We now turn to the poets of the nineteenth century, after Wordsworth,

though the first on the list was his senior in years. He is less

important for his work than as the pioneer of the poets who, in the

United States, contributed to the poetic literature of the English

language.

Philip Freneau.

Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the first American poet of any note.

America, colonial or independent, has scarcely any early literary

history, which may be mainly accounted for by the preoccupation of

men's minds in taming the waste, in dispossessing the warlike natives,

in establishing the Puritan theocracy in New England, and in war,

whether colonial, against France and her Indian allies, or against

the Old Country. Yet we might have expected lyrics, at least, from

the non-Puritan settlers of the very literary age of Elizabeth and

James I. and from Cavalier exiles of the period of Charles I. They

must have been in love; but that poetic passion, among the colonists,

was singularly tuneless. We might have looked for volumes on the new

country in addition to the learned volume of William Strachey (who

compares the religion, rites, and legends of the Red Tribes with those

of Greece and Rome) and the larger and more romantic tome of Captain

John Smith. The Anglo-Saxon colonists of this Isle of Britain lived

even more hardly than the colonists in America; yet we have seen that,

even in its scanty fragments, their poetry has distinction, sentiment,

and pathos. But American poetry did not begin at the beginning in poems

of personal sentiment and experience and in heroic lays. Religion,

theological controversy, colonial history, and witchcraft fully

occupied the flowing pen of Cotton Mather (1663-1728). The theocracy,

like that of Calvin, Knox, and Andrew Melville, which he supported, was

broken by the turn of public opinion in 1692, against the hangings of

witches on "spectral evidence" (subjective apparitions of the witches

to their victims). On the witches, on religion, on colonial history

with a controversial purpose ("Magnalia"), and on many other themes,

Cotton Mather wrote at enormous length. He was a Bostonian, a Harvard

man, and learned; in fact, he was the counterpart of his correspondent,

Wodrow, the author of the "History of the Sufferings of the Kirk under

the Restoration". His style is Jacobean rather than late Caroline, and

the curious will find him "full of matter".

Religion inspired Jonathan Edwards; politics, science, and homely

Hesiodic advice occupied Benjamin Franklin, but, as for poetry in

America, it begins with Freneau, who was born eight years before

Prince Charles's last hope of recovering England failed, and who died

in the death year of Sir Walter Scott (1832). Freneau was a sailor, a

journalist, a writer of patriotic verse during the War of Independence,

and his best known poem is "The Indian Cemetery," which displays the

same regret for a vanished people as the Anglo-Saxon "The Ruined City".

Thomas Campbell stole, consciously or unconsciously, a line from this

piece. Here is Campbell, in "O'Connor's Child"--

Now on the grass-green turf he sits,

His tasselled horn beside him laid;

Now o'er the hills in chase he flits,

The hunter and the deer--a shade.

Freneau has--

By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,

In habit for the chase arrayed,

The hunter still the deer pursues,

The hunter and the deer--a shade.

This plagiarism, by a Scot who ought to have known better, must be

taken as a real case of extremely petty larceny. Any mortal who cared

for grammar would have written, not "The hunter _and_ the deer--a

shade"--for arithmetically there were two shades--but

The hunter _like_ the deer, a shade.

Campbell, if not Freneau, must have known that the passage coincides

with the scene in Homer ("Odyssey," Book XI.) where the shade of

Heracles pursues the shades of the animals which on earth he had slain.

The cadences of Freneau are those of Mickle in "Cumnor Hall".

The dews of summer night did fall,

The Moon, sweet Regent of the sky,

Silver'd the walls of Cumnor Hall

And many an oak that grew thereby.

As a rule, Freneau's "Muse," like that of Mr. Lothian Dodd when

slightly exhilarated, "was the patriotic," inspiriting to the

contemporary warrior, but not of imperishable literary value. As senior

in years to Tennyson and Browning, Freneau's compatriots, Bryant,

Whittier, and Longfellow, may here follow him in chronological order.

William Cullen Bryant.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was one of those concerning whom

Sainte-Beuve says that they carry about in them a poet who died

young. His tendency was to write Hymns to Proserpine; among the works

which fascinated his boyhood were Blair's "Grave," Bishop Porteous

on "Death" (the ghost of Mrs. Veal (1705), a qualified critic,

preferred Drelincourt), and the hectic verses of Kirke White. Later

came Wordsworth, perhaps too late; for Bryant's "Thanatopsis," written

when he was 17, descends from such later works as follow the author of

the Anglo-Saxon poem of "The Grave". Not much later came "The Water

Fowl," a favourite of the compilers of anthologies. "Thanatopsis" was

frequently retouched, and now closes with a passage of the highest

ethical dignity, though to be sure there is little of hope in the idea

that

each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of Death.

He was successful as a journalist,

the friend of Freedom's cause

As far away as Paris is,

and also at home, where the negro was concerned. He did not cease when

an editor to write poetry, and he translated Homer into blank verse.

In reading Bryant's poems we cannot but see that he offered the best

wine first, in pieces like "To a Water Fowl" and "The Yellow Violet".

The former is full of charm in atmosphere and cadence, though the

concluding moral, as in "The Yellow Violet," is inspired by Wordsworth.

His best pieces of landscape, pictures of autumn and winter, are

somewhat reminiscent of Cooper. "The Ages," a summary of the world's

history in the stanza of Spenser, is more remarkable for the happy

patriotism of its conclusion than for originality of thought. It is

really amusing to see his inability to escape from the charms of the

tomb,--tombs of Red Indians, or of conquerors or of kings, "in dusty

darkness hid," all are welcome to him; and in "The Child's Funeral"

the reader is happily surprised by the discovery that the infant,

prematurely placed in the vault, is alive and enjoying himself.

John Greenleaf Whittier.

Whittier (1807-1892) was born of a rural Quaker family in

Massachusetts. He was mainly self-taught; he early commenced

journalist, on the side of the party opposed to slavery; and he

retained no high esteem for his early flights in verse. He wrote much

in the journal, "The New Era," which was fortunate enough to publish

Mrs. Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and during the great war he

was one of the bards who stimulated the valour of the North; much as

another Quaker, by waving his hat, encouraged the Duke of Cumberland's

dragoons at Prince Charles's rearguard action at Clifton. But there

the side befriended by the English Quaker was not victorious. In

"Snow-Bound" (1866) (the name-giving piece is a delightful picture of a

happy winter's night in such a cottage as that of Whittier's boyhood)

Whittier first met a popular success as a poet, though already some of

his poems (probably pirated) were not unpopular in England. He was a

good, earnest and amiable man, and, as a poet, copious and wholesome,

rather than of curious and exquisite distinction. Many of his verses

are religious, moral or political, and, despite his love of nature, his

lines are not always, where nature is concerned, on a level with the

best of Bryant. His stories in ballad or balladish form were naturally

popular; "Maud Muller" is perhaps the best known in England; he had a

variety of themes, colonial, Red Indian, and generally historical. He

even went to the "Rig-Veda"; and catholicity of taste is shown when an

American Quaker sings of Soma, the rather mysterious nectar of Indra

and other deities of the Indian Olympus. That his poems of war should

be energetic, while he was professedly a man of peace, is not so remote

from the practice of the earlier Friends as we are apt to suppose.[1]

His life,--his rustic and laborious youth, his irregular education,

his absorption in the politics of his own country, his enthusiasm for

Freedom's cause,--has a resemblance to the life of Burns, and makes him

distinctly a national poet. But it is needless to enumerate the points

in Bums which are missing in Whittier!

Perhaps an alien may venture to utter an idea which was in his mind

before he found that it had been expressed by a fellow-countryman

of the poet. Professor Barrett Wendell writes, concerning some

of Whittier's pieces, "they belong to that school of verse which

perennially flourishes and withers in the poetical columns of country

newspapers". The verse of the country newspaper was the wild-stock of

Whittier's rose; the wild-stock of Burns was the folk-song of Scotland.

Whittier had to educate himself, and his genius often lifted him far

above the artless verse of his youth. He was not wholly unimitative. In

his famous appeal, "Massachusetts to Virginia," we read--

And sandy Barnstaple rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;

And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narraganset Bay,

Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,

And the cheers of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke hill,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

_And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle!_

It is Macaulay's "Armada"!

There is a mountain peak in America which bears the name of the

renowned statesman, Daniel Webster. Whittier, in days before the war,

had written against Daniel Webster, more in sorrow than in anger, the

poem called "Ichabod".

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

Which once he wore!

The glory from his grey hairs gone

For ever more.

Much later, in a kind of palinode, he, addressing the shade of Webster,

gave a good example of the vigour of his octosyllabics!

But, where the native mountains bare

Their foreheads to diviner air,

Fit emblem of enduring fame,

One lofty summit keeps thy name.

For thee, the cosmic forces did

The rearing of that pyramid,

The prescient ages shaping with

Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith.

The rigorous critic may say that the idea is derived from Byron; and

object to

forces did

The rearing of that pyramid,

as a somewhat colloquial idiom, but the lines have very great speed and

vigour.

If we insist that a very young literature must produce for inspection

her national poet (and Mr. Lowell says that foreign critics made this

demand very early indeed) the poet cannot be Poe, and Whitman is hardly

eligible. Whittier seems, so far, to be the best candidate for the bays.

Many admirers of Burns will be eager to confess that Whittier's

"Snow-bound" has merits superior to those of the Ayrshire ploughman's

companion-piece, "The Cottar's Saturday Night".

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow, by far the most popular, in his own country and in England,

of American poets, was born at Portland, Maine, in 1807; he was two

years older than Tennyson. He was a contemporary at Bowdoin College

of his country's greatest novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1826 he

began three "travel-years" which prepared him for the Chair of French

and Spanish literature, first held by George Ticknor in 1817; he first

taught at Bowdoin, and in 1836 succeeded Ticknor at Harvard. American

literature now began to be affected by the poets of the European

continent, which had, ever since Chaucer, and especially in the

Elizabethan age, fostered the poetry of England. Only the morally pure

and elevating elements in continental literature affected Longfellow;

and this was not precisely the case where Chaucer and the Elizabethans

were concerned. Indeed, the greater literature of the United States

is not mastered by the Passions; Byron, Shelley, and Burns were never

its idols, and Hawthorne did a daring thing when he wrote "The Scarlet

Letter". Longfellow, whom Poe absurdly accuses of plagiarism, was no

imitator. He had a note, simple indeed, but his own. As far as any

traces in his work of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, and

Shelley, are apparent, we might suppose that he had never read them.

This kind of originality is not always found even in considerable

poets. The measure of Scott's "Lay" is borrowed from "Christabel";

Burns usually had a model which he transfigured; Byron's Oriental tales

in verse are bad copies from Scott in versification;--but the minor

poet is always imitative.

Longfellow, like the enemy of Bonaparte mentioned by Heine, was "still

a professor" till 1854, when he was succeeded by Mr. Lowell. While

occupying an academic Chair he published perhaps his best-known work,

"The Voices of the Night" (1839), his "Evangeline" (pathos in English

hexameters) in 1847, and "The Golden Legend" in 1851. In his first

book Longfellow "made a bull's-eye" in hitting the public taste. The

bull's-eye rang to the anvil strokes of "The Village Blacksmith".

