No More Learning

Jean Ingelow wrote
some other good things, but nothing at all equalling this; while
she also wrote too much and too long. If, as has been suggested
above, this disappointingness is even commoner with poetesses
than with poets, there is a possible explanation of it in the lives,
more unoccupied until recently, of women. Unless a man is an
extraordinary coxcomb, a person of private means, or both, he
seldom has the time and opportunity of committing, or the wish
to commit, bad or indifferent verse for a long series of years; but
it is otherwise with women.
The period of the forties was somewhat stronger in the
number, if not in the quality, of the poetesses it produced.
Harriet Eleanor Hamilton-King is best known by her respectable,
but tedious, The Disciples—a sort of Italomaniac epic influenced
in spirit, perhaps, by both the Brownings and written in a blank
verse not unsuggestive of Aurora Leigh. Her shorter poems
are rather better; but, like most of the lesser poetesses of this
particular time, she not only, in a famous phrase, 'could be very
serious,' but thought it her duty to be this rather too exclusively.
One of her companions, indeed, Emily Pfeiffer, rather unneces-
sarily excused herself for want of proficiency in the for some time
popular pastime of rondeaux, ballades and so forth, on the ground
that 'the burden of meaning lay too heavily on a woman singer's
heart' for her to excel in these trivialities. The same lady is
>
6
6
12-2


## p. 180 (#196) ############################################

180
[CH.
Lesser Poets
also reported to have explained that she considered it her duty
to go on writing poetry after her husband's death because he had
a high opinion of what she wrote before it. There have, no doubt,
been great poets capable of such innocent egotism and want of
humour; but Emily Pfeiffer could scarcely claim their excuses.
The compassionate sonnet, which will tolerate and, to some
extent, ennoble all faults except triviality and carelessness,
enabled her to do her most tolerable work; the rest was mostly
negligible. Another very serious poetess was Augusta Webster,
who, again, represents a strong Browning influence both from
husband and wife, and who, owing, perhaps, to this, sometimes
made fair experiments in lyrical metres. Her blank verse, how-
ever, of which she was very prolific in forms non-dramatic, semi-
dramatic and dramatic, sometimes employed Robert Browning's
licences without his justifications, and, at others, became unspeak-
ably monotonous. To the forties, also, belongs Sarah or 'Sadie'
Williams-a short-lived singer in both divine and human fashions,
of which a remark made already, and to be repeated in reference
to other writers, is again true—that they show a certain diffused
poetic power which is hardly concentrated in any single piece;
Isabella Harwood, who wrote not a few closet dramas under the
pseudonym ‘Ross Neil,' in blank verse, better than that of most
of her companions mentioned here; and the various and sometimes
almost brilliant talent of Violet Fane'-Mary Montgomerie Lamb,
Mrs Singleton by her first marriage and Lady Currie by her second.
A poetess who has scarcely received the credit she deserved
was Margaret Veley, whose scanty but excellent verse will be
found in a posthumous collection prefaced by Sir Leslie Stephen
and entitled A Marriage of Shadows and other Poems. The
author was a novelist also, but, in that department too, was not
voluminous; and she died in rather early middle age. It is
particularly interesting to compare her work with that of Mrs Clive
('V')', because the strong resemblance between them, in general,
brings out the difference between the first and second halves of the
century. Both in thought and expression of a similar attitude, and
in formal and verbal utterance, Margaret Veley's melancholy is
vaguer and fainter than her senior's; her metrical devices and
her vocabulary are more elaborate; she is sometimes rather more
obscure and more deliberately artistic, though the elaboration and
deliberation are not in the least affected. Her art, in fact, is, though
1 Anne Evans (see ante and post), who came between them in time, might, with
advantage, be joined in the comparison.
a


## p. 181 (#197) ############################################

vi]
Younger Writers
181
not consciously, more sophisticated. But her accomplishment is
various and almost great. Her chief work, A Japanese Fan, is
really something of a positive masterpiece of quiet ironic passion,
suitably phrased in verse. The title poem of her book and The
Unknown Land deserve an honourable place among the phantas-
magorias in irregular Pindaric which have formed a great feature
of later nineteenth-century poetry; while, among definite lyrics,
Michaelmas Daisies may stand as a representative document for
the survey of the subject of this chapter with which it should
conclude.
Some, mainly younger, poetesses must be mentioned more
briefly, though most of them obtained, and one or two of them
deserved, reputation as such. Mathilde Blind, daughter of a
wellknown German refugee, wrote much verse in unimpeachable
English, showing strong literary sympathies and correct versifica-
tion. Any competent critic in the future will be able to see at
once that she wrote in the last quarter or third of the nineteenth
century, and did good 'school-work’in its styles—work agreeable
enough to read. Over-estimation may be thought to have been
the lot of the two ladies, Miss Bradley and Miss Cooper, an aunt
and a niece, who had the curious fancy of writing in collaboration
under one masculine name, Michael Field. Their work, which was
most commonly tragic drama, but included lyric, received very high
praise from reviewers, from the appearance, in 1884, of Callirrhoe,
a piece on which the influence of Landor was evident in style as well
as subject. Others have failed to discover much in the joint work
which goes beyond the standard, already noticed, of nineteenth-
century closet drama, or, in the lyrics, much more than the half
machine-made verse which usually comes late in great periods of
poetry. There was, perhaps, something more to be made of two
others, who both died young and of whom the second died not
happily, Constance Naden and Amy Levy. Miss Naden's work is
a little overloaded by its sometimes very serious subjects, pan-
theistic philosophy and the like, though, at times, it is also comic.
But already (she died at thirty-one) she showed signs of that
internal fire which melts and recasts subject according to the
poet's idiosyncrasy. Amy Levy, dying still younger, achieved
even less, but gave occasional evidence-especially in a short
and very simply languaged poem on the waltz—of a passionate
and almost triumphant intensity not common.
But the most remarkable poetess, after Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and Christina Rossetti, of the later and latest


