the mono-dramatic "Strayed Reveller," which as mentioned above is one of
the very earliest of all; and the more fully dramatised and longer
"Empedocles on Etna," in regard to which Mr. Arnold showed a singular
vacillation, issuing it, withdrawing nearly all of it, and than issuing
it again. Its design, like that of the somewhat later "Merope," is not
of the happiest, but it contains some lyrical pieces which are among
the best-known and the best of their author's work. Early too, if not of
the earliest, are certain longer narrative or semi-narrative poems, not
seldom varied with or breaking into lyric--"Sohrab and Rustum" with
another of the fine closes referred to, perhaps indeed the finest of
all; "The Sick King in Bokhara"; "Balder Dead"; "Tristram and Iseult";
"The Scholar-Gipsy," a most admirable "poem of place," being chiefly
devoted to the country round Oxford; "Thyrsis" (an elegy on Clough which
by some is ranked not far below _Lycidas_ and _Adonais_). But perhaps
Mr. Arnold's happiest vein, like that of most of the poets of the last
two-thirds of the century, lay, not in long poems but in shorter pieces,
more or less lyrical in form but not precisely lyrics--in short of the
same general class (though differing often widely enough in subject and
handling) as those in which the main appeal of Tennyson himself has been
said to consist. Such is "The Forsaken Merman," the poet's most original
and perhaps most charming if not his deepest or most elaborate thing--a
piece of exquisite and passionate music modulated with art as touching
as it is consummate; "Dover Beach," where the peculiar religious
attitude, with the expression of which so much of Mr. Arnold's prose is
concerned, finds a more restrained and a very melodious voice; the
half-satiric, half-meditative "Bacchanalia"; the fine "Summer Night";
the Memorial Verses (Mr. Arnold was a frequent and a skilled attempter
of epicedes) on Wordsworth, on Heine, and on the dog _Geist_; with,
almost latest of all and not least noble, "Westminster Abbey," the
opening passages of which vie in metre (though of a more complicated
mould) and in majesty with Milton's "Nativity Ode," and show a wonderful
ability to bear this heavy burden of comparison.
Perhaps these last words may not unfairly hint at a defect--if not _the_
defect--of this refined, this accomplished, but this often disappointing
poetry. Quite early, in the preface before referred to, the poet had run
up and nailed to the mast a flag-theory of poetic art to which he always
adhered as far as theory went, and which it may be reasonably supposed
he always endeavoured to exemplify in practice. According to this "all
depends on the subject," and the fault of most modern poetry and of
nearly all modern criticism is that the poets strive to produce and the
critics expect to receive, not an elaborately planned and adjusted
treatment of a great subject, but touches or bursts of more or less
beautiful thought and writing. Now of course it need not be said that in
the very highest poetry the excellence of the subject, the complete
appropriateness of the treatment, and the beauty of patches and
passages, all meet together. But it will also happen that this is not
so. And then the poet of "the subject" will not only miss the happy
"jewels five words long," the gracious puffs and cat's paws of the wind
of the spirit, that his less austere brother secures, but will not make
so very much of his subjects, of his schemes of treatment themselves.
His ambition, as ambition so often does, will over-reach itself, and he
will have nothing to show but the unfinished fragments of a poetical
Escurial instead of the finished chantries and altar-tombs which a less
formal architect is able to boast.
However this may be, two things are certain, the first that the best
work of Matthew Arnold in verse bears a somewhat small proportion to the
work that is not his best, and that his worst is sometimes strangely
unworthy of him; the second, that the best where it appears is of
surpassing charm--uniting in a way, of which Andrew Marvell is perhaps
the best other example in English lyric, romantic grace, feeling, and
music to a classical and austere precision of style, combining nobility
of thought with grace of expression, and presenting the most
characteristically modern ideas of his own particular day with an almost
perfect freedom from the jargon of that day, and in a key always
suggesting the great masters, the great thinkers, the great poets of the
past. To those who are in sympathy with his own way of thinking he must
always possess an extraordinary attraction; perhaps he is not least,
though he may be more discriminatingly, admired by those who are very
much out of sympathy with him on not a few points of subject, but who
are one with him in the Humanities--in the sense and the love of the
great things in literature.
The natural and logical line of development, however, from the
originators of the Romantic movement through Keats and Tennyson did not
lie through Matthew Arnold; and the time was not yet ripe--it can
perhaps hardly be said to be ripe yet--for a reaction in his sense. He
was, as has been said, a branch from Wordsworth, only slightly
influenced by Tennyson himself, than whom indeed he was not so very much
younger. The direct male line of descent lay in another direction; and
its next most important stage was determined by the same causes which
almost at the middle of the century or a little before brought about
Prae-Raphaelitism in art. Both of these were closely connected with the
set of events called the Oxford Movement, about which much has been
written, but of which the far-reaching significance, not merely in
religion but in literature, politics, art, and almost things in general,
has never yet been fully estimated. As far as literature is concerned,
and this special part of literature with which we are here dealing, this
movement had partly shown and partly shaped the direction of the best
minds towards the Middle Ages, which had been begun by Percy's
_Reliques_ in a vague and blind sort of way, and which had been
strengthened, directed, but still not altogether fashioned according to
knowledge, by Scott and Coleridge.
This movement which dominates the whole English poetry of the later half
of the century with the exception of that produced by a few survivors of
the older time, and to which no successor of equal brilliancy and
fertility has yet made its appearance, is popularly represented by three
writers, two of whom, Mr. William Morris and Mr. Swinburne, are
fortunately still alive, and therefore fall out of our province.
Rossetti, the eldest of the three, a great influence on both, and as it
happens an example unique in all history of combined excellence in
poetry and painting, has passed away for some years, and will give us
quite sufficient text for explaining the development and illustrating
its results without outstripping the limits traced in the preface to
this book; while his sister, and a distinguished junior member of the
school, also dead, Mr. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, may profitably be brought
in to complete the illustration.
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, generally known as Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, was born in London on 12th May 1828. He was the son of an
Italian poet and critic of eminence, who, like so many of his countrymen
of literary tastes during the early part of the century, had fallen into
the Carbonaro movement, and who had to fly first to Malta and then to
England. Here he married Miss Polidori, whose mother was an
Englishwoman; and his four children--the two exquisite poets below dealt
with, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, a competent critic, and Maria Francesca, the
eldest daughter, who wrote an excellent introduction to Dante--all made
contributions, and two of them great contributions, to English
literature. The father himself, who was Professor of Italian at King's
College, London, was an enthusiastic though rather a fantastic Dantist,
and somewhat of a visionary generally, with wild notions about mediaeval
secret societies; but a man of the greatest honesty and honour, and a
brilliant contrast to the various patriot-charlatans, from Ugo Foscolo
downwards, who brought discredit on the Italian name in his time in
England. These particulars, of a kind seldom given in this book, are not
otiose; for they have much to do with the singular personality of our
English Rossetti himself.
