No More Learning

Even his lyrical gift, acknowledged by the best judges
among his contemporaries and successors to be extraordinary and
constantly shown in The Errors of Ecstacie, in the verse
scattered about the prose Labours of Idleness and elsewhere,
in the pastoral drama Sylvia and in the wonderful outburst
of his masterpiece Nepenthe, too seldom takes the clear, pure,
finished form which, sooner or later, assures a permanent place.
It is often, and in Nepenthe most of all, unintelligible to those
who demand a definite and fairly obvious meaning translatably
expressed; it sometimes (the crowning instance is the loathsome
rubbish, for one fears no softer phrase will do, of the Dwerga part in
Becket, on which the author obstinately prided himself) shows
gross lapses of taste; it has, more frequently still, ill-blended
sentiment and grotesque; and, sometimes, it suffers from that
rather fatal fluency which seems especially to beset Irish poets.
But, ever and anon, come splendid bursts. Those who can dive
in poetic whirlpools will find the gold cups oftenest in Nepenthe
itself and, sometimes, in The Errors of Ecstacie, which, while it
came long before Bailey's Festus and longer before Dobell's Balder
and Alexander Smith's Life Drama, contains something of the
essence of all three in five and thirty merciful pages. Those, on the
other hand, who want poetic sweetmeats all ready for consump-
tion in a separate and at once accessible form, have only to turn the


## p. 115 (#139) ############################################

v]
I15
Darley. Beddoes
pages of Sylvia, where the lyrics obligingly stand out, or to go
straight to the minor poems. The once immensely popular I've
been roaming may strike most people now as only a sample of the
‘Mooreish melody’; and, though pretty, is not supremely so. But
the equally wellknown It is not Beauty I demand (which, in
its Carolinity, deceived the very elect in the person of Francis
Turner Palgrave) is quite a different thing; The Enchanted
Lyre, The Maiden's Grave are not mere banjo music, and
Sylvia, though much of its main stuff is of very little worth,
is spangled all over with most delightful snatches of lyric.
At his very best, however, Darley never reached the astonish-
ing intensity and poignancy of poetic appeal which is found in
a few things of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the youngest, as Darley
was the eldest, of the group, and which, if concentrated only in
these few, diffuses itself into a strange poetic atmosphere all over
his fantastic work. Beddoes was unquestionably mad when, just
before his death, he made repeated and, at last, successful
attempts at suicide ; this madness, beyond much question, had
developed itself in, at least, the latter half of his not very short
life; and it may be doubted whether he was ever entirely sane.
But, as has been remarked over and over again, madness will
neither make nor break a poet; and it is a chance whether it
stimulates or checks, colours or discolours, his work. Both the
bad and the good results are clear enough in the poems-dramatic,
after a fashion, and lyrical, after the best fashion—which we have
from Beddoes.
The main constituent of this work is a play entitled Death's
Jest Book or The Fool's Revenge, which was ready for publication
as early as the spring of 1829. It was referred by the author to
B. W. Procter and other timid critics, and pronounced by them,
perhaps naturally, but unfortunately, to require revision. Beddoes
submitted, and re-wrote it again and again, but never got it
finished. After his death, it was published, but with what regard
to the variants we do not know. He had earlier, at Oxford,
published two much slighter productions, The Bride's Tragedy and
The Improvisatore, and his remains furnished his friend Kelsall
(to whom they were left and who handed them over to Browning)
with some miscellaneous poems, which were increased when
Beddoes's work was reprinted by Edmund Gosse with Browning's
permission. Beddoes has been called a link between Shelley and
Browning himself. He was an avowed devotee of Shelley, and
took a warm interest in the task of bringing out that poet's
a
8-2


## p. 116 (#140) ############################################

116
[ch.
Lesser Poets, 1790–1837
a
posthumous poems. But there are also strong influences of
Keats in his poems (see, especially, Pygmalion and Letter from
Oxford), and, on the whole, the real filiation of his work, both
dramatic and lyric, goes straight back to the larger Elizabethan
time. Yet, though the influence of such writers as Tourneur and
Webster is obvious, it is a great mistake to take him, as has
been done, for a mere composer of Elizabethan pastiche, a word
for which we have unluckily no exact synonym in English, though
we have plentiful examples of the thing. Beddoes, in many
ways, is intensely and, indeed, prophetically modern ; he was a
trained physician and physiologist; there is not a little of modern
science in his thought, and his reader is often reminded of Ibsen
in his more poetical plays. It is not quite clear whether Death's
Jest Book, as we have it, is a made text out of the three distinct
versions which were said to exist, or merely one of them; and this
makes it very difficult to judge it as a whole. Of the frequent
greatness of the blank verse and of the still more exceptional great-
ness of the lyric found in it and outside it, there can be little
dispute among impartial judges. For some years, Dream-Pedlary
has even been near, if it has not actually incurred, that rare but
formidable danger which attends enthusiastic laudation by the
few, at first adopted by the many and then kicked against by
them. But the Dirge for Wolfram (“If thou wilt ease thine heart')
is fully its equal; and such a pair it will be almost impossible to
find in English outside the work of the very greatest of our poets.
The same touch, if not the same completeness of working, may
be found in many other places. There may be more doubt about
Beddoes's complete success anywhere in the line of grim humour
such as Old Adam, the carrion crow and the Song of the Stygian
Naiades. But, over these, as over all the rest, there hovers that
atmosphere of real, if seldom perfect, poetry referred to above. To
be content with this, or even to perceive it, is, no doubt, not for
everybody. It is easy to dismiss Beddoes as a mere producer of
Fantastic beauty, such as lurks
In some wild poet when he works
Without a conscience or an aim,
and of that not very often; it is easy to dismiss him as an Eliza-
bethan copyist; not least easy, perhaps, to obtain the credit of
wise moderation by this and that admission. But, historically,
,
1 Was Tennyson thinking of Beddoes ? In Memoriam and Death's Jest Book were
published in the same year, 1850. But, also, in that year, Miss Zoe King, Beddoes's
cousin, met Tennyson on bis wedding tour and lent him a copy of Beddoes, whom
he 'rated highly. '
9


## p. 117 (#141) ############################################

v]
117
Wells. Horne
6
Beddoes is an invaluable instance of that curious influence of
transition periods on which we may say something true if not new
at the close of this chapter. Personally and individually, he is an
instance of the kind of poet whom it would be more or less pre-
posterous to call a great poet, and who yet has produced things
which only the greatest poets can match.
The remaining members of this group, though sometimes in-
teresting both as persons and as poets, must be treated more
briefly, for they are rather 'curiosities of literature' than great
men of letters. More especially does this position belong to
Wells. In a long life (very little disturbed, it would seem, either
by the legal or the professorial business which, at times, he
attempted), he produced nothing but a few prose stories and
tales, and the remarkable closet-drama Joseph and his Brethren,
originally published, 1823—4, under a pseudonym. We are told
that three versions of Beddoes's chief play exist in manuscript :
and it appears not impossible that three different versions of
Wells's will some day exist in print. For he very considerably
altered the original in the reprint which, fifty years later, was
brought about by the enthusiasm of the poet Swinburne, and he is
said to have altered that reprint itself still more with manuscript
corrections and additions not yet made public. The drama, un-
doubtedly, is a remarkable production ; but it is probable that
the very high praise bestowed on it has been the cause of
a good deal of disappointment even to readers who were quite
prepared to admire. The character of Phraxanor (Potiphar's
wife) has a certain force and even original touches poetically
expressed ; but the enormous verbiage of her speeches drowns the
spirit of these. Wells is said to have burnt several volumes
of manuscript poetry and prose; and, although some fine things
might have been found in them, it is difficult to be very sorry.
For, at first, in all cases, he admittedly wrote with ostentatious
contempt of the most ordinary care; and, if the current version of
Joseph and his Brethren is a fair specimen of his attempts at
revision, care would probably have done very little good.
His friend, eulogist and very close contemporary Richard H.
Horne presented himself somewhat more seriously as a candidate
for distinction in letters, both prose and verse. He was a man
of many adventures in life as well as in literature, but a fanciful
moralist might have drawn evil prognostications, and might now
draw tragic warning, from the rather wellknown story of Horne
snow-balling Keats when the latter, as 'an old boy,' came to


