No More Learning

If there had been any
man of absolutely firstrate genius among them, this state of things
might not merely have provoked revolt—which it did—but have
brought about the complete victories afterwards achieved by their
own juniors. But they all belonged to the new crusade, and, if


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v]
107
Hartley Coleridge
none of them quite reached Jerusalem, they did notable things
somewhere about Antioch.
We may list them alphabetically as follows: Beddoes, Hartley
Coleridge, Darley, Hood, Richard Henry (fantastically Hengist)
Horne, Praed, Sir Henry Taylor, Thomas Wade, C. J. Wells and
Charles Whitehead. Their births date from that of Darley, in the
same year with that of Keats, to Wade's, ten years later, and group
themselves symmetrically in a single decade, on either side of the
parting of the centuries. They have all felt strongly the literary
influences which helped to determine the work of the greater
group before them the recovery of older (especially Elizabethan)
English literature; the discovery of foreign; the subtle revival of
imagination that is not confined to “ideas furnished by the senses’;
the extension of interest in natural objects and the like. If
whatever influence may be assigned to the French revolution and
the great war is less immediate with them, it has, in their case,
the strength of retrospect and the fresh impetus of the unsettled
state of politics, society and thought, which the revolution and the
war left behind them. But there is still about them a great deal
a
that is undigested and incomplete; and no one of them has a genius,
or even a temperament, strong enough to wrest and wrench him
out of the transition stage.
Nearly the eldest, the most famous by birth and promise, but,
in a way, the most unfortunate, was Hartley Coleridge? There is
neither space nor necessity here to tell over again the pitiful story
of the promise of his youth, recorded not merely by his father but
by men so little given to mere sentimentalism as Southey and
Wordsworth, and of the lamentable failure of his manhood. It is
permissible to think that he was harshly and rather irrationally
treated at Oriel. If a probationer fellow disqualifies himself by
drunkenness, he does not deserve a solatium of £300, and, if he
deserves a solatium of £300, his fault can scarcely have been one
of a hopelessly disqualifying nature. But, however great may
have been the shock of disappointment at this disgrace, and at the
loss of the life of studious ease for which alone he was fitted, it
cannot have caused, though it may have determined and rendered
incurable, that fatal paralysis of will which he inherited from his
1 Anyone who wishes to appreciate Hartley should look at the generally neglected
fragment of his Prometheus, which, it is important to remember, preceded Shelley's
masterpiece. 8. T. C. 's adverse criticism (he was rather a Roman father in that
respect, if not in others) and, perhaps, the Oriel calamity arrested the composition.
It must have been, no doubt, in any case, & much lesser thing than Shelley's; but it
would have been not damagingly different, and it might have been good.
a


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108
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
father in an aggravated form. This not merely hampered him in
schoolmastering—that is not surprising—but stunted and made
abortive the poetical and critical genius which he certainly pos-
sessed. He did attain, by good luck, by kindness of friends and by
his own indifference to elaborate comfort, a life, if not of studious
ease, at least of almost entire, or very slightly taxed, leisure, with
considerable facility for poetic and other composition. On the
margins of books and even newspapers, as well as in a few finished
and published papers, he showed that he possessed a critical faculty
not much short, on individual points, of his father's or of Hazlitt's;
and he also wrote verse. But a fanciful eugenist might have
argued that Hartley only inherited that portion of poetical spirit
which his father had shown before the child's own birth. The
greater part of Hartley's poems certainly makes one think rather
of the Coleridge before 1797 than of the poet of The Ancient
Mariner and Kubla Khan and Christabel. He knew his limits
('I am one of the small poets '), though the beautiful and touching
piece Poietes Apoietes-
No hope have I to live a deathless name-
half contradicts its own assertion: and to it may be added the fine
sonnet to Shakespeare (which, with Matthew Arnold's companion
poem in verse and Dryden's short description in prose, may be
ranked for combined adequacy and brevity, on a thousand times'
attempted subject), the striking pair on Youth, A Medley, the
most Shakespearean of Shakespearean imitations,
When I review the course that I have run;
the Homer, almost as good as the Shakespeare, the sonnet on the
extraordinarily difficult subject Prayer and one or two others.
The 'sonnet's narrow ground' just suited Hartley; for, though the
far-brought fancies of his youth did not wholly desert his age, they
found no power in him to carry them further still, or shape them
into abiding and substantial form. Nor is it too charitable, too
fanciful, or too obvious, to assign part, at least, of his failure to his
time-a time with the old assisting convictions or conventions
broken down and the new not firmly set.
Thomas Hood and Winthrop Mackworth Praed, though moving
in very different spheres and, so far as one knows, strangers to
one another in life, are indissolubly associated in literature, owing
to the singular 'double arrangement of their combination of
serious and comic work, and of the character of at least the