He was educated at King's College School; but his leanings towards art
were so strong that at the age of fifteen he began the study of it,
leaving school to draw at the Royal Academy and elsewhere. His art
career and the formation of the P.R.B. (Prae-Raphaelite Brotherhood)
unfortunately fall outside our sphere. It is enough to say that for some
twenty years Rossetti, if he was known at all (and he was never known
very widely nor did he ever seek notoriety) was known as a painter only,
though many who only knew his poems later conceived the most passionate
admiration for his painting. Yet he wrote almost as early as he
painted, contributing to the famous Prae-Raphaelite magazine, the _Germ_,
in 1850, to the remarkable _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which also
saw the early work of Mr. Morris, in 1856, and publishing some
translations from _The Early Italian Poets_ in 1861. He had married the
year before this last date and was about to publish _Poems_ which he had
been writing from an early age. But his wife died in 1862, and in a fit
of despair he buried his MSS. in her coffin. They were years afterwards
exhumed and the _Poems_ appeared in 1870. Eleven years later another
volume of _Ballads and Sonnets_ was published, and Rossetti, whose
health in the interval had been much shattered, and who had
unfortunately sought refuge from insomnia in chloral, died next year in
April 1882. The last years of his life were not happy, and he was most
unnecessarily affected by attacks on the first arrangement of his
_Poems_.
These poems had a certain advantage in being presented to a public
already acquainted with the work of Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne; but
Rossetti was not merely older than his two friends, he was also to some
extent their master. At the same time the influences which acted on him
were naturally diverse from those which, independently of his own
influence, acted on them. For the French and English mediaeval
inspirations of Mr. Morris, for the classical and general study of Mr.
Swinburne, he had his ancestral Italians almost for sole teachers; and
for their varied interests he had his own art of painting for a
continual companion, reminder, and model. Yet the mediaeval impulse is
almost equally strong on all three, and its intensity shows that it was
the real dominant of the moment in English poetry. The opening poem of
Rossetti's first book, "The Blessed Damozel," which is understood to
have been written very early, though afterwards wrought up by touches
both of his love for his wife while living and of his regret for her
when dead, is almost a typical example of the whole style and school,
though it is individualised by the strong pictorial element rarely
absent from his work. The "Blessed Damozel" herself, who "leaned out
From the gold Bar of Heaven," is a figure from the _Paradiso_, divested
of the excessive abstraction of that part of Dante, and clothed partly
in the gayer colours and more fleshly personality of English and French
mediaevalism, partly in a mystical halo which is peculiar to these
nineteenth century re-creations of mediaeval thought and feeling. The
poem is of extreme beauty, and ornate as is its language in parts there
are touches, such as the poet's reflection
To one it is ten years of years,
which utter the simplest truth and tenderness; while others, such as the
enumeration of the Virgin's handmaidens (over which at the time the
hoofs of earless critics danced)--
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies--
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys--
are consummate triumphs of the word-music brought by Tennyson into
English poetry. Indeed this couplet of names might be made a sort of
text to expound the great appeal to the ear of this kind of poetry,
which any one who is deaf to the exceptional and golden harmony of the
arrangement need never hope to appreciate. It is perfectly easy to
change the order in many ways without affecting the verse; there is
absolutely none of these combinations which approaches the actual one in
beauty of sound and suggestion.
"Love's Nocturn" which follows is more of the early Italian school pure
and simple; and "Troy Town," a ballad with burdens, is one of a class of
poem much affected by Rossetti and ever since, which has produced some
admirable work, but is perhaps a little open to the charge of too
deliberate archaism. It is at any rate far inferior to his own "Sister
Helen." But "The Burden of Nineveh" which follows is in a quite
different style, and besides its intrinsic excellence is noteworthy as
showing how very far Rossetti was from being limited in his choice of
manners. But to go through the whole contents of this very remarkable
volume would be impossible, and we can only particularise the great
sonnet-sequence "The House of Life" (which was attacked for want of
decency with as little intelligence as "The Blessed Damozel" had been
attacked for want of sense), and a set "for pictures." The first,
somewhat thorny and obscure in language, is of extreme poetical and
philosophical beauty. The latter, beautiful enough, may be said to lend
themselves a little to the attacks of those critics who charged Rossetti
with, in the Aristotelian phrase, "shifting his ground to another kind"
or (to vary the words) of taking the quotation _ut pictura poesis_ in
too literal a sense. Some songs, especially "Penumbra" and "The
Woodspurge," of intense sweetness and sadness, were also included; and
the simple directness of "Jenny" showed, like "Nineveh," capacities in
the poet not easily to be inferred from the bulk of his poems.
Rossetti's second volume, while it added only too little to the bulk of
his work--for much of it consisted of a revised issue of "The House of
Life"--added greatly to its enjoyment. But it produced no new kind,
unless certain extensions of the ballad-scheme into narrative poems of
considerable length--"Rose-Mary," "The White Ship," and "The King's
Tragedy"--be counted as such. "Rose-Mary" in particular exhibits the
merits and defects of the poet in almost the clearest possible light,
and it may be safely said that no English poet, not the very greatest,
need have been ashamed of such a stanza as this, where there is no
affectation worth speaking of, where the eternal and immortal
commonplaces of poetry are touched to newness as only a master touches,
and where the turn of the phrase and verse is impeccable and supreme:--
And lo! on the ground Rose-Mary lay,
With a cold brow like the snows ere May,
With a cold breast like the earth till Spring--
With such a smile as the June days bring
When the year grows warm for harvesting.
Here, as elsewhere, it has seemed better to postpone most of the
necessary general criticism of schools and groups till the concluding
chapter, but in this particular respect the paucity of individuals which
our scheme leaves (though Miss Rossetti and Mr. O'Shaughnessy will give
valuable assistance presently), may make a few words desirable, even if
they be partly repetition and partly anticipation. We find in Rossetti a
strong influence of pictorial on poetic art; an overpowering tendency to
revert to the forms and figures, the sense and sentiment of the past,
especially the mediaeval past; and a further tendency to a mysticism
which is very often, if not always, poetic in character, as indeed
mysticism generally if not always is. We find in point of form a
distinct preference for lyric over other kinds, a fancy for archaic
language and schemes of verse, a further fancy for elaborate and ornate
language (which does not, however, exclude perfect simplicity when the
poet chooses), and above all, a predilection for attempting and a
faculty for achieving effects of verbal music by cunning adjustment of
vowel and consonant sound which, though it had been anticipated
partially, and as it were accidentally in the seventeenth century, and
had been after the Romantic revival displayed admirably by Coleridge and
Keats, and brought to a high pitch by Tennyson, was even further
elaborated and polished by the present school. Indeed, they may be said
to have absolutely finished this poetical appeal as a distinct and
deliberate one. All poets have always attempted, and all poets always
will attempt, and when they are great, achieve these enchanting effects
of mere sound. But for some considerable time it will not be possible
(indeed it will be quite impossible until the structure, the intonation,
the phrase of English have taken such turns as will develop physical
possibilities as different from those of our language as ours are from
those of the seventeenth century) for any poets to get distinctly great
effects in the same way. It is proof enough of this that, except the
masters, no poet for many years now _has_ achieved a great effect by
this means, and that the most promising of the newer school, whether
they may or may not have found a substitute, are abandoning it.