Young men shouted "Excelsior" as they walked the streets, like the two

Writers to the Signet who met each other shouting lines from Flodden in

"Marmion" on the North Bridge of Edinburgh. It is true that

To the Lords of Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke,

or

The stubborn spearmen still made good

Their dark impenetrable wood,

or

The laurel, the palms, and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake,

are perhaps even more provocative than "Excelsior" to him who shouts

"for his personal diversion". But it is much to write verses which

provoke this kind of enthusiasm among persons not apt to be stirred by

literature. On mature reflection, the maiden in "Excelsior" was rather

"in a coming on disposition,"

He answered as he turned away,

"What would the Junior Proctor say?"

is a pardonable academic parody. If you analyse the similes in "The

Psalm of Life," you meet some shipwrecked brother who, though he

has piled up his bark on some reef, is still sailing o'er Time's

dreary main, and taking comfort in observing, through his glass, that

somebody has left footprints on the sands. _Enfin_, these poems have

"_that!_" as Reynolds said, though the metaphors are mixed as if by

the master-hand of Sir Boyle Roche. These things are not Longfellow's

masterpieces, and they, with the apocryphal viking's "Skeleton in

Armour," are best read in happy and uncritical boyhood. At any age we

may appreciate such lines as--

The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,

The best beloved Night,

and

I remember the black wharves and the slips,

And the sea-tide, tossing free,

And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,

And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,

And the magic of the sea.

Simplicity is dominant in Longfellow's verse; and he _has_ "a message"

on which he is perhaps too fond of dwelling. In one of his anti-slavery

poems the hero, like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, is a king in his own

country, though the slave trade in "black ivory" direct from Africa

was no longer extant. In "Hiawatha" he reproduced the measure of the

Finnish "Kalewala" with much of the woodland perfume of the original

poem. To boys fresh from Cooper's novels the tale is a delight if it

has palled on more sophisticated tastes. Theocritus hoped that his

verses "would be on men's lips, above all on the lips of the young". If

this were Longfellow's ambition he had his reward in full. He wrote for

a young people, in the boyhood of its own literature, and opened for

it the magical volume of old romance, and his hold on those who read

him in youth can never be shaken, being strengthened by all happy and

tender memories. His muse

Sits and gazes at us,

With those deep and tender eyes.

Like the stars, so still and saint-like.

Looking downwards from the skies.

Alfred Tennyson.

Born in 1809, the son of the Rev. George Tennyson, Rector of the parish

at Somersby in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Alfred Tennyson was a schoolboy

when Keats and Byron died. At the age of 8, he says, "I remember making

a line I thought grander than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott..." it was

this--

With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood.

The context is absent, but the line is sonorous, and utterly unlike

anything that the child could find in the poems with which he was

already acquainted, those of Thomson, Scott, Byron, and Campbell. Even

if he had read Milton, the line gave promise of his originality as an

"inventor of harmonies" in blank verse. After imitating Pope, and, on

a large scale (6000 verses), copying Scott, Tennyson wrote, at 14, a

drama in blank verse. Of this a chorus survives in Tennyson's volume of

1830, and in such lines as these about the mountains riven

By secret fire and midnight storms

That wander round their windy cones,

we already find his manner, his use of a favourite epithet, and his

interest in the forces that

Draw down the æonian hills and sow

The dust of continents to be.

At 17 (1826), after being "dominated by Byron," he "put him away

altogether," and this was the tendency of his generation at Cambridge,

of Thackeray, Monckton Milnes, and others. In 1827 "Poems by Two

Brothers," Alfred and his brother Frederick (Charles, too, contributed)

were published, but contained none of the verses stamped with his own

unmistakable mark which he had already composed. Among these the ballad

on a wooing like that of the Bride of Lammermoor is specially original.

At 19 (1828) Tennyson wrote "The Lover's Tale" in blank verse,--he had

not yet read Shelley, but the Italian scenery, and the rich imagery,

are somewhat in Shelley's manner. The book was published fifty

years later (1879); only the two first parts were written in youth.

Tennyson went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1828, where he met

Thackeray, FitzGerald, Milnes (Lord Houghton), and Arthur Hallam, son

of the historian, and the foremost of his friends. He contributed to

the essays of this set,--"The Apostles," a paper on "Ghosts," and won

the prize poem on "Timbuctoo" by an obscure production in blank verse.

Concerning the cause of its success there is an amusing if apocryphal

anecdote.

In 1830, when Bulwer Lytton was declaring that novels had killed the

taste for poetry, Tennyson's first volume appeared. The obvious fault

was the affected diction; babblings as of Leigh Hunt; but in "Mariana

in the Moated Grange," Tennyson declared his real self; as in "The Ode

to Memory," "The Dying Swan," "Recollections of the Arabian Nights,"

and "Oriana". Here we discern Tennyson's mastery of original cadences;

his close observation of Nature; his opulent language, and his visions

of romance. "The Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensitive Mind"

displays the doubts that recur in "In Memoriam"; and "The Mystic"

reveals a very potent element in his character, that of the visionary

with elusive experiences of "dissociation" approaching to "trance".

In a beautiful passage of "In Memoriam," these experiences are again

cast, as far as possible, "in matter moulded forms of speech". Before

1830 Tennyson had anticipated, in an essay, the modern doctrine of the

evolution of man from the lowest rudimentary forms of life, and had

also personal psychological experiences like those of Plotinus and

other late Platonic philosophers.

In 1832 almost all of the poems of the new volume of 1833 had been

composed. This book included the first shape, magical but more or

less humorous, and confused in form, of "The Lady of Shalott"; with

the first form of "Œnone" (written in the Pyrenees during a tour with

Hallam), "The Miller's Daughter," which needed and received much

correction, as did "The Palace of Art". Here, too, first appeared the

passion of "Fatima," the perfect "Mariana in the South," and "The Lotus

Eaters," which has, in brief space, all the languor and all the charm

of Spenser; it is a poem never excelled by Tennyson. A very amusing

review, by Lockhart in "The Quarterly," mocked at all the many faults,

but never alluded to the more numerous and essential beauties of the

book. Ten years later Lockhart repented, and handed Tennyson's two

volumes of 1842 to his friend Sterling, for criticism which could not

be mocking. The poet, though naturally sensitive to criticism, had

bowed to censures which, as he saw, were deserved, and had substituted

noble lines for the earlier inequalities and eccentricities.

The sudden death at Vienna, of Arthur Hallam, in September, 1833,

was a shock and a sorrow which left an indelible mark on the poet's

character and genius. He composed, not much later, "The Two Voices,"

and the resolute and noble "Ulysses"; with "Sir Galahad," that

absolute romantic lyric; "Tithonus," perhaps the most perfect of all

his poems on classical mythology; "The Morte d'Arthur," the greatest

of his idylls on the cycle of Arthur; and he wrote many parts of "In

Memoriam". He had chosen Poverty for his mate, with poetry, like

Wordsworth.

In 1842 appeared the two volumes which contain the flower and fruit

of Tennyson's youth. Much that was new, with more that was re-formed

from early immature phases, was offered; and such excellence in so many

various styles, including the rural idylls--the light and charming "Day

Dream" (The Sleeping Beauty), "The Talking Oak," and again "The Dream

of Fair Women," the strange romantic "Vision of Sin"; the classical and

Arthurian poems--to mention no others,--was never exhibited by a young

English poet. There was little to regret or discard, and even "The

May Queen" had this merit or demerit that it at once became extremely

popular. Here was a fortunate "alacrity in sinking"! In the opinion of

"Old Fitz" (Fitz Gerald), Tennyson never regained the level of these

two thin volumes of 1842: perhaps we may say that he never rose above

that level.

"The Princess" (1847) contains several of his most perfect lyrics, and

all the charm of his blank verse, but it is professedly a fantasy; the

poet "is not always wholly serious," he writes somewhat in the vein of

"Love's Labour's Lost". In 1850 appeared, anonymously, "In Memoriam,"

the record of three years of pain, and of strivings with the Giant

of Bunyan's Doubting Castle. We cannot discuss the reasonings,

the waverings, the reviewings of the then most recent theories of

evolution, with their presumed theological consequences; but the lover

of poetry who cannot find it in "In Memoriam" may perhaps be regarded

as not destitute of prejudices. Tennyson would be more universally

appreciated as a great and delightful poet if he had never expressed

any of his personal opinions about politics, society, morals, or

religion in verse. His two volumes of 1842 contain nothing, or very

little, that can annoy the most sensitive up-to-date spirit.

In 1850, Tennyson, by that time married, succeeded Wordsworth in the

Laureateship. The first fruits of his office was the magnificent "Ode

on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852). In 1855 appeared

"Maud," which is prejudiced by the "topical" allusions to the Crimean

War, and by the appearance, as hero and narrator, of a modern Master

of Ravenswood, who is, according to the poet himself "a morbid poetic

soul... an egotist with the makings of a cynic". The love-poetry is

beautiful; and most beautiful are the exquisite lines "O that 'twere

possible". But the day for a kind of tale or novel of modern life, in

verse, had passed before the death of Crabbe.

In 1859 appeared the first four "Idylls of the King," "Enid," from a

mediaeval tale in the Welsh "Mabinogion"; "Elaine," and "Guinevere,"

from the "Morte d'Arthur," and "Vivien," they beguiler of the wise

Merlin, from the same source. All are rich in beauties of style, in

visions of Nature, in such characters as Elaine and Lancelot, and in

delicate observation; except "Vivien" all the Idylls were eagerly

welcomed; though some critics held that Arthur preached too much to his

fallen Queen.

Thackeray wrote to his "dear old Alfred" that the Idylls had given him

"a splendour of happiness.... Gold and purple and diamonds, I say,

gentlemen, and glory and love and honour, and if you haven't given me

all these why should I be in such an ardour of gratitude? But I have

had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has come to me

since I was a young man." Old men who were schoolboys when Thackeray

wrote thus, felt, and feel, what Thackeray expresses. The Idylls were

continued later, to the number of twelve;--not all are of equal merit;

none perhaps is so good as the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, but the whole

are the poetic rival, in romantic charm, in haunting evasive allegory,

and in ethics, of Malory's great old book. In the Idylls, as in Malory,

we find, as Caxton had written four hundred years earlier, "the gentle

and virtuous deeds that some knights used in these days, noble and

renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be

seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, love, cowardice,

murder, hate, virtue, and sin." The tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere,

the mystic interlude of the Quest for the Grail, the ruin of that

world, and the passing of Arthur, were all given by old romance, and

are all beautified by charm of diction, and countless pictures of

Nature, and similes worthy of Homer, such as

So dark a forethought rolled about his brain,

As on a dull day in an Ocean cave

The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall

In silence.

In "Enoch Arden" (1864) Tennyson again displayed his matchless variety

of command over all classes of poetic themes, and added to "In

Memoriam" a lyric full of the tranquil tenderness of an immortal love,

"In the Valley of Cauteretz". Once more choosing a novel and difficult

and sublime topic, he gave us "Lucretius," a study of the magnificent

ruin of a supreme heart and soul and intellect.

Of the seven plays published between 1875 and 1892 there is not space

to speak; but by common admission the genius of Tennyson was not fitted

for the drama of the stage. In 1880 the poet, unconquerable by Time,

gave, in "Ballads and Other Poems," the nobly passionate dramatic

monologue of "Rizpah"; and his most thrilling war-song, "The Revenge".

With 1885 came the Virgilian cadences of the lines to Virgil, written

for the poet's townsmen, the Mantuans, on that

Golden branch amid the shadows,

Kings and realms that pass to rise no more.

