A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) Part 11

Oh! exquisite malady of the soul, How hast thou marred me--

put the thing well. Those who have once tasted his poetry return, and probably, though they are never likely to be numerous, always when they have once tasted will return, to the visions and the melodies--

Of a dreamer who slumbers, And a singer who sings no more.

Another poet whose death brings him within our range, and who may be said to belong, with some striking differences of circ.u.mstance as well as individual genius, to the same school, was James Thomson, second of the name in English poetry, but a curious and melancholy contrast to that Epicurean animal, the poet of _The Seasons_. He was born at Port-Glasgow on 23rd November 1834, and was the son of a sailor. His parents being in poor circ.u.mstances, he obtained, as a child, a place in the Royal Caledonian Asylum, and, after a good education there, became an army schoolmaster--a post which he held for a considerable time. But Thomson's natural character was recalcitrant to discipline and distinguished by a morbid social jealousy. He gradually, under the influence of, or at any rate in company with, the notorious Charles Bradlaugh, adopted atheistic and republican opinions, and in 1862 an act of insubordination led to his dismissal from the army, for which he had long lost, if he ever had, any liking. It is also said that the death of a girl to whom he was pa.s.sionately attached had much to do with the development of the morbid pessimism by which he became distinguished.

For some time Thomson tried various occupations, being by turns a lawyer's clerk, a mining agent, and war correspondent of a newspaper with the Carlists. But even before he left the army he had, partly with Mr. Bradlaugh's help, obtained work on the press, and such income as he had during the last twenty years of his life was chiefly derived from it. He might undoubtedly have made a comfortable living in this way, for his abilities were great and his knowledge not small. But in addition to the specially poetical weakness of disliking "collar-work," he was hampered by the same intractable and morose temper which he had shown in the army, by the violence of his religious and political views, and lastly and most fatally by an increasing slavery to drink and chloral.

At last, in 1882, he--after having been for some time in the very worst health--burst a blood-vessel while visiting his friend the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston, and died in University College Hospital on 3rd June.

This melancholy story is to be found sufficiently reflected in his works. Those in prose, though not contemptible, neither deserve nor are likely to receive long remembrance, being for the most part critical studies, animated by a real love for literature and informed by respectable knowledge, but of necessity lacking in strict scholars.h.i.+p, distinguished by more acuteness than wisdom, and marred by the sectarian violence and narrowness of a small anti-orthodox clique. They may perhaps be not unfairly compared to the work of a clever but ill-conditioned schoolboy. The verse is very different. He began to write it early, and it chiefly appeared in Mr. Bradlaugh's _National Reformer_ with the signature "B. V.," the initials of "Bysshe Vanolis,"

a rather characteristic _nom de guerre_ which Thomson had taken to express his admiration for Sh.e.l.ley directly, and for Novalis by anagram.

Some of it, however, emerged into a wider hearing, and attracted the favourable attention of men like Kingsley and Froude. But Thomson did nothing of importance till 1874, when "The City of Dreadful Night"

appeared in the _National Reformer_, to the no small bewilderment probably of its readers. Six years later the poem was printed with others in a volume, quickly followed by a second, _Vane's Story_, _etc._ Thomson's melancholy death attracted fresh attention to him, and much--perhaps a good deal too much--of his writings has been republished since. His claims, however, must rest on a comparatively small body of work, which will no doubt one day be selected and issued alone. "The City of Dreadful Night" itself, incomparably the best of the longer poems, is a pessimist and nihilist effusion of the deepest gloom amounting to despair, but couched in stately verse of an absolute sincerity and containing some splendid pa.s.sages. With this is connected one of the latest pieces, the terrible "Insomnia." Of lighter strain, written when the poet could still be happy, are "Sunday at Hampstead"

and "Sunday up the River," "The Naked G.o.ddess," and one or two others; while other things, such as "The fire that filled my heart of old," must also be cited. Even against these the charge of a monotonous, narrow, and irrational misery has been brought. But what saves Thomson is the perfection with which he expresses, the negative and hopeless side of the sense of mystery, of the Unseen; just as Miss Rossetti expresses the positive and hopeful one. No two contemporary poets perhaps ever completed each other in a more curious way than this Bohemian atheist and this devout lady.

So far in this chapter the story of poetry, from Tennyson downwards, has been conducted in regular fas.h.i.+on, and by citing the princ.i.p.al names which represent the chief schools or sub-schools. But we must now return to notice a very considerable company of other verse-writers, without mention of whom this history would be wofully incomplete. Nor must it by any means be supposed that they are to be regarded invariably as const.i.tuting a "second cla.s.s." On the contrary, some of them are the equals, one or two the superiors, of Thomson or of O'Shaughnessy. But they have been postponed, either because they belong to schools of which the poets already mentioned are masters, to choruses of which others are the leaders, or because they show rather blended influences than a distinct and direct advance in the main poetical line of development.

