessa"; its lyrics are largely topical; and its best poems are those taken over from Orestes and Primavera.

"The New Inferno" (1911), his longest poem, presents in clumsy narrative a loose series of overdrawn pictures to illustrate trite moral texts.

Lyrics and Dramas (1913) has flashes of the old spontaneity. But his susceptibilities are blunted, his themes more commonplace, and whereas, before, the seamy side of life was depicted with solemn pathos, now its lurid aspects are exploited. He affects at times a gay nonchalance, but usually relapses into apathetic pessimism.

His last volume of non-dramatic verse, Panama, and other poems (1915), is his worst, and reveals nothing but an indifferent talent for narrative.

The truth is that Phillips had no critical power, and especially no sense of self-criticism. He read little, and so his genius was either starved or allowed to grow unpruned. He is best in Paolo and Francesca, in parts of Herod, or in poems where lyric and drama come together as the climax of such a simple narrative as Marpessa. His most original work is "Christ in Hades", but it is somewhat overweighted by its intellectual ambition. Promise of equal originality is found in The Wife; but in that vein the promise is frustrated. Desiring to be objective, he becomes merely squalid, and ends in conventional realism.

List of Phillips's non-dramatic works:

1. Orestes and Other Poems. London, printed for private circulation, 1884 (contains 8 poems, of which "Thoughts at Sunrise" appears again in New Poems; a 2nd, "Vale Camoena", in a revised version becomes the opening poem in Primavera, and occurs again as "The Dreaming Muse" in New Poems; a 3rd, "Orestes", also reappears in a revised version both in Primavera and in New Poems).
2. Primavera: Poems by four authors. Oxford, Blackwell, 1890 (the collaborators were Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose, and A.S. Cripps; contains "Vale Camoena" and '"Orestes" and 2 more poems by Phillips, "To a Lost Love" and two stanzas, "A Dream" ("My dead love …"), afterwards printed as the opening section of "The Apparition" in volumes 4 and 5 of this list).
3. Eremus: A Poem. London, partly privately, partly Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894.
4. Christ in Hades. London, Elkin Mathews, 1897 (no. 3 of the ‘Shilling Garland’ series, edited by Phillips's cousin, Laurence Binyon; contains the titular poem, 6 sections of "The Apparition" as in 5 below, and the 3 poems there following entitled Lyrics).
5. Poems. London, John Lane, 1898 (really 1897).
6. New Poems. John Lane, 1908 (really 1907) (amongst the new matter is Iole, a Tragedy in one act).
7. The New Inferno. John Lane, 1911.
8. Lyrics and Dramas. John Lane, 1913.
9. Panama and Other Poems. John Lane, 1915.

Drama

Phillips's finest dramas are those in which an ancient story and an older world are used in order to exhibit such elemental impulses as still determine the common human lot. But then, almost invariably, he or his producer once more obscures what is essential by reconstructing the outer accidents for spectacular effect.

His dramatic genius was intense, but of limited range. He could invest a human relationship, under circumstances essentially simple though often overlaid by the pomp of empire, with an air of devastating fate. His chosen theme is maternal or fraternal love torn asunder by the intervention of some such primary force as sexual passion. Outside this field he lacks artistic pliability and moral strength; and so for variety he is tempted to specious devices.

List of dramatic works:

1. Paolo and Francesca. John Lane, 1900 (really 1899); produced 6 March 1902, St. James's Theatre, by G. Alexander.
2. Herod. John Lane, 1901 (really 1900); produced 31 October 1900, Her Majesty's Theatre, by H.B. Tree.
3. Ulysses. John Lane, 1902; produced 1 February 1902, His Majesty's Theatre, by H. B. Tree.
4. The Sin of David. London, Macmillan, 1904; produced 30 September 1905, Stadttheater, Düsseldorf; March 1913, at Johannesburg, by H.B. Irving; July 1914, Savoy Theatre, by Irving.
5. Aylmer's Secret. Unpublished, manuscript burnt by Phillips; produced 4 July 1905, Adelphi Theatre.
6. Nero. Macmillan, 1906; produced 25 January, His Majesty's Theatre, by Tree (part of the original, omitted from Tree's version and from this volume, appears as a 1-act play, Nero's Mother, in Lyrics and Dramas).
7. Iole (in New Poems); produced June 1913, Cosmopolis, Holborn, by Efga Myers and Phillips.
8. The Bride of Lammermoor. Unpublished; produced 23 March 1908, King's Theatre, Glasgow, by Martin Harvey; and as The Last Heir 5 October 1908, Adelphi Theatre, by Harvey.
9. Faust (in collaboration with J. Comyns Carr). Macmillan, 1908; produced 5 September 1908, His Majesty's Theatre, by Tree.
10. Pietro of Siena. Macmillan, 1910; produced 10 October 1911, Studio Theatre, by the Drama Society.
11. The King. Stephen Swift and Co., 1912 (also by John Lane in Lyrics and Dramas); this and The Adversary were to have been produced by the Drama Society, but Tree acquired the rights to The King, and died before producing it.
12. The Adversary (in Lyrics and Dramas).
13. Armageddon. John Lane, 1915; produced 1 June 1915, New Theatre, by Martin Harvey.
14. Harold (in Poetry Review, January and March 1916); not produced.

