No More Learning

This combination of long disuse of appetite with an almost
entire want of guidance in taste goes far to explain, though, except
in Macaulay's case, it is required to excuse, in very different degrees,
the immense, and by no means ephemeral, popularity of The Lays
of Ancient Rome, Festus and Proverbial Philosophy, far asunder as
are the positive poetic merits of these books. In the case of The
Lays, the public was fortunate in what it received and, whatever
may have been said by later criticism, was justified in its reception
thereof. That, in his singularly constituted, and, perhaps, never
yet quite adequately mapped-out, mind, Macaulay had secret places,
where lay concealed springs of poetry of purer kinds than that
which he allowed to flow freely in The Lays, is proven, as finally as
fortunately, by the exquisite classicism of Epitaph on a Jacobite,
which Landor could not have bettered, and the romantic strangeness
of The Last Buccaneer, which suggests an uncanny collaboration
1 See ante.
· The strictly prosodic aspects of the more important of these will be found in
some cases dealt with in the next chapter; but it may be difficult entirely to exclude
glances at them here, where, indeed, place has been expressly reserved for them.


## p. 149 (#165) ############################################

VI]
Macaulay's Lays
149
of Macaulay's two contemporaries Praed and Beddoes. But his
Lays themselves are far finer poetry than Matthew Arnold and some
other critics have been willing to allow. They belong, indeed, to a
wide-ranging class of verse which includes masterpieces like Gray's
Elegy and things certainly not masterpieces like The Minstrel
and the poems of Mrs Hemans, not to mention, for the present,
more modern examples—a class which seems deliberately to set
itself to give the public just the sort of poetry which it can well
understand and nothing more. In the better examples of this
poetry-to which The Lays, though they may not attain to the
height of Gray, most certainly belong—there is no sacrifice of
poetry itself. Anybody who denies that name to the larger part
of The Battle of the Lake Regillus and the best part of The
Prophecy of Capys, with not a little elsewhere, had best be met
by the silence, the smile and the not too obvious shrug, which
are suitable to Ephraim when he has irrevocably announced his
junction with idols. And they have the special merit (belonging
to the best of their class) that liking for them, acquired, as it is
probably most often acquired, early, will mature into liking for
greater poetry still. The Lays, in a certain, and only a certain,
sense, may be milk for babes; but good milk is a great deal
better than tainted meat and unsound wine. The babes can go on
to relish such meat and wine as the author also showed that he
knew how to produce when he wrote how the broken heart by
the Arno thought of the lovelier Tees' and how
the crew with eyes of flame, brought the ship without a name
Alongside the last Buccaneer.
Therefore, in this case, the unshepherded, and for long almost
ungrassed, public went not wrong ; but it is impossible to say the
same of its somewhat earlier divagation in favour of Martin
Farquhar Tupper. Proverbial Philosophy, to this day, is and will
probably always remain, one of the chief curiosities of literature,
perhaps the supremest of all such things in its own special class.
The author, from the combined and direct testimony of persons
who knew him at different times of his life, was by no means
a fool, when he had not a pen in his hand. In his other books of
verse, which are numerous, it is possible, as, for instance, in The
Crock of Gold, to discover passages, or even poems, of passable or
possible poetry of a not very high kind. These volumes were not
much bought; and, no doubt, were, as wholes, not very much worth
buying. But Proverbial Philosophy, which made his reputation,
which sold in unbelievable numbers and which has sometimes earned