Others again rank here, and not earlier, because they are of the second cla.s.s, or a lower one.

Of these, though he leaves a name certain to live in English literary history, if not perhaps quite in the way in which its author wished, is Martin Farquhar Tupper, who was born, in 1810, of a very respectable family in the Channel Islands, his father being a surgeon of eminence.

Tupper was educated at the Charterhouse and at Christ Church, and was called to the bar. But he gave himself up to literature, especially poetry or verse, of which he wrote an enormous quant.i.ty. His most famous book appeared originally in 1839, though it was afterwards continued. It was called _Proverbial Philosophy_, and criticised life in rhythmical rather than metrical lines, with a great deal of orthodoxy. Almost from the first the critics and the wits waged unceasing war against it; but the public, at least for many years, bought it with avidity, and perhaps read it, so that it went through forty editions and is said to have brought in twenty thousand pounds. Nor is it at all certain that any genuine conception of its pretentious triviality had much to do with the decay which, after many years, it, like other human things, experienced.

Mr. Tupper, who did not die till 1889, is understood to have been privately an amiable and rather accomplished person; and some of his innumerable minor copies of verse attain a very fair standard of minor poetry. But _Proverbial Philosophy_ remains as one of the bright and s.h.i.+ning examples of the absolute want of connection between literary merit and popular success.

It has been said that Lord Tennyson's first work appeared in _Poems by Two Brothers_, and it is now known that this book was actually by the _three_,--Frederick, Charles, and Alfred. Frederick, the eldest, who, at a great age, is still alive, has never ceased verse-writing. Charles, who afterwards took the name of Turner, and, having been born in 1808, died in 1879, was particularly famous as a sonneteer, producing in this form many good and some excellent examples. Arthur Hallam, whom _In Memoriam_ has made immortal, was credited by the partial judgment of his friends with talents which, they would fain think, were actually shown both in verse and prose. A wiser criticism will content itself with saying that in one sense he produced _In Memoriam_ itself, and that this is enough connection with literature for any man. His own work has a suspicious absence of faults, without the presence of any great positive merit,--a combination almost certainly indicating precocity, to be followed by sterility. But this consummation he was spared. John Sterling, who has been already referred to, and who stands to Carlyle in what may be called a prose version of the relation between Tennyson and Hallam, wrote some verse which is at least interesting; and Sir Francis Doyle, also elsewhere mentioned, belongs to the brood of the remarkable years 1807-14, having been born in 1810. But his splendid war-songs were written not very early in life.

Of the years just mentioned, the first, 1807, contributed, besides Mr.

Frederick Tennyson, the very considerable talent of Archbishop Trench, a Harrow and Trinity (Cambridge) man who had an actual part in the expedition to Spain from which Sterling retreated, took orders, and ended a series of ecclesiastical promotions by the Archbishopric of Dublin, to which he was consecrated in 1864, which he held with great dignity and address during the extremely trying period of Disestablishment, and which he resigned in 1884, dying two years later.

Trench wrote always well, and always as a scholar, on a wide range of subjects. He was an interesting philologist,--his _Study of Words_ being the most popular of scholarly and the most scholarly of popular works on the subject,--a valuable introducer of the exquisite sacred Latin poetry of the Middle Ages to Englishmen, a sound divine in preaching and teaching. His original English verse was chiefly written before the middle of the century, though perhaps his best known (not his best) verses are on the Battle of the Alma. He was a good sonneteer and an excellent hymn-writer.

1809 contributed three writers of curiously contrasted character. One was Professor Blackie, an eccentric and amiable man, a translator of aeschylus, and a writer of songs of a healthy and spirited kind. The second, Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, a poet of Parables, has never been popular, and perhaps seldom arrived at that point of projection in which poetical alchemy finally and successfully trans.m.u.tes the rebel materials of thought and phrase into manifest gold; but he had very high and distinctly rare, poetical qualities. Such things as "Old Souls,"

"The Snake Charmer," "The Palmist," three capital examples of his work, are often, and not quite wrongly, objected to in different forms of some such a phrase as this: "Poetry that is perfect poetry ought never to subject any tolerable intellect to the necessity of searching for its meaning. It is not necessary that it should yield up the whole treasures of that meaning at once, but it must carry on the face of it such a competent quant.i.ty as will relieve the reader from postponing the poetic enjoyment in order to solve the intellectual riddle." The truth of this in the main, and the demurrers and exceptions to it in part, are pretty clear; nor is this the place to state them at length. It is sufficient to say that in Dr. Hake's verse, especially that part of it published between 1870 and 1880 under the t.i.tles _Madeline_, _Parables and Tales_, _New Symbols_, _Legends of the Morrow_ and _Maiden Ecstasy_, the reader of some poetical experience will seldom fail to find satisfaction.

