No More Learning

His famous counsel to Shelley, too, might suggest
that he himself was, above all, a curious and elaborate artificer.
Some of his manuscripts, no doubt, support this impression.
Yet, Keats was not only extraordinarily spontaneous: he could
play lightly with the passing mood. His quick sensitiveness of
eye and ear and fancy tempted him along many poetic byways
beside the way he deliberately chose He did not write only in
his singing-robes, but delighted to weave pleasant rimes in familiar
undress. The brother and sister-in-law in America, and his friend
Reynolds, received many such rimed interludes in his letters-lively
fountains of verse springing up unbidden in the garden of his prose.
Such are the four poems, Robin Hood, Lines on the Mermaid
Tavern, Fancy and The Bards of Passion and of Mirth, all written
in the short couplet of L'Allegro, with a delicacy of music of which
Milton had helped him to the secret, and a daintiness and playful-
ness of fancy akin to Beaumont and Fletcher, and other haunters
of the Mermaid, bards of 'mirth’even more than of 'passion. '
It is natural to contrast with these light and sparkling improvisa-
tions the rich and concentrated style-loaded with gold in every
rift'-and the intricate interwoven harmonies of the majority of
the contemporary odes. But, most of these were impromptus, too,
.
born of the same sudden inspiration, and their crowded felicities
were not studiously inlaid, but of the vital essence of the speech.
A may morning, an autumn afternoon, a nightingale's song in a
Hampstead garden, a mood of dreamy relaxation after sleep-
from intense, almost momentary, experiences like these sprang
poems which, beyond anything else in Keats, touch a universal
note. In the earliest of these, the fragmentary Ode to Maia
(May 1818), the recent singer of Endymion breathes yet another
lyric prayer to the old divinities of antique Greece, seeking the
‘old vigour' of its bards, and, yet more, their noble simplicity,
'content' to make 'great verse' for few hearers. The author of
the preface to Endymion already possessed that temper; and, if
he ever won the pellucid purity of Greek speech, it was in these
lines. The other odes belonged to the spring of 1819, save Autumn,
the latest, written in September. Psyche, almost the last of the
6
>
7


## p. 90 (#114) #############################################

୨୦
Keats
[CH.
group, was, he tells his brother George, “the first and only one with
which I have taken even moderate pains. ' Yet this, like Indolence,
falls somewhat short of the flawless art of the rest. In both, he is,
at moments, luxuriant and unstrung like his earlier self. Psyche,
‘loveliest vision far' of faded Olympus, becomes now, like Maia, a
living symbol of the beauty he worships, and he will be the priest
of her sanctuary. The Miltonic reminiscences are palpable, and by
no means confined to an incidental phrase or image. The passing
of the gods of Greece, moving, in spite of himself, to the poet of the
Nativity Ode, Keats mourned more naively than Schiller had
done twenty years before; then, by a beautiful, perhaps 'illogical,'
transition, lament passes into a rapturous hymn to the deathless
Psyche whose living temple was the poet's mind. Indolence com-
memorates a mood, as genuine, indeed, but less nearly allied to the
creative springs of Keats’s genius. Love and ambition and poetry
itself appear as ghostly or masque-like figures on a 'dreamy urn’;
for them he builds no sanctuary, but turns away from their lure
to the honied joys of sense—the sweetness of 'drowsy noons,' his
'head cool-bedded in the flowery grass. '
In the nearly contemporary Ode on a Grecian Urn, the
symbolism of the urn-figures became far more vital. From the
drowsed intoxication of the senses, he rises to a glorious clear-eyed
apprehension of the spiritual eternity which art, with its unheard
melodies,' affords. The three consummate central stanzas have
themselves the impassioned serenity of great sculpture. Only less
noble are the daring and splendid imagery of the opening, and the
immortal paradox of the close. “Their lips touched not, but had
not bade adieu,' Keats later said of the sleeping lovers in Psyche,
recalling, perhaps, with the carved figures of the Grecian Urn,
the wistful joy of Melancholy. In both these great odes, however,
the words imply a more spiritual and complex passion than the
naïve bliss of Psyche and Cupid. They meant a stranger and rarer
insight into the springs of both joy and sorrow than was thus
conveyed. The worship of beauty is the clue to everything in
Keats; and, as he came to feel that an experience into which no
sadness enters belongs to an inferior order of beauty, so he found
the most soul-searching sorrow 'in the very Temple of Delight. '
But the emotional poise is other than in the Grecian Urn: there,
he contemplates the passing of 'breathing human beauty' from the
serene heights of eternal art; here, it fills him with a poignant,
yet subtly Epicurean, sadness. Melancholy is thus nearer to the
mood of Indolence, and, like it, suffers from some resurgence of


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IV]
91
Sonnets
the earlier Keats ; but the closing lines are of consummate quality.
In the Ode to a Nightingale, the work of a morning in his friend
Brown's Hampstead garden, the poignant sense of life as it is,
'where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,' and the reaching
out to a visionary refuge-the enchanted world created by the
bird's song—are present together, but with changing dominance,
the mood's ecstatic self-abandonment being shattered, at its very
acme, by the knell-like 'forlorn,' which 'tolls' him back to his
'sole self. '
In Autumn, finally, written after an interval of some months,
the sense that beauty, though not without some glorious com-
pensation, perishes, which, in varying degrees, dominates these
three odes, yields to a serene and joyous contemplation of beauty
itself. The 'season of mellow fruitfulness' wakens no romantic
vision, no romantic longing, like the nightingale's song; it satisfies
all senses, but enthralls and intoxicates none; everything breathes
contented fulfilment without satiety, and beauty, too, is fulfilled
and complete. Shelley, whose yet greater ode was written a few
weeks later, gloried in the 'breath of autumn's being'—the wild
west wind as the forerunner and 'creator' of spring. Keats feels
here no need either of prophecy or of retrospect. If, for a
moment, he asks 'Where are the songs of spring? ' it is only to
reply "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too. This is the
secret of his strength, if, also, of his limitation-to be able to
take the beauty of the present moment so completely into his
heart that it seems an eternal possession.
With one exception, the Autumn ode is the last great and
complete poem of Keats. The last of all, written a year later,
is, with Milton's Methought I saw, among the most moving of
English sonnets. Of the sixty-one sonnets he wrote, more than
thirty are later than those in the 1817 volume, already noticed,
and nearly all belong to the fifteen months following January
1818. He had written no sonnet during the last eight months
of 1817. But his close and eager study of Shakespeare's poems
towards the end of that year sent him back with renewed zest
to sonnet-writing, and, henceforth, after an interval of hesitation,
it was exclusively on the Shakespearean rime-scheme. The sonnet
which shows him most decisively under the spell of Shakespeare
(On sitting down to read King Lear once again, January 1818)
still, it is true, follows (save for the final couplet) the Petrarchian
form. But, a few days later, he wrote the noble When I have
fears, with the beautiful repetition of the opening phrase in each


