No More Learning

closed and that, however earnestly critics may inculcate the
principle of not judging by any agreement or disagreement with
an author's opinions, and bowever honestly they may endeavour
to ‘reck their own rede,' the majority of mankind will always be
more or less influenced by that most natural but most uncritical
doctrine, 'I must take pleasure in the thing represented before
I can take pleasure in the representation. On the whole, it is
very doubtful whether, despite the enormous popularity of his
book, well deserved and well maintained, Keble has not lost more
than he has gained in the general estimate of him as a poet. Very
large numbers—perhaps the vast majority-of those who have
admired the book have been too much impressed and too much
affected by their agreement with its temper and teaching to care
much about critical examination of the merits or demerits of its
expression. On the other hand, it is an equally natural tendency
in those who disagree with the doctrine to try if they can find fault
with the music. With charges of bigotry, narrowness and the like,
we have, of course, nothing to do. But other accusations, of 'tame-
ness,' of unfinished and obscure expression and the like, concern us
very nearly. One of the most agreeable of literary anecdotes, to
which there is a supplement more delightful than itself, tells how
Wordsworth, admiring the book which owed much to him and
to which he himself, in his later work, perhaps owed something,
declared that it was so good that if it were his he would rewrite
it. ' The addition (fathered on Pusey) is that he actually proposed
to Keble collaborative rehandling. If Pusey really said this, it
must be true, for, though he had quite humour enough to invent
it, his sense of veracity was of the strictest.
It is said frequently, and with some plausibility, that allowances
and explanations are inadmissible in the judgment of poetry-
poetry is poetry or it is not. As regards what may be called
'pure' poetry, that, no doubt, is true; but, as regards what may,
with equal justice, be called 'applied' poetry--verse with a special
object and purpose—it is not. In cases of this kind, you have to
discover, more or less accurately, what the poet meant to do before
you can decide whether he has done it. In Keble's case, we could,
without very much difficulty, conclude what he meant to do from
his actual work in verse; but, fortunately, we have an invaluable
external assistance. His Oxford Praelections, as professor of
poetry, are not now, as they were till very recently, locked up in
their original Latin from general perusal; and nobody who had
any right to call himself a critic ought to have been ignorant of
-


## p. 169 (#185) ############################################

vi]
Keble
169
a
6
them while they were. If, to them, be added his posthumously
.
collected critical essays in original English, the clearest possible
notion of his attitude can be obtained. He has left descriptions
of poetry-one in English, one in Latin—the second of which is
rather a rider to, than a variant of, the first. This first, evidently
starting from Wordsworth's, but greatly improved on it, runs thus:
The indirect expression in words, most appropriately in metrical words, of
some overpowering emotion or ruling taste or feeling, the direct indulgence
of which is somehow repressed.
To this he adds, in his Latin comments, starting from Aristotle
and Bacon, but, again, improving upon the former and correcting
the latter, that it is subsidium benigni numinis—the assistance
of the Divinity-in purifying passion. Now, when the original
emotion, taste, feeling, passion, were all religious or ecclesiastical,
and the poetry itself an assistance-a subsidium
for their ex-
pression, but not, in any way, an end in itself, it would, naturally,
follow that this expression must be, in many ways, conditioned,
and, in fact, limited. Ornament, as the rubrics have it, will be
but a 'decent tippet' for the subject; no far-sought or far-brought
curiosities of rime, or rhythm, of fancy, or conceit, will be cared
about; in fact, stimulus' itself (see the Taylorian context quoted
in the last chapter of this kind), though not neglected, will be
subordinated to edification.
Yet, it may be boldly asserted, and safely argued, that Keble
is not quotidian,' while the defects in form which have been urged
against him have altogether escaped the notice of some critics
rather apt to be over- than under-critical in that matter. Indeed,
it may be very strongly suspected that an antecedent notion about
the probable dullness and not improbable clumsiness of all religious
poetry has, in some, if not all, cases invited an injurious application
of it. The Christian Year has, perhaps, nowhere the astonishing
and rocket-like soar and blaze of more than one seventeenth
century religious poet, or the quieter, but hardly less unique, glow
of some later nineteenth century sacred verse-writers. The great
motto of the school in conduct and faith, 'quietness and confi-
dence,' is extended to Keble's verse. But the quietness never
becomes tameness, and the confidence never passes into rhetoric.
The poet with whom he comes into nearest comparison is, of course,
George Herbert; and, though Keble has not Herbert's seasoning
of quaintness, he has other merits to make up for the absence of
this, and he sometimes rises to a grandeur which Herbert hardly
1 Ante, vol. XII, chap. v, p. 97.


## p. 170 (#186) ############################################

170
[CH.
Lesser Poets
ever attains. The book has been so long and so widely known
that its best things are, as it were, sifted and laid out beforehand;
and it would be mere coxcombry to attempt to specify others.
The Evening Hymn, which has the peculiar placid piety noted
by Thackeray in Addison's similar work, with a more than
Addisonian unction, has been, also, the most popular of all; but,
perhaps, the best-certainly those where the asserted quality of
grandeur shows most-are What went ye out to see (third Sunday
in Advent), See Lucifer like lightning fall (third Sunday in Lent),
and best of all for a sculptor's hand (second Sunday after
Easter), with its almost Miltonic phrasing and moulding of the
magnificent words of Balaam. Nor should Red o'er the forest
peers the setting sun—the only thing in the manner of Gray's
Elegy that has ever come near the Elegy itself—be unnoticed.
It is not quite an idle question whether, if Newman had been
more secularly minded, or even if, retaining his actual temper, he
had taken seriously to poetry, he would or might have been very
great poet. That Lead, Kindly Light (it is, perhaps, rather a
misfortune that it is not more generally known by its actual title
The Pillar of Cloud) is poetry and great poetry in one poetical
way can only be denied by those (they have been known) who, not
out of mere idle paradox but, exercising such intellectual faculties
as they possessed, have made the same denial in the case of Dies
Irae. That, in another way, and looking rather at choice and
grasp of subject than at isolated poetic phrase or musical cry, The
Dream of Gerontius is poetry, and even great poetry, is equally
certain. That the two or three fragments of early light verse show
great faculty in that way likewise is true. On the other hand, there
is the fact that, in the not very small volume entitled Verses on
various occasions, composed during a long life, though there is
'nothing base,' there is, also, nothing at all, except the things
already mentioned, which is above the level of The Christian Year,
and nothing, with the same exceptions, equal to Keble's best things.
There might be two different explanations of this: one is furnished
by the rather curious, but, apparently, quite frank and genuine,
preface to the volume. Surprise at critics having discovered merit
in your work is a not very uncommon affectation; but it is not
one of which Newman, considering both his faults and his virtues,
is likely to have been guilty; and he says he felt it. But he goes
on to make the much more curious excuse for republishing all his
verse, that he really does not himself know whether it is good or
bad, and is of opinion that there is no criterion of poetry at all. In