It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that of this poet with Lord Houghton, earlier known to everybody as Richard Monckton Milnes, who died in 1885. He was of the golden age of Trinity during this century, the age of Tennyson, and throughout life he had an amiable fancy for making the acquaintance of everybody who made any name in literature, and of many who made none. A practical and active politician, and a constant figure in society, he was also a very considerable man of letters. His critical work (princ.i.p.ally but not wholly collected in _Monographs_) is not great in bulk but is exceedingly good, both in substance and in style. His verse, on the other hand, which was chiefly the produce of the years before he came to middle life, is a little slight, and perhaps appears slighter than it really is. Few poets have ever been more successful with songs for music: the "Brookside" (commonly called from its refrain, "The beating of my own heart"), the famous and really fine "Strangers Yet," are the best known, but there are many others. Lord Houghton undoubtedly had no strong vein of poetry. But it was always an entire mistake to represent him as either a fribble or a sentimentalist, while with more inducements to write he would probably have been one of the very best critics of his age.

It is necessary once more to approach the unsatisfactory brevity of a catalogue in order to mention, since it would be wrong to omit, Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), an Irish writer who produced some pleasant and spirited work of ordinary kinds, and laboured very hard to achieve that often tried but seldom achieved adventure, the rendering into English poetry of Irish Celtic legends and literature; Alfred Domett (1811-87), author of the New Zealand epic of _Ranulf and Amohia_ and much other verse, but most safely grappled to English poetry as Browning's "Waring"; W. B. Scott (1812-90), an outlying member of the Prae-Raphaelite School in art and letters, in whom for the most part execution lagged behind conception both with pen and pencil; Charles Mackay (1814-89), an active journalist who wrote a vast deal in verse and prose, his best things perhaps being the mid-century "Cholera Chant," the once well-known song of "A good time coming," and in a sentimental strain the piece called "O, ye Tears"; and Mrs. Archer Clive, the author of the remarkable novel of _Paul Ferroll_, whose _IX.

Poems by V._ attracted much attention from competent critics in the doubtful time of poetry about the middle of the century, and are really good.

Not many writers, either in prose or poetry, give the impression of never having done what was in them more than William Edmonstoune Aytoun, who was born in 1813 and died in 1865. He was a son-in-law of "Christopher North," and like him a pillar of _Blackwood's Magazine_, in which some of his best things in prose and verse appeared. He divided himself between law and literature, and in his rather short life rose to a Professors.h.i.+p in the latter and a Sheriffdom in the former, deserving the credit of admirably stimulating influence in the first capacity and competent performance in the second. He published poems when he was only seventeen. But his best work consists of the famous _Bon Gaultier Ballads_--a collection of parodies and light poems of all kinds written in conjunction with Sir Theodore Martin, and one of the pleasantest books of the kind that the century has seen--and the more serious _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, both dating from the forties, the satirically curious _Firmilian_ (see below), 1854, and some _Blackwood_ stories of which the very best perhaps is _The Glenmutchkin Railway_.

His long poem of _Bothwell_, 1855, and his novel of _Norman Sinclair_, 1861, are less successful.

The _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, on which his chief serious claim must rest, is an interesting book, if hardly a great one. The style is modelled with extreme closeness upon that of Scott, which even Sir Walter, with all his originality and genius, had not been able always to preserve from flatness. In Aytoun's hands the flats are too frequent, though they are relieved and broken at times by really splendid bursts, the best of which perhaps are "The Island of the Scots" and "The Heart of the Bruce." For Aytoun's poetic vein, except in the lighter kinds, was of no very great strength; and an ardent patriotism, a genuine and gallant devotion to the Tory cause, and a keen appreciation of the chivalrous and romantic, did not always suffice to supply the want of actual inspiration.

If it had been true, as is commonly said, that the before-mentioned _Firmilian_ killed the so-called Spasmodic School, Aytoun's failure to attain the upper regions of poetry would have been a just judgment; for the persons whom he satirised, though less clever and humorous, were undoubtedly more poetical than himself. But nothing is ever killed in this way, and as a matter of fact the Spasmodic School of the early fifties was little more than one of the periodical outbursts of poetic velleity, more genuine than vigorous and more audacious than organic, which are constantly witnessed. It is, as usual, not very easy to find out who were the supposed scholars in this school. Mr. P. H. Bailey, the author of _Festus_, who still survives, is sometimes cla.s.sed with them; but the chief members are admitted to have been Sydney Dobell and Alexander Smith, both remarkable persons, both failures of something which might in each case have been a considerable poet, and both ill.u.s.trating the "second middle" period of the poetry of the century which corresponds to that ill.u.s.trated earlier by Darley, Horne, and Beddoes.