## p. 92 (#116) #############################################

92
[CH.
Keats
quatrain, reminiscent of Shakespearean sonnets, such as In me
thou see'st. One or two, as the charming June's sea, copy the
Elizabethan manner too cleverly to be very like Keats, nor are
his mind and passion at all fully engaged. But, often, he pours
into the Shakespearean mould a phrase and music nobly his own.
To Homer (“Standing aloof') contains the line “There is a
budding morrow in midnight' which Rossetti pronounced the
noblest in English poetry. To Sleep is full of the poppied
enchantment of the Nightingale ode. A new, and tragic, note
sounds in The Day is gone, I cry you mercy-with one or
two exceptions (Ode to Fanny and To. . . ) the only reflection in
his poetry of the long agony of his passion for Fanny Brawne.
Finally, after a long interval, came that September day of 1820
when, 'for a moment,' writes Severn, he became like his former
self,' and wrote his last sonnet and last verse Bright star! He
still aspires, as in the great odes, towards something steadfast and
unchangeable; but now, when he is at the end of his career, and
aware that it is the end, the breathing human passion counts
more for him than the lone splendour of the star.
Save for this sonnet, the year 1820 was a blank. Even before
the seizure of 3 February, his poetic power had declined, though still
capable of glorious flashes such as redeem the revised Hyperion.
With the publication of his last volume, in July, some perception
of his real stature at length dawned in the high places of criticism.
Jeffrey, in The Edinburgh, did not conceal his admiration ; Byron
admitted that, in Hyperion, the surgeon's apprentice had really
'done something great’; Shelley, strangely indifferent to the rest
of the volume, declared that, if Hyperion were not grand poetry,
none had been written in his time. Neither Shelley nor Keats
completely understood each other ; but the younger poet here fell
short, both in critical discernment and in modesty, of the elder;
his chief recorded utterance about Shelley, and addressed to him,
expresses only the annoyance of a lover of fine phrases at the
‘magnanimity' of the idealist which stood in their way. Of the
fact that Shelley's mind, with some limitations from which he
was exempt, had a far larger reach than his own, he nowhere
betrays any perception. To Shelley's cordial overtures of friend-
ship, he had, throughout, responded with reserve; and an
invitation now received from him (August 1820), to spend the
winter with him in Italy, was declined. Even such companionship
could not be faced by a dying man. A month later, Keats set
out for Rome in care of the devoted Severn, who, during this


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IV]
93
Summary
6
last brief, sad phase of the poet's life, takes the place of the
no less devoted Brown. There, after a relapse from which he
never recovered, he died on 23 February 1821. Four days later,
he was buried in the protestant cemetery. In April, the self-
effacing epitaph which described him as 'one who had writ in
water' was magnificently belied by Adonais.
I am certain of nothing,' Keats once wrote, but the holiness
of the heart's affections and the Truth of Imagination. Neither
Wordsworth nor Shelley put so trenchantly the faith that was
implicit in the poetry of both. Nor would either have asserted
with the same daring simplicity that he had ' pursued the principle
of Beauty in all things. Abstractions distinguishable from beauty-
nature, liberty, love—and truths with which imagination had little
to do, counted for as much, or more, with both; and beauty itself is
with neither of them so comprehensive, with neither so near and
intimate, as it is with Keats. Shelley's worship is remote and
'intellectual,' at once too abstract and too simple to take in much
of the concrete and complex actual world. It was the 'Life of
Life,' and his gaze pressed home to it through the shimmering veil
of the material beauty by which other men's senses were arrested
and detained. It was a harmony, perfectly realised only in a
world completely at one with itself. The complexities and con-
flicts of life, and its resulting pain and sorrow, thus remained,
for him, purely evil things, of inferior status, even in poetry.
Keats could not compare with Shelley in range of ideas, but
neither was he weighted with Shelley's speculative incubus; if
his thought was not illuminated by Plato, neither was it distorted
by Godwin; if he had not access to the sublimities of Aeschylus,
he was steeped in the rich humanity of Shakespeare and Spenser
and Browne and Wordsworth. His whole imaginative and
emotional life was permeated by his eager and acute sensations ;
while his senses—it is but the other side of the same fact-were
transfigured by imagination and emotion. He projected himself
instinctively and eagerly into the nature of other living things, not
merely some 'immortal' nightingale whose song set wide the magic
casements of romance in his heart, but the mere sparrow picking
about the gravel before his window. He was no subtle-souled
psychologist like Coleridge, but he rendered emotions with a power
and richness in which exquisiteness of feeling and poignancy of
sensuous symbolism have equal part. Shelley's explanation of his
unlettered mastery of the myths of Greece— He was a Greek'
was more generous than apt; he was nearer akin to the Elizabethans,


## p. 94 (#118) #############################################

94
Keats
[CH. IV
6
nearer to Wordsworth, nearer even to Shelley himself; but he
recovered more completely than any of them the intense humanis-
ing vision of nature of which primeval myth was born. And he
won his way from the 'Asiatic 'luxury of his first work to a power
of striking home by the fewest and most familiar words, as in La
Belle Dame, which, utterly un-Greek in atmosphere and spirit, has
the magical simplicity of some lyrics of the Anthology. He did
not learn to express beauty so comprehensively as he perceived
and understood it; probably, he would never have approached in
drama the full compass of the beauty which lies, he knew, in the
agonies and strife of life--the beauty of
the fierce dispute
Between damnation and impassion'd clay
in King Lear or Macbeth. But, in the imaginative intensity of
single phrases, no English poet has come nearer to Shakespeare
or oftener recalls him.
And, in Hyperion, he showed himself master, not only of a
poetic speech for which no theme was too noble or too great, but
of a power of construction by no means to be explained by the
great example he had before him. It would be rash to say what in
poetry would have been beyond the reach of one who, at twenty-
five, compels the comparison with Shakespeare and Milton, and
yet, deeply as he came under their spell, was lifted by their genius
only into more complete possession of his own.


## p. 95 (#119) #############################################

CHAPTER V
LESSER POETS, 1790-1837
ROGERS, CAMPBELL, MOORE AND OTHERS
IN two wellknown lines of the dedication of Don Juan,
Byron, pursuing his quarrel with the lake poets, or, rather, with
Southey, but grouping the three in a common disparagement, laid
it down that
Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe will try
'Gainst you the question with posterity.
It is needless to say that posterity has decided that question,
group for group, in a sense opposite to the noble poet's real or
apparent anticipation. Southey, indeed, may have been “knocked
out of the competition, on the one side, in the general opinion, and
Scott and Crabbe, on the other, may hold their ground, though
with considerably fewer points to their credit than Wordsworth
and Coleridge. But something like critical unanimity or, at least, ,
a vast majority of critical votes, would disallow, despite admitted
merits, the possibility of Rogers, Campbell and Moore continuing
the fight on anything like even terms. Still, the grouping remains;
and, as Scott falls out of any possible treatment in such a chapter
as this and Crabbe has received his measure already, the remaining
poets of Byron's fancy may properly occupy us first, to be followed
by a large and, in few cases, quite uninteresting or undistinguished
train of poets, sometimes of rare excellence in special lines,
but, now for this reason now for that, not classable or, at any rate,
not generally classed, among the greater singers. The whole body
will represent, in some cases with a little overflow, the time
before the appearance of distinctly Victorian poets—the time, for
the most part, anterior to that most noteworthy 'Lament for Dead
Makers' which Wordsworth, less happily than Dunbar, called An
Extempore Efusion on the Death of James Hogg, which mentions