## p. 182 (#198) ############################################

182
[CH.
Lesser Poets
nineteenth century, was one of whose poetical capacity few people,
except personal friends, had any opportunity of judging till the
century itself was nearly closed; while her death, not long after
its actual close, was the first occasion of extensive eulogy and
collected publication of her poems. Then, the name of Mary
E. Coleridge became widely divulged, and her poems (printed in
a fairly full collection, besides some remarkable prose essays) were,
for a time, quite eagerly bought. The eulogists, in some cases,
were of the highest competence, but not quite always so; and
the chorus of compliment, in some cases, had its frequent, if not
constant, effect of arousing something like the feeling of the
historical or legendary Athenian in regard to Aristides. But it
is recorded that one critic, who, by accident, had known nothing
of her work and was somewhat inclined to revolt against this chorus,
having gone to a public library and obtained her poems, opened
them at a venture in three places, and read the poems on which he
chanced. He then shut the book, returned it to the librarian and
immediately ordered a copy from his bookseller, in obedience to the
law which ordains that true poetry shall never (cases of necessity
being excluded) be read except in a book belonging to the reader.
Nor did the complete reading contradict—on the contrary, it con-
firmed and intensified—the impression derived from these sortes
Coleridgianae. It is not, of course, to be expected that everyone
will—and it would be unreasonable to insist that everyone should-
agree with the estimate implied in this anecdote. There are, in
particular, two objections to Mary Coleridge's verse which cannot
be merely dismissed—as we have dismissed others in these historic
reviews of poetry—with a simple 'disabling of judgment. ' One
such objection might be derived from the almost unbroken gloom
of the general atmosphere? ; the other, from the frequent use (and,
as some may call it, abuse) of the parabolic method-employed
with such complication that an imaginative interpreter, whose
'cocksureness' is not equal to his imagination, may wisely decline
to be certain of the special moralitas to be adopted. An objection
of the first class is sometimes met by the retort sarcastic, 'Oh!
you want the universe to be universally regarded through a horse-
collar,' but this is obviously idle. The house of mourning deserves
its bards at least as well as the house of mirth, and is likely to
get poetry of a higher class out of them. There are poems and
6
1 It will have been noticed that this characteristic, not uncommon in poets, is
specially common in poetesses. They prolong their attendance on the school of
suffering, even after they have attained the strain of song.


## p. 183 (#199) ############################################

a
6
vi]
Mary Coleridge
183
poem-books of all kinds, from In Memoriam to A Little Child's
Monument, which, even in recent times, justify a statement hardly
needing any justification. But, when a collection of poems, written
on no common subject, and at periods apparently extending over
more than five and twenty years, is something like a cypress-
grove, a certain morbidity of temperament may be not unfairly
suggested. And, on the other hand, the person who is quite sure
of the exact intention of such a poem as Unwelcome-
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,
with all its welcome strangeness, and its quaint urbanity of
rhythm, may, perhaps, rather be commiserated on his certainty
than complimented on his acuteness. Let the reader, however,
prepare himself for a garden of Proserpine rather than of Adonis,
for a region if not exactly of 'mystery' at any rate of 'enigma'-
the words come from Mary Coleridge's most distinguished eulogist-
and he will, if he have any taste for poetry, find no further difficulty
and a great deal of delight. When she did not publish quite
anonymously, she seems to have generally adopted, from George
Macdonald, the signature "Avodos—which, evidently, means, in the
two writers', not so much (as it has been inadequately translated)
'wanderer' as 'wayless one'-a person who is not only not travelling
by a definite road to a definite goal, but who hardly sees any
road before him at all. In fact, the influence of that most unequal
genius? who produced Phantastes and The Portent and Lilith was
evidently much stronger on Mary Coleridge than the mere adoption
of the pseudonym would show—though her shorter life, her greater
poetical and critical gift and the absence of any temptation to
produce hack-work all told in her favour.
She is said to have refrained from publishing her poems herself
and to have objected to others publishing them, at least in her
lifetime, out of ancestral reverence—for fear of dishonouring the
shade of S. T. C. As a matter of fact, there is more of the
Estesian' character in her than there is in Hartley or in Sara, while
her pure originality is, perhaps, also greater than that of either
of these kinsfolk. She was only unlucky in her time. It has been
observed more than once—Matthew Arnold himself, though he
sometimes exemplifies the feature poetically censured, might be
cited in critical support of the censure that mere discourage-
ment, mere quest, as it were, of a stool to be melancholy upon,
? In Greek itself, the word is used of places not persons, and is simply our
ordinary pathless. '
? As to his own poems, see post.


## p. 184 (#200) ############################################

184
[ch.
Lesser Poets
and remonstrances, from that cathedra when it has been found,
with the arrangements of the universe—though by no means an
unpoetic mood, is apt to become monotonous in its expression.
Since Byron and Shelley, in their lower and higher ways re-
spectively, until the present day, we have had a very great deal
of it. But the unavoidable monotony of the key can be overcome
by the variety and idiosyncrasy of note, and this is most eminently
true of Mary Coleridge. Others may have lent her fiddles to play,
melancholy or mysticism ; but, in Latimer's famous phrase, her
rosin is her own-borrowed from, and, as yet, borrowed by, none.
To specify pieces from the nearly 240 poems found in her collected
poems is at once very difficult and rather idle, for, as has been
said above, the merest chance-medley will serve in the case of
readers likely to care for her, and there is hardly a poem in the
book which will not displease or weary others. For those who must
have specimens, The Other Side of a Mirror, A Difference, He
came unto His Own and His Own received Him not, The Witch,
(a worthy progeny of Christabel), A Day-dream and on the
Arrival of a Visitor may serve. And it may, perhaps, be added
that it will be found useful to read her in close connection with
canon Dixon (see post), whose work may not impossibly have
influenced hers. The connection, at any rate, struck the present
writer independently; and it adds a somewhat interesting touch
to the mental map of the poetry of our time.
We must now turn from groups aggregated according to
subject, style, sex and other joint characteristics to the large
number of individual poets who do not seem to lend themselves,
without arbitrary classification, to such grouping. In their case,
chronological order is almost the only one possible; though
arrangement by decades may be convenient.
The first batch thus to be formed consists of men the eldest
of whom were born in the same year with Tennyson, while none
of them was younger than Browning. Tennyson's contempora-
ries were two poets as much contrasted in every possible way
as could well be-Richard Monckton Milnes, known, during the
latter part of his life, as lord Houghton, and Thomas Gordon
Hake, glanced at above. Milnes, always widely known in society
and, to some extent, in politics, was, also, at one time, almost a
1 This form of grouping may seem artificial; but only to those who have not
taken the trouble to notice, or who are unable to understand, the subtle influence
of the spirit of even narrowly separated times which literary, like other, history
shows to have been exerted on persons born within them.