Of this pair, Sydney Dobell had some, and Alexander Smith had others, of the excuses which charity not divorced from critical judgment makes for imperfect poets. Dobell, with sufficient leisure for poetical production, had a rather unfortunate education and exceedingly bad health. Smith had something of both of these, and the necessity of writing for bread as well. Dobell, the elder of the two, and the longer lived, though both died comparatively young, was a Kentish man, born at Cranbrook on 5th April 1824. When he was of age his father established himself as a wine-merchant at Cheltenham, and Sydney afterwards exercised the same not unpoetical trade. He went to no school and to no University, privations especially dangerous to a person inclined as he was to a kind of pa.s.sionate priggishness. He was always ill; and his wife, to whom he engaged himself while a boy, and whom he married before he had ceased to be one, was always ill likewise. He travelled a good deal, with results more beneficial to his poetry than to his health; and, the latter becoming ever worse, he died near Cheltenham on 22nd August 1874. His first work, an "Italomaniac" closet drama ent.i.tled _The Roman_, was published in 1850; his second, _Balder_, in 1853. This latter has been compared to Ibsen's _Brand_: I do not know whether any one has noticed other odd, though slight, resemblances between _Peer Gynt_ and Beddoes' chief work. The Crimean War had a strong influence on Dobell, and besides joining Smith in _Sonnets on the War_ (1855), he wrote by himself _England in Time of War_, next year. He did not publish anything else; but his works were edited shortly after his death by Professor Nichol.

Alexander Smith, like so many of the modern poets of Scotland, was born in quite humble life, and had not even the full advantages open to a Scottish "lad o' pairts." His birthplace, however, was Kilmarnock, a place not alien to the Muses; and before he was twenty-one (his birth year is diversely given as 1829 and 1830) the Rev. George Gilfillan, an amiable and fluent critic of the middle of the century, who loved literature very much and praised its pract.i.tioners with more zeal than discrimination, procured the publication of the _Life Drama_. It sold enormously; it is necessary to have been acquainted with those who were young at the time of its appearance to believe in the enthusiasm with which it was received; but a little intelligence and a very little goodwill will enable the critic to understand, if not to share their raptures. For a time Smith was deliberately pitted against Tennyson by "the younger sort" as Dennis says of the faction for Settle against Dryden in his days at Cambridge. The reaction which, mercifully for the chances of literature if not quite pleasantly for the poet, always comes in such cases, was pretty rapid, and Smith, ridiculed in _Firmilian_, was more seriously taxed with crudity (which was just), plagiarism (which was absurd), and want of measure (which, like the crudity, can hardly be denied). Smith, however, was not by any means a weakling except physically; he could even satirise himself sensibly and good-humouredly enough; and his popularity had the solid result of giving him a post in the University of Edinburgh--not lucrative and by no means a sinecure, but not too uncongenial, and allowing him a chance both to read and to write. For some time he stuck to poetry, publis.h.i.+ng _City Poems_ in 1857 and _Edwin of Deira_ in 1861. But the taste for his wares had dwindled: perhaps his own poetic impulse, a true but not very strong one, was waning; and he turned to prose, in which he produced a story or two and some pleasant descriptive work--_Dreamthorpe_ (1863), and _A Summer in Skye_ (1865). Consumption showed itself, and he died on 8th January 1867.

It has already been said that there is much less of a distinct brotherhood in Dobell and Smith, or of any members.h.i.+p of a larger but special "Spasmodic school," than of the well-known and superficially varying but generally kindred spirit of periods and persons in which and in whom poetic yearning does not find organs or opportunities thoroughly suited to satisfy itself. Dobell is the more unequal, but the better of the two in s.n.a.t.c.hes. His two most frequently quoted things--"Tommy's Dead" and the unt.i.tled ballad where the refrain--

Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line!

occurs at irregular intervals--are for once fair samples of their author's genius. "Tommy's dead," the lament of a father over his son, is too long, it has frequent flatnesses, repet.i.tions that do not add to the effect, bits of mere gush, trivialities. The tragic and echoing magnificence of the Ravelston refrain is not quite seconded by the text: both to a certain extent deserve the epithet (which I have repudiated for Beddoes in another place) of "artificial." And yet both have the fragmentary, not to be a.n.a.lysed, almost uncanny charm and grandeur which have been spoken of in that place. Nor do this charm, this grandeur, fail to reappear (always more or less closely accompanied by the faults just mentioned, and also by a kind of flatulent rant which is worse than any of them) both in Dobell's war-songs, which may be said in a way to hand the torch on from Campbell to Mr. Kipling, and in his marvellously unequal blank verse, where the most excellent thought and phrase alternate with sheer balderdash--a pun which (it need hardly be said) was not spared by contemporary critics to the author of _Balder_.