Tennyson's genius was, indeed, akin to that of Virgil in tenderness,

in "the sense of tears in mortal things," in elaborate and exquisite

art, and in the selecting and polishing and re-setting of jewels from

the poetry of ancient Greece. We saw, in the opening of this volume,

how from age to age Homer's descriptions of the Elysian land, and of

the home of the gods, reached an Anglo-Saxon minstrel; and now Tennyson

recasts the thoughts in his picture of "the island valley of Avilion,"

the Celtic paradise.

At the age of 81, like Sophocles unsubdued by time, and still absolute

master of his art, he composed one of his supreme lyrics, "Crossing the

Bar": we repeat it and we marvel at the exquisite unison of thought

with music. Even in "The Death of Œnone" the aged hand no "uncertain

warbling made".

The poet crossed the bar on 6 October, 1892, his Shakespeare by his

side, and his open chamber-window flooded by moonlight. It is probable

that we live too near Tennyson to appreciate his greatness. "Men hardly

know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley; the phenomenon is too

familiar; but later generations will know and understand, and through

the darkness of time will follow the light of this "Golden Branch among

the Shadows".

Robert Browning.

Born three years later than Tennyson, in May, 1812, Robert Browning's

first published poem, "Pauline," appeared in the same year as

Tennyson's second volume of verse, namely in 1833. Thenceforward the

careers of the two poets were, in some respects, curiously similar, as

each "flourished" most decisively in 1840-1850. Browning was a native

of a London suburb, his father was a man of very active intelligence,

a reader of old books; and though Browning, in boyhood, was educated

at a private school, his essential instruction was that which he gave

himself in his father's library. At an early age, about 16, he read

Shelley, and an intense enthusiasm for Shelley, as a man and poet,

pervades his "Pauline". The poem is a monologue addressed to Pauline,

on "the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth

study," as Browning wrote in the dedication of "Sordello". The poem

is, naturally, more or less autobiographical; like Wordsworth's "The

Prelude," it was intended to be but part of a large work, "so many

utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine--poetry always

dramatic in principle," so the author wrote in 1867, and the speaker

in "Pauline" is really but as one of Browning's "Men and Women," and

"Dramatis Personæ". The work contains several passages of great beauty,

written in a "regular" style of blank verse without eccentricity, and

is full of promise of success in a path which, later, as far as form is

concerned, Browning did not follow. The construction of the paragraphs

of blank verse is in places difficult, indeed obscure, a fault which

haunted the poet's manner.

Of "Pauline" not a single copy was purchased: and it was with

reluctance that Browning, much later, permitted it to appear among his

works. His "Paracelsus" (1835) is in form a drama with four characters,

and is, again, a story of "incidents in the development of a soul,"

that of a famous chemist, half mystic, half charlatan (1493-1541) who

determined to become

The greatest and most glorious man on earth.

For him unattainable Science is "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and her,

dead votaries call to him

Lost, lost! yet come!

With our wan troop make thy home.

There are one or two charming lyrics, but there is a weight of

prolixity, and almost entire absence of action. The poem, however,

obtained for Browning recognition among men of letters and special

students of poetry, when he was not yet 24 years of age. He knew

Talfourd, whose "Ion" (1835) was a recognized dramatic triumph at the

moment; Forster, the friend and biographer of Dickens (with Forster,

Browning's relations later were stormy), and Macready, the actor, who

(1837) put his "Strafford" on the stage, with but slight success.

Browning's dramas intended to be acted have had even less hold on

the scenic world than Tennyson's; "A Blot in the Scutcheon," (1843)

might have fared better but was thwarted by the internal politics of

the stage. "Sordello" (1840), a narrative in heroic verse, though

of an original sort that would have puzzled Dry den, was again the

study of "a soul," that of a legendary Mantuan mediaeval poet and

soldier, mentioned by Dante. The abundance of mediaeval Italian

history,--introducing, as familiar to all, matters which were but

vaguely known by few,--and the long hurrying sentences, following

trains of ideas associated only in the poet's mind, defeated the

ordinary reader. As

Here the Chief immeasurably yawned

in a long passage of exposition, so did the world, and "Sordello" was a

stumbling-block in the path of the poet's fame.

On the other hand, in "Pippa Passes" (1841) Browning produced a drama

partly lyrical, partly in prose, partly in blank verse, full of

variety, humour, strength, and charm, and with that vein of optimism

which is never unwelcome. Just as Tennyson "came to his own" with his

two volumes of 1842, so the works published by Browning (1841-1846)

in cheap numbers, as "Bells and Pomegranates," gave assurance of his

originality and his greatness. His dramatic lyrics, when they came,

were poetry of a new kind, in measures as various as the moods; here

was a "garden of the souls" so rich and strange, so full of novelty of

incident, of observation in Italy and in England, as had never before

been presented to a world which, for the moment, regarded it not. The

strangeness in places might throw a shade on the beauty; the poet did

not by any means always choose to make audible, in his verse, the music

to which, as an art, he was devoted. In 1855 his "Men and Women" did

at last win to the favour first of an enthusiastic few, then of all

lovers of poetry. The very names of the poems, from "Bishop Blougram"

to "In a Gondola," "Porphyria's Lover," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "The Last

Ride together," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "A Grammarian's

Funeral," call up a troop of visionary pictures; while "Christmas Eve

and Easter Day" (1850) opens Browning's series of meditations on faith

and the mysteries of existence. The poet's life, from his marriage to

another poet, Miss Barrett (1846), to her death in 1861, was spent,

in great part, in Italy, mainly in Florence; and Italian history,

literature, art, and politics constantly inspired him.

In 1864 appeared his "Dramatis Personæ," of the same varied character

as "Men and Women". Of the new poems the speculations of "Abt Vogler,"

the musician, of "Rabbi Ben Ezra,"--the faith pronouncing all things

very good,--the gallant resolution in face of death of "Prospice," won

for Browning the applause of readers who value "thought" in poetry. Of

these, many preferred the passages most difficult of comprehension, and

found joy in mysteries where the difficulties were really caused by the

manner of the poet.

In 1868 a world which had neglected Browning fell with enthusiasm

on the four successive volumes of "The Ring and the Book". Here all

persons concerned in a peculiarly brutal set of murders of 1698, and

many lookers-on, give their own versions and their own views of the

characters and events, while the lawyers have their say, and the Pope

sums up all in a poem by a fourth part longer than the "Iliad".

The last twenty years of the poet's life were prolific in books very

various in character from "Fifine at the Fair" (1872), and "Red Cotton

Night-Cap Country" (1873), to "Asolando," in 1889, the year of his

death. His "Transcript" from Euripides is not merely rugged, but very

quaint. The method is the old method, but a growing wilfulness often

mars the results--the defect of Browning's quality. His resolute

courage never failed; he was firm on the rock of his belief; but it is

probable that he will always be best known by the work of his central

period, from "Pippa Passes" to "Dramatis Personæ". He is the poet of

love, of life, and of the will to live; here and beyond the grave;

and he is the expounder, and, indeed, the creator, of innumerable

characters, while, if his poetry lacks "natural magic," and supreme

felicity of phrase, his pictures are largely and vigorously designed

and coloured. No poet perhaps, save Scott, showed so little of the poet

in general society; no man was more kindly and natural in his ways.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Poe, born in 1809 at Boston, was on the mother's side English,

but in genius he was of no nationality. His parents, who were actors,

died early, and he was adopted at the age of 2 by a gentleman of

Virginia, Mr. Allan, with whom he passed five years in Europe

(1815-1820). From the University of Virginia he passed, as poets are

apt to do, in the disfavour of his dons, nor did he long abide at

West Point, the military school, leaving in 1831 in very unfortunate

circumstances. Like Shakespeare in the tradition he "was given to

all manner of unluckiness," such as losing more money at cards than

he could pay, which estranged his guardian. In 1827, at the age of

18, he had published the now almost indiscoverable volume of verse,

"Tamerlane and Other Poems". He betook himself to journalism, writing

verses, criticisms (whereby he made many enemies) and short stories.

With his genius for these, whether tales of gruesome mystery, or of

treasure-hunting, or of a marvellous detective, he would, in the

America of to-day, have been rich, as authors count riches. But his pay

was infinitesimal, and he lived in dire poverty, always longing for

a magazine of his own; but his engagements as an editor were neither

permanent nor lucrative. He was, in "The Gold Bug," the founder of all

stories of hidden treasure, and all detective stories descend from

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue". In composing "crawlers," as R. L.

Stevenson called tales of horror, he had no rival. He always avoided

the supernatural; his effects were mortuary, and he was too partial to

premature burials. His style was that of an artist, clean and sober, in

"The Gold Bug," but in such pieces as "The Fall of the House of Usher"

he aimed at poetical effects in prose. The doors of the doomed mansion

"threw slowly back their ponderous and ebony jaws". Poe appears to

have had the wish to be a scholar; he may even, by many allusions to

unfamiliar books, give the impression that his reading is very wide,

but scholarship was inconsistent with his restless and poverty-stricken

life. Yet something of the fastidiousness of the scholar possessed him,

and made him a student of style, and a relentless reviewer of the many

nobodies who formed the majority of his literary contemporaries. His

poetry is the very reverse of "a criticism of life". His heroes, if in

love at all, are constant to some _belle morte_, Annabel Lee or the

Lost Lenore; and he has no hope of attaining to the love of his most

beautiful poem,--

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicèan barques of yore,

(where Nicèan seems to mean Phæacian). He combines the maximum of music

in his verse with the minimum of human nature, of flesh and blood. His

"Ulalume," with its recurrent and re-echoing double rhymes, trembles

on the verge between pure nonsense and some realm beyond the bounds of

known romanticism:--

Hard by the dim lake of Auber,

In the misty mid region of Weir.

Weir, we surmise, is not far from

the sunset land of Boshen,

In the midmost of the Ocean,

where dwelt the Yonghi Bonghi Bo.

The celebrated "Raven," probably by far his most popular poem, winged

his way to Poe's study from the cliffs which frown on the dim lake of

Auber. His fancy for ever dwells "out of space, out of time," where it

has learned that mysterious music of his which can be parodied, but

cannot be recaptured. He has heard the harping of Israfel, and follows

it in "a mortal melody".

Thus, in "The Haunted Palace,"

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,

On its roof did float and flow,.

(This--all this--was in the olden

Times long ago.)

And every gentle air that dallied

In that sweet day,

Along the ramparts plumed and pallid

A winged odour went away.

Poe's versification was self-taught, and his verse, so small in volume

and so original, was precisely adapted to the dreams of which his

poetry is made. He wrote "There is no such thing as a long poem,"

meaning that no long poem can be uniformly exquisite. Yet he never

attained to what is most entirely exquisite, apart from actuality,

and dreamlike, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". As has been said of Gerard

de Nerval, "his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth,

and far from human shores, his fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled

harbours of happy stars "; night is light to him, and daytime is

darkness. Like Gerard's, his overword is

_Où sont nos amoureuses?_

_Elles sont au tombeau!_

_Elles sont plus heureuses_

_Dans un séjour plus beau._

Perhaps because he is so non-American, so decidedly a citizen of no

city, Poe has been more admired on the Continent, and translated into

more languages than any poet of America. His works were admirably

rendered into French by Charles Baudelaire, himself an adorer of

The love whom I shall never meet,

The land where I shall never be.