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96
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
a
other and greater writers than the Ettrick shepherd, and which
actually marks an important dividing line between the dead and
the living poets of the earlier nineteenth century, when a full third
of that century had passed.
The “knock-out' above suggested in Southey's case might or
might not really have surprised Byron ; for it is clear that it was
Southey's principles and personality, rather than his poetry,
that annoyed his assailant. But he might have been much more
certainly disappointed at the corresponding drop in the public
estimation of Rogers. At the present time, it is probably a very
exceptional thing to find anyone who, save in a vague traditional
way, thinks of the author of The Pleasures of Memory as a poet
at all; and, even where that tradition survives, it is extremely
;
questionable whether it is often supported by actual reading. At
one time, of course, Rogers was quite a popular poet; and it is
a task neither difficult nor disagreeable for the literary historian
to trace the causes of his popularity. He had, like Campbell, the
very great advantage of beginning at a dead season and, again like
Campbell, he had the further, but more dangerous, advantage of
writing in a style which, while thoroughly acceptable to established
and conventional criticism, had certain attractions for the tastes,
as yet undeveloped, which were to bring about new things. He
kept this up later, with some deliberate heed to younger tastes,
in Italy and Jacqueline, thus shifting, but still retaining, his grasp.
His wealth left him free to write or not, exactly as he pleased :
and, in the famous case of Italy itself, to reinforce his work in
a manner which appealed to more tastes than the purely literary by
splendid presentation with the aid of great pictorial art. If he had
a sharp tongue, and, perhaps, not exactly a kind heart, he had
a very generous disposition; and he was most powerfully assisted
by the undefinable gift, by no means a necessary consequence of
his affluence, which enabled a parvenu to become something like
a master of society. He really had taste of various kinds : he
might have been a greater poet if he had had less. And so he hit
the bird of public taste on several of its many wings.
But the greater number, if not the whole, of these attractions
have now ceased to attract; like the plates of Italy itself, they have
generally become 'foxed’ with time. We ask, nowadays, simply,
Was Rogers a poet ? ' and, if so, 'What sort of a poet was he? '
There cannot, for reasons above glanced at, be many people whose
answer to this question would be worth much, unless it is based
on a dispassionate re-reading of the documents in the case. Such


## p. 97 (#121) #############################################

v]
Rogers
97
a re-reading may, to some extent, qualify earlier and more impul-
sive judgments of the same critic; but it is not likely, whatever
power of correcting his impressions that critic may possess, to
produce any very material alteration of opinion. For Rogers, very
distinctly and unmistakably, comes on one side of the dividing line
which marks off sheep from goats in this matter; though, on
which side the goats are to be found and on which the sheep
will depend entirely on the general and foregone attitude of the
investigator of poetry. Rogers's subjects are good ; his treatment
of them is scholarly, and never offends against the ordinary canons
of good taste ; his versification is smooth and pleasing on its own
limited scale; from some points of view, he might be pronounced
an almost faultless writer. But will all this make him a poet? If
it will not, we might, perhaps, explain the failure worse than by
applying to him that opposition of 'quotidian' and 'stimulant’
which his very near contemporary William Taylor of Norwich
devised as a criterion; which Carlyle laughed at; which Taylor
himself made somewhat ridiculous in application ; but which has
something to say for itself, and which will not be found quite
useless in regard to many, if not most, of the subjects of this
chapter.
Rogers is always quotidian. You may read The Pleasures of
Memory at different times of life (and the more different these
periods and the longer the intervals the better). It is not difficult
or unpleasant to read ; and though, if not at first, certainly a little
later, you may feel pretty sure that, if Akenside, on the one hand,
and Goldsmith, on the other, had not written, The Pleasures of
Memory might never have been, this is far from fatal. The question
is 'What has it positively to give you? ' Here is one of its very
best couplets :
Ethereal Power! who at the noon of night
Recallst the far-fled spirit of delight.
That is good; ‘far-fled spirit of delight' is good. But is it, to
borrow once more La Rochefoucauld's injurious comparison, 'de-
licious'? Is it even satisfying ? Could you not very well do
without it? Now, the phrases of a real poet, though there are,
fortunately, thousands and myriads of them, are always delicious;
they are always satisfying; and no one of them will enable you to
do without any of the others.
Let us try another text and test. The duke of Wellington
(as Rogers himself most frankly records in a note to the poem)
had told Rogers, with his usual plainness of speech and absence
7
E. L. XII.
CH. V.


## p. 98 (#122) #############################################

98
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837 [CH.
>
of pose, a striking story, how, when he went to sleep after the
great slaughter of Assaye,
whenever I woke, which I did continually through the night, it struck me
that I had lost all my friends : nor could I think otherwise till morning came
and, one by one, I saw those that were living.
We know vaguely what mighty use the poets, the real poets, from
Shakespeare (one might even say from Chaucer) to Shelley would
have made of this. If the comparison with these be thought
unfair, we can guess from isolated touches in poems like Lochiel
and Lord Ullin's Daughter what a contemporary, a companion in
Byron's group and, as we may say, a “schoolfellow' like Campbell
could have made of it. This is the commonplace and conventional
generality which it suggested to Rogers :
Where many an anxious, many a mournful thought,
Troubling, perplexing, on his heart and mind
Preyed, ere to arms the morning trumpet called.
With equal frankness it would be unkind to call it insensibility),
he wrote Italy partly in verse partly in prose ; and there must
have been some, perhaps many, to whom the illiberal but critical
thought must have suggested itself “Why not all in prose ? ' The
somewhat famous story of Ginevra would have lost little; and,
perhaps, only one piece, and that the best of all, “The Campagna
of Rome,' might be saved, in almost its own figure, by the lines
6
Once again
We look; and lo! the sea is white with sails
Innumerable, wafting to the shore
Treasures untold; the vale, the promontories
A dream of glory; temples, palaces,
Called up as by enchantment; aqueducts
Among the groves and glades, rolling along
Rivers on many an arch high overhead-
And in the centre, like a burning sun
The Imperial City.
Let us leave Rogers with that line and a half and with only a
historical, not a spiteful, reference to Paradise Regained; for
hardly anywhere else, in short poem or in long, has he come so near
the 'poetic moment,' even if he has come near, also, to Milton in
more senses than one.
Not thus ungraciously can any critic speak of Campbell ; but,
anyone who spoke of him with unmixed graciousness would hardly
be a critic. To him, the moment' just mentioned was no stranger;
a