## p. 109 (#133) ############################################

v]
Hood
109
comic work of both. This latter, in its more special aspect, may
be postponed for a little, so that we may group it further in a way
not unimportant or uninteresting to the historical student of
literature. It is sufficient here to dismiss as unprofitable and
unnecessary the question whether, in any case, serious or comic,
there was a debt owing on either side to the other. Mere partisans
have sometimes excited themselves over this question, but it is of
no real importance. Although they pair off in so remarkable a
manner, each, to eyes of any critical discernment, has a perfectly
sufficient idiosyncrasy. It was long the case, and it may be doubted
whether it has entirely ceased to be so, that the fame of Hood's
serious work was largely, if not completely, obscured by that of
his comic, with the exception of the two great popular-sentimental
favourites The Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs. It is
well known that Thackeray, in one of those impulsive outbursts
which have been often misinterpreted, expressed himself as rather
indignant at Hood's comic avocation from his real business. No
man's memory and reputation have been more cruelly overloaded
and overwhelmed by the publication of heaps of what is only not
sheer rubbish because it served once to win bread for a true poet
and an admirable man of letters, and because there is nothing in
it in the least disgraceful. But, apart even from the very best of
the comic work, which is to be noticed later, apart from the
'sensational pieces' The Song and The Bridge, which make their
appeal at once to all those who are likely to appreciate them,
Hood has to his credit a body of purely serious poetical work
neither aiming at mere popularity, nor deliberately eschewing it,
work to be taken at a purely poetic valuation and judged on
that, which (even though fifteen editions of it sold in as many
years after his death) is still far too often neglected, and, even
when not quite neglected, is far too seldom accorded its proper rank.
It was, perhaps, in the circumstances, a minor misfortune-
similar to the major one of the huge unsifted dust-heap of the
Works—that there were included in the collection of his Serious
Poems, made just after his death, even such in themselves excellent
things as Miss Kilmansegg and the Clapham Academy ode. For
public taste was, is and probably always will be, not merely a 'great-
sized monster of ingratitudes' but one of haste, indiscrimination
1 It turns very mainly on the other question of priority in the use of what has been
called 'antithetical punning. ' This, even as regards the bare chronology of the writings
of the two, is doubtful; and every one ought to know that there are much older examples,
which each might have taken as pattern, independently, if either wanted any pattern
at all.
6