## p. 185 (#201) ############################################

vi] Lord Houghton and Gordon Hake 185
]
popular poet. Lord Houghton (who also possessed an admirable
prose style, and whose services in editing Keats were important in
quality and still more important in time) was not a poet of the
'big bow-wow' tone, but he was neither a twitterer nor a yelper.
A critic's attitude towards Strangers Yet and The Brookside now,
and for the greater part of the last twenty years, may be compared,
from the higher and wider historic standpoint, with its counter-
part, the attitude of eighteenth-century critics towards the meta-
physicals. ' If, as they saw nothing but ‘false wit,' 'awkward
numbers' and so forth, in the one case, he sees nothing but senti-
mentality and 'jingle,' in the other, then we can class him and
find him wanting. These two famous, or once famous, songs and
other poems by the same author belong to their own division of
poetry only. But that division is not the lowest, and these
themselves rank high in it.
The contrast just made might almost have been supplied,
so far as kinds of poetry go, without exploring further than
Houghton's own contemporary, Hake, who sought for depth
even at the cost of obscurity, for strangeness at the cost of
broken music and for quaint thought and expression at the
cost of attraction and grace, risking, also, the charge of posturing
and jargon-making. He never could have been a popular poet,
and neither when the somewhat younger spasmodics caught the
public ear, for a time, with verse not wholly dissimilar, nor when
the work of poets nearly a generation younger than himself, such
as Dante Rossetti, created a taste for poetry still more like
his own, did he become so. His best things—Old Souls, The
Palmist and great part of Maiden Ecstasy—have what has been
called a “fortified' character: they require, save in the case of
exceptionally qualified or exceptionally exercised persons, either
to be taken by storm or sapped with elaborate approaches.
Now, about poetry of this kind, there is not only this difficulty
but another, and an even more dangerous one-that composition
of it tempts imitation of a merely specious kind and measure.
For the last half century a great deal of verse has been written
suggesting the speech which an acute critic of the last generation,
G. S. Venables, put in Carlyle's mouth-
a
I will be strange and wild and odd,
but not possessing root of thought or fruit of beauty enough to
support and to carry off the strangeness and wildness and oddity.
This is not quite true of Hake: but it might seem to be true.


## p. 186 (#202) ############################################

186
[CH.
Lesser Poets
Very different, again, from either of these was their (slightly)
junior, Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, who, rather late in life, became
professor of poetry at Oxford, and justified his election by lectures,
somewhat exoteric, indeed, but singularly acute and sensible. Sir
Francis could write verse of various kinds which was never con-
temptible, but his strong point was the very difficult and dangerous
kind of war poetry, in which, putting The Charge of the Light
Brigade aside, he surpassed every other writer between Campbell
and a living poet. Whenever he came near this great and too
often mishandled subject, his genius seemed to catch fire; and,
in two almost famous pieces—The Red Thread of Honour and
A Private of the Buffs—in the first especially, that curious in-
spiriting and exciting quality which all songs of what Dante calls
salus (war and patriotism) should have, and which they too often
lack, is present in almost the highest degree.
Another small group of poets born before 1820, the youngest
of whom was not Browning's junior so far as years go, may be
formed of three men, each of whom exercised other arts or pro-
fessions besides poetry—Alfred Domett, William James Linton and
William Bell Scott. Domett, as probably many people know who
know nothing else about him, was the Waring of Browning's
vivid and grotesque poem. He fulfilled his poet's apparent ex-
pectations of his doing something respectable by becoming prime
minister of New Zealand. But, when he returned to England and
published a long poem, Ranolf and Amohia, it must be confessed
that not a few who eagerly read it as the long-expected work
of Waring' himself, experienced considerable disappointment,
which has not been removed by subsequent perusal. Others
praised it highly; and even Tennyson, who, though not as
grudging as Wordsworth in his estimate of other poets, was not
mealy-mouthed, granted it intellectual and imaginative subtlety
and power of delineating delicious scenery. ' But he confessed
that he found it difficult to read ; and this it certainly is. The
story fixes no hold on the immediate interest or the later memory;
the characters are outlines only; and, though the descriptions are
certainly often beautiful, they do not exactly charm and are
frequently interrupted and spoilt by flatnesses of phrase like
Where they a small canoe had found
Which Amo settled they might take,
the last line of which would have been a triumph for the most
disrespectful and audacious parodist of Wordsworth or of Crabbe.
1 De vulgari eloquentia, book 11, chap. II.


## p. 187 (#203) ############################################

vi] W. J. Linton and W. B. Scott 187
Before he went to the colonies, Domett had written minor verse of
merit, some of which was published in Blackwood, with boisterous
eulogy from Wilson. A Christmas Hymn with the refrain ‘Centuries
ago’is the stock selection of these for praise. It has merit, but no
consummateness.
The other two, W. J. Linton and W. B. Scott, were artists
as well as poets ; and Linton had very much the advantage in
both his professions. The excellence of his engravings is uni-
versally known ; his skill in verse, translated and original, less so.
Linton was essentially—in the original Greek, not in the modern,
sense—an epigrammatist : that is to say, not a wit but a writer
of short poems on definite subjects, finished off in a manner
suggesting the arts of design as well as those of poetic expression.
In perfection of these things—which may, of course, be called toys
,
or trifles, and which are certainly miniatures—he yields only to
Landor; and, while even his best things have not Landor's
supremacy when he is at his best, Linton avoids the austere
jejuneness which characterises some of the greater writer's trifles,
and suffuses his own with more colour, shadow and light. Such
apparently slight things as Epicurean and A Dream need no slight
skill—as anybody who tries to imitate them will find.
Of Linton's at one time friend (for W. B. Scott had a habit of
quarrelling, whether it was exercised in this instance or not), it is
difficult to find anything more complimentary to say than that
his verses, to use Browning's words of something else, “intended
greatly. He put forward various theories of poetry; affected
considerable contempt of others; and always, whether writing in
a way somewhat like Hake or in a way somewhat like Rossetti,
tried to be different and difficult. Unfortunately, he very seldom
succeeded in being good; and, perhaps, never in being very good.
His ballads really deserve the name (unjustly given in some other
cases) of Wardour street work; his elaborate efforts in the greater
ode are pretentious and hollow. A little prettiness in lyric and
a little picturesqueness in sonnet he did, sometimes, reach ; but,
l;
on the whole, his execution was emphatically a failure? whatever
may have been the merit of his aims and his theories.
The most noteworthy of the poets who were born between
Browning's birth-year and the ten years later date 1822 were
Aytoun and Bailey, who have been already noticed in this chapter,
1 Anyone to whom this judgment seems harsh should read The Sphinx, Scott's
most highly praised poem, and think what Rossetti or James Thomson the second
would have made of it.


