No More Learning

Two years later came the third series of Poems and Ballads. In
its lighter pieces and especially in such ballads as The Jacobite's
Lament, in which the calm melancholy of an exile like him who
'pined by Arno for his lovelier Tees' is touched with the passion
of romantic sorrow, there is much of the accustomed freshness of
spirit; but the chief effort of the volume, the poem written to com-
memorate the tercentenary of the Armada, shows fatigue, and the
force which drives its galloping and thundering rhythms is more
mechanical than that which, at a touch, set in motion the ardent
measures of the choruses of Erechtheus and the ode to Athens.
At the same time, the falling off noticeable in the later volumes,
Astrophel and A Channel Passage, and his two last plays, The
Sisters, a drama of modern life more ingenious in design than satis-
factory in execution, and Rosamund Queen of the Lombards, is only
the decline incidental to growing age. Loyal to his old enthusiasms,
he was lover of freedom and patriot to the end; and the last poems
of his life, though their insular tone may have astonished some
of his old friends, gave utterance to his conviction that England,
like Athens of old, was the safeguard of the world's liberty.
In addition to his poetry, Swinburne published from 1868
onwards several volumes of literary criticism. His Essays and
Studies and Miscellanies bear the most striking testimony to his
comprehensive knowledge and love of poetry and to his scholarly
insight. Of his monographs upon individual writers, A Study of
Shakespeare takes the first place, not merely as a panegyric in
eloquent prose, but as the most stimulating and original contribution
made by an English poet to the understanding of the greatest master
of English song. His various essays upon the dramatists of Shake-
speare's age, a subject always congenial to him, have the aspect
of final pronouncements. His criticism, however, was too much
charged with the white heat of enthusiasm to be always judicious:
his praise, always lavish, was, at times, extravagant, and his con-
demnation of his bêtes noires knew no measure. His admirable
estimate of Wordsworth in one of the most elaborate of his essays
was the fruit of calm and measured judgment: no greater contrast
to this could be found than the scorn poured, in the same essay, upon
Byron, whose negligent trifling with the gift of verse and occasional
vulgarity of execution were, to Swinburne, inexcusable faults with-
out compensation. Thinking and writing in superlatives of praise
and blame were natural to him. In the genius of Shakespeare,


## p. 137 (#153) ############################################

v] Prose Criticism : General Characteristics 137
Shelley and Victor Hugo, 'God stood plain for adoration': to write
of their work was to express the most cherished tenets of a creed
of which they were the deities. For those who failed when judged
by his standard, who touched the shrine of song with unworthy
hands, who misused or paltered with their talent, Swinburne had
no mercy: they were the enemies of his creed, to be denounced
with the energy of a fanatic. Thus, while his praise constantly
glows with the rapture of lyric devotion and his blame draws
freely upon the resources of irony and epigram, the unvaryingly
rhapsodical tone of his prose, its over-copious periods and unre-
strained vocabulary are not a little exhausting to his readers.
The 'fury in the words' is not seldom out of proportion to the
value of the words themselves, and the insight of the poet is
dulled by the excessive protestations of the enthusiast.
When Swinburne died in 1909, England lost the most fertile
lyric poet of the Victorian era, whose unequalled versatility in the
use of lyric form was amazing in its brilliance. Receptive of mani-
fold influences, classical, English and foreign, he reproduced them
in a style which was wholly individual. With all his fiercely
cherished prejudices and his unsparing condemnation of the
dogmas and opinions held most sacred by his countrymen, few
poets have been more catholic in their tastes or more ready to
recognise and applaud sincerity of purpose in other men's work.
An implacable enemy, he was the most devoted of friends; his
cordial admiration for the work of his brother poets was as
generous as the selflessness with which Scott praised his contem-
poraries. His earliest volume was inscribed to Rossetti; Christina
Rossetti received the dedication of A Century of Roundels, William
Morris that of Astrophel, Theodore Watts-Dunton, the constant
companion of his later years, that of Tristram of Lyonesse and of
later poems. The first series of Poems and Ballads was dedicated
to Edward Burne-Jones, and the last volume of Swinburne's life
bore an inscription to the joint memory of Burne-Jones and
Morris, the painter and poet of old-world romance, united in life-
long brotherhood. In return, his simplicity of character and the
unswerving idealism to which he devoted his genius won the
admiration and affection of all who knew him. All, indeed, who
are aware that truth takes many and diverse forms and value the
sincere expression of conviction more than a tame acquiescence
in convention pay unconstrained honour to Swinburne's celebra-
tion of his ideals of liberty and justice, clothed in music which
is borne upon the wings of the wind and wails and rejoices, now


