has proved much more of a "germinal" poet than Shelley. Although the
latter was, I think, by far the greater, his poetry had little that was
national and very little that was imitable about it. He has had a vast
influence; but it has been in the main the influence, the inspiration of
his unsurpassed exciting power. No one has borrowed or carried further
any specially Shelleian turns of phrase, rhythm, or thought. Those who
have attempted to copy and urge further the Shelleian attitude towards
politics, philosophy, ethics, and the like, have made it generally
ludicrous and sometimes disgusting. He is, in his own famous words,
"something remote and afar." His poetry is almost poetry in its
elements, uncoloured by race, language, time, circumstance, or creed. He
is not even so much a poet as Poetry accidentally impersonated and
incarnate.
With Keats it is very different. He had scarcely reached maturity of any
kind when he died, and he laboured under the very serious disadvantages,
first of an insufficient acquaintance with the great masters, and
secondly of coming early under the influence of a rather small master,
yet a master, Leigh Hunt, who taught him the fluent, gushing, slipshod
style that brought not merely upon him, but upon his mighty successor
Tennyson, the harsh but not in this respect wholly unjust lash of
conservative and academic criticism. But he, as no one of his own
contemporaries did, felt, expressed, and handed on the exact change
wrought in English poetry by the great Romantic movement. Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Scott, and even Southey to some extent, were the authors of
this; but, being the authors, they were necessarily not the results of
it. Byron was fundamentally out of sympathy with it, though by accidents
of time and chance he had to enlist; Shelley, an angel, and an effectual
angel, of poetry, was hardly a man, and still less an Englishman. But
Keats felt it all, expressed what of it he had time and strength to
express, and left the rest to his successors, helped, guided, furthered
by his own example. Keats, in short, is the father, directly or at short
stages of descent, of every English poet born within the present
century who has not been a mere "sport" or exception. He begat Tennyson,
and Tennyson begat all the rest.
The evidences of this are to be seen in almost his earliest poems--not
necessarily in those contained in his earliest volume. Of course they
are not everywhere. There were sure to be, and there were, mere echoes
of eighteenth century verse and mere imitations of earlier writers. But
these may be simply neglected. It is in such pieces as "Calidore" that
the new note is heard; and though something in this note may be due to
Hunt (who had caught the original of it from Wither and Browne), Keats
changed, enriched, and refashioned the thing to such an extent that it
became his own. It is less apparent (though perhaps not less really
present) in his sonnets, despite the magnificence of the famous one on
Chapman's _Homer_, than in the couplet poems, which are written in an
extremely fluent and peculiar verse, very much "enjambed" or overlapped,
and with a frequent indulgence in double rhymes. Hunt had to a certain
extent started this, but he had not succeeded in giving it anything like
the distinct character which it took in Keats' hands.
_Endymion_ was written in this measure, with rare breaks; and there is
little doubt that the lusciousness of the rhythm, combined as it was
with a certain lusciousness both of subject and (again in unlucky
imitation of Hunt) of handling, had a bad effect on some readers, as
also that the attacks on it were to a certain extent, though not a very
large one, prompted by genuine disgust at the mawkishness, as its author
called it, of the tone. Keats, who was always an admirable critic of his
own work, judged it correctly enough later, except that he was too harsh
to it. But it is a delightful poem to this day, and I do not think that
it is quite just to call it, as it has been called, "not Greek, but
Elizabethan-Romantic." It seems to me quite different from Marlowe or
the author of _Britain's Ida_, and really Greek, but Greek mediaeval,
Greek of the late romance type, refreshed with a wonderful new blood of
English romanticism. And this once more was to be the note of all the
best poetry of the century, the pouring of this new English blood
through the veins of old subjects--classical, mediaeval, foreign, modern.
We were to conquer the whole world of poetical matter with our English
armies, and Keats was the first leader who started the adventure.
The exquisite poetry of his later work showed this general tendency in
all its latest pieces,--clearly in the larger poems, the fine but
perhaps somewhat overpraised _Hyperion_, the admirable _Lamia_, the
exquisite _Eve of St. Agnes_, but still more in the smaller, and most of
all in those twin peaks of all his poetry, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
and "La Belle Dame sans Merci." He need indeed have written nothing but
these two to show himself not merely an exquisite poet but a captain and
leader of English poetry for many a year, almost for many a generation
to come. Wordsworth may have given him a little, a very quiet hint for
the first, the more Classical masterpiece; Coleridge something a little
louder for the second, the Romantic. But in neither case did the summons
amount to anything like a cue or a call-bell; it was at best seed that,
if it had not fallen on fresh and fruitful soil, could have come to
nothing.
As it is, and if we wish to see what it came to, we must simply look at
the whole later poetry of the nineteenth century in England. The
operations of the spirit are not to be limited, and it is of course
quite possible that if Keats had not been, something or somebody would
have done his work instead of him. But as it is, it is to Keats that we
must trace Tennyson, Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Morris; to Keats that
even not a little of Browning has to be affiliated; to Keats, directly
or indirectly, that the greater part of the poetry of nearly three
generations owes royalty and allegiance.
Of him, as of Shelley, some foolish and hurtful things have been said.
In life he was no effeminate "aesthetic" or "decadent," divided between
sensual gratification and unmanly _Katzenjammer_, between paganism and
puerility, but an honest, manly Englishman, whose strength only yielded
to unconquerable disease, whose impulses were always healthy and
generous. Despite his origin,--and, it must be added, some of his
friendships,--there was not a touch of vulgarity about him; and if his
comic vein was not very full-pulsed, he had a merry laugh in him. There
is no "poisonous honey stolen" from anywhere or extracted by himself
from anything in Keats; his sensuousness is nothing more than is, in the
circumstances, "necessary and voluptuous and right." But these moral
excellences, while they may add to the satisfaction with which one
contemplates him, hardly enhance--though his morbid admirers seem to
think that the absence of them would enhance--the greatness and the
value of his poetical position, both in the elaboration of a new poetic
style and language, and still more in the indication of a new road
whereby the great poetic exploration could be carried on.
Round or under these great Seven--for that Byron was great in a way need
not be denied; Southey, the weakest of all as a poet, had a very strong
influence, and was one of the very greatest of English men of
letters--must be mentioned a not inconsiderable number of men who in any
other age would have been reckoned great. The eldest of these, both in
years and in reputation, holds his position, and perhaps always held it,
rather by courtesy than by strict right. Samuel Rogers[7] was born in
London on 30th July 1763, and was the son of a dissenting banker, from
whom he derived Whig principles and a comfortable fortune. It is said
that he once, as a very young man, went to call on Dr. Johnson, but was
afraid to knock; but though shyness accompanied him through life, the
amiability which it is sometimes supposed to betoken did not. He
published a volume of poems in 1786, and his famous _Pleasures of
Memory_, the piece that made his reputation, in 1792. Twenty years
afterwards _Columbus_ followed, and yet two years later, in 1814,
_Jacqueline_; while in 1822 _Italy_, on which, with the _Pleasures of
Memory_, such fame as he has rests, was published, to be reissued some
years afterwards in a magnificent illustrated edition, and to have a
chance (in a classical French jest) _se sauver de planche en planche_.
He did not die till 1855, in his ninety-third year: the last, as he had
been the first, of his group.
Rogers had the good luck to publish his best piece at a time when the
general and popular level of English poetry was at the lowest point it
has reached since the sixteenth century, and to be for many years
afterwards a rich and rather hospitable man, the acquaintance if not
exactly the friend of most men of letters, of considerable influence in
political and general society, and master of an excessively sharp
tongue. A useful friend and a dangerous enemy, it was simpler to court
or to let him alone than to attack him, and his fame was derived from
pieces too different from any work of the actual generation to give them
much umbrage. It may be questioned whether Rogers ever wrote a single
line of poetry. But he wrote some polished and pleasant verse, which was
vigorous by the side of Hayley and "correct" by the side of Keats. In
literature he has very little interest; in literary history he has some.
_Felix opportunitate_ in the same way, but a far greater poet, was
Thomas Campbell, who, like Rogers, was a Whig, like him belonged rather
to the classical than to the romantic school in style if not in choice
of subject, and like him had the good luck to obtain, by a poem with a
title very similar to that of Rogers' masterpiece, a high reputation at
a time when there was very little poetry put before the public. Campbell
was not nearly so old a man as Rogers, and was even the junior of the
Lake poets and Scott, having been born at Glasgow on the 27th July 1777.