## p. 188 (#204) ############################################

188
Lesser Poets
[CH.
and Matthew Arnold, who falls out of it. But there were others
not negligible, especially Aubrey de Vere, Thomas Westwood and
Charles Mackay, who were all born in 1814. The son of one
verse-writer of merit and the brother of another, Aubrey de Vere
possessed connections, different from those of blood, with two
groups interesting, directly and indirectly, in literature. He was
a personal disciple of Wordsworth and, perhaps, chief of all
Wordsworthians pure and simple; and, also, he was one of the
Anglican group who were not satisfied tendere in Latium, but who
made the full voyage and found the waves irremeable. There may
be something to attract, and should be nothing at all to repel, the
true critical approach in any or all of these circumstances ; but,
when the critical judgment is directed solely to his work, its
summing up cannot be wholly favourable. He wrote both longer
and shorter poems; the former, on a considerable variety of
subjects-preferably legendary, the legends being supplied by
Irish early poetry, hagiology, the classics and so forth. They
seldom fail to command respect and esteem? ; but, alas ! they still
seldomer transport—the one thing needful. Of all the numerous
attempts to English in verse the famous epic duel of Cuchullain
and Ferdia, De Vere's, if the most elegant, is the flattest, the most
devoid of local colour and temporal spirit ; and his lyrics, though
sometimes pretty, are never anything more.
Westwood was one of the members, though the youngest, or
nearly so, of Charles Lamb's circle; but he did not publish till much
later and, in middle life, was a good deal occupied with business.
His most ambitious thing, The Quest of the Sancgreall, is, un-
fortunately, post-Tennysonian in more senses than that of date.
Latterly, he took much interest in the literature, as well as in the
practice, of angling, and wrote some good fishing songs. Once,
in the little piece called Springlets, he reached charm ; in some
others, he was near it.
Less polish but somewhat more vigour than is to be found in
these writers characterised the verses of Charles Mackay-a long-
lived and hard-working journalist and man-of-letters-of-all-work.
A good deal of it is in the mixed vein of sentiment and what may
be called 'rollick,' which was popular in the second third of the
century. The song 0 Ye Tears ! , which was once a favourite,
requires either more simplicity, or more art, or more of both, to
make it capital ; but that adjective may almost be applied to the
1 It may be worth mentioning that Landor, who, though not a jealous critic, was
very sparing of admiration for poetry, bestowed it unsparingly upon De Vere.


## p. 189 (#205) ############################################

>
VI] Charles Mackay and Others 189
Cholera Chant (quoted and justly praised by Kingsley in Alton
Locke), and others of his lyrics are above the average. There are
reasons for believing that if he had led that life of concentration on
poetry which seems to be, if not quite universally, in a very large
majority of cases, necessary to produce poetry in perfection, he
might, like others mentioned in this chapter and the last of its
kind, have been more than a lesser poet. But journalism and
bookmaking, though they may favour the production of verse,
are not usually favourable to the quality of poetry.
The first writer of poetic importance between 1820 and 1830 was
Matthew Arnold"; but the years immediately succeeding the decade
added to the list a fair number of poets who were to be of note,
especially Coventry Patmore, William Allingham, Francis Turner
Palgrave, George Macdonald and the very remarkable writer known
as a poet chiefly under the name of Johnson and as a prose writer
under that of Cory. To this group some, perhaps, would add the
rather younger Gerald Massey, whose birth drew towards the thirties,
William Caldwell Roscoe, Thomas Woolner and Walter Thornbury.
But none of these excite either personal enthusiasm or a sense of
historical importance in some minds? . Thornbury's ballads are
spirited, but too often, if not always, give one the depressing feeling
that if Macaulay, Maginn, Thackeray and Aytoun had not written
neither would he; and they constantly sin by exaggeration. Gerald
Massey's considerable bulk of war, love and miscellaneous poetry
has, sometimes, been commended on the ground that he was a self-
made man, sometimes on the other ground that, like Eliza Cook,
he appealed to strictly popular and uncultured tastes. But
nothing that the present writer has read of Massey's work seems
anywhere near poetic 'proof. Roscoe, coming of a family dis-
tinguished (not merely by the historian) in letters, had his work
ushered to the world with strong recommendations from a well-
known critic, Richard Holt Hutton, who was his brother-in-law;
but it has no 'inevitableness' whatever and no very special poetic
qualities of any kind. Thomas Woolner, the sculptor, was a
member of the early pre-Raphaelite group and had many literary
friends outside it. His My Beautiful Lady was received with
a round of applause which did not last very long, and has seldom
been echoed since. His blank verse suggests an imitation of
1 See ante, chap. IV.
? Some would rank above them all an eccentric poet of rather wasted talent,
Arthur Joseph Munby, who wrote verse at intervals from the time of his leaving
Trinity college, Cambridge, in 1851, till his death, all but sixty years later. Nor
would this estimate lack arguments to support it,


## p. 190 (#206) ############################################

190
[Ch.
Lesser Poets
Tennyson, conditioned by an attempt to give roughness and
originality to phrase, and generally unsuccessful; his lyrics are
unimportant. Whether Allingham deserves to be given any
higher place than these is very doubtful. He had the fluency
and ease of verse which has been again and again noticed as
common in Irish poets ; and some of his lighter songs and ballads,
such as Lovely Mary Donnelly, are really pretty. But he has
been allowed by patriotic and competent critics to be dull, tame
and uninventive; one of his best shorter things, Up the Fairy
Mountain, borrows its first and best stanza from one of the most
beautiful of Jacobite ballads and entirely fails to live up to it;
while he constantly indulged in banalities like
A thing more frightful than words can say.
Not thus can the others mentioned above be dismissed.
Coventry Patmore, though a recent and comparatively accidental
coterie admiration has sometimes exalted him too high, was a very
remarkable poet in more ways than one. That he was one of the
few poets who have given careful attention to the mechanism
of poetry is the least of these ways; nor were his prosodic
speculations, though interesting and ingenious, very happy. It
is of more importance that his actual verse was not only of great
merit as a whole, but of two kinds exceptionally different from
each other. The kind of criticism-scholastic, in the worst sense
only-which has never been absent when there was any criticism
at all, and which has recently been present to an intolerable
degree, would, no doubt, if it had the chance, decide that the
same person could never have written The Angel in the House
and The Unknown Eros, though the last part of the first named
work, The Victories of Love, might be a saving stepping-stone to
a few brighter spirits.
The Angel in the House first appeared in 1854 and may be
said to be like Matthew Arnold's nearly contemporary work in
one direction and that of the spasmodics in another—a kind of
half-conscious, half-unconscious revolt against both Tennyson and
Browning, but especially against the former. Revolt, indeed, may
seem too fierce a word for the mild domesticities of Patmore's
poem ; some critical stand might even be made for the contention
actually made, that it is a direct development of more than one
of Tennyson's poems, especially The Miller's Daughter. But
development itself has, in the language of the Articles as to
another matter, often something of the nature of' revolt; it


