_Browning’s Influence--R. H. Horne--
Alfred Domett--T. E. Brown--
Coventry Patmore_
So much for the Tennysonian influence upon Victorian technique, and
the questions arising from the work of poets who were subject to, or
part of, that influence. The manner which we have examined as being
characteristically Browning’s made a far less marked impression upon
the work of his age. It can hardly be said of any of the greater poets
of the time that he wrote differently because of Browning’s example.
There are notes in some of Morris’s early work in which we can detect a
moment’s consciousness of the Browning idiom--in _Sir Peter Harper’s
End_ for instance--but it passed never to return, and is nowhere
else to be found in the principal poets of the time, with one exception
to be mentioned. Browning’s influence upon later poetry is another
matter, but not one for discussion here, where it must be sufficient
to repeat that in the new vigour that came into English poetry after
the perfumed dusk of the eighteen-nineties[15] Browning is likely to
be found by critical historians to have had a considerable hand. Of
the less celebrated Victorian poets, who were yet in some measure an
adornment of their age, three found in Browning’s technique a more
constant inspiration to their own. These were Richard Hengist Horne,
Alfred Domett and T. E. Brown. Horne was a strange figure in Victorian
poetry who gets an obscure corner in the anthologies, and is otherwise
forgotten save as a friend of the Brownings. But he was a poet of great
ambitions, and of a good deal more achievement than we remember. His
epic poem _Orion_, which attained much fame in its time, and some
permanent notoriety as the Farthing Epic, so called because Horne,
angered by public neglect when it first appeared, contemptuously had
it sold at a farthing, is a very readable work for any one who cares
to try it and is not afraid of poetry in long measure. Also he wrote
many admirable short pieces, and his work as a whole only needed more
of the discipline that would have kept him from sprawling in poetry to
have given him a much wider reputation than he now enjoys. He was an
older man than Browning, having been born in 1803, but he lived a long
working life of eighty years, and so far as he made his poetic mark
in either direction it was rather in Browning’s than in Tennyson’s.
_The Plough_, justly the best known of his lyrics, has a kind of
ungarlanded earthiness and an impetus in its conclusion that remind us
rather of Browning’s robust method than of the more opulent tendencies
of the age.
Above yon sombre swell of land
Thou seest the dawn’s grave orange hue,
With one pale streak like yellow sand,
And over that a vein of blue.
The air is cold above the woods;
All silent is the earth and sky,
Except with his own lonely moods
The blackbird holds a colloquy.
Over the broad hill creeps a beam,
Like hope that gilds a good man’s brow;
And now ascends the nostril-steam
Of stalwart horses come to plough.
Ye rigid Ploughmen, bear in mind
Your labour is for future hours:
Advance--spare not--nor look behind--
Plough deep and straight with all your powers!
Poetry was merely an occasional occupation to Alfred Domett; he
was, nevertheless, professedly a disciple of Browning, who made him
the Waring of the poem, a fact which gives him, perhaps, a moment’s
factitious interest in a brief study of Victorian poetry. His poetic
gift was real but slightly tended, and fell into neglect in a life
of politics. His _Flotsam and Jetsam_, however, deserves some
remembrance, and the following will serve to show that his discipleship
to the great poet who was his friend was not wholly a vain one.
INVISIBLE SIGHTS
“So far away so long--and now
Returned to England?--Come with me!
Some of our great ‘celebrities’
You will be glad to see!”
* * * * *
Carlyle--the Laureate--Browning--_these!_
These walking bipeds--Nay, you joke!--
Each wondrous power for thirty years
O’er us head-downward folk
Wrapt skylike, at the Antipodes,--
Those common limbs--that common trunk!
’Tis the Arab-Jinn who reached the clouds,
Into his bottle shrunk.
The flashing Mind--the boundless Soul
We felt ubiquitous, that mash
Medullary or cortical--
That six-inch brain-cube!--Trash!
The third of the poets mentioned, T. E. Brown, is of a wider popularity
and a more distinguished talent than the others. His poems have
remained in print and still find many readers, and the reputation of
his best work is likely rather to be increased than diminished by
time. A shy and scholarly figure, he was a good democrat in his poetry
and wrote of humble lives without condescension and yet rather from a
sympathetic seclusion than as a poet of the people. Perhaps his mind
was the one of his generation in which Browning’s influence worked
to most considerable purpose, though it would be at least as true to
say in justice to a genuine but limited poet that his was a striking
instance of a smaller poetic endowment working under the same technical
instincts as the greater. In his work we find a rhapsodic note of
lyricism, a sense of dramatic antithesis, a fondness for elliptical
argument, all of which are in Browning’s habit. Brown’s touch in his
longer poems may not be as firm as the master’s, which is merely to say
unnecessarily that he was not as great a poet as Browning, but in his
shorter pieces he could often score a success in a manner that Browning
himself could hardly have used more effectively, in evidence of which
_Salve_ may be given.
To live within a cave--it is most good;
But, if God make a day,
And some one come, and say,
“Lo! I have gather’d faggots in the wood!”
E’en let him stay,
And light a fire, and fan a temporal mood!
So sit till morning! when the light is grown
That he the path can read,
Then bid the man God-speed!
His morning is not thine: yet must thou own
They have a cheerful warmth--those ashes on the stone.