Poe died in 1849; legends of his life are many and negligible. He is

a poet who has not much honour in his own country, or who, at least,

has more honour in countries not his own. To call him a great poet is

impossible, but he is a haunting poet. His prose stories were dismissed

as "Hawthorne and delirium tremens" by a great English critic, but

really his horrors are carefully designed and elaborated works,

polished _ad unguem_; rather cold than frenzied,--witness "The Cask of

Amontillado".

Critics, and many readers, have a passion for "classing" poets, as if

they were in an examination. We cannot call Poe great, for poetry deals

with life, with action, with passion, with duty, and with the whole

of the great spectacle of Nature. To the Muse of Poe these things are

indifferent; but to the singing of the dreams with which he dwells he

brings such originality of tone and touch as is rare indeed in the

poetry of any people. As a critic, too, he is a pioneer of the school

of _l'art pour l'art_, of art for art's sake--a school distinctly

decadent, and therefore in modern Europe he, rather than Aristotle, is

hailed as a prince of critics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803) was born at Boston of what the Autocrat of

the Breakfast Table liked to call "the Brahmin caste"; that is the

educated clerical class, ministers from father to son. A similar

class existed in Scotland after the Reformation.[2] Preaching was in

the blood of these gentlemen of Boston. Emerson, after breaking away

from Unitarianism in a singular sermon at Boston (1832), continued

to preach, when he could find an audience, and then betook himself

to lecturing, first on scientific subjects, and next on literature

and things in general. In 1837 he delivered to the F B K Society at

Harvard a lecture on "The American Scholar". He said: "Mr. President

and Gentlemen, This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs,

by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American

Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe".

Indeed Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell successively held a Chair

founded for the precise purpose of listening to the courtly Muses of

mediaeval and modern Europe. But the American scholar, it seems, was to

listen neither to them nor to Homer, Virgil, and Horace, nor even to

Isaiah, who was much about an Asiatic Court. Walt Whitman must be the

typical American scholar, from the point of view of Emerson.

The position of Emerson, as poet and essayist, is matter of controversy

among the learned of his own country. In a poem styled "Nature,"

Emerson writes:--

She is gamesome and good

But of mutable mood,--

No dreary repeater now and again,

She will be all things to all men,

She who is old but nowise feeble

Pours her power into the people.

As to his prose, Prof. Barrett Wendell of Harvard writes: "The Essays

are generally composed of materials which he collected for purposes of

lecturing.... He would constantly make note of any idea which occurred

to him; and when he wished to give a lecture he would huddle together

as many of those notes as would fill the assigned time, trusting with

all the calm assurance of his unfaltering individualism that the truth

inherent in the separate memoranda would give them all together the

unity implied in the fact of their common sincerity.... The fact that

these essays were so often delivered as lectures should remind us of

what they really are.... Emerson's essays, in short, prove to be an

obvious development from the endless sermons with which for generations

his ancestors had regaled the New England fathers."

Professor Trent of Columbia University asks: "Shall we not follow

Emerson's own lead, and call him frankly a great poet, basing the title

on these and similar essays" ("Circles" and "The Oversoul") "and on

the somewhat scanty but still important mass of his compositions in

authentic poetic form"--of which a poor specimen has just been given.

Some of Emerson's fellow-citizens, Professor Trent says, answer his

question in the affirmative. Emerson, on the strength of his prose

and verse, is "a great poet". "Others equally cultivated maintain

that many of his poems are only versified versions of his essays, and

declare that save in rare passages he is deficient in passion, in

sensuousness, in simplicity ..." while Mr. Trent, speaking for himself,

says that Emerson "is prone to jargon, to bathos, to lapses of taste".

Mr. Matthew Arnold, and Charles Baudelaire, agreed with the second and

less favourable party of American critics. Baudelaire's remarks were

intemperate in style, but Mr. Trent thinks that, "it seems as if the

time had come for Emerson's countrymen frankly to accept the verdict"

of Matthew Arnold, that Emerson's prose "was not of sufficient merit to

entitle him to be ranked as a great man of letters".

It does not become an alien to interfere in this unsettled controversy.

In literary criticism of modern English poetry Emerson said that Pope

"wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake". Walter Scott "wrote a

rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland," Wordsworth had the merit of

being "conscientious," Byron was "passional," Tennyson "factitious".

It is, of course, impossible here to discuss Emerson as a philosopher.

He is spoken of as an Idealist, but he seems to lean a little to

Pragmatism. "The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular theory

is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is

most desirable to the mind." To whose mind? Emerson visited England

twice; after the second tour he wrote "English Traits". Dickens had done,

regrettably, the same sort of work in "American Notes," and "Martin

Chuzzlewit". Authors on each side of the Atlantic took the advice of

the elder Mr. Weller, and abused the countries and peoples that they

visited, Emerson hitting the darker blots in our society. He had an

influence, mainly over young men, in both countries, scarcely inferior

to that of Carlyle; but left nothing so massive and concrete as

Carlyle's "Frederick," "Cromwell," and "The French Revolution". Having

quoted from Professor Barrett Wendell passages which leave rather

a mournful impression, we must add that, in his opinion, Emerson's

work "surely seems alive with such unconditioned freedom of temper as

makes great literature so inevitably lasting". Professor Trent, while

confessing "that true poetic glow and flow are almost entirely absent

from Emerson's verses, and that his ever-recurring and often faulty

octosyllabic couplets soon become wearisome," declines to rank him

with Tennyson, Shelley, or Longfellow, and ends: "But to Americans, at

least, Emerson is an important poet, whose best work seems likely to

gain rather than to lose value".

James Russell Lowell.

The poetic qualities of Whittier and of James Russell Lowell

(1819-1891) are pleasantly indicated in Mr. Lowell's sonnet to Whittier

on his seventy-fifth birthday.[3]

Here is deserved praise of Whittier's studies of Nature, and of his

anti-slavery Tyrtæan verse, while the poet betrays his own affection

for the sonorous, heroic song of early mediaeval France, "The Song of

Roland".

The circumstances of Lowell's birth and career were as different as

possible from those of the tuneful farm-boy. Lowell, like Holmes,

Emerson, and so many others, was of the hereditarily cultivated class

of New England, clergymen from generation to generation. He was born at

his father's place, Elmwood, near Cambridge, was educated at Harvard,

lived there, as Matthew Arnold said of himself at Balliol, "as if it

had been a great country house," was sent down, for some frolic, to

Concord, where he met the sage Emerson, "chaffed" that philosopher

and Carlyle in rhymes, and displayed, generally, the gaiety of the

undergraduate. Mr. Lowell, in fact, in manner and personal appearance,

was, though an enthusiastic patriot, like anything but a "foreigner".

He was called to the bar, but preferred literature to law, and wrote

prose and verse for the magazines. In 1846 he began the first set

of "The Biglow Papers," very lively studies in American politics

as rurally understood by the Rev. Hosea Wilbur and Bird o' Freedom

Sawin. In satiric and humorous poetry, in dialect, he was supreme from

the first. In 1848, he produced "A Fable for Critics"; the idea may

have been suggested by Suckling's rhymed and bantering criticism of

contemporary minstrels, in his "Session of the Poets". The rhymes in

"The Festival of the Poets" are more than Hudibrastic; the measure is

anapæstic. It is the work of a young man who is amusing himself in a

crowd of scribblers, each claiming to be "the American Scott," "the

American Dante," and so forth. Hawthorne finds a place and Cooper.

Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show

He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so;

But he need take no pains to convince us he's not

(As his enemies say) the American Scott.

Of Emerson

His prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,

Is some of it pr--; no, it's not even prose.

All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he's got,

To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what.

As for Bryant, somebody

Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth

May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd's worth,

cries this patriot.

Whittier's manliness is applauded,

But his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes,

And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes.

Concerning Poe,

Three-fifths of him's genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,

which is perfectly true, but where, except in Poe and Hawthorne, was

the man with even two-fifths of genius? That Theocritus, were he

living, "would scarce change a line" in the hexameters of Longfellow's

"Evangeline," is a criticism dictated by friendship. The mere name

of "The Vision of Sir Launfal" suggests the influence of Tennyson.

The verse, however, is not imitative; the moral is excellent, and

"American children," we learn, have been set to studying "Sir Launfal"

in annotated editions, perhaps a pathetic illustration of what may be

called "the patriotic fallacy in matters connected with literature".[4]

In 1862-1863, the Civil War gave a motive for new "Biglow Papers,"

which were deservedly popular in England as well as in America. "The

Commemoration Ode" has the same origin, in patriotism and resentment

of the European attitude. This Ode is perhaps the seal of Mr. Lowell's

diploma as a poet; the third and fifth sections, on the Harvard men

who fell in battle, are swift, sonorous, and inspiring. When the poet

exclaims, "Tell us not of Plantagenets," the critic can only murmur

that he had no notion of telling of persons like Richard Cœur de Lion,

"whose thin blood crawls". "'Tis with Lincoln, not with Richard, that

the poem has to do," Bret Harte might have said. Indeed the Ode is too

long. The ode "Under the Old Elm," practically an ode to Washington,

is dignified, and of historic interest; perhaps no other poet has more

worthily celebrated "that unblemished gentleman," the national hero;

and the last section, addressed to Virginia, has a noble dying fall,

like the close of the "Iliad". But not of popular appeal are such lines

as these:--

O for a drop of that Cornelian ink

Which gave Agricola dateless length of days.

Here the Professor (who held Longfellow's chair at Harvard) interrupts

the poet. The reference is to the brief biography by Tacitus of his

father-in-law.

In 1877 Mr. Lowell went as American Minister to Spain, a country

always of high attraction to American men of letters, historians, or

poets. From 1880 to 1885 Mr. Lowell represented his country at the

Court of St. James, and won the hearts of all who had the honour of

his friendship. As a speaker on many occasions where literature and

art were concerned he was without a rival; in conversation his humour,

wit, vast knowledge of men and of books, and his simple spontaneous

kindness, endeared him to all. With Shenstone his friends might say,

"Quanto minus est cum reliquis versari, quam tui meminisse,"--"Memory

of him is dearer than life with others".

Concerning the mass of Mr. Lowell's shorter poems, many of them

occasional, it may, perhaps, be said that few of them stamp themselves

on the memory by any strong individuality of thought and cadence, and

that he did not take Keats's advice to Shelley, "load every rift with

ore". In a favourite passage opening:--

And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;

Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,

And over it softly her warm ear lays.

the last line has a certain dissonance. His critical essays are of

many various degrees of value. In his essay on "Swinburne's Tragedies"

(1866, "Chastelard" and "Atalanta") he never seems to perceive the

extraordinary and unprecedented merit of the lyrical measures, which

are something better than "graceful, flowing, and generally simple in

sentiment and phrase". In quite a different field the long essay on

"Witchcraft" is rather antiquated, because we now know so much more

about the psychology of the subject than was known when the essay was

written. After philosophizing with Mr. E. B. Tylor on the origin of

the belief in spirits, the critic honestly exclaims: "I am puzzled, I

confess, to explain the appearance of the _first_ ghost, especially

among men who thought death to be the end-all here below". That _is_

the puzzle, and Lucretius, who is quoted, could not solve it, nor had

Mr. Lowell heard of "deferred telepathic impressions". This kind of

topic allowed the author to bring in countless illustrations from his

wide knowledge of all literatures, especially from the early mediaeval

French, of which he was a votary before "Aucassin et Nicolete" and the

heroic epics and sweet earliest lyrics were appreciated out of France.

