No More Learning

Songs of Two Worlds,
which first appeared in three series, and the more ambitious Epic
of Hades which followed, deserved the title of perfect works of art
in one sense only perhaps ; but they certainly deserved it in that.
They hit the object at which they were immediately aimed; though,
beyond all doubt, their success helped to provoke in others a
reaction of taste which has dominated the last thirty years and
more and which has most curiously and uncritically affected the
popular estimate of Tennyson himself. Often, when one reads
uncomplimentary remarks on Idylls of the King, one thinks
that the critic, by some mistake, has come upon a copy of The
Epic of Hades with a wrong lettering on the back.
The means by which Lewis Morris hit the vulgar and some, at
first, of those who should not have come under that designation,
were the strictest 'propriety of subject and expression, a modern
and liberal tone towards questions of politics, religion and philo-
sophy; an entire avoidance of all obscurity, preciousness or
eccentricity of language; and the observance, respectable till it
1
1 This is the poem called He and She, the subject being a living husband who
sits by the side of his dead wife and implores spiritual communion. It has been very
highly admired by some ; and, though not without flatnesses here and there, really has
something of the intensity and the music generally denied to his poetry above.


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202
[ch.
Lesser Poets
became distressing, of an absolute smoothness of versification.
He was great at truisms in morality, and, indeed, in everything.
He could draw fairly pretty pictures, though, when you examined
them, you found that there was scarcely ever a touch of real nature
or original wit in them, that the colours were those of the tenpenny-
halfpenny box and the outlines stencilled. He had, sometimes,
a faculty—which, in a satirist, would have been admirable of
writing things which looked like poetry till one began to think
of them a little1
A pleasant and popular person, with a great many friends both
in Oxford and in London, Lewis Morris secured fairly favourable
views at first. But unbiassed censors, especially of a slightly
younger generation, began to revolt before many years had
passed ; and, not content with a rough reception of his later
works Gwen, The Ode of Life, Gycia, Songs Unsung (a dangerously
suggestive title), went back to the earlier Songs and The Epic
and did their best to demonstrate the poetical nullity of the whole
work. That work, for a good many years, has been available in
a single volume, and everybody can form his own opinion on it.
It may be warranted to do nobody any harm; if, by some curious
chance, a little savage on a desert island read it knowing no other
poetry and liked it, this would be a rather good sign in him.
A very different poet was Sir Alfred Lyall? who, both during,
and after, a brilliant career in the Indian civil service, wrote
verses, few but fit, in a style very much his own, though Browning
must have had considerable influence on his way of poetising
thought if not of framing expression for it. The spirit of the
opening poem of his Verses written in India, The Old Pindaree,
has inspired others to an extent much greater than its debt to
earlier poets. Theology in Extremis (his other most famous poem)
is of the problem order, the speech or meditation of an Englishman
in the mutiny who, though a freethinker, will not purchase his life
by uttering the Mohammedan formula. Most, however, are rather
studies of Indian, than of English, nature; and the situation between
;
· For instance, in an imposing Pindaric (that old refuge-bag of poetic wind that is
not of the spirit), he writes of nature or the world
Unchanging she
Alike in short-lived flower and ever-changing sea.
A paragraph or stanza which ends with • sea' always has a certain conjuring effect
in English, and 'flowers' are useful to the poet as well as to the poetaster. But
a minute's reflection will show that there is no real antithesis between the brief life of
the flower and the ever-changingness' (which, no doubt, is itself the most unchanging
thing in the world) of the ocean.
2 See, also, vol. xiv.
a
9
6
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vi]
Alfred Austin
1
203
6
the two is sometimes strikingly put, as in Badminton, the half
parodied, half serious Land of Regrets and the sombre Retro-
spection. From one critical point of view, indicated already, one
might call Sir Alfred's poetry rather ‘applied' than “pure’; and,
from another, it might seem the work of an exceedingly clever and
scholarly man of the world rather than of a poet. It is, no doubt,
essentially 'occasional'-anecdotes, situations, reflections, brief
characters thrown into verse-form. But there is always dis-
tinction in it, generally music, often really poetic expression of
thought.
That Alfred Austin hardly deserved to be made poet laureate
is a proposition which very few persons, whatever their personal
or political attitude towards him, are likely to deny now, and which,
in after times, nobody at all, except out of mere whim, is likely to
dispute. But, as in other cases, the penalty of the error fell unfairly
on himself. It could not be said of him, as we said of Pye, that
he was not a poet at all; but it could be, and was, said that, though
a really vigorous and accomplished writer of prose, and a tolerable
master of unambitious form in verse, his poetical powers were of
the most mediocre kind. He began with cheap satire in an exploded
style; and, though he fortunately abandoned this, neither his
longer nor his shorter poems possessed pathos, power or beauty
enough to give them much attraction even for a time or to keep
them in memory after their writer's death. Browning's nickname
‘Banjo Byron,' in the exceedingly ill-mannered and not extra-
ordinarily witty attack prefaced to Pacchiarotto, was not very
happy; for, though Austin was a professed admirer of Byron, he
cannot be said to have copied him much except in satire, where
Byron himself was a copyist. He could keep up poems of some
length like Prince Lucifer and The Human Tragedy without being
so tame as Lewis Morris, and he could come rather nearer to vigour
and passion in lyric than (with the exception here noted) Edwin
Arnold. So that, had only the three been available, his appoint-
ment would have been fully justified.
Only that indefinable something which constantly and mys-
teriously interferes in the history of poetry prevented the Cam-
bridge poet, Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel, from attaining a
rank in his art which would have taken him out of this chapter.
As it is, there are none of his contemporaries who, to the present
writer, seem to have come so close to majority, except his two close
contemporaries at Oxford, R. W. Dixon and lord De Tabley. This
something 'may, perhaps, be connected with two other things which


