No More Learning

194 (#210) ############################################

194
[CH.
Lesser Poets
of whom stand very high in it. The best of all were, probably,
Thomas Edward Brown and Richard Watson Dixon-indeed, there
are those who would deny the limitation of 'second' or 'lesser' to
Dixon. They may, therefore, be treated first, Dixon being taken
out of chronological order, and should be followed by Sebastian
Evans, Robert earl of Lytton (better known as a poet by his
pseudonym Owen Meredith), Sir Edwin Arnold, Sir Lewis
Morris, Sir Alfred Lyall, Roden Noel, Alfred Austin, lord de
Tabley, Thomas Ashe and Theodore Watts? One or two of these
had, in their day, great popularity, whether deserved or not; one
held the perilous premiership of the laurel; several occupied
important positions outside poetry and even outside literature
altogether. But they all have an interest of a peculiar kind
historically, because they may be said to be the first group born to
the full influence of Tennyson and Browning, whose appearances,
as poets, coincided with, or very slightly preceded, their own births.
Thomas Edward Brown--author of Fo'c'sle Yarns and a good
many other volumes of verse, collected and enlarged from MS
matter after his death—is not the easiest of the minor poets of
the later nineteenth century to survey with what has been called
a 'horizontal' view. Living, for the greater part of his life,
within what he certainly regarded as the 'black purgatorial rails'
of schoolmastership, he made of not a few of the boys who
emerged from the black-railed fold fervent disciples and fast
friends, whose voices, including the very forcible and peremptory
one of W. E. Henley, were loudly raised in his favour. Except
the short and remarkable yarn Betsy Lee, he published nothing
till he was over fifty ; but, later, he made his verse more accessible.
Nor could others, personally impartial, fail to discern in his work,
not merely when it was collected, but as isolated examples came
before them, a quite uncommon tone frequently, and, sometimes,
a suggestion of something more behind which might become not
merely uncommon but supreme.
1 To these, some would add Richard Garnett, best known as a librarian and, next
best, as a literary critic, editor, biographer and historian, but, also, a very skilful writer
of verse; David Gray, one of the numerous beneficiaries, and not the least deserving
of them, by the fund of pity and praise always open for poets, actual and possible, who
die young; Herman Charles Merivale, who, at least, must have a line of mention
for certain charming lyrics and sonnets, especially, in the latter kind, Thaisa's
Dirge; and John Nichol, professor of English literature at Glasgow, whose principal
work was done in prose, but who wrote a closet drama Hannibal, of no low rank
in the Philip van Artevelde class, and some lyrics which were both scholarly and
graceful.


## p. 195 (#211) ############################################

VI]
T. E. Brown
195
On the other hand, a thorough critical examination of his
work, conducted, so far as possible, with full allowance to himself
for his time and complete absence of what may be called 'temporal
prejudice’ on the part of the critic-assisted, likewise, by a careful
consideration of the special claims put forward for him, and
guarding almost more carefully against prejudice arising from
any particular statement of these claims—is not facile. One may
be repelled by some of these statements of claim, although Brown
is not responsible for them. There are to be found expressions
about him which would be exact enough, though a little en-
thusiastic in their exactness, if made about Dante. And Brown
is not Dante.
What he is, is excessively difficult to define without those
limitations and reservations which are apt to revolt uncritical
minds; but, with not too much indulgence in them, it is possible
enough. About his general poetic kind, there is no difficulty at
all: every one who has appreciated him has seen that he is of the
mystics of the company of his namesake Sir Thomas in prose,
of Vaughan, Blake and, to no small extent, Wordsworth in verse.
But, with this mysticism, he combines a vivid and, sometimes,
almost familiar realism of expression and choice of subject, which
Wordsworth did not reach and which none of the others attempted.
In this combination, having much less power of expression than of
thought, he sometimes breaks down. He is often strangely desti-
tute of sheer clarity, as in The Peel Life Boat, a defect which,
probably, prevented its appearance in Henley’s Lyra Heroica. It
seems to have been commissioned for this book; but Henley,
who, with all his admiration for Brown, was, as an editor,
utterly autocratic and quite free from respect of persons, must
have seen that it wanted the indefinable that! ' In his nar-
rative poems, the following now of Tennyson now of Browning
is so unmistakable and so continuous as to be teasing; and the
unconventionalities' in diction and thought which have largely
caused his popularity, such as it is, and his relatively greater
influence, are not safe from very damaging comment. The
outburst against his ‘Englishwoman on the Pincian' which
concludes Roman Women is only the 'platitude reversed' of
Tourguénieff's pitiless and fatal epigram on later nineteenth-
century esprit-and as conventional itself as the conventionalities
it objurgates. The satire on commonplace orthodoxy in A Sermon
at Church on Good Friday is as stale as its subject, and in hope-
lessly bad taste. One could find many other faults in Brown.
>
13-2


## p. 196 (#212) ############################################

196
Lesser Poets
[CH.
His dialect pieces-agreeable in one or two instances-force on
one by their bulk the fact that the lingo itself is not a real dialect,
but an ugly and bastard patois or, rather, jargon of broken-down
Celtic and the vulgarest English. His 'idylls,' such as Mary
Quayle and Bella Gorry, are fine and affecting stories, which
would have been much better in prose.
And yet Brown is a poet-and, at times, much more than
a minor poet. No one who knows what poetry is can turn the
leaves of the most convenient and accessible selection-collection
of his poems—that in The Golden Treasury series—with any fair
attention and remain in doubt of this. The remarkable Opifex,
in which he confesses the limitations of his own powers, justifies
his claims in poetry; and there are dozens of other lyrics which
will appeal—some to some tastes and some to others—but all
to those fortunate ones to whom all poetry that is poetry is
welcome. White Foxglove in one vein ; The Sinking of the
Victoria in another; Risus Dei, and, as comments on it, in the
poet's extremer style, the Dartmoor pieces, in a third ; The
Prayer, perhaps likely to be the most popular of all with the most
different people—and the most seventeenth-century in tone; The
Schooner, an early instance of the modern violent style, but a fine
one; others too many to mention occur as specimens. And one
great thing may be added to the right side of Brown's balance-
sheet—that he is singularly free from monotony--in fact, he might
have lost in freshness of appeal if he had gained in formal mastery
of expression.
A much greater poet at his best than Brown, like him most
imperfectly known or knowable during his lifetime and nearly
contemporary, still only accessible in selection and probably never
to be studied in completeness (it is believed that he destroyed
much of his work) was Richard Watson Dixon, canon of Carlisle
for many years, a strenuous worker in the two northern dioceses,
an ecclesiastical historian of the first rank, and an early member
of the original literary offshoot at Oxford of the pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood. Brown was not exactly 'a man of this world, but
he was very much more so than Dixon; and, while Brown largely
took the Wordsworthian side of poetry, Dixon was wholly on the
Coleridgean. He published several volumes most of which are
extremely difficult to obtain ; and the reader who cannot easily
frequent large public libraries must judge him from Mano, his
longest poem, from the so-called Last Poems and, best of
all, from the Poems selected and prefaced by or under the