His father was a real Campbell, and as a merchant had at one time been
of some fortune; but the American War had impoverished him, and the poet
was born to comparative indigence. He did, however, well at the college
of his native city, and on leaving it took a tutorship in Mull. His
_Pleasures of Hope_ was published in 1799 and was extremely popular, nor
after it had its author much difficulty in following literature. He was
never exactly rich, but pensions, legacies, editorships, high prices for
his not extensive poetical work, and higher for certain exercises in
prose book-making which are now almost forgotten, maintained him very
comfortably. Indeed, of the many recorded ingratitudes of authors to
publishers, Campbell's celebrated health to Napoleon because "he shot a
bookseller" is one of the most ungrateful. In the last year of the
eighteenth century he went to Germany, and was present at (or in the
close neighbourhood of) the battle of Hohenlinden. This he afterwards
celebrated in really immortal verse, which, with "Ye Mariners of
England" and the "Battle of the Baltic," represents his greatest
achievement. In 1809 he published _Gertrude of Wyoming_, a short-long
poem of respectable _technique_ and graceful sentiment. In 1824 appeared
a volume of poems, of which the chief, _Theodric_ (not as it is
constantly misspelled _Theodoric_), is bad; and in 1842 another, of
which the chief, _The Pilgrim of Glencoe_, is worse. He died in 1844 at
Boulogne, after a life which, if not entirely happy (for he had
ill-health, not improved by incautious habits, some domestic
misfortunes, and a rather sour disposition), had been full of honours of
all kinds, both in his own country, of where he was Lord Rector of
Glasgow University, and out of it.
If Campbell had written nothing but his longer poems, the comparison
above made with Rogers would be wholly, instead of partly, justified.
Although both still retain a sort of conventional respect, it is
impossible to call either the _Pleasures of Hope_ or _Gertrude of
Wyoming_ very good poetry, while enough has been said of their
successors. Nor can very high praise be given to most of the minor
pieces. But the three splendid war-songs above named--the equals, if not
the superiors, of anything of the kind in English, and therefore in any
language--set him in a position from which he is never likely to be
ousted. In a handful of others--"Lochiel," the exquisite lines on "A
Deserted Garden in Argyleshire," with, for some flashes at least, the
rather over-famed "Exile of Erin," "Lord Ullin's Daughter," and a few
more--he also displays very high, though rather unequal and by no means
unalloyed, poetical faculty; and "The Last Man," which, by the way, is
the latest of his good things, is not the least. But his best work will
go into a very small compass: a single octavo sheet would very nearly
hold it, and it was almost all written before he was thirty. He is thus
an instance of a kind of poet, not by any means rare in literature, but
also not very common, who appears to have a faculty distinct in class
but not great in volume, who can do certain things better than almost
anybody else, but cannot do them very often, and is not quite to be
trusted to do them with complete sureness of touch. For it is to be
noted that even in Campbell's greatest things there are distinct
blemishes, and that these blemishes are greatest in that which in its
best parts reaches the highest level--"The Battle of the Baltic." Many
third and some tenth rate poets would never have left in their work such
things as "The might of England flushed _To anticipate the scene_,"
which is half fustian and half nonsense: no very great poet could
possibly have been guilty of it. Yet for all this Campbell holds, as has
been said, the place of best singer of war in a race and language which
are those of the best singers and not the worst fighters in the history
of the world--in the race of Nelson and the language of Shakespeare. Not
easily shall a man win higher praise than this.
In politics, as well as in a certain general kind of literary attitude
and school, another Thomas, Moore, classes himself both historically and
naturally with Rogers and Campbell; but he was a very much better poet
than Rogers, and, though he never reached quite the same height as
Campbell at his narrow and exceptional best, a far more voluminous verse
writer and a much freer writer of good verse of many different kinds. He
was born in Dublin on 28th May 1779; his father being a grocer, his
mother somewhat higher in social rank. He was well educated, and was
sent to Trinity College, Dublin, where he had but surmounted political
difficulties; for his time as an undergraduate coincided with
"Ninety-eight," and though it does not seem that he had meddled with
anything distinctly treasonable, he had "Nationalist" friends and
leanings. Partly to sever inconvenient associations, partly in quest of
fortune, he was sent to London in that year, and entered at the Temple.
In a manner not very clearly explained, but connected no doubt with his
leaning to the Whig party, which was then much in need of literary help,
he became a protege of Lord Moira's, by whom he was introduced to the
Prince of Wales. The Prince accepted the dedication of some translations
of Anacreon, etc., which Moore had brought over with him, and which were
published in 1800; while two years later the _Poems of Thomas Little_, a
punning pseudonym, appeared, and at once charmed the public by their
sugared versification and shocked it by their looseness of tone--a
looseness which is not to be judged from the comparatively decorous
appearance they make in modern editions. But there was never much harm
in them. Next year, in 1803, Moore received a valuable appointment at
Bermuda, which, though he actually went out to take possession of it and
travelled some time in North America, he was allowed to transfer to a
deputy. He came back to England, published another volume of poems, and
fought a rather famously futile duel with Jeffrey about a criticism on
it in the _Edinburgh Review_. He began the _Irish Melodies_ in 1807,
married four years later, and from that time fixed his headquarters
mostly in the country: first near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, then near
Devizes in Wiltshire, to be near his patrons Lord Moira and Lord
Lansdowne. But he was constantly in London on visits, and much in the
society of men of letters, not merely of his own party. In particular he
became, on the whole, Byron's most intimate friend, and preserved
towards that very difficult person an attitude (tinged neither with the
servility nor with the exaggerated independence of the _parvenu_) which
did him a great deal of credit. He was rather a strong partisan, and,
having a brilliant vein of poetical satire, he wrote in 1813 _The
Twopenny Post Bag_--the best satiric verse of the poetical kind since
the _Anti-Jacobin_, and the best on the Whig side since the _Rolliad_.
Nor did he fail to take advantage of the popular appetite for long poems
which Scott and Byron had created; his _Lalla Rookh_, published in 1817,
being very popular and very profitable. It was succeeded by another and
his best satirical work, _The Fudge Family_, a charming thing.
Up to this time he had been an exceedingly fortunate man; and his good
luck, aided it must be said by his good conduct,--for Moore, with all
his apparent weaknesses, was thoroughly sound at the core,--enabled him
to surmount a very serious reverse of fortune. His Bermuda deputy was
guilty of malversation so considerable that Moore could not meet the
debt, and he had to go abroad. But Lord Lansdowne discharged his
obligations; and Moore paid Lord Lansdowne. He returned to England in
1823, and was a busy writer for all but the last years of the thirty
that remained to him; but the best of his work was done, with one
exception. Byron left him his _Memoirs_, which would of course have been
enormously profitable. But Lady Byron and others of the poet's
connections were so horrified at the idea of the book appearing that, by
an arrangement which has been variously judged, but which can hardly be
regarded as other than disinterested on Moore's part, the MS. was
destroyed, and instead of it Moore brought out in 1830 his well-known
_Life of Byron_. This, some not incompetent judges have regarded as
ranking next to Lockhart's _Scott_ and Boswell's _Johnson_, and though
its main attraction may be derived from Byron's very remarkable letters,
still shows on the part of the biographer very unusual dexterity, good
feeling, and taste. The lives of _Sheridan_ and _Lord Edward Fitzgerald_
had, and deserved to have, less success; while a _History of Ireland_
was, and was bound to be, an almost complete failure. For, though a very
good prose writer, Moore had little of the erudition required, no grasp
or faculty of political argument, and was at this time of his life, if
not earlier, something of a trimmer, certain to satisfy neither the
"ascendency" nor the "nationalist" parties. His prose romance of _The
Epicurean_ is much better, and a really remarkable, piece of work; and
though the _Loves of the Angels_, his last long poem, is not very good,
he did not lose his command either of sentimental or of facetious lyric
till quite his last days. These were clouded; for, like his
contemporaries Scott and Southey, he suffered from brain disease for
some time before his death, on 25th February 1852.