Alexander Smith never rises to the heights nor strikes the distinct notes of Dobell; but the _Life Drama_ is really on the whole better than either _Balder_ or _The Roman_, and is full of what may be called, from opposite points of view, happy thoughts and quaint conceits, expressed in a stamp of verse certainly not quite original, but melodious always, and sometimes very striking. He has not yet had his critical resurrection, and perhaps none such will ever exalt him to a very high prominent position. He seems to suffer from the operation of that mysterious but very real law which decrees that undeserved popularity shall be followed by neglect sometimes even more undeserved. But when he does finally find his level, it will not be a very low one.

To the Spasmodics may be appended yet another list of bards who can claim here but the notice of a sentence or a clause, though by no means uninteresting to the student, and often very interesting indeed to the student-lover of poetry:--the two Joneses--Ernest (1819-69), a rather silly victim of Chartism, for which he went to prison, but a generous person and master of a pretty twitter enough; and Ebenezer (1820-60), a London clerk, author of _Studies of Sensation and Event_, a rather curious link between the c.o.c.kney school of the beginning of the century and some minor poets of our own times, but overpraised by his rediscoverers some years ago; W. C. Bennett, a popular song-writer; William Cory ( -1892), earlier and better known as Johnson, an Eton master, a scholar, an admirable writer of prose and in _Ionica_ of verse slightly effeminate but with a note in it not unworthy of one glance of its punning t.i.tle; W. C. Roscoe (1823-59), grandson of the historian, a minor poet in the best sense of the term; William Allingham (1824-89), sometime editor of _Fraser_, and a writer of verse from whom at one time something might have been expected; Thomas Woolner, a sculptor of great, and--in _My Beautiful Lady_, _Pygmalion_, etc.--a poet of estimable merit, whose first-named volume attracted rather disproportionate praise at its first appearance. As one thinks of the work of these and others--often enjoyable, sometimes admirable, and long ago or later admired and enjoyed--the unceremoniousness of despatching them so slightly brings a twinge of shame. But it is impossible to do justice to their work, or to the lyrics, merry or sensuous, of Mortimer Collins, who was nearly a real poet of _vers de societe_, and had a capital satiric and a winning romantic touch; the stirring ballads of Walter Thornbury (which, however, would hardly have been written but for Macaulay on the one hand and Barham on the other) and the ill-conditioned but clever Radical railing of Robert Brough at "Gentlemen." But if they cannot be discussed, they shall at least be mentioned. On three others, Frederick Locker, Arthur Hugh Clough, and "Owen Meredith" (Lord Lytton), we must dwell longer.

Clough has been called by persons of distinction a "bad poet"; but this was only a joke, and, with all respect to those who made it, a rather bad joke. The author of "Qua Cursum Ventus," of the marvellous picture of the advancing tide in "Say not the struggle," and of not a few other things, was certainly no bad poet, though it would not be uncritical to call him a thin one. He was born at Liverpool on New Year's Day 1819, spent part of his childhood in America, went to Rugby very young and distinguished himself there greatly, though it may be doubted whether the peculiar system which Arnold had just brought into full play was the healthiest for a self-conscious and rather morbid nature like Clough's.

From Rugby he went to Balliol, and was entirely upset, not, as is sometimes most unjustly said, by Newman, but by the influence of W. G.

Ward, a genial Puck of Theology, who, himself caring for nothing but mathematics, philosophy, and play-acting, disturbed the consciences of others by metaphysical quibbles, and then took refuge in the Church of Rome. Clough, who had been elected to an Oriel fellows.h.i.+p, threw it up in 1848, turned freethinker, and became the head of an educational inst.i.tution in London called University Hall. He did not hold this very long, receiving a post in the Education Office, which he held in various forms till his death in 1861 at Florence.

It is not necessary to be bia.s.sed by Matthew Arnold's musical epicede of "Thyrsis" in order to admit, nor should any bias against his theological views and his rather restless character be sufficient to induce any one to deny, a distinct vein of poetry in Clough. His earliest and most popular considerable work, _The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_ (the t.i.tle of which was originally rather different,) is written in hexameters which do not, like Kingsley's, escape the curse of that "pestilent heresy"; and the later _Amours de Voyage_ and _Dipsychus_, though there are fine pa.s.sages in both, bring him very close to the Spasmodic school, of which in fact he was an unattached and more cultivated member, with fancies directed rather to religiosity than to strict literature. _Ambarvalia_ had preceded the _Bothie_, and other things followed. On the whole, Clough is one of the most unsatisfactory products of that well-known form of nineteenth century scepticism which has neither the strength to believe nor the courage to disbelieve "and have done with it." He hankers and looks back, his "two souls" are always warring with each other, and though the clash and conflict sometimes bring out fine things (as in the two pieces above cited and the still finer poem at Naples with the refrain "Christ is not risen"), though his "Latest Decalogue" has satirical merit, and some of his country poems, written without undercurrent of thought, are fresh and genial, he is on the whole a failure. But he is a failure of a considerable poet, and some fragments of success chequer him.