## p. 197 (#213) ############################################

6
VI] Richard Watson Dixon
197
supervision of the present poet laureate—to which volume one
would gladly see added all or most of what has not been selected
there but is still available. In this case, the editor has been
a more austere man than Henley was in regard to his friend
pronouncing his poetry not to be defended against charges of
inequality, poor and faulty passages and, above all, want of
finish. Each of those charges may, undoubtedly, be advanced,
and, to some extent, supported. And even Mary Coleridge, a
great champion of Dixon and probably, as has been said above,
not a little influenced by him, admitted, in nine probable readers
out of ten, a first feeling of 'disappointment'—though she
promised them a change first to 'surprise' and then to 'ecstasy. '
But, if not in every tenth, in some proportion or other, the
unpleasant first step will be happily escaped, unless the reading
begins with Mano, in which case there is some danger that the
surprise will be rarely, and the ecstasy never, reached. That
longest and most ambitious of his attempts contains beautiful
passages; and, even as a whole, it leaves an impression of
somewhat reluctant and extorted esteem. But there is too much
history in it; the history, moreover, is of a period (the tenth and
eleventh centuries) which is difficult to make interesting unless
it is treated with a purely romantic neglect of history itself; the
characters hardly grasp the reader; and the audacious attempt
to use terza rima for a really long poem in English fails, as it has
always failed and as it probably always will fail. Love's Con-
solation-much shorter, but still extending to some 400 or 500
lines—is a beautiful but incoherent pre-Raphaelite dream, the
expression of which too often follows those early Keatsian lapses
which the greater pre-Raphaelites avoided.
It is only as a lyric poet that Dixon shows his full power; but,
sometimes, in this capacity, his command over strangeness and his
ability to transport are all but supreme. It was said above that
Brown has a Blake-like quality ; but Dixon's Fallen Rain is
Blake himself, not a pastiche or an imitation but a poem, Blake's
authorship of which, if it had been found anonymous with a
possibility of its having been somehow saved from Tatham's crime,
no one would have doubted for a moment. As it is, the resem-
blance is almost bewildering. The Feathers of the Willow has been
recognised by almost all competent critics who have come across
it as unique in its peculiar exemplification of the combined
pictorial and musical appeal of poetry. Less perfect, because
longer, but, as being longer, somewhat more imposing and varied,


## p. 198 (#214) ############################################

198
Lesser Poets
[ch.
a
is To Shadow, a poem, in parts, more like Beddoes than it is like
any other poet, but, again, absolutely free from plagiarism or even
suggestion. Perhaps the greatest of all—to use the superlative
and the adjective itself carefully—is the Ode on Advancing Age.
In form, this is of the most apparently irregular Pindaric, though
every apparent irregularity may be justified on the strictest
prosodic principles. But this form is not in the least intruded,
so as to obscure; it is, on the contrary, suited in the highest degree-
as, also, are the diction, the imagery and the whole body and garment
—to the strange spirit of the piece. Everyone knows Lamb's
description of the two great dirges in Shakespeare and Webster
as, the one of the water watery, the other of the earth earthy.
No other poet in any passage occurring to the memory of the
present writer, has, in the same way, saturated a piece of verse-
itself almost a dirge--as Dixon has done here with the melancholy
essence of sea and shore and sea-birds' cry, or with any similar
conjuring of scene and sound and atmosphere. These, perhaps, are
Dixon's very best things; but there are many others not far short
of them, while for passages of sheer word-painting none of his
friends surpassed him. There has been some discussion on the
point whether he can be called a Wordsworthian or not; and
a settlement of this, perhaps, is not much to be hoped for, because
the genuine impressions of what is and is not Wordsworthian differ
in competent critics more widely than is the case in regard to the
essential quality of any other poet. But it is, at least, a testimony
to absence of monotony in a writer that, with an entire freedom
from mere imitation, he should suggest Wordsworth at one time
and Keats at another, while the lyrics specially cited above are
quite different from both and belong, in an equally independent
manner, to the traditions of Blake or of Coleridge. On the whole,
Dixon may be allowed to be not an easy poet to understand, and
one in respect of whom it is necessary, in critical slang, to get the
atmosphere' before appreciation is possible. No doubt, this is
what Mary Coleridge meant. But, when it has been achieved, or,
in the fortunate cases where the reader drops into the proper place
and attitude at once, there is not likely to be much quarrel as to
the quality of the poetry.
Sebastian Evans, who was born in the same year with Brown,
but whose favourite subjects were nearer Dixon's, was a younger
brother of the well-known antiquary Sir John Evans and also of
Anne Evans, whose verse has been noticed already? She was a
1 See p. 177.


## p. 199 (#215) ############################################

vi]
"Owen Meredith'
199
friend of Thackeray and, for some time, an inmate of his house,
where she may have derived the suggestion of one of the least
unsatisfactory definitions of humour ever attempted—'thinking
in jest while feeling in earnest. ' Her brother Sebastian was
himself possessed of the quality; but (which may surprise some
who do not possess it) he was, among a variety of pursuits—art,
literature of other kinds, journalism, politics—an enthusiastic
medievalist, as was shown in his poetical and other writings, from
the early Brother Fabian's Manuscripts to his late presentation of
The High History of the Holy Graal, including the part to be found
in French and Welsh but not in Malory or in most modern adapta-
tions of the story. The thinking in jest and the feeling in earnest
of his sister's words are both present in Evans's poetry; and they
find frequent expression which, if not exactly consummate, is
distinct and attractive. Of the rather numerous attempts at re-
telling the story of St Brandan and Judas his, if the most deliberately
quaint, is one of the most original ; and Shadows is a poem which
would not disgrace the signature of any poet.
Three charges-heavy and, if fully substantiated, damaging if not
even damning—have been brought by some against Robert, second
lord and first earl Lytton, viceroy of India and author of a long
series of books in various kinds of verse. It is the opinion of others
that they cannot be fully substantiated; and that there are in
Owen Meredith,' as he called himself at first, especially in his
earliest and latest work, counterbalancing merits which have been
too much disregarded by critics. But dangerous defects, laying
him open to the charges referred to, cannot be denied. The first
and vaguest is something like a repetition of accusations constantly
brought against his father-accusations of unreality, affectation,
pose, theatricality and so forth. That he does not always avoid the
suggestion of such things may be granted : that he was able to
avoid them and frequently did so may be affirmed. With regard
to the second charge—that of plagiarism, a somewhat similar
position may be taken up. There is, undoubtedly, a good deal
more echo of other men's work in ‘Owen Meredith' than was
either necessary or wise. But, as this echoing was always of work
generally known, the writer could never possibly hope to escape
detection or to pass off what was not his own as his own—which
is the essence of plagiarism—and the habit, in fact, was only an
incident or item of the third count, which cannot be denied at all,
and which really contains within itself almost everything that can
justly be said against lord Lytton as a poet. This concerns his


## p. 200 (#216) ############################################

200
[CH.
Lesser Poets
enormous, and almost fatal, fluency. He did not live to be an old
man; and his life was full of vocations and avocations of all kinds.
Yet, the bulk of his work in verse would be unusually large for
a man who had as little else to do as Wordsworth or Tennyson,
and who had lived as long as either. It was said that, even when
he corrected his work, he was sure to recoup himself for any
omissions by manifold insertions; and he had a fancy for extensive
verse-novels, such as Lucile and Glenaveril. His really brilliant
satiric-epic-fantasy King Poppy, which was posthumously published
after he had been writing and rewriting it for twenty years, would
be much better if it were half the length. Yet, from the early
Wanderer to the again posthumous collection of lyrics called
Marah, which contains some of his very best work, there is
constant evidence that, when some invisible mentor seized him
and forced him to concentrate his powers, they were equal to
the composition of real poetry of a high class. The piece variously
called Astarte and Fata Morgana in The Wanderer, and that
entitled Selenites (though a slight licence is taken with the quantity
of the word) in Marah, are, perhaps, the very best of all; but there
are scores nearly as good. A Love Letter, which has been the
most general favourite and which opens admirably, would have
gained by losing half its forty-two stanzas. For those who do not
insist upon lyric, not a few passages and some pieces in Chronicles
and Characters, Fables in Song and After Paradise ought to give
a satisfaction which, if they have, up to the time, only thought
of lord Lytton as a flashy Byronist, born out of due time, will
surely make them change their minds.
Whether Edwin, later Sir Edwin, Arnold can be called a more
popular poet than lord Lytton is a question which might occasion
logomachy ; but he certainly escaped the unfavourable criticism
which, in this way and that, 'Owen Meredith'attracted. Although
‘
we do not now write Arts of Preserving Health or discussions of
the sugar cane in verse, there has never failed a public for poetry
which, as the naïve phrase goes, 'tells you something'; and The
Light of Asia, Sir Edwin's best known poem, gained vogue as
an easy version of what some said was a very exoteric Buddhism.
Despite active employment, first in educational matters and then
in journalism, he produced a good deal of verse on many different
subjects and in many different forms. Some of it obtained con-
siderable praise, while, on the other hand, there are critics who are
seldom able to perceive true poetry in anything that Sir Edwin
wrote-his blank verse appearing to them fluently insignificant and