## p. 118 (#142) ############################################

118
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
his Edmonton school, where Horne actually was a scholar.
Horne bombarded the temple or castle of the muses with many
balls of both verse and prose for many years; but they were apt
to be cold shot. His New Spirit of the Age, written, it is true,
in a sort of collaboration with Mrs Browning (then Miss Barrett),
contains, with a few better things, some of the most inept criticism
in English ; and what it is possible to know of his immense
journey-work does not seem to be much better. His tragedies,
from Cosmo de Medici and The Death of Marlowe (both of 1837)
to Laura Dibalzo, more than forty years later, are, as wholes,
rather indigestible, with really poetic passages here and there, but
not enough to season the rest. His own rather puerile and, at
first, at least, somewhat costly, jest of publishing his one poem
of merit, the quasi-epic Orion, at the price of one farthing,
though it may have attracted attention at first, has, probably,
done more harm than good in the long run by inviting cheap
epigram. Orion is worth a very considerable number of farthings,
and, provided that its reader goes no farther in its author's
work, he will probably think Horne a better poet than any
other of the group here immediately associated with him. It
is, no doubt, permeated by that dangerous notion about poetry
illustrating the growth of a poet's mind for which Wordsworth,
though he made atonement for it in his own case, was mainly
responsible, and its allegory has offended some who have forgotten
Hazlitt's final phrase on this subject—that allegory will bite
nobody if people will let it alone. In fact, the final passage,
as to the end of Akinetos (the “Great Unmoved'—the repre-
sentative of obstinate conservatism, who is literally petrified at
last), may commend itself, as really fine poetry, to persons who
rather sympathise with Akinetos himself. Nor does this stand alone.
It was, perhaps, not surprising that, in 1831, with the great
poets of the early nineteenth century all dead, silent or pro-
ducing things hardly worthy of them, and with Tennyson and
Browning but just visible to any, and actually seen by few, the
Spenserians of the third Whitehead's? Solitary should have
seemed to promise a poet. But, if the poem be examined care-
fully, it will be found to be little more than a clever mosaic of
variously borrowed fancy, phrase and cadence, super-excellent as
a prize poem, but, like most prize poems, possessing hardly any
6
1 After Paul and William, Charles. The difference of the minority' of his pre-
decessors and himself would make a fair text for a comparison of eighteenth and
nineteenth century poetry of the lesser kind.


## p. 119 (#143) ############################################

v]
119
Whitehead and Wade
>
symptomatic or germinal evidence in it. At any rate, though
before his dry-and wet-rot in the Bohemia of fancy and, latterly, the
Australia of fact, Whitehead wrote one successful play, The Cavalier,
one or two quasi-historical tales or novels of some merit (Jack
Ketch, Richard Savage) and some other work, even his eulogists have
only discovered in his later pieces a sonnet or two of distinction;
(As yonder Lamp in my Vacated Room is that usually quoted').
But sonnet-making itself gives a much higher place to the last
of this group, Thomas Wade. He was a friend of the Kembles and
was enabled by them to bring out three plays, the first two of which
were successful, and the third, The Jew of Arragon, damned, while a
fourth and fifth never saw the stage. He wrote various other things,
was a journalist for years and left much unpublished; but his fame
must rest on the curious volume-not very easy to obtain but quite
worth possessing by any lover of poetry-somewhat pretentiously
(as some, but not all, think) entitled Mundi et Cordis : de rebus
sempiternis et temporariis: Carmina, which appeared in 1835. The
'brevities,' as its author calls them, in the same deliberate quaintness
(it would be harsh to call it affectation, for Wade lives very fairly
up to his style and title), which the volume contains, are not
all sonnets (indeed, the book has an English sub-title Poems and
Sonnets) nor are some of the best of them. But Wade had an
admirable gift for this form, and wrote it, perhaps, as well as anyone,
between Wordsworth and the Rossettis, except Charles Tennyson
[Turner). He was much under the influence of Shelley among
his forerunners, and sometimes reminds one of Darley among his
contemporaries; but he has a more even taste, if a less fiery
imagination, than the author of Nepenthe. He has usually had
the least justice done to him of all the group; and he can never be
popular. But that atmosphere or aura of poetry which hangs about
most of them, and about the character, of which a few words should
be said later, are present in and round him in a vaguely diffused,
most unboisterous, faintly coloured and perfumed manner which is
worth the notice of the student of poetry.
The tendency of the group just discussed, with the notable
exceptions of Hood and Praed, was not, on the whole, towards
light or jocular verse; but, by those two exceptions and others,
1 And vacated,' here, is not exactly a felicity. Whitehead was a friend of Dickens ;
and, at least, thought himself to have passed on the composition of Pickwick to the
greater writer. He suggests himself as a possible original for the reflections on 'Horace
Kinch and the Dry-rot in Men'(The Uncommercial Traveller), though the circumstances
are artistically altered: and though Dickens, no doubt, had more than one painful
example in his mind.
6


## p. 120 (#144) ############################################

I 20
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790–1837
such verse was very well represented during the first thirty or
forty years of the nineteenth century. It would, indeed, have
been strange if things had been otherwise, for the eighteenth had
kept unbroken the traditions, and had even increased the means,
of this kind of poetry, with a positive extension of its varieties
and range; while the greater writers of the actual period, in not
a few cases, had shown no disinclination to be wisely foolish in
proper places. With Anstey, Williams and Stevenson leading the
way to the brilliant political lampooning of the Rolliad, of Wolcot
and of the Canning group; with Southey founding the macabre
ballad and Coleridge, occasionally, showing what he might have
done in that way; with Moore as agreeably effervescent in
grotesque as in sentiment; with Shelley capable, now and then,
of an uncertain and flickering but humourous or 'humouresque'
flash—there was no reason for anybody who had inclinations that
way to be ashamed of indulging them. Moreover, the names of
Swift and Prior were still, and justly, held great; and 'divine
Nonsensia' (in the good, not contemptuous, sense) had counted
most of the best English poets from Chaucer, through Shakespeare,
downwards as her occasional chaplains. Comparatively early, too,
not merely immediate popularity, but lasting and well-deserved
reputation, was won by James and Horace Smith, with the ever
welcome Rejected Addresses—a collection of parodies of Byron,
Scott, Southey and other famous writers of the day which, though
it may have been sometimes equalled, had, at its best, certainly
never been, and never has been, surpassed for appositeness, good
humour as well as humour positive and a lightness which, unlike
that of most such work, has never become heavy since.
Hood was thirteen and Praed was ten when Rejected Addresses
appeared; and both, therefore, were now at an age suitable for such
seed to fall into such soil. As was remarked above, in speaking
of their serious and half-serious poems, the difference of attitude
between them is very remarkable and interesting. That Hood had
the deeper and higher poetical genius there can be no doubt, and
it was probably not the mere necessities of hackwork which drove
him, by reaction, into more definite extravaganza, more horseplay in
word and verse, wilder acrobatics and pyrotechnics of punning and
the like, when he put himself in the comic vein. It is impossible that
a professional of this kind should not, in the actual language of the
ring, ‘miss his tip’sometimes; there are some people who (it may
be thought, unhappily) cannot relish verbal tumbling and metrical
fireworks at all; and there are others, less to be commiserated, who
>