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204
[ch.
Lesser Poets
have unfavourably conditioned many poets during the nineteenth
century-undue voluminousness of work, and an undue influence of
the printed book'-not, as in the case of Owen Meredith,' running
into anything that even an unfavourable judge could call plagiarism,
but communicating a sort of aura of secondhandness—a faint
suggestion of reminiscence and pastiche. Of these two failings,
the latter may almost be disregarded; at certain times (and they
are usually not times of small things in poetry), it is almost inevit-
able. The bulk of the work and the causes or constituents of
that bulk-undue fluency to start with and subsequent inability
to compress or distil that fluency into something stronger and more
forcible—is a more serious objection. Roden Noel's most remark-
able single book, A Little Child & Monument-a collection of
episodes on his own son Eric, who died at five years old-equals,
—
for intense reality of feeling and general adequacy of expression,
anything of its kind. But pure personal lamentation unrelieved
by digression and, as it were, episode, is, of all kinds of poetry,
and, perhaps, of literature, that which should be kept from undue
expatiation and prolongation. The book contains most beautiful
things; but the comment something too much of this' must force
itself upon the least cynical of readers. The same fault is observ-
able in Livingstone in Africa, but is even more noticeable there
because there is no depth of passion even to attempt to carry
it off. He, perhaps, shows at his best in pieces like A Vision
of the Desert, The Water Nymph and The Boy. Here, though
there is not the slightest imitation, and the subjects, especi-
ally in the second-named poem, are quite different, there is
a suggestion of Darley's masterpiece Nepenthe; but the very
mention of that poem implies a certain incoherence, a wealth
and almost spilth of imagery and sound flung abroad as boys
fling nuts. In this and other aspects, Roden Noel has been com-
pared to Shelley, but no critic can fail to discern the difference
between them. The intensity and mastery of Shelley always
unify, for the time and in the poem, his prodigality of image and
colour and symphonic arrangement; this can hardly be said of
Noel. The Land's End poem, Thalatta, wants, like much of
the rest, carding and thinning and winnowing; but the study is
a really fine one, and some of the shorter love-poems, as well as of
the individual constituents of A Little Child's Monument, escape
almost all censure. Now, to make a pardonable repetition, he
who can write without banality of the sea and of love and of
death is a poet.
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## p. 205 (#221) ############################################

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## p. 217 (#233) ############################################