## p. 201 (#217) ############################################

VI]
Lewis Morris
201
his lyrics, with one remarkable exception', lacking life, wanting in
intensity and in anything but rather commonplace music.
There was, however, never so much difference in his case between
the public and, at first, a few, but, latterly, nearly all, critics as
occurred in the case of Lewis Morris, who, also, was later knighted.
Lewis Morris has been called 'the Tupper of the later nineteenth
century'; but the comparison is unfair in both ways, except so far
as it concerns the just mentioned difference between public and
critics, and the extraordinary vogue of more or less worthless verse.
The historic circumstances of the two are curiously and dis-
tinguishingly different. Tupper, as has been said above, obtained
his popularity in a dead season of poetry with matter of, at least,
unusual form. Lewis Morris, on the other hand, began when
poetry, especially through Tennyson's work, had again been
popularised, and even when new movements in advance had
stimulated the appetite but, in some cases, had shocked or puzzled
the taste of the average reader. The French, if one remembers
rightly, long ago manufactured out of Defoe's masterpiece a
Robinson des enfants. Lewis Morris set himself to be a Tennyson
des enfants, and was justified of a considerable number of the
grown-up children whom he addressed. Songs of Two Worlds,
which first appeared in three series, and the more ambitious Epic
of Hades which followed, deserved the title of perfect works of art
in one sense only perhaps ; but they certainly deserved it in that.
They hit the object at which they were immediately aimed; though,
beyond all doubt, their success helped to provoke in others a
reaction of taste which has dominated the last thirty years and
more and which has most curiously and uncritically affected the
popular estimate of Tennyson himself. Often, when one reads
uncomplimentary remarks on Idylls of the King, one thinks
that the critic, by some mistake, has come upon a copy of The
Epic of Hades with a wrong lettering on the back.
The means by which Lewis Morris hit the vulgar and some, at
first, of those who should not have come under that designation,
were the strictest 'propriety of subject and expression, a modern
and liberal tone towards questions of politics, religion and philo-
sophy; an entire avoidance of all obscurity, preciousness or
eccentricity of language; and the observance, respectable till it
1
1 This is the poem called He and She, the subject being a living husband who
sits by the side of his dead wife and implores spiritual communion. It has been very
highly admired by some ; and, though not without flatnesses here and there, really has
something of the intensity and the music generally denied to his poetry above.


## p. 202 (#218) ############################################

202
[ch.
Lesser Poets
became distressing, of an absolute smoothness of versification.
He was great at truisms in morality, and, indeed, in everything.
He could draw fairly pretty pictures, though, when you examined
them, you found that there was scarcely ever a touch of real nature
or original wit in them, that the colours were those of the tenpenny-
halfpenny box and the outlines stencilled. He had, sometimes,
a faculty—which, in a satirist, would have been admirable of
writing things which looked like poetry till one began to think
of them a little1
A pleasant and popular person, with a great many friends both
in Oxford and in London, Lewis Morris secured fairly favourable
views at first. But unbiassed censors, especially of a slightly
younger generation, began to revolt before many years had
passed ; and, not content with a rough reception of his later
works Gwen, The Ode of Life, Gycia, Songs Unsung (a dangerously
suggestive title), went back to the earlier Songs and The Epic
and did their best to demonstrate the poetical nullity of the whole
work. That work, for a good many years, has been available in
a single volume, and everybody can form his own opinion on it.
It may be warranted to do nobody any harm; if, by some curious
chance, a little savage on a desert island read it knowing no other
poetry and liked it, this would be a rather good sign in him.
A very different poet was Sir Alfred Lyall? who, both during,
and after, a brilliant career in the Indian civil service, wrote
verses, few but fit, in a style very much his own, though Browning
must have had considerable influence on his way of poetising
thought if not of framing expression for it. The spirit of the
opening poem of his Verses written in India, The Old Pindaree,
has inspired others to an extent much greater than its debt to
earlier poets. Theology in Extremis (his other most famous poem)
is of the problem order, the speech or meditation of an Englishman
in the mutiny who, though a freethinker, will not purchase his life
by uttering the Mohammedan formula. Most, however, are rather
studies of Indian, than of English, nature; and the situation between
;
· For instance, in an imposing Pindaric (that old refuge-bag of poetic wind that is
not of the spirit), he writes of nature or the world
Unchanging she
Alike in short-lived flower and ever-changing sea.
A paragraph or stanza which ends with • sea' always has a certain conjuring effect
in English, and 'flowers' are useful to the poet as well as to the poetaster. But
a minute's reflection will show that there is no real antithesis between the brief life of
the flower and the ever-changingness' (which, no doubt, is itself the most unchanging
thing in the world) of the ocean.
2 See, also, vol. xiv.
a
9
6
6


## p. 203 (#219) ############################################

vi]
Alfred Austin
1
203
6
the two is sometimes strikingly put, as in Badminton, the half
parodied, half serious Land of Regrets and the sombre Retro-
spection. From one critical point of view, indicated already, one
might call Sir Alfred's poetry rather ‘applied' than “pure’; and,
from another, it might seem the work of an exceedingly clever and
scholarly man of the world rather than of a poet. It is, no doubt,
essentially 'occasional'-anecdotes, situations, reflections, brief
characters thrown into verse-form. But there is always dis-
tinction in it, generally music, often really poetic expression of
thought.
That Alfred Austin hardly deserved to be made poet laureate
is a proposition which very few persons, whatever their personal
or political attitude towards him, are likely to deny now, and which,
in after times, nobody at all, except out of mere whim, is likely to
dispute. But, as in other cases, the penalty of the error fell unfairly
on himself. It could not be said of him, as we said of Pye, that
he was not a poet at all; but it could be, and was, said that, though
a really vigorous and accomplished writer of prose, and a tolerable
master of unambitious form in verse, his poetical powers were of
the most mediocre kind. He began with cheap satire in an exploded
style; and, though he fortunately abandoned this, neither his
longer nor his shorter poems possessed pathos, power or beauty
enough to give them much attraction even for a time or to keep
them in memory after their writer's death. Browning's nickname
‘Banjo Byron,' in the exceedingly ill-mannered and not extra-
ordinarily witty attack prefaced to Pacchiarotto, was not very
happy; for, though Austin was a professed admirer of Byron, he
cannot be said to have copied him much except in satire, where
Byron himself was a copyist. He could keep up poems of some
length like Prince Lucifer and The Human Tragedy without being
so tame as Lewis Morris, and he could come rather nearer to vigour
and passion in lyric than (with the exception here noted) Edwin
Arnold. So that, had only the three been available, his appoint-
ment would have been fully justified.
Only that indefinable something which constantly and mys-
teriously interferes in the history of poetry prevented the Cam-
bridge poet, Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel, from attaining a
rank in his art which would have taken him out of this chapter.
As it is, there are none of his contemporaries who, to the present
writer, seem to have come so close to majority, except his two close
contemporaries at Oxford, R. W. Dixon and lord De Tabley. This
something 'may, perhaps, be connected with two other things which