During his lifetime, especially during the first half or two-thirds of
his literary career, Moore had a great popularity, and won no small
esteem even among critics; such discredit as attached to him being
chiefly of the moral kind, and that entertained only by very
strait-laced persons. But as the more high-flown and impassioned muses
of Wordsworth, of Shelley, and of Keats gained the public ear in the
third and later decades of the century, a fashion set in of regarding
him as a mere melodious trifler; and this has accentuated itself during
the last twenty years or so, though quite recently some efforts have
been made in protest. This estimate is demonstrably unjust. It is true
that of the strange and high notes of poetry he has very few, of the
very strangest and highest none at all. But his long poems, _Lalla
Rookh_ especially, though somewhat over-burdened with the then
fashionable deck cargo of erudite or would-be erudite notes, possess
merit which none but a very prejudiced critic can, or at least ought to,
overlook. And in other respects he is very nearly, if not quite, at the
top of at least two trees, which, if not quite cedars of Lebanon, are
not mere grass of Parnassus. Moore was a born as well as a trained
musician. But whereas most musicians have since the seventeenth century
been exceedingly ill at verbal numbers, he had a quite extraordinary
knack of composing what are rather disrespectfully called "words." Among
his innumerable songs there are not one or two dozens or scores, but
almost hundreds of quite charmingly melodious things, admirably adjusted
to their music, and delightful by themselves without any kind of
instrument, and as said not sung. And, what is more, among these there
is a very respectable number to which it would be absolutely absurd to
give the name of trifle. "I saw from the beach" is not a trifle, nor
"When in death I shall calm recline," nor "Oft in the stilly night," nor
"Tell me, kind sage, I pray thee," nor many others. They have become so
hackneyed to us in various ways, and some of them happen to be pitched
in a key of diction which, though not better or worse than others, is so
out of fashion, that it seems as if some very respectable judges could
not "focus" Moore at all. To those who can he will seem, not of course
the equal, or anything like the equal, of Burns or Shelley, of Blake or
Keats, but in his own way,--and that a way legitimate and not low,--one
of the first lyrical writers in English. And they will admit a
considerable addition to his claims in his delightful satirical verse,
mainly but not in the least offensively political, in which kind he is
as easily first as in the sentimental song to music.
Something not dissimilar to the position which Moore occupies on the
more classical wing of the poets of the period is occupied on the other
by Leigh Hunt. Hunt (Henry James Leigh, who called himself and is
generally known by the third only of his Christian names) was born in
London on the 19th October 1784, was educated at Christ's Hospital,
began writing very early, held for a short time a clerkship in a public
office, and then joined his brother in conducting the _Examiner_
newspaper. Fined and imprisoned for a personal libel on the Prince
Regent (1812), Hunt became the fashion with the Opposition; and the
_Story of Rimini_, which he published when he came out of gaol, and
which was written in it, had a good deal of influence. He spent some
years in Italy, to which place he had gone with his family in 1822 to
edit _The Liberal_ and to keep house with Byron--a very disastrous
experiment, the results of which he recorded in an offensive book on his
return. Hunt lived to 18th August 1859, and was rescued from the chronic
state of impecuniosity in which, despite constant literary work, he had
long lived, by a Crown pension and some other assistance in his latest
days. Personally, Leigh Hunt was an agreeable and amiable being enough,
with certain foibles which were rather unfairly magnified in the famous
caricature of him as Harold Skimpole by his friend Dickens, but which
were accompanied by some faults of taste of which Mr. Skimpole is not
accused.
In letters he was a very considerable person; though the best and far
the largest part of his work is in prose, and will be noticed hereafter.
His verse is not great in bulk, and is perhaps more original and
stimulating than positively good. His wide and ardent study of the older
English poets and of those of Italy had enabled him to hit on a novel
style of phrase and rhythm, which has been partly referred to above in
the notice of Keats; his narrative faculty was strong, and some of his
smaller pieces, from his sonnets downwards, are delightful things. "Abou
ben Adhem" unites (a rare thing for its author) amiability with dignity,
stateliness with ease; the "Nile" sonnet is splendid; "Jenny kissed me,"
charming, if not faultless; "The Man and the Fish," far above vulgarity.
The lack of delicate taste which characterised his manners also marred
his verse, which is not unfrequently slipshod, or gushing, or trivially
fluent, and perhaps never relatively so good as the best of his prose.
But he owed little to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries
owed not a little to him.
A quaint and interesting if not supremely important figure among the
poets of this period, and, if his poetry and prose be taken together, a
very considerable man of letters,--perhaps the most considerable man of
letters in English who was almost totally uneducated,--was James Hogg,
who was born in Ettrick Forest in the year 1772. He was taken from
school to mind sheep so early that much later he had to teach himself
even reading and writing afresh; and, though he must have had the
song-gift early, it was not till he was nearly thirty that he published
anything. He was discovered by Scott, to whom he and his mother supplied
a good deal of matter for the _Border Minstrelsy_, and he published
again in 1803. The rest of his life was divided between writing--with
fair success, though with some ill-luck from bankrupt publishers--and
sheep-farming, on which he constantly lost, though latterly he sat rent
free under the Duke of Buccleuch. He died on 21st November 1835.
Even during his life Hogg underwent a curious process of mythopoeia at
the hands of Wilson and the other wits of _Blackwood's Magazine_, who
made him--partly with his own consent, partly not--into the famous
"Ettrick Shepherd" of the _Noctes Ambrosianae_. "The Shepherd" has Hogg's
exterior features and a good many of his foibles, but is endowed with
considerably more than his genius. Even in his published and
acknowledged works, which are numerous, it is not always quite easy to
be sure of his authorship; for he constantly solicited, frequently
received, and sometimes took without asking, assistance from Lockhart
and others. But enough remains that is different from the work of any of
his known or possible coadjutors to enable us to distinguish his
idiosyncrasy pretty well. In verse he was a very fluent and an
exceedingly unequal writer, who in his long poems chiefly, and not too
happily, followed Scott, but who in the fairy poem of "Kilmeny"
displayed an extraordinary command of a rare form of poetry, and who has
written some dozens of the best songs in the language. The best, but
only a few of the best, of these are "Donald Macdonald," "Donald
M'Gillavry," "The Village of Balmanhapple," and the "Boy's Song." In
prose he chiefly attempted novels, which have no construction at all,
and few merits of dialogue or style, but contain some powerful passages;
while one of them, _The Confessions of a Justified Sinner_, if it is
entirely his, which is very doubtful, is by far the greatest thing he
wrote, being a story of _diablerie_ very well designed, wonderfully
fresh and enthralling in detail, and kept up with hardly a slip to the
end. His other chief prose works are entitled _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_,
_The Three Perils of Man_, _The Three Perils of Woman_, and _Altrive
Tales_, while he also wrote some important, and in parts very offensive,
but also in parts amusing, _Recollections of Sir Walter Scott_. His
verse volumes, no one of which is good throughout, though hardly one is
without good things, were _The Mountain Bard_, _The Queen's Wake_,
_Mador of the Moor_, _The Pilgrims of the Sun_, _Jacobite Relics_ (some
of the best forged by himself), _Queen Hynde_, and _The Border Garland_.
A greater writer, if his work be taken as a whole, than any who has been
mentioned since Keats, was Walter Savage Landor, much of whose
composition was in prose, but who was so alike in prose and verse that
the whole had better be noticed together here. Landor (who was of a
family of some standing in Warwickshire, and was heir to considerable
property, much of which he wasted later by selling his inheritance and
buying a large but unprofitable estate in Wales) was born at Ipsley
Court, in 1775. He went to school at Rugby, and thence to Trinity
College, Oxford, at both of which places he gained considerable
scholarship but was frequently in trouble owing to the intractable and
headstrong temper which distinguished him through life. He was indeed
rusticated from his college, and subsequently, owing to his extravagant
political views, was refused a commission in the Warwickshire Militia.
He began to write early, but the poem of _Gebir_, which contains in germ
or miniature nearly all his characteristics of style, passed almost
unnoticed by the public, though it was appreciated by good wits like
Southey and De Quincey. After various private adventures he came into
his property and volunteered in the service of Spain, where he failed,
as usual, from impracticableness. In 1811, recklessly as always, he
married a very young girl of whom he knew next to nothing, and the
marriage proved anything but a happy one. The rest of his long life was
divided into three residences: first with his family at Florence; then,
when he had quarrelled with his wife, at Bath; and lastly (when he had
been obliged to quit Bath and England owing to an outrageous lampoon on
one lady, which he had written, as he conceived, in chivalrous defence
of another) at Florence again. Here he died in September 1864, aged very
nearly ninety.
Landor's poetical productions, which are numerous, are spread over the
greater part of his life; his prose, by which he is chiefly known, dates
in the main from the last forty years of it, the best being written
between 1820 and 1840. The greater part of this prose takes the form of
"Imaginary Conversations"--sometimes published under separate general
headings, sometimes under the common title--between characters of all
ages, from the classical times to Landor's. Their bulk is very great;
their perfection of style at the best extraordinary, and on the whole
remarkably uniform; their value, when considerations of matter are added
to that of form, exceedingly unequal. For in them Landor not only
allowed the fullest play to the ungovernable temper and the childish
crotchets already mentioned, but availed himself of his opportunities
(for, though he endeavoured to maintain a pretence of dramatic
treatment, his work is nearly as personal as that of Byron) to deliver
his sentiments on a vast number of subjects, sometimes without too much
knowledge, and constantly with a plentiful lack of judgment. In
politics, in satiric treatment, and especially in satiric treatment of
politics, he is very nearly valueless. But his intense familiarity with
and appreciation of classical subjects gave to almost all his dealings
with them a value which, for parallel reasons, is also possessed by
those touching Italy. And throughout this enormous collection of work
(which in the compactest edition fills five large octavo volumes in
small print), whensoever the author forgets his crotchets and his rages,
when he touches on the great and human things, his utterance reaches the
very highest water-mark of English literature that is not absolutely the
work of supreme genius.