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IIO
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
and other bad things. It had been accustomed to consider Hood
a mere joke-smith; and it was sure to fix on these and one or two
others as instances of his real vocation. All this serio-comic or
tragi-comic stuff were much better segregated, and the removal
would leave nearly three quarters of a volume of some four
hundred pages full of poetry pure and simple. Nothing in this is
rubbish; some of it is extraordinarily good. The Haunted House
is one of the minor, and not so very minor, marvels of English
poetry. The only objection that one can imagine as being brought
against it, by anyone who can appreciate it at all, is that the
craftsmanship is almost too unconcealedly and obtrusively perfect?
-the accumulation of the unusual, stately, mournful rhythm of
the stanza; the carefully constructed and diffused detail and the
atmosphere of decay, destruction and dread; the as careful selection
of language tending to the same object but never diverging into
extravagance or the disgusting; above all, the triumphant avoid-
ance of that slip into the ludicrous which these horror-plays
and poems constantly commit. The Elm Tree is nearly as good,
though, perhaps, it might have been shortened. The more popular
Eugene Aram and The Bridge of Sighs itself are not flawless,
but the grimness of the one and the pathos of the other could have
been attained by none save a true poet. The Plea of the Mid-
summer Fairies may be thought to need no praise after Lamb's;
yet, it may not be impertinent, and it is certainly not rash, to
pronounce it, after nearly a hundred years, the most charming poem
of some size and pretension which has missed its due meed of
general appreciation during the interval. It was rather unwise
to try Hero and Leander again; and the anapaestic metre of
Lycus the Centaur was ill chosen—the gallop of the centaur
probably suggested it. Yet, if anyone will read these two
poems patiently he will hardly think otherwise than nobly of
them.
But Hood was by no means only a master of the heavier plectrum.
He could write songs and shorter pieces generally, light, but not in
the least comic, with singular skill. Some of these, no doubt, have
been confounded, with Moore'sand others, under the generalcensure-
tickets tinkling,' 'trivial,'tawdry,' sentimental’ and what not.
Anyone who chooses may, of course, pin one or another, or several,
of these epithets to A Death Bed, and even to the great Farewel,
Life stanzas written on his own death-bed; to the ballad (It was
>
6
1 Wordsworth, it may be remembered, made no very different objection from this
to The Ancient Mariner itself.


## p. 111 (#135) ############################################

v]
III
Praed
not in the Winter) of the time of roses; to Fair Ines and A lake
and a Fairy boat and the bitter-sweet irony of Spring it is cheery
and the stateliness and fervour of Giver of glowing light and The
stars are with the Voyager. But a more catholic criticism will
simply disregard tickets or, perhaps, detach them and throw them
on the rubbish heap, their appointed place, saying, 'These things
are poetry: and this was a poet. '
Merely as a serious poet, Praed holds a far lower place than
Hood; in fact, with one doubtful exception, to be noticed
presently, he has nothing at all to compare with The Haunted
House or The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, and not much to
show with the shorter poems. Arminius escapes the bad side of
mediocrity in one way and Josephine in another ; but the best
and, perhaps, the only distinguished thing Praed has done in this
kind is the strange and beautiful Time's Song,
O’er the level plains, where mountains meet me as I go,
unusual and effective alike in rhythm, in the phrase adroitly broken
to suit the rhythmical movement, and in the economy of con-
struction, detail and explanation, leading up to a kind of the rest
is silence. ' But he never repeated this in a short poem, or
expanded the method in a longer. The fact is that the ironic
.
and humourous impulse, partly, no doubt, determined by Byronic
influence at first, but diverging into ways not in the least like
Byron's, was generally omnipresent and omnipotent with him,
and almost invariably deflected his treatment into the sort of
mixed mode which Southey had started in things like The Old
Woman of Berkeley, and which Barham, a much older man than
Praed, was to practise with signal success a little later. Not
a few both of the Tales and of other pieces, from the schoolboy
Gog onwards, have this hybrid character. But it produced at least
one thing which is a masterpiece of its kind and which contrasts
again most curiously with Hood's tragi-comedy. In this latter,
The Desert Born, Miss Kilmansegg herself and the rest, the
comic (even where there is positively tragic matter) always has
the upper hand and, sometimes, burlesques the tragic itself. The
Red Fisherman bas, of course, a comic side or, rather, one may
say, a comic outside or jacket to it; and it is full of excursions in
themselves comical. But these are used almost in the manner in
which Shakespeare uses similar devices, sometimes to set off that
seriousness which, no doubt, is greater in him than in Praed.
With Hood, the “finish,' as wine-tasters say, the flavour that is