## p. 204 (#220) ############################################

204
[ch.
Lesser Poets
have unfavourably conditioned many poets during the nineteenth
century-undue voluminousness of work, and an undue influence of
the printed book'-not, as in the case of Owen Meredith,' running
into anything that even an unfavourable judge could call plagiarism,
but communicating a sort of aura of secondhandness—a faint
suggestion of reminiscence and pastiche. Of these two failings,
the latter may almost be disregarded; at certain times (and they
are usually not times of small things in poetry), it is almost inevit-
able. The bulk of the work and the causes or constituents of
that bulk-undue fluency to start with and subsequent inability
to compress or distil that fluency into something stronger and more
forcible—is a more serious objection. Roden Noel's most remark-
able single book, A Little Child & Monument-a collection of
episodes on his own son Eric, who died at five years old-equals,
—
for intense reality of feeling and general adequacy of expression,
anything of its kind. But pure personal lamentation unrelieved
by digression and, as it were, episode, is, of all kinds of poetry,
and, perhaps, of literature, that which should be kept from undue
expatiation and prolongation. The book contains most beautiful
things; but the comment something too much of this' must force
itself upon the least cynical of readers. The same fault is observ-
able in Livingstone in Africa, but is even more noticeable there
because there is no depth of passion even to attempt to carry
it off. He, perhaps, shows at his best in pieces like A Vision
of the Desert, The Water Nymph and The Boy. Here, though
there is not the slightest imitation, and the subjects, especi-
ally in the second-named poem, are quite different, there is
a suggestion of Darley's masterpiece Nepenthe; but the very
mention of that poem implies a certain incoherence, a wealth
and almost spilth of imagery and sound flung abroad as boys
fling nuts. In this and other aspects, Roden Noel has been com-
pared to Shelley, but no critic can fail to discern the difference
between them. The intensity and mastery of Shelley always
unify, for the time and in the poem, his prodigality of image and
colour and symphonic arrangement; this can hardly be said of
Noel. The Land's End poem, Thalatta, wants, like much of
the rest, carding and thinning and winnowing; but the study is
a really fine one, and some of the shorter love-poems, as well as of
the individual constituents of A Little Child's Monument, escape
almost all censure. Now, to make a pardonable repetition, he
who can write without banality of the sea and of love and of
death is a poet.
6


## p. 205 (#221) ############################################

vi]
Lord de Tabley
205
a
a
But, perhaps, the most interesting subject of analysis, for one
who would master the riddle—if it be a riddle-of later nineteenth-
century verse which did not attain unto the first three,' or the first
half-dozen, is the already mentioned lord de Tabley, who, suc-
ceeding to the title rather late in life, had been known, when
he began to write after leaving Oxford, under the pseudonyms
‘Preston' and 'Lancaster,' and, later, while still a commoner,
by his own name John Byrne Leicester Warren. His literary
history (he was also a scientific botanist, an authority in numis-
matics and, altogether, a man of very wide culture) was curious.
He did not publish any verse till he was nearly thirty ; then,
during about twelve years, he issued no less than seven volumes,
with a novel or two; then, for nearly twenty more, he contributed
nothing at all to literature, and, at last, after his accession to the
title and just before his death, published two volumes of selected
poems which, if they did not secure an adequate recognition of his
powers, did awake, in younger critics, something like what a few of
their elders had vainly striven to bring about earlier, a sense of
undue neglect.
It was, undoubtedly, unfortunate for him that his period of
earlier poetic appearances exactly coincided with the appearances
of Morris, Swinburne and Rossetti, who were not only, in different
ways, undoubtedly, greater poets than himself, but poets great
in a more popular fashion, though not a more vulgar one.
Philoctetes, in particular, his first really important work, came,
in the most unlucky fashion, just after Atalanta in Calydon; and,
though its author was at no time in the very slightest degree an
imitator, still less a plagiarist, the similarity of classical subject
(there was no other), and the quieter and more purely scholarly
character of Warren's piece, made a certain 'occultation' inevit-
able. The last of the series, The Soldier's Fortune, published
ten years later (the ill-success of which has been thought to be
the reason of its author's long abstinence from poetry), is an
extreme instance of an error frequent in the subjects of this
chapter. Among the few people who have read it through—it is
now believed to be a very difficult book to obtain—there can
have been little difference of opinion as to the merit, not merely
of individual passages, but as to the remarkable presence in it of
what the Greeks used to call by the difficultly translatable word
dianoia, “thought,' 'mental temper,' etc. But it is too long-
enormously too long-and not sustained in its length by varied
incident or story. The two late selected volumes, however, make
6
6


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206
[ch.
Lesser Poets
it inexcusable for anyone who cares for poetry to remain ignorant
of the merits of what they contain. It is almost safe to say that in
these contents there is hardly a poem which is not really a poem.
When a historical critic gives such a judgment in such a case,
he is bound to explain, if he can, the reasons which have made
the general estimate of the poet different. Two of these reasons,
applying to the original reception of lord de Tabley's poetry, have
been given: two others may be added. As he was distinctly
unfortunate in the time of his beginning, so he was, at least partly,
in that of his reappearance. The younger generation (to its
credit) did him more justice than the elder, with rare exceptions,
had done. But, still, they were a younger generation, and he
represented an elder : his ways were not their ways; so that
respect, rather than enthusiasm, was excited. Lastly, it must be
admitted that, except for sworn lovers of poetry, Warren's poetry
may be said, in the common phrase, to want a little more powder. '
It is apt to be too scholarly and quiet for the general taste,
which wants strong flavour, luscious sweetness, lively pastime, exu-
berant force and the like. But, after this admission, the judgment
given will still stand.
Something more than a neighbourhood of birth-years connects
Thomas Ashe with Noel and de Tabley, though he was certainly
inferior to both of them as a poet. He, too, began with a classical
drama, The Sorrows of Hypsipyle, which, at the time, tempted
some who read it, though they knew the danger and deception of
these closet dramas, to expect not a little from him. After leaving
Cambridge, he was, for the greater part of his not very long life,
a schoolmaster and, latterly, a working man of letters; but he
never left off verse-writing, and divided his practice between longer
poems, such as the drama just mentioned, a narrative piece on
the story of Psyche—often told but so charming that nobody but
blockhead could spoil it wholly-and lyrics. The general im-
pression of Ashe's work is that given by much modern poetry,
namely, that compression, distillation-any of the metaphorically
allied processes which, without importing actually foreign qualities,
bring out and bring together those which exist in a too diffused
condition-might have made of him a poet of real value. In
further comparison with some of his near contemporaries, he
takes far higher rank; for, in almost his least good work there
is always what analysts call a 'trace' of poetry. But the trace
rarely rises to a distinctly appreciable, and, perhaps, never to
a high, percentage.
a