## p. 99 (#123) #############################################

v]
Campbell
99
they met, and he made almost or quite the best of it, again and
again. He has the glorious distinction of being, in three different
pieces, nearer than any other poet among many to being a
perfect master of the great note of battle-poetry. Of these, one,
Ye Mariners of England, is, to some extent, an adaptation,
though an immense improvement on its original; and The Battle
of the Baltic has some singular spots on its sun. But Hohenlinden
is unique; subject and spirit, words and music make an indivisible
quaternity and, except in two or three passages of Homer and
Aeschylus, there is nothing anywhere that surpasses the last and
culminating stanza in poignant simplicity. Perhaps no other poem
of Campbell can be named with these three, as a whole, but most of
his earlier and shorter poems give flashes of undoubted poetry.
There is no space here for a miniature anthology of these blooms;
but some of them are universally known, and no one with an eye
and ear for poetry can read, without recognising it in them,
Lochiel's Warning, Lord Ullin's Daughter (the central jewel of
this, however hackneyed, must be excepted for quotation,
a
And in the scowl of Heaven each face
Grew dark as they were speaking),
the less known, but, in parts, extremely beautiful Lines on Re-
visiting a Scene in Argyllshire, The Soldier's Dream, The Last
Man and others. All these are of a tragic and, if not romantic,
romantesque cast; but Campbell has retained not a little of the
eighteenth century epigram in such lines as the other stock
quotation
The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below.
He had a bluff felicity, as in The Song of Hybrias the Cretan,
which is not too common at any time; and, in other songs, such as
Withdraw not yet those lips and fingers, or How delicious is the
winning, there are strange reminiscences of that seventeenth
century feeling to which he sometimes did justice in his critical
Specimens and which greater singers have not been able to
command in their actual verse.
So far so good; but, unfortunately, no historical account of
Campbell's poetry can be arrested at this point. He did not write
much verse in his fairly long life; not because he was prevented
by untoward circumstances (for, though he had some hackwork to
do, it was never oppressive or prohibitory), but, apparently, because
he did not feel inclined to write much. But, at a rough guess, he
SAY! !
7-2


## p. 100 (#124) ############################################

Іоо
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
wrote some six or seven thousand lines in all, and it is certain that
the poems referred to above, even taking the bad or indifferent
(which, in some, is the much larger) part with the good, do not
amount to anything like six or seven hundred. The long, or
comparatively long, Pleasures of Hope, which at once made his
fame and his fortune, is much better (though Byron did not think
80) than its companion and predecessor Memory, for, as has been
said, Campbell was a poet and Rogers, save by chance-medley, was
not. But, with less flatness, it has nearly as much artificiality;
it scarcely ever gets beyond metred rhetoric; and this rhetoric
itself, as in the tag
And Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell,
6
is not always firstrate. Freedom, whether she sits crowned upon
the heights or, for the time, dies fighting on the field, has something
else to do than to shriek. Of the other long poems, Gertrude of
Wyoming, perhaps, is the clumsiest caricature of the Spenserian
stanza ever achieved by a man of real poetic power; the comparison
with Thomson which has sometimes been made of it is an insult to
The Castle of Indolence; and it is even far below Beattie. As for
Theodoric and The Pilgrim of Glencoe, they have, from the first,
been carefully confessed and avoided' by Campbell's warmest
admirers when these had any taste at all. But, it may be said,
this long-poem practice was not his vein. The accidents of time
and other things had, in the dead season of 1799, made The
Pleasures of Hope a success, and he had to try to repeat it.
But he did not by any means confine himself to these long
poems; and it will have been noticed that, even in reference to
the shorter ones and the best of them, it was necessary to speak in
all but one instance with reservations. In his Specimens, Campbell
showed himself, though rather a limited, not a bad, critic, and,
though his dislikel to the prevailing romantic school (which yet he
followed in a sidelong and recalcitrant manner) made him take
a questionable part in the Bowles-Pope controversy, he was not
contemptible there. But, of self-criticism at least of such self-
criticism as prevents a man from publishing inferior work—he
seems to have had little or nothing. It would be dangerous to
take his asserted confession, at one moment, that The Pleasures of
Hope was 'trash,' as a serious utterance; besides, it is not exactly
1 It has been urged that, in 1842, he acknowledged the greatness of Wordsworth.
“'Tis somewhat late, as the voice said in Christmas Eve and Easter Day, but, no
doubt, better than never.


## p. 101 (#125) ############################################

v]
Campbell
IOI
that. Yet, he could deliberately publish, as a version of a chorus
in Medea, the following lines:
Hallowed Earth! with indignation
Mark! oh mark! the murderous deed-
Radiant eye of wide creation
Watch the accursed infanticide(ceed].
In the vales of placid gladness
Let no rueful maniac range;
Chase afar the fiend of madness,
Wrench the dagger from Revengeſvange).
a
a
Which looks like an attempt to match Pope's Song by a Person of
Quality in the serious blood-and-thunder vein. Nor, if he is
seldom quite so bad as this, does he avoid, in a very large number
of cases, coming only too near to it.
Cases of 'the poet dying young' (all Campbell's best work was
done when he was a little past thirty) and the man surviving are,
of course, common enough; and, in most of them, there is little or
no need to seek for a special and philosophical explanation. In
Campbell's, we may, perhaps, find a particular one beyond the
undoubted and obvious fact that the springs of his Helicon were
neither frequent nor full; and that it required a special stamp
of one breed of Pegasus to set them flowing. He probably suffered
not a little from being, in a rather peculiar manner, recalcitrant to
his time. He was younger than Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott
and Southey, and, though he did not live to be a very old man,
Tennyson's Poems of 1842 and Browning's Bells and Pomegranates,
1841, were published before his death. But he withstood the
romantic grace, and yet he could not thoroughly rest and be
content with the older classical dispensation. It has been said
that Collins would probably have benefited unequivocally by the
chance of writing at the time when Campbell actually did write.
It is not too great a compliment to the author of Hohenlinden
to say that there are not a few touches in him which remind us of
Collins. But, if he did not exactly, in the language of his own
country, sin the mercies' that Collins did not receive, he made little
use of them. And so he remains an interesting example, both in
himself and to literary history, of the dangers of a transition period.
It can hardly be said that either Rogers or Campbell is a
difficult poet to criticise, for, though estimates of both may differ
considerably, the difference, as hinted already, will depend almost
entirely on the general attitude of the particular critic towards poetry


