No More Learning

156 (#172) ############################################

156
Lesser Poets
[CH.
The most usually quoted names in the group are those of
Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith and the two Joneses, Ernest and
Ebenezer, each of whom deserves some special notice here. But
some community of character, both in the respects noticed above
and, sometimes, also, in a sort of vague political unrestfulness,
may be observed in others, such as William Bell Scott and Thomas
Gordon Hake, who, after showing 'spasmodic' signs, became, as it
were, outside pre-Raphaelites later.
The most 'occasional poet among the semi-official spasmodics,
as we may call them, was, probably, Ernest Jones, son of a soldier
of distinction, a king's godson in Germany, presented at court in
England, and a barrister, but a violent chartist agitator, a two-
years' prisoner for sedition, an industrious journalist and lecturer,
later a not unsuccessful practitioner in his profession, a frequent
candidate for parliament and, at last, just before his death, a
successful one, after a fashion. This brief biography does not
sound very promising ; but, as a matter of fact, Jones was not
a bad poet. Even his Songs of Democracy redeem their inevitable
clap-trap with less spitefulness than Ebenezer Elliott's (though
Elliott was a prosperous, and Jones a very unlucky, man) and
by an occasional humour of which the Sheffield poet was in-
capable. It is impossible for the bitterest reactionary who
possesses a sense of that inestimable quality not to recognise it
in The Song of the Lower Classes, with its mischievous, ricketty,
banjo-like quasi-refrain of
We're low-we're low-we're very very low !
And, when Jones would let politics alone-politics which, on
whatever side the subject be taken up, seldom inspire any but
the satiric muse—he could, as in some of his pieces on the
Crimean war and in others, more general, such as The Poet's
Parallel, show real poetic power.
His namesake, Ebenezer, was also bitten with the chartist
mania, having some excuse in the facts that his circumstances,
never very bright or prosperous, became steadily worse, while,
though never quite in Alton Locke's straits, he was so like him in
his infirm health and in other ways, that, if dates and other things
did not make it extremely unlikely, there might be suspicions of
his having been taken as a model, to some extent, by Kingsley.
Studies of Sensation and Event (1843), his only substantive pub-
lished work, shows a quite unmistakable poetic faculty, though
undeveloped (he was only 23) and never fully to be developed
(for he died in 1860 and the interval had been sterilised by


## p. 157 (#173) ############################################

vi]
Ebenezer Jones
157
ill-health, domestic misfortune and office work). But it appeared in
that disastrous interval of poetic taste and poetic criticism which
has been more than once mentioned, the only cheerful side of which
is the hard discipline it gave to the two great capacities-great
enough to meet and withstand and conquer it—of Tennyson and
Browning. Ebenezer Jones had no such greatness—would pro-
bably never have attained it even if circumstances had been more
favourable; and they were not favourable at all. But The Hand
and Rain and The Face—these are the stock extracts, but it is
as silly to neglect as it is degrading to rely on stock matter—have
something that is not like other people, and is poetry. The ill-
success of his first book and the possibly unfortunate, but certainly
unusual and respectable, variety of 'poetic irritability' which
seems to have determined him, in consequence of that ill-success,
to destroy what unpublished verse he had and write little more,
prevented him from being much more than a promise of a poet.
Such posthumous work as we have shows little new merit. But,
in the circumstances, it would be a vulgar error to expect such
merit, and an error even more vulgar to cancel the praise due
to the promise. Judging by that, Ebenezer Jones might have
been at least as good a poet as most of those mentioned in this
chapter; and there is hardly a case in it in which the phrase Dis
aliter visum is at once more obvious and more explicable.
Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell are persons and poets of
what we may call more substantive character than those whom we
have been mentioning after Bailey. It is true that, in both cases,
pleas in arrest of definite judgment—things troublesome to the critic
but not negligible by him-exist. Both suffered from bad health,
and, though fortune, in the more vulgar sense of the term, was kind
enough to Dobell, it was not till rather late, and in a very moderate
fashion, that she was kind to Smith. Yet, these external cir-
cumstances cannot, as in the case of the Joneses, be allowed to
leave historical judgment uncertain. Both Smith and Dobell had
sufficient opportunities of showing the best that was in them; and
they must be presumed to have shown it. It is a 'best' which,
sometimes, has undoubted, and not unplentiful, good in it; it has
flashes of a quality to which Southey's ingenious glovemaker must
have allowed his most complimentary label, 'the real best ’; but it
never holds this quality for long, and it is full of the 'spasmodic'
flaws-extravagance of conception and diction, a sort of Byronism
metamorphosed, imitation of other poets which, sometimes, goes
near to plagiarism, an inequality which exceeds the large limits
>