## p. 138 (#154) ############################################

138
[CH.
Christina Rossetti
loud with delight in its beauty and strength and now threatening
or plaintive in its anger or sadness, like the voice of the sea.
The first number of The Germ contained, as well as Rossetti's
My Sister's Sleep, a sonnet by his brother William Michael and
two lyrics by his sister Christina Georgina Rossetti. Christina,
born in 1830, produced her earlier work under the pseudonym
Ellen Alleyn. The two lyrics in question, Dream Land and
An End, are the natural outcome of a mind that instinctively
translates its passing dreams into music as faint and clear as the
horns of elf-land, such music as is heard at its perfection in the
lyrics of Shelley. A song, Oh roses for the flush of youth, in
the second number of The Germ, has the same unsought
grace. Together with this appeared the more elaborate A
Pause of Thought and A Testimony, the second of these founded
on the recurrent theme of Ecclesiastes and employing scriptural
language with the skill and ease manifested by Rossetti in
The Burden of Nineveh and by Swinburne in countless poems.
Unlike her brother, whose sympathy with religion was purely
artistic, and still more unlike Swinburne, whose attitude to
the orthodox conceptions of Christianity was openly hostile,
Christina Rossetti was, to the end of her life, a devout Christian,
finding the highest inspiration for her song in her faith and
investing Anglican ideals of worship with a mystical beauty.
Her volumes of collected verse, beginning with Goblin Market
and other poems in 1862 and ending with New Poems, collected
in 1896, two years after her death, by her brother William,
are permeated, even when they deal with subjects not primarily
religious, with this devotional feeling. Goblin Market and The
Prince's Progress, her two chief narrative poems, are both, in
effect, allegories, the first obvious in its application, the second
capable of more than one interpretation, of the soul in its struggle
with earthly allurements. Her sequences of sonnets, Monna
Innominata and Later Life, are filled with her sense of the
claims of divine love over human passion. While her brother,
in The Blessed Damozel, drew the picture of an immortal spirit
yearning for the love it has left behind and translating the joys
of heaven into concrete imagery, Christina Rossetti embodies the
desire of the soul on earth to climb
the stairs that mount above,
Stair after golden skyward stair
To city and to sea of glass,