## p. 150 (#166) ############################################

150
[CH.
Lesser Poets
for him the title ‘The People's Poet Laureate,' is such incredible
rubbish that it would almost justify the obloquy which has come
upon ‘early Victorian' taste if it were not that even the loose and
unregimented criticism of that period itself would have none of it.
It furnished the subject of one of the most brilliant of the Bon
Gaultier parodies and skits (see post) a few years after its appear-
ançe; the very schoolboys (not to mention the undergraduates)
of its date seem, from not untrustworthy testimony, to have
been taught by their still uncorrupted classical education to revolt
against it; and the present writer can give personal evidence that,
by the middle of the fifties or thereabouts, it was a hissing and
a scorn to all who had any sense of literature, or were ever going
to have it. But the great middle, or lower middle, class here, and,
still more, in America, steadily bought it till much later; and
nobody can refuse it rank as a 'document' of what myriads of
people thought might be poetry in the beginning of the second
third of the nineteenth century.
As such, it can never wholly lose its position; and it would be
rash (considering the extraordinary changes of superficial and
ephemeral taste which are familiar to the historical student) to
say that it can never recover something, at least, of what it has
lost. But it would certainly be surprising if it did, especially as,
since its time, other examples of popular rubbish have secured,
and yet others are, at intervals, likely to secure, equal vogue with
the same class of readers. In it 'there be truths,' unfortunately
always presented as truisms. There is—if not, as lord Foppington
sarcastically observed of his lost bride and actual sister-in-law,
‘a nice marality'--a sound one enough. There is an unflinching
adoption of the proverbial form with its strange popular effect.
But, over the whole, platitude broods with wings that drop the
deadliest tedium: one waits in vain for any phrase that shall give
light to the gloom or life to the stagnation; at times, the dullness
ferments itself into sheer silliness after a fashion which exasperates
instead of relieving. A faint amusement at such an impossible
thing ever having been thought possible may support the reader
for awhile; but sleep or the relinquishment of his task can be the
only ‘happy ending' of such an adventure.
But, even thus, not quite enough has been said for present
purposes about Proverbial Philosophy. An ‘interlunar cave' of
poetical matter for people to fix their eyes on will do much ; and
an almost entire want of authority in criticism (though, as has been
said, even the usually feeble critics of the day would not stand this),
a
9


## p. 151 (#167) ############################################

VI] Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy 151
will, perhaps, do more. But the inexorable ‘historic estimate' has
something to add. Tupper (no doubt in the most unconscious way
in the world) had hit on the fact, corroborated by that poetical
history of which he had probably not much notion (his attempts at
transversing Old English poetry prove it), that, in poetic interlunia,
irregular rhythms acquire a certain phosphoric light. Proverbial
Philosophy is written in a sort of doggerel which, sometimes coming
very close to what some call the 'accentual' English hexameter,
more often strays into a vaguely rhythmical, but quite unmetrical,
stave reminiscent of Ossian and Blake, perhaps, and pretty certainly
not without influence on Whitman. The intolerable imbecility of
the statement of the matter,
pay quickly that thou owest;
The needy tradesman is made glad by such considerate haste;
the infantine egotism of such things as this,
I never forced Minerva's will, nor stole my thoughts from others,
(where one feels instinctively that Tupper never came within
finger-tip reach of Pallas, and that, if he never stole his thoughts
from others, it was, at least, partly because he never knew what
was worth stealing)—these things are, or ought to be, balanced, if
not compensated, by the reflection that the form, chiefly through
Whitman's transformation, has been largely used since; that the
principle of it—the revolt of rhythm against metre—is very much
alive at the present day; and that Martin Farquhar Tupper-
impossible as he is to read, except as a sandwich of somnolence
and laughter; probable as it is that the reading may be inter-
rupted for ever by a paroxysm of utter repudiation of the book to
the second-hand stall or the dustbin-is, in literary history, not
a mere cypher. He teaches lessons amazingly different from those
which he thought he was teaching; and he utters warnings which
never, in the slightest degree, entered his own head. These lessons
and warnings have been partially disclosed in the remarks just
made; there is no room for more of them. Let it only be added that,
if an adventure of the kind of this History be again undertaken
'a hundred years hence,' though it is possible that Tupper may
be omitted or merely glanced at, the popularity of certain verse-
writers of present or recent days will probably form the subject
1 In the very first paragraph there are two examples—one of the spondaic, one of
the regular dactylic, form of this :
Corn from the / sheaves of science with | stubble from | mine own | garner,
These I commend to I thee, o docile | scholar of Wisdom.
The Alexandrine and the fourteener occur, also, and practically the whole wanders round
these centres.