## p. 171 (#187) ############################################

vi]
Newman
171
another man, this statement would probably be like the former, an
affectation, or else a mere whim. But Newman's mind, as is well
known, was rather over-furnished with logic, and extremely under-
furnished with the historic sense; and, no doubt, he meant what he
said. To one who did mean it, poetry must, necessarily, seem an
altogether inferior thing—supplying 'the harmless pleasure of
verse-making' (his own words) and, perhaps, the equally harmless
pleasure of verse-reading, but not orovdalov—not serious. It
was almost impossible that, from a man so minded, much poetry
of any kind should come: we have only to be thankful that, as a
matter of fact, The Pillar of Cloud and The Dream of Gerontius
actually came.
The most noteworthy of the numerous writers of verse whom
the tractarian movement and the powerful example of The
Christian Year raised up were Isaac Williams, Frederick William
Faber and John Mason Neale? . The odium theologicum which
excluded Williams from the Oxford professorship of poetry was
exceptionally unjust, for his combined claims as poet and scholar
far exceeded those of his actual opponent, Garbett, or, indeed, of
any likely candidate; and he has scarcely had full justice done to
him since. But it may be admitted that Lyra Apostolica (of
which he was part-author), The Cathedral and his other works
show him as a sort of ‘moon’ of Keble—always a dangerous posi-
tion, and specially dangerous here, because Keble's own poetic
light had more of the moon than of the sun in it. His characteristic
is certainly not strength; but the grace and scholarship and purity
of his verse can hardly be missed by any impartial student of
poetry. Faber (who followed Newman, not Keble, at the parting
of the ways) had, possibly, the greatest specially poetical power of
the whole group. It is well known, both from a certain rather
ungracious anecdote and from his general expressions on the
subject, that Wordsworth was exceedingly chary of the title of
poet; yet, he told Faber that, by his devoting himself to orders,
‘England lost' one. In the principal book of his younger, and still
Anglican, years, The Cherwell Water Lily, and in most of his other
work, the possibility rather than the certainty of such a develop-
ment, to any great extent, may be noted. The verse—which shows
the influence not merely of Wordsworth himself but of Scott-is
fluent, musical and possessed of something like, with a nineteenth
century difference, what the eighteenth century called 'elegance';
but, still more, it wants strength and concentration. Later, if he
1 See, ante, vol. II, chap. XII.
6


## p. 172 (#188) ############################################

172
[CH.
Lesser Poets
did not exactly acquire these, he displayed something which un-
favourable critics have labelled 'meretricious,' a term which itself
gives a grudging recognition of a kind of beauty. The label is
unfair and undiscriminating. The famous hymn The Pilgrims of
the Night has, certainly, a feminine quality; but even Aristotle has
admitted that the feminine is not always the bad. The singular
piece entitled The Sorrowful World comes, sometimes, near to
consummateness. But, in his later years, at any rate, Faber gave
himself no elbow-room and, in his earlier, he had not come to
full powers.
The third of this group, Neale, was, also, a member of another
-larger, in itself, but still very small-of those curious and
extremely beneficent writers of whom Edward FitzGerald is, per-
haps, the chief, and who, without showing any great talent for
original poetry, have an extraordinary faculty of translating or
paraphrasing verse from other languages. His life, though not
long, was, after he left Cambridge, almost entirely leisurely; and
he devoted his whole leisure to hymnology and other ecclesiastical
study and writing. His original verse has, perhaps, been sometimes
too contemptuously spoken of; but, at its best, it is second-rate.
Some of his translations are really marvellous—not merely as com-
positions, but when taken in close connection with their originals.
Of the millions (the number is certainly not exaggerated) who, in
the sixty or seventy years since its appearance, have known
Jerusalem the Golden, probably not more than hundreds are
really acquainted with its source, the De Contemptu Mundi of
Bernard of Clugny or Morlaix, though the earlier publications
of this by Flacius Illyricus and Polycarp Leyser were always more
or less accessible to scholars; though archbishop Trench had
included extracts of it in his Sacred Latin Poetry before Neale
took it in hand; and though it has been several times printed
since. Nobody accustomed to medieval Latin and capable of
recognising poetry could fail to see the extraordinary beauty of
the best parts of Bernard's work. Its form, however--dactylic
hexameters, unbroken except for the final spondee, with internal
rime in each line and end rime for each couplet—though managed
without the least effort and with wonderful effect, is not only
rather difficult in itself and in Latin, but would, in English, not
so much as the stock-phrase goes) 'court,' as ensure, disaster.
Neale neither attempted the impossible by trying the metre itself
nor endeavoured to come near it by employing anapaests or any
English swinging measure. He boldly transposed the rhythm


## p. 173 (#189) ############################################

VI]
Trench
173
altogether into the shortened iambic 'common measure' of seven,
six, seven, six, rimed only on the shorter lines. And he got out of
this a rhythmical effect which, though in mere scheme and prosodic
analysis as different as possible from the Latin, provides, in English,
a parallel if not an identical effect of panting and yearning music,
with diction and imagery to match. As pieces of craftsmanship
for the expert not less than as providing popular satisfaction for
the multitude, Jerusalem the Golden and its companions have few
equals. Nor was this Neale's only, though it was his greatest,
triumph. For others, we may be content with noting The day is
past and over and Art thou weary, art thou languid, which show
hardly less command of rhythm, language and general atmosphere
inspired by, rather than simply taken from, the originals.
Trenchhimself has much more extensive and direct claims to
appear here than those—not in themselves unimportant-given
by the volume just referred to; and, unlike most of the poets
recently mentioned, he wrote miscellaneous, as well as sacred, verse.
Like many, if not most, of his exact contemporaries, he was very
much under the influence of Wordsworth, personal as well as
poetical, and his sonnets in a Wordsworthian fashion are among
his best work. One of his best known things, the verses on the
battle of the Alma, is marred by a certain monotony in the long
trochaic metre which he adopts. The remarkable poem on love
(love divine, in the first place, but not without a reference to
human) has, on the other hand, a distinct individuality of metre.
Trench's wellknown work in popular linguistics had some bearing
on the study of poetry; and there is no doubt that the selection,
already quoted, of medieval Latin verse had a very much fuller
result than that with which it has been credited. Yet, he was,
perhaps, born just a little too early. It is surprising to find,
in the very context more than once referred to, that he-a fervent
admirer of Latin hymns and author of an early and remarkable
tractate on accentual Latin poetry generally-while extolling the
matter of Bernard's poem, positively abuses the ‘inattractiveness,'
'awkwardness' and 'repulsiveness of the metre. It was neither
Latin nor English, neither orthodoxly Vergilian nor orthodoxly
Miltonic-it was strange and new, and Trench could not put
himself in a mood to hear it gladly. Something similar may
have cramped him in his own production. He is, putting the
sonnets above mentioned aside, best when he is pretty definitely
6
>
1 See, ante, vol. XII, chap. xn.