## p. 191 (#207) ############################################

vi]
Coventry Patmore
191
indicates, at any rate, want of complete satisfaction. The poem
contained, even at the first, much very pretty verse; as it went
on, it was to contain not a little that is positively beautiful. But
its ambling versification-somniferous to some of those whom it
did not merely please, and positively irritating to others--the
deliberate banality of the subject; and the equally deliberate
adoption of language outgoing even Wordsworth, even Crabbe,
in its avoidance of poetic diction, though they conciliated a large
part of contemporary taste, produced a by no means conciliatory
effect upon another part which, in the long run, has prevailed.
When a man writes
Our witnesses the cook and groom,
We signed the lease for seven years more,
it is not unreasonable to think that Apollo, if he thought it worth
his while, must have twitched the poet's ear rather sharply and
that attention should have been paid to the twitch. The scornful
allusion ‘idylls of the dining-room and the deanery,' though its
author, Swinburne, was courteous enough not to name the idyllist,
expressed a good deal of the younger and youngest opinion of
the time. Many years later, after changes of family, faith and
circumstance, Patmore produced a book of odes, entitled The
Unknown Eros, which, as was said above, might, but for certain
evidence, have seemed the work of an entirely different person.
Instead of the regular and too often monotonous flow of the
Angel poems, abrupt Pindaric measures were tried, challenging,
and sometimes attaining, splendour but, at the same time, risking-
and sometimes falling into-harshness and dissonance. The simple,
almost lisping language was changed, likewise (indeed, some hint
had been given of this in The Victories), into a grandiose diction,
sometimes violent and bombastic, but, at other times, really grand;
and the subjects, instead of being those of ordinary and domestic
prattle— personal talk' of the most commonplace kind—were
always elevated or deeply pathetic, at least in intention.
It
was as if someone who had threatened to sink to the level of
Ambrose Philips had changed his models to Donne, Vaughan,
Milton, even Aeschylus. It is true that, as Patmore had seldom
fallen into actual silliness, so he rarely rose to actual sublimity;
but he did reach it sometimes and often came very near it. And
it must be admitted that such a combination of parts and scales
in poetry is a curious and, perhaps, a unique thing.
George Macdonald, better known as a novelist than as a poet,
but author of a good deal of verse, some of it exquisite, some of it
a


## p. 192 (#208) ############################################

192
[Ch.
Lesser Poets
worthless and a great deal of it unimportant, is, also, rather an
exceptional figure. Like Patmore, he was a critic, though not to
the same extent a formal critic, of poetry; and, like Palgrave, who
is to follow, he was an accomplished anthologist. Of his two main
achievements of any size, Phantastes and The Portent, the latter,
though of extraordinary goodness, is entirely prose and not very
long ; the former is a mixture of prose and verse, including
Macdonald's masterpiece, and one of the miniature masterpieces
of the century, in the stanza beginning
Alas! how easily things go wrong,
while scores of scraps hardly less good may be picked up out of
his various writings. Unfortunately, the ideal which he set before
himself, in his more poetical books, where verse and prose are mixed,
was a dangerously eclectic (some critics would call it a rococo) model.
It combined or tried to combine the supernatural and the natural,
the romantic and the grotesque, allegory and passion, sentiment
and philosophic religiosity. The two chief divisions of literature
from which it might be thought to draw illustration or, at least,
suggestion were English Caroline poetry and the work in prose
and verse of the German romantic school from Tieck and Novalis
to Chamisso and Fouqué. Now, mixed work of all kinds, of this
particular kind especially, requires either absolutely heaven-born,
though not necessarily universal, genius, which goes right and
avoids wrong instinctively in its own way, or an almost equally
supernatural spirit of self-criticism to avoid or to correct the
dangers. With neither could Macdonald be credited, though he
certainly had genius and was not destitute of critical power. The
consequence is that his verse, like his prose, but more annoyingly
so, is marred by constant incompleteness and inequality ; by
triviality, now and then; at times, by a suspicion of pose; at others,
by other bad things. Few writers of his time, except the very
greatest, have more diffused poetry about them ; but few, also, are
more uncertain in catching and concentrating it.
It is probable—though it will be rather unfair--that Palgrave's
name will always be thought of rather as that of a dispenser-a
'promus of elegancies'-in poetry than as that of a poet. The
goodness of The Golden Treasury is certainly extraordinary; it is
not rash to call it unmatched. No such epithets could be applied
to the compiler's own verse, though this is not by any means
contemptible. Intimate friend as he was of Tennyson, his shorter
pieces are Wordsworthian rather than Tennysonian. But it
>


## p. 193 (#209) ############################################

vi]
William Johnson (Cory) 193
would be a pity if the longer Visions of England ceased to be
read. In the first place, they were one of the earliest expressions
of that historical-patriotic poetry of which much has been pro-
duced since; and which, while some of it has been good, bas
certainly done good, even in its weaker examples. In the second,
the book, though there are few ‘jewels five words long' in it,
shows a poetic imagination much superior to the poetic expression
with which it is united.
Exquisiteness and idiosyncrasy, rather than fullness, magni-
ficence and force of general appeal, were the characteristics of
the work in verse (his prose was singularly nervous and virile)
of the author of Ionica—the double-edged punning title of the
poems of William Johnson, otherwise Cory. They have been
rebuked for modern paganism'; but that does not much concern
us, and it may be remembered that some have found traces of this
quality even in Wordsworth himself. Johnson, whose object was
to keep as much of the tone and style of the Greek anthologists
as could be saturated with nineteenth-century temper and tone,
could not have avoided the appearance of modern paganism if
he would. In the inevitable, and, indeed, quite legitimate and
instructive, comparison with Landor, it is this which chiefly dis-
tinguishes Johnson. Landor is Hellenic generally, but not definitely
pagan; nor is he, strictly speaking, modern unless the eighteenth
century be called modern. Johnson is late-Hellenic with intensely
modern touches. The best of his few verses are exceptionally
familiar to all who are likely to like them, and who have not
missed them by chance. The most familiar and, perhaps, most
general favourite, the short translated epitaph on Heraclitus,
has been objected to (perhaps finically, perhaps not) because, in
English, the first line
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead
would, rather, raise expectation that the tidings were false.
Mimnermus in Church, another great favourite, is, perhaps,
a little overdosed with modernity. An Invocation, disclaiming
any wish for the society of Greek nymphs and preferring that of
Greek shepherds, has some excellent verse in it, though anybody
is certainly at liberty to prefer the dryads as a subject of personal
wish for their resurrection.
The next decade, from 1830 to 1839, besides yielding the major
names of Swinburne, the greater Morris and James Thomson the
younger, was peculiarly fertile in poets of the second rank, some
13
E, L. XIII.
CA. VI.