Critical introduction

by Sidney Calvin

In regard to this poet the critical pendulum had for some years before his death swung sharply from the side of over-praise to that of over-neglect. It will some day recover its equilibrium, and Phillips will then be recognized as having belonged, by the gift of passion (“the all-in-all in poetry,” as Lamb has it,) by natural largeness of style and pomp and melody of rhythm and diction, as well as by intensity of imaginative vision in those fields where his imagination was really awake, to the great lineage and high tradition of English poetry. Yes, too directly to the lineage and too faithfully to the tradition, the advocatus diaboli may interpose.

It has been especially charged against him that his blank verse too closely reproduces the cadences of Milton and of Tennyson. But this is to mistake absorption, which is one thing, for imitation, which is quite another. It is true that he was no great metrical inventor or innovator, though some of his experiments in unrhymed lyric — for instance, "A Gleam" and "The Revealed Madonna" ... are to my mind among the most successful that have been tried in English. But he was able to stamp an individuality, strong though not revolutionary or eccentric, on blank verse whether narrative or dramatic, on the closed “heroic” couplet, that form almost disused since the romantic revival, and on such ancient and popular never-to-be-worn out measures as the familiar Poulter's measure.

As to originality not of form but of matter, it may be observed that when Phillips chose to rehandle themes on which predecessors, even the greatest, had set their mark, so far from imitating, he for better or worse always attacked them according to conceptions of his own. His Endymion, a thing over-mannered and far from 1st-rate, is in conception and treatment wholly independent of Keats. Other good cases in point are the 2 short pieces, "The Parting of Launcelotand Guinevere," a Tennysonian theme wrought without Tennyson’s cunning technique but with an intensity of passion beyond his reach, and the admirably vivid tragic vision of "Beatrice Cenci" in the little lyric so named, which might have been written just as it is had Shelley not existed.

Other criticisms directed against Phillips’s work have more foundation than the charge of imitativeness. He worked more by gusts of inspiration than by sustained care in craftsmanship, and often allowed a lax or feeble line to intrude even into his finest passages. He was also too prone to self-repetition and to that form of poetical rhetoric which consists in trying to reinforce an idea or heighten an image by rewording it over again with no essential change of thought.

Subject to these besetting flaws, he has left achievements of striking personality and power in a wide range of themes. In handling the simple, direct, universal human joys and sorrows, the longings and regrets, connected with the sexual and conjugal, the parental and filial relations, his touch is often as new and revealing as it is tender. For the sense of the past in the present, the stirrings of far-off legendary association, the apprehension of vibrating cosmic sympathies between the external universe and man aroused in the human spirit in moments of emotional tension or tragic passion — for these he found forms of utterance which were beautiful and entirely his own.

Themes of mystical religion and gropings beyond the grave were never far from his thoughts and inspired much of his work, to my mind rarely of his best, from Christ in Hades down to The New Inferno. There is a distressful power and sadness, a sadness sometimes rising to the pitch of agony, in some poems of personal confession and supplication forced upon him by the struggle against enemies within himself stronger than he could resist.

Passing to work done in more objective moods, he has left some presenting with true power and originality impressions of character and destiny among crushed and suffering city lives. His surface observation both of the crowd and individuals was intense: his divination and suggestion of histories behind the surface imaginative and penetrating....

In his later years he was accustomed to take poetic note of the changing aspects brought into the world by the progress of mechanical invention: the disappearance of sails from the sea, the invasion of the sky by aëroplanes and the like. Such notes, adroitly and tellingly written as they often are, hardly rise sufficiently above the level of newspaper verse to survive for their own sake as poetry, though they will be of interest in retrospect as marking the effect of these changes on a powerful and sensitive spirit in their day.