## p. 158 (#174) ############################################

158
[ch.
Lesser Poets
-
allowed to poets and, worst of all, that suggestion of ineffective
and undignified effort—of the 'ginger-beer bottle burst,' to borrow
a phrase from Smith himself-which is the universal mark of the
spasmodic beast.
Alexander Smith, though the younger of the two, deserves, for
more reasons than one, the earlier mention. His Life Drama
appeared in the same year as Dobell's Balder; and was, perhaps, the
last book which profited-if the result can be called profit-by that
depression in poetry itself and in criticism of poetry which had
characterised the second quarter of the century. It was greeted
at first with the wildest hosannas; and men now old, but not old
enough to have shared in, or refused, the welcome, may remember
how the bookcases of friends ten or twenty years older than them-
selves contained the volume with obvious marks of those friends'
youthful admiration. But fortune was just about to turn her
wheel. The far greater poetic powers of Tennyson and Browning
were, at last—the former in all but actual possession, the latter in
comparatively near expectance, of recognition. The new criticism
was cutting its teeth and-in the somewhat ill-conditioned fashion
of youthful animals-was ready to fix them in something. Smith
was accused of plagiarism from Tennyson himself and others;
City Poems, his second book, containing some of his very best
work, was a failure; and Edwin of Deira (1861), though rather
better received than City Poems, might, without much loss, have
remained unwritten. In his later years, Smith wrote some ex-
cellent prose, especially of the miscellaneous kind, collected in
books called Dreamthorp and A Summer in Skye! But he died
early, and it is more than doubtful whether, if he had lived longer,
he would have done much more in verse.
It is evident that he had early absorbed a great deal of the
new poetry from Wordsworth to Tennyson, and that he was re-
turning it in a fashion sufficiently, if not masterfully, dissimilated.
Hence, the charge of plagiarism”, from which he can be victoriously
cleared on almost every point-not least so on the famous passage
about 'the bridegroom sea toying with the shore,' on which Kingsley
founded a not very clear-sighted diatribe against what was then
>
i See post, chap. xv.
2 The presence of constant suggestion in him from others cannot be denied, and,
curiously enough, it is even more obvious and much more teasing in his prose than in
his verse, there being less originality of form to carry it off. Dreamthorp is a pleasant
book enough for an uncritical reader : the critic cannot read it without incessant
reminders of Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Carlyle and others clanging in his ears, and
disturbing his enjoyment.


