Theo Marzials Biography

Theophile-Jules-Henri Marzials, or as he himself abridged it, Theo Marzials, published one volume of poetry when he was a young man; achieved a reputation during his early maturity as a composer and singer of popular songs; collaborated as a librettist on Esmerelda, an opera based on Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris and produced at the Drury Lane Theatre in March 1883; had in the 1890s two poems published in the Yellow Book, a quarterly devoted to Decadent literature and art; and then lingered on for two decades before dying and passing into apparent oblivion. John M. Munro, who edited a selection of Marzials's poems in 1974, establishes no claim that Marzials has been unjustly neglected and deserves rehabilitation, but Munro does provide, through the poems and in his introduction, access to one of those illuminating minor figures who add dimension to literary history. Marzials had associations with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and A. C. Swinburne. At least one of his poems was praised by Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose own lyrical experimentations find some curious analogues in Marzials. Marzials, especially through his use of the devices, themes, and intricate forms of Old French poetry, is one more example of nineteenth-century aestheticism.

Information on the life and family background of Theo Marzials can be briefly given. The family was Venetian in origin. Both his grandfather and father were prominent Protestant clergymen in France and Belgium. The father, Antoine-Theophile Marzials, published in 1835 a volume of translations, Sermons choises de J. Wesley; he traveled in 1839 to London to attend the centenary of Methodism and while there married Mary Ann Jackson, the daughter of the president of the Wesleyan Conference. In 1857 Antoine-Theophile was appointed pastor of the French Protestant Church of London, a post he held until 1877. Theo was the second son and youngest of five children. His mother edited a volume of Gems of English Poetry from Chaucer to the Present Times (1867). His sister, Elizabeth-Marianne, published a small volume of Poems (1864). The first son, Francois-Thomas or Frank, became in 1898 accountant general of the army and in 1904 was knighted Sir Frank T. Marzials. Frank was also a prolific author: a poet, essayist, and biographer. He was the family prop who bore the burdens of the debts, first of his improvident and ineffectual father and then of his profligate brother.

In 1870 Theo Marzials became a junior assistant in the librarian's office of the British Museum, a contemporary there of Coventry Patmore, John Payne, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, and Edmund Gosse--"a nest of singing birds," as Gosse later recalled. Marzials remained at the British Museum until his retirement, with a pension of £38 a year, in 1882--a retirement dictated perhaps by ill health but possibly also motivated by the fact that he had by this time an estimated annual income of £1000 from his musical compositions and his recitals which exploited his fine baritone voice. Altogether Marzials published more than eighty musical pieces, among them the popular ballad "Twickenham Ferry" (1878) and musical settings of Christina Rossetti's "Birthday" lyric and of Swinburne's poem "Ask Nothing More of Me, Sweet"; the last became one of the most popular ballads of the 1880s. It was during this period that Marzials frequented Rossetti's house and established an intimate, probably homosexual, relationship with Edmund Gosse.

Marzials's retirement years are obscure. He spent much time during the ten years after leaving the British Museum in Italy and Paris. He became addicted to chloral, and there were reports of physical and mental collapse, a tragic end to his career, and even premature death. Briefly, in the 1890s he was "rediscovered" by Henry Harland, editor of the Yellow Book, but after 1899 Marzials published no more songs. His last two decades he spent in Devonshire, first with his sister and then as an eccentric recluse, charming his neighbors, until almost the very end, with his magnificent singing voice.

Marzials published his first poem, the privately printed Passionate Dowsabella, a Pastoral, in 1872. It was included the next year in Marzials's The Gallery of Pigeons, a collection of poems--the only volume of poetry Marzials published. One must assume that a lack of encouragement discouraged the aspiring young poet. Marzials had sent Dante Gabriel Rossetti a copy of his poems and received a letter from him which praised Passionate Dowsabella for being "something truly pastoral in a strange new way" but which criticized it for "the jarring points remaining in it" and for being "disjointed" and "a great deal inconceivably forced or neglected." Of the long poem in The Gallery of Pigeons Rossetti wrote that it "labours perhaps more under a throng of (pardon again) puerile perversities in diction than any piece in the volume." Perhaps Rossetti had in mind such lines as these describing the flight of the pigeons:

Then swirl and swoop, and far and free,
And over the bean-slope, black and brown,
........................................
Wave to the wenches, that yawn at the well
And wring up above them their smocks and socks,
And clash their pails and pannikins, Ho!
And titter and splash, and splatter and splutter,
Then flying a-thwart them, flaunt, in a flutter,
Oho! hyüeèps, hyüeèps, Oho!
Zounds! and Zephyr! and how they go!

Rossetti did express admiration for several more conventional short poems, including "And I was a full-leav'd, full-bough'd tree," "I dream'd I was in Sicily," and the "Aubade," one of the traditional forms inspired by Marzials's enthusiasm for medieval Provencal poetry and its nineteenth-century French imitators, to one of whom, Théodore Aubanel, Marzials dedicated his volume. Marzials complained that Rossetti misunderstood him. He wrote to William Bell Scott: "Rossetti does not seem to see (by what he picks out) what I am driving at; he praises my imitations and not the me in the book."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, praising Marzials's "Rondel" as "very graceful" with "an art and finish rare in English verse," shared the preference for the imitations; he disparaged "A Tragedy," a fifty-two-line Wertherian, suicidal monologue which begins

                Death!
                 Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
              Flop, plop,
           Above, beneath.

Such a poem--a bizarre failure--was apparently part of Marzials's misunderstood "me"--an apprentice poet haunted by fresh sound patterns achieved through onomatopoeia and alliteration. "The Trout" has almost the effect of a Hopkinsian rough draft in such lines as "Where shimmers the sun in the hazes a-shimmer,/The shimmer of river, oh! river a-shimmer." Perhaps had Marzials pursued, with encouragement, his original "me," he might have matured into a significant artist. As it is, "he is," as Munro concludes, "interesting rather than significant, a literary curiosity, perhaps, rather than a neglected genius."