## p. 174 (#190) ############################################

174
[ch.
Lesser Poets
echoing the seventeenth-century divine poets, and the short
piece Lord ! many times I am aweary quite is not unworthy
of Vaughan.
All the writers of sacred poetry just mentioned professed
throughout their lives one or another—sometimes more than
one-form of orthodox Christianity. But free thought, undog-
matism, unorthodoxy, or whatever it pleases to call itself, also
produced a number of verse-writers too large to be dealt with
here except by sample. The best sample of them, moreover,
A. H. Clough, is not within our jurisdiction here'. We must,
therefore, confine the representation of the class to two writers
only, W. M. Wilks Call and Thomas Toke Lynch.
Call was a Cambridge man and, on leaving college, took orders;
nor was it till he was near the half-way house of a rather more
than ordinarily prolonged life that what are politely called
' difficulties' made him give up his duties. He never returned
to them; but the type (a not uncommon one) of his dissidence
may be gauged by the fact that, in one of his best poems, having
made the refrain
I praise thee, God!
he altered 'God’ to 'World’ and afterwards altered it back again.
Eloquent, also, is the compliment which an admiring critic of, per-
haps, his best known thing, the prettily sentimental and pathetic
Manoli, published in a popular magazine, that it 'illustrates the
saddening idea that the collective welfare is too frequently pur-
chased by the suffering of the individual'—on which, as a theme
for poetry, one would like to have heard Matthew Arnold, himself
no fanatic of dogma. But Call had some poetical gift, and The
Bird and the Bower shows it. Lynch was an Independent
minister and carried his independence somewhat far even in the
opinion of his brethren. But he also had a not inconsiderable
power of writing hymns and nondescript lyrics which warble in the
precincts of hymnody proper.
Yet another class may be made, though space forbids lengthy
discussion of its members, of the numerous, and sometimes very
interesting, translations of classical and other languages who
flourished during our period. It is possible that none of them
achieved anything that was such a classic in itself as Cary's
Dante ; and certainly none approached the unique originality
and poetic merit of FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám? But the
1 See, ante, chap. iv.
? See, ante, chap. v.


## p. 175 (#191) ############################################

VI]
Translations
175
Aristophanic versions of Thomas Mitchell and John Hookham
Frere, who belonged partly to the earlier nineteenth century,
were of singular vividness and vigour; and they were followed
by the Vergilian renderings of the two Kennedys, Rann and
Charles Rann (father and son), and of John Conington; by the
Catullian of Robinson Ellis ; by the numerous attempts from the
versions of Lord Derby and F. W. Newman onwards, in all sorts
of metres and all manner of styles, to storm the impregnable fort
of Homeric quality (the best poetry, if the farthest in repro-
duction of character, being, perhaps, the Spenserian Odyssey of
Philip Stanhope Worsley); and these are only a few specimens
of the great library of verse translation produced during the time.
Indeed, few poets of that time, whether among those noticed
in this chapter or among the 'majors dealt with elsewhere,
abstained wholly from translation. Whatever opinions may be
held in petto about the necessary limitations, or the equally
necessary licences, of such translation in itself, it may fairly claim,
in the nineteenth century, to have escaped one almost fatal
danger which had pursued it in the eighteenth. The immense
variety of poetic metres and styles which was now common and
almost obligatory gave no excuse for, and, indeed, definitely pro-
hibited, the reduction (in a special sense) to a common measure
not particularly suitable to Latin, hopelessly unsuited to Greek
and of doubtful application to modern foreign languages, which
had prevailed earlier. Among the innumerable compilations and
anthologies of recent years one does not remember any wholly
composed of nineteenth-century translations in verse from different
modern languages. It might not be ill worth doing.
It was observed of the poetesses noticed in the last chapter of
this kind that they increased largely in numbers during the early
part of the nineteenth century. Ten years before the death of
Mrs Hemans, Dyce had been able to fill a respectable volume
with applicants of older date for the position of 'Tenth Muse,'
but the remaining three-quarters of the century were more pro-
lific of these than the whole earlier range of English literature.
The popularity of Mrs Hemans herself and of Miss Landon were far
exceeded by that of Mrs Browning; and, just as Mrs Browning
died, Miss Rossetti began. The works of these two, as well as
those of Emily Brontë, George Eliot and one or two others, fall,
for various reasons, out of our flock, but a very considerable
number remain—in only one case, perhaps, to be noticed last of
i Vol. XII, chap. v.
.


## p. 176 (#192) ############################################

176
Lesser Poets
[CH.
all, exhibiting a quality which marks the ticket 'lesser' as rather
ungracious, but in all entitled to challenge a place here with the
masculine minorities.
The eldest of the whole group, a lady born just within the
century and nearly ten years older than Tennyson, though she made
no public appearance with verse till just on the eve of his volumes
of 1842, was Caroline Archer Clive, author of the powerful novel
Paul Ferroll and its, as usual rather less powerful, sequel Why
Paul Ferroll killed his Wife. A sufferer from lameness and weak
health, it was not till 1840, the year of her marriage, that she gave
to the world the quaintly titled book IX Poems by V—the latter
symbol being, by those who were not in the secret, sometimes
interpreted as a number, not an initial. They attracted much
attention and high praise; but Mrs Clive did not allow herself to
be tempted into over-production, and the complete edition of her
poems which appeared years after her death scarcely exceeds
two hundred pages. There is, however, hardly a page that is
not worth reading, though, of the two longest pieces, I watched
the Heavens and The Valley of the Morlas, which fill nearly
half the book, the latter is better than the former, and neither has
quite the poetic value of the shorter constituents. The dates of
the compositions are scattered over quite forty years; and, with
rare exceptions, exhibit a singular freedom from any of the con-
temporary influences which might have been expected to show
themselves. Indeed (and this is made less surprising by the
early date of her birth), there is a certain eighteenth-century
touch of the best kind in Mrs Clive's work; although hardly
a poem, as it stands, could have been written except in the
nineteenth. The general tone (though at least the last half of
her life seems to have been quite happy) is of a sober and utterly
unaffected melancholy. The most striking piece in subject—it is
not quite the most perfect in execution, though it does not fall
short of its own necessities—is one suggested by a friend's state-
ment that, at a great court ball, when invitations were issued by
hundreds, scores of the proposed guests were found to be dead.
The completest, in union of matter and form, are Hearts Ease,
Venice and Death; but few will be found unsatisfactory, unless
the reader's nature, or his mood, be out of key with them.
Some others must be more briefly noticed. Sarah Flower
Adams—the conjunction of whose wellknown piece Nearer, my
God, to Thee with Newman's Lead, Kindly Light as the most
poetical of nineteenth-century hymns is not more hackneyed than