Frederick Locker, who on his second marriage took the additional name of Lampson, was born in 1821 of a family long connected with the Navy and with Greenwich Hospital. He himself held for some years a post in the Admiralty; but he was much more addicted to society and to literature than to official work. His first marriage with Lady Charlotte Bruce strengthened his social position, and his second gave him wealth. He published, as early as 1857, a volume of light verse ent.i.tled _London Lyrics_, which, with the work of Prior, Praed, and Mr. Austin Dobson, stands at the head of its kind in English. But--an exceedingly rare thing for amateur as well as for professional writers in our time--he was not tempted either by profit or fame to write copiously. He added during his not short life, which closed in May 1895, a few more poems to _London Lyrics_. He edited in 1867 an anthology of his own kind of verse called _Lyra Elegantiarum_, and in 1879 he produced a miscellany of verse and prose, original and selected, called _Patchwork_, in which some have seen his most accomplished and characteristic production. In form it is something like Southey's _Omniana_, partly a commonplace book, partly full of original things; but the extracts are so choicely made and the original part is so delightful that it is not quite like any book in the language. If Charles Lamb had been of Mr. Locker's time and circ.u.mstances he might have made its fellow. "My Guardian Angel," a short prose anecdote, is, as nearly as the present writer knows, unique.

Latterly its author was chiefly known as a man of much hospitality and a collector of choice books. He would not do anything bad, and apparently he did not feel inclined to do anything good. And as this is a century when almost everybody must still be doing, and taking the chance of goodness and badness, such an exception to the rule should meet with honour.

No poet of the period, perhaps none of the century, occupies a position less settled by general criticism, or more difficult to settle, than that of Edward Robert, first Earl of Lytton, for a long time known in poetry as "Owen Meredith." The only son of the novelist, he was born on 8th November 1831, and after going to Harrow, but not to either university, entered the diplomatic service at the age of eighteen. In this he filled a great many different offices at a great many different places for nearly thirty years, till, after succeeding to his father's t.i.tle, he was made First Minister at Lisbon, and then in 1876 Viceroy of India. This post he gave up in 1880, and after the return of the Tory party to power, was sent in 1887 as Amba.s.sador to Paris, where he was very popular, and where he died in 1892.

Despite the fact that his time, save for the interval of 1880-87, was thus uninterruptedly occupied with business, Lord Lytton was an indefatigable writer of verse; while in _The Ring of Amasis_ he tried the prose romance. His chief poetical books were _Clytemnestra_ (1855); _The Wanderer_ (1859), which contains some charming lyrical work; _Lucile_ (1860), a verse story; _Songs of Servia_ (_Serbski Pesme_) (1861); _Orval, or the Fool of Time_ and _Chronicles and Characters_ (1869); _Fables in Song_ (1874); _Glenaveril_, a very long modern epic (1885); and _After Paradise, or Legends of Exile_ (1887). Besides these he collaborated in 1861 with his friend Julian Fane in a poem, _Tannhauser_, which, though too much of a Tennysonian echo, has good pa.s.sages; and after his death two volumes equal if not superior to anything he had done, _Marah_, a collection of short poems, and _King Poppy_, a fantastic epic, were published. This extensive and not always easily accessible work is conveniently represented by two volumes of selections, one representing chiefly the earlier and shorter works, edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1890, the other drawn mostly from the later and longer, edited by his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, in 1894.

This latter was accompanied by reprints of _The Wanderer_ and _Lucile_.

The difficulties in criticism above referred to arise, not merely from the voluminousness of this work, nor from the fact that Lord Lytton shares with all the poets of his special generation, except Rossetti, that inability to hit upon a definite and distinct manner of his own which is so frequently and strangely remarkable in what may be called intermediate poetical periods. Indeed in his later years he did strike out something like a very distinct style. But he suffers more than any other poet of anything like his gifts from two faults, one of which is perhaps the fault that hurts a poet most with the vulgar, and the other that which does him most harm with critics. He was so frankly pleased with, and so apt at imitating the work of his great contemporaries, that he would publish things to which fools gave the name of plagiarisms--when they were in fact studies in the manner of Tennyson, Heine, Browning, and others. And in the second place, though he frequently rewrote, it seemed impossible for him to retrench and concentrate. To this may be added his fondness for extremely long narrative poems, the taste for which has certainly gone out, while it may be doubted whether, unless they are pure romances of adventure, they are ever good things.