For supreme genius Landor had not. His brain was not a great brain, and
he did not possess the exquisite alertness to his own weaknesses, or the
stubborn knack of confinement to things suitable to him, which some
natures much smaller than the great ones have enjoyed. But he had the
faculty of elaborate style--of style elaborated by a careful education
after the best models and vivified by a certain natural gift--as no one
since the seventeenth century had had it, and as no one except Mr.
Ruskin and the late Mr. Pater has had since. Also, he was as much wider
in his range and more fertile in his production than Mr. Pater as he was
more solidly grounded on the best models than Mr. Ruskin. Where Landor
is quite unique is in the apparent indifference with which he was able
to direct this gift of his into the channels of prose and poetry--a
point on which he parts company from both the writers to whom he has
been compared, and in which his only analogue, so far as I am able to
judge, is Victor Hugo. The style of no Englishman is so alike in the two
harmonies as is that of Landor. And it is perhaps not surprising that,
this being the case, he shows at his best in prose when he tries long
pieces, in verse when he tries short ones. Some of Landor's prose
performances in _Pericles and Aspasia_, in the _Pentameron_ (where
Boccaccio and Petrarch are the chief interlocutors), and in not a few of
the separate conversations, are altogether unparalleled in any other
language, and not easy to parallel in English. They are never entirely
or perfectly natural; there is always a slight "smell of the lamp," but
of a lamp perfumed and undying. The charm is so powerful, the grace so
stately, that it is impossible for any one to miss it who has the
faculty of recognising charm and grace at all. In particular, Landor is
remarkable--and, excellent as are many of the prose writers whom we have
had since, he is perhaps the most remarkable--for the weight, the
beauty, and the absolute finish of his phrase. Sometimes these splendid
phrases do not mean very much; occasionally they mean nothing or
nonsense. But their value as phrase survives, and the judge in such
things is often inclined and entitled to say that there is none like
them.
This will prepare the reader who has some familiarity with literature
for what is to be said about Landor's verse. It always has a certain
quality of exquisiteness, but this quality is and could not but be
unequally displayed in the short poems and the long. The latter can
hardly attain, with entirely competent and impartial judges, more than a
success of esteem. _Gebir_ is couched in a Miltonic form of verse (very
slightly shot and varied by Romantic admixture) which, as is natural to
a young adventurer, caricatures the harder and more ossified style of
the master. Sometimes it is great; more usually it intends greatness.
The "Dialogues in Verse" (very honestly named, for they are in fact
rather dialogues in verse than poems), though executed by the hand of a
master both of verse and dialogue, differ in form rather than in fact
from the Conversations in prose. The _Hellenics_ are mainly dialogues in
verse with a Greek subject. All have a quality of nobility which may be
sought in vain in almost any other poet; but all have a certain
stiffness and frigidity, some a certain emptiness. They are never
plaster, as some modern antiques have been; but they never make the
marble of which they are composed wholly flesh. Landor was but a
half-Pygmalion.
The vast collection of his miscellaneous poems contains many more
fortunate attempts, some of which have, by common consent of the
fittest, attained a repute which they are never likely to lose. "Rose
Aylmer" and "Dirce," trifles in length as both of them are, are very
jewels of poetic quality. And among the hundreds and almost thousands of
pieces which Landor produced there are some which come not far short of
these, and very many which attain a height magnificent as compared with
the ordinary work of others. But the hackneyed comparison of amber does
something gall this remarkable poet and writer. Everything, great and
small, is enshrined in an imperishable coating of beautiful style; but
the small things are somewhat out of proportion to the great, and, what
is more, the amber itself always has a certain air of being deliberately
and elaborately produced--not of growing naturally. Landor--much more
than Dryden, of whom he used the phrase, but in the same class as
Dryden--is one of those who "wrestle with and conquer time." He has
conquered, but it is rather as a giant of celestial nurture than as an
unquestioned god.
Even after enumerating these two sets of names--the first all of the
greatest, and the greatest of the second, Landor, equalling the least of
the first--we have not exhausted the poetical riches of this remarkable
period. It is indeed almost dangerous to embark on the third class of
poets; yet its members here would in some cases have been highly
respectable earlier, and even at this time deserve notice either for
influence, or for intensity of poetic vein, or sometimes for the mere
fact of having been once famous and having secured a "place in the
story." The story of literature has no popular ingratitude; and, except
in the case of distinct impostors, it turns out with reluctance those
who have once been admitted to it. Sometimes even impostors deserve a
renewal of the brand, if not a freshening up of the honourable
inscription.
The first of this third class in date, and perhaps the first in
influence, though far indeed from being the first in merit, was William
Lisle Bowles, already once or twice referred to. He was born on 24th
September 1762; so that, but for the character and influence of his
verse, he belongs to the last chapter rather than to this. Educated at
Winchester, and at Trinity College, Oxford, he took orders, and spent
nearly the last half century of his very long life (he did not die till
1850) in Wiltshire, as Prebendary of Salisbury and Rector of Bremhill.
It was in the year of the French Revolution that he published his
_Fourteen Sonnets_ [afterwards enlarged in number], _written chiefly on
Picturesque Spots during a Journey_. These fell early into Coleridge's
hands; he copied and recopied them for his friends when he was a
blue-coat boy, and in so far as poetical rivers have any single source,
the first tricklings of the stream which welled into fulness with the
Lyrical Ballads, and some few years later swept all before it, may be
assigned to this very feeble fount. For in truth it is exceedingly
feeble. In the fifth edition (1796), which lies before me exquisitely
printed, with a pretty aquatint frontispiece by Alken, and a dedication
of the previous year to Dean Ogle of Winchester, the Sonnets have
increased to twenty-seven, and are supplemented by fifteen
"miscellaneous pieces." One of these latter is itself a sonnet "written
at Southampton," and in all respects similar to the rest. The
others--"On Leaving Winchester," "On the Death of Mr. Headley" the
critic, a man of worth,[8] "To Mr. Burke on his Reflections," and so
forth--are of little note. The same may be said of Bowles' later
poetical productions, which were numerous; but his edition of Pope,
finished in 1807, brought about a hot controversy not yet forgotten
(nor, to tell the truth, quite settled) on the question Whether Pope was
a poet? That Bowles can have had scant sympathy with Pope is evident
from the very first glance at the famous sonnets themselves. Besides
their form, which, as has been said, was of itself something of a
reactionary challenge, they bear strong traces of Gray, and still
stronger traces of the picturesque mania which was at the same time
working so strongly in the books of Gilpin and others. But their real
note is the note which, ringing in Coleridge's ear, echoed in all the
poetry of the generation, the note of unison between the aspect of
nature and the thought and emotion of man. In the sonnets "At
Tynemouth," "At Bamborough Castle," and indeed in all, more or less,
there is first the attempt to paint directly what the eye sees, not the
generalised and academic view of the type-scene by a type-poet which had
been the fashion for so long; and secondly, the attempt to connect this
vision with personal experience, passion, or meditation. Bowles does not
do this very well, but he tries to do it; and the others, seeing him
try, went and did it.
His extreme importance as an at least admitted "origin" has procured
him notice somewhat beyond his real deserts; over others we must pass
more rapidly. Robert Bloomfield, born in 1760, was one of those
unfortunate "prodigy" poets whom mistaken kindness encourages. He was
the son of a tailor, went early to agricultural labour, and then became
a shoemaker. His _Farmer's Boy_, an estimable but much overpraised
piece, was published in 1800, and he did other things later. He died
mad, or nearly so, in 1823--a melancholy history repeated pretty closely
a generation later by John Clare. Clare, however, was a better poet than
Bloomfield, and some of the "Poems written in an Asylum" have more than
merely touching merit. James Montgomery,[9] born at Irvine on 4th
November 1771, was the son of a Moravian minister, and intended for his
father's calling. He, however, preferred literature and journalism,
establishing himself chiefly at Sheffield, where he died as late as 1854
(30th April). He had, as editor of the _Sheffield Iris_, some troubles
with the law, and in 1835 was rewarded with a pension. Montgomery was a
rather copious and fairly pleasing minor bard, no bad hand at hymns and
short occasional pieces, and the author of longer things called _The
Wanderer of Switzerland_, _The West Indies_, _The World before the
Flood_, and _The Pelican Island_. Bernard Barton, an amiable Quaker
poet, will probably always be remembered as the friend and correspondent
of Charles Lamb; perhaps also as the father-in-law of Edward FitzGerald.