The essay on Rousseau contains the usual apologies which critics

of English blood make for a man of genius whom at heart they do not

like, while the criticism of Pope is true and just, but not specially

original; and the paper on Milton (a review of a recent biography and

edition) would be better if purged of comments on Professor Masson. The

comments on Wordsworth are extremely amusing to non-Wordsworthians,

for the Wordsworthian draws a decent veil over the poet's incredible

treatment of "Helen of Kirkconnel".

And Bruce (as soon as he had slain

The Gordon), sailed away to Spain,

And fought with rage incessant,

Against the Moorish crescent,

using, no doubt, the javelin with which he had pinked Lochinvar. "In

'The Excursion' we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of

extenuating circumstances." It is not that Mr. Lowell judged Wordsworth

by his feet of clay, but having once observed the absurdities of the

bard of Rydal he did not know where to stop in treating a theme so

diverting. To Dunbar he was absolutely ruthless: "whoso is national

enough to like thistles may browse there to his heart's content".

"I would rather have written that half stanza of Longfellow's in

'The Wreck of the Hesperus,' of 'the billow that swept her crew like

icicles from her deck' than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enumeration

of meteorological phenomena put together." Mr. Lowell was not a Scot,

and was an attached friend of Professor Longfellow, whose half stanza

is not of ravishing merit. This raid across the Border is made in an

essay on Spenser, wherein Nash is said "to have far better claims than

Swift to be called the English Rabelais". This is extremely severe on

Rabelais! The undying youth of Mr. Lowell as of Matthew Arnold, may

bear the blame of such freaks as theirs in criticism. Shelley's letters

are not really of more merit than his lyrics, nor, if we are to call

any one an English Rabelais, is Nash more worthy of the compliment than

the author of "Gulliver"!

Matthew Arnold.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was the son of the Rev. Thomas Arnold, the

famous Head Master of Rugby, and author of a History of Rome. At Rugby

and Balliol he gained the prize-poems; he was a Fellow of Oriel, where

he did not reside long, marrying and becoming an Inspector of Schools

in 1851. Melancholy as much of his poetry seems, he was known to his

friends as "Glorious Mat," and, in his own words, he and his brother

Thomas lived in Balliol as in a large country house. He was a great

walker in Wordsworth's country and a keen trout-fisher. His first

verses, signed A, "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems," appeared in

a slim volume in 1849; they have nothing of the amateur, and possess a

note of their own, though the influence of Wordsworth is discernible.

"He is the man for me," Arnold might have said, as Boileau did of

Molière. Arnold did not think Tennyson _un esprit puissant_; indeed

Wordsworth was the last of our poets whom he greatly admired, though

he placed Byron (for other than Wordsworth's qualities) on the same

eminence; and preferred Shelley's letters to his lyrics. Such were what

most amateurs think the freaks of Arnold as a critic.

Of the play, or masque, or whatever it should be called, "Empedocles

on Etna," his taste later rejected all but a few glorious passages;

but again he relented, and admitted "Empedocles" within the canon of

his works. He put forth a new volume of verse in 1855; "Merope," an

imitation of the Greek tragedy, not of much merit, in 1858, and "New

Poems" in 1867. The prefaces to "Empedocles" and "Merope" are good

examples of his more sober style of criticism. Like his own Apollo he

is "young but intolerably severe," and, like Milton, he freely used,

as in "The Strayed Reveller," verse in short unrhymed measures. Though

these are distasteful to some critics, others, in Arnold's and Milton's

employment of them, find grace and harmony so delightful that they do

not regret the absence of rhyme. Arnold's rhymed verse is in simple

old-fashioned forms, in lyrics and in the beautiful stanzas of two

of his most beautiful poems, where majesty and sweetness meet, "The

Scholar Gipsy," and "Thyrsis," an elegy on A. H. Clough, the friend of

his Oxford days.

Never has the scenery around Oxford been so nobly celebrated; he

makes classical "the stripling Thames," "Bablock Hythe," "the warm

green-muffled Cumnor hills," "the Fyfield tree," all the landscape

through which Shelley wandered and left unsung. Thus Arnold has for

Oxford men the same charm as Scott for Borderers; he is their own poet;

and the pieces called "Switzerland" seem to recall a long vacation in

the Alps. They are full of beauty in the descriptions of Nature and

of Marguerite, a daughter of France, who seems to have inherited the

charm of Manon Lescaut in the famous novel of the Abbé Prévost. For the

rest, Arnold did not pen, or did not publish, sonnets to his mistress's

eyebrow, and his lyrics reveal no more of his personality than his

love of natural beauty, his delight in Nature, and a melancholy not

unconnected with instability of religious belief; as in the flux and

reflux of the sonorous lines in "Dover Beach," and "Yes, in the sea

of life enisled". There are moments in youth (perhaps confined to

Oxonians) when the grave charm of Arnold (as in the verses in the

conclusion of "Sohrab and Rustum") seems the pearl highest of price

in modern poetry. But in narrative, even in "Sohrab and Rustum" with

its Homeric similes, still more in the narrative of "Tristram and

Iseult," Arnold does not shine, and in "Merope" he certainly does not

overstimulate. His "Forsaken Merman" is perhaps most admired by readers

who are least delighted with the mass of his best poems, and least

appreciative of "Requiescat," which is a worthy mate of the noblest

"swallow flights of song" in the Greek Anthology, as hopeless and as

beautiful as they. In his genius there was something Greek; there was

nothing of frenzy and false excitement.

Arnold's criticism cannot always be termed "unaffected," and his manner

and tone varied with the nature of the subject which he was discussing.

It must be admitted that he "was not always wholly serious," and his

banter, his "educated insolence" as Aristotle says, was apt rather to

provoke than to convert people who differed from him, as to education,

politics, social problems, or literature. But he had an unsurpassed

skill in provoking discussion, and the public, which for long did not

read him, became acquainted with his name, and his views through the

newspapers. It is said that a meeting of persons connected with the

Income Tax complained to him that his returns of his literary gains did

not correspond with his immense literary reputation. He then, with his

habitual urbanity, catechized his catechizers. Had any one of them ever

bought or read a book of his? Not one could answer in the affirmative;

"So there, you see," he remarked.

His "Lectures on Translating Homer," delivered at Oxford when he was

Professor of Poetry (1857-1867) are not only admirable expositions

of Homeric art, and "the grand style," but rich in his peculiar vein

of lofty irony and academic "chaff"--of a translator who did the

"Iliad" into the metre of "Yankee Doodle". He advocated the use of

English hexameters--which, indeed, would be excellent, if any one

could write readable hexameters. His "Essays in Criticism" (1865)

pleaded vainly for an Academy on the French model, for "ideas," and

for culture, a term caught at and misapplied by feebler folk. His

remarks on two unessential French writers illustrated his inability

to appreciate the poetry as compared with the prose of France. He

conceived, however, "of the whole group of civilized nations as being,

for intellectual purposes, one great confederation... whose members

have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed,

and of one another". He had the knowledge, though appreciation did

not always accompany it, while the French, he complained, were almost

wholly ignorant of his favourite Wordsworth. Yet, much as he rejoiced

in Wordsworth's "criticism of life" (a favourite phrase), he admitted

that, save in 1798-1808, the poet was devoid of inspiration, though "a

great and powerful body of work remains," when the dross is cleared

away. Generally, Arnold had a trick of taking a single line or two,

perhaps of the worst, from a poet, using this inferior brick as a

sample of the building, and contrasting it with specimens superlatively

excellent from poets whom he wanted to extol. Thus he contrasted

Théophile Gautier with Wordsworth, taking Théo as an inn on the road,

and Wordsworth as a home eternal in the heavens. But surely we may

tarry at an inn on our way and enjoy ourselves, though perhaps only

one human being has seriously exclaimed: "I place Théophile only after

Shakespeare". In this case the trick of setting a verse from Gautier

beside a verse from Wordsworth was not played. After the appreciation

of Wordsworth it is curious to find Arnold speaking of Molière as

"altogether a larger and more splendid luminary in the poetical heaven"

than the Bard of Rydal, because the two authors are not in any way

comparable with each other. The "high seriousness" in which Wordsworth

is pre-eminent was indeed familiar to the comic author called "_le

Contemplateur_," but the nature of his art did not permit him to hint

at the existence of this quality, except in irony; while Lucretius,

not, as in Wordsworth's case, Plato, was his favourite philosopher.

Arnold's eager curiosity led him into fields of which he had no

first-hand knowledge, as in his delightful book on "The Study of Celtic

Literature". We cannot assign all "natural magic" in poetry to the

Celtic strain of blood in the population, and the peculiar wistfulness

of old Gaelic and Welsh poetry may be found in Greek, Finnish, and

even savage poetry. Though the book led others into much senseless

writing, it is in itself full of revelations of beauty. Arnold was no

Orientalist, and had no special knowledge of New Testament Greek, nor

of the comparative study of religions. These defects, with surprising

errors in taste, prevent his "St. Paul and Protestantism," "God and the

Bible," and "Literature and Dogma" from reaching a high level in their

way. But Arnold wrote beautiful prose, and wrote with that high sense

of critical superiority which was his own, as it had been Dryden's.

Both occasionally surprise, or even shock, by their idiosyncrasies,

as do Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt; but they all delight and excite and

instruct.

GENERAL WRITERS.

To the various and voluminous works of Mr. Ruskin, corresponding to

every facet of his singular intellect and character, justice cannot

possibly be done within our space. The son of a rich wine-merchant of

Scottish extraction, he was born and bred among books and works of

art, and, without attending any public school, entered Christ Church

as a gentleman commoner. He won the Newdigate prize poem, and in 1843

published the first volume of his "Modern Painters". His primary

object was to assert the supremacy of Turner, which involved him in a

comparative study of art, modern, mediaeval and classical, and of the

intellectual, literary, social, and moral conditions of the societies

in which the art, in each case, arose. He had also to observe Nature

accurately, from the contour of the Alps to the development of the

forms of trees, and, indeed, of "the meanest flower that blows". He drew

excellently, and many of the copious and beautiful illustrations are

from his own pencil. His own opinions, which, as he confessed, varied

greatly at different times, were constantly exhibited, and he wrote

in a style as highly pitched and coloured as that of De Quincey. The

effect of the whole, at least on young readers, was immensely exciting

and inspiriting, whatever the topic might be on which he expressed

himself. His was the prose of a man who was almost a poet, but his

verses proved to the world, as they must have done to himself, that

formal poetry was not his forte. In art his affections were with _les

primitifs_, the artists, holy and humble men of heart, before the

Revival of learning, before Raphael; and he was actually fierce over

Claude and Salvator Rosa. "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849)

and "The Stones of Venice" (1852) continued the teaching of "Modern

Painters". In his "Academy Notes" his attitude was thus described by a

painter in "Punch".

I sits and paints,

Hears no complaints,

I sells before I'm dry;

Comes savage Ruskin,

Puts his tusk in--

And nobody will buy.