The consequence of all this, and perhaps of other things less legitimately literary, such as political partners.h.i.+p, has. .h.i.therto been that Lord Lytton has been ranked very far indeed below his proper place.

For he had two poetical gifts, the higher of them in a high, the lower in an eminent degree. The first was the gift of true lyric, not seldom indeed marred by the lack of polish above noticed, but real, true, and constant, from the "Fata Morgana" and "Buried Heart" of _The Wanderer_ to the "Experientia Docet" and "Selenites" of _Marah_, more than thirty years later. The other was a much more individual power, and by some might be ranked higher. It is the gift of what can best generally be called ironical narration, using irony in its proper sense of covert suggestive speech. This took various forms, indicated with more or less clearness in the very t.i.tles of _Chronicles and Characters_ and _Fables in Song_,--symbolic-mystical in _Legends of Exile_ (where not only some of the legends but the poems called "Uriel" and "Strangers" are among the best things of the author and highly typical of his later manner), and fantastically romantic, with a strong touch of symbolism, in _King Poppy_. And when, as happens in most of the pieces mentioned above and many others, the combination welds itself into a kind of pa.s.sionate allegory, few poets show a better power of transporting the reader in the due poetic manner. There can be no doubt that if Lord Lytton had developed this faculty somewhat earlier (there are traces of it very early), had made its exercises rather more clear and direct, and had subjected their expression to severer thinning and compression, he would have made a great reputation as a poet. As it is, it cannot be denied that he had the positive faculties of poetry in kind and degree only inferior to those possessed by at most four or five of his English contemporaries from Tennyson downwards.

Nor should there perhaps lack mention of Roden Noel and Thomas Ashe, two writers in whom, from their earlier work, it was not unreasonable to expect poets of a distinct kind, and who, though they never improved on this early work, can never be said exactly to have declined from it. The first and elder was a son of the Earl of Gainsborough, was born in 1834, went to Cambridge, travelled a good deal, and at various times, till his death at the age of sixty, published much verse and not a little prose, both showing a distinctly poetical imagination without a sufficient organ of expression. Nor did he ever develop this except in _A Little Child's Monument_, where the pa.s.sionate personal agony injures as much as it helps the poetical result. Mr. Ashe, who was born in 1836, and died in 1889, also a Cambridge man, had a much less ambitious and rather less interesting but somewhat better-organised talent for verse, and his _Sorrows of Hypsipyle_, published in 1866, caused and authorised at the time considerable expectations from him. But his vein was rather the result of cla.s.sical culture working on a slight original talent than anything better, and he did not rise beyond a pleasant competence in verse which was never that of a poetaster, but hardly ever that of a distinct poet. In which respect he may appear here as the representative of no scanty company dead and living. For even the longest chapter of a book must have an end; and it is impossible to find room in it for the discussion of the question, whether the friends of Oliver Madox Brown, son of the famous Prae-Raphaelite painter, were or were not wrong in seeing extraordinary promise in his boyish work; whether the sonnets of Ernest Lefroy (1855-91) were exercises or works of art. A few more remarks on humorous poets and women-poets must close the record.

In the art of merely or mainly humorous singing two names, those of Edward Lear and Charles Stuart Calverley, entirely dominate the rest among dead writers in the last part of the century. Lear, a good deal the elder man of the two, was born in 1813, was a painter by profession, and was the "E. L." of a well-known poem of Tennyson's. It was not till 1861 that his delightful nonsense-verses, known to his friends in private, were first published, and they received various additions at intervals till his death in 1888. The sheer nonsense-verse--the _amphigouri_ as the French call it--has been tried in various countries and at various times, but never with such success as in England, and it has seldom, if ever, been cultivated in England with such success as by Lear. His happy concoction of fantastic names, the easy slipping flow of his verse, and above all, the irresistible parody of sense and pathos that he contrived to instil into his rigmarole are unapproachable. In a new and not in the least opprobrious sense he was "within the realms of Nonsense absolute."