His verse commended itself both to Southey (who had a kindly but rather
disastrous weakness for minor bards) and to Byron, but has little value.
Barton died in 1849.
The same pair of enemies joined in praising Henry Kirke White, who was
born in 1785 and died when barely twenty-one. Here indeed Southey's
unsurpassed biographical skill enforced the poetaster's merit in a
charming _Memoir_, which assisted White's rather pathetic story. He was
the son of a butcher, a diligent but reluctant lawyer's clerk, an
enthusiastic student, a creditable undergraduate at St. John's,
Cambridge, and a victim of consumption. All this made his verse for a
time popular. But he really deserved the name just affixed to him: he
was a poetaster, and nothing more. The "genius" attributed to him in
Byron's well-known and noble though rather rhetorical lines may be
discovered on an average in about half a dozen poets during any two or
three years of any tolerable poetic period. His best things are
imitations of Cowper in his sacred mood, such as the familiar "Star of
Bethlehem," and even these are generally spoilt by some feebleness or
false note. At his worst he is not far from Della Crusca.[10]
In the same year with Kirke White was born a much better poet, and a
much robuster person in all ways, mental and physical. Allan Cunningham
was a Dumfriesshire man born in the lowest rank, and apprenticed to a
stone-mason, whence in after years he rose to be Chantrey's foreman.
Cunningham began--following a taste very rife at the time--with
imitated, or to speak plainly, forged ballads; but the merit of them
deserved on true grounds the recognition it obtained on false, and he
became a not inconsiderable man of letters of all work. His best known
prose work is the "Lives of the Painters." In verse he is ranked, as a
song writer in Scots, by some next to Burns, and by few lower than Hogg.
Some of his pieces, such as "Fair shines the sun in France," have the
real, the inexplicable, the irresistible song-gift. Cunningham, who was
the friend of many good men and was liked by all of them, died on 29th
October 1842. His elder by eleven years, Robert Tannahill, who was born
in 1774 and died (probably by suicide) in 1810, deserves a few lines in
this tale of Scots singers. Tannahill, like Cunningham in humble
circumstances originally, never became more than a weaver. His verse has
not the _gusto_ of Allan or of Hogg, but is sweet and tender enough.
William Motherwell too, as much younger than Allan as Tannahill was
older (he was born in 1797 and died young in 1835), deserves mention,
and may best receive it here. He was a Conservative journalist, an
antiquary of some mark, and a useful editor of Minstrelsy. Of his
original work, "Jeanie Morrison" is the best known; and those who have
read, especially if they have read it in youth, "The Sword Chant of
Thorstein Raudi," will not dismiss it as Wardour Street; while he did
some other delightful things. Earlier (1812) the heroicomic _Anster
Fair_ of William Tennant (1784-1848) received very high and deserved no
low praise; while William Thom, a weaver like Tannahill, who was a year
younger than Motherwell and lived till 1848, wrote many simple ballads
in the vernacular, of which the most touching are perhaps "The Song of
the Forsaken" and "The Mitherless Bairn."
To return to England, Bryan Waller Procter, who claimed kindred with the
poet from whom he took his second name, was born in 1790, went to
Harrow, and, becoming a lawyer, was made a Commissioner of Lunacy. He
did not die till 1874; and he, and still more his wife, were the last
sources of direct information about the great race of the first third of
the century. He was, under the pseudonym of "Barry Cornwall," a fluent
verse writer of the so-called cockney school, and had not a little
reputation, especially for songs about the sea and things in general.
They still, occasionally from critics who are not generally under the
bondage of traditional opinion, receive high praise, which the present
writer is totally unable to echo. A loyal junior friend to Lamb, a wise
and kindly senior to Beddoes, liked and respected by many or by all,
Procter, as a man, must always deserve respect. If
The sea, the sea, the open sea,
The blue, the fresh, the ever free,
and things like it are poetry, I admit myself, with a sad humility, to
be wholly destitute of poetical appreciation.
The Church of England contributed two admirable verse writers of this
period in Henry Cary and Reginald Heber. Cary, who was born in 1772 and
was a Christ Church man, was long an assistant librarian in the British
Museum. His famous translation of the _Divina Commedia_, published in
1814, is not only one of the best verse translations in English, but,
after the lapse of eighty years, during which the study of Dante has
been constantly increasing in England, in which poetic ideas have
changed not a little, and in which numerous other translations have
appeared, still attracts admiration from all competent scholars for its
combination of fidelity and vigour. Heber, born in 1783 and educated at
Brasenose, gained the Newdigate with _Palestine_, a piece which ranks
with _Timbuctoo_ and a few others among unforgotten prize poems. He took
orders, succeeding to the family living of Hodnet, and for some years
bid fair to be one of the most shining lights of the English Church,
combining admirable parochial work with good literature, and with much
distinction as a preacher. Unfortunately he thought it his duty to take
the Bishopric of Calcutta when it was offered him; and, arriving there
in 1824, worked incessantly for nearly two years and then died. His
_Journal in India_ is very pleasant reading, and some of his hymns rank
with the best in English.
Ebenezer Elliott, the "Corn-Law Rhymer," was born in Yorkshire on 7th
March 1781. His father was a clerk in an iron-foundry. He himself was
early sent to foundry work, and he afterwards became a master-founder at
Sheffield. From different points of view it may be thought a
palliation--and the reverse--of the extreme virulence with which Elliott
took the side of workmen against landowners and men of property, that he
attained to affluence himself as an employer, and was never in the least
incommoded by the "condition-of-England" question. He early displayed a
considerable affection for literature, and was one, and about the last,
of the prodigies whom Southey, in his inexhaustible kindness for
struggling men of letters, accepted. Many years later the Laureate wrote
good-naturedly to Wynn: "I mean to read the Corn-Law Rhymer a lecture,
not without some hope, that as I taught him the art of poetry I may
teach him something better." The "something better" was not in Elliott's
way; for he is a violent and crude thinker, with more smoke than fire in
his violence, though not without generosity of feeling now and then, and
with a keen admiration of the scenery--still beautiful in parts, and
then exquisite--which surrounded the smoky Hades of Sheffield. He
himself acknowledges the influence of Crabbe and disclaims that of
Wordsworth, from which the cunning may anticipate the fact that he is
deeply indebted to both. His earliest publication or at least
composition, "The Vernal Walk," is said to date from the very year of
the _Lyrical Ballads_, and of course owes no royalty to Wordsworth, but
is in blank verse, a sort of compound of Thomson and Crabbe. "Love" (in
Crabbian couplets slightly tinged with overlapping) and "The Village
Patriarch" (still smacking of Crabbe in form, though irregularly
arranged in rhymed decasyllables) are his chief other long poems. He
tried dramas, but he is best known by his "Corn-Law Rhymes" and
"Corn-Law Hymns," and deserves to be best known by a few lyrics of real
beauty, and many descriptions. How a man who could write "The Wonders of
the Lane" and "The Dying Boy to the Sloe Blossom" could stoop to
malignant drivel about "palaced worms," "this syllabub-throated
logician," and so forth, is strange enough to understand, especially as
he had no excuse of personal suffering. Even in longer poems the mystery
is renewed in "They Met Again" and "Withered Wild Flowers" compared with
such things as "The Ranter," though the last exhibits the author at both
his best and worst. However, Elliott is entitled to the charity he did
not show; and the author of such clumsy Billingsgate as "Arthur
Bread-Tax Winner," "Faminton," and so forth, may be forgiven for the
flashes of poetry which he exhibits. Even in his political poems they do
not always desert him, and his somewhat famous Chartist (or
ante-Chartist) "Battle-Song" is as right-noted as it is wrong-headed.