## p. 139 (#155) ############################################

a
6
v]
Her Lyric Verse
139
and the heaven which she sees is the mystical city of The
Revelation of S. John. In her Martyrs' Song, the blessed ones
who ‘lean over the golden bar' have no regret for earth : amid
the welcoming angels, painted in verse that translates into words
the visions wrought in tapestry and stained glass by Burne-Jones
and Morris, they find 'the rest which fulfils desire' in the light
of the divine presence. Such verse has a natural kinship with the
religious poetry of the seventeenth century, and especially with
George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, where their excessive
ingenuity in metaphor gives place to spontaneous lyric fervour.
The clear notes of Herbert's Easter Song and the calm rapture
of Vaughan's 'My soul, there is a country'find their closest echo
in Christina Rossetti's' devout songs, and she adopted instinctively
the free metrical forms of rimed stanza in which they clothed
their thought.
While all her thoughts were drawn together towards one
central ideal and her verse was ruled by the supreme convic-
tion that
in la sua volontade è nostra pace,
she expressed herself with a variety of metre and rhythm and
a musical power unequalled by any other English poetess. If she
had less intellectual force and a more confined range of subject than
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who certainly, by virtue of her more
liberal sympathies, makes an appeal to a wider audience, Christina
Rossetti unquestionably had the advantage in melodiousness.
Goblin Market, written in paragraphs of varying length with short
lines and rimes binding them together at irregular intervals, is an
example of a form which, adapted by a careless writer even with
considerable imagination, might easily become mere rhythmical
prose. While the language is of the most simple kind and the
lines run freely into one another, the music of the rimes, half
unheard, is, nevertheless, strongly felt. Whether moving in these
lightly fettered cadences or in the stricter confinement of the
stanza, her lyric verse is always remarkable for its combination
of strength and seriousness of sentiment with simplicity of
expression. Mystic though she was, her thought never found
refuge in complicated or obscure language, but translated itself
into words with the clearness and definiteness which were among
the aims of the pre-Raphaelite associates of her girlhood. In
such short bursts of song as A Birthday, simile and coloured
phrase came to her aid, without effort on her part, to adorn a
crescendo which rises to a climax of innocent happiness. Her


## p. 140 (#156) ############################################

140
Christina Rossetti
[CH.
A Christmas Carol cannot be matched among Christmas songs
for its union of childlike devotion and pathos with pictorial
directness : Morris's 'Outlanders, whence come ye last ? ' and
Swinburne's "Three damsels in the queen's chamber' are not
less beautiful and are more elaborately pictorial, but they are
designedly archaic in style and are without her earnestness and
concentration of feeling. It is true that there are poems by
Christina Rossetti in which her sense of the necessity of sim-
plicity is too apparent, either in the intrusion of too homely
words or in occasional metrical weakness. Her ballads of every-
day life, such as Maude Clare and Brandons Both, inevitably
recall, to their own disadvantage, the successes of Tennyson in the
same field. On the other hand, where her imagination pursued
a higher path, as in the allegorical visions of A Ballad of Boding,
the note which she sounded was clear and unfaltering. In the
third of her Old and New Year Ditties, the famous 'Passing
away,' she showed herself no less capable than Swinburne of
wedding appropriately majestic music to her theme, varying the
cadence of her verse upon the groundwork of a single sound,
the passing bell which is heard at the end of each line, and
gradually relieving the melancholy of her opening passage, until,
in the last notes, new hope is heard. The range of her verse was,
naturally, somewhat limited by her preoccupation with religious
subjects. Contemporary movements touched her lightly, and it
was seldom that, as in the two poems entitled The German-French
Campaign, she referred to them. If this aloofness from the
world precludes her from an uncontested claim to the position
sometimes given to her as the greatest of English poetesses, no
religious poet of the nineteenth century, even if we take into
account the brilliant but more turbid genius of Francis Thompson,
can be said to challenge comparison with her whose ‘shrine
of holiest-hearted song' Swinburne approached with reverent
admiration of her single-heartedness and purity of purpose.
To the group of poets treated in this chapter may be added
Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, who was born in 1844
and died in 1881. His working life, from 1861 to his death, was
spent as an assistant in the British museum, chiefly amid sur-
roundings far removed from the themes of his verse.
friend of Rossetti and of Ford Madox Brown and married the
sister of another poet, Philip Bourke Marston. French poetry,
however, was the prevailing influence which guided his sensitive
He was a