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102
[CH.
Lesser Poets, ,
1790—1837
-a thing which can be allowed for, and compensated, with almost
mathematical accuracy.
No such process seems to be available in
the case of the third remaining member of Byron's selected group',
Moore. It is almost unnecessary to say that he was extraordinarily
popular in his own time; and this popularity had the most solid
results, running hard, in all material ways, that of Scott and Byron.
Not only did he receive three thousand pounds for the copyright
of Lalla Rookh, but the actual sale of the much shorter and vastly
inferior Loves of the Angels brought him in one thousand in the
first few months. Although not a few of the Irish Melodies are
masterpieces in their own kind, it would be interesting to know if
any other poet ever received, as Moore is said to have done, during
a great number of years, 'a hundred guineas apiece' or their
equivalent at the time, for each of more than a hundred and thirty
short songs? The Paradise Lost comparison, misleading as it
may be, certainly does come rather pat here. But the rebate of
posthumous criticism on this prodigal reward has been heavy.
For something like half a century it has been rare to find an
estimate of Moore which, if not positively contemptuous, has not
been at least apologetic. He is, perhaps, the best example existing
to prove that, in literature, an accumulation of venial sins is much
more dangerous than the commission of one capital sin or even
more; and that, to any but exceptionally critical judgments to that
manner happily born, and in that manner carefully bred, such an
accumulation will not be compensated by an accompanying ac-
cumulation of non-capital merits.
And yet, Moore's sins are but slight; in no case more than
defects, and, in some cases, capable of being vindicated from the
charge of being sins at all; while his merits are extremely numerous
and, in some cases, of a kind the reverse of vulgar. It is not true
that he was, in any bad sense, a toadeater, though, in certain ways,
like Kingsley's John Brimblecombe, he might appear to have 'a
gnathonical or parasitic spirit. ' He had, indeed, a catlike dis-
position to curl himself up near something or somebody comfortable;
1 We have—a trivial but not quite irrelevant fact—one record in Moore's own pleasant
words (Poems, 1. vol. edn, p. 432 and note) of a meeting of all this group except Scott,
with no one else present, at dinner in Campbell's house at Sydenham. Into further
biographical details, save those glanced at in the text, it is not necessary to enter in
the case of any of the three. All lived literary lives of the ordinary kind, varied, in
Rogers’s case, with a little business; in his, and in Moore's, with a great deal of
society; and in all with a certain amount of foreign travel. Campbell's domestic
life was rather exceptionally unhappy, by no one's fault; Moore's was very happy.
? Even if there is a mistake here, and the payment was 'a hundred guineas a part,'
of which there were ten and a supplement, it would have been handsome.


## p. 103 (#127) ############################################

v]
103
Moore
and it is amusing to find that, even in Paris, he was wretched till
he managed to find a new Mayfield or Sloperton, not at Lord
Moira's or Lord Lansdowne's door, but in 'a cottage belonging to
our kind Spanish friends the V. . . . . . Is, and a few steps from their
house. But it does not appear that Moore was any more in-
clined to put up with insulting treatment than the cat itself is.
Nobody ever doubted his courage, though the Jeffrey duel may
have had a touch of the ludicrous; his conduct in the difficulties
brought upon him by the fraud and flight of his deputy at Bermuda
presents a memorable contrast, refreshing on his side if saddening
on the other, to the conduct of Theodore Hook in almost precisely
similar circumstances; and, even with that rather difficult person
Byron, he seems to have maintained perfectly independent rela-
tions. For some time past, indeed, there has been a tendency to
affect disgust at his destruction of Byron's Memoirs. One would
like to be quite sure, considering the symptoms of public taste at
all times and certainly not least of late, whether resentment at the
loss of something supposed to be piquant and naughty has not
more to do with this than virtuous indignation at an imputed
breach of trust. At any rate, it is nearly certain that, putting
certain famous cruces aside, the Memoirs were much more likely
to show Byron's bad side than his good one; that they were left
to Moore in absolute property; and that their publication would
have brought him in far more money than the Life, good as it was
and handsomely as it was remunerated.
But someone may say 'Never mind his character or his life.
He shall be a not dishonourable little fellow if you like. But
there is a foible, if not a taint, all over his literature. He is almost
always trivial; and, even when he is not that, he is never intense.
He never reaches passion, but only sentiment; and that sentiment
is too often mawkish if not even rancid. He is almost purely
imitative—at least in poems of any pretension. He is a clever
craftsman, but never a real artist. He plays with patriotism,
with politics, with everything. His “prettiness" is only a mincing
artificial variety; and his “favour" was a thing of mere fashion,
not long out of date. ' That, one believes, is a pretty fair summary
of the unfavourable, which seems to have become also the general,
attitude to Moore; for nobody pays much attention now to the
schoolboy 'improprieties of the ‘Little' poems, which were never
very shocking, and of which, indeed, the poems have been purged
in all their legitimate editions for more than a century.
And, certainly, no person of sense will regard Moore as a serious


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104
[ch.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
'traitor. ' Indeed, it is a clause in the more savage indictments
that his nationalism was wholly insincere. The more moderate
charge suggested above can, perhaps, be best traversed by a counter
statement a little more in detaill.
There can be little doubt that Moore has suffered in more
ways than one from the extreme voluminousness of his writings.
The standard one-volume edition of his Poems, subtracting The
Epicurean (an exceedingly good piece of ornate prose), contains
nearly seven hundred double columned pages, which frequently
themselves contain from eighty to a hundred lines apiece. The
table of contents fills nearly twenty columns, with sometimes sixty
entries in each—the individual poems running from a distich to
a series of some thousands of lines. It does not suit the habits of
the present day to read all this; still less, to take the slight trouble
necessary to understand it; for much of it is 'occasional' and
requires commentary. And yet, it may be said unhesitatingly that,
unless the whole of it is read, or, at least, what seems to the present
writer an impossibly exhaustive selection of all its departments,
Moore will not be properly known.
For one remarkable point about him will otherwise escape
notice; and that is the curiously pervading and adequate character
of such goodness as he possesses. Moore may not meet the lofty
demands of lovers of “high seriousness, but he is never bad
except in his few and short serious satires, Corruption, Intolerance,
etc. , where he was trying something-and a very difficult thing-
for which he was not in the least fitted; and in the rant of the
'Phelim Connor' letters in The Fudge Family, which may itself
have been intended as satire of the kind which he could manage. He
may not soar very high, he may not dive very deep; but he skims
the surface with a curiously light, deft and variously fluttering wing.
Trivial he may be; mediocre, in a certain sense, he may be; but
one remembers the just protest of even the severe Boileau in
another case-Il n'est pas médiocrement gai; and some would
add and maintain pretty stoutly that, now and then, Il n'est pas
médiocrement tendre.
One thing no competent and fairminded enemy has ever
6
1 To bring compurgators' for Moore at any length here would be superfluous. But
Hazlitt's praise, though it has been discounted as due to political partisanship, must
not be neglected. And those who think it sufficient to dismiss Moore with the stock
ticket of 'tawdry' should, perhaps, be informed that Hartley Coleridge, a very con-
siderable critic and a man than whom it is hardly possible to imagine anyone
more unlike Moore in blood, temper, literary tastes and almost everything else, quite
seriously called the Irish poet's Pegasus 'a milk-white palfrey with rainbow wings. '