## p. 152 (#168) ############################################

152
Lesser Poets
[CH.
a
6
of remarks not very different from those which have appeared here.
And it is not quite so probable that, in these new essays of dullness,
there will be found any formal originality or impulse from the
historical point of view to supply such a solace or set-off as has been
pleaded here for the heavy and silly sin of Proverbial Philosophy.
The third member of this trio, though somewhat closer, in some
ways, to Tupper than either he or Tupper is to Macaulay, and
almost, though not quite, sharing the oblivion which has engulfed
Proverbial Philosophy and has not engulfed The Lays of Ancient
Rome, is, perhaps, the most difficult of the three to estimate aright.
Philip James Bailey, when, at the age of twenty-three, he wrote
Festus, in its original form, had the full benefit of that com-
paratively dead season, in poetry and criticism, which has been
spoken of above. Editions by the dozen in England and by
the score in America (where men, at that time, were desperately
busy 'getting culture') came at his call as they came at Tupper's;
but the nature of the call was itself essentially different, and (as it
is almost safe to say never happened in the case of Proverbial
Philosophy) contemporaries of undoubted poetical competence,
from Tennyson himself to Westland Marston, were ready to
welcome Bailey as a brother. He had, in fact, as Macaulay had
not attempted to do in his principal work, and as Tupper, if he
had ever attempted to do it, had obviously and ludicrously failed
to do, in an old-new way-effective if not perfect-struck that
vein of 'strangeness' which, from Aristotle downwards, all the
greatest writers have recognised as more or less necessary to
poetry. As being so, it had been a main source of the earlier
romantic triumphs; but the great poets of that time had not
found it necessary to labour this vein extravagantly or exclusively,
though some signs of doing this were obvious in the group who, in
a former chapter", have been called the intermediates. ' Bailey
drove what pickaxe he had straight at this vein and never thought
of limiting his extraction from it. He was almost immediately
followed by some notable persons who will be dealt with next
under their nickname 'spasmodics '—and it is by no means un-
arguable that both Tennyson and Browning showed signs of slight
infection—while the creed of 'strangeness for strangeness' sake'
has never wanted adherents up to the present day, and it now has
quite a company of them. Every now and then some generous
member of this community makes a plea—with due stridency and
gesticulation--for Festus: and it is doubtful whether any critic
i See vol. xii, chap. V.
.
6
>


## p. 153 (#169) ############################################

vi]
Bailey's Festus
153
endowed by nature with some catholicity of judgment has read
the poem without seeing its merits, especially in its original form.
But the defects even of that form, and, still more, of the later trans-
formation, can, at the same time, escape no such critic.
To give any account of The Lays of Ancient Rome in detail
would be absurd, for everybody knows them; to give any account
of Proverbial Philosophy in detail would be as impossible as to
do the same to a bale of cotton wool; but something of the kind is
necessary-and, in fact, from what has been said, must be seen to
be at least very desirable—in the case of Festus. As originally
planned, and as its name indicates pretty clearly, it is a variant
on the Faust story. The hero neither succumbs wholly to diabolic
temptation, as in the Marlowe version, nor is saved by the Ewig-
weibliche, as in Goethe; but he has an accompanying tempter in
Lucifer himself, and he has a whole harem of Gretchens, none of
whom he exactly betrays, and one of whom, Clara, he eventually
marries, though a sort of battle of Armageddon, followed by the
consummation of all things, interrupts the honeymoon. In the
enormous interim, Lucifer, for purposes not always obvious, per-
sonally conducts Festus about the universe—and all the universes ;
foregathers with him in merely mundane societies both of a mixed
ordinary kind and also of political-theosophical studentry, and
once creates a really poetical situation (which the author, unable
to deal with it even at first, spoilt further in the incredible
processes to be described immediately) by himself falling in love
with a girl whom he has thought to use for ensnaring Festus.
Usually, the tempter indulges in speeches of great length, replied
to with tenfold volubility by Festus, who might have claimed (as
Joanna Southcott is said actually to have done) to have ‘talked
the devil dead,' inasmuch as Lucifer himself at least once cries for
mercy. The whole concludes with the complete defeat of the
spirit unfortunate; but with more than a hint of an apocatastasis
-of an assize in which he will share.
It is quite possible that this argument, so far as the strict
Festus of 1839 is concerned, may be slightly contaminated by
later insertions, for the writer has read the poem in more versions
than one, as, indeed, is necessary, owing to the unparalleled pro-
cesses (above alluded to) which Bailey adopted towards it.
Between 1839 and 1850, Festus had a comparatively fair field
opened to it; but, by the latter year, Tennyson had thoroughly
established himself, Browning was there for those who could like
him and others had come or were coming. The Angel World, a sort
6
a