Sir Aubrey de Vere (1788-1846), a poet and the father of a poet still
alive, was a friend and follower of Wordsworth, and the author of
sonnets good in the Wordsworthian kind. But he cannot be spared much
room here; nor can much even be given to the mild shade of a poetess far
more famous in her day than he. "Time that breaks all things," according
to the dictum of a great poet still living, does not happily break all
in literature; but it is to be feared that he has reduced to fragments
the once not inconsiderable fame of Felicia Hemans. She was born (her
maiden name was Felicia Dorothea Browne) at Liverpool on 25th September
1794, and when she was only eighteen she married a Captain Hemans. It
was not a fortunate union, and by far the greater part of Mrs. Hemans'
married life was spent, owing to no known fault of hers, apart from her
husband. She did not live to old age, dying on 26th April 1835. But she
wrote a good deal of verse meanwhile--plays, poems, "songs of the
affections," and what not. Her blameless character (she wrote chiefly to
support her children) and a certain ingenuous tenderness in her verse,
saved its extreme feebleness from severe condemnation in an age which
was still avid of verse rather than discriminating in it; and children
still learn "The boy stood on the burning deck," and other things. It is
impossible, on any really critical scheme, to allow her genius; but she
need not be spoken of with any elaborate disrespect, while it must be
admitted that her latest work is her best--always a notable sign.
"Despondency and Aspiration," dating from her death-year, soars close to
real sublimity; and of her smaller pieces "England's Dead" is no vulgar
thing.
Between the death of Byron and the distinct appearance of Tennyson and
the Brownings there was a kind of interregnum or twilight of poetry, of
which one of its strangest if not least illuminative stars or meteors,
Beddoes, has given a graphic but uncomplimentary picture in a letter:
"owls' light" he calls it, with adjuncts. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Southey; Scott, Campbell, and Moore, were all living, but the poetic
production of all had on the whole ceased. Shelley and Keats would have
been in time the natural, and in genius the more than sufficient sun
and moon of the time; but they had died before Byron. So the firmament
was occupied by rather wandering stars: some of them elders already
noticed, others born in the ten or twelve years between Keats (1795) and
the eldest of the Tennysons (1807). The chief of these were the pair of
half-serious, half-humorous singers, Hood and Praed. Next in public
estimation come Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, Macaulay, Sir Henry Taylor,
the Irish poet Mangan, R. H. Horne, and the first Lord Lytton; while a
third class--of critics' rather than readers' favourites--varying in
merit, but, at the best of the best of them, ranking higher than any of
the above, may be made up of George Darley, C. J. Wells, the Dorsetshire
poet Barnes, Beddoes, Charles Whitehead, R. S. Hawker, and Thomas Wade.
To the second class must be added "L. E. L.," the poetess who filled the
interval between Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Browning.
Wells, Whitehead, and Wade may be dismissed without disrespect as, if
not critical mares'-nests, at any rate critical hobbies. Persons of more
or less distinction (and of less or more crotchet) have at different
times paid very high compliments to the _Joseph and his Brethren_ (1823,
revised later) of Charles Jeremiah Wells (1800-1879), a friend of Keats,
and a person who seems to have lived much as he pleased; to the
_Solitary_ of Charles Whitehead (1804-1862), a Bohemian ne'er-do-weel,
who also showed talent as a novelist and miscellanist; and to the _Mundi
et Cordis Carmina_ (1835) of Thomas Wade (1805-1875), a playwright and
journalist. Of the three, Wade appears to me to have had the greatest
poetical talent. But I do not think that any one who on the one hand
uses epithets in poetical criticism with caution, and on the other has
read a great deal of minor poetry as it appears, could put any one of
them very high. All were born late enough to breathe the atmosphere of
the new poetry young; all had poetical velleities, and a certain amount,
if not of originality, of capacity to write poetry. But they were not
poets; they were only poetical curiosities.
Darley, Beddoes, and Horne belong in the main to the same class, but
rise high, in one case immeasurably, above them. George Darley
(1795-1846) is perhaps our chief English example of "the poet who dies
in youth while the man survives," and who becomes a critic. In him,
however, the generation of the critic did not wait for the corruption of
the poet. An Irishman, and of Trinity College, Dublin, he was one of the
staff of the _London Magazine_, and wrote much verse bad and good,
including the once famous "I've been Roaming," of which it is safe to
say that not one in ten of those who have sung it could tell the author.
His best work is contained in the charming pastoral drama of _Sylvia_
(1827) and the poem entitled _Nepenthe_ (1839). He was a good but rather
a savage critic, and edited Beaumont and Fletcher. His work has never
been collected, nor, it is believed, ever fully published; and it has
the marks of a talent that never did what was in it to do, and came at
an unfortunate time. Some not bad judges in the forties ranked Darley
with Tennyson in poetic possibilities, and thought the former the more
promising of the two.
Except Donne, there is perhaps no English poet more difficult to write
about, so as to preserve the due pitch of enthusiasm on the one hand and
criticism on the other, than Thomas Lovell Beddoes, born at Clifton on
20th July 1803. He was the son of a very famous physician, and of Anna
Edgeworth, the youngest sister of the whole blood to the novelist.
Beddoes, left fatherless at six years old, was educated at the
Charterhouse and at Pembroke College, Oxford, and when he was barely of
age went to Germany to study medicine, living thenceforth almost
entirely on the Continent. Before this he had published two volumes,
_The Improvisatore_ and _The Bride's Tragedy_; but his principal work is
a wild Elizabethan play called _Death's Jest-Book_ or _The Fool's
Tragedy_, which he never absolutely finished. He died in 1848 at Basle
by a complicated and ghastly kind of suicide. Three years later his
Poems appeared, and they have been recently republished, with additions
and a curious collection of letters.
Beddoes has sometimes been treated as a mainly bookish poet deriving
from the Elizabethans and Shelley. I cannot agree with this. His very
earliest work, written when he could not know much either of Shelley or
Keats, shows as they do technique perhaps caught from Leigh Hunt. But
this is quite dropped later; and his Elizabethanism is not imitation but
inspiration. In this inspiration he does not follow, but shares with,
his greater contemporaries. He is a younger and tragic counterpart to
Charles Lamb in the intensity with which he has imbibed the Elizabethan
spirit, rather from the nightshade of Webster and Tourneur than from the
vine of Shakespeare. As wholes, his works are naught, or naught but
nightmares; though _Death's Jest-Book_, despite its infinite
disadvantages from constant rewriting and uncertainty of final form, has
a strong grasp. But they contain passages, especially lyrics, of the
most exquisite fancy and music, such as since the seventeenth century
none but Blake and Coleridge had given. Beddoes does not seem to have
been at all a pleasant person, and in his later days at any rate he
would appear to have been a good deal less than sane. But the author of
such things as the "Dirge for Wolfram" ("If thou wilt ease thine heart")
in _Death's Jest-Book_, and the stanza beginning "Dream-Pedlary," "If
there were dreams to sell," with not a few others of the same kind,
attains to that small and disputed--but not to those who have thought
out the nature of poetry disputable--class of poets who, including
Sappho, Catullus, some mediaeval hymn-writers, and a few moderns,
especially Coleridge, have, by virtue of fragments only, attained a
higher position than many authors of large, substantive, and important
poems. They may be shockingly lacking in bulk, in organisation, in
proper choice of subject, in intelligent criticism of life; but they are
like the summer lightning or the northern aurora, which, though they
shine only now and then, and only it may be for a few moments, shine,
when they do shine, with a beauty unapproachable by gas or candle,
hardly approached by sun or moon, and illuminate the whole of their
world.
Although quotation is in the main impossible in this book, Beddoes,
despite the efforts of his friend Kelsall, of Mr. Swinburne, of Mr.
Gosse (thanks to whom a quasi-complete edition has at last appeared),
and others, is still so little known, that a short one may be allowed in
his case. I have known a critic who said deliberately of the
above-mentioned stanza in "Dream-Pedlary"--
If there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell,
Some a light sigh
That shakes from Life's fresh crown
Only a roseleaf down.
If there were dreams to sell--
Merry and sad to tell--
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?
that these ten lines contain more pure poetry than the entire works of
Byron. And the same touch will be found not merely in the "Wolfram
Dirge" mentioned--
If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of Love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep.
...
But wilt thou _cure_ thine heart
Of Love and all its smart,
Then die, dear, die--
but in several other dirges (for the dirge is the form natural to
Beddoes), in the "Song from Torrismond," in "Love in Idleness," in the
"Song on the Water" (which is pure early Tennyson), in the exquisite
"Threnody," and in many other things. They have been called artificial:
the epithet can be allowed in no other sense than in that in which it
applies to all the best poetry. And they have the note, which only a few
true but imperfect poets have, of anticipation. Shadows before, both of
Tennyson and Browning, especially of the latter, appear in Beddoes. But
after all his main note is his own: not theirs, not the Elizabethan, not
Shelley's, not another's. And this is what makes a poet.