## p. 177 (#193) ############################################

vi]
Fanny Kemble
177
correct—wrote nothing else equal to it, and wasted most of her
poetical efforts on Vivia Perpetua, one of the class of curiously
sterile closet plays formerly noticed in connection with Philip
van Artevelde. Of two sister Sheridans, alike beautiful and witty,
Lady Dufferin (the Helen of Tennyson's Helen's Tower) wrote
some pretty songs. Her sister, Mrs Norton (as she is still
almost invariably called, though she was Lady Stirling-Maxwell
before she died) may be said, at one time, to have shared
the popularity first of Mrs Hemans and L. E. L. (whom, though
with less gush, she somewhat resembled) and, latterly, of
Mrs Browning. But her poems have not worn well, and one of
the latest and (as some held) best of them, The Lady of
La Garaye, was found singularly wanting at the time by then
younger tastes. It is to be feared that the amiable muse of
Eliza Cook will never, unlike the lady in Comus, escape from
that ‘Old Arm Chair' which contrasts, fatally for itself, with
Thackeray's 'cane-bottomed' rival. On the other hand, it is
doubtful whether, except among the numerous friends of her
famous family, Fanny Kemble has had, at any time, the repu-
tation she deserves as a poetess. It is difficult, indeed, to name
any single poem by her which is, as it were, a diploma piece;
but she is scarcely ever commonplace, and, while one would be
prepared to find a following of 'J. M. K. 's' friend by 'J. M. K. ’s'
sister, her work is, on the contrary, full of puzzling passages which
suggest Tennyson only to unsuggest him. But her long life,
despite its intervals of leisure, was frittered away between acting,
an unfortunate marriage, public readings and recitations, travels
and the accounts of them, autobiographic writings and a variety
of other things of interest but of no great value.
All the ladies just mentioned were born in the first two
decades, and most of them in the first decade, of the century;
but, about 18201 and in the years following, another group of
poetesses arose. The two eldest, Menella Bute Smedley and
Dorothy (Dora) Greenwell, were members of families otherwise
distinguished in literature, and their own names are worthily
inscribed on the columns which invidious satire long ago
grudged to lesser poets; but there is some lack of inevitableness
1 In 1820 itself was born Anne Evans, sister of a poet to be noticed later (see, post,
p. 199). Her health was weak and her life not long, but she possessed, as is not very
common, skill in music as well as in poetry, and made the two work together.
Roses and Rosemary has few superiors in these double honours,' and among her
other poems more than one or two, especially the sonnet Pevensey and Hurstmon-
ceaux, possess unusual qualities.
12
>
E, L, XIII.
CH. VÌ.


## p. 178 (#194) ############################################

178
Lesser Poets
[ch.
about their work. Dinah Craik (born Mulock) is herself more
distinguished as a novelist than as a poet. But the mild genius
of Adelaide Anne Procter, daughter of Barry Cornwall, had
something attaching about it which justified the use of the
substantive just applied, though the adjective must be kept in
view. Very recently, an Austrian monograph on her, though
it was possibly prompted by the zeal of religious sympathy
(she joined the Roman catholic church rather late in her short
life), may have startled some of its readers who remembered
Adelaide Anne Procter's work as 'a book that used to belong to
a fellow's sisters '—to borrow an admirable phrase of Thackeray
about something else. The fancy which Dickens had for her
verse is not to be too much discounted by personal acquaintance,
though that existed; for he accepted her poetry in Household
Words when he did not know it was hers; and, though he certainly
was not what one would call ‘nothing if not critical,' especially in
poetry, he always knew what would please the public. Pretty
music and, at one time, magnificent public singing may have had
something to do with the vogue of The Message, but it retains a
charm for some who are not mere sentimentalists and who never
were specially musical. And she had no small power of verse nar-
rative—among numerous examples is the version of the beautiful
story of St Beatrix, here called Sister Angela, which was given to
'Belinda' in a Christmas number of All the Year Round. Now,
verse narrative, save in the very different hands of William Morris,
has seldom been satisfactorily handled since the first half of the
nineteenth century.
With the chief singer of the other sex, born in 1830, Christina
Rossetti, we are not here concerned"; but she had, as close contem-
poraries and sisters in art poetic, two writers, one of whom obtained
a great, though hardly sustained, notoriety, while the other is one
of the most notable instances of the fact that, while judging any
kind of literary worker from first appearances is rash, and judging
a poet in this manner is rasher, to judge poetesses from single
specimens is, perhaps, rashest of all. The person first referred to
was Isa Craig, afterwards Mrs Knox, the victress in the rather
foolishly devised public competition for an ode to celebrate the
centenary of Burns. “Six hundred' is the conventional Latin equi-
valent for our equally conventional 'a thousand,' and Miss Craig
actually had more than six hundred rivals. Her ode, if the adjudi-
cators were competent, showed no very considerable poetical power
1 See, ante, chap. v.
6
i


## p. 179 (#195) ############################################

6
2
VI]
Jean Ingelow
179
in this large body. It is respectable but nothing more. She did
better things—the best, perhaps, being The Woodruff, though this
itself comes in most unlucky comparison both in title and in subject
with Dante Rossetti's Wood-spurge. On the other hand, if we had
nothing of Jean Ingelow's but the most remarkable poem entitled
Divided, it would be permissible to suppose the loss, in fact or
in might-have-been, of a poetess of almost the highest rank.
Absolutely faultless it is not; a very harsh critic might urge even
here a little of the diffuseness which has been sometimes charged
against the author's work generally; a less stern judge might not
quite pardon a few affectations and gushes,' something like those
of Tennyson's early work. It might be called sentimental by those
who confound true and false sentiment in one condemnation. But
the theme and the allegorical imagery by which it is carried out are
true; the description, not merely plastered on, but arising out of, the
necessary treatment of the theme itself, is admirable; the pathos
never becomes mawkish; and, to crown all, the metrical appro-
priateness of the measure chosen and the virtuosity with which
it is worked out leave nothing to desire. Jean Ingelow wrote
some other good things, but nothing at all equalling this; while
she also wrote too much and too long.
If, as has been suggested
above, this disappointingness is even commoner with poetesses
than with poets, there is a possible explanation of it in the lives,
more unoccupied until recently, of women. Unless a man is an
extraordinary coxcomb, a person of private means, or both, he
seldom has the time and opportunity of committing, or the wish
to commit, bad or indifferent verse for a long series of years; but
it is otherwise with women.
The period of the forties was somewhat stronger in the
number, if not in the quality, of the poetesses it produced.
Harriet Eleanor Hamilton-King is best known by her respectable,
but tedious, The Disciples—a sort of Italomaniac epic influenced
in spirit, perhaps, by both the Brownings and written in a blank
verse not unsuggestive of Aurora Leigh. Her shorter poems
are rather better; but, like most of the lesser poetesses of this
particular time, she not only, in a famous phrase, 'could be very
serious,' but thought it her duty to be this rather too exclusively.
One of her companions, indeed, Emily Pfeiffer, rather unneces-
sarily excused herself for want of proficiency in the for some time
popular pastime of rondeaux, ballades and so forth, on the ground
that 'the burden of meaning lay too heavily on a woman singer's
heart' for her to excel in these trivialities. The same lady is
>
6
6
12-2