## p. 159 (#175) ############################################

6
>
VI] Alexander Smith Sydney Dobell 159
modern poetry. It is evident, likewise, that he had taken pretty
severely the ‘spasmodic' measles—the nineteenth-century joint
revival of fifteenth-century "aureation' and seventeenth century
'metaphysicalism'-with a fresh neurosis of Weltschmerz, and so
forth. But he could write beautiful passages, if not a beautiful
poem, and he had a real lyrical gift. He might sue for citizenship
in poetry on the strength of Barbara alone; and no fairly selected
jury of poets or critics could deny it him. Perhaps he has nothing
else so solidly good; but he has other pieces not far inferior in the
lyric way, and the small blank verse passages, above referred to,
would, if collected, make a notable sheaf. In substance, fable,
matter, as well as in poetic temper, A Life Drama resembles
Festus and Balder ; but it has the advantage of being infinitely
shorter than the former and infinitely less pretentious than either.
And yet there are grounds for holding Sydney Dobell the
greatest poet of the group. He, like some others, has been
more unfortunate in his eulogists than in his detractors, for
to say that Balder 'contains beauties beyond the reach of
any contemporary poet' (the competitors, be it remembered, in-
cluding, to mention nobody else, Tennyson, Browning and Matthew
Arnold) is so monstrous an exaggeration that it may recoil not
more on its author than on its subject. But the critic who
indulged in this aberration of enthusiasm palinodes it in the
same sentence with such terms as 'preposterous' and 'chaotic,
while, in others, we find charges of 'dull verbiage,' 'outrageous
extravagance,' 'mere inanity,' 'obscurity,' 'pretentiousness,' senti-
mental and sonorous claptrap' and the like. The indignité, to
use the old tag once more, is not much more exact than the excès
d'honneur. A purely private education, very bad health and
(though he was a man of business for parts of his life) recluse
habits fostered in Dobell an evidently congenital incapacity for
self- and other criticism. The Roman, his first book, is, admittedly,
a mere rhetorical utterance of the 'Italomania' common at the
time; Balder, with some fine passages, though none of his finest,
has more of the 'burst ginger-beer bottle' quality of the spas-
modics than any other poem by any other author; and England
in Time of War contains a good deal of rubbish, with some things
as different from rubbish as it is possible to conceive. Of Dobell's
two masterpieces, Keith of Ravelston' and Tommy's Dead, as of
a considerable number of passages, if hardly another complete
1 Not so entitled, though generally so called. It is part of another poem A Nuptial
Song.
6
6
>


## p. 160 (#176) ############################################

160
[CH.
Lesser Poets
poem, in his other works, though it is, as has been said, absurd to
,
put them “beyond the reach of others, it might truly enough be
said that, in those others, nothing exactly like them is actually
found. There is, in them, an idiosyncrasy of strangeness--a faculty
of inspiring and surrounding sometimes the very simplest words
with an aura or atmosphere of poetic unfamiliarity—which thing
whosoever possesses, he passes as a poet without further question.
None of Dobell's fellows-not even Elizabeth Barrett Browning-
who is a sort of she-spasmodic of the nobler kind-actually has it
in the same way or in the same degree. But it must be allowed
that no other poet brings so vividly before us the faults which
Kingsley (with the spasmodics clearly in mind) has attributed to his
Alton Lockes and his Elsley Vavasours; while none enables us so
thoroughly to understand the way in which Matthew Arnold, at
this very time, was plying the new critical weapons he had forged
against extravagance, caprice, the subordination of the general
fashioning of the poetic garment to its decoration with purple
patches or tinsel trimmings and the like.
We may turn, in logical connection as well as rhetorical contrast,
from these poets who, though they were not all entirely destitute
of humour, undoubtedly owed most of their faults to the want of
its chastening influence, to another group composed of writers
of verse, not always purely humorous, but, at its and their own
best, mainly so. And we may, with special propriety-again
logical as well as chronological—begin with the coiner of the
name 'spasmodic'—William Edmonstoune Aytoun.
As in most, if not in all, cases, the possession of the faculty of
writing light verse was accompanied, in Aytoun, by no inconsider-
able command of serious poetry. The style of his chief efforts, in
this latter-ballad-romances of Scott's type—has not retained
much popularity ; but no one whose taste in poetry is free from
mere caprice, or mere prejudice, can deny unusual merit to The
Island of the Scots and to more than one or two other passages
of Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers. Still, Aytoun's best work
was, undoubtedly, of the comic or tragi-comic kind. Although
Firmilian and the pilot-article on it in Blackwood at once
attracted the popularity they deserved, and have received honour-
able mention from almost all critics and literary historians of
competence who have mentioned them since, it may be doubted
whether the full intrinsic and historical importance of the piece is
now, or, indeed, has ever been, sufficiently recognised. In general
scheme a rather close parody of Balder and A Life Drama, with