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

## p. 218 (#234) ############################################

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

## p. 219 (#235) ############################################

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

## p. 220 (#236) ############################################

220
[CH.
Lesser Poets
does not want to read again, and which does not leave an echo of
poetry, fainter or less faint, in the mind's ear.
Richard Middleton, latest born of all the writers who can be
mentioned in this chapter, was only twenty-nine when he died ;
and he is said to have written little, if any, verse for some time
before his death. The actual volume which contains what he did
write (for the most part, if not wholly, reprinted from periodicals)
has, no doubt, what may be called the exterior character of poetry.
There is a good deal of especially Swinburnian pastiche in it,
though, also, there is something that is not. But it may be said
to present rather another catching, and, to some extent, condensing
and uttering of the general poetic aura of the period, than any very
strong idiosyncrasy. The searcher of the perilous ways of poetry
can see behind him many Richard Middletons of former ages, each
with that age's differential chances. But, in most cases (not, of
course, in all), they had later chances of showing their power if they
had it. He had no such chance, and, apparently, might not have
taken it if he had. He is not, in what he has actually left, an unequal
poet; one may almost say, without paradox or unfairness, that it
might have been better if he had been, as there would have been
more chance of discovering where his strength lay. A good sense
of form ; a fair command of picturesque language; a decidedly
'young' expatiation in sensuous imagery and fantasy; a still
younger tendency to 'shock'-these and other familiar things
occur throughout his work. But their fermentation was not
over ; and a critical palate can hardly judge what was likely to
have been the achieved flavour of the wine. As it is, it leaves
(in this respect contrasting most unfavourably with Dowson's)
hardly any flavour at all or any reminiscence. The very name
Cynara calls up the sad tune and burden of the celebration of her
to anyone who has once heard it: that of Middleton's Irene-
though we have two poems about her—touches no chord at all.
It would be a pity to leave this chorus vatum, comprising more
than a century of persons and extending, in point of time of poetical
production, over more than seventy years, without some general
remarks, which need be neither forced nor perfunctory, and which
certainly need not indulge in the rhetorical fioriture too often
recently associated with criticism. Colour on colour, whether it
be bad heraldry or not, is bad history. We have regimented our
poets, to some extent, as to classes differenced by subject, by sex
and other considerations ; but it has been freely acknowledged


## p. 221 (#237) ############################################

-
>
vi]
Summary
221
that the greater number are rebels to any such process. It does
not, however, follow that they are a mere throng, or that the
general poetical production of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth
century (and, in some cases, a little of the twentieth) affords no
symptoms to the systematic student of literary history. It may,
therefore, be briefly considered from this point of view.
A theory-or, if that be too dignified a term, at least a notion-
glanced at above suggests that the commanding and protracted
influence of the two greatest poets of the period, Tennyson and
Browning, especially that of Tennyson, has not, on the whole, been
favourable; and an extension of this idea might urge something
similar, as regards the later time, with respect to Swinburne and
Rossetti. It was, however, also hinted, on the former occasion,
that this theory will not stand examination. In order that it
might do so, it would be necessary to establish the fact that the
lesser poetry of 1810—1900 was, generally and individually, worse
than the lesser poetry of the period immediately preceding it.
Now this, as it may be hoped the dispassionate examination
of these two periods, in chapters of some length, has shown, is
far, indeed, from being the case. In the second place, granting, for
a moment, and for the sake of argument merely, that there was
such deterioration, it would have to be established that it was due
to these influences--a more difficult task still. The influence of
Tennyson may have been apparently disastrous on such a writer
as Lewis Morris; but to say that Tennyson's influence produced
the badness, or, rather, the nullity, of Lewis Morris's verse would
be not so much uncritical as purely absurd. Perhaps those who
hold the view referred to may contend that it is not so much
definite imitation that they mean as a certain overawing and
smothering influence—that the lesser poets of the period felt like
Cassius in regard to Caesar, as petty men in the presence of the
colossus Tennyson, and dared not show their real powers. To this,
again, it can be answered that there is no evidence of it whatever,
and that, if they did so feel, they must have been a feeble folk from
whom no great poetry could be expected in any circumstances? .
Brushing all this, and other fantasies, aside and taking the
ford as we find it,' there is, beyond all question, in this long
period and among this crowd of lesser singers, an amount of
1 As a matter of simple historic fact, revolt of one kind or another from Tennyson
is, from the days of Matthew Arnold, downwards, much more noticeable than servile
imitation of him. It is, perhaps, permissible and even desirable to add that this
summing up is strictly directed at, and limited to, the actual subjects of the chapter.
No innuendo is intended as regards poets who are still living.
a