## p. 180 (#196) ############################################

180
[CH.
Lesser Poets
also reported to have explained that she considered it her duty
to go on writing poetry after her husband's death because he had
a high opinion of what she wrote before it. There have, no doubt,
been great poets capable of such innocent egotism and want of
humour; but Emily Pfeiffer could scarcely claim their excuses.
The compassionate sonnet, which will tolerate and, to some
extent, ennoble all faults except triviality and carelessness,
enabled her to do her most tolerable work; the rest was mostly
negligible. Another very serious poetess was Augusta Webster,
who, again, represents a strong Browning influence both from
husband and wife, and who, owing, perhaps, to this, sometimes
made fair experiments in lyrical metres. Her blank verse, how-
ever, of which she was very prolific in forms non-dramatic, semi-
dramatic and dramatic, sometimes employed Robert Browning's
licences without his justifications, and, at others, became unspeak-
ably monotonous. To the forties, also, belongs Sarah or 'Sadie'
Williams-a short-lived singer in both divine and human fashions,
of which a remark made already, and to be repeated in reference
to other writers, is again true—that they show a certain diffused
poetic power which is hardly concentrated in any single piece;
Isabella Harwood, who wrote not a few closet dramas under the
pseudonym ‘Ross Neil,' in blank verse, better than that of most
of her companions mentioned here; and the various and sometimes
almost brilliant talent of Violet Fane'-Mary Montgomerie Lamb,
Mrs Singleton by her first marriage and Lady Currie by her second.
A poetess who has scarcely received the credit she deserved
was Margaret Veley, whose scanty but excellent verse will be
found in a posthumous collection prefaced by Sir Leslie Stephen
and entitled A Marriage of Shadows and other Poems. The
author was a novelist also, but, in that department too, was not
voluminous; and she died in rather early middle age. It is
particularly interesting to compare her work with that of Mrs Clive
('V')', because the strong resemblance between them, in general,
brings out the difference between the first and second halves of the
century. Both in thought and expression of a similar attitude, and
in formal and verbal utterance, Margaret Veley's melancholy is
vaguer and fainter than her senior's; her metrical devices and
her vocabulary are more elaborate; she is sometimes rather more
obscure and more deliberately artistic, though the elaboration and
deliberation are not in the least affected. Her art, in fact, is, though
1 Anne Evans (see ante and post), who came between them in time, might, with
advantage, be joined in the comparison.
a


## p. 181 (#197) ############################################

vi]
Younger Writers
181
not consciously, more sophisticated. But her accomplishment is
various and almost great. Her chief work, A Japanese Fan, is
really something of a positive masterpiece of quiet ironic passion,
suitably phrased in verse. The title poem of her book and The
Unknown Land deserve an honourable place among the phantas-
magorias in irregular Pindaric which have formed a great feature
of later nineteenth-century poetry; while, among definite lyrics,
Michaelmas Daisies may stand as a representative document for
the survey of the subject of this chapter with which it should
conclude.
Some, mainly younger, poetesses must be mentioned more
briefly, though most of them obtained, and one or two of them
deserved, reputation as such. Mathilde Blind, daughter of a
wellknown German refugee, wrote much verse in unimpeachable
English, showing strong literary sympathies and correct versifica-
tion. Any competent critic in the future will be able to see at
once that she wrote in the last quarter or third of the nineteenth
century, and did good 'school-work’in its styles—work agreeable
enough to read. Over-estimation may be thought to have been
the lot of the two ladies, Miss Bradley and Miss Cooper, an aunt
and a niece, who had the curious fancy of writing in collaboration
under one masculine name, Michael Field. Their work, which was
most commonly tragic drama, but included lyric, received very high
praise from reviewers, from the appearance, in 1884, of Callirrhoe,
a piece on which the influence of Landor was evident in style as well
as subject. Others have failed to discover much in the joint work
which goes beyond the standard, already noticed, of nineteenth-
century closet drama, or, in the lyrics, much more than the half
machine-made verse which usually comes late in great periods of
poetry. There was, perhaps, something more to be made of two
others, who both died young and of whom the second died not
happily, Constance Naden and Amy Levy. Miss Naden's work is
a little overloaded by its sometimes very serious subjects, pan-
theistic philosophy and the like, though, at times, it is also comic.
But already (she died at thirty-one) she showed signs of that
internal fire which melts and recasts subject according to the
poet's idiosyncrasy. Amy Levy, dying still younger, achieved
even less, but gave occasional evidence-especially in a short
and very simply languaged poem on the waltz—of a passionate
and almost triumphant intensity not common.
But the most remarkable poetess, after Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and Christina Rossetti, of the later and latest


## p. 182 (#198) ############################################

182
[CH.
Lesser Poets
nineteenth century, was one of whose poetical capacity few people,
except personal friends, had any opportunity of judging till the
century itself was nearly closed; while her death, not long after
its actual close, was the first occasion of extensive eulogy and
collected publication of her poems. Then, the name of Mary
E. Coleridge became widely divulged, and her poems (printed in
a fairly full collection, besides some remarkable prose essays) were,
for a time, quite eagerly bought. The eulogists, in some cases,
were of the highest competence, but not quite always so; and
the chorus of compliment, in some cases, had its frequent, if not
constant, effect of arousing something like the feeling of the
historical or legendary Athenian in regard to Aristides. But it
is recorded that one critic, who, by accident, had known nothing
of her work and was somewhat inclined to revolt against this chorus,
having gone to a public library and obtained her poems, opened
them at a venture in three places, and read the poems on which he
chanced. He then shut the book, returned it to the librarian and
immediately ordered a copy from his bookseller, in obedience to the
law which ordains that true poetry shall never (cases of necessity
being excluded) be read except in a book belonging to the reader.
Nor did the complete reading contradict—on the contrary, it con-
firmed and intensified—the impression derived from these sortes
Coleridgianae. It is not, of course, to be expected that everyone
will—and it would be unreasonable to insist that everyone should-
agree with the estimate implied in this anecdote. There are, in
particular, two objections to Mary Coleridge's verse which cannot
be merely dismissed—as we have dismissed others in these historic
reviews of poetry—with a simple 'disabling of judgment. ' One
such objection might be derived from the almost unbroken gloom
of the general atmosphere? ; the other, from the frequent use (and,
as some may call it, abuse) of the parabolic method-employed
with such complication that an imaginative interpreter, whose
'cocksureness' is not equal to his imagination, may wisely decline
to be certain of the special moralitas to be adopted. An objection
of the first class is sometimes met by the retort sarcastic, 'Oh!
you want the universe to be universally regarded through a horse-
collar,' but this is obviously idle. The house of mourning deserves
its bards at least as well as the house of mirth, and is likely to
get poetry of a higher class out of them. There are poems and
6
1 It will have been noticed that this characteristic, not uncommon in poets, is
specially common in poetesses. They prolong their attendance on the school of
suffering, even after they have attained the strain of song.