## p. 161 (#177) ############################################

vi]
Bon Gaultier Ballads
161
an extra dose of melodrama in action, Firmilian not merely
administers the castigation of laughter to these pieces and to
their authors, not merely, in its burlesque of extravagant state-
ment, phrase and conceit, reaches back to Bailey and to the
Byronists, if not even to Byron himself, but positively anticipates
spasmodic productions yet unborn. Even Maud, not to appear
till a year later, is galled in its weaker parts by this audacious
and prophetic satire; so is some then unpublished work of
Mrs Browning. In fact, it would not be very difficult to make
a chain of spasmodic instances up to the present day which cannot
escape the mirror of Aytoun’s parody,
If it be urged that Firmilian requires for its full appreciation
rather more knowledge of past literature than most people can be
expected to possess, that plea cannot avail as regards the famous
and delightful Bon Gaultier Ballads which Aytoun, some years
earlier, wrote with Theodore Martin. Ta Fhairshon and the
parody of Locksley Hall have probably been the most popular
pieces; but it may, perhaps, be questioned whether George of
Gorbals? -_a burlesque both of the metre and the manner of
Mrs Browning—is not the best of all. Aytoun's scholarship, his
mastery of phrase and metre, his sardonic humour and, behind
it, that blend of romance and passion, without which so-called
humorous verse is apt to be merely funny or merely horse-playful,
made it difficult for him to go wrong; while his powers in criticism
and in satiric prose-narrative were hardly less.
The historical influence of two such books as The Ingoldsby
Legends and The Bon Gaultier Ballads, following, as it did, on the
exceptional development of satiric verse of the lighter description
from The Rolliad onwards through Canning and his group to
Moore and others with Hood and Praed following? , is greater
than has always been allowed for. Among the numerous sources
of amusement provided by a certain recent tendency to regard
early and mid-Victorian things as characterised by dull con-
ventionalism alternating with silly sentimentality, there is hardly
i The subject of this, otherwise The Rhyme of Sir Launcelot Bogle, matters
nothing, but it is curiously difficult to trace it to anything actual. Aytoun's partner,
interrogated on the subject late in life, declared that he had forgotten, if, indeed, he
ever knew; and venerable citizens of Glasgow (the scene) have been unable to do
more than assign it to some unchronicled municipal squabble. Not thus unknown
should be the facts that suggested
• Nay! tarry till they come' quoth Neish "unto the rum-
They are working at the mum
And the gin! '
? For these, see, ante, vol. XII, chap. v.
R, L. XIII. CH, VỊ.
11
6


## p. 162 (#178) ############################################

162
[ch.
Lesser Poets
any one which is so much of a fons Bandusiae as the memory
of these two books, of Thackeray's light verse and of the
enormous popularity of at least the first two collections. For, at
least, twenty years past there has been no ‘master of the laugh'
who has produced anything approaching them. In fact, there
have been pessimists who have held that, since the departure
of 'C. S. C. ' and 'J. K. S. and the comparative desertion by
W. S. Gilbert of the pure lighter lyric unconnected with the
stage, the gloomy assertion of Théodore de Banville, much earlier
justified in French,
Mais à présent c'est bien fini de rire
has transferred itself to English,
Certainly, however, no such thing was true from 1830 to 1890
or even a little later; and we must briefly survey here the bearers
of that torch of laughter which some very grave and precise
persons have not hesitated to indicate as one of the most
triumphant and idiosyncratic possessions of humanity at large
and of English humanity rather specially.
The first group or sub-group to be noticed should consist of
the earlier mid-century ‘Bohemians,' whom, however, we can
discuss here only in part, Maginn and Father Prout'l being
reserved for other divisions; Thackeray himself rising higher;
and others for other reasons being, also, excluded. Here, however,
may be mentioned Percival Leighề, a great contributor to Punch
in its brilliant second early period; and W. J. Prowse, ‘Nicholas,'
who died young and took little care of the work which his short
life and his weak health enabled him to do, but whose talent
has appealed very strongly to some good judges and can hardly be
denied by any. The City of Prague—which has sometimes been
attributed to others, particularly to James Hannay, but which is
really by Prowse—wants only a very few revising touches to make
it a masterpiece. With one of such touches, so slight that the
reading is a common one in quotation, and can be constructed out
of the printed poem itself, we get the stanza:
1
1
Though the latitude's rather uncertain,
Though the longitude's possibly vague
The people I pity who know not the city-
The beautiful city of Prague
1 See, post, vol. xiv.
2 Not to be confounded with his junior, H. 8. Leigh, who was himself a writer of
some talent in light verse.