## p. 154 (#170) ############################################

154
[ch.
Lesser Poets
of satellite of Festus, was not received cordially ; The Mystic and
The Spiritual Legend (1855) still less so; and, when an entirely
new poetical period had thoroughly set in, the Universal Hymn
in 1868 least of all. No one but a very curmudgeonly person
quarrels with a parent, poetical or other, for standing by his
unpopular children. But the way in which Bailey acted towards
his was without precedent, and, one may hope, will never be
imitated. He stuffed large portions of the unsuccessful books into
what was becoming the not very popular body of Festus itself, which,
thereby, from a tolerably exacting individuality of 20,000 lines or
thereabout, became an impossible sausage of double the number.
The earlier eulogists of Festus dwelt almost wholly, and their
more recent successors, after a very long gap, have dwelt partly,
on a supposed magnificence of subject--the ways of God being
justified to man on the basis of what is called universalism.
This, it would be quite out of place here to discuss, though,
perhaps, one may, without too much petulance, repeat that peram-
bulation of the universe or universes in blank verse shares the
drawback of that medium, as immortally urged by Thackeray,
that it is 'not argument. ' The person who succeeds in reading
Festus, even in the original, much more in the later, form, 'for the
story,' 'for the argument,' or for anything else of the kind, must
be possessed of a singular prowess or of a still more singular
indifference and insensibility.
The form requires some notice. It is, perhaps, more eccen-
trically blended, and the elements of the blend are more strangely
selected and associated, than is the case with any other long
poem which has ever attained, as Festus has done, both popu-
larity and critical acceptance of a kind. The greater part
of it, as indicated above, is couched in a curious loose blank
verse, neither definitely individual nor clearly imitated from
anybody else; but marking a further stage of the pseudo-
dramatic 'blanks' of the intermediates. ' It drops, occasion-
ally, into couplet or into semi-doggerel anapaestics-generally
bad-while it is, in one part frequently, in others sometimes,
interspersed with lyrics of extraordinary weakness. Bailey's
‘spasmodic' pupils (see below) were to redeem their faults and
frailties by occasional bursts of genuine lyric of high and (as
lyrics go) new quality. But his near namesake Haynes Bayly
himself could give the author of Festus points and beat him in
a pseudo-Mooreish, twaddling-tinkling kind of melody, which never
(so far as it is safe to use that word in connection with an author