## p. 222 (#238) ############################################

2 2 2
[ch.
Lesser Poets
a
diffused poetry which cannot be paralleled in any other age or
country except, perhaps, in our own land and language between
1580 and 1674. At no period, not even then, has the standard of
technical craftsmanship been so high ; at none has there been
anything like such variety of subject and, to a rather less
extent, of tone. Nor can we exactly charge against these writers,
as, it was claimed, we might against the 'intermediates' of the
earlier century, an uncertainty of step or object-an obviously
transitional character. If a fault can be found with this poetry
generally—and it is a fault which, as the detailed criticism offered
above should show, presses lightly on some, though heavily on
others—it is a want at once of spontaneity and of concentration,
which results in a further want of individuality. And this may be
regarded as due, not to the imitation of this or that contemporary
poet, but to a too general literariness—to what has been called
'the obsession of the printed book. ' These poets, as a rule, have
read rather too much; and, if the reading has polished their form,
it has sometimes palled and weakened their spirit.
We may extend the ungracious task of the devil's advocate
a little further, partly returning upon and collecting points hinted
at already. In, perhaps, no period of poetry has there been, even
allowing the proper average for gross bulk of production, so large
a number of first books of verse which have excited the hopes
even of experienced and somewhat sceptical critics, only to
disappoint the hopes and confirm the scepticism by subsequent
failure-or, at any rate, failure to improve. At no time—this
point, no doubt, is, in many cases, pretty closely connected with
the last-has there been such a dissipation, in the waste and
evaporating waters of mere journalism or journey-work, of powers
which might well have ripened into more generous and lasting
wine of poetry. And, even in the case of those who have never
left their first loves, there has seldom been produced such a bulk of
what we have here several times in individual cases, unconcentrated
work-poetic negus, as one might designate it-sweet and spiced
and pleasant to the taste and fairly comforting, but watered and
sophisticated. Undoubtedly, these things are very largely due to
those very circumstances which have just been mentioned-to the
positive inability of a large proportion of the poets concerned to
indulge that engrossing and exclusive disposition of the muse
which has been often noticed ; perhaps to some general con-
ditions of the time—social, political, religious and other; certainly
to that over-literariness which has been admitted. Yet, these


## p. 223 (#239) ############################################

vi]
Summary
223
allowances and explanations are still allowances and explanations
only. They do not remove or alter the fact.
Nevertheless, these poets have given us a pretty extensive
paradise of sometimes very dainty delights to wander in and feed
upon; and it should be not impossible to play the Parkinson to
some of its classes of flower and fruit—the Paterson to its main
roads and places. The whole region is dominated by the two
general principles of the earlier romantic movement, the increased
and ever increasing appeal to the senses of the mind; the in-
gemination of varied sound; and the multiplication of varied
form and colour. A second notable thing, connected closely with
the first, is the prevalence of lyric in the widest sense, including
sonnets, ballads, odes, short poems of more or less single situation,
emotion or thought, and the like, in whatever form. The closet
drama and the long poem are, of course, attempted and even some-
times with a certain popularity, if only for a time; but never with
entire success to the satisfaction of critical judgment by any poet
surveyed in this chapter. 'Songs and sonnets,' in the old accep-
tation, are your later nineteenth-century poet's only-or, at least,
his chief and principal- wear and ware. Further, there are
curious strains or veins of poetic manner which emerge at the
beginning and continue to manifest themselves until, practically,
the end. One is the 'spasmodic,' which has never been without
representatives, for better for worse, from Bailey to Davidson.
The style most opposite to this is the quietly classical, having
its most powerful exponent outside our list in Matthew Arnold,
but represented not unworthily in that list itself. A most promi-
nent feature is that revival and extension of aureate language
which was one of the main objects of the pre-Raphaelites, and
has never had, not even in Rossetti sixty years since, a more
audacious practitioner than Francis Thompson, who died but the
other day. We have noted, too, in the last twenty or thirty years,
a kind of what has been called 'violence'-a development in one
direction of the spasmodic association itself with the so-called
'realist' tendencies of the time. The artificial forms practised by
no mean poets for a considerable period must, also, keep their
place, whatever it be, in history.
But the attraction and the charm of poetry—though it is
a vulgar error to suppose that they are in the least injured or
lessened, palled or withered, by applying to them historical and
analytic considerations--are, after all, independent of these. "Is
there good and delightful poetry here? ' that is the question; and