## p. 112 (#136) ############################################

II2
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790–1837
as he
left in the mouth, is always comic unless he is wholly serious.
The reader of The Red Fisherman, if he be a fit reader, laughs
passes at
The water was as dark and rank
As ever a Company pumped,
and at the corporation banquet and the political jibes. But what
he carries away with him, like the fisherman's hook in the actual
case, is the description of the pool, and the terrible angler, and
the death-gasps of the knight and the eyes of Mistress Shore. '
Even the battle of hook and crook which just saves the abbot,
though it is humorous, is not ludicrous; and these passionate
touches, with the whole effect they produce, taken with Time's
Song, help the more purely comic verse, which we shall notice
later, to show what a poet of the higher kind Praed might have
been in addition to the lighter and gayer singer that he was.
Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Taylor offers one of the in-
teresting poetic idiosyncrasies which are pretty strongly marked
off from others, but which, somehow, fail to mark for themselves,
and in the circle of their own performances, a definite and en-
during achievement. That his main work was dramatic may partly,
but will not wholly, account for this. That the enormous influence
of the Elizabethan drama on the romantic revival should provoke
direct imitation of itself was almost a matter of course; and it
belongs to other divisions of this work to tell how all the poets-
from Wordsworth, the most undramatic of all great writers, to
Scott, the most dramatic of all men who have written bad dramas-
tried it and how almost all, except Shelley, who might have been
thought least likely to succeed, failed. But, with all of them,
drama, fortunately, was a bywork. With Taylor (for even his
remarkable lyrical faculty was essentially germane to the Eliza-
bethan school of drama), the dramatic form was all-per-
vading and all-powerful. People have forgotten most things of
his save Philip van Artevelde, which, to most, is now itself not
much more than a name; but Edwin the Fair and St Clements
Eve (if not, also, Isaac Comnenus) ought to be read, and will
hardly be read once only by those who can taste them at all.
Still, Philip van Artevelde, no doubt, is his diploma-piece and not
merely that. It failed on the stage; though, if the apparently
growing taste for psychological plays were some day to unite
itself with a taste for literature, the case might be altered. But,
for a time, it had great vogue with readers of worth ; and Taylor,
perhaps, may be thought to have been the most unfortunate of


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v]
113
Sir Henry Taylor
all these 'intermediates' in being pushed from his stool, almost
before he was fairly settled on it, by Tennyson, who used quite
different forms and methods, and by Browning, who partly used
the same, but added many others and wielded them with much
greater power. As a dramatic poem, Philip van Artevelde stands
very high. It is entirely free from the iciness which, being mis-
taken for something Greek (Greek tragedy cold! ), at first attracted
people in the almost exactly (though much more shortlived) con-
temporary Ion of Thomas, afterwards Sir Thomas, Noon Talfourd.
The part of Elena is, perhaps, nearer than that of any heroine
in any modern English play (putting Shelley's Beatrice aside) to
something great; and there are in it, as also in the other plays,
almost innumerable passages of real poetic thought expressed in
really poetic words. But Taylor had the fault-common to both
Wordsworth and Southey, of whom he was a kind of disciple-of
want of concentration in writing; he lacked action and narrative
power; and it was seldom that he either would or could give vent
to his lyric gift. The present writer has never seen an adequate
selection from Taylor, though one may exist. It would be as scrappy
as England's Parnassus itself; but it would certainly show the
author's right to a place on the sacred hill.
Some of Taylor's few but remarkable lyrics give evidence of a
sort of underground vein which was rarely tapped (and which
may be sought in vain in Talfourd). Such are the famous, or
should-be famous, 'Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife,' in
Philip van Artevelde and the song of Thorbiorga in Edwin
the Fair and divers passages in the scanty, and now, perhaps,
rarely read, Minor Poems. They connect him with the rest of the
group mentioned above, and with one or two others who are all,
or almost all, more definitely lyrical in main substance, and who
strangely anticipate not merely Tennyson and Browning, but, even
still more, the spasmodics, the pre-Rapbaelites and other poets
such as the late John Davidson, who have touched the present day.
These are the men who, while feeling strongly the 'antecedent'
influences, as they may be termed—Elizabethan, German and
miscellaneous——though not, as yet, much touched by the purely
medieval, derive more directly from Coleridge, Shelley and Keats,
especially from the first two; men who showed already, though in a
crude and half embryonic form, the strong tendency of the nine-
teenth century towards occasional and, therefore, lyrical verse;
and who, while underlying all the objections (quantum valeant) of
Wordsworth to The Ancient Mariner, possess something of the
6
E. L. XII.
CH. v.
8