So far I have said nothing of the dramas which after the year 1900 absorbed most of Phillips’s energies and constitute by far the chief bulk of his work. His later attempts in that form, Iole, The Adversary, The King, and Armageddon, may, I think, be dismissed as giving evidence of exhausted faculties and containing only here and there a phrase or line or 2 of the old power. Faust was a collaboration piece and made small pretension to originality. There remain the five, Paolo and Francesca, Herod, Ulysses, Nero, and The Sin of David. Several of these have proved successful on the stage: all have scenes and passages of stirring beauty and power. It has been objected to them that the poet, having been an actor and working with actors, has constructed his plays with too obvious and mechanical a stagecraft; that they are weak in the elements of character creation; that the persons are not made to speak vitally from within, but to describe and expound themselves in speeches put into their mouths from without, as it were decoratively and artificially; that the speeches themselves are too rhetorical, and the rhetoric often too ornate and flowery and sometimes redundant and tautological. Against this it may justly be urged that, after all, knowledge of stagecraft is a good thing in a playwright, and that Phillips’s aim in drama was intended to be on Greek lines much rather than on Shakespearian: that the intense, the Shakespearian individualization of characters has been no part of the aim, still less of the achievement, of tragic drama in some of the great literatures of the world,— it is not a capital element either in the Greek drama or the classical French: and again, that rhetoric in poetic drama there needs must be, and between the right and appropriate rhetoric of a situation, when it is touched with passion and imagination, as much of it in these plays truly is,—between such rhetoric and truly great dramatic poetry the line is difficult to draw, if it can be drawn at all.

Recognition

His Poems (1897) won the prize of £100 offered by the Academy journal for the best new book of its year.

Publications

Poetry

• Orestes, and other poems. London: privately published, 1884.
• Primavera: Poems by four authors (Laurence Binyon, Arthur Shearly Cripps, Manmohan Ghose, Stephen Phillips). Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1890.
• Eremus: A poem. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894.
• Christ in Hades, and other poems. London: Elkin Mathews, 1896.
• Poems. London & New York: John Lane, 1898.
• Marpessa. London & New York: John Lane, 1900.
• Grief and God. London: privately published, 1905.
• New Poems. London & New York: John Lane, 1907.
• The New Inferno. London & New York: John Lane, 1910.
• Panama, and other poems: Narrative and occasional. London & New York: John Lane, 1915.

Plays

• Paolo and Francesca: A tragedy in five acts. London & New York: John Lane, 1900.
• Herod: A tragedy. London & New York: John Lane, 1901.
• Ulysses: A drama in a prologue and three acts. London & New York: Macmillan, 1902, 1915.
• The Sin of David. London & New York: Macmillan, 1904.
• Nero. London & New York: Macmillan, 1906.
• Iole: A tragedy in one act. London: John Lane, 1908.
• Faust (with J. Comyns Carr). London: Macmillan, 1908.
• Pietro of Siena: A drama. London & New York: Macmillan, 1910.
• The King: A tragedy in a continuous series of scenes. London: S. Swift, 1912.
• The Adversary. London: John Lane, 1913.
• Nero's Mother. London: John Lane, 1915.
• Armageddon: A modern epic drama. London & New York: John Lane, 1915.
• Collected Plays. London & New York: Macmillan, 1921.

Collected editions

• Lyrics and Dramas. London & New York: John Lane, 1913.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets
• List of English-language playwrights
• Timeline of British poetry

References

•  Charlton, Henry Buckley (1927). "Phillips, Stephen". In Davis, H.W.C. & Wheeler, J.R.H.. Dictionary of National Biography, 3rd supplement​. London: Smith, Elder. pp. 434-436. . Wikisource, Web, Nov. 19, 2024.
• A.E.W. Mason, Sir George Alexander & The St. James' Theatre, 1935; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969.
• Whittington-Egan, Richard (2006). Stephen Phillips: A Biography. Rivendale Press. ISBN 1-904201-01-6
• See the section on Stephen Phillips in Poets of the Younger Generation, by William Archer (1902); also the articles on Tragedy and Mr Stephen Phillips, by William Watson in the Fortnightly Review (March 1898); The Poetry of Mr Stephen Phillips, in the Edinburgh Review (January 1900); Mr Stephen Phillips, in the Century (January 1901), by Edmund Gosse; and Mr Stephen Phillips, in the Quarterly Review (April 1902), by Arthur Symons.

External links

Poems

• "A Dream"
• "Beautiful Lie the Dead"
• Stephen Phillips at My Poetic Side (profile & poem, "The Kaiser and Belgium")
• Phillips in The English Poets: An anthology: "Marpessa," "A Poet's Prayer," "The Fireman," "Penelope to Ulysses," "Beatrice Cenci," "The Parting of Launcelot and Guinevere," "A Gleam!," "The Revealed Madonna"
• Stephen Phillips at PoemHunter (8 poems)
• Stephen Phillips at Poetry Nook (25 poems)

Books

• Works by Stephen Phillips at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Stephen Phillips at Internet Archive
• Stephen Phillips at Amazon.com

About

• Stephen Phillips in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Stephen Phillips: A biography

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 3rd supplement​ (edited by H.W.C. Davis & J.R.H. Weaver). London: Smith, Elder, 1927. Original article is at:. Phillips, Stephen.