## p. 121 (#145) ############################################

v] Comic Work of Hood and Praed I21
are soon satiated with either or both. The cruel kindness which,
as mentioned, has accumulated not merely the sweepings of Hood's
study, but the very rubbish of his literary dustbin more or less
pyramidically on his memory, puts him at special disadvantage
with all these classes of readers; perhaps with almost any reader
who has not a critical sieve under his arm, with which, at need, he
can sift away the slag and keep the metal. It is metal far from
unattractive to anyone who likes good fun; and there are few
places—that is to say books—where such an admirable 'pocket'
of it, already pretty well sifted, and varied, from verse to prose,
is to be found, as in Up the Rhine and in the cream of Hood's
comic poems. But the difference of taste above referred to may
always make it half needless and half useless to recommend this
part of him. The line which has been, perhaps justly, selected
as a test-
Rose knows those bows' woes
will always seem to some respectable people an enormous and
disgusting puerility. By them, Hood should be generally avoided.
Others, who can see in it not, indeed, one of the greatest achieve-
ments of human art - and genius, but a relishable trifle quite
capable of being enjoyed more than once or twice, should let them-
selves, not in the least pharisaically, say grace before and after it.
It was quite possible for Hood to avoid this style; and, without
using, as in some of his most famous poems, the contrast of
grimness or pathos, to do higher comedy, not farce at all, in verse.
The United Family is a good, though very far from the only,
instance of this. Nevertheless (for reasons which, no doubt, could
be plausibly explained, but which are pretty obvious and not,
after all, quite decisive), he is certainly surpassed by Praed in the
highest class of what is called 'verse of society,' and especially in
that kind of it which might be called pure high-comedy lyric.
Fortune of birth and breeding, scholarship, easy temperament and
circumstance; wide and, again, fortunate experience of the world;
and several other things may be thought to be necessary to this; they
certainly are found in company with it in Praed. Idiosyncrasy, in
the strictest sense of an often misused word, was present in him in
the highest degree; in a degree which could only be fully shown by
detailed, and here impossible, contrasts with, say, Prior, Thackeray
and the late Locker-Lampson. This idiosyncrasy was produced
or affected not merely by the personal essentials or accidents
noticed above, but by a curious convergence of the various poetical
motives of the time-romantic, satiric, lyrical, musical, technical


## p. 122 (#146) ############################################

I 22
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
and other. There is in Praed something of Scott, something of
Byron, something of Moore, something of Canning and something
of others; and, yet, the whole blend is Praed and nothing and
nobody else. He, in his turn, certainly taught something to
Thackeray; but, if there is less depth in his combination of
romance and humour than in his greatest pupil's, there is a certain
buoyancy and, at the same time, a calm, in the immortal Letter of
Advice, which is nowhere else to be found. The way in which
Praed picked out the stanza improved downwards from Gay and
others to Byron, perfected it still further and infused into it at
once the passion of I enter thy garden of Roses and the spirit and
zest of Molly Mog, is one of the pleasantest studies in poetical
technique and one of the most useful refutations of the fallacy
which would make of that subject an affair of 'chalk and blackboard. '
But, if anyone shudders at technicalities, let him pass them by and
content himself with the more exoteric charms of the poem just
mentioned, of The Vicar, of Twenty Eight and Twenty Nine and
Goodnight to the Season, of the first Letter from Teignmouth
and of a dozen others. Perhaps the already mentioned tender-cruel
mercy of reprinting has been exercised too freely even in this case;
but, to complain much of it would be to commit that sin which
Thackeray himself has stigmatised and to ask for a flounder that
was all back. '
The most remarkable book-as distinguished from scattered
pieces of comic or semi-comic verse—in the peculiar style which
Southey had almost originated and which Hood and Praed had
developed, was published, some of its parts having already, but
not long before, appeared, much later than the work of either of
the pair, by a man who, nevertheless, was as much Praed's elder
as he was Southey's junior. Richard Harris Barham was, indeed,
not a young man when, long before the beginning of The Ingoldsby
Legends, he wrote anonymously that famous parody of Wolfe’s
Corunna poem (see below) which was attributed to all sorts of
better known persons; and he was an active, and by no means
unclerical, parson, as well as a not very successful novelist, before,
at nearly fifty, he found the remarkable vocation which he obeyed,
without a sign of impoverishment or exhaustion for some decade
before his too early, but not very early, death. How little the
horse-collar was Barham's single vestment or instrument was
shown, once for all, by the beautiful lines, not in the least re-
quiring their Chattertonian pseudo-archaism of spelling, As I lay
a thynkynge, which are said to have been his last, and which, no
1
1


## p. 123 (#147) ############################################

v] The Ingoldsby Legends
123
doubt, supply the one and sufficient evidence of the undercurrent
of feeling necessary to keep fresh and in full flavour such humour
as his. For it is a most unfortunate mistake-though one which
has been constantly committed, sometimes with the quaintest
explosions of virtuous misunderstanding—to regard the fun of
The Ingoldsby Legends as merely 'high jinks. ' Its period was, of
course, the period of that curious institution, and there is the ‘high
jinks' quality in the Legends. Yet Barham, on the whole, belonged
not to the school of his friend Hook always, of Christopher North
too often and of Maginn, father Prout and some others, save on
the rarest occasions; but, rather, to that, just mentioned, of Hood,
Praed and Thackeray himself, who, by the way, imitated Ingoldsby
very early. High-principled but feeble-minded persons actually
regarded the Legends at the time, and have regarded them since,
as an infamous attempt to undermine the high church movement by
ridicule; as a defiling of romance; as a prostitution of art; as
a glorification of horseplay and brutality; as a perilous palliation
of drunkenness, irreverence, loose and improper conduct of all
sorts. With quite infinitely less than the provocation of Rabelais,
allegations and insinuations of faults not much less heinous than
those charged by anti-Pantagruelists were raised, while, for a
decade or two, more recently, has been added the sneer of the
superior person at 'fun out of fashion. ' On the other hand, it is
a simple fact that not a few fervent high-churchmen, medievalists,
men zealous for religion and devotees of romance, have been
among Ingoldsby's most faithful lovers. For they have seen that
.
'Love me and laugh at me’ is a motto not in the least self-
contradictory, and that the highest kind of laughter is impossible
without at least a little love, and a very high kind of love compatible
with at least a grain of laughter.
To go straight to the point, The Ingoldsby Legends are
examples of the style started by Southey in The Old Woman of
Berkeley and other pieces, raised to much higher power both of
humour and of poetry and carried out on an instrument of verse
which, though it owes a great deal to the poet laureate's principles
and practice, attempts variations of a far bolder, more intricate
and more symphonic kind. No one who has not studied the
Legends from this point of view knows how sure the artist is in
handling and fingering all his most complicated arabesques and
gambollings. The defects of taste which had been by no means
uncommon in the master and which are certainly a danger of
the kind, have been, as stated above, enormously magnified by