## p. 155 (#171) ############################################

vi]
Bailey
155
6
so voluminous and so difficult to pin down in printed form as
Bailey) attains any clear lyrical colour, passion or cry. On the
other hand, in the blank verse itself there are occasionally to be
found—and this was probably the cause of the original recognition
by brother poets and has always been the handle seized by later
eulogists of ability-passages of extraordinary brilliancy, in
diction, versification and (with a slightly rhetorical limitation)
general literary appeal. Sometimes, these are merely lines or short
fragments ; sometimes, more sustained and substantive pieces of
accomplishment. They rarely have, as the common phrase goes,
'much to do with anything' and are usually 'purple patches' in
the strictest sense-purple enough, but, also, patchy enough. They
are acceptable for their own beauty and they acquire additional
interest from the point of view of the historian; because, it was
certainly Festus and its imitations which, coming, as they did, just
at the time when a critical instauration' was beginning, set
Matthew Arnold, Bagehot and others against detailed ornament
of treatment not demonstrably connected with the subject. It is
probable that this somewhat barbaric jewellery had not a little
to do with Bailey's popularity and with that which, for a time, at
least, rewarded his followers next to be treated. It will be best
to postpone some general remarks on it till they have been dealt
with, but others may be interposed here.
The central point in Bailey and in these others who, though
they can hardly be called his disciples and form a very loose
'school,' have this centre in common with him, is a kind of
solidifying or, at least, centripetalising of the loose and floating
endeavours towards something new and strange which we found
in the 'intermediates. ' None of these can stand by himself in
individual quality, like Tennyson and Browning ; none of them
can, by an effect of scholarship and poetic determination, reach
the eclectic individuality of Matthew Arnold ; they have not even
virility of genius enough to work in a definite school like the
later pre-Raphaelites. But, by a certain gorgeousness or intricacy
of language, by a scrupulous avoidance of the apparent common-
place in subject; by more or less elaborately hinted or expressed
unorthodoxy in religion or philosophy; and, above all, by a neurotic
sentimentalism which would be passion if it could, and, sometimes,
is not absolutely far from it, though it is in constant danger of
turning to the ridiculous or of tearing its own flimsiness to tatters-
by all these things and others they struggled to avoid the obvious
and achieve poetic strangeness.


## p. 156 (#172) ############################################

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

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

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

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

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

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

6
>
VI] Alexander Smith Sydney Dobell 159
modern poetry. It is evident, likewise, that he had taken pretty
severely the ‘spasmodic' measles—the nineteenth-century joint
revival of fifteenth-century "aureation' and seventeenth century
'metaphysicalism'-with a fresh neurosis of Weltschmerz, and so
forth. But he could write beautiful passages, if not a beautiful
poem, and he had a real lyrical gift. He might sue for citizenship
in poetry on the strength of Barbara alone; and no fairly selected
jury of poets or critics could deny it him. Perhaps he has nothing
else so solidly good; but he has other pieces not far inferior in the
lyric way, and the small blank verse passages, above referred to,
would, if collected, make a notable sheaf. In substance, fable,
matter, as well as in poetic temper, A Life Drama resembles
Festus and Balder ; but it has the advantage of being infinitely
shorter than the former and infinitely less pretentious than either.
And yet there are grounds for holding Sydney Dobell the
greatest poet of the group. He, like some others, has been
more unfortunate in his eulogists than in his detractors, for
to say that Balder 'contains beauties beyond the reach of
any contemporary poet' (the competitors, be it remembered, in-
cluding, to mention nobody else, Tennyson, Browning and Matthew
Arnold) is so monstrous an exaggeration that it may recoil not
more on its author than on its subject. But the critic who
indulged in this aberration of enthusiasm palinodes it in the
same sentence with such terms as 'preposterous' and 'chaotic,
while, in others, we find charges of 'dull verbiage,' 'outrageous
extravagance,' 'mere inanity,' 'obscurity,' 'pretentiousness,' senti-
mental and sonorous claptrap' and the like. The indignité, to
use the old tag once more, is not much more exact than the excès
d'honneur. A purely private education, very bad health and
(though he was a man of business for parts of his life) recluse
habits fostered in Dobell an evidently congenital incapacity for
self- and other criticism. The Roman, his first book, is, admittedly,
a mere rhetorical utterance of the 'Italomania' common at the
time; Balder, with some fine passages, though none of his finest,
has more of the 'burst ginger-beer bottle' quality of the spas-
modics than any other poem by any other author; and England
in Time of War contains a good deal of rubbish, with some things
as different from rubbish as it is possible to conceive. Of Dobell's
two masterpieces, Keith of Ravelston' and Tommy's Dead, as of
a considerable number of passages, if hardly another complete
1 Not so entitled, though generally so called. It is part of another poem A Nuptial
Song.
6
6
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## p. 160 (#176) ############################################