## p. 194 (#210) ############################################

194
[CH.
Lesser Poets
of whom stand very high in it. The best of all were, probably,
Thomas Edward Brown and Richard Watson Dixon-indeed, there
are those who would deny the limitation of 'second' or 'lesser' to
Dixon. They may, therefore, be treated first, Dixon being taken
out of chronological order, and should be followed by Sebastian
Evans, Robert earl of Lytton (better known as a poet by his
pseudonym Owen Meredith), Sir Edwin Arnold, Sir Lewis
Morris, Sir Alfred Lyall, Roden Noel, Alfred Austin, lord de
Tabley, Thomas Ashe and Theodore Watts? One or two of these
had, in their day, great popularity, whether deserved or not; one
held the perilous premiership of the laurel; several occupied
important positions outside poetry and even outside literature
altogether. But they all have an interest of a peculiar kind
historically, because they may be said to be the first group born to
the full influence of Tennyson and Browning, whose appearances,
as poets, coincided with, or very slightly preceded, their own births.
Thomas Edward Brown--author of Fo'c'sle Yarns and a good
many other volumes of verse, collected and enlarged from MS
matter after his death—is not the easiest of the minor poets of
the later nineteenth century to survey with what has been called
a 'horizontal' view. Living, for the greater part of his life,
within what he certainly regarded as the 'black purgatorial rails'
of schoolmastership, he made of not a few of the boys who
emerged from the black-railed fold fervent disciples and fast
friends, whose voices, including the very forcible and peremptory
one of W. E. Henley, were loudly raised in his favour. Except
the short and remarkable yarn Betsy Lee, he published nothing
till he was over fifty ; but, later, he made his verse more accessible.
Nor could others, personally impartial, fail to discern in his work,
not merely when it was collected, but as isolated examples came
before them, a quite uncommon tone frequently, and, sometimes,
a suggestion of something more behind which might become not
merely uncommon but supreme.
1 To these, some would add Richard Garnett, best known as a librarian and, next
best, as a literary critic, editor, biographer and historian, but, also, a very skilful writer
of verse; David Gray, one of the numerous beneficiaries, and not the least deserving
of them, by the fund of pity and praise always open for poets, actual and possible, who
die young; Herman Charles Merivale, who, at least, must have a line of mention
for certain charming lyrics and sonnets, especially, in the latter kind, Thaisa's
Dirge; and John Nichol, professor of English literature at Glasgow, whose principal
work was done in prose, but who wrote a closet drama Hannibal, of no low rank
in the Philip van Artevelde class, and some lyrics which were both scholarly and
graceful.


## p. 195 (#211) ############################################

VI]
T. E. Brown
195
On the other hand, a thorough critical examination of his
work, conducted, so far as possible, with full allowance to himself
for his time and complete absence of what may be called 'temporal
prejudice’ on the part of the critic-assisted, likewise, by a careful
consideration of the special claims put forward for him, and
guarding almost more carefully against prejudice arising from
any particular statement of these claims—is not facile. One may
be repelled by some of these statements of claim, although Brown
is not responsible for them. There are to be found expressions
about him which would be exact enough, though a little en-
thusiastic in their exactness, if made about Dante. And Brown
is not Dante.
What he is, is excessively difficult to define without those
limitations and reservations which are apt to revolt uncritical
minds; but, with not too much indulgence in them, it is possible
enough. About his general poetic kind, there is no difficulty at
all: every one who has appreciated him has seen that he is of the
mystics of the company of his namesake Sir Thomas in prose,
of Vaughan, Blake and, to no small extent, Wordsworth in verse.
But, with this mysticism, he combines a vivid and, sometimes,
almost familiar realism of expression and choice of subject, which
Wordsworth did not reach and which none of the others attempted.
In this combination, having much less power of expression than of
thought, he sometimes breaks down. He is often strangely desti-
tute of sheer clarity, as in The Peel Life Boat, a defect which,
probably, prevented its appearance in Henley’s Lyra Heroica. It
seems to have been commissioned for this book; but Henley,
who, with all his admiration for Brown, was, as an editor,
utterly autocratic and quite free from respect of persons, must
have seen that it wanted the indefinable that! ' In his nar-
rative poems, the following now of Tennyson now of Browning
is so unmistakable and so continuous as to be teasing; and the
unconventionalities' in diction and thought which have largely
caused his popularity, such as it is, and his relatively greater
influence, are not safe from very damaging comment. The
outburst against his ‘Englishwoman on the Pincian' which
concludes Roman Women is only the 'platitude reversed' of
Tourguénieff's pitiless and fatal epigram on later nineteenth-
century esprit-and as conventional itself as the conventionalities
it objurgates. The satire on commonplace orthodoxy in A Sermon
at Church on Good Friday is as stale as its subject, and in hope-
lessly bad taste. One could find many other faults in Brown.
>
13-2