As Beddoes' forte lay in short and rather uncanny snatches, so that of
Richard Hengist Horne lay in sustained and dignified composition. He was
not christened Hengist at all, but Henry. He had a curious life. In
youth he knew Keats and Wells, having been, like them, at the private
school of Mr. Clarke at Edmonton. He went to Sandhurst and was expelled
for insubordination; joined the Mexican navy in the war of liberation;
travelled widely; but seemed at about five and twenty to be settling
down to literature and journalism in England. After writing various
things, he produced in 1837 the fine but not quite "live" plays of
_Cosmo de Medici_ and _The Death of Marlowe_, and in 1843 the famous
farthing epic, _Orion_, which was literally published at a farthing.
This was the smallest part of a great literary baggage of very unequal
value. In 1852 Horne, resuming the life of adventure, went to Australia,
served in the gold police, and stayed at the Antipodes till 1869. Then
he came home again and lived for fifteen years longer, still writing
almost to his very death on 13th March 1884.
It is not true that _Orion_ is Horne's only work of value; but it is so
much better than anything else of his, and so characteristic of him,
that by all but students the rest may be neglected. And it is an example
of the melancholy but frequently exemplified truth, that few things are
so dangerous, nay, so fatal to enduring literary fame, as the production
of some very good work among a mass of, if not exactly rubbish, yet
inferior stuff. I do not think it extravagant to say that if Horne had
written nothing but _Orion_ and had died comparatively young after
writing it, he would have enjoyed very high rank among English poets.
For, though doubtless a little weighted with "purpose," it is a very
fine poem indeed, couched in a strain of stately and not second-hand
blank verse, abounding in finished and effective passages, by no means
destitute of force and meaning as a whole, and mixing some passion with
more than some real satire. But the rather childish freak of its first
publication probably did it no good, and it is quite certain that the
author's long life and unflagging production did it much harm.
Of the other persons in the list above, Macaulay, Hartley Coleridge, and
Lord Lytton are mainly something else than poets, and Talfourd, as a
dramatist, will also be noticed elsewhere. Barnes and Hawker were both
clergymen of the West of England: the former very highly ranked by some
for his studies in Dorset dialect; the latter the author of the famous
"Song of the Western Men" (long thought a genuine antique), of the
exquisite "Queen Gwennyvar's Round," of the fine "Silent Tower of
Bottreaux," of some beautiful sonnets, and of the stately "Quest of the
Sangreal." Whether James Clarence Mangan, whose most famous poem is
"Dark Rosaleen," a musical and mystic celebration of the charms and
wrongs of Erin, is a great poet to whom Saxon jealousy has refused
greatness for political reasons, or a not ungifted but not consummately
distinguished singer who added some study to the common Irish gift of
fluent, melodious verse-making, is a question best solved by reading his
work and judging for the reader's self. It is not by any sane account so
important that to dismiss it thus is a serious _rifiuto_, and it is
probably impossible for Irish enthusiasm and English judgment ever to
agree on the subject. Of "L. E. L." Sir Henry Taylor, Hood, and Praed,
some more substantive account must be given.
Although it is not easy, after two generations, to decide such a point
accurately, it is probable that "L. E. L." was the most popular of all
the writers of verse who made any mark between the death of Byron in
1824 and the time when Tennyson definitely asserted himself in 1842. She
paid for this popularity (which was earned not merely by her verse, but
by a pretty face, an odd social position, and a sad and apparently,
though it seems not really, mysterious end) by a good deal of slightly
unchivalrous satire at the time and a rather swift and complete oblivion
afterwards. She was born (her full name being Letitia Elizabeth Landon)
in London on 14th August 1802, and was fairly well connected and
educated. William Jerdan, the editor of the _Literary Gazette_ (a man
whose name constantly occurs in the literary history of this time,
though he has left no special work except an _Autobiography_), was a
friend of her family, and she began to write very early, producing
novels and criticisms as well as verse in newspapers, in the albums and
_Souvenirs_ which were such a feature of the twenties and thirties, and
in independent volumes. She was particularly active as a poet about
1824-35, when appeared the works whose titles--_The Improvisatore_, _The
Troubadour_, _The Golden Violet_--suggested parodies to Thackeray. Her
best novel is held to be _Ethel Churchill_, published in 1837. Next year
she married Mr. Maclean, the Governor of Cape Coast Castle; and, going
out with him to that not very salubrious clime, died suddenly in about
two months. All sorts of ill-natured suggestions were of course made;
but the late Colonel Ellis, the historian of the colony, seems to have
established beyond the possibility of doubt that she accidentally
poisoned herself with prussic acid, which she used to take for spasms of
the heart.
It is tolerably exact, and it is not harsh, to say that "L. E. L." is a
Mrs. Hemans with the influence of Byron added, not to the extent of any
"impropriety," but to the heightening of the Romantic tone and of a
native sentimentality. Her verse is generally musical and sweet: it is
only sometimes silly. But it is too often characterised by what can but
be called the "gush" which seems to have affected all the poetesses of
this period except Sara Coleridge (1802-50) (who has some verses worthy
of even her name in _Phantasmion_, her only independent book), and which
appears in very large measure in the work of Mrs. Browning.
Sir Henry Taylor's poetical repute illustrates the converse of the
proposition which is illustrated by that of Horne. It is probable that,
if each is measured by his best things, _Orion_ and _Philip Van
Artevelde_, Horne must be allowed to be a good deal the better poet. But
a placid official life enabled Taylor both to gain powerful friends and
to devote himself to literature merely when and how he pleased. And so
he has burdened his baggage with no mere hack-work. He was indeed a
singularly lucky person. The son of a man of fair family but reduced
fortune who had taken to farming, Henry Taylor began in the navy. But he
disliked the service very much, and either obtained or received his
discharge after only nine months' sea life as a mid-shipman during the
year 1814. Then he entered the public store-keeper's department, but was
ousted by rearrangements after four years' service. These beginnings
were not very promising; but his father allowed him to stay quietly at
home till by pure luck he obtained a third post under Government in the
Colonial Office. This he held for nearly fifty years, during which it
gave him affluence and by degrees a very high position, and left him
abundance of time for society and letters. He resigned it in 1872, and
died on 27th March 1886. He wrote some prose of various kinds, and just
before his death published a pleasant autobiography. But his literary
fame rests on a handful of plays and poems, all of them, except _St.
Clement's Eve_, which did not appear till 1862, produced at leisurely
intervals between 1827 (_Isaac Comnenus_) and 1847 (_The Eve of the
Conquest_ and other poems). The intervening works were _Philip Van
Artevelde_ (his masterpiece, 1834), _Edwin the Fair_ (1842), some minor
poems, and the romantic comedy of _A Sicilian Summer_ (first called _The
Virgin Widow_), which was published with _St. Clement's Eve_. He had
(as, it may be noted curiously, had so many of the men of the transition
decade in which he was born) a singular though scanty vein of original
lyric snatch, the best example of which is perhaps the song "Quoth
tongue of neither maid nor wife" in _Van Artevelde_; but his chief
appeal lay in a very careful study of character and the presentation of
it in verse less icy than Talfourd's and less rhetorical than Milman's.
Yet he had, unlike either of these, very little direct eye to the stage,
and therefore is classed here as a poet rather than as a dramatist.
There is always a public for what is called "thoughtful" poetry, and
Taylor's is more than merely thoughtful. But it may be suspected by
observers that when Robert Browning came into fashion Henry Taylor went
out. Citations of _Van Artevelde_, if not of the other pieces (none of
which are contemptible, while the two last, inferior in weight to their
predecessors, show advance in ease and grace), are very frequent between
1835 and 1865: rare I think between 1865 and 1895.
And so we come at last to the twin poets, in the proper sense
humorous,--that is to say, jesting with serious thoughts behind,--of the
first division of this class. They were very close in many ways--indeed
it is yet a moot point which of the two borrowed certain rhythms and
turns of word and verse from the other, or whether both hit upon these
independently. But their careers were curiously different; and, except
in comparative length of life (if that be an advantage), Praed was
luckier than his comrade. Thomas Hood, who was slightly the elder, was
born in 1798 or 1799 (for both dates are given) in the Poultry; his
father being a bookseller and publisher. This father died, not in good
circumstances, when the son was a boy, and Thomas, after receiving some
though not much education, became first a merchant's clerk and then an
engraver, but was lucky enough to enjoy between these uncongenial
pursuits a long holiday, owing to ill-health, of some three years in
Scotland. It was in 1820 or thereabouts that he fell into his proper
vocation, and, as sub-editor of the _London Magazine_, found vent for
his own talents and made acquaintance with most of its famous staff. He
married, wrote some of his best serious poems and some good comic work,
and found that while the former were neglected the latter was eagerly
welcomed. It was settled that, in his own pathetic pun, he was to be "a
lively Hood for a livelihood" thenceforward. It is difficult to say
whether English literature lost or gained, except from one very
practical point of view; for Hood did manage to live after a fashion by
his fun as he certainly could not have lived by his poetry. He had,
however, a bare pittance, much bad health, and some extremely bad luck,
which for a time made him, through no fault of his own, an exile. His
last five years were again spent in England, and in comparative, though
very comparative, prosperity; for he was editor first of the _New
Monthly Magazine_, then of a magazine of his own, _Hood's Monthly_, and
not long before his death he received from Sir Robert Peel a civil list
pension of L100 a year. The death was due to consumption, inherited and
long valiantly struggled with.