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I14
[CH.
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837
>
6
merits which even Wordsworth allowed to that exceptionable work
of his yokefellow.
Of these, the eldest was George Darley, who, as mentioned
above, anticipated the others by nearly a decade. Darley is a
poet ill to recommend to any but those who, either by nature or
by study or by both, are initiate in at least the outer mysteries
of poetry; and even some adepts cannot stomach his most
ambitious work, the plays Becket and Ethelstan. Some physical
and some mental disabilities seem to have combined to alloy and
hamper bis idiosyncrasy. He was an incurable stammerer, and
could not, like Lamb, turn this blemish to his own or other
people's favour. He was “a great arithmetician' and, though the
one kind of 'numbers' certainly does not interfere with the
enjoyment of the other, Mathesis, except under the mantle of
Urania, has not fostered many poets. Lastly, he was a consider-
able, and a rather harsh, critic after the ugly “strip-and-whip’
fashion of his time; and, though some may say that it would have
been better if he had criticised his own work more, there seems
to have been a conflict in him of the poetical and critical
natures. Even his lyrical gift, acknowledged by the best judges
among his contemporaries and successors to be extraordinary and
constantly shown in The Errors of Ecstacie, in the verse
scattered about the prose Labours of Idleness and elsewhere,
in the pastoral drama Sylvia and in the wonderful outburst
of his masterpiece Nepenthe, too seldom takes the clear, pure,
finished form which, sooner or later, assures a permanent place.
It is often, and in Nepenthe most of all, unintelligible to those
who demand a definite and fairly obvious meaning translatably
expressed; it sometimes (the crowning instance is the loathsome
rubbish, for one fears no softer phrase will do, of the Dwerga part in
Becket, on which the author obstinately prided himself) shows
gross lapses of taste; it has, more frequently still, ill-blended
sentiment and grotesque; and, sometimes, it suffers from that
rather fatal fluency which seems especially to beset Irish poets.
But, ever and anon, come splendid bursts. Those who can dive
in poetic whirlpools will find the gold cups oftenest in Nepenthe
itself and, sometimes, in The Errors of Ecstacie, which, while it
came long before Bailey's Festus and longer before Dobell's Balder
and Alexander Smith's Life Drama, contains something of the
essence of all three in five and thirty merciful pages. Those, on the
other hand, who want poetic sweetmeats all ready for consump-
tion in a separate and at once accessible form, have only to turn the


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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132
Lesser Poets, 1790—1837 [CH.
a more natural vocabulary, and a general attempt at lyrical
quality. The sense of the country may not be more genuine in
Clare than in his elder, but it is more genuinely expressed; still,
there is constant imitation, not merely of Goldsmith and Thomson,
Beattie and Shenstone, but of Cowper and Burns, and, save now
and then (The Last of March is a favourable instance), nature
is not very freshly seen?
Yet, even in these early poems, the sonnets, with that strange
magic of the form which has often brought out of poets the
best that was in them, contain poetic signs which are nowhere
to be found in Bloomfield, and the poems written during the
miserable later years—for Clare, unlike many luckier lunatics,
was not only mad but miserable in his madness-confirm these
signs almost as well as could be expected. The wonderful late
lines
I am-yet what I am, who cares or knows ? —
one of the greatest justifications of Waller's master stroke
as to
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed-
are, indeed, far above anything else that Clare ever wrote, but
they show what he might have written.