## p. 141 (#157) ############################################

v]
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
141
and highly uncertain talent, and the English verse to which his
own is most nearly related, though at a considerable distance, is
that of Swinburne. In the three volumes which contain his best,
as well as his weakest, work, An Epic of Women, Lays of France,
founded on the lays of Marie de France, and Music and Moon-
light, he frequently adopted lyric forms which Swinburne had
used in Poems and Ballads. Sometimes, as in the were-wolf
story, Bisclavaret, which is in the stanza of The Leper, this
justifies itself, but The Fair Maid and the Sun, in the stanza
of Laus Veneris, is merely pretty, and the obvious following of
Dolores in The Disease of the Soul is a signal failure. O'Shaugh-
nessy, with a temperament which induced him to overload with
sensuous imagery the verse of An Epic of Women, a series of
lyric episodes with a too ambitious title, had little of the gift of
self-criticism. The easy and graceful stanzas, 'We are the music-
makers' and the echoing melodies, with their reminiscence of
Edgar Allan Poe, of The Fountain of Tears are worthy of their
place in most of the modern anthologies. Occasional pieces, too,
have the sudden magic effect of which Beddoes's lyrics hold the
secret. The story of Chaitivel in Lays of France contains a song
in the pleasant and effortless stanza of which Samuel Daniel's
Ulisses and the Syren is the best English model. All these pieces,
if they do not belong to the highest class of poetry, have their
own charm and furnish abundant proof of their author's keen
appreciation of musical sound. On the other hand, his ear in
the poem called Love's Eternity was hopelessly at fault and the
versification is positively slovenly. A lover of verse, with a
somewhat restricted range of theme and without strikingly original
methods of treatment, O'Shaughnessy's 'heaven-sent moments'
were few. His higher flights, as in An Epic of Women, were
restricted by excess of heavy ornament; on lower planes, he
moved more easily, but his tripping measures were hampered
by faults of harmony and little affectations of phrase. The
substance of his best pieces is immaterial, and their value is
their mellifluous sweetness of sound. As such, they are casual
triumphs in a field of which he never obtained perfect command.
1


## p. 142 (#158) ############################################

142
[ch.
Edward FitzGerald
II
EDWARD FITZGERALD
As one who found the freest current for his delicate and
impressionable genius in the translation and adaptation of the
works of others, Edward FitzGerald stands as far aloof from the
ordinary activities of the literature of his day as his life was
remote from that of the world in general. He was the third son
of John Purcell, of Bredfield hall, Suffolk, where he was born on
31 March 1809. When, in 1818, Mrs Purcell's father died, the
family assumed his name and arms. At king Edward VI's school
at Bury St Edmunds, which he entered in 1821, Edward FitzGerald
was a contemporary of James Spedding, John Mitchell Kemble
and William Bodham Donne. The friendships thus begun were
continued at Cambridge, and afterwards. For Spedding's scholar-
ship, FitzGerald cherished an affectionate admiration, with some
regret at its devotion to a purpose with which he had no sympathy,
and the series of letters to Fanny Kemble, the last of which was
written less than three weeks before his death, recalls his friend-
ship with her brother. He entered Trinity college, Cambridge, in
February 1826. Tennyson did not come up till 1828, and does not
appear to have met the ‘Old Fitz,' addressed, many years later, in
the proem to Tiresias, until they both had left Cambridge; but, of
Tennyson's immediate contemporaries, Thackeray, W. H. Thomp-
son and John Allen, afterwards archdeacon of Salop, were among
FitzGerald's intimates at Trinity. He took an ordinary degree
in 1830. After a short visit to Paris, where he had already spent
some time with his family in his early boyhood, he returned to
England and gradually settled down to a quiet life in his native
county, which, with the course of years, became practically that
of a recluse. Its uneventful story of commerce with books, varied
by an occasional visit from a friend, brief journeys to London,
becoming rarer and more distasteful as time went on, and boating
expeditions on the estuary of the Deben, is told in his letters,
a series extending over fifty-one years and remarkable for their
naturalness of style, vivacious humour and keen literary criticism,
strongly tinged with the individual prejudices of an independent
student unswayed by public opinion. He made his home, first at
Boulge near Woodbridge, and afterwards at Woodbridge itself.
Woodbridge was also the home of Bernard Barton, the friend