## p. 124 (#148) ############################################

I 24
[ch.
Lesser Poets, 1790–1837
Paper fer
objectors. They may, sometimes, exist; but they are never very
heinous, and they are, to a fairly catholic appreciation, carried off
by such a flood of fantastic humour, quaint miscellaneous erudition
(like Sterne’s and Southey's mixed), vivid picture, happy con-
versation (always a difficult thing to manage in verse), pointed
phrase, narrative felicity and refreshing medley of style and
subject, that only a critic deaf and blind to the merits can pay
much attention to the defects.
Not the least interesting feature of the present division is the
reappearance, in something like force, of poetesses. They had,
indeed, not been wanting since Lady Winchilsea, who, at her birth,
or soon afterwards, took, all unwitting, the torch from the hands
of 'Orinda' and handed it on in almost the same fashion to the
authoress of the Ode to Indifference? . There had been, more
recently, Anna Seward, that swan of Lichfield, who sang so much
and so long before her death that she has been entirely inaudible
since; and Hannah More that 'powerful versificatrix. At one
time, Anna Letitia Barbauld, by some extraordinary inspiration,
had uttered the wonderful last stanza of her 'Life' poem:
Life! we've been long together,
while, at other times, she had atoned partly for failing to under-
stand The Ancient Mariner by writing one of the best of the
many imitations of Collins's Evening, and some verses, more or
less ‘sacred,' which are not contemptible. Helen Maria Williams,
though she became nearly as bad as any Della Cruscan, had,
sometimes, been better. But the first thirty years or so of the
nineteenth century, even before the definite appearance of
Mrs Browning, which does not concern us here, saw, in Joanna
Baillie, Mrs Hemans and ‘L. E. L. ,' three persons who, for no short
time and to no few or incompetent persons, seemed to be poetesses;
while there were one or two others, such as Caroline Bowles,
Southey's second wife and, still more, Sara Coleridge, daughter of
'S. T. C. ' and sister of Hartley, who deserve to be added to them.
The long life of Joanna Baillie began earlier than that of any
of the poets of either sex, outside the retrospect of the last
paragraph, who have been mentioned in this chapter, except
Rogers; and it continued, like his, till the second half of the
nineteenth century. But, except for a tincture of romantic subject,
her work bears, and might be expected to bear, the colour of the
eighteenth. It consists of a large number of plays—On the Pas-
sions and miscellaneous—which were by no means intended to be
1 Mrs Greville.
6


## p. 125 (#149) ############################################

v]
125
Joanna Baillie
6
closet-dramas merely, and several of which made more or less suc-
cessful appearances on the actual stage; of a certain number of
lyrics—some in Scots dialect, some in literary English—and of mis-
cellaneous poems of no consequence. The strictly theatrical value
of the plays does not much concern us here. Although some fight
for it was made at the time by her friends (who were numerous, as
she well deserved), it has long been practically 'confessed and
avoided. ' Whether the poetical value is much greater may be
doubted. The composition of most of them, in contrasted exempli-
fication of 'the passions,' as passions, impresses some readers as
a sort of involuntary caricature of Jonson's humour-play in
tragedy as well as comedy; the verse is remarkably unstimulant,
though correct enough, and the general scenery, character-drawing
and so forth are essentially of the time before Scott, that is to say,
the time when the historic sense, whether in verse or prose fiction,
was not. Her lyrics in Scots have been praised by compatriots;
but this is largely because they consist of that curious re-bashing of
old Scottish ballad- and poem-motive and phrase which the con-
summate but dangerous example of Burns has vulgarised for
the last hundred years; of those not in dialect, The Chough and
Crow and Good night have a sort of traditional reputation, which
they do not ill deserve, as pleasant, soundhearted, carolling verse.
Scott's excessive praise of Joanna needs, of course, allowance for
personal friendship as well as for his general critical kindliness;
but the fact that it was also due to his recognition of a temper in
life and literature akin to his own deserves, in turn, similar recog-
nition. In fact, Joanna, though never in the least mannish, had
something virile about her- as of a ladylike and poetical
Mrs Bagnet. Now, the world is never likely to be over-provided
in life, and still less in literature, with Mrs Bagnets.
A little more of this not unfeminine virility would have been
a great advantage to the two poetesses next to be discussed,
though the first of them, at least, undoubtedly had more poetry
than Joanna. Both Felicia Dorothea Browne (Mrs Hemans) and
Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L. ) were very popular in their own
days, and the first-named has retained a success of esteem with
some not despicable judges, together with a hold on actual memory,
through “The Boy stood on the Burning Deck,' and one or two
other poems. One may go further, and say that a certain amount
of injustice has been done to both, and especially to Mrs Hemans,
during the last half, if not three quarters, of a century by
Thackeray's ‘Miss Bunion. ' It was in no way a personal caricature,


## p. 126 (#150) ############################################

126
[ch.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
1
for Mrs Hemans was almost beautiful, and L. E. L. decidedly,
though irregularly, pretty. But it hit their style, and especially
their titles, hard, and their sentiment has long been out of
fashion. Miss Landon, indeed (whose fate seems still to be wrapped
in mystery for some commentators, though, as a matter of fact, it
was almost completely cleared up years ago), can never be raised,
in the most careful and judicial estimate, to anything but a
somewhat interesting historical position. Her technique, though
some charitable souls have seen a tendency to improvement at the
last, was deplorably bad; and her popularity set a most unfortunate
precedent, in this respect, for women verse-writers. Her sentiment
and handling of her themes watered out the examples she took
from Scott, Byron and Moore, with an equally deplorable excess
of original 'gush,' and it is really difficult to name a single poem
which can be produced as a competent diploma-piece. But,
at one time, she seemed to be a sort of graceful substitute for
a pillar: Beddoes, who had real critical power, who wrote as
differently as possible and who was not mealy-mouthed, described
her, in 1825, as, after the tropical, sunset-like disappearance of
Shelley, 'the tender full faced moon of our darkness,' though he
certainly added 'milk-and-watery. She is a sign of the time
between Keats and Tennyson, and, if her work does not even, in
the words of one of Campbell's best poems, 'show where a garden
has been,' it does show where a garden might have been, if time
and the muses had been more propitious.
The claims of Mrs Hemans are much less hypothetical. If not
immaculate in form, she is much better than L. E. L. (who, by the
way, wrote one of her least bad poems on Mrs Hemans's death);
her models, though they certainly included Byron and Scott, were
Coleridge and Wordsworth also, so far as she could manage it;
and the dangerous quality of ‘Mooreishness' does not much appear
in her. Her faults-recognised as such even by generous admirers in
her own days, and by charitable critics since-are want of originality,
want of intensity and, worst of all, a third, connected with this
want of intensity but not quite identical with it and much more
wide-ranging, want of concentration. She died at a little over
forty, and suffered much from ill-health; yet, she published over
twenty volumes of verse in her lifetime, which filled a more closely
printed collection of six after her death. Some of the consti-
tuents of these, it is true, were narrative poems of length, which,
after the not wholly beneficent example of her elders and betters,
could be measured out by the long hundred without much difficulty.
>