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

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

vi]
Bon Gaultier Ballads
161
an extra dose of melodrama in action, Firmilian not merely
administers the castigation of laughter to these pieces and to
their authors, not merely, in its burlesque of extravagant state-
ment, phrase and conceit, reaches back to Bailey and to the
Byronists, if not even to Byron himself, but positively anticipates
spasmodic productions yet unborn. Even Maud, not to appear
till a year later, is galled in its weaker parts by this audacious
and prophetic satire; so is some then unpublished work of
Mrs Browning. In fact, it would not be very difficult to make
a chain of spasmodic instances up to the present day which cannot
escape the mirror of Aytoun’s parody,
If it be urged that Firmilian requires for its full appreciation
rather more knowledge of past literature than most people can be
expected to possess, that plea cannot avail as regards the famous
and delightful Bon Gaultier Ballads which Aytoun, some years
earlier, wrote with Theodore Martin. Ta Fhairshon and the
parody of Locksley Hall have probably been the most popular
pieces; but it may, perhaps, be questioned whether George of
Gorbals? -_a burlesque both of the metre and the manner of
Mrs Browning—is not the best of all. Aytoun's scholarship, his
mastery of phrase and metre, his sardonic humour and, behind
it, that blend of romance and passion, without which so-called
humorous verse is apt to be merely funny or merely horse-playful,
made it difficult for him to go wrong; while his powers in criticism
and in satiric prose-narrative were hardly less.
The historical influence of two such books as The Ingoldsby
Legends and The Bon Gaultier Ballads, following, as it did, on the
exceptional development of satiric verse of the lighter description
from The Rolliad onwards through Canning and his group to
Moore and others with Hood and Praed following? , is greater
than has always been allowed for. Among the numerous sources
of amusement provided by a certain recent tendency to regard
early and mid-Victorian things as characterised by dull con-
ventionalism alternating with silly sentimentality, there is hardly
i The subject of this, otherwise The Rhyme of Sir Launcelot Bogle, matters
nothing, but it is curiously difficult to trace it to anything actual. Aytoun's partner,
interrogated on the subject late in life, declared that he had forgotten, if, indeed, he
ever knew; and venerable citizens of Glasgow (the scene) have been unable to do
more than assign it to some unchronicled municipal squabble. Not thus unknown
should be the facts that suggested
• Nay! tarry till they come' quoth Neish "unto the rum-
They are working at the mum
And the gin! '
? For these, see, ante, vol. XII, chap. v.
R, L. XIII. CH, VỊ.
11
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162
[ch.
Lesser Poets
any one which is so much of a fons Bandusiae as the memory
of these two books, of Thackeray's light verse and of the
enormous popularity of at least the first two collections. For, at
least, twenty years past there has been no ‘master of the laugh'
who has produced anything approaching them. In fact, there
have been pessimists who have held that, since the departure
of 'C. S. C. ' and 'J. K. S. and the comparative desertion by
W. S. Gilbert of the pure lighter lyric unconnected with the
stage, the gloomy assertion of Théodore de Banville, much earlier
justified in French,
Mais à présent c'est bien fini de rire
has transferred itself to English,
Certainly, however, no such thing was true from 1830 to 1890
or even a little later; and we must briefly survey here the bearers
of that torch of laughter which some very grave and precise
persons have not hesitated to indicate as one of the most
triumphant and idiosyncratic possessions of humanity at large
and of English humanity rather specially.
The first group or sub-group to be noticed should consist of