## p. 143 (#159) ############################################

v] Translations from Calderon 143
of Charles Lamb; after Barton's death in 1849, FitzGerald
married his daughter and aided her in the publication of a
selection from Barton's poems, writing a short biography which
forms its preface. Out of a correspondence upon the topography
of the battle-field of Naseby, where FitzGerald's father owned
property, arose a friendship with Carlyle, while among men of
letters with whom he exchanged views in later life were Lowell
and Charles Eliot Norton. He died on 14 June 1883 at Bredfield
rectory near Woodbridge, while on a visit to George Crabbe, the
grandson of a poet for whose memory FitzGerald's devotion was
expressed in his Readings from Crabbe, compiled in 1879.
Of work which was entirely original, FitzGerald left little.
The charming verses, written at Naseby in the spring of 1831
under the influence of 'the merry old writers of more manly times,'
and printed in Hone's Year-Book under the title The Meadows
in Spring, were thought, at their first appearance, to be the work
of Charles Lamb and were welcomed by their supposed author
with good-humoured envy. Diffidence of his own powers and
slowness in composition prevented FitzGerald from rapid pub-
lication. It was not until 1851 that the dialogue Euphranor
appeared, a discourse upon youth and systems of education set
in the scenery of Cambridge, amid the early summer flowering of
college gardens and the measured pulse of racing oars. ' Its
limpid transparency of style was not achieved without an effort :
in 1846, when FitzGerald was writing it, he alluded to his diffi-
culties with the task in a letter to his friend Edward Cowell,
and its ease and clearness, like those of Tennyson's poetry,
appear to have been the fruit of constant polish and revision.
This was followed in 1852 by Polonius, a collection of aphorisms,
wise saws and modern instances,' with a humorously apologetic
preface. Meanwhile, probably some years before the publication
of Euphranor, he had been attracted to Spanish literature, in
which Cowell, a master of many languages, gave him some
assistance. In 1853, he published Six Dramas of Calderon, free
translations in blank verse and prose in which he endeavoured,
by methods fully explained in his preface, to reproduce the sub-
stance of the selected plays, while suppressing such details as
seemed otiose or foreign to English thought. Following the
general course of Calderon's plots and selecting the essential
points in his dialogue with much skill, he had no hesitation in
diverging, especially where he was tempted by soliloquies, from
the text and in altering portions of the action to suit his own


## p. 144 (#160) ############################################

144
Edward FitzGerald
[ch.
>
taste. One has only to compare the soliloquy of Don Juan Roca
in The Painter of his own Dishonour at the sight of the sleeping
Serafina with the original passage to see how the mental argument
in Calderon, with its direct summary of the facts of the situation,
is transmuted by FitzGerald, with added imagery, into language
of indirect reflection and allusion, in which such facts are taken
for granted without reference. Although he had little taste for
the elder English dramatists, apart from Shakespeare, his verse,
always lucid and free from the turbidity in which their style
was frequently involved, has much of the flow, the tendency to
hendecasyllabic lines and the fondness for radiant and brightly
coloured simile and metaphor characteristic of Beaumont, Fletcher
and Massinger. Such qualities made FitzGerald's translations
eminently readable for their own sake. In spite of their cold re-
ception by critics who preferred something more literal, he was able
to write in 1857, 'I find people like that Calderon book'; and, about
1858, he began translations of the two most famous of Calderon's
dramas. Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of and The Mighty
Magician bear only a general resemblance to their original.
FitzGerald regarded Calderon as too closely tied to the conven-
tional requirements of the Spanish stage; the machinery which
bound the main and secondary plots together, provided theatrical
situations and introduced the inevitable gracioso with his antics
and proverbial or anecdotal philosophy, creaked too audibly to
please him. Therefore, he confined himself to the main story of
both plays, heightening or tempering the situations as suited his
taste, reducing the part of the gracioso in one case and practically
eliminating it in the other. He justly considered that there was
'really very great Skill in the Adaptation, and Remodelling of'
The Mighty Magician: the part of Lucifer, Calderon's Demonio,
is, on the whole, more effective than in the original, where, at any
rate to an English reader, it is somewhat lacking in imaginative
power, and for the frigid, if forcible, dialectic of the scene in which
Cipriano uses the tempter's art against him and extorts his admis-
sion of the superior power of the Dios de los cristianos, FitzGerald
substituted a more impassioned dialogue rising to a more dramatic
climax. Similarly, in Such Stuf as Dreams are Made of, the
contrast between the philosophic and brutal elements in the
character of Segismundo is softened so as to give more consistency
to his bewilderment amid his sudden changes of fortune, and to
lead up to the climax with a greater show of probability ; but
it was the extreme of licence to transfer the famous soliloquy