## p. 224 (#240) ############################################

224
[CH. VI
Lesser Poets
6
it can be most unhesitatingly answered 'There is. ' A new Johnson
or Anderson or Chalmers, containing all the works of all the
poets noticed in this chapter would be a vast collection-one
would have to be, or to employ, a very skilful and industrious
'caster-off' to estimate its extent. It would certainly far exceed
the twenty-one volumes of Chalmers and might come near the
scores or hundreds of the Parnaso Italiano. Some volumes or
parts of volumes (which need not be again indicated) would be
seldom disturbed and rapidly left alone again by the few dis-
turbers. But, on the whole, an astonishing amount of poetic
pleasure would be available in the collection—some of it for all,
and all of it for some, who care for poetry. This chapter, perhaps,
is already too long; but it may be permitted to lay a little
final stress on the remarkable absence, in the period and pro-
duction considered as a whole, of monotony. The very excess of
literariness' which has been admitted escapes this condemnation
(easily applicable to some other times), because of the immense
extent of the literature from which suggestion has been taken.
Classical literature, and medieval, foreign of all nations and
languages in modern times-history, religion, philosophy, art of
all times and kinds—have been drawn upon, as well as the never-
ending resources of nature and of life. Neither, it may be
confidently affirmed, despite the admissions which have been
required, has this vast variety of subject and of form failed to
meet an at least fairly corresponding diversity of talent and even
of genius in the poets dealing with it.


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CHAPTER VII
THE PROSODY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In the last chapter on this subject? , we confined ourselves
strictly to the prosody and the prosodists of the eighteenth century
proper, postponing not merely the remarkable developments which
took place at the close of that century, but, also, certain phenomena
of actual versification, some of which appeared when the century was
little more than half over. These designed omissions must now be
made good, as necessary preliminaries to the account of the prosody
of the nineteenth-in fact, as practically the first section of the
history of that prosody itself. In many, if not in all, cases, refer-
ence to the notices of the several poets (and, sometimes, the prose-
writers) referred to will enlarge and comment what is here given;
the present summary is strictly confined to its own title.
The important occupants of that vestibule or antechamber of
the subject above referred to are Ossian, Percy's Reliques and
the poems of Chatterton and Blake. From them, we must proceed
to the various signs of prosodic upheaval shown, at the extreme
end of the century, in the ballad verse of Southey and Coleridge,
with the tendency to rimelessness, and to the imitation of classical
metres, of which the same poets are the chief, but not the only, or
the first, exponents. It will, next, be necessary to survey the chief
prosodic developments of nineteenth century poetry itself in its
two great divisions, and to follow up in each of those divisions the
account of treatises on the subject. The matter to be dealt with
is extremely voluminous, and the account of it cannot, it is feared,
be very short.
The four books or 'works' mentioned above as holding the
first place are not merely of importance, individually and as a
group,
for intrinsic character and as influences on others; they are,
also, curiously combined and cross-connected in themselves. For,
1 Ante, vol. xi, chap. XI.
E. L, XIII.
CH. VII.
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226 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [cHCH
.
6
verse.
Ossian undoubtedly influenced Blake's 'prophetic' writing: and
Percy, as undoubtedly, influenced both Chatterton's and Blake's
As a whole, they may be taken, from our point of view, not
merely as influences, but even more remarkably as symptoms of
the growing discontent with the limited practice, and almost more
limited theory, of prosody in the century wherein they appeared.
But the several constituents of the group illustrate this discontent
in curiously different ways. Ossian and Blake's Prophetic Books,
the latter deliberately and explicitly, revolt against the ‘fetters,' the
‘mechanism,' of poetry, which was, certainly, never more fettered or
more mechanical than in their time. They carry this revolt to the
point of intentionally discarding the uniformity of metre altogether,
and of preferring the variety of prose-rhythm, subject to divisions
less rhythmically continuous, but somewhat more parallel to each
other than those of prose proper. They do not, however (and
Macpherson fails here specially), succeed in doing this without
including large proportions of imbedded metre, which constantly
produce regular lines, often regular couplets and not seldom actual
stanzas-occasionally, even, suggestive of something like rime.
Blake's greater power in actual poetry commonly saves him from
this; but, on the other hand, it tempts him to make his rhythmical
staves more like loosened and enlarged variations on certain kinds
of verse-especially the 'fourteener. '
The lesson of Reliques, felt strongly in spirit, and partly in
form, by almost all later poets of the century, was not, in its
most important prosodic point—the licence of substitution in
ballad-metre-perceived or, at least, boldly adopted by anyone
(except Chatterton and Blake again) till quite the close of the
period. Even then, a lover of English verse like Southey's friend
Wynn protested against that poet's innovations, in this respect, as
faulty; and such pusillanimity accounts for the painful sing-song of
most ballad imitation from Percy himself, through even Goldsmith,
to Mickle-a sing-song which gave its main point to Johnson's
disrespectful parodying of the ballad. But Chatterton saw the
truth and followed it; Blake saw it and followed it still further
and more boldly; while Burns's practice-inherited, not, indeed,
from Percy but from Scots originals came to reinforce the
movement.
It would appear difficult for some people, even yet, to perceive
either the importance or the novelty of these examples of substi-
tution (or admission of trisyllabic feet) in English poetry. The
great prevalence, during the last hundred years, of a purely