Rossetti's younger, but very little younger, sister, Christina Georgina,
was born in 1830, sat to her brother early for the charming picture of
"The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," and is said also to figure in his
illustration of the weeping queens in Tennyson's _Morte D' Arthur_. But
she lived an exceedingly quiet life, mainly occupied in attention to her
mother and in devotion; for she had been brought up, and all her life
remained, a member of the Church of England. Her religious feelings more
and more coloured her poetical work, which was produced at intervals
from 1861 till close upon her death in the winter of 1894-95. It was not
hastily written, and latterly formed mainly the embellishment of certain
prose books of religious reflection or excerpt. But it was always of an
exquisite quality. Its first expression in book form was _Goblin Market,
and other Poems_ (1861), which, as well as her next volume, _The
Prince's Progress_ (1866), was illustrated by her brother's pencil. A
rather considerable time then passed without anything of importance (a
book called _Sing-Song_ excepted), till in 1881 _A Pageant, and other
Poems_ was added. A collection of all these was issued nine years later,
but with this the gleanings from the devotional works above mentioned
(the chief of which were _Time Flies_ and _The Face of the Deep_) have
still to be united.
There are those who seriously maintain Miss Rossetti's claim to the
highest rank among English poetesses, urging that she excels Mrs.
Browning, her only possible competitor, in freedom from blemishes of
form and from the liability to fall into silliness and maudlin gush, at
least as much as she falls short of her in variety and in power of
shaping a poem of considerable bulk. But without attempting a too rigid
classification we may certainly say that Miss Rossetti has no superior
among Englishwomen who have had the gift of poetry. In the title-piece
of her first book the merely quaint side of Prae-Raphaelitism perhaps
appears rather too strongly, though very agreeably to some. But
"Dreamland," "Winter Rain," "An End," "Echo," the exquisite song for
music "When I am dead, my dearest," and the wonderful devotional pieces
called "The Three Enemies" and "Sleep at Sea," with many charming
sonnets, adorned a volume which, on the whole, showed more of the
tendencies of the school than any which had yet appeared. For it was
less exclusively mediaeval than Mr. Morris' _Defence of Guinevere_, and
very much more varied as well as more mature than Mr. Swinburne's _Queen
Mother_ and _Rosamond_. _The Prince's Progress_ showed a great advance
on _Goblin Market_ in dignity and freedom from mannerism, and the minor
poems in general rivalled those in the earlier collection, though the
poetess perhaps never quite equalled "Sleep at Sea." The contents of _A
Pageant, and other Poems_ were at once more serious and lighter than
those of the two former books (for Miss Rossetti, like her brother, had
a strong touch of humour), while the _Collected Poems_ added some
excellent pieces. But the note of the whole had been struck, as is
usually the case with good poets who do not publish too early, at the
very first.
The most distinguished members, with the exception of Mr. and Miss
Rossetti, of this school are still alive; and, as it did not become
fashionable until about five-and-twenty years ago, even the junior
members of it have in but few cases been sent to that majority of which
alone we treat. Mr. John Addington Symonds, an important writer of
prose, began early and never abandoned the practice of verse, but his
accomplishment in it was never more than an accomplishment. Mr. Philip
Bourke Marston, son of Dr. Westland Marston, the dramatist, was highly
reputed as a poet by his friends, but friendship and compassion (he was
blind) had perhaps more to do with this reputation than strict
criticism. The remarkable talents of Mr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, which
could never be mistaken by any one who knew him, and of which some
memorials remain in verse, were mainly lost to English poetry by the
fact of his passing the last twenty years of his life as a Jesuit
priest. But the most characteristic figure now passed away was Arthur
O'Shaughnessy (1844-81). He was an official of the British Museum, and
published three volumes of poetry--_The Epic of Women_ (1870), _Lays of
France_ (1872), and _Music and Moonlight_ (1874)--which were completed
in the year of his death by a posthumous volume entitled _Songs of a
Worker_. Of these the _Lays of France_ are merely paraphrases of Marie:
great part of the _Songs of a Worker_ is occupied with mere translation
of modern French verses--poor work for a poet at all times. But _The
Epic of Women_ and _Music and Moonlight_ contain stuff which it is not
extravagant to call extraordinary.
It was never widely popular, for O'Shaughnessy pushed the fancy of the
Prae-Raphaelites for a dreamy remoteness to its very furthest, and the
charge (usually an uncritical one, but usually also explaining with a
certain justice a poet's unpopularity) of "lack of human interest" was
brought against him. Sometimes, too, either of deliberate conviction or
through corrupt following of others, he indulged in expressions of
opinion about matters on which the poet is not called upon to express
any, in a manner which was always unnecessary and sometimes offensive.
But judged as a poet he has the _unum necessarium_, the individual note
of song. Like Keats, he was not quite individual--there are echoes,
especially of Edgar Poe, in him. But the genuine and authentic
contribution is sufficient, and is of the most unmistakable kind. In the
first book "Exile," "A Neglected Heart," "Bisclavaret," "The Fountain of
Tears," "Barcarolle," make a new mixture of the fair and strange in
meaning, a new valuation of the eternal possibilities of language in
sound. _Music and Moonlight_--O'Shaughnessy was one of the few poets who
have been devoted to music--is almost more remote, and even less
popularly beautiful; but the opening "Ode," some of the lyrics in the
title poem (such as "Once in a hundred years"), the song "Has summer
come without the rose," and not a few others, renew for those who can
receive it the strange attraction, the attraction most happily hinted by
the very title of this book itself, which O'Shaughnessy could exercise.
That there was not a little that is morbid in him--as perhaps in the
school generally--sane criticism cannot deny. But though it is as unwise
as it is unsafe to prefer morbidness for itself or to give it too great
way, there are undoubted charms in it, and O'Shaughnessy could give
poetical form to these as few others could. Two of his own lines--
Oh! exquisite malady of the soul,
How hast thou marred me--
put the thing well. Those who have once tasted his poetry return, and
probably, though they are never likely to be numerous, always when they
have once tasted will return, to the visions and the melodies--
Of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.
Another poet whose death brings him within our range, and who may be
said to belong, with some striking differences of circumstance as well
as individual genius, to the same school, was James Thomson, second of
the name in English poetry, but a curious and melancholy contrast to
that Epicurean animal, the poet of _The Seasons_. He was born at
Port-Glasgow on 23rd November 1834, and was the son of a sailor. His
parents being in poor circumstances, he obtained, as a child, a place in
the Royal Caledonian Asylum, and, after a good education there, became
an army schoolmaster--a post which he held for a considerable time. But
Thomson's natural character was recalcitrant to discipline and
distinguished by a morbid social jealousy. He gradually, under the
influence of, or at any rate in company with, the notorious Charles
Bradlaugh, adopted atheistic and republican opinions, and in 1862 an act
of insubordination led to his dismissal from the army, for which he had
long lost, if he ever had, any liking. It is also said that the death of
a girl to whom he was passionately attached had much to do with the
development of the morbid pessimism by which he became distinguished.
For some time Thomson tried various occupations, being by turns a
lawyer's clerk, a mining agent, and war correspondent of a newspaper
with the Carlists. But even before he left the army he had, partly with
Mr. Bradlaugh's help, obtained work on the press, and such income as he
had during the last twenty years of his life was chiefly derived from
it. He might undoubtedly have made a comfortable living in this way, for
his abilities were great and his knowledge not small. But in addition to
the specially poetical weakness of disliking "collar-work," he was
hampered by the same intractable and morose temper which he had shown in
the army, by the violence of his religious and political views, and
lastly and most fatally by an increasing slavery to drink and chloral.