## p. 207 (#223) ############################################

а
vi] John Addington Symonds 207
To this decade, likewise, belonged Theodore Watts, in the later
years of his life known as Watts-Dunton, a solicitor, a sonneteer
and the author of a novel, Aylwin, which had a great popularity
for a time, as well as a frequent, a voluminous and a highly serious
critic of poetry. He was, and, no doubt, still more will be, best
known from the generous and faithful friendship and hospitality
which he showed to the poet Swinburne. Only coterie enthusiasm
could regard him as being himself a very noteworthy poet? , but he
had cultivated his natural gifts that way by much frequentation,
not merely of Swinburne but of the Rossettis and others, and some
of his sonnets are not unworthy of his society.
The notable poets born in the forties who can be noticed here
are rather fewer in number than those of the previous decade',
but they are of more uniform merit; and, once more, they intro-
duce, as a group, new influences of the highest importance from a
historical point of view. Almost all of them felt early, and most
of them felt from the beginning of their poetical career, the great
new impulse of the pre-Raphaelite movement, in development, in
revolt, or in simple agreement or difference. In chronological
order they include John Addington Symonds, Robert Buchanan,
Frederic Myers, Gerard Hopkins, Andrew Lang and William
Ernest Henley
The defect of Symonds in verse is the same as that which is
notable in his prose, and a variety of one which has been, and will
1 He was, at any rate, a better one-he certainly belonged to a better school—than
his namesake Alaric Alexander Watts, who might have been noticed in the last
chapter on this subject, but most of whose work belonged to the earlier part of this.
The elder Watts was unlucky enough to provoke the wicked wit of Lockhart and to
live (with perversion of his second name) in the singing flames' of
I don't like that Alaric Attila Watts,
His verses are just like the pans and the pots, etc.
The pans were neatly enough polished, and the pots were quite clean; but they were
turned out by mould and machinery, and there was very little in them. Their author
was an industrious and ingenious, though not very fortunate, journalist and book-
maker, and his principal collection Lyrics of the Heart (1850), besides serious things
very much of the kind suggested by the title, contains the rather wellknown alliterative
amphigouri,
An Austrian army awfully arrayed,
which has had an unexpected illustration in very recent times. Alaric 'Attila' was
a very harmless person, but not a very meritorious poet.
2 Partly for the comfortable reason that some of the best of them are still alive.
3 There might be added, in a sort of second division, Cosmo Monkhouse, a remark-
ably unpretentious poet whose work was not seldom above his pretensions ; George
Augustus Simcox, a scholar who, late in life, met a still mysterious fate on the Irish
coast, and who, much earlier, had published some distinguished verse; and Samuel
Waddington, a special student of the sonnet and no mean practitioner in it, as well as
in other forms of lyric verse.


## p. 208 (#224) ############################################

208
[CH.
Lesser Poets
be, noticed frequently among all his contemporaries, but it was
more prejudicial in verse than elsewhere. In his principal prose
work, The Renaissance in Italy, it certainly made itself felt; but
the abundance of the subject matter and the obligation which
every scholar (and Symonds was a scholar) feels to do his subject
the fullest justice possible in mere information counterworks it to
a considerable extent. The poet, of course, does justice to his
subject, as he may, but he is less, if at all, under the control of
pure
fact. The result on Symonds was too often unfortunate. In his
translations, the necessary attempt at fidelity acted sometimes
as cold water to keep his ebullience down; in his original poems,
it is almost always unrestrained. A similarity of title and title-
suggestion (though there is no copying on the English poet's part)
makes Gautier's La Chimère and Symonds’s Le jeune homme
caressant sa Chimère worth comparing. Both have beauty; but
that of the French verse is heightened by brevity, by discipline of
phrase and (within even the narrow limits) by increasing con-
centration and final poignancy of feeling and expression; while
the English steeps itself and washes itself out in endless luscious-
ness of fancy, and incurs the charge of what Keats called (and had,
of all poets, the right to call and to condemn) mawkishness? .
That, at least, is a fault which could not be charged against his
junior by a year, Robert Buchanan. A novelist, a dramatist, a
miscellaneous writer of all sorts, Buchanan underwent to the full
the drawback and the danger (here often pointed out) of such
divagation; and his temper, rather than his genius, exposed him
to another set-back. He was quite entitled to attack the
pre-Raphaelite school if he wished to do so; but his unluckily
pseudonymous assault (if it had been anonymous it would hardly
have mattered much, and if it had been signed nothing at all) on
the “fleshly' school of poetry combined the violence of Esau
with the disingenuousness of Jacob; and, though some of those
whom it attacked were magnanimous enough to forgive it, it
could not be easily forgotten. It ought to be said, however, that
Buchanan showed no bad blood in regard to open counter-attacks
on himself, and his verse, as always, is entitled to be judged
without regard to this misadventure, after the dues of history are
paid. His verse, though produced rather in the earlier than in the
later part of his career, was voluminous, and it was exceedingly
unequal; but it has, what many of his contemporaries lacked,
1 Symonds's theories of versification, like those of Patmore, may be best noticed
in the chapter on nineteenth-century prosody.


## p. 209 (#225) ############################################

VI]
Frederic Myers and Andrew Lang 209
a certain sincerity sufficient to atone for an occasional imitation
which he shared with them. Ratcliffe Meg, one of his most
commonly praised poems, is rather a close approach to success
than an attainment of it. But The Vision of the Man Accurst,
The Ballad of Judas Iscariot (perhaps the best of the numerous
attempts on the subject) and some passages on awe-inspiring
aspects of the scenery in the Coolin and Coruisk districts of Skye,
are poetry.
A sharp difference of specific quality, if not of general poetical
merits, again meets us when we turn to Frederic Myers. He was
early distinguished, even at school and still more at Cambridge, by
the unusual idiosyncrasy of his verse, an idiosyncrasy the more,
not the less, remarkable that he had recently felt, and very strongly
felt, the influence of Swinburne. Myers afterwards became an
inspector of schools and interested himself in other matters; so
that he did not produce much poetry. What he did, from his
prize-poem, St Paul, onward, was distinguished both in choice and
treatment of subject and in character of form; but the distinction
of form was certainly by far the greater. A good critic now living
is said to hold that he could always tell any verse by Myers,
though he might have no external knowledge of the authorship,
by its peculiar rhythm; and, though this may be an exaggeration,
it is an exaggeration of a truth. Myers's lyrics are not very
individual in substance and, perhaps, never consummate; but his
blank verse, his heroics and especially his use of the decasyllabic
quatrain with feminine rimes in the first and third lines, are
certainly fingered in a singularly original manner.
Originality, not confined to form or to a single cast of thought,
appeared in Andrew Lang, in connection with whose work must be
surveyed a curious episode, affecting a large number of verse-
producers for no small period of years in the history of English
poetry. Lang's own work in verse, in point of bulk, was an
infinitesimal part of an enormous productiveness in literature-
journalism of many kinds, especially reviewing and miniature essay-
writing, historical discussion on the larger, and also the smaller,
scale, studies in folklore and in other branches of scholarship,
translation, editing, what not, all permeated by an individuality
not so much of mere form as of general style and attitude, which
was not exceeded by that of any writer, greater or lesser, in his
time! This immense production began before he left Oxford, and
continued for more than forty years till his death. As usual, his
1 See, also, post, vol. xiv.
14
E. L. XIII.
CH, VÍ,