## p. 127 (#151) ############################################

v] L. E. L. Mrs Hemans. Sara Coleridge 127
a
But, a great many more are those short poems which, except under
the force of some extraordinary inspiration such as she hardly ever
enjoyed, take a long time and the vital power of a long time to bring
to perfection. There is little evidence of any such accumulation
and expenditure of poetic energy on her part. The greatest thing
she did, England's Dead-her most original, her most thoughtful-
lacks consummateness and inevitableness of expression, either in
the splendid, or in the simple, style. Casabianca is less unequal
in itself, but is on a lower level; and, so far as expression goes,
the equally wellknown Better Land is lower still, though it is
excellent milk well crumbled with good bread for babes. They
grew in beauty side by side has the same quality, which one is
reluctant to depreciate or ridicule, but which certainly excites
more esteem than enthusiasm. It takes the sea and death, two of
the
very
few motives which never fail to draw poetry out of any
soul that has poetry in it, to bring her subject and her expression
to a fairly equal level in-
What hid'st thou in thy treasure caves and cells ?
Leaves have their time to fall, etc.
6
Now, the soul of Mrs Hemans was a poetic soul, but it was not
,
a strong one and it failed to follow steadily what star it had.
The ‘unfulfilled renown' which Sara Coleridge won with
Phantasmion—and which would have been almost certainly ful-
filled, had she sacrificed less of her time and energies to the piety
of putting some order into the chaos of her father's 'remains '-
was derived not least from the verse with which that pleasant
book is sprinkled. This bears, like her brother Hartley's, a curious
sense of incompleteness about it; its grace and perfume and
suggestive melody seem to be but half-born.
One face alone is
worthy of not the least of the Caroline poets, and so is False Love,
too long thou hast delayed. The brief and strong defence of the
fairy way of writing,' in the Envoy, deserves to be much more widely
known than it is. But most of the songs are in undertones. They
have, however, an air of suppressed power which is absent from those
of her amiable and excellent step-aunt. Caroline Bowles, though
no relation to the author of the half-accidentally famous sonnets,
and much less voluminous, was, as a poetess, very much what he
was as a poet. Her little verses are neither pretentious nor silly;
the sentiment has hardly anything that is mawkish and still less that
is rancid about it; but it is only the cowslip wine of poetry. It is
unfortunate that not merely the general subject, but one or two


## p. 128 (#152) ############################################

128
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790–1837
internal touches of her Mariner's Hymn may make some readers
think of Christina Rossetti's incomparably superior Sleep at Sea;
but there is no real connection between them, and The Mariner's
Hymn deserves its own not too low place.
The most interesting groups which the subject of this chapter
offers have been noticed; but, before we come to individuals,
some of whom, also, are interesting, one or two other batches of
minor bards may be dealt with. For traditional dignity of form,
though certainly for little other merit, a small band of professed
epic writers may have precedence, and they may themselves be
as properly headed by the laureate for nearly a quarter of a
century, Henry James Pye, who crowned the efforts in all sorts
of verse which he made during close on that time-prize
poems and Pindaric odes, verse-essays on beauty and ballooning,
and the dreadful duty ditties of his post with an Alfred in six
books of technically faultless, but poetically null, eighteenth
century couplets. Pye, though a convenient butt for the usual
anti-laureate jokes, was, in fact, not so much a bad poet as no
poet at all? . He was not specially rhetorical, or specially silly,
or specially extravagant, or ridiculously sentimental and pseudo-
romantic His house was the house of typically eighteenth century
verse, empty and swept of all poetical life, not even garnished by
any poetical stuff, not inhabited by devils at all-but simply empty.
He is thus an interesting figure in a historical museum of the
subject.
Not very much Pye’s junior was William Sotheby, a friend of
Scott and other good men, and, apparently, quite a good man
himself; but one who certainly ran his neck into danger of, if he
did not fully deserve, the gibbeting which befell another poetaster
by epics, dramas, translations, odes and everything that readers
of poetry could wish or not wish. Edwin Atherstone may be
not unfairly called the Blackmore of the nineteenth century,
with his Fall of Nineveh, in thirty books, and others to suit,
besides prose romances. A certain grandiosity may, perhaps,
be allowed him ; as, also, to the still younger, but even more
long-lived, John Abraham Heraud (Thackeray's not unkindly
1
1 As a prose writer, Pye was far from contemptible. He had a fancy for com.
mentaries and summaries. His Summary of the Duties of a J. P. (he was himself
Bow street magistrate) was found useful, but hardly concerns us here. His Commentary
on Shakespeare's commentators, and that appended to his translation of the Poetics,
contain some noteworthy matter. A man, who, born in 1745, could write • Sir Charles
Grandison is a much more unnatural character than Caliban,' may have been a
poetaster but was certainly not a fool.
1


## p. 129 (#153) ############################################

v] Epic Writers. Pollokand R. Montgomery 129
treated original of 'Jawbrahim Heraudee'). It is doubtful
whether anyone living can boast of having read Atherstone
and Heraud through ; but they might be more preferable to
the galleys than the shorter and not uncommonly read work of
Robert Pollok, who, having barely thirty years of life to set
against their eighty or ninety, might, perhaps, have equalled
them in production had he lived. His youth, bis profession
(he was a licentiate of one of the sectarian churches in Scotland),
his ill-health, his early death and so forth, together with the
exceptional propriety in sentiment of The Course of Time, have
secured not merely reading, but some professions of admiration for
it. But the only thing that can sustain attention to its ponderous
commonplace and gradus decorations is a search for the fine
things that have been discovered in it. A conscientious enquirer
must clearly read it through in this quest; if he is not more
fortunate than the present writer, he will reach the end without
having found them. In fact, if anyone cared to do so, it would
be as easy as it would be cruel and unnecessary to treat
Pollok as Macaulay treated his immediate successor, Robert
Montgomery (born Gomery). But the thing has already been done,
in the case of The Omnipresence of the Deity and Satan, once for
all, and by no means so unfairly as it is sometimes the fashion to
say now. There are passages in both Pollok and Montgomery
which a hasty, forgetful, or, perhaps, actually not very well-
read, person might take for poetry. But, in no case will any
real originality, either of substance or of expression, be found;
nor is there, in either versifier, the slightest approach to that
technical excellence which, whether it be ever a supreme positive
quality or not, certainly covers a multitude of minor defects.
Nor, finally, is there, in either, that suggestion of something better
-that aura of unachieved success—for which full (some may
think too full) allowance is made here.
After swans, wrens; though the specific quality, not very ex-
cellent in either case, is, perhaps, a little better in the smaller
birds. It was impossible that the remarkable achievement, and
still more the immense popularity, of Moore should not produce a
large following of imitators, for most of whom the 'twitter' which
was protested against above in his case is scarcely an injurious
term. Of writers already noticed, as has been frankly confessed,
there are touches of it even in Hood and Praed, much more in
others; while it is strong in L. E. L. , and not weak in Mrs Hemans.
It is difficult to put Bryan Waller Procter (“Barry Cornwall') in
9
E. L. XII.
CH. V.


