# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Phillips, Stephen

​PHILLIPS, STEPHEN (1864–1915), poet and dramatist, the eldest child of the Rev. Stephen Phillips, precentor of Peterborough Cathedral, was born at Summertown, near Oxford, 28 July 1864. 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 six 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, one of whose staff, John Churton Collins [q.v.], helped him to discover that poetry had claims on him. In 1884 Orestes and Other Poems was privately printed. About 1885 he joined the theatrical company of his cousin, (Sir) Frank R. Benson. His only histrionic assets were a six-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 two 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. Amongst the contents of this volume are The Apparition and Christ in Hades (both reprinted from a booklet of 1897), Marpessa, and The Wife, four 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. The success of the volume, which was ‘crowned’ by The Academy journal, revived Phillips's ambition to write poetic drama; and for the next ten 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. Its 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.
Meanwhile, Phillips gained a stupendous reputation as a dramatic poet. Delays in the staging of his Paolo and Francesca, ​commissioned by (Sir) George Alexander [q.v.] in 1898, allowed it to be applauded first 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 [q.v.] produced with sumptuous accessories. When Paolo and Francesca was at last performed (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 one 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 first and best play. Phillips's day was over. His dramatic genius was intense, but of very 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. The Sin of David (1904, revised 1912) seems at first 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 one-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. The New Inferno (1911), his longest poem, presents in clumsy narrative a loose series of overdrawn pictures to illustrate trite moral texts. In 1912 a brighter period opened, as chance then allowed his friends to take his regeneration in hand. 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. 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 three 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. His last volume of non-dramatic verse, Panama and Other Poems (1915), is his worst in that kind, and reveals nothing but an indifferent talent for narrative. Shortly before his death Phillips completed a verse play on the Norman Conquest, Harold, and wrote the scenario of one on John the Baptist. He died at Deal 9 December 1915, and was buried at Hastings. He was survived by his wife, May (Lidyard), whom he married in 1892, and by one son.
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 fifteen (Destiny in Orestes and Other Poems), and recurs as a striking dramatic motive in The Adversary. Yet by nature he was open, hearty, and sociable, except when afflicted by recurrent fits of depression; he had a keen sense of humour, was an excellent raconteur, and a fine cricketer. 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. 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. 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 eight poems, of which one, Thoughts at Sunrise, appears again in New Poems; a second, Vale Camoena, in a revised version becomes the first poem in Primavera, and occurs again as The Dreaming Muse in New Poems; a third, 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, noted above, and two more poems by Phillips, To a Lost Love, and two stanzas, A Dream (My dead love …), afterwards printed as the first 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, six sections of The Apparition as in 5 below, and the three poems there following entitled Lyrics). 5. Poems. London, John Lane, 1898 (really 1897) (pp. 1–69 give poems now first printed). 6. New Poems. John Lane, 1908 (really 1907) (see under 1 and 2 above; 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.
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 H. B. 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 one-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.
[W. Archer, Poets of the Younger Generation, 1901, and Real Conversations, 1904; Sir Sidney Colvin, in T. Humphry Ward's English Poets, vol. v, 1918, and in The Bookman, March 1916; A. Waugh, Tradition and Change, ed. 1919; Coulson Kernahan, In Good Company, 1917, and Celebrities, 1923; private information.]
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