Calverley attempted less "uttermost isles" of fun. Born in 1831 of an excellent Yorks.h.i.+re family, he was educated at Harrow, and--a thing as rare in the nineteenth as common in the seventeenth century--at both universities, gaining at both a great reputation for scholars.h.i.+p, eccentricity, and bodily strength. After some time he married and began to work at the Bar; but an accident on the ice in 1867 brought on concussion of the brain, though he lingered in constantly weakening health till 1884. His _Verses and Translations_ twenty-two years earlier had made him the model of all literary undergraduates with a turn for humour; and he was able in spite of his affliction to issue some things later, the chief being _Fly Leaves_ in 1872. Calverley, as has been said, was a scholar, and his versions both from and into the cla.s.sical languages would of themselves have given him a reputation; but his forte lay partly in the easier vein of parody, wherein few excelled him, partly in the more difficult one of original light verse, wherein he had a turn (as in his famous eulogy on tobacco) quite his own. He has never been equalled in this, or even approached, except by James Kenneth Stephen (1859-92), whose premature death deprived his friends of a most amiable personality, and literature, in all probability, of a considerable ornament. As it was, "J. K. S." left next to nothing but two tiny collections of verse, showing an inspiration midway between Calverley and Praed, but with quite sufficient personal note.

Two other writers of less scholarly style, but belonging to the London Bohemian school of the third quarter of the century, W. J. Prowse, "Nicholas" (1836-70), and H. S. Leigh (1837-83), may be noticed. Prowse, whose career was very short, was the author of the charming lines on "The beautiful City of Prague," which have been attributed to others: while Leigh's _Carols of c.o.c.kayne_ (he was also a playwright) vary the note of Hood happily, and now and then with a real originality.

Except Miss Rossetti, no woman during this time approached the poetical excellence of Mrs. Barrett Browning. But the whole period has been unprecedentedly fertile in poetesses, and whereas we had but five or six to mention in the earlier chapter devoted to verse, we have here at least a dozen, though no one who requires very extended notice here.

Lady Dufferin (1807-1867), mother of the well-known diplomatist, a member of the Sheridan family, and her sister, and junior by a year, Mrs. Norton (1808-1876), were both writers of facile and elegant verse, with the Irish note of easy melody. The former was the less known to the general reader, though a few of her pieces, such as "The Irish Emigrant"

and "Katie's Letter," have always been favourite numbers for recitation.

Mrs. Norton at one time enjoyed a considerable reputation as a poetess by contributions to "Annuals" and "Souvenirs," chiefly in the sentimental ballad style which pleased the second quarter of the century. "The Outward Bound," "Bingen on the Rhine," and other things are at least pa.s.sable, and one of the author's latest and most ambitious poems, _The Lady of La Garaye_, has a sustained respectability. To a few fanatical admirers the scanty verse of Emily Bronte has seemed worthy of such high praise that only ma.s.s of work would appear to be wanting to put her in the first rank of poetesses if not of poets. Part of this, however, it is to be feared, is due to admiration of the supposed freedom of thought in her celebrated "Last Lines," which either in sincerity or bravado p.r.o.nounce that "vain are the thousand creeds," and declare for a sort of vague Pantheism, immanent at once in self and the world. At thirty, however, a genuine poetess should have produced more than a mere handful of verse, and its best things should be independent of polemical partisans.h.i.+p either for or against orthodoxy. As a matter of fact, her exquisite "Remembrance," and the slightly rhetorical but brave and swinging epigram of "The Old Stoic," give her better claims than the "Last Lines," and with them and a few others place her as a remarkable though not by any means a supreme figure.

The more prudent admirers of Marian Evans (George Eliot), who wrote a good deal of verse, either admit that her verse was not poetry, or hold up a much-quoted pa.s.sage, "Oh, may I join the choir invisible," which, like the far superior piece just referred to, is only a hymn on the side which generally dispenses with hymns; and not a very good one, though couched in fair Wordsworthian blank verse. They would no doubt indulge in derisive scorn at the idea of the mild muse of Adelaide Anne Procter, daughter of "Barry Cornwall," receiving praise denied to Miss Bronte and Miss Evans; and it must be admitted that Miss Procter never did anything so good as "Remembrance." On the other hand, she was quite free from the "sawdust" and heaviness which mar George Eliot's verse. Her style was akin to that which has been noticed in speaking of Mrs. Norton, though of a somewhat later fas.h.i.+on, and like those of her father, her songs, especially the famous "Message," had the knack of suiting composers.

Menella Bute Stedley and Dora Greenwell, a respectable pair, somewhat older than Miss Procter (she was born in 1825 and died in 1864), considerably outlived her, Miss Stedley's life lasting from 1820 to 1877, and Miss Greenwell's from 1821 to 1882. Both were invalids, and soothed their cares with verse, the latter to the better effect, though both in no despicable strain. Augusta Webster (1840-94) and Emily Pfeiffer ( -1890) were later poetesses of the same kind, but lower rank, though both were greatly praised by certain critics. Sarah Williams, a short-lived writer of some sweetness (1841-68), commended herself chiefly to those who enjoy verse religious but "broad"; Constance Naden to those who like pessimist agnosticism; Amy Levy to those who can deplore a sad fate and admire notes few and not soaring, but pa.s.sionate and genuine.

CHAPTER VII

THE NOVEL SINCE 1850