The single exception that has been mentioned to the generalization,
that Browning had little effect upon the work of his greater
contemporaries, is Coventry Patmore. Of all the great poets of his
time he has hitherto been by far the least generally understood and
appreciated. His most celebrated poem, _The Angel in the House_,
is full of material that lends itself easily to light censure, and,
however tenderly the poem may be lit by intermittent beauties, it
must be allowed that the general scheme is, on the whole, at least a
poetic indiscretion, which in the case of so ambitious a structure is
to write down failure. But the Patmore of the _Odes_ is another
matter, and here we have a poet who can find his company only among the
greatest of his time. And the manner of these _Odes_ is one of
great range and variety, not at all the range and variety of a facile
imitative gift, but notably of original poetic invention. It may, in
view of his relative reputation, and, indeed, of his relative stature,
sound a preposterous thing to say, and I admit that I say it only to
stress an argument, but if the work of a single poet alone had to be
chosen to survive in witness of the genius of Victorian poetry in its
many aspects, a by no means frivolous case might be made for Patmore’s
claim. It is true that many aspects of the age’s genius would then be
recorded in something a little short of their finest manifestation,
though others could hardly ask for more authoritative witness. But in
no one poet are the several aspects assembled at so representative
a level of expression. The pressure of Patmore’s individual poetic
energy was not so great as that of Tennyson or Browning, hardly as
that of Morris or Arnold or Swinburne. His spiritual insight at its
most intense was as revealing as that of any poet of his or, indeed,
of any age, but in his poetic life he did not dwell as habitually
at the centre of creative energy as those his great contemporaries.
There was too often something occasional in his work, not in the mere
choice of subject, but in his imaginative relation to the subject when
chosen, to allow him poetic constancy of the first order. And that
is, perhaps, on the whole, the reason why, advancing as his reputation
continues to be in the best critical opinion, it is, and is likely to
remain, a little below that of the highest of his time. While this
is so, however, it is also true that there was very little in the
manifold achievement of Victorian poetry that Patmore did not at some
time or another come to by the entirely personal movement of his own
genius. This copiousness in his talent was a thing quite distinct from
Swinburne’s sublime virtuosity, more lonely in its origin and much more
far-reaching in its influence.
One of the most remarkable poetic affinities of recent times is to
be found between the genius of Francis Thompson and that of Alice
Meynell. However much these two poets may have resembled each other
in spiritual temperament no two could differ more decidedly in poetic
method. Thompson, whose manner is piled up in magnificence, exuberant
in trailing and intricate imagery, drenched with every perfume and
stained with every dye that he can extract from language at the
very pitch of eloquence, is in his diction the flushed and almost
breathless consummation of all the more luxuriant tendencies in
Victorian verse. Alice Meynell, on the other hand, with her diction so
chaste and disciplined and exact, her imagery so frugal and unadorned,
is a rarefied incarnation of the grave magic that the genius of Matthew
Arnold had caught from the seventeenth century, a century which in so
far as it worked upon Thompson did so rather in its florid ecstasy. And
yet the poet from whom both Thompson and Alice Meynell derived more
clearly than any other among the Victorians was Patmore, and it was no
doubt a consciousness that they inherited widely divergent strains from
a common parentage that accounted in some measure, at least, for their
responsiveness to each other, not merely in sympathetic appreciation,
but in their essential poetic natures. For Patmore, too, knew the
seventeenth century, and more consciously than did any other poet of
his time, and he knew it both in its serene logical enchantment and
in its almost demoniac spiritual fervour. He wore both manners with a
Victorian difference, but he could wear them and independently of each
other. Of the first this is an example--_Vesica Piscis_.
In strenuous hope I wrought,
And hope seem’d still betray’d;
Lastly I said,
“I have labour’d through the Night, nor yet
Have taken aught;
But at Thy word I will again cast forth the net!”
And, lo, I caught
(Oh, quite unlike and quite beyond my thought,)
Not the quick, shining harvest of the Sea,
For food, my wish,
But Thee!
Then, hiding even in me,
As hid was Simon’s coin within the fish,
Thou sigh’st, with joy, “Be dumb,
Or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.”
And of the second, this--
* * * * *
O Death, too tardy with thy hope intense
Of kisses close beyond conceit of sense;
O Life, too liberal, while to take her hand
Is more of hope than heart can understand;
Perturb my golden patience not with joy,
Nor, through a wish, profane
The peace that should pertain
To him who does by her attraction move.
Had all not been before?
One day’s controllèd hope, and one again,
And then the third, and ye shall have the rein,
O Life, Death, Terror, Love!
But soon let your unrestful rapture cease,
Ye flaming Ethers thin,
Condensing till the abiding sweetness win
One sweet drop more;
One sweet drop more in the measureless increase
Of honied peace.
These are not seventeenth-century verse, but they are striking examples
of Victorian verse worked upon by two main influences from the
seventeenth century, and they bring Patmore representatively into line
on the one hand with the “florid and flowing schemes” of Tennyson, and
on the other with the “stiffer movement and graver tones” of Arnold.
And that outside both these he was also subject to the instincts of
Browning’s characteristic manner the following poem will show.
A woman is a foreign land,
Of which, though there he settle young,
A man will ne’er quite understand
The customs, politics and tongue.
The foolish hie them poste-haste thro’,
See fashions odd and prospects fair,
Learn of the language _How d’ye do?_
And go and brag they have been there.
The most for leave to trade apply
For once at Empire’s seat, her heart,
Then get what knowledge ear and eye
Glean chancewise in the life-long mart.
And certain others, few and fit,
Attach them to the Court and see
The Country’s best, its accent hit,
And partly sound its Polity.