## p. 163 (#179) ############################################

VI]
Edward Lear
163
a
a
-a thing of much sweetness. But the wisest sojourners in
Bohemia have admitted that its capital is not a good city to
abide in; and we shall find that the best of the group now under
mention were only visitors of the spiritual Prague, if even that.
More of a scholar than Prowse was Mortimer Collins, who frittered
away, if not in actual idleness yet in hasty and desultory work,
talents perhaps greater than anyone else of the class, except
Maginn, possessed. He left, however, some charming love-poetry,
as To F. C. , and some brilliant satiric verse, as The British
Birds.
The author of one of the most original books of comic verse
ever written, Edward Lear, though he was a great traveller,
had not much to do with Bohemia. An artist he was in more
than one sense and in more than one branch of art; but none of
his artistries led him Prague-wards, just as the fact that he
owed not a little to patronage did not, in the least, subject him to
any of the trials, or tempt him into any of the revolts and excesses,
of Bohemia's uglier elder sister Grub street. Severe critics in the
arts of design have admitted him to be an excellent draughtsman:
it would be a sufficient and final testimony of the hopelessness of
a literary critic if he failed to find in Lear a super-excellent writer
of an almost unique kind.
The delightful Book of Nonsense (the form of the verse of
which was long afterwards senselessly vulgarised and, in fact,
prostituted, in newspaper competitions under the equally sense-
less name ‘Limerick'), taking, perhaps, a hint from the im-
memorial nursery rime, combined sens? and nonsense, after the
specially English fashion, in a way never' own before ; while his
somewhat longer poems—The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, the famous
Jumblies and others—readjusted the combination in a fashion
almost more delectable still.
Frederick Locker (who, late in life, on the occasion of his
second marriage, took the additional name Lampson) was one of
the few English writers who have devoted themselves wholly to
what is called 'verse of society. ' The advantage of official or
private means—sufficient at all times and, latterly, large-made it
possible for him entirely to avoid the hack-work which is nowhere
more perilous to perfection than in this particular department;
and his total production is, comparatively, small. It is included
chiefly in the frequently reprinted and much altered volume
London Lyrics, to which has to be added the most remarkable
and too little known book called Patchwori a sort of olio or
1
11-2


## p. 164 (#180) ############################################

164
Lesser Poets
[CH.
macédoine slightly resembling Southey's Omniana and consisting
of prose and verse partly original partly not. But Locker made
the very best use of his leisure, and has left practically nothing
that is not perfected and polished up to the limit of his own
powers. These powers, no doubt, had certain limitations. He had
pathos-or he could not have displayed his humour to such ad-
vantage; but this pathos seldom reached poignancy, as may be
seen by comparing those two remarkable pendants, his To My
Grandmother and Oliver Wendell Holmes's Last Leaf. His rigid
abstinence from all major notes may be thought to show some-
thing of what is opprobriously called ‘sparrow-hawking. But,
though these be, in a certain sense, truths, they are very unjust
objections. A man has a perfect right to choose and define his
own business; and the only question is whether he has done it
well. Locker did his supremely well. His extraordinary urbanity
and ease have been admitted by fellow-craftsmen from whose
judgment there is no appeal, as well as by quite disinterested
critics. He is, perhaps, the only instance of a poet who was per-
petually altering and retouching his verse without ever spoiling it.
His obvious and, indeed, avowed model was Praed; but, except in
some very early pieces, perhaps, where he was following too
closely, one would not often mistake or mis-ascribe work of the
two. The same is the case and still more so—with Prior. More-
over, the enjoyment of his work is constantly heightened by the
sense, for those who have some knowledge of literature, of what
he has escaped. The dangers of this light, easy verse are very
much greater than anybody who has not studied it very carefully
may think. Vulgarity, of course, is the worst of all; but, of this,
there was not a trace in Locker. Triviality is a subtler danger;
and, as, perhaps, no two people entirely agree upon what is trivial,
it is difficult to speak positively about it. Perhaps, Locker some-
times approached it in pieces like Our Photographs, but much
less often than any save the very princes of the craft of light verse.
From that ‘inept laughter' (which is different from triviality and
which the Latin tag justly stigmatises as the ineptest thing in the
world) Locker was perfectly free. His form, if never quaint and
not often exquisite, is surprisingly adequate. And, lastly, not only
does he possess the almost indefinable air of good breeding, but he
adds to it something more indefinable still, the quintessence of that
widely varying quality which, in its different lower forms, is called
'slyness,''archness,' and which, in its better shape, the eighteenth
century, with a slight difference from the modern use of the word,