At last, in 1882, he--after having been for some time in the very worst
health--burst a blood-vessel while visiting his friend the blind poet
Philip Bourke Marston, and died in University College Hospital on 3rd
June.
This melancholy story is to be found sufficiently reflected in his
works. Those in prose, though not contemptible, neither deserve nor are
likely to receive long remembrance, being for the most part critical
studies, animated by a real love for literature and informed by
respectable knowledge, but of necessity lacking in strict scholarship,
distinguished by more acuteness than wisdom, and marred by the sectarian
violence and narrowness of a small anti-orthodox clique. They may
perhaps be not unfairly compared to the work of a clever but
ill-conditioned schoolboy. The verse is very different. He began to
write it early, and it chiefly appeared in Mr. Bradlaugh's _National
Reformer_ with the signature "B. V.," the initials of "Bysshe Vanolis,"
a rather characteristic _nom de guerre_ which Thomson had taken to
express his admiration for Shelley directly, and for Novalis by anagram.
Some of it, however, emerged into a wider hearing, and attracted the
favourable attention of men like Kingsley and Froude. But Thomson did
nothing of importance till 1874, when "The City of Dreadful Night"
appeared in the _National Reformer_, to the no small bewilderment
probably of its readers. Six years later the poem was printed with
others in a volume, quickly followed by a second, _Vane's Story_,
_etc._ Thomson's melancholy death attracted fresh attention to him, and
much--perhaps a good deal too much--of his writings has been
republished since. His claims, however, must rest on a comparatively
small body of work, which will no doubt one day be selected and issued
alone. "The City of Dreadful Night" itself, incomparably the best of the
longer poems, is a pessimist and nihilist effusion of the deepest gloom
amounting to despair, but couched in stately verse of an absolute
sincerity and containing some splendid passages. With this is connected
one of the latest pieces, the terrible "Insomnia." Of lighter strain,
written when the poet could still be happy, are "Sunday at Hampstead"
and "Sunday up the River," "The Naked Goddess," and one or two others;
while other things, such as "The fire that filled my heart of old," must
also be cited. Even against these the charge of a monotonous, narrow,
and irrational misery has been brought. But what saves Thomson is the
perfection with which he expresses, the negative and hopeless side of
the sense of mystery, of the Unseen; just as Miss Rossetti expresses the
positive and hopeful one. No two contemporary poets perhaps ever
completed each other in a more curious way than this Bohemian atheist
and this devout lady.
So far in this chapter the story of poetry, from Tennyson downwards, has
been conducted in regular fashion, and by citing the principal names
which represent the chief schools or sub-schools. But we must now return
to notice a very considerable company of other verse-writers, without
mention of whom this history would be wofully incomplete. Nor must it by
any means be supposed that they are to be regarded invariably as
constituting a "second class." On the contrary, some of them are the
equals, one or two the superiors, of Thomson or of O'Shaughnessy. But
they have been postponed, either because they belong to schools of which
the poets already mentioned are masters, to choruses of which others are
the leaders, or because they show rather blended influences than a
distinct and direct advance in the main poetical line of development.
Others again rank here, and not earlier, because they are of the second
class, or a lower one.
Of these, though he leaves a name certain to live in English literary
history, if not perhaps quite in the way in which its author wished, is
Martin Farquhar Tupper, who was born, in 1810, of a very respectable
family in the Channel Islands, his father being a surgeon of eminence.
Tupper was educated at the Charterhouse and at Christ Church, and was
called to the bar. But he gave himself up to literature, especially
poetry or verse, of which he wrote an enormous quantity. His most famous
book appeared originally in 1839, though it was afterwards continued. It
was called _Proverbial Philosophy_, and criticised life in rhythmical
rather than metrical lines, with a great deal of orthodoxy. Almost from
the first the critics and the wits waged unceasing war against it; but
the public, at least for many years, bought it with avidity, and perhaps
read it, so that it went through forty editions and is said to have
brought in twenty thousand pounds. Nor is it at all certain that any
genuine conception of its pretentious triviality had much to do with the
decay which, after many years, it, like other human things, experienced.
Mr. Tupper, who did not die till 1889, is understood to have been
privately an amiable and rather accomplished person; and some of his
innumerable minor copies of verse attain a very fair standard of minor
poetry. But _Proverbial Philosophy_ remains as one of the bright and
shining examples of the absolute want of connection between literary
merit and popular success.
It has been said that Lord Tennyson's first work appeared in _Poems by
Two Brothers_, and it is now known that this book was actually by the
_three_,--Frederick, Charles, and Alfred. Frederick, the eldest, who, at
a great age, is still alive, has never ceased verse-writing. Charles,
who afterwards took the name of Turner, and, having been born in 1808,
died in 1879, was particularly famous as a sonneteer, producing in this
form many good and some excellent examples. Arthur Hallam, whom _In
Memoriam_ has made immortal, was credited by the partial judgment of his
friends with talents which, they would fain think, were actually shown
both in verse and prose. A wiser criticism will content itself with
saying that in one sense he produced _In Memoriam_ itself, and that
this is enough connection with literature for any man. His own work has
a suspicious absence of faults, without the presence of any great
positive merit,--a combination almost certainly indicating precocity, to
be followed by sterility. But this consummation he was spared. John
Sterling, who has been already referred to, and who stands to Carlyle in
what may be called a prose version of the relation between Tennyson and
Hallam, wrote some verse which is at least interesting; and Sir Francis
Doyle, also elsewhere mentioned, belongs to the brood of the remarkable
years 1807-14, having been born in 1810. But his splendid war-songs were
written not very early in life.
Of the years just mentioned, the first, 1807, contributed, besides Mr.
Frederick Tennyson, the very considerable talent of Archbishop Trench, a
Harrow and Trinity (Cambridge) man who had an actual part in the
expedition to Spain from which Sterling retreated, took orders, and
ended a series of ecclesiastical promotions by the Archbishopric of
Dublin, to which he was consecrated in 1864, which he held with great
dignity and address during the extremely trying period of
Disestablishment, and which he resigned in 1884, dying two years later.
Trench wrote always well, and always as a scholar, on a wide range of
subjects. He was an interesting philologist,--his _Study of Words_ being
the most popular of scholarly and the most scholarly of popular works on
the subject,--a valuable introducer of the exquisite sacred Latin poetry
of the Middle Ages to Englishmen, a sound divine in preaching and
teaching. His original English verse was chiefly written before the
middle of the century, though perhaps his best known (not his best)
verses are on the Battle of the Alma. He was a good sonneteer and an
excellent hymn-writer.
1809 contributed three writers of curiously contrasted character. One
was Professor Blackie, an eccentric and amiable man, a translator of
AEschylus, and a writer of songs of a healthy and spirited kind. The
second, Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, a poet of Parables, has never been
popular, and perhaps seldom arrived at that point of projection in which
poetical alchemy finally and successfully transmutes the rebel
materials of thought and phrase into manifest gold; but he had very high
and distinctly rare, poetical qualities. Such things as "Old Souls,"
"The Snake Charmer," "The Palmist," three capital examples of his work,
are often, and not quite wrongly, objected to in different forms of some
such a phrase as this: "Poetry that is perfect poetry ought never to
subject any tolerable intellect to the necessity of searching for its
meaning. It is not necessary that it should yield up the whole treasures
of that meaning at once, but it must carry on the face of it such a
competent quantity as will relieve the reader from postponing the poetic
enjoyment in order to solve the intellectual riddle." The truth of this
in the main, and the demurrers and exceptions to it in part, are pretty
clear; nor is this the place to state them at length. It is sufficient
to say that in Dr. Hake's verse, especially that part of it published
between 1870 and 1880 under the titles _Madeline_, _Parables and Tales_,
_New Symbols_, _Legends of the Morrow_ and _Maiden Ecstasy_, the reader
of some poetical experience will seldom fail to find satisfaction.