## p. 105 (#129) ############################################

v]
105
Moore
denied him—an almost unique faculty of marrying words to music
and music to words. Part of this skill, it may be said, has little or
nothing to do with poetical merit, but another part of it has; and
Moore has rarely received sufficient credit for the remarkable skill
with which he effects strictly prosodic variations. But the still
more purely poetical value, excluding even prosodic considerations,
of the best of his songs in Irish Melodies, in National Airs and
in half a dozen other collections has been strangely belittled by
some good judges. Grant that to transfer Ben Jonson's scorn
from prose to verse, some of the most popular, such as The Minstrel
Boy and The Last Rose of Summer, and a good many others are
somewhat 'flashy things,' only prejudice or that lack of freshness
of taste which transfers its own faults to the things distasted, or
sheer insensibility, can deny a true, if not the rarest or finest,
poetic touch to Oft in the stilly night (however little fond one may
be of forms like 'stilly'), At the mid hour of night when stars
are weeping (a wonderful rhythm), I saw from the beach and
others yet which might be named almost by dozens. The
notes to Lalla Rookh (which nobody need read) are said to bore
a generation which thinks it knows everything already; and the
verse-tale of this particular kind is wholly out of fashion. Yet,
there are some who, after knowing the poem almost by heart in
youth and reading it at different times later, have still found 'The
Veiled Prophet' a much more interesting person to read about
than some others of their youthful acquaintances; while, in the
way of light, sweet, meringue-like verse, 'Paradise and the Peri'
is still not easily to be beaten.
Moreover, even Moore's lightest verse can only be neglected
at no small loss. Our fathers well knew The Fudge Family
in their French and English experiences, and The Two-Penny
Post Bag and the cloud of minor satiric trifles; and scores of
delectable tags which enliven other peoples' work were borrowed
from them. The felicitous impertinence, neither ill-natured nor
ill-bred, which Moore had at command is, perhaps, nowhere better
shown than in the famous or should-be famous suggestion as to
Rokeby (put quite properly in a publisher's mouth) that Scott
Having quitted the Borders to seek new renown
Is coming by long quarto stages to town,
And beginning with Rokeby (the job's sure to pay)
Means to do all the gentlemen's seats by the way.
But there are a thousand examples of it nearly or quite as good,
and it attaches itself to matters political, social, ecclesiastical and


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106
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
miscellaneous in a way that ought to amuse, and could not
seriously annoy, anyone who has not a rather regrettable proportion
of the dunce or of the prig or of both in his composition. This
mediocrity, really not ungolden and not of the kind that the Latin
sentence blasts, is the note of all Moore's verse-sentimental or
jocular. If it offends exclusive lovers of the sublime, they must
be offended; but there is a fortunate possibility of being able
to appreciate Shakespeare or Shelley, Milton or Keats, at the
greatest perfection of any or all, and yet to find a pastime of
pleasure, now and then, in Moore's abundant store of sentiment
that, if sometimes more or less superficial, is never wholly insincere,
and in his satire which, if never lethal, is always piquant.
The three poets just discussed, while, in at least two cases, they
deserve their place at the head of this chapter by a certain com-
parative ‘majority'in real worth, and in all three by prescription,
have, also, an independent historical right to it. They all (it was
the reason of Byron's selection of them for his battle-royal of
poets) affected, in different ways, the older or classical school.
We may now turn from them to a larger and younger group who,
partly, no doubt, because of their being younger, belong decidedly
to the other school or division. They represent the generation
born between the birth-years of Keats and Tennyson ; and
it has sometimes been proposed to make of them a definite
batch or squad of intermediates between the first and definitely
Georgian romantic group from Wordsworth to Keats himself and
the definitely Victorian poetry (harbingered before strictly Vic-
torian times, but carried out in them) by Tennyson, the Brownings
and their followers. There is, perhaps, some better excuse for
this than a mere rage for classification. To exercised critical
judgments, a certain transitional character does certainly pervade
all or most of this company. They were not in a position, as
Tennyson and Browning were if they chose, to imbibe the influence
of all their great elders just mentioned, before they themselves
wrote, or at least published, anything. The strong places of
pedagogy and of criticism were still, in their youthful time, largely,
if not universally, occupied by what their own French contem-
poraries disrespectfully called perruques. If there had been any
man of absolutely firstrate genius among them, this state of things
might not merely have provoked revolt—which it did—but have
brought about the complete victories afterwards achieved by their
own juniors. But they all belonged to the new crusade, and, if


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v]
107
Hartley Coleridge
none of them quite reached Jerusalem, they did notable things
somewhere about Antioch.
We may list them alphabetically as follows: Beddoes, Hartley
Coleridge, Darley, Hood, Richard Henry (fantastically Hengist)
Horne, Praed, Sir Henry Taylor, Thomas Wade, C. J. Wells and
Charles Whitehead. Their births date from that of Darley, in the
same year with that of Keats, to Wade's, ten years later, and group
themselves symmetrically in a single decade, on either side of the
parting of the centuries. They have all felt strongly the literary
influences which helped to determine the work of the greater
group before them the recovery of older (especially Elizabethan)
English literature; the discovery of foreign; the subtle revival of
imagination that is not confined to “ideas furnished by the senses’;
the extension of interest in natural objects and the like. If
whatever influence may be assigned to the French revolution and
the great war is less immediate with them, it has, in their case,
the strength of retrospect and the fresh impetus of the unsettled
state of politics, society and thought, which the revolution and the
war left behind them. But there is still about them a great deal
a
that is undigested and incomplete; and no one of them has a genius,
or even a temperament, strong enough to wrest and wrench him
out of the transition stage.
Nearly the eldest, the most famous by birth and promise, but,
in a way, the most unfortunate, was Hartley Coleridge? There is
neither space nor necessity here to tell over again the pitiful story
of the promise of his youth, recorded not merely by his father but
by men so little given to mere sentimentalism as Southey and
Wordsworth, and of the lamentable failure of his manhood. It is
permissible to think that he was harshly and rather irrationally
treated at Oriel. If a probationer fellow disqualifies himself by
drunkenness, he does not deserve a solatium of £300, and, if he
deserves a solatium of £300, his fault can scarcely have been one
of a hopelessly disqualifying nature. But, however great may
have been the shock of disappointment at this disgrace, and at the
loss of the life of studious ease for which alone he was fitted, it
cannot have caused, though it may have determined and rendered
incurable, that fatal paralysis of will which he inherited from his
1 Anyone who wishes to appreciate Hartley should look at the generally neglected
fragment of his Prometheus, which, it is important to remember, preceded Shelley's
masterpiece. 8. T. C. 's adverse criticism (he was rather a Roman father in that
respect, if not in others) and, perhaps, the Oriel calamity arrested the composition.
It must have been, no doubt, in any case, & much lesser thing than Shelley's; but it
would have been not damagingly different, and it might have been good.
a


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108
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
father in an aggravated form. This not merely hampered him in
schoolmastering—that is not surprising—but stunted and made
abortive the poetical and critical genius which he certainly pos-
sessed. He did attain, by good luck, by kindness of friends and by
his own indifference to elaborate comfort, a life, if not of studious
ease, at least of almost entire, or very slightly taxed, leisure, with
considerable facility for poetic and other composition. On the
margins of books and even newspapers, as well as in a few finished
and published papers, he showed that he possessed a critical faculty
not much short, on individual points, of his father's or of Hazlitt's;
and he also wrote verse. But a fanciful eugenist might have
argued that Hartley only inherited that portion of poetical spirit
which his father had shown before the child's own birth. The
greater part of Hartley's poems certainly makes one think rather
of the Coleridge before 1797 than of the poet of The Ancient
Mariner and Kubla Khan and Christabel. He knew his limits
('I am one of the small poets '), though the beautiful and touching
piece Poietes Apoietes-
No hope have I to live a deathless name-
half contradicts its own assertion: and to it may be added the fine
sonnet to Shakespeare (which, with Matthew Arnold's companion
poem in verse and Dryden's short description in prose, may be
ranked for combined adequacy and brevity, on a thousand times'
attempted subject), the striking pair on Youth, A Medley, the
most Shakespearean of Shakespearean imitations,
When I review the course that I have run;
the Homer, almost as good as the Shakespeare, the sonnet on the
extraordinarily difficult subject Prayer and one or two others.
The 'sonnet's narrow ground' just suited Hartley; for, though the
far-brought fancies of his youth did not wholly desert his age, they
found no power in him to carry them further still, or shape them
into abiding and substantial form. Nor is it too charitable, too
fanciful, or too obvious, to assign part, at least, of his failure to his
time-a time with the old assisting convictions or conventions
broken down and the new not firmly set.
Thomas Hood and Winthrop Mackworth Praed, though moving
in very different spheres and, so far as one knows, strangers to
one another in life, are indissolubly associated in literature, owing
to the singular 'double arrangement of their combination of
serious and comic work, and of the character of at least the