## p. 165 (#181) ############################################

<
VI]
C. S. C.
165
called 'dryness. ' This quality, perhaps, is nowhere shown in such
perfection as in the prose anecdote My Guardian Angel, to be
found in Patchwork; but, in different degrees, it suffuses almost
the whole of his verse. He rises highest, perhaps, in My Neigh-
bour Rose, the finale of which contains something that indicates
a possibility of entirely serious verse of a high kind from him.
But, for anyone who can enjoy this class of poetry, it is very
difficult to go wrong with Locker.
We may close this survey of lighter nineteenth-century verse
with notice of three or, perhaps, four most remarkable 'university
wits' Of the first three, one belonged wholly to Oxford, one
wholly to Cambridge and a third—the eldest, as a matter of fact,
and the most widely known-to both. This was Charles Stuart
Calverley (born Blayds), a man who, in consequence of a disastrous
accident, suffered severely for years and died in middle age; who,
in consequence, partly, of this, did not do much work; but
who made the initials C. S. C. , by which he was usually known,
early familiar and, to the present day, famous for the expression in
verse of a scholarly wit unsurpassed in its own kind. Comparing
notes with younger readers one may pretty well assure oneself
that the intense enjoyment caused to the undergraduate mind by
Fly Leaves, in 1866, was not a mere matter of contemporary
partiality and congruity; while Calverley’s translations from Greek
and Latin yield to none in fidelity or in finish. He has, perhaps,
attracted most popular attention as a parodist; and not very wise
exception has been taken to the 'bitterness' of his exercise in this
kind on Browning. Better balanced judgment will see in it, as in
all Calverley's work in parody, nothing but fair play if not, also,
positive good nature. Scarcely the most extravagant line but
could be paralleled from Browning's actual work somewhere or
other.
Nor did this most scholarly of humorous poets and least
pedantic of scholars require the canvas of an original on which
to embroider his thoughts and fancies; for many of his best things
are quite original themselves. He had eminently the faculty of
giving to a word a ludicrous aspect, by unobtrusive pun or other-
wise, or of getting a secondary comic effect from a simple phrase,
a
as in
The ladies following in the van
of one of his lightest things and
We're not as tabbies are
1 See, also, post, vol. xiv, the chapter on university journalism.