## p. 196 (#212) ############################################

196
Lesser Poets
[CH.
His dialect pieces-agreeable in one or two instances-force on
one by their bulk the fact that the lingo itself is not a real dialect,
but an ugly and bastard patois or, rather, jargon of broken-down
Celtic and the vulgarest English. His 'idylls,' such as Mary
Quayle and Bella Gorry, are fine and affecting stories, which
would have been much better in prose.
And yet Brown is a poet-and, at times, much more than
a minor poet. No one who knows what poetry is can turn the
leaves of the most convenient and accessible selection-collection
of his poems—that in The Golden Treasury series—with any fair
attention and remain in doubt of this. The remarkable Opifex,
in which he confesses the limitations of his own powers, justifies
his claims in poetry; and there are dozens of other lyrics which
will appeal—some to some tastes and some to others—but all
to those fortunate ones to whom all poetry that is poetry is
welcome. White Foxglove in one vein ; The Sinking of the
Victoria in another; Risus Dei, and, as comments on it, in the
poet's extremer style, the Dartmoor pieces, in a third ; The
Prayer, perhaps likely to be the most popular of all with the most
different people—and the most seventeenth-century in tone; The
Schooner, an early instance of the modern violent style, but a fine
one; others too many to mention occur as specimens. And one
great thing may be added to the right side of Brown's balance-
sheet—that he is singularly free from monotony--in fact, he might
have lost in freshness of appeal if he had gained in formal mastery
of expression.
A much greater poet at his best than Brown, like him most
imperfectly known or knowable during his lifetime and nearly
contemporary, still only accessible in selection and probably never
to be studied in completeness (it is believed that he destroyed
much of his work) was Richard Watson Dixon, canon of Carlisle
for many years, a strenuous worker in the two northern dioceses,
an ecclesiastical historian of the first rank, and an early member
of the original literary offshoot at Oxford of the pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood. Brown was not exactly 'a man of this world, but
he was very much more so than Dixon; and, while Brown largely
took the Wordsworthian side of poetry, Dixon was wholly on the
Coleridgean. He published several volumes most of which are
extremely difficult to obtain ; and the reader who cannot easily
frequent large public libraries must judge him from Mano, his
longest poem, from the so-called Last Poems and, best of
all, from the Poems selected and prefaced by or under the


## p. 197 (#213) ############################################

6
VI] Richard Watson Dixon
197
supervision of the present poet laureate—to which volume one
would gladly see added all or most of what has not been selected
there but is still available. In this case, the editor has been
a more austere man than Henley was in regard to his friend
pronouncing his poetry not to be defended against charges of
inequality, poor and faulty passages and, above all, want of
finish. Each of those charges may, undoubtedly, be advanced,
and, to some extent, supported. And even Mary Coleridge, a
great champion of Dixon and probably, as has been said above,
not a little influenced by him, admitted, in nine probable readers
out of ten, a first feeling of 'disappointment'—though she
promised them a change first to 'surprise' and then to 'ecstasy. '
But, if not in every tenth, in some proportion or other, the
unpleasant first step will be happily escaped, unless the reading
begins with Mano, in which case there is some danger that the
surprise will be rarely, and the ecstasy never, reached. That
longest and most ambitious of his attempts contains beautiful
passages; and, even as a whole, it leaves an impression of
somewhat reluctant and extorted esteem. But there is too much
history in it; the history, moreover, is of a period (the tenth and
eleventh centuries) which is difficult to make interesting unless
it is treated with a purely romantic neglect of history itself; the
characters hardly grasp the reader; and the audacious attempt
to use terza rima for a really long poem in English fails, as it has
always failed and as it probably always will fail. Love's Con-
solation-much shorter, but still extending to some 400 or 500
lines—is a beautiful but incoherent pre-Raphaelite dream, the
expression of which too often follows those early Keatsian lapses
which the greater pre-Raphaelites avoided.
It is only as a lyric poet that Dixon shows his full power; but,
sometimes, in this capacity, his command over strangeness and his
ability to transport are all but supreme. It was said above that
Brown has a Blake-like quality ; but Dixon's Fallen Rain is
Blake himself, not a pastiche or an imitation but a poem, Blake's
authorship of which, if it had been found anonymous with a
possibility of its having been somehow saved from Tatham's crime,
no one would have doubted for a moment. As it is, the resem-
blance is almost bewildering. The Feathers of the Willow has been
recognised by almost all competent critics who have come across
it as unique in its peculiar exemplification of the combined
pictorial and musical appeal of poetry. Less perfect, because
longer, but, as being longer, somewhat more imposing and varied,


## p. 198 (#214) ############################################

198
Lesser Poets
[ch.
a
is To Shadow, a poem, in parts, more like Beddoes than it is like
any other poet, but, again, absolutely free from plagiarism or even
suggestion. Perhaps the greatest of all—to use the superlative
and the adjective itself carefully—is the Ode on Advancing Age.
In form, this is of the most apparently irregular Pindaric, though
every apparent irregularity may be justified on the strictest
prosodic principles. But this form is not in the least intruded,
so as to obscure; it is, on the contrary, suited in the highest degree-
as, also, are the diction, the imagery and the whole body and garment
—to the strange spirit of the piece. Everyone knows Lamb's
description of the two great dirges in Shakespeare and Webster
as, the one of the water watery, the other of the earth earthy.
No other poet in any passage occurring to the memory of the
present writer, has, in the same way, saturated a piece of verse-
itself almost a dirge--as Dixon has done here with the melancholy
essence of sea and shore and sea-birds' cry, or with any similar
conjuring of scene and sound and atmosphere. These, perhaps, are
Dixon's very best things; but there are many others not far short
of them, while for passages of sheer word-painting none of his
friends surpassed him. There has been some discussion on the
point whether he can be called a Wordsworthian or not; and
a settlement of this, perhaps, is not much to be hoped for, because
the genuine impressions of what is and is not Wordsworthian differ
in competent critics more widely than is the case in regard to the
essential quality of any other poet. But it is, at least, a testimony
to absence of monotony in a writer that, with an entire freedom
from mere imitation, he should suggest Wordsworth at one time
and Keats at another, while the lyrics specially cited above are
quite different from both and belong, in an equally independent
manner, to the traditions of Blake or of Coleridge. On the whole,
Dixon may be allowed to be not an easy poet to understand, and
one in respect of whom it is necessary, in critical slang, to get the
atmosphere' before appreciation is possible. No doubt, this is
what Mary Coleridge meant. But, when it has been achieved, or,
in the fortunate cases where the reader drops into the proper place
and attitude at once, there is not likely to be much quarrel as to
the quality of the poetry.
Sebastian Evans, who was born in the same year with Brown,
but whose favourite subjects were nearer Dixon's, was a younger
brother of the well-known antiquary Sir John Evans and also of
Anne Evans, whose verse has been noticed already? She was a
1 See p. 177.