The still shorter life of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, on the other hand,
was passed under sufficiently favourable stars. He was born in 1802, and
his father, Serjeant Praed, possessed property, practice at the bar, and
official position. Praed was sent to Eton, where he became a pillar of
the famous school magazine _The Etonian_, and thence to Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he did extremely well, made the acquaintance of
Macaulay, and wrote in _Knight's Quarterly_. After a short interval of
tutoring and reading for the bar he entered Parliament in 1830, and
remained in it for the rest of his life, which closed on 15th July 1839.
He had latterly been secretary to the Board of Control, and it was
thought that, had he lived, he might have made a considerable political
reputation both as speaker and administrator.
The almost unchequered sunshine of one of these careers and the little
sun and much shadow of the other have left traces--natural though less
than might be supposed--of difference between the produce of the two
men; but perhaps the difference is less striking than the resemblance.
That Hood--obliged to write for bread, and outliving Praed by something
like a decade at the two ends--wrote a great deal more than Praed did is
of little consequence, for the more leisurely writer is as unequal as
the duty labourer. Hood had the deeper and stronger genius: of this
there is no doubt, and the advantage more than made up for Praed's
advantages in scholarship and in social standing and accomplishment. In
this serious work of Hood's--_Lycus the Centaur_, _The Plea of the
Midsummer Fairies_, _The Elm Tree_, _The Haunted House_--there is
observable--to a degree never surpassed by any of the poets of this
group except Beddoes, and more sustained and human, though less weird
and sweet, than his--a strain of the true, the real, the ineffable tone
of poetry proper. At this Praed never arrives: there are at most in him
touches which may seem to a very charitable judgment to show that in
other circumstances sorrow, passion, or the like might have roused him
to display the hidden fire. On the other hand, neither Hood's breeding,
nor, I think, his nature, allowed him to display the exquisite airiness,
the delicate artificial bloom and perfection, of Praed's best _vers de
societe_--the _Season_, the _Letter of Advice_, and the rest. This last
bloom has never been quite equalled--even Prior's touch is coarse to it,
even that of the late Mr. Locker is laboured and deliberate. So too as
there is nothing in Praed of the popular indignation--generous and fine
but a little theatrical--which endears Hood to the general in _The
Bridge of Sighs_ and _The Song of the Shirt_, so there is nothing in
Hood of the sound political sense, underlying apparent banter, of
Praed's _Speaker Asleep_ and other things.
But where the two poets come together, on a ground which they have
almost to themselves, is in a certain kind of humorous poetry ranging
from the terrific-grotesque, as in Hood's _Miss Kilmansegg_ and Praed's
_Red Fisherman_, to the simple, humorously tender study of characters,
as in a hundred things of Hood's and in not a few of Praed's with _The
Vicar_ at their head. The resemblance here is less in special points
than in a certain general view of life, conditioned in each case by the
poet's breeding, temperament, and circumstance, but alike in essence and
quality: in a certain variety of the essentially English fashion of
taking life with a mixture of jest and earnest, of humour and sentiment.
Hood, partly influenced by the need of caring for the public, partly by
his pupilship to Lamb, perhaps went to further extremes both in mere fun
and in mere sentiment than Praed did, but the central substance is the
same in both.
Yet one gift which Hood has and Praed has not remains to be noticed--the
gift of exquisite song writing. Compared with the admired inanities of
Barry Cornwall, his praised contemporary, Hood's "Fair Ines," his "Time
of Roses," his exquisite "Last Stanzas," and not a few other things, are
as gold to gilt copper. Praed has nothing to show against these; but he,
like Hood, was no inconsiderable prose writer, while the latter, thanks
to his apprenticeship to the burin, had an extraordinary faculty of
illustrating his own work with cuts, contrary to all the canons, but
inimitably grotesque.
* * * * *
It is probable that even in this long survey of the great poetical
production of the first third of this century some gaps may be detected
by specialists. But it seemed to me impossible to give more than the
barest mention here to the "single speech" accident of Charles Wolfe,
the author of the "Burial of Sir John Moore," which everybody knows, and
of absolutely nothing else that is worth a single person's knowing; to
the gigantic and impossible labours of Edwin Atherstone; to the
industrious translation of Rose and Sotheby; to the decent worth of
Caroline Bowles, and the Hood-and-water of Laman Blanchard. And there
are others perhaps who cannot be even mentioned; for there must be an
end.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] _Lyrical Ballads_, 1798, and with additions 1800; _Poems_, 1807 (in
these four volumes even adorers have allowed all his greatest work to be
included); _The Excursion_, 1814; _The White Doe of Rylston_, 1815;
_Sonnets on the River Duddon_, and others, 1819-20. In 1836 he brought
out a collected edition of his poems in six volumes. _The Prelude_ was
posthumous.
[4] It must be remembered that Wordsworth was a prose writer of
considerable excellence and of no small volume. Many people no doubt
were surprised when Dr. Grosart, by collecting his pamphlets, his
essays, his notes, and his letters, managed to fill three large octavo
volumes. But his poetry so far outweighs his prose (though, like most
poets, he could write admirably in his pedestrian style when he chose)
that his utterances in "the other harmony" need not be specially
considered. The two most considerable examples of this prose are the
pamphlet on _The Convention of Cintra_ and the five and twenty years
later _Guide to the Lakes_. But minor essays, letters of a more or less
formal character, and prefaces and notes to the poems, make up a goodly
total; and always display a genius germane to that of the poems.
[5] This word, as well as "Aspheterism," which has had a less general
currency, was a characteristic coinage of Coleridge's to designate a
kind of Communism, partly based on the speculations of Godwin, and
intended to be carried into practice in America.
[6] Yet this praise can only be assigned to Coleridge with large
allowance. He was always unjust to his own _immediate_ predecessors,
Johnson, Gibbon, etc.; and he was not too sensible of the real merits of
Pope or even of Dryden. In this respect Leigh Hunt, an immeasurably
weaker thinker, had a much more catholic taste. And it is not certain
that, as a mere prose writer, Coleridge was a very good prose writer.
[7] Curiously enough, there was another and slightly older Samuel
Rogers, a clergyman, who published verse in 1782, just before his
namesake, and who dealt with Hope--
Hope springs eternal in the _aspiring_ breast.
His verse, of which specimens are given in Southey's _Modern English
Poets_, is purely eighteenth century. He died in 1790.
[8] Henry Headley, who, like Bowles and Landor, was a member of Trinity
College, Oxford, and who died young, after publishing a few original
poems of no great value, deserves more credit for his _Select Beauties
of Ancient English Poetry_, published in two volumes, with an exquisite
title-page vignette, by Cadell in 1787, than has sometimes been allowed
him by the not numerous critics who have noticed him recently, or by
those who immediately followed him. His knowledge was soon outgrown, and
therefore looked down upon; and his taste was a very little
indiscriminate. But it was something to put before an age which was just
awakening to the appetite for such things two volumes full of selections
from the too little read poets of the seventeenth, with a few of the
sixteenth century. Moreover, Headley's biographical information shows
very praiseworthy industry, and his critical remarks a great deal of
taste at once nice and fairly catholic. A man who in his day could,
while selecting and putting forth Drayton and Carew, Daniel and King,
speak enthusiastically of Dryden and even of Goldsmith, must have had
the root of the matter in him as few critics have had.
[9] Not to be confounded with _Robert_, or "Satan" Montgomery, his
junior by many years, and a much worse poet, the victim of Macaulay's
famous classical example of what is called in English "slating," and in
French _ereintement_. There is really nothing to be said about this
person that Macaulay has not said; though perhaps one or two of the
things he has said are a little strained.
[10] Some fifteen years ago, in a little book on Dryden, I called Kirke
White a "miserable poetaster," and was rebuked for it by those who
perhaps knew Byron's lines and nothing more. Quite recently Mr. Gosse
was rebuked more loudly for a less severe denunciation. I determined
that I would read Kirke White again; and the above judgment is the
mildest I can possibly pronounce after the reading. A good young man
with a pathetic career; but a poetaster merely.