## p. 109 (#133) ############################################

v]
Hood
109
comic work of both. This latter, in its more special aspect, may
be postponed for a little, so that we may group it further in a way
not unimportant or uninteresting to the historical student of
literature. It is sufficient here to dismiss as unprofitable and
unnecessary the question whether, in any case, serious or comic,
there was a debt owing on either side to the other. Mere partisans
have sometimes excited themselves over this question, but it is of
no real importance. Although they pair off in so remarkable a
manner, each, to eyes of any critical discernment, has a perfectly
sufficient idiosyncrasy. It was long the case, and it may be doubted
whether it has entirely ceased to be so, that the fame of Hood's
serious work was largely, if not completely, obscured by that of
his comic, with the exception of the two great popular-sentimental
favourites The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs. It is
well known that Thackeray, in one of those impulsive outbursts
which have been often misinterpreted, expressed himself as rather
indignant at Hood's comic avocation from his real business. No
man's memory and reputation have been more cruelly overloaded
and overwhelmed by the publication of heaps of what is only not
sheer rubbish because it served once to win bread for a true poet
and an admirable man of letters, and because there is nothing in
it in the least disgraceful. But, apart even from the very best of
the comic work, which is to be noticed later, apart from the
'sensational pieces' The Song and The Bridge, which make their
appeal at once to all those who are likely to appreciate them,
Hood has to his credit a body of purely serious poetical work
neither aiming at mere popularity, nor deliberately eschewing it,
work to be taken at a purely poetic valuation and judged on
that, which (even though fifteen editions of it sold in as many
years after his death) is still far too often neglected, and, even
when not quite neglected, is far too seldom accorded its proper rank.
It was, perhaps, in the circumstances, a minor misfortune-
similar to the major one of the huge unsifted dust-heap of the
Works—that there were included in the collection of his Serious
Poems, made just after his death, even such in themselves excellent
things as Miss Kilmansegg and the Clapham Academy ode. For
public taste was, is and probably always will be, not merely a 'great-
sized monster of ingratitudes' but one of haste, indiscrimination
1 It turns very mainly on the other question of priority in the use of what has been
called 'antithetical punning. ' This, even as regards the bare chronology of the writings
of the two, is doubtful; and every one ought to know that there are much older examples,
which each might have taken as pattern, independently, if either wanted any pattern
at all.
6


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IIO
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
and other bad things. It had been accustomed to consider Hood
a mere joke-smith; and it was sure to fix on these and one or two
others as instances of his real vocation. All this serio-comic or
tragi-comic stuff were much better segregated, and the removal
would leave nearly three quarters of a volume of some four
hundred pages full of poetry pure and simple. Nothing in this is
rubbish; some of it is extraordinarily good. The Haunted House
is one of the minor, and not so very minor, marvels of English
poetry. The only objection that one can imagine as being brought
against it, by anyone who can appreciate it at all, is that the
craftsmanship is almost too unconcealedly and obtrusively perfect?
-the accumulation of the unusual, stately, mournful rhythm of
the stanza; the carefully constructed and diffused detail and the
atmosphere of decay, destruction and dread; the as careful selection
of language tending to the same object but never diverging into
extravagance or the disgusting; above all, the triumphant avoid-
ance of that slip into the ludicrous which these horror-plays
and poems constantly commit. The Elm Tree is nearly as good,
though, perhaps, it might have been shortened. The more popular
Eugene Aram and The Bridge of Sighs itself are not flawless,
but the grimness of the one and the pathos of the other could have
been attained by none save a true poet. The Plea of the Mid-
summer Fairies may be thought to need no praise after Lamb's;
yet, it may not be impertinent, and it is certainly not rash, to
pronounce it, after nearly a hundred years, the most charming poem
of some size and pretension which has missed its due meed of
general appreciation during the interval. It was rather unwise
to try Hero and Leander again; and the anapaestic metre of
Lycus the Centaur was ill chosen—the gallop of the centaur
probably suggested it. Yet, if anyone will read these two
poems patiently he will hardly think otherwise than nobly of
them.
But Hood was by no means only a master of the heavier plectrum.
He could write songs and shorter pieces generally, light, but not in
the least comic, with singular skill. Some of these, no doubt, have
been confounded, with Moore'sand others, under the generalcensure-
tickets tinkling,' 'trivial,'tawdry,' sentimental’ and what not.
Anyone who chooses may, of course, pin one or another, or several,
of these epithets to A Death Bed, and even to the great Farewel,
Life stanzas written on his own death-bed; to the ballad (It was
>
6
1 Wordsworth, it may be remembered, made no very different objection from this
to The Ancient Mariner itself.


## p. 111 (#135) ############################################

v]
III
Praed
not in the Winter) of the time of roses; to Fair Ines and A lake
and a Fairy boat and the bitter-sweet irony of Spring it is cheery
and the stateliness and fervour of Giver of glowing light and The
stars are with the Voyager. But a more catholic criticism will
simply disregard tickets or, perhaps, detach them and throw them
on the rubbish heap, their appointed place, saying, 'These things
are poetry: and this was a poet. '
Merely as a serious poet, Praed holds a far lower place than
Hood; in fact, with one doubtful exception, to be noticed
presently, he has nothing at all to compare with The Haunted
House or The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, and not much to
show with the shorter poems. Arminius escapes the bad side of
mediocrity in one way and Josephine in another ; but the best
and, perhaps, the only distinguished thing Praed has done in this
kind is the strange and beautiful Time's Song,
O’er the level plains, where mountains meet me as I go,
unusual and effective alike in rhythm, in the phrase adroitly broken
to suit the rhythmical movement, and in the economy of con-
struction, detail and explanation, leading up to a kind of the rest
is silence. ' But he never repeated this in a short poem, or
expanded the method in a longer. The fact is that the ironic
.
and humourous impulse, partly, no doubt, determined by Byronic
influence at first, but diverging into ways not in the least like
Byron's, was generally omnipresent and omnipotent with him,
and almost invariably deflected his treatment into the sort of
mixed mode which Southey had started in things like The Old
Woman of Berkeley, and which Barham, a much older man than
Praed, was to practise with signal success a little later. Not
a few both of the Tales and of other pieces, from the schoolboy
Gog onwards, have this hybrid character. But it produced at least
one thing which is a masterpiece of its kind and which contrasts
again most curiously with Hood's tragi-comedy. In this latter,
The Desert Born, Miss Kilmansegg herself and the rest, the
comic (even where there is positively tragic matter) always has
the upper hand and, sometimes, burlesques the tragic itself. The
Red Fisherman bas, of course, a comic side or, rather, one may
say, a comic outside or jacket to it; and it is full of excursions in
themselves comical. But these are used almost in the manner in
which Shakespeare uses similar devices, sometimes to set off that
seriousness which, no doubt, is greater in him than in Praed.
With Hood, the “finish,' as wine-tasters say, the flavour that is