Ruskin was extolling and defending the work of the Pre-Raphaelite

Brotherhood, including Rossetti--whom he knew well, and bought from

gladly--Millais, Holman Hunt, and others less celebrated, with whom

were joined William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They went back

to the art of the Middle Ages, often applying its minute study of

detail to incidents in modern life. The value of Ruskin's theories

of art is now, and has long been, disputed. Ruskin was not an

"impressionist," and the libel action brought against him by Whistler,

characteristically appealing to a British jury on a question of art,

and receiving one farthing of damages, left the questions open to each

impartial mind. Ruskin's socialistic theories, in "Unto This Last"

have had infinitely more permanent and wide-reaching results than his

æsthetics. But, be these right or wrong, his early works are of the

highest and most varied interest, both in matter and expression. There

never was a man more rich in pity, and more open-handed, whether it was

his pictures and other objects of art, or his money that he lavishly

bestowed. In the sixties and later he produced many small books with

pretty symbolical titles, dealing with all things from personal

confessions to social problems: he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at

Oxford, where his lectures were crowded, and his "Fors Clavigera," an

autobiography in numbers, came out in parts. It contains many examples

of his style at its best, that is, at its simplest. One glorious

passage gives a great Turneresque picture of a scene viewed from a

certain bridge over Ettrick, whence, in fact, to mortal eyes no such

prospect is visible! In "Fors" Ruskin wrote with great sympathy and

affection about Sir Walter Scott.

In his later years and writings, the contradictions of his complicated

character, and the effects of over-work, and too keen a vision of

"the sad pageant of men's miseries," began to affect his work with

eccentricity; and he sought retirement near Coniston Lake with his

friends, Mr. and Mrs. Severn.

Of joy in widest commonalty spread,

of joy in art and Nature, he had made many thousands of people

participators, for while others had written on art, none had done so

with so much contagious enthusiasm, varied eloquence, and magnificent

imagination. The rhythm of his style is almost as often invaded by

blank verse, as in Dickens's case, and, according to R. L. Stevenson,

an irruption of blank verse into prose is a symptom of great fatigue.

In one short sentence of prose in Swinburne's essay on Lamb and Wither

we read:--

Behind him and beneath we see....

The Hazlitts prattling at his heel,

The Dyces labouring in his wake.

Two other Oxford critics, Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) and John

Addington Symonds (1840-1893) are so recently silent that they cannot

here be critically estimated. Both were devoted to literature and art,

classical, modern, and of the Renaissance. Both had their peculiar

styles, that of Symonds very animated, but somewhat Corinthian; that

of Pater remarkable for a kind of hieratic precision, and sedulous

daintiness, and a vocabulary in which certain favourite terms occurred

but too frequently. Symonds _sufflaminandus erat_; in his "History of

the Renaissance in Italy" he is certainly unable to keep the stream

of his learning and enthusiasm within its banks; while an impatient

reader might demand a more rapid and less obviously self-conscious

movement in the style of Pater. His first volume, "Studies in the

History of the Renaissance" (1873), brought to young readers the same

kind of pleasant surprise as "The Defence of Guenevere" or "Atalanta in

Calydon". The essay on Coleridge, and the "little poem in prose" on the

Monna Lisa of Leonardo, appeared to be new models of excellence. This

book remains the most characteristic of the author, though he seems to

have thought that his style verged perilously on that of poetry. He

avoided this possible danger, without ceasing "still to be neat, still

to be dressed," in his reflective novel of Roman life, "Marius the

Epicurean" (1885), in which Marius is far from being an Epicurean in

the vulgar sense of the word, but is rather the John Inglesant of the

period. The book, like "Clarissa Harlowe," is not to be read so much

for the story as for the delicate dreamy succession of the moods, and

of the inclinations and half-beliefs of the hero, and for the pictures

of the manners of the age. "Plato and Platonism" is a valuable study,

and "Imaginary Portraits" shows more imagination in the designing of

character than Marius. The reef which he and R. L. Stevenson did not

always steer clear of was _préciosité_, over-anxious effort towards

novelty and perfection of phrase.

[1] See "English Conspiracy and Dissent, 1660-1674," by Professor

Wilbur C. Abbott, "American Historical Review," April, July, 1909.

[2] The Simpsons produced ministers in every generation from 1560 to

1730, when one of them fell into heresy.

[3] Vol. IV, p. 134, "To Whittier".

[4] Professor W. P. Trent.

CHAPTER XXXV.

LATE VICTORIAN POETS.

Edward FitzGerald.

Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), a contemporary at Trinity College,

Cambridge, of Thackeray and Tennyson, was in later life the friend

of both. Though he vehemently admired Tennyson's poems up to 1842,

he never was quite contented with them later; yet detested all the

work of both of the Brownings, as if jealous of the supremacy of his

friend. He was, indeed, a humorous person, and a person "of humours,"

in Ben Jonson's sense of the word. He was a great reader, a delicate

and sound critic, where prejudice did not interfere; a most interesting

letter-writer; and, for the rest, passed away his life with his books,

his garden, his boat, and his pipe. Nothing of the little that he

wrote, for example, translations from Æschylus and Calderon, reached

the public, nor for long did his very free version of quatrains in the

Persian, attributed to Omar Khayyám, an astronomer. It is impossible

here to discuss how many of these quatrains are really, by Omar, how

many are masterless verses assigned to him by tradition, and how

much of the merit of the "Rubáiyàt" is due to FitzGerald. But it is

hardly too bold to say that but for the new music and melancholy of

FitzGerald's verse, but for FitzGerald's own contribution of a sad

and humorous stoicism under an Epicurean wash of colour, Omar and his

company would never have been known to the general English reader. The

slim pamphlet of the "Rubáiyàt" (1859) was "a drug in the market" till

the set of Rossetti and Swinburne discovered it and talked about it.

Then a wider circle of young University men made it an idol; to adore

it was a sign of grace; and, in the long run, to admire Omar and the

old French tale of "Aucassin et Nicolete" became a substitute for a

liberal education. It was no longer necessary to have read anything

else. It was not FitzGerald's fault that the saying of the Alexandrian

Philistine in Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all," became "Omar is

enough for all". But, though idolised by the worst judges, FitzGerald's

little masterpiece remains a very original and, in Wordsworth's phrase,

"a very pretty piece of paganism". His letters are probably the best

and most interesting of any letters much concerned with literature that

have been published since those of Byron.

George Meredith.

As a poet, Meredith attained, when he chose (and he often did choose)

to a pitch of obscurity no less deserving of admiration, and of

interpretative commentaries, than the darkest verses of Browning. He

did not begin in this manner; his early verses, such as "Juggling

Jerry," "The Old Chartist," "Marian," "Love in the Valley," have the

charm of being fresh, natural, and easily readable by him who runs;

while, like most of Meredith's verses, they are the poetry of a lover

of the Earth, with all that she bears and nourishes. Many poems read

like hymns to Earth by an Earth-intoxicated pagan. But "Modern Love"--a

long sequence of pieces of sixteen lines, which exceed the sonnet in

length without possessing its answering and echoing rhymes--contains a

story, and a sad story, of the pangs of two wedded lovers. What that

story is, perhaps some commentator has told in prose; if not, the poet

needs such a commentary. The preluding sonnet to "Modern Love" may

contain the secret, it closes thus:--

But listen in the thought; so may there come

Conception of a newly added chord,

Commanding space beyond where ear has home.

In labour of the trouble at its fount,

Leads Life to an intelligible Lord

The rebel discords up the sacred Mount.

We "listen in the thought," but conception of a newly added chord does

not readily arrive, not where ear has home at all events, and nothing

leads us to an intelligible Lord, if that means an intelligible poet.

Persons cultivated enough to love English poetry more obscure than an

"unseen" piece of Pindar, find much matter in verses like these.

The two lovers, married apparently, in "Modern Love," are "condemned to

do the flitting of the bat," but, in the dark, we lose sight of them,

and can only admire luminous breaks of two or three lines here and

there, glow-worms in the darkness of the grass. The mystery of Byron's

"Manfred," reckoned fine in its day, the new poet explains as "an after

dinner's indigest". Byron, no doubt, could have said something not less

witty about "The Nuptials of Attila".

Meredith's manner, in short, "is not of the centre". Great poets rarely

conceal their meaning like hidden wealth; he who does so, values too

cheaply the leisure of the reader, or values too highly the reader's

industry and ingenuity.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Elizabeth Barrett, later the wife of the poet Robert Browning, was born

on 6 March, 1806 (died in 1861). Her father was a man of considerable

wealth and eccentricity; at least he appears to have resented almost

as much as Queen Elizabeth the idea of any one marrying. His daughter

had a good education, some knowledge of Greek, and wrote verse early.

In several of her most pleasing verses, such as "Little Ellie,"

and "Hector in the Garden," we hear echoes of the memories of her

childhood. She translated from the Greek, and also wrote a kind of

romantic ballads (not in the manner of the Border ballads) which

had abundant life and movement. She took up the cause of children

overworked in factories at an age when they should not have worked at

all. Her health became deplorable, her life that of a valetudinarian,

till, in 1846, Robert Browning married her and took her out of her

father's sphere of influence. Thenceforth her health improved; at this

time her fame and popularity as a poet of great variety and passion

far exceeded those of the author of "Men and Women". Her sonnets, really

original, though published as "From the Portuguese" were not so popular

as her lyrics and romances, but her genius, somewhat too eager and

careless, especially in her recklessness of correct rhymes, was in

need of the formal restraints of the sonnet. Her "Casa Guidi Windows"

(1851) and other poems displayed her enthusiasm for a free and united

Italy; her "Aurora Leigh," a _tendenz_ novel in verse, attracted much

attention, if it does not bear the test of time so well as her briefer

poems; her "Poems before Congress" were of somewhat temporary interest.

Mrs. Browning, with Miss Rossetti, holds the highest place among the

women-poets of England, but her Muse is neither trimly girdled nor

neatly shod; and her manner not infrequently does injustice to the pity

and passion of her sympathies, conceptions, and emotions.

Christina Rossetti.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) as a poet resembled her brother as

much as a woman who lived a somewhat fugitive and cloistered life,

practising the rites of her religion and in the exercise of good works,

could resemble an artist so unapt for self-control as Dante Rossetti.

Both felt the same half-exotic influences of a family half-Italian;

both shared the same early enthusiasm for mediaeval art, and there

is a certain sameness in the colour and harmonies of their verse and

in their use of words. In 1862 Miss Rossetti published, in brief,

irregular rhymed lines, "Goblin Market," a tale of the affection of

sisters dwelling in a rural England that marches with a country of

fantastic malevolent elves, a species of fairy of her own invention.

The whole effect is magical yet moral "which is strange," and the

moral is not strained or didactic, but natural, and a great part of

the charm of this delightful composition. "The Prince's Progress," in

the same way, is suggested by the beautiful tale of "The Black Bull of

Norroway," but the suggestion is remote and the bewitched Prince comes

too late to his bride. The best lyrics of the author are singularly

musical with an anticipation of some of Swinburne's effects, as in

"Dreamland".

She left the rosy morn,

She left the fields of corn,

For twilight lone and lorn

And water springs.

Through sleep as through a veil,

She sees the sky look pale,

And hears the nightingale

That sadly sings.