It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that of this poet
with Lord Houghton, earlier known to everybody as Richard Monckton
Milnes, who died in 1885. He was of the golden age of Trinity during
this century, the age of Tennyson, and throughout life he had an amiable
fancy for making the acquaintance of everybody who made any name in
literature, and of many who made none. A practical and active
politician, and a constant figure in society, he was also a very
considerable man of letters. His critical work (principally but not
wholly collected in _Monographs_) is not great in bulk but is
exceedingly good, both in substance and in style. His verse, on the
other hand, which was chiefly the produce of the years before he came to
middle life, is a little slight, and perhaps appears slighter than it
really is. Few poets have ever been more successful with songs for
music: the "Brookside" (commonly called from its refrain, "The beating
of my own heart"), the famous and really fine "Strangers Yet," are the
best known, but there are many others. Lord Houghton undoubtedly had no
strong vein of poetry. But it was always an entire mistake to represent
him as either a fribble or a sentimentalist, while with more inducements
to write he would probably have been one of the very best critics of his
age.
It is necessary once more to approach the unsatisfactory brevity of a
catalogue in order to mention, since it would be wrong to omit, Sir
Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), an Irish writer who produced some pleasant
and spirited work of ordinary kinds, and laboured very hard to achieve
that often tried but seldom achieved adventure, the rendering into
English poetry of Irish Celtic legends and literature; Alfred Domett
(1811-87), author of the New Zealand epic of _Ranulf and Amohia_ and
much other verse, but most safely grappled to English poetry as
Browning's "Waring"; W. B. Scott (1812-90), an outlying member of the
Prae-Raphaelite School in art and letters, in whom for the most part
execution lagged behind conception both with pen and pencil; Charles
Mackay (1814-89), an active journalist who wrote a vast deal in verse
and prose, his best things perhaps being the mid-century "Cholera
Chant," the once well-known song of "A good time coming," and in a
sentimental strain the piece called "O, ye Tears"; and Mrs. Archer
Clive, the author of the remarkable novel of _Paul Ferroll_, whose _IX.
Poems by V._ attracted much attention from competent critics in the
doubtful time of poetry about the middle of the century, and are really
good.
Not many writers, either in prose or poetry, give the impression of
never having done what was in them more than William Edmonstoune Aytoun,
who was born in 1813 and died in 1865. He was a son-in-law of
"Christopher North," and like him a pillar of _Blackwood's Magazine_, in
which some of his best things in prose and verse appeared. He divided
himself between law and literature, and in his rather short life rose to
a Professorship in the latter and a Sheriffdom in the former, deserving
the credit of admirably stimulating influence in the first capacity and
competent performance in the second. He published poems when he was
only seventeen. But his best work consists of the famous _Bon Gaultier
Ballads_--a collection of parodies and light poems of all kinds written
in conjunction with Sir Theodore Martin, and one of the pleasantest
books of the kind that the century has seen--and the more serious _Lays
of the Scottish Cavaliers_, both dating from the forties, the
satirically curious _Firmilian_ (see below), 1854, and some _Blackwood_
stories of which the very best perhaps is _The Glenmutchkin Railway_.
His long poem of _Bothwell_, 1855, and his novel of _Norman Sinclair_,
1861, are less successful.
The _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, on which his chief serious claim
must rest, is an interesting book, if hardly a great one. The style is
modelled with extreme closeness upon that of Scott, which even Sir
Walter, with all his originality and genius, had not been able always to
preserve from flatness. In Aytoun's hands the flats are too frequent,
though they are relieved and broken at times by really splendid bursts,
the best of which perhaps are "The Island of the Scots" and "The Heart
of the Bruce." For Aytoun's poetic vein, except in the lighter kinds,
was of no very great strength; and an ardent patriotism, a genuine and
gallant devotion to the Tory cause, and a keen appreciation of the
chivalrous and romantic, did not always suffice to supply the want of
actual inspiration.
If it had been true, as is commonly said, that the before-mentioned
_Firmilian_ killed the so-called Spasmodic School, Aytoun's failure to
attain the upper regions of poetry would have been a just judgment; for
the persons whom he satirised, though less clever and humorous, were
undoubtedly more poetical than himself. But nothing is ever killed in
this way, and as a matter of fact the Spasmodic School of the early
fifties was little more than one of the periodical outbursts of poetic
velleity, more genuine than vigorous and more audacious than organic,
which are constantly witnessed. It is, as usual, not very easy to find
out who were the supposed scholars in this school. Mr. P. H. Bailey, the
author of _Festus_, who still survives, is sometimes classed with them;
but the chief members are admitted to have been Sydney Dobell and
Alexander Smith, both remarkable persons, both failures of something
which might in each case have been a considerable poet, and both
illustrating the "second middle" period of the poetry of the century
which corresponds to that illustrated earlier by Darley, Horne, and
Beddoes.
Of this pair, Sydney Dobell had some, and Alexander Smith had others, of
the excuses which charity not divorced from critical judgment makes for
imperfect poets. Dobell, with sufficient leisure for poetical
production, had a rather unfortunate education and exceedingly bad
health. Smith had something of both of these, and the necessity of
writing for bread as well. Dobell, the elder of the two, and the longer
lived, though both died comparatively young, was a Kentish man, born at
Cranbrook on 5th April 1824. When he was of age his father established
himself as a wine-merchant at Cheltenham, and Sydney afterwards
exercised the same not unpoetical trade. He went to no school and to no
University, privations especially dangerous to a person inclined as he
was to a kind of passionate priggishness. He was always ill; and his
wife, to whom he engaged himself while a boy, and whom he married before
he had ceased to be one, was always ill likewise. He travelled a good
deal, with results more beneficial to his poetry than to his health;
and, the latter becoming ever worse, he died near Cheltenham on 22nd
August 1874. His first work, an "Italomaniac" closet drama entitled _The
Roman_, was published in 1850; his second, _Balder_, in 1853. This
latter has been compared to Ibsen's _Brand_: I do not know whether any
one has noticed other odd, though slight, resemblances between _Peer
Gynt_ and Beddoes' chief work. The Crimean War had a strong influence on
Dobell, and besides joining Smith in _Sonnets on the War_ (1855), he
wrote by himself _England in Time of War_, next year. He did not publish
anything else; but his works were edited shortly after his death by
Professor Nichol.