## p. 183 (#199) ############################################

a
6
vi]
Mary Coleridge
183
poem-books of all kinds, from In Memoriam to A Little Child's
Monument, which, even in recent times, justify a statement hardly
needing any justification. But, when a collection of poems, written
on no common subject, and at periods apparently extending over
more than five and twenty years, is something like a cypress-
grove, a certain morbidity of temperament may be not unfairly
suggested. And, on the other hand, the person who is quite sure
of the exact intention of such a poem as Unwelcome-
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,
with all its welcome strangeness, and its quaint urbanity of
rhythm, may, perhaps, rather be commiserated on his certainty
than complimented on his acuteness. Let the reader, however,
prepare himself for a garden of Proserpine rather than of Adonis,
for a region if not exactly of 'mystery' at any rate of 'enigma'-
the words come from Mary Coleridge's most distinguished eulogist-
and he will, if he have any taste for poetry, find no further difficulty
and a great deal of delight. When she did not publish quite
anonymously, she seems to have generally adopted, from George
Macdonald, the signature "Avodos—which, evidently, means, in the
two writers', not so much (as it has been inadequately translated)
'wanderer' as 'wayless one'-a person who is not only not travelling
by a definite road to a definite goal, but who hardly sees any
road before him at all. In fact, the influence of that most unequal
genius? who produced Phantastes and The Portent and Lilith was
evidently much stronger on Mary Coleridge than the mere adoption
of the pseudonym would show—though her shorter life, her greater
poetical and critical gift and the absence of any temptation to
produce hack-work all told in her favour.
She is said to have refrained from publishing her poems herself
and to have objected to others publishing them, at least in her
lifetime, out of ancestral reverence—for fear of dishonouring the
shade of S. T. C. As a matter of fact, there is more of the
Estesian' character in her than there is in Hartley or in Sara, while
her pure originality is, perhaps, also greater than that of either
of these kinsfolk. She was only unlucky in her time. It has been
observed more than once—Matthew Arnold himself, though he
sometimes exemplifies the feature poetically censured, might be
cited in critical support of the censure that mere discourage-
ment, mere quest, as it were, of a stool to be melancholy upon,
? In Greek itself, the word is used of places not persons, and is simply our
ordinary pathless. '
? As to his own poems, see post.


## p. 184 (#200) ############################################

184
[ch.
Lesser Poets
and remonstrances, from that cathedra when it has been found,
with the arrangements of the universe—though by no means an
unpoetic mood, is apt to become monotonous in its expression.
Since Byron and Shelley, in their lower and higher ways re-
spectively, until the present day, we have had a very great deal
of it. But the unavoidable monotony of the key can be overcome
by the variety and idiosyncrasy of note, and this is most eminently
true of Mary Coleridge. Others may have lent her fiddles to play,
melancholy or mysticism ; but, in Latimer's famous phrase, her
rosin is her own-borrowed from, and, as yet, borrowed by, none.
To specify pieces from the nearly 240 poems found in her collected
poems is at once very difficult and rather idle, for, as has been
said above, the merest chance-medley will serve in the case of
readers likely to care for her, and there is hardly a poem in the
book which will not displease or weary others. For those who must
have specimens, The Other Side of a Mirror, A Difference, He
came unto His Own and His Own received Him not, The Witch,
(a worthy progeny of Christabel), A Day-dream and on the
Arrival of a Visitor may serve. And it may, perhaps, be added
that it will be found useful to read her in close connection with
canon Dixon (see post), whose work may not impossibly have
influenced hers. The connection, at any rate, struck the present
writer independently; and it adds a somewhat interesting touch
to the mental map of the poetry of our time.
We must now turn from groups aggregated according to
subject, style, sex and other joint characteristics to the large
number of individual poets who do not seem to lend themselves,
without arbitrary classification, to such grouping. In their case,
chronological order is almost the only one possible; though
arrangement by decades may be convenient.
The first batch thus to be formed consists of men the eldest
of whom were born in the same year with Tennyson, while none
of them was younger than Browning. Tennyson's contempora-
ries were two poets as much contrasted in every possible way
as could well be-Richard Monckton Milnes, known, during the
latter part of his life, as lord Houghton, and Thomas Gordon
Hake, glanced at above. Milnes, always widely known in society
and, to some extent, in politics, was, also, at one time, almost a
1 This form of grouping may seem artificial; but only to those who have not
taken the trouble to notice, or who are unable to understand, the subtle influence
of the spirit of even narrowly separated times which literary, like other, history
shows to have been exerted on persons born within them.


## p. 185 (#201) ############################################

vi] Lord Houghton and Gordon Hake 185
]
popular poet. Lord Houghton (who also possessed an admirable
prose style, and whose services in editing Keats were important in
quality and still more important in time) was not a poet of the
'big bow-wow' tone, but he was neither a twitterer nor a yelper.
A critic's attitude towards Strangers Yet and The Brookside now,
and for the greater part of the last twenty years, may be compared,
from the higher and wider historic standpoint, with its counter-
part, the attitude of eighteenth-century critics towards the meta-
physicals. ' If, as they saw nothing but ‘false wit,' 'awkward
numbers' and so forth, in the one case, he sees nothing but senti-
mentality and 'jingle,' in the other, then we can class him and
find him wanting. These two famous, or once famous, songs and
other poems by the same author belong to their own division of
poetry only. But that division is not the lowest, and these
themselves rank high in it.
The contrast just made might almost have been supplied,
so far as kinds of poetry go, without exploring further than
Houghton's own contemporary, Hake, who sought for depth
even at the cost of obscurity, for strangeness at the cost of
broken music and for quaint thought and expression at the
cost of attraction and grace, risking, also, the charge of posturing
and jargon-making. He never could have been a popular poet,
and neither when the somewhat younger spasmodics caught the
public ear, for a time, with verse not wholly dissimilar, nor when
the work of poets nearly a generation younger than himself, such
as Dante Rossetti, created a taste for poetry still more like
his own, did he become so. His best things—Old Souls, The
Palmist and great part of Maiden Ecstasy—have what has been
called a “fortified' character: they require, save in the case of
exceptionally qualified or exceptionally exercised persons, either
to be taken by storm or sapped with elaborate approaches.
Now, about poetry of this kind, there is not only this difficulty
but another, and an even more dangerous one-that composition
of it tempts imitation of a merely specious kind and measure.
For the last half century a great deal of verse has been written
suggesting the speech which an acute critic of the last generation,
G. S. Venables, put in Carlyle's mouth-
a
I will be strange and wild and odd,
but not possessing root of thought or fruit of beauty enough to
support and to carry off the strangeness and wildness and oddity.
This is not quite true of Hake: but it might seem to be true.