## p. 145 (#161) ############################################

v] Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam 145
at the end of the second act of La Vida es Sueño from Segis-
mundo to his gaoler and to depress it to a less prominent position
in the play.
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus and the two Oedipus tragedies
of Sophocles were also adapted for English readers by FitzGerald
with considerable freedom. Oedipus at Thebes and Oedipus at
Athens were works of the last years of his life, and he was content
to supply the choruses from Potter's translation. But the work which
has given his name its most enduring celebrity was the Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyám, of which the first edition appeared in 1859.
The stimulating influence of Cowell led him to take an interest
in Persian poetry. In 1855, he began his version of the Salámán
and Absál of Jámí, the first poem which he read in the original,
and, in 1862, he completed A Bird's-eye View of Farid-Uddin
Attar's Bird-Parliament. These, however, were mere experi-
ments. With the detached quatrains of Omar Khayyam, each
a poem in itself linked to the rest by community of thought and
subject, he felt a closer sympathy. During a visit to Bedfordshire
in May 1857, he read over Omar 'in a Paddock covered with
Butterflies and brushed by a delicious Breeze, while a dainty
racing Filly of W. Browne's came startling up to wonder and
snuff' about him, as he turned quatrains into medieval Latin rimes
and found his author, one of the lighter Shadows among the
Shades, perhaps, over which Lucretius presides so grimly,' breathe
'a sort of Consolation to him. The result of these ruminations
was an English poem of seventy-five quatrains founded upon the
selection and combination of rubáiyát; reproducing the form of
the original but weaving its isolated pieces into a continuous train
of thought. A new edition, in 1868, in which the stanzas were
increased to 110, completely remodelled the poem of 1859, to the
disadvantage of the bold imagery of the opening quatrain, but,
in other respects, with great felicity; and this, after further but
less drastic alterations, which rearranged and reduced the stanzas
to 101, formed the basis of the later editions of 1872 and 1879.
A comparison of FitzGerald's poem with earlier and later trans-
lations of Omar into more literal prose and verse proves the
extreme freedom with which he handled his original, transferring
thoughts and images from their actual context to clothe them in
a dress which is entirely his own. At the same time, his main
object, as in the case of Calderon, was to present, in a connected
form intelligible to English minds, the characteristics of Omar's
thought, his pondering upon life and death, the eternal mysteries
10
E. L. XIII,
CH. V.


## p. 146 (#162) ############################################

146
[CH. V
Edward FitzGerald
of the whence, why and whither of man and the influence of
external and irresponsible power upon him, and his resort to the
pleasures of the moment as a refuge from the problem. He did
not shirk the freer speculations of his author: 'I do not wish
to show Hamlet at his maddest : but mad he must be shown,
or he is no Hamlet at all. ' Characteristically avoiding audacious
expressions which have been regarded by some students of Omar
as the esoteric utterances of an ultra-refined mysticism, he gave
a turn to the culminating stanza preceding the coda of the piece,
the appeal to heaven to take, as well as give, man's forgiveness,
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd,
which suggests an impiety undiscovered by other translators, but
not out of keeping with the tone of some of the numerous rubái-
yát omitted by him. FitzGerald habitually concealed his own
thoughts on the mysteries which perplexed Omar; and the
warmth of religious enthusiasm which he infused into the some-
what formal atmosphere of El Magico Prodigioso might, con-
sidering its gratuitous copiousness, quite as reasonably as a single
stanza of his Rubáiyát, be taken to express his convictions.
Apart from the question of its contents, the singular beauty
and perfection of phrase in the Rubáiyát and the dignity and
melodiousness of its rhythm have earned it a permanent place
among the masterpieces of English lyric poetry. Its stanza was
a novelty which others, like Swinburne in his Laus Veneris, were
not slow to borrow. It is not FitzGerald's only claim to eminence,
for Euphranor and the translations from Calderon, to say nothing
of his letters, must always appeal to those who love polished sim-
plicity of style. But, in this one instance, his genius, which needed
external literary stimulus for complete expression, responded so
naturally to the call as to clothe its original in a form attractive
not merely to the connoisseur in style but to all who recognise the
true relation of poetry to human life.