Alexander Smith, like so many of the modern poets of Scotland, was born
in quite humble life, and had not even the full advantages open to a
Scottish "lad o' pairts." His birthplace, however, was Kilmarnock, a
place not alien to the Muses; and before he was twenty-one (his birth
year is diversely given as 1829 and 1830) the Rev. George Gilfillan, an
amiable and fluent critic of the middle of the century, who loved
literature very much and praised its practitioners with more zeal than
discrimination, procured the publication of the _Life Drama_. It sold
enormously; it is necessary to have been acquainted with those who were
young at the time of its appearance to believe in the enthusiasm with
which it was received; but a little intelligence and a very little
goodwill will enable the critic to understand, if not to share their
raptures. For a time Smith was deliberately pitted against Tennyson by
"the younger sort" as Dennis says of the faction for Settle against
Dryden in his days at Cambridge. The reaction which, mercifully for the
chances of literature if not quite pleasantly for the poet, always comes
in such cases, was pretty rapid, and Smith, ridiculed in _Firmilian_,
was more seriously taxed with crudity (which was just), plagiarism
(which was absurd), and want of measure (which, like the crudity, can
hardly be denied). Smith, however, was not by any means a weakling
except physically; he could even satirise himself sensibly and
good-humouredly enough; and his popularity had the solid result of
giving him a post in the University of Edinburgh--not lucrative and by
no means a sinecure, but not too uncongenial, and allowing him a chance
both to read and to write. For some time he stuck to poetry, publishing
_City Poems_ in 1857 and _Edwin of Deira_ in 1861. But the taste for his
wares had dwindled: perhaps his own poetic impulse, a true but not very
strong one, was waning; and he turned to prose, in which he produced a
story or two and some pleasant descriptive work--_Dreamthorpe_ (1863),
and _A Summer in Skye_ (1865). Consumption showed itself, and he died on
8th January 1867.
It has already been said that there is much less of a distinct
brotherhood in Dobell and Smith, or of any membership of a larger but
special "Spasmodic school," than of the well-known and superficially
varying but generally kindred spirit of periods and persons in which
and in whom poetic yearning does not find organs or opportunities
thoroughly suited to satisfy itself. Dobell is the more unequal, but the
better of the two in snatches. His two most frequently quoted
things--"Tommy's Dead" and the untitled ballad where the refrain--
Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!
occurs at irregular intervals--are for once fair samples of their
author's genius. "Tommy's dead," the lament of a father over his son, is
too long, it has frequent flatnesses, repetitions that do not add to the
effect, bits of mere gush, trivialities. The tragic and echoing
magnificence of the Ravelston refrain is not quite seconded by the text:
both to a certain extent deserve the epithet (which I have repudiated
for Beddoes in another place) of "artificial." And yet both have the
fragmentary, not to be analysed, almost uncanny charm and grandeur which
have been spoken of in that place. Nor do this charm, this grandeur,
fail to reappear (always more or less closely accompanied by the faults
just mentioned, and also by a kind of flatulent rant which is worse than
any of them) both in Dobell's war-songs, which may be said in a way to
hand the torch on from Campbell to Mr. Kipling, and in his marvellously
unequal blank verse, where the most excellent thought and phrase
alternate with sheer balderdash--a pun which (it need hardly be said)
was not spared by contemporary critics to the author of _Balder_.
Alexander Smith never rises to the heights nor strikes the distinct
notes of Dobell; but the _Life Drama_ is really on the whole better than
either _Balder_ or _The Roman_, and is full of what may be called, from
opposite points of view, happy thoughts and quaint conceits, expressed
in a stamp of verse certainly not quite original, but melodious always,
and sometimes very striking. He has not yet had his critical
resurrection, and perhaps none such will ever exalt him to a very high
prominent position. He seems to suffer from the operation of that
mysterious but very real law which decrees that undeserved popularity
shall be followed by neglect sometimes even more undeserved. But when he
does finally find his level, it will not be a very low one.
To the Spasmodics may be appended yet another list of bards who can
claim here but the notice of a sentence or a clause, though by no means
uninteresting to the student, and often very interesting indeed to the
student-lover of poetry:--the two Joneses--Ernest (1819-69), a rather
silly victim of Chartism, for which he went to prison, but a generous
person and master of a pretty twitter enough; and Ebenezer (1820-60), a
London clerk, author of _Studies of Sensation and Event_, a rather
curious link between the Cockney school of the beginning of the century
and some minor poets of our own times, but overpraised by his
rediscoverers some years ago; W. C. Bennett, a popular song-writer;
William Cory ( -1892), earlier and better known as Johnson, an Eton
master, a scholar, an admirable writer of prose and in _Ionica_ of verse
slightly effeminate but with a note in it not unworthy of one glance of
its punning title; W. C. Roscoe (1823-59), grandson of the historian, a
minor poet in the best sense of the term; William Allingham (1824-89),
sometime editor of _Fraser_, and a writer of verse from whom at one time
something might have been expected; Thomas Woolner, a sculptor of great,
and--in _My Beautiful Lady_, _Pygmalion_, etc.--a poet of estimable
merit, whose first-named volume attracted rather disproportionate praise
at its first appearance. As one thinks of the work of these and
others--often enjoyable, sometimes admirable, and long ago or later
admired and enjoyed--the unceremoniousness of despatching them so
slightly brings a twinge of shame. But it is impossible to do justice to
their work, or to the lyrics, merry or sensuous, of Mortimer Collins,
who was nearly a real poet of _vers de societe_, and had a capital
satiric and a winning romantic touch; the stirring ballads of Walter
Thornbury (which, however, would hardly have been written but for
Macaulay on the one hand and Barham on the other) and the
ill-conditioned but clever Radical railing of Robert Brough at
"Gentlemen." But if they cannot be discussed, they shall at least be
mentioned. On three others, Frederick Locker, Arthur Hugh Clough, and
"Owen Meredith" (Lord Lytton), we must dwell longer.
Clough has been called by persons of distinction a "bad poet"; but this
was only a joke, and, with all respect to those who made it, a rather
bad joke. The author of "Qua Cursum Ventus," of the marvellous picture
of the advancing tide in "Say not the struggle," and of not a few other
things, was certainly no bad poet, though it would not be uncritical to
call him a thin one. He was born at Liverpool on New Year's Day 1819,
spent part of his childhood in America, went to Rugby very young and
distinguished himself there greatly, though it may be doubted whether
the peculiar system which Arnold had just brought into full play was the
healthiest for a self-conscious and rather morbid nature like Clough's.
From Rugby he went to Balliol, and was entirely upset, not, as is
sometimes most unjustly said, by Newman, but by the influence of W. G.
Ward, a genial Puck of Theology, who, himself caring for nothing but
mathematics, philosophy, and play-acting, disturbed the consciences of
others by metaphysical quibbles, and then took refuge in the Church of
Rome. Clough, who had been elected to an Oriel fellowship, threw it up
in 1848, turned freethinker, and became the head of an educational
institution in London called University Hall. He did not hold this very
long, receiving a post in the Education Office, which he held in various
forms till his death in 1861 at Florence.