## p. 186 (#202) ############################################

186
[CH.
Lesser Poets
Very different, again, from either of these was their (slightly)
junior, Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, who, rather late in life, became
professor of poetry at Oxford, and justified his election by lectures,
somewhat exoteric, indeed, but singularly acute and sensible. Sir
Francis could write verse of various kinds which was never con-
temptible, but his strong point was the very difficult and dangerous
kind of war poetry, in which, putting The Charge of the Light
Brigade aside, he surpassed every other writer between Campbell
and a living poet. Whenever he came near this great and too
often mishandled subject, his genius seemed to catch fire; and,
in two almost famous pieces—The Red Thread of Honour and
A Private of the Buffs—in the first especially, that curious in-
spiriting and exciting quality which all songs of what Dante calls
salus (war and patriotism) should have, and which they too often
lack, is present in almost the highest degree.
Another small group of poets born before 1820, the youngest
of whom was not Browning's junior so far as years go, may be
formed of three men, each of whom exercised other arts or pro-
fessions besides poetry—Alfred Domett, William James Linton and
William Bell Scott. Domett, as probably many people know who
know nothing else about him, was the Waring of Browning's
vivid and grotesque poem. He fulfilled his poet's apparent ex-
pectations of his doing something respectable by becoming prime
minister of New Zealand. But, when he returned to England and
published a long poem, Ranolf and Amohia, it must be confessed
that not a few who eagerly read it as the long-expected work
of Waring' himself, experienced considerable disappointment,
which has not been removed by subsequent perusal. Others
praised it highly; and even Tennyson, who, though not as
grudging as Wordsworth in his estimate of other poets, was not
mealy-mouthed, granted it intellectual and imaginative subtlety
and power of delineating delicious scenery. ' But he confessed
that he found it difficult to read ; and this it certainly is. The
story fixes no hold on the immediate interest or the later memory;
the characters are outlines only; and, though the descriptions are
certainly often beautiful, they do not exactly charm and are
frequently interrupted and spoilt by flatnesses of phrase like
Where they a small canoe had found
Which Amo settled they might take,
the last line of which would have been a triumph for the most
disrespectful and audacious parodist of Wordsworth or of Crabbe.
1 De vulgari eloquentia, book 11, chap. II.


## p. 187 (#203) ############################################

vi] W. J. Linton and W. B. Scott 187
Before he went to the colonies, Domett had written minor verse of
merit, some of which was published in Blackwood, with boisterous
eulogy from Wilson. A Christmas Hymn with the refrain ‘Centuries
ago’is the stock selection of these for praise. It has merit, but no
consummateness.
The other two, W. J. Linton and W. B. Scott, were artists
as well as poets ; and Linton had very much the advantage in
both his professions. The excellence of his engravings is uni-
versally known ; his skill in verse, translated and original, less so.
Linton was essentially—in the original Greek, not in the modern,
sense—an epigrammatist : that is to say, not a wit but a writer
of short poems on definite subjects, finished off in a manner
suggesting the arts of design as well as those of poetic expression.
In perfection of these things—which may, of course, be called toys
,
or trifles, and which are certainly miniatures—he yields only to
Landor; and, while even his best things have not Landor's
supremacy when he is at his best, Linton avoids the austere
jejuneness which characterises some of the greater writer's trifles,
and suffuses his own with more colour, shadow and light. Such
apparently slight things as Epicurean and A Dream need no slight
skill—as anybody who tries to imitate them will find.
Of Linton's at one time friend (for W. B. Scott had a habit of
quarrelling, whether it was exercised in this instance or not), it is
difficult to find anything more complimentary to say than that
his verses, to use Browning's words of something else, “intended
greatly. He put forward various theories of poetry; affected
considerable contempt of others; and always, whether writing in
a way somewhat like Hake or in a way somewhat like Rossetti,
tried to be different and difficult. Unfortunately, he very seldom
succeeded in being good; and, perhaps, never in being very good.
His ballads really deserve the name (unjustly given in some other
cases) of Wardour street work; his elaborate efforts in the greater
ode are pretentious and hollow. A little prettiness in lyric and
a little picturesqueness in sonnet he did, sometimes, reach ; but,
l;
on the whole, his execution was emphatically a failure? whatever
may have been the merit of his aims and his theories.
The most noteworthy of the poets who were born between
Browning's birth-year and the ten years later date 1822 were
Aytoun and Bailey, who have been already noticed in this chapter,
1 Anyone to whom this judgment seems harsh should read The Sphinx, Scott's
most highly praised poem, and think what Rossetti or James Thomson the second
would have made of it.


## p. 188 (#204) ############################################

188
Lesser Poets
[CH.
and Matthew Arnold, who falls out of it. But there were others
not negligible, especially Aubrey de Vere, Thomas Westwood and
Charles Mackay, who were all born in 1814. The son of one
verse-writer of merit and the brother of another, Aubrey de Vere
possessed connections, different from those of blood, with two
groups interesting, directly and indirectly, in literature. He was
a personal disciple of Wordsworth and, perhaps, chief of all
Wordsworthians pure and simple; and, also, he was one of the
Anglican group who were not satisfied tendere in Latium, but who
made the full voyage and found the waves irremeable. There may
be something to attract, and should be nothing at all to repel, the
true critical approach in any or all of these circumstances ; but,
when the critical judgment is directed solely to his work, its
summing up cannot be wholly favourable. He wrote both longer
and shorter poems; the former, on a considerable variety of
subjects-preferably legendary, the legends being supplied by
Irish early poetry, hagiology, the classics and so forth. They
seldom fail to command respect and esteem? ; but, alas ! they still
seldomer transport—the one thing needful. Of all the numerous
attempts to English in verse the famous epic duel of Cuchullain
and Ferdia, De Vere's, if the most elegant, is the flattest, the most
devoid of local colour and temporal spirit ; and his lyrics, though
sometimes pretty, are never anything more.
Westwood was one of the members, though the youngest, or
nearly so, of Charles Lamb's circle; but he did not publish till much
later and, in middle life, was a good deal occupied with business.
His most ambitious thing, The Quest of the Sancgreall, is, un-
fortunately, post-Tennysonian in more senses than that of date.
Latterly, he took much interest in the literature, as well as in the
practice, of angling, and wrote some good fishing songs. Once,
in the little piece called Springlets, he reached charm ; in some
others, he was near it.
Less polish but somewhat more vigour than is to be found in
these writers characterised the verses of Charles Mackay-a long-
lived and hard-working journalist and man-of-letters-of-all-work.
A good deal of it is in the mixed vein of sentiment and what may
be called 'rollick,' which was popular in the second third of the
century. The song 0 Ye Tears ! , which was once a favourite,
requires either more simplicity, or more art, or more of both, to
make it capital ; but that adjective may almost be applied to the
1 It may be worth mentioning that Landor, who, though not a jealous critic, was
very sparing of admiration for poetry, bestowed it unsparingly upon De Vere.