## p. 210 (#226) ############################################

2 IO
[CH.
Lesser Poets
poetical work, for the most part, belonged to the earlier time,
though he never lost grip of the lyre. It comprised one long
poem, Helen of Troy, some early imitations and translations
chiefly of French poetry, and a considerable body of lyric, partly,
but by no means wholly, in special forms to be presently noticed.
In humour, which never turned to horseplay, and always showed the
vein of feeling referred to in Anne Evans's definition; in a certain
touch of melancholy, which never became affected or morbid; and
in a command of 'numbers'-music in language and rhythm-
which, though it could manage the most complicated measures,
never enslaved itself to them or relied on them, Lang’s verse
could stand the severest tests. He chose to liken his poetry to
grass of Parnassus—wild flowers at the foot of the mount only-
but such things as the Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre, and
as the great sonnets entitled The Odyssey and Colonel Burnaby
know nothing of the lower slopes. Only, in Lang's case, as in
many others, but, perhaps, more than in any, there is to be
lamented the dissipation—in the strict, not the transferred, sense
of the word-of his powers. It may safely be said that hardly any
great poet has ever achieved his greatness in the course of varied
avocation by daily work, literary or other, unless, like Shakespeare,
he happened to be a dramatist, where the poetry, if not of the
essence of the journey-work, is, so to speak, inextricably connected
with it, so that the writer passes from one to the other with no
sense of change or rupture. It may, in particular, or it may not
be, possible to write, but, as a matter of fact, no man has written
great poetry on a large scale and in bulk while he was perpetually
called off to go to a newspaper office and get a subject'; to go
home or to his club to write on it; to visit a library to look up
facts for a book of another kind; to write a chapter or a page of
that, and the like. Every known example shows that dame
Oiseuse is as much the portress of poetry as she is of love.
Helen of Troy, though, in parts, very beautiful, is not an achieved
poem as a whole. If the author could have been shut up for a
year or two in a fairly comfortable prison it might have been? .
1 A few lines must be given to a contemporary of Lang at Oxford who was, to &
greater extent than is usual, a poetical might-have-been. Gerard Hopkins was not
only much let and hindered in writing poetry, but never published any, and all we
have consists of fragments issued as specimens from MSS. But these fragments
show that he not merely might have been, but was, a poet. Unfortunately, an
ingrained eccentricity which affected his whole life, first as an undergraduate and then
as a Jesuit priest, helped these accidents. He developed partially acute, but not
generally sound, notions on metre; and though, quite recently, broken-backed rhythms
like his have been often attempted, the results have scarcely been delightful. In his


## p. 211 (#227) ############################################

vi]
French Forms of Verse
2 II
This question, however, does not touch the other and more
general one referred to above. Much of Lang's work is couched
in the strict metrical forms which, by the operation of a slightly
different temper and language, arose in northern France after the
downfall of Provençal poetry in the south, were widely cultivated
there from the thirteenth to the fifteenth and even sixteenth
centuries, were imitated by English poets such as Chaucer, Gower,
Lydgate and others of the time, but never with us achieved anything
like the effect attained by French poets from Lescurel to Villon.
They were still largely written in the earlier French renascence,
but were turned out of favour by the Pléiade; were occasionally,
though rarely, attempted in English during the seventeenth
century, but died away almost entirely later. These forms—
ballade, rondeau, roundel, triolet, virelai, chant royal-may, loosely,
be said to belong to the same general class as the sonnet, but
are much more artificial in their structure; the keys of all being first
the use, under more or less intricate laws, of the refrain, and the
repetition of one or more lines at statutory intervals; and, secondly,
the observance of regularly recurrent rimes. The effect, especially
when the poet is skilful enough to make this kind of carillon
express sense as well as mere sound, is, sometimes, extremely
beautiful; but, obviously, it is likely to become monotonous, tedious
and purely artificial.
The revival of these forms in English depended upon an easily
discoverable train of causes. The French romantic movement of
1830, and earlier, eagerly and naturally fed itself upon old French
patterns, and some writers of its second generation, especially
Théodore de Banville, had already managed the forms with
singular grace. Now, in turn, the interest in these modern French
poets created among younger English writers and critics by the
pre-Raphaelite school, especially Swinburne, was very keen; and
the result was practically unavoidable. Who first accomplished
an English ballade or triolet is rather an idle question”; what is
important is that the forms were adopted by many eager and
skilful verse writers—at least three of the chief of whom, Austin
Dobson, Edmund Gosse and the present poet laureate-are still
alive, besides Lang, Henley and many others down to the merest
own case, though the process of appreciation is most like the proverbial reconstruction
of a fossil beast from a few odd bones, it shows that they belonged to a poet.
i For instance, by Patrick Carey.
? There are, of course, roundels in Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) and
ballades in Rossetti's Poems (1870). But neither of these distinguished persons played
quite the rigour of the game.
14–2


## p. 212 (#228) ############################################

2 1 2
[CH.
Lesser Poets
poetasters, who must needs try the trick of the time. This fancy
continued during the seventies and earlier eighties in some
force, lasted yet longer with diminished vogue and is not abso-
lutely out of fashion even now, though examples are not common? .
The present writer, as one who was prepared for it almost before
it arose, who welcomed it eagerly, who preserves some of its
results in his own private and unprinted anthology of preferred
poetry, but whose acquaintance with it has come to forty year'
and more, may, perhaps, be permitted to give his opinion about
it, briefly, because it is, as was laid down above, a distinct and
noteworthy episode in English poetic history.
There can be no doubt, then, that, originally, these forms were
of great benefit to French poetry. The danger, at various times, and
not least when the heroic part of the middle ages, on the one
hand, and the folk song part, on the other, ceased, has been an
easy skipping quality-a sort of recitative not far from prose.
The firmer outline and the definitely concerted music of these
refrain pieces was a great corrective to this. But, when they
came to be applied to a perfected poetic language like nineteenth-
century English, which, whether in blank verse, in couplet, in
stanza, or in miscellaneous lyric measures, had learnt how to
combine the greatest variety with the most serried force, the
maximum of rhetorical, with the maximum of strictly poetical,
music-certain things were almost bound to follow. The results
achieved were, in some cases, as has been more than admitted,
really beautiful. It would be improper to quote living writers
here, but the two others named above supply unquestionable
examples. The very piece cited above as a masterpiece by Lang
is a ballade. But, from itself, a curious side-deduction may be
made. In all the best French examples, the ballade form impresses
itself inevitably; you may read Lang's poem, and hardly notice
that it is a ballade at all. In short-and the same, more or less,
is the case with the best exercises of still living poets—the
poem gains little from the form, unless the poet has put in poetry
enough to make it independent of any form in particular. The
fact seems to be that English is somewhat intolerant of measures
which are too regularly and intricately concerted. Bacon's old
and often repeated sarcasm, you may see things oft as good in
tarts,' applies here.
At the same time, with fire enough in the inside—and,
fortunately, there are numerous cases of this--the things can
1 Ernest Dowson was, perhaps, the last of its best younger practitioners.
!


## p. 213 (#229) ############################################

vi]
W. E. Henley
213
be subdued to the poet's most serious purpose excellently well.
And, for playful purposes, whether half tender or wholly burlesque,
these forms are unsurpassable. There are dozens of Lang's pieces,
some of them never yet fished up from the depths of old periodi-
cals, which are perfect in these ways.
To sum up, these artificial forms may be very useful and
can be charming in various respects. But it is difficult, unless
they are very freely treated, to get rid in them of a certain exotic
and constrained air ; and, unless they are undoubted successes,
they are apt to be intolerable.
General appreciation of the poems of William Ernest Henley
has not, perhaps, been helped by coterie admiration, however
generous and eager. But they occupy a peculiar and, in their
way, a commanding position among their fellows. Henley tried
the artificial forms, as has been mentioned above ; but they did
not entirely suit his touch. The best, by far, is the splendid and
quite serious rondeau, What is to come? which concludes his
own collection of them under the sub-title (itself a half confession)
Bric-à-Brac. Next to it, but much lower, may come, in the
lighter kind, the ballade which opens the set I loved you once
in Old Japan.
But, with him, it was a case of 'Not here, O Apollo,' and the
poems by which he obtained, and will keep a place, in English
poetry, as well as the most characteristic of those which may
not have so fair a fate, are markedly different. Henley, from a
rather early period, was a student not merely of modern French
light literature and poetry but of French art; and these influences
probably brought it about that he was almost, if not quite, the
introducer of impressionism into English verse. The extremely
striking Hospital Verses, written during a long sojourn in the
Edinburgh infirmary—where the skill of Lister did what was
possible to minimise an affection of the limbs which left Henley
a cripple—are entirely of this class. When restored to com-
—
parative health, he took to journalism, and, for nearly twenty
years, was an active and, for the whole of the rest of his life, an
occasional contributor or, more frequently and preferably, editor
-an occupation for which he had remarkable talents. His actual
production, however, was never very large, though, both in verse
and prose, it was exceedingly characteristic; and his abstinence
from the excessive collar-work to which most tolerably successful
journalists and working men of letters are tempted gave him time
to write as much poetry as, probably, he would have written in