## p. 199 (#215) ############################################

vi]
"Owen Meredith'
199
friend of Thackeray and, for some time, an inmate of his house,
where she may have derived the suggestion of one of the least
unsatisfactory definitions of humour ever attempted—'thinking
in jest while feeling in earnest. ' Her brother Sebastian was
himself possessed of the quality; but (which may surprise some
who do not possess it) he was, among a variety of pursuits—art,
literature of other kinds, journalism, politics—an enthusiastic
medievalist, as was shown in his poetical and other writings, from
the early Brother Fabian's Manuscripts to his late presentation of
The High History of the Holy Graal, including the part to be found
in French and Welsh but not in Malory or in most modern adapta-
tions of the story. The thinking in jest and the feeling in earnest
of his sister's words are both present in Evans's poetry; and they
find frequent expression which, if not exactly consummate, is
distinct and attractive. Of the rather numerous attempts at re-
telling the story of St Brandan and Judas his, if the most deliberately
quaint, is one of the most original ; and Shadows is a poem which
would not disgrace the signature of any poet.
Three charges-heavy and, if fully substantiated, damaging if not
even damning—have been brought by some against Robert, second
lord and first earl Lytton, viceroy of India and author of a long
series of books in various kinds of verse. It is the opinion of others
that they cannot be fully substantiated; and that there are in
Owen Meredith,' as he called himself at first, especially in his
earliest and latest work, counterbalancing merits which have been
too much disregarded by critics. But dangerous defects, laying
him open to the charges referred to, cannot be denied. The first
and vaguest is something like a repetition of accusations constantly
brought against his father-accusations of unreality, affectation,
pose, theatricality and so forth. That he does not always avoid the
suggestion of such things may be granted : that he was able to
avoid them and frequently did so may be affirmed. With regard
to the second charge—that of plagiarism, a somewhat similar
position may be taken up. There is, undoubtedly, a good deal
more echo of other men's work in ‘Owen Meredith' than was
either necessary or wise. But, as this echoing was always of work
generally known, the writer could never possibly hope to escape
detection or to pass off what was not his own as his own—which
is the essence of plagiarism—and the habit, in fact, was only an
incident or item of the third count, which cannot be denied at all,
and which really contains within itself almost everything that can
justly be said against lord Lytton as a poet. This concerns his


## p. 200 (#216) ############################################

200
[CH.
Lesser Poets
enormous, and almost fatal, fluency. He did not live to be an old
man; and his life was full of vocations and avocations of all kinds.
Yet, the bulk of his work in verse would be unusually large for
a man who had as little else to do as Wordsworth or Tennyson,
and who had lived as long as either. It was said that, even when
he corrected his work, he was sure to recoup himself for any
omissions by manifold insertions; and he had a fancy for extensive
verse-novels, such as Lucile and Glenaveril. His really brilliant
satiric-epic-fantasy King Poppy, which was posthumously published
after he had been writing and rewriting it for twenty years, would
be much better if it were half the length. Yet, from the early
Wanderer to the again posthumous collection of lyrics called
Marah, which contains some of his very best work, there is
constant evidence that, when some invisible mentor seized him
and forced him to concentrate his powers, they were equal to
the composition of real poetry of a high class. The piece variously
called Astarte and Fata Morgana in The Wanderer, and that
entitled Selenites (though a slight licence is taken with the quantity
of the word) in Marah, are, perhaps, the very best of all; but there
are scores nearly as good. A Love Letter, which has been the
most general favourite and which opens admirably, would have
gained by losing half its forty-two stanzas. For those who do not
insist upon lyric, not a few passages and some pieces in Chronicles
and Characters, Fables in Song and After Paradise ought to give
a satisfaction which, if they have, up to the time, only thought
of lord Lytton as a flashy Byronist, born out of due time, will
surely make them change their minds.
Whether Edwin, later Sir Edwin, Arnold can be called a more
popular poet than lord Lytton is a question which might occasion
logomachy ; but he certainly escaped the unfavourable criticism
which, in this way and that, 'Owen Meredith'attracted. Although
‘
we do not now write Arts of Preserving Health or discussions of
the sugar cane in verse, there has never failed a public for poetry
which, as the naïve phrase goes, 'tells you something'; and The
Light of Asia, Sir Edwin's best known poem, gained vogue as
an easy version of what some said was a very exoteric Buddhism.
Despite active employment, first in educational matters and then
in journalism, he produced a good deal of verse on many different
subjects and in many different forms. Some of it obtained con-
siderable praise, while, on the other hand, there are critics who are
seldom able to perceive true poetry in anything that Sir Edwin
wrote-his blank verse appearing to them fluently insignificant and


## p. 201 (#217) ############################################

VI]
Lewis Morris
201
his lyrics, with one remarkable exception', lacking life, wanting in
intensity and in anything but rather commonplace music.
There was, however, never so much difference in his case between
the public and, at first, a few, but, latterly, nearly all, critics as
occurred in the case of Lewis Morris, who, also, was later knighted.
Lewis Morris has been called 'the Tupper of the later nineteenth
century'; but the comparison is unfair in both ways, except so far
as it concerns the just mentioned difference between public and
critics, and the extraordinary vogue of more or less worthless verse.
The historic circumstances of the two are curiously and dis-
tinguishingly different. Tupper, as has been said above, obtained
his popularity in a dead season of poetry with matter of, at least,
unusual form. Lewis Morris, on the other hand, began when
poetry, especially through Tennyson's work, had again been
popularised, and even when new movements in advance had
stimulated the appetite but, in some cases, had shocked or puzzled
the taste of the average reader. The French, if one remembers
rightly, long ago manufactured out of Defoe's masterpiece a
Robinson des enfants. Lewis Morris set himself to be a Tennyson
des enfants, and was justified of a considerable number of the
grown-up children whom he addressed. Songs of Two Worlds,
which first appeared in three series, and the more ambitious Epic
of Hades which followed, deserved the title of perfect works of art
in one sense only perhaps ; but they certainly deserved it in that.
They hit the object at which they were immediately aimed; though,
beyond all doubt, their success helped to provoke in others a
reaction of taste which has dominated the last thirty years and
more and which has most curiously and uncritically affected the
popular estimate of Tennyson himself. Often, when one reads
uncomplimentary remarks on Idylls of the King, one thinks
that the critic, by some mistake, has come upon a copy of The
Epic of Hades with a wrong lettering on the back.
The means by which Lewis Morris hit the vulgar and some, at
first, of those who should not have come under that designation,
were the strictest 'propriety of subject and expression, a modern
and liberal tone towards questions of politics, religion and philo-
sophy; an entire avoidance of all obscurity, preciousness or
eccentricity of language; and the observance, respectable till it
1
1 This is the poem called He and She, the subject being a living husband who
sits by the side of his dead wife and implores spiritual communion. It has been very
highly admired by some ; and, though not without flatnesses here and there, really has
something of the intensity and the music generally denied to his poetry above.


## p. 202 (#218) ############################################

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

## p. 204 (#220) ############################################

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