## p. 189 (#205) ############################################

>
VI] Charles Mackay and Others 189
Cholera Chant (quoted and justly praised by Kingsley in Alton
Locke), and others of his lyrics are above the average. There are
reasons for believing that if he had led that life of concentration on
poetry which seems to be, if not quite universally, in a very large
majority of cases, necessary to produce poetry in perfection, he
might, like others mentioned in this chapter and the last of its
kind, have been more than a lesser poet. But journalism and
bookmaking, though they may favour the production of verse,
are not usually favourable to the quality of poetry.
The first writer of poetic importance between 1820 and 1830 was
Matthew Arnold"; but the years immediately succeeding the decade
added to the list a fair number of poets who were to be of note,
especially Coventry Patmore, William Allingham, Francis Turner
Palgrave, George Macdonald and the very remarkable writer known
as a poet chiefly under the name of Johnson and as a prose writer
under that of Cory. To this group some, perhaps, would add the
rather younger Gerald Massey, whose birth drew towards the thirties,
William Caldwell Roscoe, Thomas Woolner and Walter Thornbury.
But none of these excite either personal enthusiasm or a sense of
historical importance in some minds? . Thornbury's ballads are
spirited, but too often, if not always, give one the depressing feeling
that if Macaulay, Maginn, Thackeray and Aytoun had not written
neither would he; and they constantly sin by exaggeration. Gerald
Massey's considerable bulk of war, love and miscellaneous poetry
has, sometimes, been commended on the ground that he was a self-
made man, sometimes on the other ground that, like Eliza Cook,
he appealed to strictly popular and uncultured tastes. But
nothing that the present writer has read of Massey's work seems
anywhere near poetic 'proof. Roscoe, coming of a family dis-
tinguished (not merely by the historian) in letters, had his work
ushered to the world with strong recommendations from a well-
known critic, Richard Holt Hutton, who was his brother-in-law;
but it has no 'inevitableness' whatever and no very special poetic
qualities of any kind. Thomas Woolner, the sculptor, was a
member of the early pre-Raphaelite group and had many literary
friends outside it. His My Beautiful Lady was received with
a round of applause which did not last very long, and has seldom
been echoed since. His blank verse suggests an imitation of
1 See ante, chap. IV.
? Some would rank above them all an eccentric poet of rather wasted talent,
Arthur Joseph Munby, who wrote verse at intervals from the time of his leaving
Trinity college, Cambridge, in 1851, till his death, all but sixty years later. Nor
would this estimate lack arguments to support it,


## p. 190 (#206) ############################################

190
[Ch.
Lesser Poets
Tennyson, conditioned by an attempt to give roughness and
originality to phrase, and generally unsuccessful; his lyrics are
unimportant. Whether Allingham deserves to be given any
higher place than these is very doubtful. He had the fluency
and ease of verse which has been again and again noticed as
common in Irish poets ; and some of his lighter songs and ballads,
such as Lovely Mary Donnelly, are really pretty. But he has
been allowed by patriotic and competent critics to be dull, tame
and uninventive; one of his best shorter things, Up the Fairy
Mountain, borrows its first and best stanza from one of the most
beautiful of Jacobite ballads and entirely fails to live up to it;
while he constantly indulged in banalities like
A thing more frightful than words can say.
Not thus can the others mentioned above be dismissed.
Coventry Patmore, though a recent and comparatively accidental
coterie admiration has sometimes exalted him too high, was a very
remarkable poet in more ways than one. That he was one of the
few poets who have given careful attention to the mechanism
of poetry is the least of these ways; nor were his prosodic
speculations, though interesting and ingenious, very happy. It
is of more importance that his actual verse was not only of great
merit as a whole, but of two kinds exceptionally different from
each other. The kind of criticism-scholastic, in the worst sense
only-which has never been absent when there was any criticism
at all, and which has recently been present to an intolerable
degree, would, no doubt, if it had the chance, decide that the
same person could never have written The Angel in the House
and The Unknown Eros, though the last part of the first named
work, The Victories of Love, might be a saving stepping-stone to
a few brighter spirits.
The Angel in the House first appeared in 1854 and may be
said to be like Matthew Arnold's nearly contemporary work in
one direction and that of the spasmodics in another—a kind of
half-conscious, half-unconscious revolt against both Tennyson and
Browning, but especially against the former. Revolt, indeed, may
seem too fierce a word for the mild domesticities of Patmore's
poem ; some critical stand might even be made for the contention
actually made, that it is a direct development of more than one
of Tennyson's poems, especially The Miller's Daughter. But
development itself has, in the language of the Articles as to
another matter, often something of the nature of' revolt; it


## p. 191 (#207) ############################################

vi]
Coventry Patmore
191
indicates, at any rate, want of complete satisfaction. The poem
contained, even at the first, much very pretty verse; as it went
on, it was to contain not a little that is positively beautiful. But
its ambling versification-somniferous to some of those whom it
did not merely please, and positively irritating to others--the
deliberate banality of the subject; and the equally deliberate
adoption of language outgoing even Wordsworth, even Crabbe,
in its avoidance of poetic diction, though they conciliated a large
part of contemporary taste, produced a by no means conciliatory
effect upon another part which, in the long run, has prevailed.
When a man writes
Our witnesses the cook and groom,
We signed the lease for seven years more,
it is not unreasonable to think that Apollo, if he thought it worth
his while, must have twitched the poet's ear rather sharply and
that attention should have been paid to the twitch. The scornful
allusion ‘idylls of the dining-room and the deanery,' though its
author, Swinburne, was courteous enough not to name the idyllist,
expressed a good deal of the younger and youngest opinion of
the time. Many years later, after changes of family, faith and
circumstance, Patmore produced a book of odes, entitled The
Unknown Eros, which, as was said above, might, but for certain
evidence, have seemed the work of an entirely different person.
Instead of the regular and too often monotonous flow of the
Angel poems, abrupt Pindaric measures were tried, challenging,
and sometimes attaining, splendour but, at the same time, risking-
and sometimes falling into-harshness and dissonance. The simple,
almost lisping language was changed, likewise (indeed, some hint
had been given of this in The Victories), into a grandiose diction,
sometimes violent and bombastic, but, at other times, really grand;
and the subjects, instead of being those of ordinary and domestic
prattle— personal talk' of the most commonplace kind—were
always elevated or deeply pathetic, at least in intention. It
was as if someone who had threatened to sink to the level of
Ambrose Philips had changed his models to Donne, Vaughan,
Milton, even Aeschylus. It is true that, as Patmore had seldom
fallen into actual silliness, so he rarely rose to actual sublimity;
but he did reach it sometimes and often came very near it.