## p. 214 (#230) ############################################

214
[CH.
Lesser Poets
any case—his bad health and his not long life being duly con-
sidered. Henley's main characteristic in life and letters alike
was masterfulness; and it should be left to individual taste and
judgment to decide whether a quality which almost as often leads
men ill as well instigated more or less than it injured in his case.
It certainly led him to violence and eccentricity of form and
expression ; and (though this affected his prose more than his
verse) to a rather perverse adoption and propagation of opinions,
not so much because he held them himself as because former
writers had held the opposite. It may be doubted whether he
gained much by his fondness for rimeless measures; or by his
symbolist, and almost futurist, if not Blastist (for Henley was
singularly anticipatory of later developments in the fringes of
literature), adoration of speed. ' But, In Hospital can at no time
be read without admiration; and very beautiful things will be
found among the, again characteristically, but, in a way, unfairly,
entitled Echoes. There are echoes (all but the greatest poetry
of the period is an echo, though a multifarious and often a
beautiful one) of old ballads, of standard verse, of modern
singers as various as Tennyson and Emily Brontë and Swinburne.
But, even in these, as, for instance, in the best known of his
verses except, perhaps, the portrait of Stevenson, Out of the
Night that covers me, Henley almost always contrives to blend
an original tone; and, sometimes, the echo is so faint, and
derivable from so many separate sources, many, even, so doubt-
fully present, that the title becomes a mere polite or ironic
apology. Such pieces are In the Year that's come and gone,
Love, his flying feather, and, at least, the beginning and end (for
the middle is not so good) of the splendidly swinging ballad
with the half refrain
I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave,
with not a few others. In his later books, The Song of the
Sword, Hawthorn and Lavender, London Voluntaries, Rhymes
and Rhythms, including his admirable 'England! my England ! ",'
he sometimes allowed the violence which has been noticed to
remain unchastened, if he did not even lash it up; but this
violence never sprang, as it often does, from weakness, but only
from an erroneous theory, from a naturally fervid temperament
and, beyond all doubt, very largely from the irritation of harassing
disease. Of him, the old parable is surely justified as to the
1 Pro rege nostro,


## p. 215 (#231) ############################################

vi]
Philip Bourke Marston
215
union of sweetness and strength, though the other combination
of sweetness and light may not always have been present.
The dividing year of the century produced two poets, neither
of whom can receive extended notice here but who are worth study
both intrinsically and historically.
Philip Bourke Marston, who, from infancy, was threatened, and
long before his early death struck, with blindness, had domestic
afflictions which aggravated this greatest of personal ones. These,
no doubt, influenced the verse of which he wrote not a little ; nor,
perhaps, in any case, would he have been a poet of great inten-
sity, while his actual production was, in Henley's phrase as to
his own, much 'echoed. ' But, some of his work, especially of his
sonnets, is beautiful ; and the frequent wailing of his verse never
turns to whining-a too natural and common degeneration. The
other, Robert Louis Stevenson-as full, despite some counter-
influences, of buoyancy as Marston was lacking in it—found his
principal and abiding vocation in prose, not verse ; but, in the
latter form, did some remarkable work, entirely, or almost entirely,
free from that 'sedulous aping' which he frankly acknowledged
in prose and which does not always improve his more popular and
permanent tales and essays. A Child's Garden of Verses is,
perhaps, the most perfectly natural book of the kind.
It was
supplemented later by other poems for children ; and some of
his work outside this, culminating in the widely-known epitaph
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill,
has the rarely combined merits of simplicity, sincerity, music and
strength.
Slightly younger than these two, but, as it happened, a friend
of Philip Marston, came Herbert Edwin Clarke, whose verse,
though always well received by competent critics, had, perhaps,
less effect on the public—even such part of the public as reads
poetry—than that of any writer of anything like equal merit
noticed in this chapter. This might have been partly due to
the fact, glanced at in other cases, that his first books, Poems
in Excile and Storm-Drift, appeared at an unlucky time (1879—82),
when there was a great deal of verse of relative excellence, but,
80 to speak, 'held under' by the eminence of the leaders, old and
new ; partly to the pessimism which was displayed in some of the
poems. Owing, it is believed, to discouragement, and, also, to
business occupation, Clarke did not write much for some years,
and his later volumes, Poems and Sonnets and Tannhäuser and


## p. 216 (#232) ############################################

216
[CH.
Lesser Poets
other Poems, though, apparently, rather more widely read, came
into competition, as such competition goes, with a new flight of
verse, some realist, some ultratranscendental, beside which it may
have seemed out of fashion. But those who read poetry for its
own sake will scarcely fail to find it in all his books. Of his
earlier work, three poems (which may be conveniently found
together in the useful thesaurus to be mentioned in the biblio-
graphy)--A Nocturn at Twilight, A Voluntary and Failure-
give different aspects of his verse in very high quality. By the
Washes, Chant d'Amour and certain of his latest sonnets, should,
also, be sought for. And there may be reckoned to Clarke one
signal merit—that, putting a few scattered passages of Tenny-
son aside, his is the only poetry which has done justice (he was
to the manner and matter born, at Chatteris in Cambridgeshire)
to the strange and unique beauty of the fen-country, with its
command—unequalled save at sea and very different from that
given by the sea--of level horizon and unbroken sky.
The remarkable sonnets of Edward Cracroft Lefroy-poems
of a style rather older than their date, and singularly free from
pre-Raphaelite influence--the precocious achievement of Oliver
Madox Brown, in whom that influence was naturally very strong ;
and the somewhat epicene touch (acknowledged long after it
had been recognised by some under the for a long time well-kept
pseudonym Fiona Macleod) by William Sharp, can receive no
extended notice here. But two poets, born towards the close of
the fifties, Francis Thompson and John Davidson, are too notable,
both intrinsically and historically, not to receive as much as can
be given. With two yet younger, but, also, now dead, they may
close our record.
The eldest of the group, John Davidson (in whom some fairly
sober critics have seen the best poet, not now living, who belonged
to the second half of the last century by birth), was not a very early
producer and, for a time, confined himself chiefly to unclassified
dramas, Scaramouch in Naxos, Bruce, Smith, showing great
ability, but too inorganic to establish a reputation. Coming to
London when he was a little past thirty, he fell into a better vein of
chiefly lyric poetry, which, fortunately, he continued to work, but to
which, unfortunately, he was neither able nor, indeed, wholly willing
to confine his energies. Attempts at novel-writing, which showed
the ill-organised character of his early verse with the same kind of
promise; miscellaneous journalism, which was wholly against grain
or collar (whichever metaphor be preferred); and a barren