"When I am dead, my dearest," is not less musical and melancholy. Many

of the sacred poems have great sincerity as well as original beauty

of form; and some of these, with some of the sonnets, half reveal the

sorrow of a life and its religious consolations,--see the sequence of

sonnets styled "Monna Innominata" and "Later Life". She is, indeed, a

true poet of the inner life and of nature. To institute comparisons

between her and Mrs. Browning is apt to cause injustice to either or to

both.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

While Tennyson was in the mid-flush of his fame, there arose a school,

in poetry and pictorial art, which, like him, turned to the Middle

Ages for subjects and inspiration, but also reverted to the ideals of

the great Italian painters who were before Raphael. The leader and

the eldest of the little Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, son

of Gabriel Rossetti, a devout interpreter of Dante, and of his wife,

a Miss Polidori, a kinswoman of Byron's strange and ill-fated young

Italian physician. Dante was born in 1828, from his earliest days wrote

verses and drew, and, after passing through King's College School,

became a student of art, and a painter whose colour was undoubtedly

excellent, while his subjects were chosen from religion and romance;

his portraits being in a high degree romantic, and his mannerisms

tending towards the monotonous. They were the paintings of a poet;

and his poetry is that of a painter. While some of his poetry, like

"The Blessed Damozel," his most characteristic piece, appeared early

in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (1856) and "The Germ," he

published no book before 1861, when his translations from the early

Italian poets gave evidence that, as a translator, he was unique and

unapproached. Bizarre circumstances, connected with his grief for the

death of his wife, delayed the appearance of his collected sonnets and

other verses till 1870, when the work excited enthusiasm among all who

desired some new thing in poetry; while certain mannerisms of slight

importance spoiled the pleasure of others, and the choice of themes

in two or three cases offended the precise. Indeed, the sonnet has

no wide popular appeal, and the sequence styled "The House of Life,"

with its kind of mysticism proved nearly as puzzling, in another way,

as the sonnets of Shakespeare. The pictorial and visionary beauty

and the novel harmonies of the verse, could not but be admired. The

ballads were too artificial for the ballad farm, which is nothing if

not simple, though the ballads also have Rossetti's special note and

impress, his colour, passion, mystery, and romance. Rossetti, after

many years, vexed by insomnia and by sleepy drugs, died in 1882. It is

not easy to say whether he was fortunate or unfortunate in that the

newness of his manner had been to some extent anticipated, through the

delay of his own poems, by the not dissimilar newness of his sister

Christina, and of Swinburne. Their works made some aspects of his

manner seem not so new, and at the same time not so likely to deter by

entire unfamiliarity of tone.

William Morris.

A younger associate of Rossetti was William Morris, educated at

Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. His Muse was "pre-Raphaelite"

and mediaeval in his early prose stories in "The Oxford and Cambridge

Magazine" (1856), and his later fictions, in the same archaic and

fantastic manner (there were seven of them between 1889 and 1898),

never could wholly recapture the magic of "The Hollow Land" of his

undergraduate days. It is even the author's opinion that Morris never,

in his voluminous later poetry, reached the same level of original

effect as in several poems in his "Defence of Guenevere," published

when his age was 24, in 1858. This opinion can scarcely be the result

of "ossification of the intellect," which seldom sets in when the

critic is an undergraduate, and is eagerly expecting a new poem from a

favourite author. That poem, "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867), was,

to some devotees of "The Defence of Guenevere," a disappointment. The

vigour and melancholy of "The Haystack in the Floods," and "Sir Peter

Harpdon's End," and "The Sailing of the Sword," and the unanalysable

magic of "The Blue Closet" and "The Wind," were not in "Jason," and

could not be, and never will be anywhere again. In the earlier book the

young poet had caught a rare element in mediaeval romance and song, a

vague but poignant sense of colour and yearning and mystery, not to

be defined in prose, and scarcely, except perhaps in "Sir Galahad,"

apprehended by Tennyson. We were carried again into such chambers as

that wherein--

Beside the bed there was a stone

_Corpus Christi_ written thereon;

or we were brought face to face with some forgotten tragedy of the

Hundred Years' War, and saw the true lovers and the parting that they

had beside the haystack in the floods, such dull grey floods in a dull

green land as Shelley saw in fact, and recognized with terror that he

had seen before--in vision.

The new poem, "Jason," retold, with an approach to Chaucer's manner in

versification and in mediaeval tone, the immortal pre-Homeric story of

the adventure of the Fleece of Gold. The poem, in rhymed decasyllabic

couplets, with songs interspersed, should be compared with the ancient

poems on the subject, especially with the "Argonautica" of Apollonius

Rhodius. Morris had succeeded in telling of the love of Medea and

the adventures of the heroes, in the tone of romance, with "abundant

fluency, distinctness, and distinction". He had already in hand many of

the tales in "that ocean of the sea of stories," "The Earthly Paradise"

in four volumes (1868-1870). Of the twenty-four tales half are from

classical, half from romantic sources. To some readers the opening,

the adventure of English voyagers of the time of Edward III., who

find the Earthly Paradise, is more congenial, the heroes being men of

this world, than the languor which seems to hang over the personages

in the tales of Lotusland. The tales are more like work in tapestry

than in painting; the manner tends to monotony; we need a wind from

the wings of the Muse of Homer. Morris called himself "the idle singer

of an empty day". No man was more industrious, not only in his great

poetic task, but in Icelandic studies,--hence the ringing anapæsts of

his "Sigurd the Volsung"--in study of the arts of the Middle Ages;

in manufacture and sale of objects of household decoration, and of

furniture, in glass for church windows, and in printing. Coming into

close touch with artisans and labourers, and being more and more

impressed by the hideousness of their modern conditions of life, and by

the contrasted mindless luxury of many of the rich, he founded a social

democratic league, tersely described as meant "to blow the guts out of

everybody". The beauty and happy æsthetic simplicity of the society

which is to follow after this initial process he described in "News

from Nowhere," and he chanted for the toilers in "Poems by the Way".

Not for the people, perhaps, in fact for few, he produced translations

of the Volsunga Saga, combining the fragments from Icelandic prose and

poetry about that glorious tragic fable; and also rendered the Saga

of "Grettir the Strong" and others, into an English of his own, with

archaicisms of various ages blended. His verse translation of "Beowulf"

is obscure, owing to his effort to find living words in the form of

their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. These things, and even the series of his

tales, such as "The Story of the Glittering Plain," and "The Roots of

the Mountains," are delightful to the few but "caviare to the general".

In things æsthetic, literary, and revolutionary, the idle singer of an

empty day has been a most active and enduring influence.[1]

It has been said of Morris that he is "the most Homeric" of English

poets. Despite the excellence of his fighting scenes, as in "The Story

of Sigurd the Volsung," and the interest in the details of the arts and

crafts which he shares with Homer, he has neither the strength nor the

simplicity nor the speed of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," nor the delicate

power in the drawing of character, nor the unconscious magic of the

Achæan "Father of the Rest". Indeed no English poetry after "Beowulf"

is, or in any way could be, Homeric.

Swinburne.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, of an old Northumbrian family, which,

according to the poet's verses, had suffered in the cause of Mary

Stuart and of the last Stuarts, was born in 1837, the eldest son

of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane Ashburnham. He was educated at

Eton, where, as he tells us, Charles Lamb led him to study the

early dramatists. When he was aged 12 he composed a tragedy in

imitation of Cyril Tourneur's works ("The Atheist's Tragedy," "The

Revenger's Tragedy"), but exceeding greatly their average of rapes and

murders. The choice of themes, and of the model, argues unsurpassed

precocity--among other things. Many of Swinburne's lyrics

Sang themselves to him in class time,

When idle of hand as of tongue.

He went up to Balliol, where he took no part whatever in the sports and

amusements of the College, and appears to have lived in the society

of Mr. T. H. Green (later the critic of Hume, and exponent of Hegel),

and of Mr. John Nichol, later Professor of English Literature in the

University of Glasgow. Swinburne obtained the Taylor Scholarship in

Modern Languages, open to the whole University, and like Shelley and

Landor, but not for the same sort of reasons, left Oxford without

entering the Final Schools. He made the acquaintance at Oxford of

Morris' Burne-Jones, and Dante Rossetti, who were painting on the

ceiling of the Union the romantic pictures which instantly vanished

away owing to some defect in the medium employed. Swinburne must

already have had an extensive and peculiar knowledge of literature. In

his last year as an undergraduate he began his play of "Chastelard,"

published in 1865, and he was contributing to "The Spectator" some of

his poems including "Faustine". He must already have been the master

of his rapid, ringing, and infinitely varied metres; his blank verse,

taste, and manner were already themselves in his neglected volume of

two plays, "The Queen Mother" (Catherine de Medici) and "Rosamund"

(Fair Rosamund) (1860), and he had made an intimate study of the

manners and absence of morals at the Court of the Valois. He had the

cruelty to poison Chicot, who, in Dumas, survives immortally. In

1865 appeared "Atalanta in Calydon," a small quarto with a decorative

white cloth binding. The poem at once swept every young reader off his

feet by the wonderfully original and novel metres of the choruses,

and by the remarkable beauty of the blank verse, which was entirely

independent of the then reigning influence of Tennyson. Swinburne was

indeed an "inventor of harmonies," and if his persons were not strictly

Greek, the verdict of youth was that they were something much better!

The action of the tragedy, the avenging by Althæa of her brothers on

their slayer, her son, was more in the Germanic than the Greek taste,

so here we had a "Revenger's Tragedy" wholly unlike that of Cyril

Tourneur, and dignified by the beautiful figure of the maiden Atalanta.

It is probable that "Atalanta" remains Swinburne's masterpiece in

poetry; but, owing to its classical character, it did not achieve the

instantaneous popularity of his "Poems and Ballads" of 1866. Here was

a nest of singing birds of every note, from the sonorous splendour of

"The Triumph of Time," in a new stanza already employed in "Atalanta,"

to "The Garden of Proserpine" (in the measure, improved, of Keats's

"Some drear-nighted December") and "The Hymn to Proserpine" with the

surge and reflux of its anapæsts, and "Dolores" in a measure which Mr.

Chivers, an American poet, had already used, with a poor ha'porth of

sense to a monstrous deal of sound. Some of the subjects ("very curious

and disgusting") and some of the sentiments (distinctly anticlerical,

to state it mildly) were unfavourably criticized, not unnaturally, and

the volume was transferred from Mr. Moxon, long the poets' publisher,

to Messrs. Chatto & Windus.[2] But most of Swinburne's readers, at

Oxford at least, were quite-indifferent as to the nature of his

opinions and sentiments, which were suspected to be, in Lamb's words,

"only his fun". He was staunch to them, however, always, both in prose

and poetry; indeed, whatever be the subject of his prose, he usually

gets in hits at the clergy of all denominations, "The blood on the

hands of the King, and the lie on the lips of the priest". He also

attacks Carlyle, in and out of season, and is severe on a race of

reptiles unnamed who haunt his imagination. Meanwhile his "Chastelard"

had not the attraction of his lyrics. "Bothwell," the second in the

trilogy of Queen Mary, was of excessive length, though the natural

limit of a play is almost as much defined as that of a sonnet; and

the last of the trilogy, "Mary Beaton" was rather too daring in

contradiction of historic fact. Mistress Beaton was not in love with

Chastelard any more than Queen Mary was. She did not vengefully pursue

her mistress to Fotheringay, but married Ogilvy of Boyne, when Lady

Jane Gordon (in love with Ogilvy) married the Earl of Bothwell, who was

in love with her, never with the Queen.