It is not necessary to be biassed by Matthew Arnold's musical epicede of
"Thyrsis" in order to admit, nor should any bias against his theological
views and his rather restless character be sufficient to induce any one
to deny, a distinct vein of poetry in Clough. His earliest and most
popular considerable work, _The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_ (the title
of which was originally rather different,) is written in hexameters
which do not, like Kingsley's, escape the curse of that "pestilent
heresy"; and the later _Amours de Voyage_ and _Dipsychus_, though there
are fine passages in both, bring him very close to the Spasmodic
school, of which in fact he was an unattached and more cultivated
member, with fancies directed rather to religiosity than to strict
literature. _Ambarvalia_ had preceded the _Bothie_, and other things
followed. On the whole, Clough is one of the most unsatisfactory
products of that well-known form of nineteenth century scepticism which
has neither the strength to believe nor the courage to disbelieve "and
have done with it." He hankers and looks back, his "two souls" are
always warring with each other, and though the clash and conflict
sometimes bring out fine things (as in the two pieces above cited and
the still finer poem at Naples with the refrain "Christ is not risen"),
though his "Latest Decalogue" has satirical merit, and some of his
country poems, written without undercurrent of thought, are fresh and
genial, he is on the whole a failure. But he is a failure of a
considerable poet, and some fragments of success chequer him.
Frederick Locker, who on his second marriage took the additional name of
Lampson, was born in 1821 of a family long connected with the Navy and
with Greenwich Hospital. He himself held for some years a post in the
Admiralty; but he was much more addicted to society and to literature
than to official work. His first marriage with Lady Charlotte Bruce
strengthened his social position, and his second gave him wealth. He
published, as early as 1857, a volume of light verse entitled _London
Lyrics_, which, with the work of Prior, Praed, and Mr. Austin Dobson,
stands at the head of its kind in English. But--an exceedingly rare
thing for amateur as well as for professional writers in our time--he
was not tempted either by profit or fame to write copiously. He added
during his not short life, which closed in May 1895, a few more poems to
_London Lyrics_. He edited in 1867 an anthology of his own kind of verse
called _Lyra Elegantiarum_, and in 1879 he produced a miscellany of
verse and prose, original and selected, called _Patchwork_, in which
some have seen his most accomplished and characteristic production. In
form it is something like Southey's _Omniana_, partly a commonplace
book, partly full of original things; but the extracts are so choicely
made and the original part is so delightful that it is not quite like
any book in the language. If Charles Lamb had been of Mr. Locker's time
and circumstances he might have made its fellow. "My Guardian Angel," a
short prose anecdote, is, as nearly as the present writer knows, unique.
Latterly its author was chiefly known as a man of much hospitality and a
collector of choice books. He would not do anything bad, and apparently
he did not feel inclined to do anything good. And as this is a century
when almost everybody must still be doing, and taking the chance of
goodness and badness, such an exception to the rule should meet with
honour.
No poet of the period, perhaps none of the century, occupies a position
less settled by general criticism, or more difficult to settle, than
that of Edward Robert, first Earl of Lytton, for a long time known in
poetry as "Owen Meredith." The only son of the novelist, he was born on
8th November 1831, and after going to Harrow, but not to either
university, entered the diplomatic service at the age of eighteen. In
this he filled a great many different offices at a great many different
places for nearly thirty years, till, after succeeding to his father's
title, he was made First Minister at Lisbon, and then in 1876 Viceroy of
India. This post he gave up in 1880, and after the return of the Tory
party to power, was sent in 1887 as Ambassador to Paris, where he was
very popular, and where he died in 1892.
Despite the fact that his time, save for the interval of 1880-87, was
thus uninterruptedly occupied with business, Lord Lytton was an
indefatigable writer of verse; while in _The Ring of Amasis_ he tried
the prose romance. His chief poetical books were _Clytemnestra_ (1855);
_The Wanderer_ (1859), which contains some charming lyrical work;
_Lucile_ (1860), a verse story; _Songs of Servia_ (_Serbski Pesme_)
(1861); _Orval, or the Fool of Time_ and _Chronicles and Characters_
(1869); _Fables in Song_ (1874); _Glenaveril_, a very long modern epic
(1885); and _After Paradise, or Legends of Exile_ (1887). Besides these
he collaborated in 1861 with his friend Julian Fane in a poem,
_Tannhaeuser_, which, though too much of a Tennysonian echo, has good
passages; and after his death two volumes equal if not superior to
anything he had done, _Marah_, a collection of short poems, and _King
Poppy_, a fantastic epic, were published. This extensive and not always
easily accessible work is conveniently represented by two volumes of
selections, one representing chiefly the earlier and shorter works,
edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1890, the other drawn mostly from the
later and longer, edited by his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, in 1894.
This latter was accompanied by reprints of _The Wanderer_ and _Lucile_.
The difficulties in criticism above referred to arise, not merely from
the voluminousness of this work, nor from the fact that Lord Lytton
shares with all the poets of his special generation, except Rossetti,
that inability to hit upon a definite and distinct manner of his own
which is so frequently and strangely remarkable in what may be called
intermediate poetical periods. Indeed in his later years he did strike
out something like a very distinct style. But he suffers more than any
other poet of anything like his gifts from two faults, one of which is
perhaps the fault that hurts a poet most with the vulgar, and the other
that which does him most harm with critics. He was so frankly pleased
with, and so apt at imitating the work of his great contemporaries, that
he would publish things to which fools gave the name of
plagiarisms--when they were in fact studies in the manner of Tennyson,
Heine, Browning, and others. And in the second place, though he
frequently rewrote, it seemed impossible for him to retrench and
concentrate. To this may be added his fondness for extremely long
narrative poems, the taste for which has certainly gone out, while it
may be doubted whether, unless they are pure romances of adventure, they
are ever good things.
The consequence of all this, and perhaps of other things less
legitimately literary, such as political partnership, has hitherto been
that Lord Lytton has been ranked very far indeed below his proper place.
For he had two poetical gifts, the higher of them in a high, the lower
in an eminent degree. The first was the gift of true lyric, not seldom
indeed marred by the lack of polish above noticed, but real, true, and
constant, from the "Fata Morgana" and "Buried Heart" of _The Wanderer_
to the "Experientia Docet" and "Selenites" of _Marah_, more than thirty
years later. The other was a much more individual power, and by some
might be ranked higher. It is the gift of what can best generally be
called ironical narration, using irony in its proper sense of covert
suggestive speech. This took various forms, indicated with more or less
clearness in the very titles of _Chronicles and Characters_ and _Fables
in Song_,--symbolic-mystical in _Legends of Exile_ (where not only some
of the legends but the poems called "Uriel" and "Strangers" are among
the best things of the author and highly typical of his later manner),
and fantastically romantic, with a strong touch of symbolism, in _King
Poppy_. And when, as happens in most of the pieces mentioned above and
many others, the combination welds itself into a kind of passionate
allegory, few poets show a better power of transporting the reader in
the due poetic manner. There can be no doubt that if Lord Lytton had
developed this faculty somewhat earlier (there are traces of it very
early), had made its exercises rather more clear and direct, and had
subjected their expression to severer thinning and compression, he would
have made a great reputation as a poet. As it is, it cannot be denied
that he had the positive faculties of poetry in kind and degree only
inferior to those possessed by at most four or five of his English
contemporaries from Tennyson downwards.