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VI]
John Davidson
217
rebellious pseudo-philosophy, which had its root in temper not in
intellect, partly called him away from the muse, partly spoilt his
sojourns without her. He was, to some extent, saved from
uttermost need by a small civil list pension, but could not
reconcile himself to life (he also thought himself to be threatened
with cancer), and committed suicide by drowning. His work,
which has a faint resemblance to that of Robert Buchanan, but
with much more genius and accomplishment on one side, and to
Henley's, with less leisurely deliberation on another, is, necessarily,
rather unequal; but, from the early Fleet Street Eclogues to
the posthumous volumes, ‘splendid gleams' are never wanting,
and some pieces give a full and steady light throughout. There
is, therefore, hardly any part of Davidson's poetical work which
does not deserve to be read. The blank verse of the early
plays possesses a singular originality ; while, chaotic and 'topsy-
turvified' as is the matter, it wanted but a little more art to be
triumphantly carried off by the form, and may still be so with
a little allowance—no more than reasonable—in the case of
any
who
know poetry when they see it. Of one modern kind of ballad-
that which does not aim at being a pastiche of the old kind, but
at telling a story lyrically in a fairly simple and ordinary kind
of verse-Davidson was a master, and nearly a great master.
The Ballad of Heaven is, though, perhaps, he did not mean it
to be so, one of the best. His miscellaneous lyrics, where his
greatest strength lies, are not poetry for everyone. There is
violence—uncritical, but pathetic because not in the least merely
affected; there is attempted vulgarity, though it was as impossible
for Davidson to be really vulgar as it has been easy for some
poets of higher rank in certain ways. There is frequently
mistake—that is, say, the poet attacks things that he does not
understand and, therefore, makes a mere windmill charge at them.
But there is no mere copying or echo; there is a strange com-
mand of poetic music and always 'the gleam. Kinnoull Hill,
For Lovers, London, The Lutanist may be mentioned in a sort
of random choice out of many of his best poems; but, as was said
before, he must be read as a whole.
A curious complement-contrast is supplied by Francis Thompson,
Davidson's close contemporary from birth to death, and, with him,
almost completely representative of the main tendency of poetry
among men who had reached, but not more than reached, middle
life before the twentieth century began. Thompson, like David-
son, suffered from poverty and ill-health, though this last was
6


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218
[CH.
Lesser Poets
partly caused, as it was not in Davidson's case, by imprudence
on his part. But, during the latter years of his life, he was taken
up,' both in person and in reputation, by benevolent persons in
a powerful coterie. He was very much more of a scholar than
Davidson, and was always, or almost always, as definitely devout
as Davidson was the reverse ; nor, though, as has been said, he had
had losses and privations, did he make these much of a subject
for poetry. The two are thus, in many ways, different; but, for
that
very reason, the representative character assigned to them
in regard to the poetry of the latest years of the century is the
more complete.
It has been said that Thompson had strong classical leanings;
he was, also, very much under the influence of Caroline poetry,
especially that of Crashaw, and, in more recent styles, of Coventry
Patmore (the Patmore of the Odes not of The Angel in the
House), a definite suggestion from whom he at least once quite
frankly acknowledges and whose poetry was, perhaps, present
with him oftener than he knew. His most famous poem, The
Hound of Heaven, is, like others of his pieces, irregular Pindaric
of a thoroughly seventeenth-century kind. The opening stanza
a
is undeniably fine; it is the best following of Crashaw in his
Sainte Teresa vein that has ever been achieved, and the rest is
not too unequal to it. But the anticipated pre-Raphaelitism of
the Fletchers has been called in to blend with Crashaw's often
extravagant, but seldom too gaudy, diction; and the result, too
often, approaches the fatal 'frigidity. '
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateway of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars-
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon
makes one think rather of Benlowes (and of Butler upon him)
than of Crashaw. Thompson sometimes played undesirable tricks
with rime and diction, as in "able' and 'babble' and as in the,
certainly 'gritty,' lines
Wise-unto-Hell Ecclesiast!
Who siev'dst life to the gritty last.
But his following of the 'metaphysicals' sometimes resulted in
quite charming results. The Inconstant need not have been
disowned by any captain of the Caroline crew, and the following
led him through pieces that have less of the pastiche about them,


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vi]
Ernest Dowson
219
like Absence, to some that have hardly any, such as Penelope.
Whether he ever became entirely free from his various imitations
and attained the true mimesis—the creation or re-creation of
something after his own image and not other people's—whether
the clothes of gorgeous language and an elaborate imagery in which
he swathed himself did not prove as much a hamper as a help are,
perhaps, questions for individual decision. But that he is on the
right side of the dividing line is certain.
The last pair of all our company once more supply, between
them, a representative contrast; but it is of a very different kind.
Ernest Dowson and Richard Middleton, who both died about the
age of thirty, though there were some dozen years between their
births, reproduce once more a situation which has been already
noted twice in surveying nineteenth-century poetry. As, at the
beginning, there were those who had partially, and, later, those who
had fully, shared the influence of the great romantic school from
Wordsworth to Keats; as, later, there was a similar division among
those who felt the power of Tennyson and Browning; so, now, was
it with regard to the school of Rossetti and Swinburne. Both
Dowson and Middleton represent the poetry of youth-and of
youth which has been brought up from the beginning on the
theories of art for art's sake and enjoyment (literary and other)
for enjoyment's sake. Both have had the benefit of that ‘Mar-
cellus allowance,' as it has been called, which is earned by early
death; and, in consequence of sympathy from these various sources,
both have been extravagantly praised. The extravagance, how-
ever, may be thought to have been far better justified in Dowson's
case than in his companion's. He wrote little, his life being,
undoubtedly, shortened by habits destructive of health, peace and
power of mental exertion. His work may be injured to some
tastes, though not to all, by its being largely in the artificial forms
noticed above. Dowson was an excellent French scholar. His
verse is exquisitely finished and curiously appealing. His most
famous poem, I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion,
is couched in unusual, but quite defensible, metre and has singular
music and 'cry. A little more virility would have made it a very
beautiful poem, and it is actually a beautiful one. Something else,
and no little thing, may be said in Dowson's favour. There is
scarcely a single poem in his scant hundred and sixty pages of
largely and loosely printed verse which, when one has read it, one
| This is quite different from the poem of the same title sometimes ascribed, and
sometimes denied, to Donne.
>


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220
[CH.
Lesser Poets
does not want to read again, and which does not leave an echo of
poetry, fainter or less faint, in the mind's ear.
Richard Middleton, latest born of all the writers who can be
mentioned in this chapter, was only twenty-nine when he died ;
and he is said to have written little, if any, verse for some time
before his death. The actual volume which contains what he did
write (for the most part, if not wholly, reprinted from periodicals)
has, no doubt, what may be called the exterior character of poetry.
There is a good deal of especially Swinburnian pastiche in it,
though, also, there is something that is not. But it may be said
to present rather another catching, and, to some extent, condensing
and uttering of the general poetic aura of the period, than any very
strong idiosyncrasy. The searcher of the perilous ways of poetry
can see behind him many Richard Middletons of former ages, each
with that age's differential chances. But, in most cases (not, of
course, in all), they had later chances of showing their power if they
had it. He had no such chance, and, apparently, might not have
taken it if he had. He is not, in what he has actually left, an unequal
poet; one may almost say, without paradox or unfairness, that it
might have been better if he had been, as there would have been
more chance of discovering where his strength lay. A good sense
of form ; a fair command of picturesque language; a decidedly
'young' expatiation in sensuous imagery and fantasy; a still
younger tendency to 'shock'-these and other familiar things
occur throughout his work. But their fermentation was not
over ; and a critical palate can hardly judge what was likely to
have been the achieved flavour of the wine. As it is, it leaves
(in this respect contrasting most unfavourably with Dowson's)
hardly any flavour at all or any reminiscence.