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Vii]
The New Practices
227
6
accentual system of prosody disguises the importance—for it
suggests that, supposing you get your requisite number of accented
syllables in a line, the rest may, as it has been put, be ‘left to take
care of themselves. The absence of attention to historic facts
disguises the novelty. But it is difficult to think that anyone with
a delicate ear can, when his attention is called to it, fail to perceive
that the difference between ‘Like a rogue for forgery' and 'Like
rogues for forgery' is much greater than that between singular
and plural only; or to see how much rhythmical gain there is in
The wild winds weep
And the night is a-cold,
compared with
The wild winds weep
And night is cold,
though in each case the number of accents is exactly the same.
And it is almost as difficult to conceive how anybody with a
logical mind can fail to see the force of Shenstone's almost timid
championship of what he calls the dactyl’in the first half of the
century, or of Wynn's distinct protest against it some sixty years
later, taken with its actual absence between these dates in the verse
of almost every poet except those named.
The revived fancy for rimelessness and for classical metres
which the extreme end of the century saw runs in a curricle
rather with the Ossianic hybrid verse-prose than with the new
use of substitution; but it is quite as much a sign of discontent
with the favourite metres and metrification of the century as
either. It also, of course, had precedents—though, perhaps, not
very happy ones—to plead in English, though the immediate
stimulus was, possibly, German. Frank Sayers? was able to muster
(and might, even, have further strengthened) a tolerable bod
of such precedents for his rimeless stanzas; and English hexa-
meters, sapphics and the like could bring forward undoubted,
though rather dangerous, ancestry. But it is nearly certain
that disgust with the tyranny of the stopped rimed couplet, and
craving for a change—the most decided change possible-was the
chief agent in the matter. The rimeless Pindarics were to produce
two remarkable poems of some length and of no small merit in
Southey's Thalaba and Shelley's Queen Mab; little good came, as
little good has ever come, of English classical forms. But, as
direct or indirect protests, both have a value which is not to be
neglected.
When the actual turn of the tide took place, in the very closing
1 See, ante, vol. XI, pp. 179, 180.
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228 The Prosody of the Nineteenth Century [CH.
years of the century, it was impossible that some attention should
not be paid to the theoretical as well as to the practical aspect of
the turning.