## p. 130 (#154) ############################################

130
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
[ch.
any higher group than this, though the allocation may surprise
some readers. Procter's great personal popularity; his long life
(during the latter part of which he wisely did nothing to compete
with the far greater poets who had arisen since his early days,
and provoked no enquiry into the grounds of his former ac-
ceptance), and some domestic accidents connected with the
character of his wife and the talents of his daughter, saved him
alike from total forgetfulness, and from the unpleasant revulsion
or revolution which death often brings upon a man's fame. He
was very well read, and had had the wits and taste to catch up
beautiful old rhythms. He would sometimes mould pretty things
on them, as in Sit down, sad soul and the Song for Twilight.
But, anyone who wishes not to disturb the pleasant atmosphere of
praise and affection which has been raised round Procter by great
writers from Lamb to Swinburne had better not explore the
context of the still vaguely known lines
The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
which Ethel Newcome most excusably quoted. Nor, with Moore
to go to, do we want things like
0! the summer night
Has a smile of light,
And she sits on a sapphire throne.
>
The much more hardly used Thomas Haynes Bayly, to some
extent, deserved the ridicule which has fallen on him, by in-
dulgences in positive silliness, and by faults of taste which
Procter never could have committed. Nobody can have done
more to bring 'the drawing-room ballad' into the contempt from
which it has never fully emerged than Bayly did by his effusions.
Even now, when we seldom mention them, and the songs them-
selves are never heard, their names are, in a way, familiar, if only
contemptuously so. Perhaps, contempt might be qualified by a
little affection if they were more read, for there is pathos and
(independently of the famous composers who 'set' him) music
in Bayly. But it is too often, if not invariably, frittered
away. And it may be specially noted that there is hardly
any easier and completer method of appreciating that undefinable
mixture of breeding and scholarship with which Praed has been
credited above than by comparing the pretty numerous pieces in
which Bayly either directly imitates, or unconsciously coincides
with, Praed's society-verse style.


## p. 131 (#155) ############################################

v]
131
Bloomfield and Clare
Perhaps the position of the most twittering of all the twit-
terers has been wrongly assigned to William Robert Spencer, of
whom both Scott and Byron thought well, and who, at least, was
a translator of some merit. And the pathetic end of Laman
Blanchard, celebrated and mourned by Bulwer and by Thackeray
(Johnstone and Maxwell agreeing for once! ), neither makes nor
mars his rank as, perhaps, the best of this bunch-a lesser Hood,
both in serious and light verse, but with the same combination
of faculties, and with a skill in the sonnet which Hood more seldom
showed.
Community of circumstance, of misfortune and (in part) of
subject has linked Robert Bloomfield and John Clare together.
Both, though Bloomfield was not 'tied to the soil' by birth, were
agricultural labourers, or, as Bloomfield's own much better phrase
has it, ‘farmers' boys'; both made themselves authors under
the consequential difficulties ; both were patronised; neither
made the best use of the patronage; and both died mad, though,
in Bloomfield's case, actual insanity has been questioned. Nor
is there quite so much dissimilarity between the poetic value
of their work, if the poems of Clare published during his life-
time be taken alone, as readers of the high, and not ill-deserved,
praise sometimes bestowed on the younger poet might expect.
The late Sir Leslie Stephen, indeed, took a low view of Clare's
production as a whole; but ‘asylum verses' were not the kind
of poetry that generally appealed to that accomplished critic.
They certainly distinguish Clare from Bloomfield, from whom
even madness or approach to madness did not extract anything
better than a sort of modernising of Thomson, most creditable
as produced under difficulties and entitled to the further con-
sideration that, when he first produced it, the newer poetry had
hardly begun to appear, and that nothing but eighteenth century
echoes could possibly be expected. Charles Lamb, who never
went wrong without good cause, and who, on no occasion, was an
unamiably 'superior' critic, thought that Bloomfield had 'a poor
mind,' and there is certainly nothing in his work to indicate that
it was a rich one, poetically speaking. Lamb put Clare higher,
even on the work he knew, and his judgment was eventually
justified; but it may be questioned whether the appeal of the
volumes on which he formed it is, except in technique, much
higher than Bloomfield's. As was certain to be the case in 1820,
as compared with 1800, the stock couplet versification and
diction of the eighteenth century are replaced by varied metres,
9_2


## p. 132 (#156) ############################################

132
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837 [CH.
a more natural vocabulary, and a general attempt at lyrical
quality. The sense of the country may not be more genuine in
Clare than in his elder, but it is more genuinely expressed; still,
there is constant imitation, not merely of Goldsmith and Thomson,
Beattie and Shenstone, but of Cowper and Burns, and, save now
and then (The Last of March is a favourable instance), nature
is not very freshly seen?
Yet, even in these early poems, the sonnets, with that strange
magic of the form which has often brought out of poets the
best that was in them, contain poetic signs which are nowhere
to be found in Bloomfield, and the poems written during the
miserable later years—for Clare, unlike many luckier lunatics,
was not only mad but miserable in his madness-confirm these
signs almost as well as could be expected. The wonderful late
lines
I am-yet what I am, who cares or knows ? —
one of the greatest justifications of Waller's master stroke
as to
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed-
are, indeed, far above anything else that Clare ever wrote, but
they show what he might have written. And other poems 2
among these sad waifs exhibit, with greater art, the truthfulness
of that 'country sense' to which he had been unable to give
full poetic expression earlier. No such results of suffering will be
found in Bloomfield's songs, which he continued to publish up to
the
year before his death. For nature had made him only a ver-
sifier ; while she made Clare a poet.
In passing from groups or batches to individuals, an accidental
link to the last-mentioned writer, in madness and in sonnet
writing, may be found in a curious person, who, like others,
owes his survival in literary history to Southey, and who might,
perhaps, have been dealt with in the last volume. Among
the 'disdained and forgotten ones who were included in
Specimens of Later English Poetry, was John Bampfylde, a
member of one of the best Devonshire families, a Cambridge
man and a suitor of Reynolds's niece Miss Palmer, who figures
6
1 It has been suggested, and is not improbable, that the early volumes were
tampered with, and 'prettified' generally, by the publishers; of course, with the best
intentions.
2 Known only from the Life by Cherry; but reproduced, in part, by Palgrave, Gale
and Symons in selections. Clare seems to have left voluminous manuscripts, but their
existence and whereabouts are, largely, unknown. The suspicions of 'tinkering' re-
ferred to above make a complete and thoroughly authenticated edition very desirable.