the earlier mid-century ‘Bohemians,' whom, however, we can
discuss here only in part, Maginn and Father Prout'l being
reserved for other divisions; Thackeray himself rising higher;
and others for other reasons being, also, excluded. Here, however,
may be mentioned Percival Leighề, a great contributor to Punch
in its brilliant second early period; and W. J. Prowse, ‘Nicholas,'
who died young and took little care of the work which his short
life and his weak health enabled him to do, but whose talent
has appealed very strongly to some good judges and can hardly be
denied by any. The City of Prague—which has sometimes been
attributed to others, particularly to James Hannay, but which is
really by Prowse—wants only a very few revising touches to make
it a masterpiece. With one of such touches, so slight that the
reading is a common one in quotation, and can be constructed out
of the printed poem itself, we get the stanza:
1
1
Though the latitude's rather uncertain,
Though the longitude's possibly vague
The people I pity who know not the city-
The beautiful city of Prague
1 See, post, vol. xiv.
2 Not to be confounded with his junior, H. 8. Leigh, who was himself a writer of
some talent in light verse.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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168
Lesser Poets
[CH.
closed and that, however earnestly critics may inculcate the
principle of not judging by any agreement or disagreement with
an author's opinions, and bowever honestly they may endeavour
to ‘reck their own rede,' the majority of mankind will always be
more or less influenced by that most natural but most uncritical
doctrine, 'I must take pleasure in the thing represented before
I can take pleasure in the representation. On the whole, it is
very doubtful whether, despite the enormous popularity of his
book, well deserved and well maintained, Keble has not lost more
than he has gained in the general estimate of him as a poet. Very
large numbers—perhaps the vast majority-of those who have
admired the book have been too much impressed and too much
affected by their agreement with its temper and teaching to care
much about critical examination of the merits or demerits of its
expression. On the other hand, it is an equally natural tendency
in those who disagree with the doctrine to try if they can find fault
with the music. With charges of bigotry, narrowness and the like,
we have, of course, nothing to do. But other accusations, of 'tame-
ness,' of unfinished and obscure expression and the like, concern us
very nearly. One of the most agreeable of literary anecdotes, to
which there is a supplement more delightful than itself, tells how
Wordsworth, admiring the book which owed much to him and
to which he himself, in his later work, perhaps owed something,
declared that it was so good that if it were his he would rewrite
it. ' The addition (fathered on Pusey) is that he actually proposed
to Keble collaborative rehandling. If Pusey really said this, it
must be true, for, though he had quite humour enough to invent
it, his sense of veracity was of the strictest.
It is said frequently, and with some plausibility, that allowances
and explanations are inadmissible in the judgment of poetry-
poetry is poetry or it is not. As regards what may be called
'pure' poetry, that, no doubt, is true; but, as regards what may,
with equal justice, be called 'applied' poetry--verse with a special
object and purpose—it is not. In cases of this kind, you have to
discover, more or less accurately, what the poet meant to do before
you can decide whether he has done it. In Keble's case, we could,
without very much difficulty, conclude what he meant to do from
his actual work in verse; but, fortunately, we have an invaluable
external assistance. His Oxford Praelections, as professor of
poetry, are not now, as they were till very recently, locked up in
their original Latin from general perusal; and nobody who had
any right to call himself a critic ought to have been ignorant of
-