## p. 166 (#182) ############################################

166
[CH.
Lesser Poets
in his noble apology for tobacco. His considerable critical faculty
was inadequately, but clearly, shown in his Remains; he was a
student of the theory of verse, as well as a skilled practitioner
in it; and it is evident that, with better luck, he might have
produced a great bulk of valuable work in various kinds.
Henry Duff Traill had a longer life than Calverley, though his,
too (in this case directly), was cut short by an accident. But his
time, almost from the moment of his leaving Oxford, was occupied
by journalism; and of the immense quantity of this which he
produced very little ever found its way into permanent and
acknowledged form. This little included, however, two volumes of
satiric verse (Recaptured Rhymes and Saturday Songs) of very
high quality indeed. Traill was almost, if not quite, as deft a
parodist as Calverley; and the most enthusiastic admirer of
Rossetti who has any sense of humour cannot fail to enjoy his
caricature of the Rossettian sonnet. But his great excellence was
as a political satirist in verse—a department in which he came
very close to Canning and, perhaps, even surpassed Moore. The
Ballad of Baloonatics Craniocracs (a satire on the philological
and historical arguments used in regard to the war of 1878), and
Laputa Outdone, on the arguments for the miscellaneous extension
of the franchise, are masterpieces of their kind. But Traill had
a strong inclination-which circumstances did not allow him to
indulge—towards more serious or wholly serious poetry, and
examples of each of these may be found in An Enfant Terrible
and The Age of Despair. Some who knew Traill well, and the
press of the last third of the century fairly, have held that no
greater talent than his, both in verse and prose, was diverted into,
and swallowed up in, the gulf of anonymous writing.
The youngest and the shortest-lived of the three, James
Kenneth Stephen, who, like Calverley, established himself in
literature by his initials, had his chances marred in a manner
even worse than that from which Calverley suffered, by his early
death and the illnes hich preceded it. The variety and brilliancy
of the talent shown Lapsus Calami and the other too rare waifs
of J. K. S. 's short life were altogether exceptional. Time and chance,
with which no man can strive, arrested their development, but not
before they had shown themselves unmistakably.
It would be difficult to pass over, in this survey of university wits,
the verse included in the ever delightful Alice in Wonderland
and other pieces of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, otherwise Lewis
Carroll. In some respects, and those important ones, it comes


## p. 167 (#183) ############################################

vi]
Lewis Carroll
167
nearer to Lear's than to any other by the approximation to
nursery rimes; he wrote pure nonsense sometimes; the use of
jargon in proper, and, indeed, in common, names and so forth. But,
it is, in others, not far from Calverley's—the two men, indeed, were
born close together and must have been actual contemporaries at
Oxford before Calverley migrated. Dodgson's academic vein, how-
ever, was mathematical not classical, and there is something of the
manipulation of symbols in his systematical absurdity and the non-
sensical preciseness of his humour. Some, indeed, of his collegiate
and private skits were actually mathematical in form. But the
public joy which he gave to grown-up people quite as much as, or
even more than, to the young, was scarcely analysable; for it
arose from all sorts of springs of wit and humour combined or
alternated. The mazy but not entirely unplanned jargon of Jabber-
wocky, and the sense married to nonsense, without the slightest
grotesqueness of language, in The Walrus and the Carpenter are,
each in its kind, supreme. His later book Rhyme? and Reason?
contained some things that were not in his proper vein, and Sylvie
and Bruno unwisely set at naught the Aristotelian warning against
shifting from kind to kind. But the comparative unpopularity
of The Hunting of the Snark was not quite justified. It may
be a little too long for its style; but some things in it are of
its author's best quality, and the subtle distinction between ‘Snark'
and 'Boojum’ is but too true an allegory of life and literature.
At the other extremity of the scale of poetry in subject, but,
like the last group, largely academic in character, we may find
another company of singers wholly or mainly in the difficult and
debated department of sacred verse. The number might be made
very large if persons who have written a creditable hymn or two (or
even twenty) were included. But this is impossible. John Keble,
cardinal Newman, archbishop Trench, Frederick William Faber,
Isaac Williams, John Mason Neale and, perhaps, as representatives
of a school different from any represented by these and specially
numerous during the nineteenth century, Wathen Mark Wilks Call
and Thomas Toke Lynch, must suffice in this place, though, in the
account of poetesses, some names may be added.
The author
of The Christian Yearl has, of course, gained as well as lost
by the facts that, in a certain sense, his book was the manifesto
and the manual at once of a great religious movement, which was
enthusiastically supported and bitterly opposed, that it marked the
beginning of an epoch of English church history which has not yet
1 See, ante, vol. XII, chap. XII.
>
a


## p. 168 (#184) ############################################

168
Lesser Poets
[CH.
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.
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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.