## p. 133 (#157) ############################################

v]
133
Bampfylde and Leyden
>
often in Madame d'Arblay's Diary and in other books of the
Johnsonian library. Bampfylde led an unhappy and disorderly
life, and died mad; but, a decade before Bowles, he had
published a tiny volume of sonnets, two of which Southey
reprinted as “among the most original in English,' with a
couple of other pieces from manuscript. The phrase "original’
would seem to have attracted surprise from some of the very
few persons who have dealt with Bampfylde ; but Southey was
not wont to use words lightly, and it is clear what he meant.
Except for Warton (who was a friend of Bampfylde, was made
the subject of one of his sonnets and was clearly his host at
a dinner at Trinity, Oxford, which forms the subject of another),
there were few sonneteers in 1779, and Bampfylde may well
share some of the praise which has been given to Bowles,
as an 'origin. ' His own language is frankly Miltonic ("Tuscan
air' actually appears in the Trinity piece), but the greater
number of his sonnets are entitled Evening, Morning, The
Sea, Country enjoyment and so forth, and the opening of the
poem To the River Teign, first printed by Southey, though
classicised (after Milton and Gray) in diction, does not ill carry
out the latter poet's example (in his letters if not in his poems)
of direct attention to actual vales and streams. ' Of an older
birth date, too, than most of his companions in the present chapter,
though not than Mrs Barbauld, Rogers, or Pye, was the much-
travelled, many-languaged, many-friended and many-scienced, but
short-lived and eccentric John Leyden. Leyden's ballads, especially
The Mermaid, have been highly praised, but a truthful historic
estimate must class them with the hybrid experiments numerous
between Percy's Reliques and The Ancient Mariner and not
completely avoided even by Scott himself, Leyden's great friend
and panegyrist, at the opening of his career. Of his longer poems,
Scenes of Infancy and others, few except partial judges have
recently had much good to say.
There remain some dozen or half score of individual poets,
who are, most of them, more definitely of the transitional
character which pervades this chapter, and who, while illus-
trating, in different respects and degrees, the general charac-
teristics which will be set forth at its close, neither exhibit
any special community with each other nor possess power
1 After dinner, Phyllis and Chloe' came in. The frequentation of college rooms
by ladies was certainly not so frequent then as now, but the sonneteer takes pains
to tell us that everything was strictly proper.


## p. 134 (#158) ############################################

134
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
sufficient to entitle them to long separate notice. If any demur
is made to this last sentence, it would probably be in the
cases of the western poets, both of them in Anglican orders,
Robert Stephen Hawker and William Barnes. Of these, Hawker,
at least, would seem to have had fire enough in him to have
made him a much greater poet than he was. He was old
enough to belong to the days of literary mystification, and his
best known poem, the Song of the Western Men, though quite
original except its refrain", took in, as a genuine antique, not
merely Dickens, which is not surprising, but Scott and Macaulay,
which is. There is, however, nothing in the filling up of this
poem which scores of other pens might not have written. The
Silent Tower of Bottreau, sometimes called The Bells of
Bottreaux, is very much more of a diploma piece, and, perhaps,
Queen Gwennyvar's Round (“Naiad for Grecian Waters ') would,
if one word were altered, be the best of all. But Pater Vester
Pascit illa, The Sea Bird's Cry, all the special Morwenna
poems (referring to the patron saint of his remote and beautiful
parish Morwenstow) and not a few others of the shorter pieces
have no common poetry in them. Hawker was old when he
was ‘induced' (a rather ominous word) to commit to writing
a long poem, which he had thought of for years, entitled The
Quest of the Sangraal; and he only wrote one complete book
or chant' of it. But the fragment shows promise of original
treatment; and its blank verse is full of vigour and independence.
In order to put Barnes satisfactorily in his place, a longer
discussion of dialect poetry than would here be fitting is almost
necessary, and some notice, at least, of the curious philological
craze, by which, following in the distant footsteps of Reginald
Pecock, he would have revolutionised the English language by
barring Latin compounds and abstractions, might not be super-
fluous. But it must suffice to say that, in his case more than in
most others, acceptance or rejection (at least polite laying aside)
as a whole is necessary. No single piece of Barnes, one can
make bold to say, is possessed of such intrinsic poetical quality
that, like the great documents of Burns, it neither requires the
attractions of dialect to conciliate affection, nor is prevented
from exciting disgust by the repulsion of dialect. All alike are
permeated by pleasant and genuine perception of country charms”;
6
6
1. And shall Trelawney die? ' etc.
2 In this respect, they are only rivalled by Clare's and, necessarily, are of happier
tone.


## p. 135 (#159) ############################################

v]
Barton. James Montgomery. Elliott 135
by not unpleasant and genuine sentiment of a perfectly manly
kind and by other good qualities of general literature. The verse
is fluent and musical enough ; the diction neither too 'aureate,'
nor too 'vulgar,' nor too much loaded with actually dialectic
words. Whether, in the absence of special poetic intensity and
idiosyncrasy, the vesture of dialectic form repels or attracts, so
as to procure rejection, or so as to deserve acceptance, of the
'middle kind of poetry' offered, must depend to such a degree upon
individual taste that it seems unnecessary to speak positively or
copiously on the question.
Some verse-writers of earlier date, and, at one time or another,
of wider appeal, may now be mentioned, though they need not
occupy us long. The quaker poet Bernard Barton has so many
pleasant and certainly lasting literary associations—the friendship
of Lamb and of Southey and of FitzGerald, the presentation of
Byron in his most sensible, good-natured and un-Satanic aspect,
and, in fact, numerous other evidences of his having possessed
the rare and precious qualities which 'please many a man and
never vex one'—that it would be a pity if anyone (except at
the call of duty) ran the risk of vexation by reading his
verse. He wrote, it is said, ten volumes of it, and there is no
apparent reason, in what the present writer has read of them,
why he or any man should not have written a hundred such, if
he had had the time. Some of his hymns are among his least
insignificant work.
The same is the case with James Montgomery, whom we
might have mentioned with his unlucky namesake in the long-
poem division, for he wrote several epics or quasi-epics, which were
popular enough, entirely negligible, but not absurd. Some of his
hymns, also, such as Go to dark Gethsemane, Songs of praise the
angels sang and others, are still popular and not negligible,
while he could sometimes, also, write verses (not technically
'sacred,' but devoted to the affections and moral feelings) which
deserve some esteem. James Montgomery is one of the poets
who have no irrefragable reason for existing, but whom, as
existing, it is unnecessary to visit with any very damnatory
sentence.
The condition of Ebenezer Elliott is different. He had much
more poetical quality than Montgomery, and very much more than
Barton, but he chose, too frequently, to employ it in ways which
make the enjoyment of his poetry somewhat difficult. A man is
not necessarily the worse, any more than he is the better, poet for


## p. 136 (#160) ############################################

136
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
being 'a Corn Law Rhymer,' whether his riming takes the form
of defence or, as in Elliott's case, of denunciation. Dryden and
Canning are not unpalatable to intelligent liberals, nor Shelley
and Moore, in their political poems, to intelligent tories. But
Elliott seldom (he did sometimes, as in his Battle Song) put enough
pure poetic fire in his verse to burn up, or to convert into clear
poetic blaze, the rubbish of partisan abuse which feeds his furnace.
Still, he does, in this and one or two other instances even of the
political poems, establish his claim, which is fortunately reinforced
by a not inconsiderable number of poems sometimes lyrical, some-
times in other form, where a real love of nature finds expression
in really poetic numbers. He began to write before the end of
the eighteenth century, and, therefore, naturally enough, echoed
Thomson and Crabbe for some time; but Southey, that Providence
of poetical sparrows, took him in hand, and Elliott's later and
better verse shows no copying, either of Southey himself or of
any of the greater new poets, only a beneficial influence of the new
poetry itself. In few, if any, instances do locality and environment
provide more stimulating contrast than in the case of Sheffield
(Elliott's abode) and its neighbourhood; and it is fair to say that,
in very few instances, has a poet, not of the absolutely first class,
taken better advantage of this opportunity.
In writing of another and, in a way, the most famous of Southey's
protégés, Henry Kirke White, one has to remember not merely that
'Clio is a Muse,' but that, unlike some of her sisters, she has the
duty of a female Minos or Rhadamanthus cast upon her. A very
good young man, possessed of sound literary instincts, dying young,
after a life not exactly unfortunate or unhappy, but, until nearly
the last, not quite congenial and blameless always, he has been duly
embalmed in two different but precious kinds of amber-Southey's
perfect prose and Byron's fine verse-rhetoric. His biographer's
private letters to White's brother increase the interest and sympathy
which one is prepared to extend to the subject of so much good
nature and good writing from such strikingly different quarters.
But it is really impossible, after soberly reading Kirke White's
actual performances, to regard him—to quote Shelley once more-
as even a competitor for the inheritance of unfulfilled renown.
A hymn or two—The Star of Bethlehem and the in modern
hymnals) much altered Oft in danger, oft in woe-some smooth
eighteenth century couplets and a prettyish lyric or so on non-sacred
subjects are the best things that stand to his credit. It is, of
course, perfectly true that he died at twenty, and that, at twenty,
а