In his poem of farewell to the Queen of Scots, Swinburne sang of

her eyes as "blue," a curious error to make after so many years of

study. "Songs before Sunrise" were often of great technical--beauty,

abounding in the old political enthusiasms and aversions; while lovers

of poetry almost wished, with all respect, that the applause of Victor

Hugo could be "taken as read," with the panegyrics of babies, and

the abuse of "Bonaparte the Bastard". The tragedy "Erechtheus" more

closely conformed to the early Greek model than "Atalanta," but the

subject was of inferior interest, and what FitzGerald, speaking of

Tennyson's later poems, called "the old champagney flavour" was, in the

choruses, less exhilarating. Narrative was not the poet's forte, he

was too ebullient, and neither "Tristram" (in rhymed heroic couplets)

nor "Balin and Balan" (in the stanza of'"The Lady of Shalott") was on

a level with the early triumphs. Three or four later volumes of verse

were marked by the _tour de force_ of using lines of extraordinary

length; the skill never failed the poet, what failed more and more was

the interest of his readers. The generation which first welcomed him

had grown grey, it may be said, and cold to new poetry, but it did

not appear that the new generation was warmer. In his delight in the

sea, tempest, frost and fire, and all meteoric forces and elemental

things, Swinburne resembled Shelley, but Shelley's music is more

spontaneous and of a more natural charm than Swinburne's, who relied

so much on "apt alliteration's artful aid," and on double rhymes. His

characters, in play and narrative poetry, do not dwell in the memory

like the creations of great tragedians and narrators; they are rather

sonorous than sympathetic, more "heroic" than human. Queen Mary and

her Maries did not speak in Swinburne's tones, but like women of this

world. "Before his fortieth year," Mr. Gosse informs us, "there had set

in a curious ossification of Swinburne's intellect." But this appears

merely to mean that he saw no merit in Ibsen, Stevenson, Dostoieffsky.

As to Ibsen, it was not likely that he should see any merit; as to the

others, most ageing men rather shun new novelists, there is nothing

"curious" in that; while with his "hostility to Zola" it is easy to

sympathise. The ossification left him as exuberant as ever in his old

tastes, which included all that is best in the literature of the world,

and as vehement in the old way on the old themes. But if, by forty, he

"had done his do" in Cromwell's phrase, the phenomenon is usual among

poets, "the _new_ wine is best," with most of them, and perhaps none,

save Scott, has ever been able to turn with success to an entirely

fresh field.

As a critic, Swinburne had a transcendent knowledge of literature, and

a power of appreciation only rivalled by Charles Lamb; but whether

he loved or hated an author, his language was certainly too violent

in praise or dispraise. His essay on Wordsworth and Byron, and

incidentally on Matthew Arnold, contains many things that are true, and

needed to be said, but their truth would not be less apparent if the

critic did not speak in the tones of a demoniac, and write sentences

longer, and less easily to be construed, than those of Clarendon. Of

his prose works the "George Chapman," "Essays and Studies," "Note on

Charlotte Brontë," "Study of Shakespeare," and "Miscellanies," may all

be read with pleasure, instruction, and gratitude, though here and

there with surprise and regret. The vehemence and turbulence appear

almost incompatible with the possession of humour, of which, none the

less, whether in Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, or the Bab Ballads,

Swinburne had a very keen appreciation. Humour was not conspicuous in

his book of parodies, "Cap and Bells," and memory recalls no amusing

comic relief in his tragedies. But he must have meant to-be amusing

when he said that "in all things he desired to preserve the golden

mean of scrupulous moderation". There is somewhat lacking to that

remarkable genius of almost the last true English poet; we can but say

"he was born to be so". As English in heart he was as Shakespeare,

but a patriot need not have insulted the enemies of his country,

especially, in one instance, when they were Republicans.

One field in which he worked industriously has yet to be mentioned, his

punctual and frequent celebration of the recently dead. Of his many

elegies that on Charles Baudelaire is perhaps the best, but it attains

not unto "Lycidas," "Adonais," and "Thyrsis".

Poetic Underwoods.

There was, in the age of the great poets of the early nineteenth

century, a considerable growth of underwood. Among the more conspicuous

plants are Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore. Campbell (1777-1844) was

born and bred at Glasgow. His first verses, "The Pleasures of Hope,"

in rhyming heroic couplets, appeared in a poetic dearth (1799) and

were fair samples of a kind of poetry which was near its death. His

"Gertrude of Wyoming" was pathetic (1809), few have even heard of

his "Pilgrimage of Glencoe," and Campbell lives by short spirited

things, "Hohenlinden," "Ye Mariners of England," "Of Nelson and the

North," "Lochiel, Lochiel, Beware of the Day," and the longer piece

which displays the resolution and fortitude of "The Last Man" in a

very pleasing light. Campbell lived by ordinary writing, critical and

editorial. He was a scrupulous, almost a timid corrector of his own

verses. A draft for, one of his great naval songs, in the library at

Abbotsford, is much longer and not nearly so good as the published

version. Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) was a man of wealth, and the friend

of men of letters, especially of Byron, through as many generations as

Nestor reigned over. His "Italy" (1822) _se sauve sur les planches_, on

the plates by Turner.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) had greater intelligence, vivacity, agility,

an endearing if trivial lyric note of his own, and plenty of witty

banter. His songs were meant to be sung, and were sung to the

accompaniment of the piano, or the Harp of Erin. He was born in Dublin,

was barely 20 when he translated Anacreon, or the poems that were

attributed to Anacreon, while his "Poems by Thomas Little" were more

than Anacreontic. A duel with the editor of the "Edinburgh Review,"

Jeffrey, would have advertised him better if Byron had not spoken

of the pistols as leadless; Byron and he, thereafter, became bosom

friends (see Byron's Correspondence, in which he tells whom he has

been kissing). As the biographer of the noble poet, Moore's asterisks

are not often successful in wrapping the facts in a mystery. By "Irish

Melodies" (1807) Moore chiefly lives; "The Twopenny Postbag," being

"topical" and dealing in Whig witticisms, cannot be popular with an

age in which few have read "The Rovers," "The Loves of the Triangles,"

and the other classical drolleries of the "Anti-jacobin" (mainly by

Ellis, Frere, and Canning). Not to have read these is to be deficient

in liberal education. "Lalla Rookh," Oriental stories in verse, was

welcomed almost as eagerly as Byron's "Giaour," "Lara," and similar

romances of the land of the cypress and myrtle. The "Life of Byron"

(1830) was also, though hampered by disputes and the burning of Byron's

Memoirs, a great success, but neither then nor now can a complete

view of Byron's life be given. Moore enjoyed his reputation and

social opportunities in his own day, but the competition of the great

contemporary and of later poets has injured his laurels.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) was at the opposite pole from Moore

as a man and a poet. Educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke, Oxford,

he made poetry his main object in a lonely and dissatisfied life,

always struggling with a chaotic tragedy in the most sombre Elizabethan

manner, "Death's Jest Book, or the Fool's Tragedy". He could not

satisfy himself with it; chaotic it remains, but it contains beautiful

passages, and, among other admirable lyrics, he produced--

If there were Dreams to sell,

What would you buy?

His letters, though frequently morbid, are often interesting. He

died abroad, dubiously sane. What is poetic in the mass of Beddoes's

writings is true poetry.

It is not possible here to do more than mention Thomas Hood (1799-1845)

whose abundant animal spirits and puns were, and if any one cares

to look into his facetious works still are, highly entertaining. His

"Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" is in a serious vein, and though it

has much charm, it never was appreciated. "The Song of the Shirt" and

"The Bridge of Sighs" made for him a name by their pathos, while his

character, his fortitude, and irrepressible spirits, not to be subdued

by hack-work and misfortune, made him an honour to his profession.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839, Eton and Cambridge) is remembered

for his lively and adroit occasional verses, more than for his essay

in the grotesque and terrible, "The Red Fisherman". Praed was certainly

the foremost writer of _vers de société_ of his day, though he was not

a Gay or a Prior.

[1] See his Life by Mr. Mackail and the admirable biographical

"Introductions" by his daughter, Miss May Morris, to each volume of the

new edition of his Collected Works. Longmans & Co.

[2] On the back of my copy of the original edition I found three

superimposed paper tickets with three publishers' names, Pickering,

Moxon, and Chatto & Windus.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

LATEST GEORGIAN AND VICTORIAN NOVELISTS.

Scott's example and success naturally attracted many writers towards

the novel. Byron, Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, with

Polidori, Byron's physician, all amused themselves with writing

romances in the "truly horrid" style during a period of rainy weather

on the Lake of Geneva. Byron's first chapters of a romance of a

vampire, with the opening scene, in the desert near Ephesus, are

admirable and tantalizing. Completed as heaven pleased by Polidori,

the story was popular on the Continent, was made the theme of more

than one opera, and was dramatized by Charles Nodier. Mrs. Shelley's

"Frankenstein," highly praised by Scott, really is very satisfactorily

horrid; her later novels are forgotten.

So far, and also in the three Scottish novels of Miss Susan Ferrier

(1782-1854) there was no imitation of Scott, indeed her tale "Marriage"

(1818) was published four years after "Waverley". This work, with

"Inheritance," and "Destiny," contained humorous studies of Scottish

character--of these Miss Pratt is the best remembered.

John Galt (1779-1839) was a man of affairs and a prolific general

writer, an acquaintance of Byron. The best of his books, "The Annals

of the Parish," is very good indeed: the old innocent minister records

the humours and sorrows of his flock from year to year, throughout the

commercial "awakening of Scotland". Except for the fact that the book

deals with Scottish life it is not an imitation of Sir Walter; nor is

"The Provost," or "The Ayrshire Legatees," who travel south as Humphry

Clinker travelled north of Tweed, and, like Humphry's company, narrate

their adventures and record their reflections. Galt's best books

are still well worth reading; they, not Scott's romances, are the

ancestors of the modern "Kailyard School," as it was called in its day.

Beginning with an imitation of Scott, William Harrison Ainsworth (born

1805) became a literary man very young, published for the first time in

"A Christmas Box," Scott's "Bonny Dundee," and, as editor, advertised

himself colossally (he was a strikingly handsome person), and poured

out historical novels, "The Tower," "Rookwood," "Jack Sheppard," and

many others. He "crammed" for the historical details, of which he

was too lavish, and, aided by Cruikshank's designs, attained a wide

popularity, which has vanished. He continued to write almost till his

death in 1882.

G. P. R. James (1799-1860) is only remembered for his famous two

horsemen in his opening scenes; long before his death his vogue had

passed.

His contemporary, Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881), for

a man so active in politics, wrote a great mass of fiction, from the

"Vivian Grey" of his boyhood, to more mature works in which many of

the characters were easily recognized by contemporaries. The political

novels, such as "Coningsby" abound in satire, "Sybil" in reflections

on society; all are full of a fantasy rather Oriental, and "Lothair,"

in 1870, was as personal in its allusions as "Coningsby". "Ixion"

and "The Infernal Marriage" are brief apologues, full of mocking

mirth; everywhere there is brilliance; but substance in the way of

human character and of "convincing" narrative is rare. The author was

amusing himself and his world between the innings of a greater game.

Thackeray's burlesque "Codlingsby" may survive "Coningsby".

Perhaps Thackeray's "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety Oneth," may

also outlive its originals, the military novels of Charles Lever

(1806-1872), tales of the camp, the march and the battle. Yet they lose

great pleasure who neglect Major Monsoon, Micky Free, and Baby Blake,

in Lever's "Charles O'Malley"; the major is a jewel of a character. The

early scenes at Trinity College, Dublin, and in the Galway of the old

days of claret and pistols are admirable; and Lever knew many anecdotes

of the Peninsular War to which he does full justice. He was in his

early years a most spirited narrator, full of humour, with sometimes a

cloud of melancholy crossing the landscape which dwells in the memory.

No man could always maintain the high spirits of "Charles O'Malley"

and "Harry Lorrequer," and Lever turned to tales of a more subdued

and ordinary kind. One of them, "A Day's Ride: a Life's Romance,"

considerably lowered the circulation of Dickens's "All the Year Round".

But it will be in a sad kind of world that "Charles O'Malley" will die.