Nor should there perhaps lack mention of Roden Noel and Thomas Ashe, two
writers in whom, from their earlier work, it was not unreasonable to
expect poets of a distinct kind, and who, though they never improved on
this early work, can never be said exactly to have declined from it. The
first and elder was a son of the Earl of Gainsborough, was born in 1834,
went to Cambridge, travelled a good deal, and at various times, till his
death at the age of sixty, published much verse and not a little prose,
both showing a distinctly poetical imagination without a sufficient
organ of expression. Nor did he ever develop this except in _A Little
Child's Monument_, where the passionate personal agony injures as much
as it helps the poetical result. Mr. Ashe, who was born in 1836, and
died in 1889, also a Cambridge man, had a much less ambitious and rather
less interesting but somewhat better-organised talent for verse, and his
_Sorrows of Hypsipyle_, published in 1866, caused and authorised at the
time considerable expectations from him. But his vein was rather the
result of classical culture working on a slight original talent than
anything better, and he did not rise beyond a pleasant competence in
verse which was never that of a poetaster, but hardly ever that of a
distinct poet. In which respect he may appear here as the representative
of no scanty company dead and living. For even the longest chapter of a
book must have an end; and it is impossible to find room in it for the
discussion of the question, whether the friends of Oliver Madox Brown,
son of the famous Prae-Raphaelite painter, were or were not wrong in
seeing extraordinary promise in his boyish work; whether the sonnets of
Ernest Lefroy (1855-91) were exercises or works of art. A few more
remarks on humorous poets and women-poets must close the record.
In the art of merely or mainly humorous singing two names, those of
Edward Lear and Charles Stuart Calverley, entirely dominate the rest
among dead writers in the last part of the century. Lear, a good deal
the elder man of the two, was born in 1813, was a painter by profession,
and was the "E. L." of a well-known poem of Tennyson's. It was not till
1861 that his delightful nonsense-verses, known to his friends in
private, were first published, and they received various additions at
intervals till his death in 1888. The sheer nonsense-verse--the
_amphigouri_ as the French call it--has been tried in various countries
and at various times, but never with such success as in England, and it
has seldom, if ever, been cultivated in England with such success as by
Lear. His happy concoction of fantastic names, the easy slipping flow of
his verse, and above all, the irresistible parody of sense and pathos
that he contrived to instil into his rigmarole are unapproachable. In a
new and not in the least opprobrious sense he was "within the realms of
Nonsense absolute."
Calverley attempted less "uttermost isles" of fun. Born in 1831 of an
excellent Yorkshire family, he was educated at Harrow, and--a thing as
rare in the nineteenth as common in the seventeenth century--at both
universities, gaining at both a great reputation for scholarship,
eccentricity, and bodily strength. After some time he married and began
to work at the Bar; but an accident on the ice in 1867 brought on
concussion of the brain, though he lingered in constantly weakening
health till 1884. His _Verses and Translations_ twenty-two years earlier
had made him the model of all literary undergraduates with a turn for
humour; and he was able in spite of his affliction to issue some things
later, the chief being _Fly Leaves_ in 1872. Calverley, as has been
said, was a scholar, and his versions both from and into the classical
languages would of themselves have given him a reputation; but his forte
lay partly in the easier vein of parody, wherein few excelled him,
partly in the more difficult one of original light verse, wherein he had
a turn (as in his famous eulogy on tobacco) quite his own. He has never
been equalled in this, or even approached, except by James Kenneth
Stephen (1859-92), whose premature death deprived his friends of a most
amiable personality, and literature, in all probability, of a
considerable ornament. As it was, "J. K. S." left next to nothing but
two tiny collections of verse, showing an inspiration midway between
Calverley and Praed, but with quite sufficient personal note.
Two other writers of less scholarly style, but belonging to the London
Bohemian school of the third quarter of the century, W. J. Prowse,
"Nicholas" (1836-70), and H. S. Leigh (1837-83), may be noticed. Prowse,
whose career was very short, was the author of the charming lines on
"The beautiful City of Prague," which have been attributed to others:
while Leigh's _Carols of Cockayne_ (he was also a playwright) vary the
note of Hood happily, and now and then with a real originality.
Except Miss Rossetti, no woman during this time approached the poetical
excellence of Mrs. Barrett Browning. But the whole period has been
unprecedentedly fertile in poetesses, and whereas we had but five or six
to mention in the earlier chapter devoted to verse, we have here at
least a dozen, though no one who requires very extended notice here.
Lady Dufferin (1807-1867), mother of the well-known diplomatist, a
member of the Sheridan family, and her sister, and junior by a year,
Mrs. Norton (1808-1876), were both writers of facile and elegant verse,
with the Irish note of easy melody. The former was the less known to the
general reader, though a few of her pieces, such as "The Irish Emigrant"
and "Katie's Letter," have always been favourite numbers for recitation.
Mrs. Norton at one time enjoyed a considerable reputation as a poetess
by contributions to "Annuals" and "Souvenirs," chiefly in the
sentimental ballad style which pleased the second quarter of the
century. "The Outward Bound," "Bingen on the Rhine," and other things
are at least passable, and one of the author's latest and most ambitious
poems, _The Lady of La Garaye_, has a sustained respectability. To a few
fanatical admirers the scanty verse of Emily Bronte has seemed worthy of
such high praise that only mass of work would appear to be wanting to
put her in the first rank of poetesses if not of poets. Part of this,
however, it is to be feared, is due to admiration of the supposed
freedom of thought in her celebrated "Last Lines," which either in
sincerity or bravado pronounce that "vain are the thousand creeds," and
declare for a sort of vague Pantheism, immanent at once in self and the
world. At thirty, however, a genuine poetess should have produced more
than a mere handful of verse, and its best things should be independent
of polemical partisanship either for or against orthodoxy. As a matter
of fact, her exquisite "Remembrance," and the slightly rhetorical but
brave and swinging epigram of "The Old Stoic," give her better claims
than the "Last Lines," and with them and a few others place her as a
remarkable though not by any means a supreme figure.
The more prudent admirers of Marian Evans (George Eliot), who wrote a
good deal of verse, either admit that her verse was not poetry, or hold
up a much-quoted passage, "Oh, may I join the choir invisible," which,
like the far superior piece just referred to, is only a hymn on the side
which generally dispenses with hymns; and not a very good one, though
couched in fair Wordsworthian blank verse. They would no doubt indulge
in derisive scorn at the idea of the mild muse of Adelaide Anne Procter,
daughter of "Barry Cornwall," receiving praise denied to Miss Bronte and
Miss Evans; and it must be admitted that Miss Procter never did anything
so good as "Remembrance." On the other hand, she was quite free from the
"sawdust" and heaviness which mar George Eliot's verse. Her style was
akin to that which has been noticed in speaking of Mrs. Norton, though
of a somewhat later fashion, and like those of her father, her songs,
especially the famous "Message," had the knack of suiting composers.
Menella Bute Stedley and Dora Greenwell, a respectable pair, somewhat
older than Miss Procter (she was born in 1825 and died in 1864),
considerably outlived her, Miss Stedley's life lasting from 1820 to
1877, and Miss Greenwell's from 1821 to 1882. Both were invalids, and
soothed their cares with verse, the latter to the better effect, though
both in no despicable strain. Augusta Webster (1840-94) and Emily
Pfeiffer ( -1890) were later poetesses of the same kind, but lower rank,
though both were greatly praised by certain critics. Sarah Williams, a
short-lived writer of some sweetness (1841-68), commended herself
chiefly to those who enjoy verse religious but "broad"; Constance Naden
to those who like pessimist agnosticism; Amy Levy to those who can
deplore a sad fate and admire notes few and not soaring, but passionate
and genuine.