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

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

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

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

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vi]
Newman
171
another man, this statement would probably be like the former, an
affectation, or else a mere whim. But Newman's mind, as is well
known, was rather over-furnished with logic, and extremely under-
furnished with the historic sense; and, no doubt, he meant what he
said. To one who did mean it, poetry must, necessarily, seem an
altogether inferior thing—supplying 'the harmless pleasure of
verse-making' (his own words) and, perhaps, the equally harmless
pleasure of verse-reading, but not orovdalov—not serious. It
was almost impossible that, from a man so minded, much poetry
of any kind should come: we have only to be thankful that, as a
matter of fact, The Pillar of Cloud and The Dream of Gerontius
actually came.
The most noteworthy of the numerous writers of verse whom
the tractarian movement and the powerful example of The
Christian Year raised up were Isaac Williams, Frederick William
Faber and John Mason Neale? . The odium theologicum which
excluded Williams from the Oxford professorship of poetry was
exceptionally unjust, for his combined claims as poet and scholar
far exceeded those of his actual opponent, Garbett, or, indeed, of
any likely candidate; and he has scarcely had full justice done to
him since. But it may be admitted that Lyra Apostolica (of
which he was part-author), The Cathedral and his other works
show him as a sort of ‘moon’ of Keble—always a dangerous posi-
tion, and specially dangerous here, because Keble's own poetic
light had more of the moon than of the sun in it. His characteristic
is certainly not strength; but the grace and scholarship and purity
of his verse can hardly be missed by any impartial student of
poetry. Faber (who followed Newman, not Keble, at the parting
of the ways) had, possibly, the greatest specially poetical power of
the whole group. It is well known, both from a certain rather
ungracious anecdote and from his general expressions on the
subject, that Wordsworth was exceedingly chary of the title of
poet; yet, he told Faber that, by his devoting himself to orders,
‘England lost' one. In the principal book of his younger, and still
Anglican, years, The Cherwell Water Lily, and in most of his other
work, the possibility rather than the certainty of such a develop-
ment, to any great extent, may be noted. The verse—which shows
the influence not merely of Wordsworth himself but of Scott-is
fluent, musical and possessed of something like, with a nineteenth
century difference, what the eighteenth century called 'elegance';
but, still more, it wants strength and concentration. Later, if he
1 See, ante, vol. II, chap. XII.
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172
[CH.
Lesser Poets
did not exactly acquire these, he displayed something which un-
favourable critics have labelled 'meretricious,' a term which itself
gives a grudging recognition of a kind of beauty. The label is
unfair and undiscriminating. The famous hymn The Pilgrims of
the Night has, certainly, a feminine quality; but even Aristotle has
admitted that the feminine is not always the bad. The singular
piece entitled The Sorrowful World comes, sometimes, near to
consummateness. But, in his later years, at any rate, Faber gave
himself no elbow-room and, in his earlier, he had not come to
full powers.
The third of this group, Neale, was, also, a member of another
-larger, in itself, but still very small-of those curious and
extremely beneficent writers of whom Edward FitzGerald is, per-
haps, the chief, and who, without showing any great talent for
original poetry, have an extraordinary faculty of translating or
paraphrasing verse from other languages. His life, though not
long, was, after he left Cambridge, almost entirely leisurely; and
he devoted his whole leisure to hymnology and other ecclesiastical
study and writing. His original verse has, perhaps, been sometimes
too contemptuously spoken of; but, at its best, it is second-rate.
Some of his translations are really marvellous—not merely as com-
positions, but when taken in close connection with their originals.
Of the millions (the number is certainly not exaggerated) who, in
the sixty or seventy years since its appearance, have known
Jerusalem the Golden, probably not more than hundreds are
really acquainted with its source, the De Contemptu Mundi of
Bernard of Clugny or Morlaix, though the earlier publications
of this by Flacius Illyricus and Polycarp Leyser were always more
or less accessible to scholars; though archbishop Trench had
included extracts of it in his Sacred Latin Poetry before Neale
took it in hand; and though it has been several times printed
since. Nobody accustomed to medieval Latin and capable of
recognising poetry could fail to see the extraordinary beauty of
the best parts of Bernard's work. Its form, however--dactylic
hexameters, unbroken except for the final spondee, with internal
rime in each line and end rime for each couplet—though managed
without the least effort and with wonderful effect, is not only
rather difficult in itself and in Latin, but would, in English, not
so much as the stock-phrase goes) 'court,' as ensure, disaster.
Neale neither attempted the impossible by trying the metre itself
nor endeavoured to come near it by employing anapaests or any
English swinging measure. He boldly transposed the rhythm


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

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

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174
[ch.
Lesser Poets
echoing the seventeenth-century divine poets, and the short
piece Lord ! many times I am aweary quite is not unworthy
of Vaughan.
All the writers of sacred poetry just mentioned professed
throughout their lives one or another—sometimes more than
one-form of orthodox Christianity. But free thought, undog-
matism, unorthodoxy, or whatever it pleases to call itself, also
produced a number of verse-writers too large to be dealt with
here except by sample. The best sample of them, moreover,
A. H.