## p. 147 (#163) ############################################

CHAPTER VI
LESSER POETS OF THE MIDDLE AND LATER
NINETEENTH CENTURY
In taking up, and endeavouring to complete, the chapters on
poets? who, though not in general opinion attaining to the first
rank, have, at one time or another, enjoyed some considerable
amount of esteem or who, in that calculus of criticism which
disregards popularity, have deserved such esteem, the method
pursued will be, as it has been on former occasions, systematised,
to some extent, though avoiding arbitrary classification. The
number of verse-writers who fall to be mentioned, as representing
the middle and later generations of the last century, is very great:
and, even after careful sifting and the relegation of some to the
bibliography and others to silence altogether, will amount to a
round hundred. But it is not necessary to present them in
a mere throng or in simple catalogue, alphabetical or chrono-
logical, though, after some grouping, the last named method may
become necessary.
We may take, first, three very remarkable, though, in them-
selves, most dissimilar, representatives of the curious class which,
attaining, for a time, and not always losing, popularity of the
widest kind, is demurred to by critics and sometimes succumbs
totally, sometimes partially, to the demurrers. These are Macaulay,
Martin Farquhar Tupper and Philip James Bailey. The last named
will lead us, naturally enough, to a fairly definite group of which,
in a way, he was the leader: the so-called 'spasmodics' of the mid-
nineteenth century. That name or nickname, invented by Aytoun,
will, in the same fashion, introduce a numerous, and, in some cases,
excellent, class of satiric and humorous writers, in whom the
century, until quite its close, was specially rich. As a contrast,
the equally remarkable section of 'sacred' poets, headed by Keble
1 The poets excluded by the specification of this chapter are Tennyson, the
Brownings, Matthew Arnold, Kingsley, the Rossettis, William Morris, Swinburne,
James Thomson and O'Shaughnessy. For these, see ante and post.
2
>
1042


## p. 148 (#164) ############################################

148
[ch.
Lesser Poets
and Newman, may succeed these; and then we may take up the great
body of verse-writers of the other sex, though their ‘prioresses,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, are denied us'.
One or two smaller groups may present themselves for treatment
together; but the bulk of our subjects, though sometimes admitting
what may be called linked criticism, will have to follow mainly in
chronological order
The case of Macaulay's poetical work is a very peculiar and
a very instructive one in the history both of poetry and of criticism;
in fact, in the history, properly so-called, of literature generally.
The poems included in The Lays of Ancient Rome, though partly
printed at earlier dates, were collected and issued at a time when
poetry had, for years, sunk out of the popular esteem which it had
enjoyed during the first quarter of the century; and was only, for
the younger generation, rising again at the call of Tennyson.
Criticism was in a very similar position—the almost simultaneous
deaths of Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb having left no prominent
representatives of it except the scattered utterances of Coleridge's
son and the senescence of Leigh Hunt, the rather untrustworthy
and eccentric survivals of 'Christopher North' and De Quincey
and a numerus of very inferior and haphazard reviewers who had
not yet felt the influence of the new examples of criticism to be
set in the fifties by George Brimley and Matthew Arnold.
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.
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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


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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.
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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.


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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
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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,


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<
VI]
C. S.