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II2
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790–1837
as he
left in the mouth, is always comic unless he is wholly serious.
The reader of The Red Fisherman, if he be a fit reader, laughs
passes at
The water was as dark and rank
As ever a Company pumped,
and at the corporation banquet and the political jibes. But what
he carries away with him, like the fisherman's hook in the actual
case, is the description of the pool, and the terrible angler, and
the death-gasps of the knight and the eyes of Mistress Shore. '
Even the battle of hook and crook which just saves the abbot,
though it is humorous, is not ludicrous; and these passionate
touches, with the whole effect they produce, taken with Time's
Song, help the more purely comic verse, which we shall notice
later, to show what a poet of the higher kind Praed might have
been in addition to the lighter and gayer singer that he was.
Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Taylor offers one of the in-
teresting poetic idiosyncrasies which are pretty strongly marked
off from others, but which, somehow, fail to mark for themselves,
and in the circle of their own performances, a definite and en-
during achievement. That his main work was dramatic may partly,
but will not wholly, account for this. That the enormous influence
of the Elizabethan drama on the romantic revival should provoke
direct imitation of itself was almost a matter of course; and it
belongs to other divisions of this work to tell how all the poets-
from Wordsworth, the most undramatic of all great writers, to
Scott, the most dramatic of all men who have written bad dramas-
tried it and how almost all, except Shelley, who might have been
thought least likely to succeed, failed. But, with all of them,
drama, fortunately, was a bywork. With Taylor (for even his
remarkable lyrical faculty was essentially germane to the Eliza-
bethan school of drama), the dramatic form was all-per-
vading and all-powerful. People have forgotten most things of
his save Philip van Artevelde, which, to most, is now itself not
much more than a name; but Edwin the Fair and St Clements
Eve (if not, also, Isaac Comnenus) ought to be read, and will
hardly be read once only by those who can taste them at all.
Still, Philip van Artevelde, no doubt, is his diploma-piece and not
merely that. It failed on the stage; though, if the apparently
growing taste for psychological plays were some day to unite
itself with a taste for literature, the case might be altered. But,
for a time, it had great vogue with readers of worth ; and Taylor,
perhaps, may be thought to have been the most unfortunate of


## p. 113 (#137) ############################################

v]
113
Sir Henry Taylor
all these 'intermediates' in being pushed from his stool, almost
before he was fairly settled on it, by Tennyson, who used quite
different forms and methods, and by Browning, who partly used
the same, but added many others and wielded them with much
greater power. As a dramatic poem, Philip van Artevelde stands
very high. It is entirely free from the iciness which, being mis-
taken for something Greek (Greek tragedy cold! ), at first attracted
people in the almost exactly (though much more shortlived) con-
temporary Ion of Thomas, afterwards Sir Thomas, Noon Talfourd.
The part of Elena is, perhaps, nearer than that of any heroine
in any modern English play (putting Shelley's Beatrice aside) to
something great; and there are in it, as also in the other plays,
almost innumerable passages of real poetic thought expressed in
really poetic words. But Taylor had the fault-common to both
Wordsworth and Southey, of whom he was a kind of disciple-of
want of concentration in writing; he lacked action and narrative
power; and it was seldom that he either would or could give vent
to his lyric gift. The present writer has never seen an adequate
selection from Taylor, though one may exist. It would be as scrappy
as England's Parnassus itself; but it would certainly show the
author's right to a place on the sacred hill.
Some of Taylor's few but remarkable lyrics give evidence of a
sort of underground vein which was rarely tapped (and which
may be sought in vain in Talfourd). Such are the famous, or
should-be famous, 'Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife,' in
Philip van Artevelde and the song of Thorbiorga in Edwin
the Fair and divers passages in the scanty, and now, perhaps,
rarely read, Minor Poems. They connect him with the rest of the
group mentioned above, and with one or two others who are all,
or almost all, more definitely lyrical in main substance, and who
strangely anticipate not merely Tennyson and Browning, but, even
still more, the spasmodics, the pre-Rapbaelites and other poets
such as the late John Davidson, who have touched the present day.
These are the men who, while feeling strongly the 'antecedent'
influences, as they may be termed—Elizabethan, German and
miscellaneous——though not, as yet, much touched by the purely
medieval, derive more directly from Coleridge, Shelley and Keats,
especially from the first two; men who showed already, though in a
crude and half embryonic form, the strong tendency of the nine-
teenth century towards occasional and, therefore, lyrical verse;
and who, while underlying all the objections (quantum valeant) of
Wordsworth to The Ancient Mariner, possess something of the
6
E. L. XII.
CH. v.
8


## p. 114 (#138) ############################################

I14
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
>
6
merits which even Wordsworth allowed to that exceptionable work
of his yokefellow.
Of these, the eldest was George Darley, who, as mentioned
above, anticipated the others by nearly a decade. Darley is a
poet ill to recommend to any but those who, either by nature or
by study or by both, are initiate in at least the outer mysteries
of poetry; and even some adepts cannot stomach his most
ambitious work, the plays Becket and Ethelstan. Some physical
and some mental disabilities seem to have combined to alloy and
hamper bis idiosyncrasy. He was an incurable stammerer, and
could not, like Lamb, turn this blemish to his own or other
people's favour. He was “a great arithmetician' and, though the
one kind of 'numbers' certainly does not interfere with the
enjoyment of the other, Mathesis, except under the mantle of
Urania, has not fostered many poets. Lastly, he was a consider-
able, and a rather harsh, critic after the ugly “strip-and-whip’
fashion of his time; and, though some may say that it would have
been better if he had criticised his own work more, there seems
to have been a conflict in him of the poetical and critical
natures. Even his lyrical gift, acknowledged by the best judges
among his contemporaries and successors to be extraordinary and
constantly shown in The Errors of Ecstacie, in the verse
scattered about the prose Labours of Idleness and elsewhere,
in the pastoral drama Sylvia and in the wonderful outburst
of his masterpiece Nepenthe, too seldom takes the clear, pure,
finished form which, sooner or later, assures a permanent place.
It is often, and in Nepenthe most of all, unintelligible to those
who demand a definite and fairly obvious meaning translatably
expressed; it sometimes (the crowning instance is the loathsome
rubbish, for one fears no softer phrase will do, of the Dwerga part in
Becket, on which the author obstinately prided himself) shows
gross lapses of taste; it has, more frequently still, ill-blended
sentiment and grotesque; and, sometimes, it suffers from that
rather fatal fluency which seems especially to beset Irish poets.
But, ever and anon, come splendid bursts.