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v]
Kirke White. Cary
137
>
many great poets have done little or not at all better. But, to
draw any reasonable probability of real poetry in future from this
fact requires a logic and a calculus which the literary historian
should respectfully decline to practise. For, if the fact of not
having written good poetry up to the age of twenty were sufficient
to constitute a claim to poetical rank, mankind at large might
claim that position; and, even if the fact of the claim were
limited to having actually written bad or indifferent verse before
that age, the Corpus Poetarum would be insupportably enlarged.
It is no small relief to turn from indifferent performance and
undiscoverable promise to something, and that no small thing, not
merely attempted but definitely done. Henry Francis Cary wrote
some prose sketches of poets, not without merit, in continuation or
imitation of Johnson's Lives; and was a translator on a large scale;
but one of his efforts in this latter difficult and too often thankless
business has secured him the place (and, again, it is no scanty or
obscure one) which he occupies in English literature. It may be
impossible to translate Dante into English verse after a fashion
even nearly so satisfactory to those who can read the Italian
poet, and who can estimate English poetry, as is the prose of
J. A. Carlyle and A. J. Butler. But it may be very seriously
doubted whether, of the innumerable attempts in verse up to the
present day, any is so satisfactory to a jury composed of persons
who answer to the just given specifications as Cary's blank verse. It
is, no doubt, in a certain sense, a 'refusal”; but it is not in the
least, in the sense of the famous passage of its original, a rifiuto.
It is, on the contrary, a courageous, scholarly and almost fully
justified recognition that attempts directly to conquer the difficulty
by adopting rimed terza rima are doomed to failure; and that all
others, in stanza or rimed verse of any kind, are evasions to begin
with, and almost as certain failures to boot. It may even be said
to be a further, and a very largely successful, recognition of the
fact that blank verse, while 'nearest prose' in one sense, and,
therefore, sharing its advantages, is almost furthest from it in
another, in the peculiar qualities of rhythm which it demands.
Cary does not quite come up to this latter requisition, but, unless
Milton had translated Dante, nobody could have done so.
Meanwhile, Cary's verse translation has gone the furthest and
come the nearest. It is no slight achievement.
Two names famous in their way remain to be dealt with and the
dealing may with both, as with Cary, be pleasant. Probably no
“single-speech' poet has attracted more attention and has been
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138
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790-1837
the subject of more writing than Charles Wolfe, several times
questioned but quite unquestionable author of The Burial of Sir
John Moore. The thing is one of those windfalls of the muses'
for which one can only give the muses thanks. That it seems to
have been originally a metrical paraphrase from Southey's admir-
able prose account of the facts in The Annual Register is not in
the least against it; that, not merely the at once flaming and
triumphant patriotism of the time (1817) but all competent
judgment since has accepted it as one of the very best things of
the kind is conclusive. It has been parodied not merely in one
famous instance by Barham, but again and again; it was made
the subject of a most ingenious mystification by father Prout;
it may be cavilled at by merely pedantic criticism as facile,
sentimental, claptrap and what not. But its facility is the facility
of at least temporary inspiration; its sentiment is of the sunt
lacrimae rerum and of no meaner description; if it appeals for the
plaudite, it is to those whose applause is worth having. It has the
rush and sweep of Campbell (no less a person than Shelley thought
it might be his) without Campbell's occasional flaws. There is
no doubt about it. But, when amiable persons, founding their
belief on some amiable things (To Mary and so forth) which are
included among Wolfe's Remains, suggest that we lost a major poet
by Wolfe’s death in consumption at the age of thirty-two, it is best
to let the reply be silence.
On the other hand, there are reasons for thinking that, if
Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta, had devoted himself entirely
to letters, he might have been a poet, if not exactly of first rank,
at least very high in the second. He has no 'rocket' piece like
Wolfe's Burial. But, though he died at forty-three, and, for the
last twenty years of his life, laboured faithfully at clerical work
(latterly of the most absorbing kind), he showed a range and variety
of talent in verse which should have taken him far. The story is
.
well known how, during a visit of Scott to Oxford, Heber added
impromptu on a remark from Sir Walter the best lines of the
rather famous Newdigate which he was about to recite. He added
to hymnology some dozen of the best and best known attempts
in that difficult art below its few masterpieces. He could write
serio-comic verse in a fashion which suggests not imitation,
but, in some cases, anticipation, of Moore, Praed and Barham at
The Spenserians of his Morte d'Arthur need only to have
been taken a little more seriously to be excellent; and the
1 But it was before his baronetcy.
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v]
Heber
139
charming lines to his wife (If thou wert by my side, my love)
in the late Indian days, unpretentious and homely as they are,
remind one of the best side of the eighteenth century in that
vein as shown in Lewis's Winifreda.
For there was still a considerable eighteenth century touch in
Heber ; and the fact may conveniently introduce the few general
remarks which have been promised to end this chapter. It is safe
to say that all the poets here dealt with—major, minor, or minim,
in their own division-display, not merely in a fanciful chronological
classification but in real fact, the transition character which is very
important to the historical student of literature, and very inte-
resting to the reader of poetry who does not wilfully choose to shut
his ears and eyes to it. Some, to use the old figure, are Januses
of the backward face only; or with but a contorted and casual
vision forwards. Hardly one can be said to look steadily ahead,
though, in the group to which particular attention has been
devoted (that of Hood, Darley, Beddoes and others), the forward
velleity, however embarrassed and unknowing, is clear. Their
struggle does not avail much, but it avails something. In yet
others, new kinds of subject, and even of outward form, effect an
alteration which their treatment hardly keeps up.
Another point connected with this general aspect and itself of
some importance for the general study of literary history is this,
that, despite individual tendencies to imitation, all these poets show
a general air as of sheep without a shepherd. They have-except
Rogers, Bloomfield and one or two more among the minors and
Campbell as a kind of major in a half vain recalcitrance-lost the
catchwords and guiding rules of eighteenth century poetry, and they
have not fully discovered those of the nineteenth. Even their elder
contemporaries, from Wordsworth downwards, were fully compre-
hended by few of them; Shelley and Keats only dawn upon the
youngest and not fully even on them. Now, it has sometimes been
asserted that the complete dominance of any poet, poets or style of
poetry is a drawback to poetic progress; and particular applications
have been suggested in the case of the long ascendency of Tennyson
in the middle and later nineteenth century.